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Eesh! A tipster sent the Gawker blog an applicant’s cover letter for a digital account manager position. Oh. My. This candidate is confident and bold — very bold. Although Gawker didn’t publish the entire cover letter, it did post excerpts. For instance, “I don’t just think outside the box, I stand on top of it. I aim to appease my employer. If he/she isn’t satisfied with my work, I will sweat blood and tears until I get them the result that they are enamored with.” Would yo…

Disclaimer: This isn’t a recommendation to break the law— ahem —just an interesting case study. Tax Today, an Australian accounting firm offering quick refunds on tax return, placed ads on ATM machines suggesting Tax Today customers get their money back in as little time as it takes to receive cash from the ATM. The signs were put up at 3 a.m. in the morning by two people. That morning, bank employees removed the signs—before customers could see them, but not before marketers film…

How did Boeing react when an 8-year-old sent the company a drawing of an airplane? It mailed him a cold form letter. “Like many large companies, we do not accept unsolicited ideas,” the letter said. “Experience showed that most ideas had already been considered by our engineers …” Last week, the boy’s dad posted the letter on his blog , sparking a social media backlash against Boeing. But wait! There’s a happy ending for both sides. Boeing had  joined Twitte…

Well that economic downturn wasn’t so bad, now was it? That’s one result of a study from USC’s strategic communications and PR center. The study’s author, Jerry Swerling, said “from a historical perspective, it appears that we have weathered the recession far better than previous recessions.” According to Swerling’s study, 42.5 percent of respondents reported a decrease in PR budgets — although internal staff increased at 62 percent of companies surveyed &#…

What’s up with this Irish airline’s communication strategy? The Dublin, Ireland-based company seems to be taking the “any PR is good PR” theory to the extreme. Examples: CEO Michael O’Leary announces Ryanair will start charging flyers to use the bathroom; O’Leary says that future overseas flights in business class will include “beds and blowjobs”; a company spokesman calls bloggers “idiots” and “lunatics.”

Let 1-800-Flowers be a lesson for you: always tell your audience how to access your organization’s Facebook page. 1-800-Flowers issued a press release announcing its Facebook presence, but the press release failed to provide the URL to the page. So, if someone reading that release decided to then search Facebook for the 1-800-Flowers page, he or she would find a group called “1-800-Flowers Suck,” which was apparently created by a disgruntled customer.  Yikes .

Many (maybe most) of the big names in social media are men (think Chris Brogan, Brian Solis, Gary Vaynerchuck). But look out, guys; it won’t be that way for long, according to Shelly Kramer, co-founder of V3 Integrated Marketing in Kansas City. “When it comes to brands and their never-changing objective of reaching their target audience, it’s a no-brainer that that audience is, in most cases, women,” she wrote on the blog, Finding Answers . “And women instinctively know…

You hear a film adaptation of your favorite book is hitting theaters. When it comes out, you and your sweetheart hit the theater — and you leave crestfallen. That was terrible, you think. The book was way better. Not the case when it comes to these 15 books turned movies, according to The Huffington Post . What do you think? Agree?

The New York Times personal technology columnist David Pogue wrote one of the more unique reviews of the iPad. He reviewed it for techies (your IT department) and non-techies (you). For techies, Pogue harshly critiqued the iPad. “The bottom line is that you can get a laptop for much less money … Besides: If you’ve already got a laptop and a smartphone, who’s going to carry around a third machine?” For everyone else, Pogue celebrated the iPad. “Some have suggested that…

We’re all trying to find ways to prove to clients that we really do know what we’re talking about. Richard Pentin at If Only Blog pulled together the latest stats to provide an overview of the essential tools for understanding customers’ social media behavior. At the very least you can wow your co-workers with your statistical knowledge. — Beth Carroll, contributor to  PR Daily Europe  

The topics at this July conference, which will take place at Bournemouth University in England, include “Public Relations in Communist Hungary,” “Embracing the Embarrassing,” and a discussion on the differences between PR and propaganda, reports the BBC. Academics from 14 countries are slated to present papers on the history of PR. This marks the first PR-related conference at Bournemouth.

And the hits just keep on coming for the newspaper industry. Kubas Associates surveyed 500 newspaper executives in November and they offered a dismal outlook for next year. “Among the discouraging findings: Publishers seem to agree that advertising revenues will continue to decline in 2010, although less rapidly (which passes for “improvement” nowadays), with a 0.2 percent overall decline. Related New York Layoffs hit The New York Times : Who’s out at Gray Lady?

The Business Insider sifted through the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which surveys customers every month, to find the companies with the lowest marks. Some organizations on this list may surprise you, others maybe not. “These are not terribly competitive industries, as the switching barriers for most of them are quite high,” David VanAmburg of ACSI told Business Insider . “In other industries, like the food or clothing sector, the competition is huge. They bend over backwards …

Shatner is, of course, Captain Kirk, and Lin Yu is the Taiwanese singing sensation who sounds exactly like Whitney Houston. As you probably imagined, they make a great singing pair. On comedian George Lopez’s show Wednesday night, Shatner and Yu sang Bonnie Tyler’s prom theme classic, “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” On Thursday, the Internet went crazy for it.

The Corporate Communications team is looking for a corporate communications professional to handle all media relations activities for Markit’s North American operations across a wide range of products and services. These include the Markit CDX credit derivative indices, the Markit/Creditex credit event auctions, and the firm’s credit and structured finance products and services. The role also involved handling the firm’s internal communications efforts in North America. Read more about …