Clint Eastwood Makes Whose Day at Republican National Convention?

The Republican and Democratic national conventions by their nature are coronation affairs attended by staunchly aligned supporters. Let's face it, they are more pep rallies than platforms for serious political discourse. But still they are the one time that each party has the national stage to itself and has the opportunity to reach beyond their constituency to tell their story and hopefully sway independents. These events are carefully orchestrated and scripted. The individuals chosen to speak work for weeks, even...

Social Media's Impact on B2B Technology Decision Making

For a long time, we've known from CIO's and our clients that the Gartner Magic Quadrant was on the short list of technology decision making factors. This has been slowly changing, as we've seen data from the likes of Forrester that reveal that more IT decision making is based on feedback and influence from peers via social networks. Source: blogs.forrester.com via Ted on Pinterest As I cited in a blog post last year on social media strategy for B2B technology...

#FF @TechTrailblaze

Every once in a while you know you have a great idea, but the time may not be right. It could be something you share in a proposal, or suggest to a friend, or bounce off a few colleagues. You know it's good, but no one quite knows how it could work or when they could do it. That was the case with the latest global award the TechTrailBlazers. The brainchild of Rose Ross, chief trailblazer at the Tech Trailblazers...

Client - PR Agency Relationships: It's a Matter of Trust

It seems like everywhere you turn these days you read about another breach of trust between some commercial or goverment institution and the public. The recent revelations regarding the manipulation of the Libor rates by Barclays is just the latest in a disheartening series of cases, including Facebook's IPO mess; JP Morgan's bad derivative bets and subsequent disclosure that its traders have been hiding losses; Penn State's mishandling of the Sandusky child abuse case; and many more. It feels like...

Lakers or Celtics? -- The Importance of Setting Aside Competing Differences

When starting out at any new organization, it’s important to fit in. Not just feel like you’re meshing, but to fully and totally become a part of the team. It helps to do research on the organization -- whether you will interviewing with them, outreaching to them for new business, or pitching them on a story. When I was going through the interview process with Lois Paul and Partners, my research on my future employer and colleagues led me to...

What Your Own Facebook Newsfeed Tells You About Increasing Brand Engagement

Mathew Ingram of GigaOm recently wrote about Facebook's challenging ad business model. It touched on an issue I've been thinking about of late with regards to finding the right voice on a company Facebook page. In short, Facebook is the most personal of any of the social networks. It's not far from the truth to say that the reason that almost all of Facebook's users joined the network in the first place was to connect with personal friends and family....

Facebook: You Say Tuh-mey-toh, I Say Tuh-mah-toh

Yesterday, fellow LPPer, Ted Weismann, shared his thoughts on Facebook's covert email address change, and more importantly told us how to fix it. I don't mean to pile on but I can't help it because I'm so amused that Facebook is trying to turn this into a semantic discussion. I just read Nick Bilton's post on the New York Times Bits blog, "On Facebook, the semantics of visibility vs privacy." It borders on hilarious. A Facebook spokesperson told Bilton the...

How Bloomberg Broke Through the Valley Echo Chamber at D

There were a number of interesting takeaways from the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital conference this week in lovely Rancho Palos Verdes, California. But the part that intrigued me the most was NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg's addressing the crowd via video interview (due to an unexpected issue that prevented his travel). In his very candid and engaging interview with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, he deftly provided a real person view on the application of technology in government and...

How Tech PR Pros Can Work Effectively With Media

Last night, LPP hosted the Publicity Club of New England's latest media roundtable discussion. The evening's focus was "Tech's Hot Trends," and was moderated by Matthew Lloyd, director of communications at iRobot (aka @mattlloydbos). Panelists included Michael Farrell, newest technology reporter at The Boston Globe (aka @globembfarrell), Gregory Gomer, managing editor at BostInno (aka @sliggity), Eric Lundquist, VP Editorial at InformationWeek/ United Business Media (aka @ESLundquist), Dan Primack, senior editor at FORTUNE (aka @danprimack), and Dan Rowinski, writer at ReadWriteWeb...

SXSWi: “Surviving Technology” and Creating Accountability

While some of George Friedman’s predictions may be a bit far-fetched (as far as I know, we are not at war with Japan, nor on the brink of another Cold War with Russia), I found little to dissent with during his “Surviving Technology” presentation at SXSW Interactive last week. When my colleague, Linsey McNew, invited me to hear him speak, I was eager to attend thinking we’d get some further insight into what really went down with the Anonymous hack....