During a Twitter party for a client this past week, we discussed Black Friday shopping and how to find deals with a women’s lifestyle/ parent audience. Sponsored Twitter parties, aka chats, are a great way to gauge your audience to find out their interests, likes/dislikes and shopping preferences along with educating consumers about your product/ service and deals, and driving traffic to your site (more to come on Twitter parties at a later date). Read more…
When you’re in PR, you’re expected to do everything harder, better, faster and stronger. Here’s a few tips for keeping the good times rollin’:
- Track your time in real time: If you’re like me (or any other PR pro), you’re a slave to your to-do list. But what about those times when, at the end of the day, it looks like you’ve accomplished practically nothing? Kinda sucks, doesn’t it? Try keeping a word doc or email where you log your time after each completed task or project. You’ll have a visual of where exactly all your time is being spent and it will save you loads of time when you’re doing your billing at the end of the week. In fact, my billing only takes my 30 minutes or less. And that’s not an exaggeration. Read more…
This post originally appeared on PR Breakfast Club.
By now everyone has heard about the ConAgra-Ketchum crisis and forwarded it along to their consumer clients as a cautionary tale.But if you’ve been living under a rock for the past week and missed the public smearing (NYT, HuffPo, Gawker, PRWeek, Business Insider, to name a few) here’s the nutshell version:Ketchum planned a bait and switch stunt with celebrity chef George Duran being the bait and Marie Callender’s frozen food line being the switch. Taking note from other major food brands like Pizza Hut and Domino’s and hoping for similar success, ConAgra thought the invited bloggers would be pleasantly surprised by the quality of their meals and the company hoped they would be able to use the footage for promotional videos on YouTube and its Web site.
There are plenty of ways to kill a blog, but how do you keep yours hanging in there? Or more importantly, why bother?
Having a blog, in many ways, is like being in a relationship. You need to commit to it, spend time with it and nurture it. If you neglect it, you’ll notice the effects pretty fast.
But should you continue blogging, or start a blog in the first place? That’s a conversation you need to have with yourself.
If you may have noticed (or not noticed), I’ve been neglecting my blog. It’s not because I don’t have anything to write about – I’m plenty opinionated and more than willing to donate my 2 cents to the next charity case. It’s because this past year I got a reality check: I’m not in college anymore. I’m in the real world with a real job, real clients and real responsibilities. And to be frank, the last thing I want to do is stare at a computer screen when I do have a little free time at the end of the day.
I go back and forth on my dedication to my blog. On one hand, I don’t owe any of you a damn thing. Think about it: I’m not being paid to blog, I’m not heading up my own agency and trying to recruit clients. I’m just a young pro figuring out her career and giving opinions and insight on our evolving industry.
While some found Intel’s Museum of Me app as “creepy and unsettling” (some even likened it to a funeral parlor) or narcissism at its finest, I found it be an absolutely fascinating digital experience.
After giving your permission link to your Facebook account, Intel gathers information and images to create a virtual museum with several “art exhibits” based on your data. With virtual onlookers and soothing background music, the three-minute video takes you through exhibits such as pictures of you, pictures of your friends, words that you commonly use, your likes and more.
This post was originally written for Allison Ralston’s blog.
Some people have lifelong dreams of living and working in New York City. They fall in love with the city (sometimes never even having visited) and are determined to make a living. To paraphrase the great Frank Sinatra, if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.
However, I was not one of those people.
I hadn’t fathomed calling NYC home until two months before I graduated college. New York City was just a place I saw in the movies; It seemed fun and all, but wasn’t really “real” for me. In the Midwest, where I’m from, the big city you move to is Detroit or Chicago. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would have moved 800 miles away from home to live in a city I could barely navigate. And now, this month marks my one year anniversary of living in New York, NY.