I think that we might be losing our way. Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln's Own Stories 16th president of US (1809 - 1865) Public relations and social media tools are powerful ways to communicate character. The character of a company or an individual. But it seems that more and more people are trying to use these tools to manipulate the shadows of brand and reputation. read more...
How To: The Secrets for Gaming Twitter Are Free, and Why It Doesn’t Matter Anyway
Let me start by saying that I have never gamed Twitter to get more followers. Moreover, I am personally opposed to it, mostly because it makes no sense. More on that in a moment... So if you came to this page looking for a way to game Twitter, I will share it with you in a few seconds, courtesy of my friend Jim Turner (@Genuine). Jim read more...
A Call for Free Speech in a Digital Age: Why Free Exchange of Information Matters
Every day I ply my trade as a public relations practitioner, which at its core means that in order to be employed, I depend on a culture that allows freedom of expression. I have to admit that I am not much of an activist myself, but Sasha Gong's op-ed piece in the Washington Post (which was later run in the Houston Chronicle where I read it) really hit home for read more...
Ethical Marketing: Big Pharma will Pocket the Swag But Lunch is Still on Them
I have always thought it interesting that pharmaceutical reps showed up at my doctor's office on an alarming basis with platters of food to go along with their drug samples. As a communications professional, I recognized that they were using these lunches to help doctors and their staff remember them, and hopefully their drug of choice. Funny that I never noticed the pens and the notepads, or at least they didn't seem to bother me all that much. But now it seems that in a bid to burnish their image, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America revamped its code of conduct to ban knickknacks with read more...
Flacks, Hacks and Secondary Lies
CBS Executive Vice President for Communications at CBS News Gil "Stanly Bing" Schwartz put together a rebuttal to Andrew Cohen's piece about PR Flacks. It is entertaining, but I am not so sure that his claim about secondary lies being less problematic than primary lies rings true. He contends PR people generally never lie except when lied to by their clients. Sometimes this happens, but I am not sure that it leaves us less responsible for those lies and our dogged defense of them. He makes a point that public relations and journalism are two sides read more...