In the PR industry, where personal careers are built upon others’ reputations, it’s often necessary to make compromises. Protect the client, right? Not always, says Marvet Britto who has repped stars like Kim Cattrall and Mariah Carey:

I always tell people, “It’s not what you say yes to, it’s what you say no to that builds equity.” So, for me, I’ve had to stop working with A-list clients. I knew that I was being asked to compromise my morals or my character or integrity to protect them or to work with them, and I wasn’t willing to do so. I’ve always run my business from a place of truth. There are a lot of people that believe that being a publicist means that you’re supposed to protect your client at any costs. I don’t subscribe to that school. I subscribe to the school of being completely transparent with media and being completely transparent and truthful because, at the end of the day, truth is what elevates brands. When you are a truthful brand, you will create an organic connection to your consumer.

To find out how Britto built her firm with zero experience in the industry, read So What Do You Do, Marvet Britto, President and CEO of the Britto Agency?

– Sherry Yuan

Given their recent cringe-worthy non-apologies, perhaps Serena Williams and Paula Deen can learn something about handling public scandals from Pat O’Brien, co-host of Fox Sports Primetime.

O’Brien suffered his share of embarrassment back in 2005, when the drunken voice-mail messages he left a woman were leaked onto the Internet. Now, he’s more than willing to dish out some advice on how to rebound.

“I say this all the time: the best way to handle if you did something is to admit it. Cover-ups always worsen the crime. And we’re talking about low-level scandals here, obviously, not murder or anything. I always say the three A’s: admit, apologize, advance,” he told Mediabistro for its So What Do You Do? interview. “I talk to a lot of people in trouble — politicians, celebrities — they will call me and ask what to do. And that’s what I tell them. Get in front of the first camera you can find and admit it if you did it. And apologize to somebody and move on.”

For the full interview, read So What Do You Do, Pat O’Brien, Co-Host of Fox Sports Primetime?

In Mediabistro’s latest So What Do You Do? interview, Star editor-in-chief James Heidenry tackles his newsstand nemeses head-on, calling People and Us Weekly “the mouthpiece of celebrity publicists” – and he didn’t mean that in a positive way. 

“They covet these relationships with the publicists, and as a result they don’t say negative things about the celebrities, something like a famous person getting caught cheating, whereas we don’t have any such relationships,” he explained.

Although the pub isn’t necessarily beholden to PR pros, said Heidenry, getting on his team’s good side can sometimes work in your favor. “If a publicist wants to serve their clients, they should have a good relationship with us, because, frankly, we do have stories on certain people that we hold, because we like the relationship with the publicist and we’ve done Q&A with the celebrity in the past or photo shoots with them,” he said. 

Read the full interview in So What Do You Do, James Heidenry, Editor-in-Chief of Star?

You may know Peter Shankman for his work as a commentor, strategic advisor and author of books like Can We Do That?!, an overview of crazy PR stunts that actually worked.

Shankman’s new book Nice Companies Finish First (which hits stores today!) is a little different. Its thesis holds that the big secret behind some of the most successful brands around is a decision to simply be nice or unexpectedly generous to customers on a regular basis. We spoke with him last week to figure out why:

Where did you find the inspiration for your new book?

Well, when I sold my previous venture HARO (the publicity service Help a Reporter Out) to Vocus, I realized that they were really buying my audience. I’d spent four years cultivating and building that audience and I really felt like every member of HARO was a friend, so I wasn’t going to sell it just anybody. I chose Vocus because they were our largest advertiser and, since I wrote all the ads, I believed that they understood that level of respect I had for my audience, and the level of trust my audience put into me. I knew they wouldn’t violate that.

And this realization led you to the subject of “niceness”?

Yes. I started doing research into companies and how they behave in order to see whether companies who treat their customers and investors nicely make more money. I found it to be true — companies that are doing “the little things” a little better than everyone else almost always fare better.

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This week we posted on Weber Shandwick‘s decision to publicize its new content-creation wing, Mediaco, and what that means for the future of PR. This morning we had the opportunity to speak with Steve Rubel, chief content strategist at Edelman PR, to go over how his firm is addressing this newest chapter in the ongoing “PR vs. marketing vs. advertising” debate.

How does the Weber Shandwick announcement relate to recent “creative” moves by Edelman?

There’s a lot of hype in the never-ending hunt for shiny objects in marketing, but the bigger picture here is that the economics of the industry have changed – demand side platforms (ad exchanges) have made advertising more efficient, which caused the price of CPM (cost per impression) and ads themselves to plummet. This is good for the industry but bad for publishers, because media outlets squeezed by tech developments can’t make the leap to other revenue streams like subscription, video, etc.

