October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, which has inspired a new crop of public service announcements about the disease that The Los Angeles Times said “leverage male lechery to an astonishing degree.” The L.A. Times’ Dan Neil wrote, “If this were a Budweiser commercial, the bluestockings, psalm singers and family focusers would be going completely mental, but in this case the morals police have no grounds to object unless they want to come off as somehow pro-breast cancer.”
Viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella spent nine months analyzing five million tweets and 40 million retweets to determine what content Twitter users like to share. The result is a 22-page report, due out today. FastCompany has published nine effective ways to get retweeted, compliments of Zarrella’s report.
The Washington Redskins were booed (by their own fans) on Sunday after the team beat the St. Louis Rams, 9 – 7. Rookie linebacker Robert Henson, who didn’t play in the game, took to Twitter to rip the fans. He first wrote, “All you fake half hearted Skins fan can .. I won't go there but I dislike you very strongly, don't come to Fed Ex to boo dim wits!!” And then, after fans tweeted back, he wrote: “No I didn't play but I still made more than you in a year and you'd [gladly] switch spots with me in a second.” Ouch.
Frank Liberman, a Hollywood publicist for more than 60 years, died Monday. He was 92. “Liberman represented Bob Hope for 41 years, Phyllis Diller for 33 and David Janssen for 16,” according to The Hollywood Reporter’s Mike Barnes. “He also repped Henry Fonda, Nat ‘King’ Cole, Tony Bennett, Jack Paar, Harry Belafonte, Steve Allen, Charles Bronson, Joan Blondell, Dorothy Lamour, Peggy Lee, Mel Ferrer, Mike Nichols, Frank Langella, Nick Nolte and William Shatner, among others.”
Tuning in to tweets is like watching Maury Povich’s show or professional wrestling, according to Dan Lyons, tech critic for Newsweek. “You know it's awful. You know you shouldn't enjoy it, yet you can't look away,” he wrote. “That, I'm afraid to say, is why I've come to believe that, of all the hellish things that have been spawned in the fever swamp that is the Internet, Twitter may turn out to be the most successful of them all — not in spite of its stupidity, but because of it.” Twitter, he said, has become a playground for imbeciles, skeevy marketers, D-list celebrity half-wits, and pathetic attention seekers. “Stupid stuff sells,” Lyons wrote. “The genius of Twitter is that it manages to be even stupider than TV. It's so stupid that it's brilliant.” Related PR Daily How to pitch Dan Lyons.
CropLife, a nonprofit association, is hiring an online communications coordinator. This person will be responsible for management of a variety of projects primarily involved in Web site design and development. Read more about this job.
Andy Sernovitz, the man who literally wrote the book on word-of-mouth marketing, has three tips for hiring social media specialists. Tip No. 2 said not to measure the quality of job candidates by the number of Twitter followers or Facebook friends they have. "Any spammer can amass a couple thousand followers on Twitter," Sernovitz wrote. Good advice.
A group of PR students planned a fundraiser — a chili cook-off — for a local library. The library moved the date of the event back (after their graduation), changed the budget and left the students with a nasty taste of the real world. Leo Bottary, a communications consultant, offered the students some advice. “I believe the lessons here are far more valuable and pervasive than what might have been gained from ordering plastic forks and napkins for a chili cook-off,” he blogged.
A new study published by eMarketer found that a whopping 86 percent of professionals from various industries have adopted social media. That’s the goods news. The bad news is a mere 16 percent of them measure the return on investment (ROI) of their social media initiatives. “More than four in 10 respondents did not even know whether the social tools they were using had ROI measurement capabilities,” according to eMarketer.
The New York Times is “exploring plans to build search products that can sift through thousands of Twitter feeds and pull together commentary on specific topics,” reported Adweek’s Mike Shields. Better watch your back, Maureen Dowd.
In college, I majored in history. My peers chided me for this decision; I felt sorry for them. “Lemmings,” I muttered to the business and pre-law majors. And then I graduated. Ahem. Not that many jobs for history majors. This reminds me of the students entering J-schools today, most likely against the advice of their friends and loved ones. “For a new crop of journalists, with many more wannabes starting journalism school this fall, tumult in the news industry means new opportunities for connecting with readers online, but also fresh anxiety about finding a way to get paid for it,” wrote Andrew Vanacore for the Associated Press. Some graduates, the story noted, are treating journalism like a “hobby.” Kind of like me and the History Channel.
“Advertising agencies around the country are trying to figure out social media. How do we do it? How do we sell it? Do we have to?” Jason Falls, a social media consultant, blogged on Social Media Explorer. “The answer is probably yes, you do have to if you want to continue to offer a full range of marketing services to your clients, and bill appropriately. Some agencies are doing a good job adjusting, hiring smart social media thinkers and getting smart about social media quickly. Others are still cocking their head sideways like a puppy trying to figure out a vacuum cleaner.”
A Nevada lawmaker wants to pass a resolution about the pronunciation of the word, "Nevada." That got a MyRagan-ite thinking: More commonly mispronounced words need legislation, too. Which ones would you choose?
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