The San Jose Mercury News looks at the PR lessons [Free subscription required] from Wendy’s recent crisis.
“The real trick of responding to something like this is to do it in a way that shows you care it happened, that it’s something not in keeping with the way you do business and you feel badly about it,” said Lou Williams, chairman of L.C. Williams & Associates, a Chicago firm that holds the hand of companies trying to navigate their way through corporate crises.
Ken Deutsch gives some interesting feedback to Amy Joyce‘s article last week on how corporate blogs are offering little or no value to their readers:
“Companies that use the traditional command-and-control approach to public relations and brand protection will fail to take advantage of the power of the Internet.”
The Richmond Times Despatch offers some advice for a career in Public Relations from Katherine Woodall:
Public relations has changed in the past 25 years.
“It keeps it interesting,” Woodall said. “You need innate curiosity, superb communication skills and a desire to learn and understand new things. You have to be willing to do a lot of things, make mini-changes.
“If you are open to change,” Woodall said, “opportunities happen.”
Trevor Cook is currently writing a very interesting paper on whether blogging will retain its current revolutionary zeal or will in fact be consumed by corporate interests. You can download the latest draft here.
On a related matter, Trevor has some interesting comments on Colin McKay‘s question does the blogging emperor have any clothes on?
Jim Horton rightly bemoans an awful article that positions PR in the cheap advertising business through an analysis of VNRs.
Kevin Dugan questions the validity of David Daniels assertion that RSS will have a limited impact on e-mail marketing. I tend to agree. I don’t think RSS means the end of e-mail marketing but over time I’d expect to see a lot of e-mail traffic such as newsletters etc. being available as RSS feeds. In addition, because RSS is different to e-mail, it will require a different approach. At the very least it makes common sense for marketers to evaluate RSS. Ignoring it makes no sense at all.
PR firm Shift Communications has been doing a lot of work recently on attempting to build tighter links between the PR function and the sales organization. Their latest initiative is to support marketing professionals in understanding the origin of in-bound leads. It’s a noteworthy initiative, however, I can’t help thinking that if marketing staff aren’t already effectively managing this process, what are they doing? and more fundamentally how are they being measured?
Infoworld has a great feature on blogging and wikis in the enterprise.
A lot of PR bloggers are turning up on WebProNews here’s a selection of some of the more recent hits:
- Shel Holtz asks is Disney’s image so bad that even when they’re right, they’re wrong…
- Mike Manuel thinks its a fun time to be in Public Relations…
- Steve Rubel questions the validity of a job listing on Craig’s list for a blog PR specialist in Chicago.
Finally Tom Murphy is conducting a *very* interesting online survey on Public Relations. You can participate here.
Murphy's Law 