Tips and Tools

Infographics everywhere! Who doesn’t love a story chock full of both information and pictures?

With so many people creating infographics these days, we asked Zubin Mowlavi, CEO of Lucid Fusion to outline the top three ways infographics are being used by companies as part of their outreach campaigns. Lucid Fusion is a Southern California digital agency that specializes in product launches, brand awareness, and does other marcomms work. He responds after the jump.

And if you want to check out a few of the infographics we’ve recently featured, click here, here, and here. The complete infographic for the image above is here. Read more

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

Stepping in front of that Austin audience may not sound hard at first, but public speaking pros warn that being an engaging and helpful panelist takes planning.

“Many people think they can just wing it — I’ve seen it a hundred times — but it’s important to do your homework,” said frequent panelist Nicole Williams, founder and CEO of the career website WORKS by Nicole Williams.

South By Southwest organizer Christine Auten advised, “Look [the panelists] up on LinkedIn and see what groups and organizations they’re part of.” By reading up on interviews they’ve given in the past, you can glean clues as to what they’ll say again and how you can add to that perspective or counter it.

For more tips on wowing the South By crowd, read How to Be a Great Panelist at SXSW (or Any Other Conference). [sub req'd]

PR software company Vocus has acquired iContact, an email and social media marketing company, for $169 million, “$91 million in cash, $9 million in common stock, and approximately $79 million in redeemable convertible preferred stock,” according to an announcement made late yesterday.

According to that release, iContact is used by 70,000 organizations. The purchase brings an email offering into its existing marketing suite.

There will be no changes to either company’s products and services, and the iContact staff will stay put in Raleigh-Durham, NC. (Vocus is based in Maryland.) IContact was founded in 2003 and has since garnered media coverage and received $50 million in venture financing.

The news came on the same day as Vocus’ earnings announcement.

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Thomson Reuters has acquired RedEgg, the company behind MyMediaInfo and other tools and services for PRs and marketers.

Thomson Reuters will incorporate RedEgg into the Corporate Services group with RedEgg founders Eric Hill and Gaugarin Oliver serving in new executive roles. Thomson ONE Public Relations and Thomson Reuters InPublic already include MyMediaInfo and MyNewsBrief services.

More than 1,000 companies in North America use MyMediaInfo services. And more than 7,000 businesses around the world use Thomson Reuters Corporate Services.

Details about the acquisition are undisclosed.

It’s the Tuesday after Thanksgiving and you’re still eating turkey and stuffing with a side of pie for lunch. A delightful treat indeed, but Thanksgiving dinner is only the beginning. We’ve now officially entered the holiday season, which means about five weeks of delightful treats that we will regret come January 2 when we’re topping our list of resolutions with “Lose five pounds.”

It’s a vicious cycle! Made particularly hard for PR pros and comms staffers who are busy with events and clients that give easy access to holiday snacks. Rebecca Cooper, author, nutritionist, and founder of Rebecca’s House, has sent us five tips to keep from overindulging, which we’ve published after the jump.

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Time to break out your favorite drinking vessel folks! Wine glasses, beer steins, or big wooden buckets. The holidays are upon us and there’s lots to do.

Brands have only just begun to beat us over the head with their cheerful messages and pitiable begging for a piece of our gift-buying budgets. One way they’re hoping to win us over is by enlisting a celebrity.

After the jump, we’ve got five ways that a celebrity can be integrated into your holiday marketing (if you haven’t done so already) from David Schwab, MD of Octagon First Call, which specializes in bringing celebs and marketing campaigns together.

Check it out after the jump.

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Are you looking for a free site to send out your press releases? British tech PR agency Vitis has just released the first of several studies evaluating the free services, and found that just a sliver of them are getting your release on to Google News.

Vitis examined 60 services and only five percent of them got the job done.

The sites did better at getting releases on to Google’s search index: 49 percent did that.

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Edelman‘s market research firm StrategyOne has teamed with Crimson Hexagon, the social media monitoring and analysis company, to create Sunrise, a digital monitoring and analytics tool. It works across a variety of languages and users can select the data they’re most interested in taking a closer look at.

The 1.0 version is available now. Among its capabilities, it can track messaging and industry topics, monitor competitors, and track conversations across social media and message boards. Version 2.0 will be available early 2012.

 

This morning, former Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs gave a master class in how to deliver a keynote address.

Speaking at the Council of PR Firms’ Critical Issues Forum — the theme was “Social Revolution: Are You Mobilizing Communities or Just a Voice in the Crowd?” – he discussed social media, communications, politics, business, and the day-to-day of being in the Obama White House in a seamless 30-minute speech that made it one of the better keynotes we’ve ever heard. After the jump, we have a few one liners from the speech (the #CIF2011 hashtag has been following the conference all day) and a look at why the speech was so successful.

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PRNewswire has partnered with HubSpot to provide greater distribution and lead generation services to customers. PRN’s iReach platform, which is designed to create more online visibility for smaller businesses, will incorporate a HubSpot Canvas app to identify influential prospects and customers, and reach them. HubSpot is an inbound marketing software developer.

Content that’s pushed out will appear on social networks and the PRNewswire.com website.

Separately but related, the two companies are hosting a webinar on November 1, ”The Science of Press Releases,” focused on creating effective press releases. More info here.