Getting Ready for Generation 'F'

A young colleague of mine sent me an interesting article this week from the Wall Street Journal entitled “The Facebook Generation vs. the Fortune 500.” It makes the point overall that companies who will once again be vying to attract and keep top talent once the economy grows again had better be sharpening their social media skills and mindset. The author, Gary Hamel, included “a list of 12 work relevant characteristics of online life” that he believes will be expected...

Back away from the teleprompter, Mr. President

Since I'm an early bird, I missed President Obama's gaffe about the Special Olympics with Jay Leno last week. It seems even his laughter was found appalling by many Americans who are facing serious problems and want to see a serious Commander in Chief wrestling with these at all times. Then there was the response to his anger at a recent press conference when a reporter pushed him for a reaction to the AIG bonuses and his retort was that...

Move over Real Shaq, Twitter is for business

It was ironic today that just as I was reading a blog post on Open Innovators called 77 Revenue Models for Twitter, I saw a tweet from Sam Houston about how the revenue has indeed started. Sam pointed me to a VentureBeat post on the project by Federated Media to promote its ExecTweets service through ad space on Twitter profiles. Most interesting in this is how the first advertising experiment is geared towards business users. This focus on business users...

Another reason to love JetBlue

Hat tip to @dchurbuck who tweeted yesterday "way to go, JetBlue" along with a link to the company's hysterical new video on its site, The CEO's Guide to Jetting that is a send-up of CEOs being forced to give up their private jets and fly like the little people. With the swirling anger about AIG bonuses and top executive compensation programs, this clever marketing of JetBlue's cheaper but more comfortable flights ("let your assistant's assistant book you on JetBlue") was...

Everybody's somebody at SXSWi

As we mentioned here, our Austin crew has been welcoming people from all over for the SXSW festivals. I've enjoyed following the live blogging and tweeting by Linsey Krauss and Lauren Whittenberg since last Friday, but we want to give Linsey the opportunity to share their highlights and takeaways through a guest post here. Enjoy! ------------------------------------------ It's been a busy past five days here in Austin, Texas as the SXSW Interactive Conference just wrapped up to welcome a new crop...

Finally, a constructive post about PR

I've long since accepted the reality that platforms like blogs and Twitter enable frequent and very public opinions about PR. I've also held the personal feeling that exposing bad PR practices in this way will in the long run lead to improvement across the profession. Or at least that has been my hope. So I am disappointed every time I see one get published and then bounce around the echo chamber for the ensuing one or two days. I am...

Citizen Journalists or Citizen News-Readers?

I have long held the belief that the growth of social media and the woes of print publications ultimately will spawn an evolved news media that includes more citizen journalism. The medium is not dying. It is morphing into new vehicles that better serve a public using computers, handheld devices and, perhaps, interactive television to stay informed, conduct research and express opinions. The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism just released their lengthy report, "The State of the News Media"...

Word-of-mouth starts with opening your mouth

I received an e-mail last week from a colleague with a link to a story in B2B magazine about an Aberdeen report on social media spending plans. I thought I had that day's blog post in the bag -- until I clicked on the link in the story to Aberdeen's site. My effort to blog on it ended there, as all I got was an executive summary that actually gave me less information than the B2B story. What was ironic...

IBM Jumps into the Water

In January, I was sifting through clean tech press coverage for our quarterly meeting with the Austin Clean Energy Council and I couldn't help but be amazed by the frenzy of optimism (otherwise known as market hype) in the business press related to smart grid technologies. I can't help it, I'm a sucker for new, exciting markets with growth potential. That is probably why I'm in the PR technology profession. Back to my point, BusinessWeek, Fortune, Wired, The New York...

SXSW is Underway in Austin

Mid-March is always an exciting time of year to live in Austin, TX. As I my colleague Ted mentioned earlier, SXSW has arrived in Austin. Over the next two weeks, the interactive, film and music event will reportedly bring $95 million to the Austin area and thousands of participants from all over the world. The interactive portion alone last year brought 10,000 people to Austin. This year, event organizers and media speculated that the interactive event will double or triple...