Critical Mass PR

The NFL operated a 2,800 square foot Social Media Command Center for two weeks during Super Bowl XLVI festivities. Fifty staffers monitored hundreds of keywords to help improve fans’ onsite experiences — reaching nearly 50,000 people directly on social networks and creating 1.8 million online impressions daily. And last month, the Collegiate Marketing Group launched [...]

Consumers gather 60 percent of information needed to make purchase decisions before contacting vendors and read about ten pieces of content before buying, according to data from Come Recommended, LLC, a digital PR consultancy. Brand journalism and the related practice of content marketing are strategies communicators are using to profit from this behavior. Each is [...]

Gamification helps organizations crowdsource ideas, drive and even train people for improved job performance. Tech research giant Gartner suggests that these activities are less compelling in their normal settings but more appealing when gamified to engage people in completing a series of tasks. Gamification, which integrates gaming elements like points, levels and leaderboards into campaigns to [...]

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 [...]

Google+ debuted in June and amassed its first 25 million users faster than any other social network, according to PC Magazine. This finally established Google’s social media presence, after its previous Wave and Buzz experiments received little fanfare. Google+ functions similarly to Facebook, including requiring users to register their real names. Google experienced crisis-level backlash in July [...]

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 [...]