Archives
By Month
By Category
Contact Us
If you know about a story that we should be following, let us know.
Mediatwits
Mediatwits #32: Yahoo's Mr. Wrong?; Steve Rubel's Clip Book; Fake @Wendi_Deng
Welcome to the 32nd episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Rafat Ali. We're back from our holiday break and ready to tackle more media news. The big news of the new year is a new CEO (again) at Yahoo, this time PayPal president Scott Thompson will try his...
more »
Social Media
How PBS NewsHour Used Social Media in Response to Hack Attack
PBS NewsHour staffers who were awake late last Sunday before Memorial Day, including myself, were just as startled as the rest of the Internet to discover a legitimate-looking blog post on our site claiming that late rapper Tupac Shakur was alive. We were under a hacking attack. Suddenly, it was time for damage control. I hope you never find yourself...
more »
Public Relations
Why Are Hispanics Missing in Leadership at Media Companies?
Fifty million people. One trillion dollars in buying power. Ad spending up 164% since 2001 to $3.88 billion. Hundreds of Spanish-language TV stations across the U.S. Those eye-catching numbers represent the immense, and largely untapped, scale and wealth of the Hispanic-American media market. Put into greater perspective, if Hispanic-Americans comprised their own country, it would be the fifth-largest, by population, in the European Union. And this demographic is growing -- rapidly.
more »
Public Relations
How to Fix the Tech PR Industry's Diversity Deficit
PBS.org has recently been home to some frank and thoughtful discussions about an overlooked issue: the lack of racial diversity in the media. For those who may have missed it, the dialogue was sparked by Retha Hill in an Idea Lab post about the lack of minorities at new media conferences. Mark Glaser expanded the conversation from the comments section...
more »
4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Apple Offers Free Bumpers as iPhone Fix
In this week's 4MR podcast I look at the problems Apple has been having with its iPhone 4. The infamous "death grip" issue meant you'd have dropped calls if your hand went over a certain part of the phone's antenna. Apple brought out Steve Jobs for a press conference today where they offered free bumpers to solve the issue, and would refund anyone for their iPhone if they weren't satisfied. I talked with Chicago Sun-Times tech guru Andy Ihnatko for his take on the press conference and Apple's non-apology apology.
more »
Public Relations
What Working for Wikipedia Taught Me About Collaboration
A little over three years ago, I started working as the communications manager for Wikipedia. I had just moved to St. Petersburg, Fla., and was ecstatic to hear that this quirky website, which had begun to pop up in many of my web searches, was based there. Having grown up in New York, my culture radar detected that this was...
more »
Public Relations
5 Digital PR Lessons from BP's Oil Spill Response
Just like late night talk show hosts who salivate over a fresh political sex scandal, professional communicators can't stop analyzing and talking about BP's public relations work during the current Gulf Coast oil spill disaster. More to the point, they can't shut up about BP's inability to relate to the public, and its poor use of digital and social tools...
more »
5Across
5Across: Athletes on Social Media
Back in the day, the only coverage of a sporting event came from the accredited media. But now, you can find out more from fans in the seats taking pictures and posting to blogs -- or from the athletes themselves who are getting hooked on Twitter and Facebook status updates. In fact, Major League Baseball has warned players it is...
more »
Public Relations
Social Media Release Must Evolve to Replace Press Release
It's been nearly four years since the birth of the social media release, and the terminology and abilities of this tool are evolving alongside social media itself. This fast-paced evolution means many communicators are finding it tough to choose which tool best fits their needs. Sometimes, this wealth of options can lead PR pros to stick with the classic news...
more »
Public Relations
PR Pros Use Twitter to Reinvigorate Brands, Engage in Conversation
Fairmont Hotels & Resorts operates luxury properties in countries all over the world, from the U.S. and Canada to Asia the Middle East and Africa. Aside from traditional promotions, one of the ways it connects with current, past and future guests is via its main Twitter account. Several accounts are also maintained by individual properties. "We push out news and...
more »
PoliticalShift
The Highs (and Lows) of Public Officials on Twitter
Are high profile public officials using Twitter as a noble tool to bypass the proverbial "mainstream media filter" and communicate directly with constituencies? Or do they just see it as yet one more wall in the online echo chamber, something merely to influence and/or amplify mainstream media stories? The answer probably lies somewhere in between as I found from examining...
