Critical Mass PR

Pop music star Sting held a news conference at a New York Apple store on Nov. 15 to announce his Sting 25 “appumentary,” an iPad app with historical interviews, music videos and concert footage promoting a career-spanning CD box set of the same name. Similarly, Clear Channel Broadcasting, Inc.’s iHeartRadio app repurposes audio and commercial messages [...]

A recap of my 2011 Digital Dialogue column offering digital communication advice as published in the PR Tactics Journal by the Public Relations Society of America. Happy Holidays and a prosperous 2012 to everyone! Mobile’s challenges for digital communicators (Jan 2011) – Tablets, Tumblr and a pack of mobile options kicked off a year of communicators needing [...]

The President completed a social networking trifecta in July, hosting a Twitter town hall meeting that generated 119,000 #AskObama tweets containing 40,000 unique questions, according to TwitSprout. The President’s digital communications strategy may focus on balancing activity across several channels, but in the private sector, Facebook, Google and others are waging the battle for social media [...]

LinkedIn Corp. closed its first day of public trading on May 19 at $94.25 per share, tallying a net worth of nearly $9 billion. This development triggered optimism for other social media companies anticipating Initial Public Offerings (IPOs), including Facebook — with a projected $100 billion valuation, according to CNBC — and eventually Twitter. Regional deal-of-the-day [...]

Aflac fired “spokesduck” Gilbert Gottfried over his comments about the Japanese tsunami. GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons documented an elephant hunt that angered PETA.  An Applebee’s restaurant in Michigan accidentally served alcohol to a toddler. These headlines illustrate how crisis topics vary. However, there is a common mindset that PR practitioners can apply to help manage [...]

I’m fortunate on occasion to receive books for review. Such is the case with When the Headline Is You: An Insider’s Guide to Handling the Media, authored by media and crisis communications trainer Jeff Ansell, with Jeffrey Leeson. My thanks to both for sharing a copy. Ansell’s 16 years of journalism and 22 years of [...]

Online news consumption surpassed newspapers for the first time last year according to Pew Research Center’s 2011 State of the News Media report. Forty-six percent of respondents access news online at least three times weekly, compared to 40 percent from newspapers. Pew also finds that 47 percent of Americans access local news via mobile devices. These [...]

What happens when you merge the frequency of newspapers, the engagement of magazines and the immediacy of the Web? The answer is TheDaily.com, according to News Corp. The Daily debuted in February as the first national news publication with original content created each day exclusively for the iPad. All Things Digital — a Wall Street Journal website also owned by [...]

Fresh off a family visit to Dunkin’ Donuts over the weekend I see the franchisor has redesigned its website per details in a Mashable post which also cites DD for placing more “importance on self-distributed media.” This echoes the continuing trend of brand journalism: where big brands and businesses of various sizes publish their own [...]

Social technology has the power to differentiate you from the crowd and attract attention to your message — but first you must make the online experience come to life for your audience. In this month’s Digital Dialog column, Ryan Zuk talks with Amy Martin, the CEO of Phoenix-based Digital Royalty, about how to use digital media to achieve IRL results.