Your PR Architect

By Keith Allison (originally posted  to Flickr as Michelle Wie)  [CC-BY-SA-2.0  (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons caption Not a golfer. Never have been. If there's no tiny windmill on the course, you won't find me. But I worked behind the scenes at a few LPGA golf tournaments in Rochester, NY, doing the PR and community relations thing. In a temporary building with air conditioning. Next to the microwave fries table. As I said, I'm no golfer. When the LPGA announced this morning they were abandoning Rochester for the greener (as in cash) greens of metro New York City, after 38 years in Rochester, I had a few observations: LPGA's timing sucks. Really? Announce a 2015 move to NYC two months prior to the 2014 tournament in Rochester? Why not just set fire to the ticket booth at Monroe Country Club? Waiting to make the announcement after August 2014 would still sting, but it would not have insulted the upcoming Rochester ev

The most important tool to get usable PR photos isn't a $5,000 digital SLR camera. Or a camera phone. Or some in-between device, like a point-and-shoot digital camera. It's your brain. The thinking machine between your ears.  Yes, I can tell you about tiny imaging sensors that capture grainy, disappointing photos. Or how any bright light source you see on your smartphone's screen will trick the camera into under exposing the shot, making faces dark and unrecognizable. Or how that tiny flash won't light up anything further than six feet from your lens. But you won't care. Or won't remember. So, instead, let's talk about your brain, and how it ought to think about PR photos. It should ask three questions, well before you decide that photos of a PR event would be good to have: 1. How quickly does the world need to see these photos? 2. Where will these photos be used? 3. What message will the photos say about your brand? First, how q

Public relations pros once loved weekly newspapers, for several reasons: They often had more space for feature stories and were open to running accompanying photos. Eager young journalists wrote long stories about our clients. Many were delivered free or at modest cost. Unlike a daily paper, they lived in our home for a week. The daily, once read, was recycled in anticipation of the next day's edition. Most of this has changed. Weekly papers haven't fared much better than dailies as ad dollars have left the newspaper industry in favor of internet content. Dailies responded by trimming editorial staff and beefing up their online media presence. Weeklies rely more upon local advertisers and have a more modest business model, but their websites aren't a big destination for local news. By noebse via  Wikimedia Commonscontent.  We have two weeklies in our town. One has been locally written and published for years. Its design is a little dated, but I credit the owner

I read about a women's electric vehicle team at the Kate Gleason College of Engineering at Rochester Institute of Technology. I thought it was interesting, and used Shareaholic to post it to Twitter and Facebook. Here's what appeared on my Facebook timeline: Notice anything? Facebook defaulted to the second image on the RIT news story, showing the men's team. The women's team (see the second screen shot below), while visible in the original story, wasn't promoted when shared via social media. Why did the second photo appear in my timeline, and not the first? There may be a coding trick or algorithm that easily explains this occurrence. I'd love to hear more about it. But from my side of the screen -- the side most of us see -- this feels a bit biased. Men in engineering? Run the image. Women in engineering? Not interested. Which is baloney. Especially if the women aren't getting equal recognition. If Facebook arbitrarily selects photos of peop