Tesla PR Crash & Burn

The EV blog  Electrek broke the news last week that Tesla is dissolving its PR department.  Editor-in-chief  Fred Lambert’s story covered journalists’ growing frustrations with the comms team leading up to its shutdown. He wrote: Electrek can confirm that Tesla has dissolved its PR department — technically becoming the first automaker who doesn’t talk to the press… […]

Does Social Media Marketing Need a Reboot? Neal Schaffer Responds

I was thrilled when Neal Schaffer agreed to participate in my series about challenges facing social media marketing.  Neal is a social media speaker and consultant ranked by Forbes and others as a top influencer. I had the privilege of writing for his Maximize Social Business blog for three years, and have also spoken at […]

Drew Neisser on Next Steps for Social Media Marketing

I have been blogging about challenges confronting digital PR and social media marketing. You can read those posts to learn more. In a nutshell, issues have surfaced over the past couple of years (related to fake news, online manipulation, growing privacy concerns as examples) that I believe drive the need to take stock and possibly […]

FUD 2.0 and the State of PR Ethics

I’m always interested in topics related to my profession, PR, and the industry we serve, technology. So I was eager to see what NY Times had to say in Jack Nicas’s recent piece: How Facebook’s P.R. Firm Brought Political Trickery to Tech. Longtime readers know that I like to call out misperceptions about PR, hence […]

Tow Center & Reuters Share Research on Publishers & Platforms

I love to check out reports from Tow Center for Digital Journalism and Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. They cover the intersection of news and digital media and can be a great resource for PR pros and digital marketers. So I eagerly attended the Platforms and Publishers meetup at Columbia Tow Center last […]

Social Tools Summit 2017 Boston

I enjoyed attending my third consecutive Social Tools Summit event in Boston last week, where I moderated a panel on branding and thought leadership. It was great to take a day and get caught up on the state of the art in social media. The field is constantly changing, and there’s never a shortage of […]

What to do when PR hits a Pay Wall

PR folks know the feeling. You put a press release over the wire – and then duck. Not necessarily because of all the press inquiries that come in (wouldn’t that be great)? You duck to avoid the flood of offers from pay-to-play opportunities. Each one needs to be vetted and explained to the client or […]

3 Ways to Blow out Influencer Marketing Results

When looking for the right influencers, it’s tempting to focus on the big fish, the ones with huge followings. Most think that size matters (as I’ve pointed out, influence is not just a number). Then again, much has been said about the benefits of targeting micro-influencers – those with fewer than 10K Twitter followers. They’re […]

Huffington Goes Viral with Data Science – You can Too

Cross posted on Hack the Feed My recent posts have explored how publishers are working with social platforms to expand audience and adapt story telling formats (see Publishers & Platforms In a Relationship, and Platforms as Publishers: 6 Key Takeaways for Brands). They reported the experiences of social teams and editors at some of the […]

The Invisible Warriors: Millennials & Social Media

By Laura Davenport, Intern Lazy, they call us. Apathetic, they accuse. Insults like these, and many others aside—materialistic, selfish, and lacking in focus, to name a few—are leveled at the Millennial Generation on a regular basis. When they accuse us of these charges, I wonder to whom we are compared. Maybe its the all-American soldiers […]