Last night in #prchat20, we were discussing whether it’s potentially dangerous to abandon a channel of communication (in this case, we were focusing largely on Twitter and Facebook, but the thinking applies elsewhere) because it isn’t proving itself to be profitable.
I made the analogy of a basketball team. A basketball team has five players who [...]
What goes up must come down.
Newton gets a lot of credit for this idea, but let’s face it: People were noticing this a long time before he put together a theory about it. And they were noticing it didn’t just apply to physical objects.
Whether it’s the stock market, a person’s mood, or the recent batting [...]
It’s been a little over two weeks since the FTC announced they were going to start watching blogs. Since then, there’s been healthy discussion and debate. Bloggers have had pretty much the same reaction as advertisers did when the FTC first came after unscrupulous ads. It’s great. It’s a sign that social media is coming [...]
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 [...]
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 over the [...]
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 the equally mindless [...]
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 rules [...]
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 and communication [...]
If you’re a big fan of PR debacles, then you’ve probably already heard about the United Breaks Guitars music video on Youtube.
If you haven’t, here’s a summary: Guy watches guitar get broken by baggage handlers. Guy gets nowhere with customer service. Guy makes suspiciously-high-production-value music video on Youtube complaining about his treatment.
And the crowd goes [...]
There seems to be an accepted reality in online marketing: Writing fake, positive reviews for products is something everyone does. It’s the only way to be competitive.
Does this smell like bullshit to anyone else?
I’ve looked around the net for statistics on just how many online, on-site (i.e. sites like Amazon or Newegg) reviews are real, [...]
Welcome to Fedorable, a blog for technology and PR. It's updated by Rex Riepe and Greg Allard, the guys behind IvyLees.