more »
Public Relations
How PR People Can Tactfully Locate, Pitch Influential Bloggers
Many PR agencies are hesitant to issue any guarantees on whether a particular piece of content or advertisement will "go viral," leading millions of users to toss it around through their various social media platforms. One way that they try to achieve this is by approaching the people often most responsible for the viral spread of content online -- big-name...
more »
Thought Leader Q&A
Edelman's Steve Rubel Switches from Blog to Lifestream
I spoke with Rubel a couple months ago when he was visiting San Francisco for the Ad:tech conference. We met at B Restaurant near Moscone Center and I interviewed him with my Flip camera. We talked about his balancing act as a blogger/journalist/PR person, how PR is shifting with the advent of social media, and what lessons Edelman and Edelman's client Wal-Mart have learned from previous missteps online.
more »
Public Relations
Issue Advocacy on the Internet, Part 2
On May 7, I published an introduction to issue advocacy on the Internet, which looked at three opportunities and three challenges to communicators who hope to take their advocacy campaign online. Online content, I pointed out, is interactive (as opposed to merely informational), syndicatable (as opposed to confined or static) and permanent (as opposed to fleeting or disposable). These three...
more »
Public Relations
Issue Advocacy on the Internet, Part 1
The Internet has been alternately characterized as participatory, conversational, and collaborative. By empowering its users to create (not just consume) content, it is by design a more democratic medium than any other. There has been plenty of discussion about how, by giving everyone a public voice, the Internet is upending conventional power dynamics and enabling a new generation of opinion...
more »
Public Relations
Amazon's Fail: Not Using Social Media to React to #AmazonFail Meme
In what some initially speculated to be a homophobic new expurgation policy, Amazon.com removed hundreds of gay and lesbian themed books from its sales rating system, effectively concealing these books from online shoppers. Some titles were completely delisted from Amazon's search engine. The controversy may never have provoked such widespread media attention -- or an official company response -- if...
more »
MarketingShift
'Cluetrain Manifesto' Still Relevant 10 Years Later
When The Cluetrain Manifesto appeared on the web in 1999, neither its supporters nor its authors believed it was trying to say anything particularly new. Rather, the 95 theses and the following chapters -- written in almost a stream of consciousness, psychoanalytic style befitting of something labeled a "manifesto" -- were thought to merely point out the obvious to the...
more »
Public Relations
PR People Must Heed Digital Reality as Newspapers Fold
Last Wednesday morning, as the sun rose over the West Coast, newspaper delivery people in Seattle dropped off the final edition of the Post Intelligencer, one of Seattle's two daily newspapers. The struggling P-I was 145 years old and, by coincidence, 145 newsroom employees were left without jobs. Hearst, which owns the news organization, announced that it will retain 20...
more »
PoliticalShift
Public Diplomacy in the Digital Age, Part 2
We're a nation at war. At war not with another nation, but with a hateful ideology violently expressed: terrorism. Every militaristic move a terrorist makes is designed to intimidate, frustrate, agitate....in short, communicate. Physical destruction and loss of life, crass as it sounds, are means to those ends. In this sense, the war of ideas is no longer a metaphor or a figure of speech -- it's a literal war in which we now find ourselves. And in a war of ideas, public diplomacy will be an important tool in our national security toolkit.
more »
Public Relations
Public Diplomacy in the Digital Age, Part 1
"What is public diplomacy?" was the first question that Ted Koppel posed at the recent Media as a Global Diplomat conference attended largely by public diplomacy professionals. I was surprised that the panelists, including the outgoing Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy & Public Affairs, couldn't readily agree on an answer to this foundational question. Koppel continued, "I thought [public...
more »
Public Relations
In Hudson River Landing, PR Pros Were Not First Responders
In times of crisis, communications professionals have an important -- and increasingly complicated -- role to play. We used to be the first to offer public responses to catastrophes, able to develop elucidating messages before much of the news media was on the scene. Nowadays, the type of media that will report on a crisis is often as unforeseen as...
more »
