Category: General

OK, OK, I know I said I’d leave Lizzie Grubman alone.  But where there’s good content, slow Summer news flow and a post to be filled, well sometimes you have to relent.

Now clearly Lizzie Grubman is good at what she does, otherwise she wouldn’t have a successful thriving bi-coastal PR agency. That’s a fact gentle reader. I don’t know anything about society or fashion PR, so I can’t critique her work. But she knows her stuff.

I posted previously how Lizzie was booked to give a three hour talk on PR.  For $49 that had to be a gimme for anyone in NYC.

However while she may be a successful PR, it seems she missed the point about what attendees paying good money for a session on “an expert in-depth look at what is takes to launch and maintain a sucessful PR career” would be looking for. Seminars usually involve skills and knowledge transfer.  You pay money to hear an expert and learn. Errrr, not in a seminar with Lizzie apparently. You don’t even get her side of the SUV incident, don’t mind tips on launching a new restaurant. Her response to any specific PR questions was: “I’m not giving away my secrets unless you hire me.”

Salon’s Lynn Harris has a very entertaining review of Lizzie’s seminar.

Meanwhile, Sheryl McCarthy, writing for Newsday, bemoans the amount of press inches (and pixels) Lizzie is getting. Not only is she still successfully running her PR firm, but she’s now landed a radio job at  WNEW-FM.

Sheryl finishes with this:

“Let’s all remember the Lizzie Grubman story every time we’re tempted to lecture some young minority kids about accepting affirmative action – because they will feel so much better about themselves if they achieve success based on their own hard work and merit. It seems one can either do it the hard way, or if one is fortunate enough to be born rich – and not have to work too hard – one can do it the Lizzie Grubman way.”

As we begin to pitch more blogs the differences between them and our traditional media mix becomes more apparent.  I’ve started to see PR pitch critiques appearing, where bloggers analyse pitches they’ve been sent.

Now of course this is a double edge sword.  On the one hand, by seeing the feedback these pitches get you can hone your own skills, however on the other hand what if it’s you pitch they critique?

Connors Communications pitched Aaron Bailey over at 601am on behalf of Vonage. Here’s the critique.

I think the takeaway here is that anything you put in an e-mail is in the public domain (that’s always been the case of course), make sure it’s well written and relevant and finally think about the media.  Weblogs are about online content, in other words, links!

Meanwhile Anne Holland discusses a PR pitch she got on behalf of Patrick Spain, CEO of Alacritude to discuss “how stupid his new competitors are”. I kid you not. The PR people even provided a quote in case Anne didn’t have time to interview him. Ahem.

The always readable Deborah Branscum may have the answer.

Spam exists because some people are stupid enough to reward these idots with their custom.

Deborah, had a post this week about the discovery of a list on the Internet of 6,000 people who responded to a spam for “Penis Enlargement”. Yep that’s right.

Seemingly 6,000 people gave over $300,000 or $17 per expected inch enlargement.  The interesting thing is the calibre of the suckers.  Read all about it at Medialife.

That spammer should follow up with the Nigerian scam offer, I’m sure at least half those 6,000 would believe that.

Well, well, well. Another lesson in the art of redfacing by a PR practitioner.

According to a story at Up2Speed, a PR person at UK firm ESpotting, which has recently merged with FindWhat.com, sent out a press release cc’ing all 350 journalists in the distribution list of the e-mail. The press release in question, is a really exciting appointment announcement.

I won’t include the list of journalists as it’ll only make the spammers jobs easier.

Now normally when a PR person is called a buffoon, I would try and defend them.  In this case I agree with Up2Speed, but would like to use much stronger language.

Mail merge has been around for twenty years.  If you want a great example of poor online or electronic communication, this has to be this week’s case study.

Unbelievable.

Our friends at Google have added an interesting new feature for the poor beaten-up PR people of the world who need to track breaking news.

Google News Alerts allows you to create “news trackers” so when a story breaks they deliver it, along with a link to your inbox.

Michael O’Connor Clarke has a detailed review of the service and he rightly points out some obvious shortcomings, however credit where it’s due, it’s a useful addition to the monitoring arsenal. 

After all, if you want top of the range intelligent news monitoring, pay for a service.

Just like Google News, Google News Alerts is an added resource, not the answer to all your problems. 

Unfortunately like everything else in life, hard work still delivers the best results.

Here’s a nice example of a company providing its press releases and media information as an RSS Feed.  IDC, the industry research firm has its feed here.

 

Ryan May over at the Minnesota PR blog continues to produce some great PR related links.  He includes two stories on networking.

Given the current economic environment, good networking online and offline has never been as important.

The Star Tribune has a general networking story, while the Business Journal talks a number of individuals on how they are networking, including Paul Maccabee, a local PR pro.

That’s a postive headline by the way.

MediaMap does a good job marketing it’s services (primarily comprehensive media and analyst lists, forward features and some PR tools thrown in). They were the first media database to add bloggers, they provide good content through their ExpertPR newsletter and now are maintaining a blog.

John Pocaro is a marketing guy over at Microsoft who maintains an interesting marketing-related blog. 

He points to an essay by Dave Pollard on “The Blogging Process” which does a good job outlining the various elements of keeping a well written and researched blog updated and promoted.

OK, OK, so the first post of the day was little depressing.  So here’s a positive PR post to balance things out!

The Venture Blog, a blog about all things venture capital, has a well written post from Abigail Johnson of PR firm, Roeder-Johnson, on the importance of PR.

“Notice that this is NOT publicity or hype. Though some of the tools used to accomplish this strategic communications probably include working with the press and analysts, the goal of this kind of effort is a long-term market understanding of a company’s leadership.”