Your PR Architect

When I'm on the road, I buy hot coffee at McDonald's. Until now. McDonald's Corp. is valued at $93 billion, but sales are declining. I'm part of the decline, and by the end of this tale, I hope you'll join me in dining elsewhere. By Ramon FVelasquez, via Wikimedia Commons Last week, the company -- still profitable, by any measure -- invited a band to play at their South by Southwest showcase. Without pay. In turn, the band Ex-Cops used social media to expose McDonald's cheapness. Rolling Stone and other online media picked up the story. This gave McDonald's unwanted PR exposure it doesn't need, with the SXSW-age audience it so desperately needs to reach. Worse? McDonald's media relations drone responded by essentially saying, "We're just paying artists the way other sponsors do." Except they aren't paying. Other SXSW sponsors pay their performers, says Ex Cops. And not with Happy Meals. If SXSW were a countr...

To you, it may be mid-summer. To a PR person, it's now the Christmas season. By Sigismund von Dobschütz (Own work)  [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Public relations people can't use regular calendars. Especially if they're working on product publicity. Most need to gear their PR strategies to reach consumers in the November-December retail window. Which is why I loathe "Christmas in July" media events. The people at Cision have created a 2014 Holiday Gift Guide pitching kit. You can download it here. It may be useful if you have clients who sell packaged goods, pricey hams, electronic products, or sports items, and who count on PR to help drive their year-end sales. Such a "kit" can help you spend the next few weeks convincing print, broadcast, and online media to include those products in their roundups. You may get a 1...

By Oregon Department of Transportation (Diversity Uploaded by AlbertHerring) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Wow. Say what you will about Google's massive  Internet presence,  but when they mess up, they're not shy about it. A few days ago, Google admitted its workforce was overwhelmingly white. And male. They shared some metrics here . This is unusually forthright, because there's no major litigation facing Google regarding workforce inequities. Instead, they got out in front of their problem, defusing potential negative publicity before criticism or litigation arose. But dig deeper and you find their statistics are somewhat worse when it comes to the diversity of the company's leadership. Google's overall workforce is: 30 percent female, 70 percent male.  61 percent white,  30 percent Asian,  2 percent African American, and  3 percent Hispanic. Google's leadership demographics are less fo...

A Monkee has taught me plenty about Facebook. And how we're viewing the social media juggernaut all wrong. We use it for product publicity. Or as an online chronicle of our everyday musings. And, we're missing the point. Facebook isn't a journal. It's not about news. It's about sifting information about you and selling it to Purveyors of Other Stuff. In exchange for allowing us to post recipes or fuzzy smartphone photos, Facebook sifts and parses our comments for clues about us. As we share our opinions or lunch menus, Facebook neatly packages that information and re-sells it to marketers. Maybe Facebook is a useful mechanism for public relations professionals who want their clients' views and products shared. On its own, Facebook isn't an all-inclusive PR strategy. Those "which rock musician are you" quizzes tend to muck up the sharing process. Your posts are arbitrarily ranked by Facebook's software, meaning they may not show up in your...

Which Rochester ad agency didn't get the message about distracted driving? The Rochester Advertising Council's 2013 campaign "Yeah, You're that Distracting" has helped make motorists aware that texting while driving can have fatal results. It convinced me that multitasking behind the wheel was a great way to wreck a car, and likely injure someone. But their great campaign doesn't stop outdoor advertising initiatives like this one: The photo isn't mine. Someone -- perhaps a local TV journalist -- grabbed this image with a smartphone and posted it to a social media feed. I'm betting many other motorists did the same thing, and maybe even added a snarky comment. Free publicity? Sure. And Twitter users' tendency to repost and add their own comments are likely to give the athletic club's modest two-billboard campaign a broader reach than they'd have earned if they'd purchased 10 normal billboards. However: campaigns like this...