This has led to a greater willingness to open their platforms to branded/sponsored content, thereby empowering marketers to make good on their longtime desire tell their stories their own way on some of world’s largest websites (Ed. note: see The Washington Post). That is the big change here.

Some people say this is all old news. How do you respond to that point?

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Yesterday we posted on Weber Shandwick‘s new unit Mediaco, which will focus on creating and distributing content for clients. Today we had the chance to talk to Jason Wellcome, the Weber digital EVP who will run the new unit, on exactly what his teams do — and what this development means for the PR industry.

Here’s the firm’s promo video:

In our conversation, Wellcome gave us a little more detail on the strategy and its implications:

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Today’s guest post comes to you courtesy of our friends at PressDoc, the (social) media-friendly press release distribution, tracking and measurement service. To celebrate the release of PressList, a new service designed to help users pitch stories to journalists, the PressDoc team conducted a series of Q&As with experts in the field.

Their first interview subject is Kevin Dugan, a veteran of both the journalism and PR disciplines. He is the co-author of the Bad Pitch Blog, winner of an Award of Commendation in the Blog category from the Public Relations Society of America and a listed member of the AdAge “Power 150“. He tweets under the @prblog handle. 

From your experience, which email pitches do journalists pay attention to, and what makes them read the press release?

Pitching success boils down to relevance. In fact, the list is more important than the pitch. If it’s relevant? It can be long. It can have large attachments. I don’t care because I’m focused on the relevant content and not how it was packaged.

How often is it relevant? Rarely.

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In a new Adweek interview on the future of public relations, Weber Shandwick CEO Andy Polansky says that PR is increasingly “the steward of the strategy”. He believes that developments in digital/social media are the “biggest growth engines” for the industry at large and that they have increased the amount of power that firms hold when shaping messaging strategies for clients.

He makes some very strong statements about social media being “the core of everything we’re doing” and echoes Edelman‘s sentiments about an industry more directly involved in the creative process, saying that “Whoever retains the most creative thinkers will win market share.”

The topics covered in the interview are, in fact, similar to those Polansky addressed when we spoke to him after his promotion last November. In that post he also focused on the power that firms have gained through social media and the very “explosion of data” that has led some to create their own custom analytics tools. The Adweek quote that interests us most concerns the public’s perception that PR is all about “spin” when more firms are concerned with pushing and sharing a given client’s narrative through content and messaging than containing and minimizing the effects of its missteps.

These are familiar talking points to anyone who works in the industry, but we’re interested in specifics: in what ways have firms begun more aggressively managing media strategies for clients over the past few years?

As members of the media, we know that one of the bigger challenges PR pros face is getting their content and their clients’ content into the right hands.

Of course we all have our mailing lists and Twitter columns–but a marketing platform called MyPRGenie, armed with the tagline “Turn Buzz Into Leads”, hopes to put everything you need to connect and push content to the best media contacts in the palm of your hand with its new “marketing suite” app. The company’s press release states that “Sales professionals have had access to this kind of data for years but this is the first time such a system has been added to a public relations platform”. We spoke to company founder and CEO Miranda Tan for details.

How did you build the database?

We focused on media contacts only. With the launch of the MyPRGenie crowdsourcing platform, we plan to use crowdsourcing and the latest technology to help us build the most up-to-date media database as oppose to the old fashion way of researching and mining for media contacts.

In what seems to be a combination PR stunt/staffing experiment, Pizza Hut announced that it will be choosing someone to fill its currently empty Social Media Manager of Greatness role (what, no ninjas?) at the upcoming South by Southwest Festival in a very…unconventional way.

In honor of the 140-character Twitter feed that the lucky winner will run, company reps will give applicants 140 seconds to perform what amounts to a personal “elevator pitch”, explaining exactly why they’re qualified to manage a brand with 166,000 followers and more than 10 million Facebook fans.

The chain’s PR director hopes to meet “the best and the brightest” among the thousands of media fanatics attending the festival. In explaining his team’s thinking, he says: “The time you have to tell a story, engage a customer or leave a lasting impression on someone socially has shrunk to seconds”–so he wants someone who can make his or her case in just over two minutes with nothing more than a smartphone and an acceptable ID.

Of course, hopefuls can apply for the position in more traditional ways as well, but who’d want to do that? Here’s the job description, redirected from the URL “BecauseImGreat” in case you missed the point.

So is anyone up for the challenge this Sunday at the Austin Hilton? And will there be perfume?