Your PR Architect

Our local PRSA chapter held its award ceremony last week. Many great public relations campaigns, agencies, and practitioners were recognized. And deservedly so. My Canon camera. By Mohylek (Own work),  via Wikimedia Commons I'd share photos, except I wasn't there. And most of the photos posted on social media by the event's attendees were uniformly awful. Poorly lit, under-exposed snapshots -- the incriminating fingerprint of a smartphone camera that uses a tiny sensor and fires a tiny LED to produce a feeble flash. Or has no flash at all. (I'd link to their pictures, but it's unfair to show colleagues in less than flattering photos.) Footnote: this isn't specific to the Rochester, NY PRSA chapter. I've now seen shots from the Buffalo PRSA Excalibur awards event; they aren't any better, and in some cases, look no better than any after-party selfies you've seen. Listen, I get it. People don't want to carry two devices. A stand-al...

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...

Is it worth shouting about an award if you aren't among the Top Ten winners? Today, Apple is the world's No. 1 Brand, according to Interbrand, a brand consulting agency (surprise!) that annually assigns an economic value to the best-known global brands. This year, Apple bounced long-time top dog Coca-Cola off the Global Brands summit, landing it just below Google at No. 2. (Read the whole list here. ) Business awards are our industry's cottage industry. A publication or organization looking to gain credibility creates some form of award competition, invites nominees, recognizes the winning companies at a banquet or news conference -- and then tries to leverage the relationship into an exchange of cash. Buying an ad or a membership. Licensing the award logo for use on packaging or in ads. And so on. Everyone likes recognition. Even if it's not cheap. Once J.D. Power recognizes your company as tops in customer satisfaction, you need to pay a minimum five-figu...