Say it ain't so, Rupert!

I was in the process of writing a blog post about the German Chancellor's pledge to create "a new kind of copyright to protect online journalism," as reported in The New York Times earlier this week, when I saw the news flash yesterday that the Boston Bureau of the Wall Street Journal is closing and 9 journalists there will lose their jobs unless they can find a position somewhere within the company within a certain prescribed period of time. It...

What's up with Virtual Desktops?

There's renewed interest now with the introduction of Windows 7 to evaluate desktop virtualization. This "trend" though is no surprise to Timothy Stammers, senior analyst at OVUM. Tim, along with his colleague Steve Hodgkinson, authored a comprehensive report on the virtual desktop market this summer, Enterprise Virtual Desktop Alternatives: A Market Scan. Coming on the heels of VMworld and Citrix Analyst day, we caught up with Tim to discuss trends in desktop virtualization for the latest in our Beyond the...

No one under the age of 25 was involved in this post

My Twitter feed search on PR has turned up several tweets regarding this article on Edelman PR that appeared a few days ago. The article from the Chicago Tribrune discusses how the senior members of the esteemed PR firm are being schooled by younger employees in how to use social media tools such as Facebook. The meme I've seen on Twitter in articles like this on Gawker is "are you paying big bucks for senior staff when the work is...

The Scariest Words That Ever Chilled PR People

This year we're bombarded with television and movie vampires and zombies as we inch our way toward Halloween. At both of our offices there are plans for costume contests and the little ghosts and goblins will be visiting. Meanwhile, though, I polled our team for some of the scariest words that have been heard by our fellow PR people in recent times. They came up with a great list. Kristen Dattoli-Orfanos pointed out that "Billy Bob Thornton's" publicist was mopping...

Undue Influence?

Late last week, SearchDataCenter.com wrote a story about a lawsuit that ZL Technologies Inc. filed against Gartner alleging that the firm favors larger vendors in their reports. According to the story, ZL Technologies claimed that "Gartner's 'Magic Quadrant,' an annual report ranking IT vendors in particular categories, favors larger companies to the detriment of smaller vendors and IT buyers." The story puts the spotlight on a issue that has long been discussed amongst technology vendors, the media and PR professionals...

SNW: By the Numbers

As the dust is settling and attendees are catching up on being out of the office for a few days, I thought it would be worthwhile to take a look at SNW and what we may have learned, albeit in my case from the outside looking in. In the interest of full disclosure, which seems to be of particular interest to some in light of the recent FTC ruling, none of our clients in the storage industry or outside were...

Live Music Capital a Great Place for Live Networking

Last night we held our fourth annual Fall Reception at our Austin, Texas office and, this year, held the event at our 515 Congress Street location, right in the heart of downtown. On a rainy Wednesday night we drew a great crowd of about 50 clients and friends of the agency from the technology and clean energy industries, local associations and investment groups. It was a fun event, as always, and was a great reminder of what John Graham, chairman...

Search is rapidly upping the social media ante

Yesterday raised the stakes for companies as far as the impact of social media is concerned. Here are the reasons why: The Pew Internet and American Life Project released a new report on social network use that in particular showed a hockey stick rise in the number of people using services like Twitter to update their status online Microsoft dominated the day's buzz with its announcement of the integration of Twitter into Bing search results Google tried to steal some...

Community-based news hits home

Yesterday was an odd day. I woke up excited about spending the day with my sister at the Patriots game. This excitement was tempered, however, after I picked her up. She recently graduated from UConn and had gone to her first homecoming weekend, one that was marred by the stabbing death of Jasper Howard, a junior cornerback on the UConn football team. The incident happened very early on Sunday morning. When I picked up my sister at 10 a.m., she...

Make Sure PR Hasn't Passed its Expiration Date

A good friend of mine moved to the corporate PR side after many years as an agency PR person. In a recent email exchange, this person's comment really struck me: "I try to be a really nice client but when they peddle the same old rubbish that I saw in 2004, it does grate a little!" Since I know this comment came from a very reasonable PR person who knows first-hand about how hard it can be to meet expectations...