Category: Uncategorized

December 17, 2015

No more “front page”

A speaker at a conference I attended kept referring to landing great placements “on the front page.” Each time he said it, the words clattered around the room like a Model T. Here’s why we need to change our emphasis.

December 3, 2015

Is there 1 right way to pitch?

I examined 11 ultra-successful pitches and looked for commonalities. You may not notice a grand unifying theory right away, but there IS one thing all these winning PR pros had in common.

November 24, 2015

Black Friday and “real” PR

REI’s awesome move to shutter stores for Black Friday reminded me of the real definition of PR (and also demonstrated an oft-overlooked publicity tactic).

November 20, 2015

Problems of an “overachieving” PR Pro

“It’s almost getting too easy,” she told me, not bragging, just saying. She mastered a SINGLE element of the craft and leveraged it in a major way. Now she’s tackling the next step . . .

November 12, 2015

How to win at conferencing

She was right in the front. All three times. We would all benefit from this PR professional’s example of being aggressive about professional development.

October 29, 2015

“What’s with the grammar errors & sentence fragments?”

That was a question I got on a recent webinar with current university PR professors. It didn’t surprise me. Here’s why I use an informal tone in my pitches.

October 22, 2015

Sorry, I’m sick of Back to the Future Day

And if I was that sick of it, imagine how journalists felt? When pitching media, it’s no longer enough just to claim a connection to a date on the calendar. Here are three ways to set yourself apart from the masses.

October 15, 2015

Are you a ‘source’ or a ‘flack’?

If you take off your “PR pro” hat for a minute and put on your “shopper” hat, you may find a parallel that helps explain why journalists and bloggers deal with PR people the way they do.

October 1, 2015

Are you developing this overlooked skill?

This comms VP is one of the most effective PR pros I’ve ever worked with, and I finally figured out why.

September 17, 2015

When pitch customization backfires

In an interview earlier this year, a top-tier reporter complained to me about something PR pros tend to do. We should all take note and change our customized pitches accordingly.