New Year’s Resolutions Your PR Team Probably Won’t Share with You

In their secret files, many PR people are adding their New Year’s resolutions for 2010. This list represents, in their heart of hearts, the way they want to do PR in 2010 differently than in the past. If your PR person, team or agency hasn’t shared their list with you yet, ask for it. This secret list is worth looking at seriously for higher ROI and happier PR people throughout the year: Resolution: Only write a full-blown press release, including...

The bottom line from all these social media predictions

Things were too crazy before Christmas to pay attention to the social media predictions posts that filled my stream. I saved a few of them for reading this week, as I knew it would be slow. Some are very obvious and some are too far "out there" to come true. Rather than link to these, I'll instead give my own aggregated takeaway from them combined with my own viewpoint: Social media in 2010 will become synonymous with marketing, communication, sales...

LP&P's top 10 blog posts of 2009

The week before Christmas for most people is the time to reflect back on the year, while the time between Christmas and New Year's Day is for looking ahead. We're doing that here as well, as we had our list of the best and worst PR moments of 2009 yesterday. Next week, we'll share our New Year's resolutions with you. In that vein, I'd like to use this post to reflect on what we've brought to you on this blog...

Best and Worst PR Moves of 2009 - Part I

I don't know about you, but I love "Best and Worst" lists. I'll even read a Best and Worst list in a category I don't care about just because they are usually fun. We want this blog to be fun and entertaining as well as informative, so I challenged our agency to compile their suggestions for the best and worst PR moves of 2009 (of course excluding our own programs). The emails started to come flying at me immediately. It...

What media -- social or otherwise -- do you respond to first?

What will you respond to first? - A call to your home land line - A call to your business land line - A call to your mobile phone - A text to your mobile phone - An email to your business address - An email to your personal address - A Facebook message - A LinkedIn message from one of your connections, or through one of your connections I'm betting some of this is age-related and my young twenty-something...

Why social media no longer can be underestimated or ignored

A mere six weeks ago, a significant tremor hit the disciplines of marketing and communications. Microsoft and Google both announced it would be licensing the Twitter data feed and integrating results in its search engines. Microsoft rolled out Twitter integration with Bing as a separate beta feature. Google said it was going to take some time to roll it out, presumably to get it right the first time. It didn't take it long, as it made its integration live this...

MIT Wins Social Media Scavenger Hunt

Leave it to MIT to analyze and figure out the best way to leverage social media and incent its huge network of contacts to win a nationwide contest designed to test the power of social media. As reported on CNN this weekend: A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology won $40,000 in a high-tech scavenger hunt on Saturday by discovering the location of 10 red weather balloons. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced that the MIT team was...

Remembering Dick McGlinchey

Last night I learned that my former partner, Dick McGlinchey, who co-founded my agency (then called McGlinchey & Paul) in 1986 has passed away after bravely battling a tough illness for a number of years. This is a sad day for all of us who had the great privilege of working with Dick and knowing him as one of the smartest, funniest and most unique individuals many of us will ever know. Dick was on my "short list" of the...

A prediction for 2010: Portable identities take social media's impact to another level

I have been playing close attention of late to the rapid proliferation of the various portable identity services. I now look to see if it's implemented on any site I visit, and if so, which ones it uses and how it uses them. Examples of these portable identity services include Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect. These allow a visitor to log-in to the site using his/her Facebook or Google credentials and identity. Any activity or interaction on that site...

Seeking the Limelight -- or Not

In 1995 Gus Van Sant's ironic film "To Die For" was loosely based on the case of Pamela Smart, who is in prison for conspiring with teen students to murder her husband in New Hampshire. Played by Nicole Kidman, the lead character is obsessed with the idea of becoming a famous TV broadcaster. At the end of the film, the young female teenager who blew the whistle on the murder plot, talks about how she has been on all of...