Tips and Tools

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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Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.

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.

Just a day after announcing the acquisition of Glide Technologies, NASDAQ OMX has partnered with The Meltwater Group, bringing press release distribution to Meltwater Press’ media contact services. Meltwater has 20,000 customers. With this partnership they will now be able to push their press releases to a million financial contacts, 3,500 websites, and other contacts throughout North America.

The Meltwater Group is also making an appearance on the Mediabistro job board this week. Check it out here.

NASDAQ OMX has acquired Glide Technologies, a British corporate communications and reputation management services company. Glide, which was founded in 2003, will be brought into the NASDAQ OMX Corporate Solutions fold, providing PR and IR pros with an enhanced set of services.

Glide provides media monitoring, measurement, online newsroom creation tools, and other services for campaign execution and assessment. Among its products are Glide Newsroom, Glide Manager, a PR management platform, and GlideIntelligence Social Media for sentiment analysis and monitoring.

This week Dell launched the Corporate Social Media Interactive Assessment, a tool that analyzes how well a company is listening and engaging with audiences, how integrated the listening process is, and how much the company is benefiting from its spending on things like staff. Filling out the survey will generate an infographic with personalized details.

The Assessment grew out of research Dell conducted with Forrester Consulting — Listening and Engaging in the Digital Marketing Age. The study of 200 U.S. marketers at medium and large companies found that many companies are actively using social media (sometimes more than traditional listening methods) for a variety of purposes, including as a feedback generator from consumers. And that information is being used across the business.

Interesting (though fitting) that Dell would launch this tool. More than anything, it reminds other companies of the need to monitor and respond to what’s happening on social media and other channels. Earlier this week, Business Wire and MyMediaInfo released a couple of new monitoring tools that might be of some help in this area.

Remember Quora? Business Insider thinks they might be getting millions in another round of fundraising. Are you (still) using Quora? Should we be using it (again)?

Next week, Klout is introducing some changes to its scoring. According to a post on its blog, Klout’s People Rank is getting a tune up after a three month renovation project. The site says some users could see their scores drop after the changes, but it’s a sacrifice for accuracy.

Cision has introduced Cision Social Publish, a feature that uses the company’s PitchEngine partnership to distribute news across a number of social media platforms and with a variety of different content. The dashboard for the feature includes a Facebook app to publish stories on a company page, unlimited publishing on the PitchEngine site, and the choice to integrate newsfeeds.

And Business Wire announced this week that it has an expanded relationship with the AP. More news y’all!