Greg and I have tried here on Fedorable to give our insights on various challenges we have faced in developing Presskit’n and IvyLees. It’s in that spirit that I write this post, even though he’s not here to help me with it. Greg died on Sunday, September 13th in a car accident while returning from [...]
Author Archives: Rex
On shilling: Where the “everyone does it” sleaze mentality comes from
TechCrunch recently covered an example of shilling, where interns were paid to post fake reviews on Apple’s App Store. The sleazy PR firm in question this time was Reverb Communications, based out of California. TechCrunch’s article pulls up a lot of great points, even going as far to post an e-mail from Reverb in which [...]
Posted in Ethics, Public Relations 1 Comment
Brand image and brand perception: Two sides of the same coin
We had an interesting talk on #pr20chat a couple weeks ago, when Beth Harte started with a simple question: “What is branding?” All of the PR folks in the chat promptly painted their faces with war paint and went to battle against each other. Okay, so it wasn’t that bad. But we were starkly divided [...]
Posted in Branding, Public Relations 4 Comments
Embrace the trolls
Todd Defren wrote last week to ignore the trolls, and it’s a post I’ve been thinking about for a few days. After mulling it over, I can’t help but think it’s bad advice. Here’s why. The wisdom of crowds We will often handwave the mindless comments from naysayers, only to turn around and happily embrace [...]
Posted in Public Relations, Social Media 3 Comments
Newest revenue stream accessible via Twitter: Lawsuits
Gawker is reporting on an apartment management company that’s sued a former tenant over a tweet. In the tweet, the tenant said her apartment was moldy and also mentioned the company, Horizon, by name. The damages claim? 50,000 bucks. The tenant had 20 followers. That’s 2500 bucks a follower. At the moment, Horizon Realty is [...]
Posted in Uncategorized 1 Comment
Having a code of ethics, in and of itself, is meaningless
Some organizations treat the topic of ethics as though it were something on a checklist. “We have an ethics page on our site; therefore we are ethical.” The word ethics leaves a lot of room for this type of behavior. In the end, being ethical simply means consistently following a set of rules. But the [...]
Posted in Ethics, Public Relations 1 Comment
Digg’s short URL fiasco and what we can learn from it
When Digg first came out with their short URL service, they saw tons of usage right off the bat, regardless of the fact that they were attaching their patently annoying Digg bar to every page instead of using a real redirect. Thousands and thousands of people used it, but some hated it. I personally never [...]
Posted in Ethics Leave a comment
The price of being sleazy: Three hundred thousand dollars
The New York Times reported Tuesday on a cosmetic surgery company that was faking reviews online. The cost? $300,000. And of course a New York Times article outing them as sleazebags. I wonder if they used the “But everybody’s doing it!” defense. The article was particularly surprising to me because I know that some PR [...]
Posted in Ethics, Public Relations Leave a comment
How to customize the look of your social media release
Every now and then we do a post on a Presskit’n feature. Today we’re going to look at how to customize the look of your social media release. Here’s a recent IvyLees release using the default theme: We decided not to use the IvyLees theme (that would be trite, right?), instead opting for something a [...]
Posted in Branding, Presskit'n, Social Media, Technology Leave a comment
Conversation vomit: Why aggregating everything everyone says is a stupid idea
You’ve seen it at the bottom of some blog posts. It’s a long stream of “So-and-so said this on so-and-so site” with every retweet on the subject clogging up the flow of discussion. It’s conversation vomit. It’s when an aggregator eats everything around the Internet about a blog post, comes back to the blog post, [...]
Posted in Social Media, Technology Leave a comment
