Archive for the ‘Digital Cocktail’ Category

The NOW Revolution: How to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter, and More Social

February 10 from  8:00 to 10:00 a.m.

Marriott Courtyard Mission Valley
595 Hotel Circle South
San Diego (Mission Valley), CA 92108 

About The Event

Technology and social media have changed business forever. We’ve moved from “news cycles” and “campaigns” to always on, 24/7 engagement where every customer is a reporter, and every employee is in marketing, whether they like it or not. Read the rest of this entry »

The Social Diego Social Media Symposium – presented by Nuffer, Smith, Tucker and San Diego State University’s Digital & Social Media Collaborative – is designed to help attendees learn to listen to the social media dialogue, engage audiences in conversations and energize their most loyal fans.  The symposium will be held Friday, Jan. 28, 2011, at San Diego State University’s Parma Payne Goodall Alumni Center. Read the rest of this entry »

A firestorm has ignited around the relationships between bloggers and public relations professionals. The debate has been going around in circles since the first PR pro “pitched” a blogger on behalf of his/her client. Since then, leaders in the PR industry are trying to navigate the often times rough waters in reaching out to bloggers. In turn, bloggers have started to educate themselves on how best to work with said PR pros while still remaining true to their original intention for their personal blog.

While I don’t have my own personal blog, I’m in an interesting spot as I run in both circles. I’m the public relations and social media account supervisor at Bailey Gardiner and I have great friends that blog. These bloggers range from moms to business professionals – all who have well written, highly visited and interesting blogs.   Read the rest of this entry »

So you’ve taken the plunge and decided to create a corporate blog for your company, or you’ve counseled your client to create a blog as another vehicle to communicate with their target publics, but the hard part can be trying to create enough content to capture and maintain an audience.  While some of your content will be inspired by topics in the news or company announcements, supplementing those reactionary posts with scheduled content will help alleviate the inevitable writer’s block and help ensure a steady stream of substance. Read the rest of this entry »

One of our frequent visitors and commenter on SoCalPRBlog is San Diego publicist and flamenco extraordinaire Stephanie Thompson of Stephanie Thompson Public Relations. Stephanie  recently wrote a great blog entry on why not to neglect your good old website. In the age of social media and other “hot” communication channels, Thompson reminds people that your website is still the first tool consumers typically access when they want to know more about you. It’s like your online business card!

Check out the full story here – it’s a good read!

Last week PR Newswire announced the launch of ProfNet Connect, a tool that operates like a social network to connect communications professionals and journalists.

The web-based platform enables users to create detailed expert pages that showcase areas of expertise, viewpoints on issues, and general availability, as well as their own photos, videos, white papers and speaking abstracts.  Reporters, bloggers, authors and event coordinators can then access the profiles to conduct research and outreach to the expert directly.  The expert profiles on ProfNet Connect are made instantly available to the media and are indexed by major search engines.

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The very mention of the words student, teacher and social network in the same breath summons controversy in the blink of an eye; what with states like Missouri legally disallowing students and teachers to become “friends” on social networks like MySpace and Facebook, it’s now more than just an issue of ethics and personal privacy. Students will always try to get closer to their teachers if only to gain a peep into their private lives, not because they’re voyeurs, but because they’re naturally curious as to the other side of the stentorian they see and interact with in school.

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I had the opportunity recently to try BuzzStream, a tool created for PR professionals to help track activity and conversations with key online media and bloggers. It’s sort of a combination of super-powered database with a dash of Cision and a splash of project management. The idea is to make it easier to for PR people to track relationships with online influencers to make for more effective interaction.

What I love about BuzzStream is that it makes it simple to bookmark information from the Internet – from articles and posts you find important, to information about the authors, using an intuitive tool that automatically fills in all the details it can grab. Talk about a time saver – no searching for contact and manually filling in information, outlets etc… You can also add your own notes and even rate influencers to prioritize future outreach.

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I was introduced via Twitter to a new tool available to marketers, PR people, or anyone hosting chats on Twitter. Hashtracking.com offers much slicker analytics for a particular hashtag than any tool I’ve seen yet. Created by developer Brian Maso, the site seeks to help anyone adding or following a particular hashtag, from special interests to chats, a way to better gauge metrics like reach and participation.

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By now we’ve all heard the news – popular email subscription service HARO, which supplies media leads to PR people and anyone else looking to become famous, was acquired by PR software company Vocus (which also owns PRWeb). HARO founder Peter Shankman, who grew at warp speed the resource from its humble beginnings as a Facebook page to the giant it is today, will continue to run the company.

My take – awesome call by the Vocus team. They’ve got an instant audience of 100,000 of their primary client-base at their fingertips. While the number of PR database options have grown over the years, Cision, previously known as Bacon’s, had arguably been the leader historically. I’d wager that Vocus and Cision consider each other their greatest competitors. Those of us courted by the companies probably know that Vocus has the best technology (critical when we are on deadline) and Cision is less expensive, and may have better media contacts and profiles. Now, while we don’t pay for the emails we receive from HARO, we are now all essentially clients of Vocus. That means huge brand awareness and potential loyalty, that in my opinion, Cision’s heritage used to own.

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