Your PR Architect

In my favorite film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, there's a scene where the heroes step off a train at a rural town in Bolivia. Sundance takes a few steps into the plaza, and promptly steps into cow dung -- while Butch extols how much more they can buy with their stolen dollars and pesos. Sundance surveys the run-down plaza, looks at Butch, and says: "What could they have here that you'd possibly want to buy?" The scene comes to mind (minus the cow dung) every time I get an email from AmazonLocal, Groupon, or LivingSocial. Each of these online deal aggregators uses the power of social networking and deal-making with retailers to offer half-price deals to members. Call it social couponing. Ninety percent of these deals are things I would never, ever buy. Even after I've customized my Groupon settings. I've purchased one or two of these offers. The majority, however, are for goods or services I don't find valuable. Is this a $20 burger? O

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

How many hats do you wear in PR? Counselor? Writer? Media negotiator? Strategist? Here's one more: ethicist. we need more authenticity. In PR. On Facebook. And maybe in life. Brian Solis, who blogs about the impact of culture, technology and business, thinks there's room for much more transparency online. Brian had an interesting take on authenticity in public relations and social media, which you can read here . He argues for disclosing your relationship with a client or company if you write a personal blog or reviews about that company's products. Brian's post doesn't directly talk about the 2006 "Wal-marting Across America" scandal, captured here . But the connection's clear. Fast-forward; in 2013, authenticity is on the ropes again. Facebook and Twitter, in particular, enable unbridled "liking" and "following" of products, brands, and services. When we cheerily agree to use a Facebook app, we often give it permission t

This started out as some informal recommendations I shared with a colleague at a large not-for-profit institution. As with many large enterprises, not all areas within the organization get the online visibility they desire. My friend's area wants to earn some visibility with prospective customers -- but the "mother ship" organization's social media strategy doesn't provide the ability to promote individual departments or divisions. Here's what I shared with my colleague: Facebook would be an OK place to purchase ads, if that's where your target audience is looking -- and if they will take action based on your ads. When I visited (your department's) Facebook page, I saw 430 views, but just 24 "likes". You want the 'likes' to grow, because they show up on other people's Facebook feeds. For comparison, a small local non-profit's Facebook page has 64 likes. It's much smaller than your organization, so word of that pag