The PR Fuel Mailbag: Employee Blackmail, Public Relations Disasters, and More Fun
It’s time for another dip into the PR Fuel mailbag. This time we answer some questions from PR Fuel readers, including public relations professionals, who are dealing with some serious issues: a threatening ex-employee, a shaky merger, a recalcitrant journalist, and a strange resume request. A… Read more
Optimizing Your Web Site for the Blind
Online assistive technologies for the blind continue to evolve. Where people with low vision use screen magnification software to aid them in using web sites, the blind use screen readers. One of the most common-and free-screen readers is called JAWS. This software introduces each page to the listener … Read more
Washington Monument Strategy: Political PR Tool or Crass Manipulation?
I read an article about local government using the threat of budget shortfalls to close a popular and much-needed public service. The writer referred to it as a Washington Monument Strategy. I had never heard that phrase before but a Google search showed it along with the phrase Washington Monument Syndr… Read more
Five Reasons to Use Blogs as Public Relations Tools
A post on Kevin Dugan’s Strategic Public Relations blog (http://prblog.typepad.com) recently caught my eye. Dugan discussed an article longtime online marketing genius B.L Ochman highlighting ten “examples of sites, campaigns, and companies that are crying out for blogs.” Th… Read more
Public Relations Basics: How to Respond to Critics
No matter the size of your business or organization, there will always be critics. How you respond to these critics — publicly and privately — is very important. Writing a correction letter to a newspaper or magazine is often the easiest (and cheapest) public relations strategy when respon… Read more
Branding – How to Recognize Your Brand Values and Protect Them
What is a brand, anyway? It seems like it is a mysterious “something-or-other” that isn’t marketing, isn’t PR, isn’t advertising. So if we know what it isn’t, shouldn’t we also know what a brand is?
As the branding theorist Jacques Chevron has commented, a … Read more
Cross-Culture Public Relations – It’s Not as Easy as It Looks
Every public relations professional dreams of developing a campaign that puts his or her company’s tag line on the lips of the entire world. However, the tried and true rules of continuity, consistency, and even practicality don’t always apply when it comes to international or cross-cult… Read more
Goodbye Newspapers, You Arrogant Monopolistic Dinosaurs
It’s no secret eReleases works with newspapers. Many of our subscribing journalists are from newspapers. Many of our customers have received print in local and nationwide newspapers alike. I like newspapers. I still subscribe to my local newspaper, the Baltimore Sun, as well as to the Wall Stree… Read more
Are You Unhappy With Your Public Relations Job?
These days it seems like everyone I know in the public relations game is looking for a new job. If nothing else, the sheer amount of people I know looking for a change in the public relations industry–I honestly believe that about 50 percent of the PR reps I know are looking to change employers–s… Read more
Having the Right Attitude in Public Relations
Over the past decade, I’ve been yelled at by many people, and in many capacities. As a journalist, I had CEOs, public relations consultants, and lawyers heaping verbal abuse on me every week. Every one of those incidents served to remind me that people have different ideas of what is appropriate beh… Read more