Your PR Architect

I'm completely aware that this article is paid for. It touts a Rochester, NY automobile dealership, and one employee's love of an heirloom Pontiac. Which we never actually see, because the dealer sponsoring the copy sells Chevrolets. 1966 Catalina, by Tino Rossini (Flickr: Catalina) [CC BY 2.0 ] via Wikimedia Commons Nonetheless, I have a quibble or two with it. Veteran PR practitioners will recognize this ode to Chevrolets as "advertorial." The new term is "sponsored content." If you want to know the price range of a new Corvette, that's about the only newsworthy aspect of the story. Whatever we call it, I made a good living writing it for a spectrum of clients. Sponsored content, well presented, demonstrates subject matter expertise that creates a halo effect for a client and/or his/her brand. To be fair, the Gannett Rochester operation labeled this honestly: "This story is produced and presented by our sponsor." Sponsored edito...

Now and then, I have the privilege of leveraging the craft of public relations to do some real-world good. In a few weeks, that opportunity comes around again with our "PR Apprentice" competition -- where we'll ask college students to dive in to the deep end of the PR pool. It's a sink or swim event. This year's program (Oct. 2-3) involves members of the PRSA chapter in Rochester, NY and local media representatives serving as coaches and judges of teams from several colleges and universities in Western New York. Over a 36-hour period, the teams of students will strategize and pitch their best plans to promote a dual-language awareness campaign for Ibero American Action League's Early Childhood Center . View a video and full details on PRSA Rochester's website. Engaging undergraduates in this competition gives them both exposure to a real-world PR challenge, and helps them demonstrate their skills to agency, not-for-profit, and corporate practiti...

Somehow the title "editor" has become a dirty word. The daily newspaper here (and other Gannett dailies ) recently reorganized its news staff. Titles with words like "news" and "editor" disappeared. That's a problem for public relations people who practice good media relations. If I want to pitch a particular story to a reporter covering the town of Brighton, I could look at a page of newsroom contacts , and find the right individual. Or an editor who'd be interested. Newsroom, By Thomas Schmidt (NetAction) (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa /3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Today, it's a murky search. "Editors" have been replaced by Content Strategists. Audience Analysts. Consumer Experience Directors. And Storytelling Content Coaches. One staff member's new job title is Problem Solver. I'm not kidding. In the real world, that job was formerly "Consumer Advocate." And i...

I have a bunch of orphans to look after. Not long ago, I worked on a series of video podcasts. Created them, actually, with the help of some very talented video professionals. Our videos profiled professional photographers (see the screen shot below), many of whom championed the virtues of film and digital photography. No one called our work "content creation" at the time. But we produced online material to help build the reputation and brand of a company struggling to re-imagine itself for the digital era. Digital eventually supplanted film, and the company filed for bankruptcy reorganization. Our videos, however, reflect the company's view at the time: that film gave photographers creative latitude that digital cameras did not. (View the series at this link. ) This view, in 2014, has changed. The podcasts -- including this one, profiling British photographer  Jocelyn Bain Hogg  -- live on as created in 2011. Frozen in time. I would have forgotten the...

Last week, except for a few Fathers' Day photos, I didn't post on Facebook. You could say I went on a Facebook diet. Cut out the starchy, empty carbs (also known as "clickbait.") Got away from the screen, took longer walks. De-listed myself from pointless pages I'd once liked. I did share a few responses to others' posts on Facebook. But for seven days, I refrained from sharing links to other stories and videos, or leaving pseudo-pithy observations of my own. Mostly, I eavesdropped on the din of discourse on the world's largest gossip website. What happened when I stepped back from the "scream of consciousness" of Facebook? I spent less time fretting over what to post. No pontificating on the missteps of public figures. No hunting for decades-old snapshots for "Throwback Thursday." And, I got more stuff done. I thought friends would take note of my absence, message me, and ask if I were OK. I was mistaken. I blew past th...

An effective PR strategy requires leveraging social media to drive visits to richer content: blogs, videos, podcasts, infographics, etc. Create great content, and you give a human identity to an otherwise faceless business or organization. But, the content must be rich and active . And, if you once used Alta Vista for online search, you know that, like early roses, nothing online is forever. Recently I revisited my list of links to blogs and other websites that carry content I’d created. To be certain the URLs were accurate, I clicked each link. More than a few articles – mostly posts I’d written for company blogs – had been vaporized. Broken links? Worse. After digging, I discovered the hosting service that managed the blogs had folded. The client company (the one with their name on the website) hadn’t restored its missing content, or explained where it had gone. With the hosting service’s servers inoperative, a large chunk of their blog content – the “real...