A PR agency I once worked for had a large chemical company as a client. One day, I was summoned to a meeting with one of the agency’s senior leaders, who asked if I would take over as the senior relationship manager for the client. The person who had been in that […]
For the last several years, I have had a white board in my office on which I have written a number of adages (currently 24) that have come to mean something to me over the years. The list changes now and then, with new entries supplanting older ones […]
Could you land this? A fellow communications practitioner once said to me, “I may be the PR guy, not the CEO, but in an emergency I could land the plane.” What did he mean by that? He meant that he understood enough about how his company worked — […]
If you have ever bought or received a diamond engagement ring, you have undoubtedly learned about the Four Cs. These are the four factors that determine the value of a gem. For the uninitiated and/or the unlucky, here are the Four Cs: Clarity, Color, Cut and Carat. And just because I’ve never […]
Right up front, let me say that Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) is an intellectually bankrupt concept and a desecration of all that is good and right in the world. Wow! It felt good to say that out loud. AVE is a purported measurement tool that attempts to assign […]
The fun (or should I say unsettling) thing about paradigm shifts is that it’s hard to tell when they’re happening. But I spotted one recently, and it kind of rocked my world. If your company recruits recent college graduates, chances are your new employees barely think about email […]
Over the years I have written and spoken a lot about crisis preparedness and response. One point I often stress is that the best way to manage a crisis is not to have one in the first place, and this is why doing a regular vulnerabilities assessment – […]
If you want to provoke a raging argument on Facebook, forget about politics or religion. Try asking a question about punctuation. Recently, I was castigated by an extraordinarily literate FB friend for the punctuation of the name of this blog. She contended that the possessive form of my […]
The other day, I had lunch with Joe, a friend of mine, somebody I had hired as a recent Penn grad at Burson-Marsteller many years ago. We’ve stayed in touch over the years but while I soldiered on in my PR career he abandoned his and decamped to […]
Just how much can you get done in sixty minutes? If your organization became the center of a crisis, in sixty minutes could you: Get Management and Legal to approve a statement and post it on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and the corporate website? Shoot and upload a video […]
Chris Atkins’ Random PR Thoughts