Tips and Tools

Corporate PR Directors can have almost as short a shelf-life as CMOs. Do you have what it takes to get the job and keep it? The Arlington Mills Group says you only need to answer seven simple questions to find out if you have the right stuff.

The tricky one addresses crisis work for a hypothetical vacuum company:

7. When facing a crisis, experienced communications professionals understand that there are certain "power phrases" to use on the press that can "transform the message." Pick the best of these:

A. Schaffen-Wertheimer regrets this minor chemical release at our Malaysian vacuum hose assembly plant.

B. The great majority of victims were not company employees, but legally contracted freelance youth vacuum assembly enthusiasts.

C. It is unfortunate that the Malaysians are moving forward with this indictment based solely on the results of a six month investigation.

D. The real tragedy would be if this unfortunate incident were to distract us from our mission: delivering best-in-class vacuuming innovation and value to the global consumer.

Bingo. The answer is D.

The relationship management application Gist became available today. I've been playing with it in Beta, and I'll hazard to say it's a PR pro's dream.

If you're constantly thinking in terms of who you should be talking to in the media, which clients need attention, which new business leads are running hot, and what they're all writing about on their social profiles and blogs and why, Gist will be compelling to you.

There are other social networks that touch upon some of the aggregating features of Gist, but none are dedicated to analyzing your private email exchanges that actually help you conduct business. Gist pulls in info from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and pulls in company info from 50,000 news sites and 20 million blogs.

It acts as a heatmap of your inbox, and automatically creates a dossier on each contact which can be edited and managed manually with notes, next steps, and links. A critical feature Gist added since Beta is the ability to tag a contact or a company to your liking.

I won't go too much in to functionality but suffice to say, you get out of Gist what you put in. It has a lot of features and there's still benefit to letting it do its thing and just absorbing the analysis. It works with Gmail, Outlook, and Salesforce, or you can push a CSV file through it too.

More after the jump:

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Fleishman-Hillard SVP Ben Finzel has a problem with vocab, gay vocab.

As head of the FH Out Front gay and lesbian practice, Finzel sees that words like "choice," "preference," and "tolerance," are used as sly digs to undermine the LGBT community. And, communicators and media use them too in flatfooted attempts to be sensitive.

Fleishman is as far as Finzel knows, and I know, the only large firm with a global LGBT practice. Their client have included included Ernst & Young, UPS and Motorola.

Finzel breaks the grates down to a manageable list of eight on the Out Front blog, all with a consistent theme--gay people are people. Equal, normal, born that way.

So next time you communicate to a particular community, make an effort to speak the speak correctly, and have someone within said community check your work.

The Eight Words and Phrases to Avoid in LGBT Communications (with paraphrasing by PRNewser in the interest of brevity) are after the jump:

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Kevin Dugan and Richard Laermer, the PR execs behind the Bad Pitch Blog are going beyond writing about the bad, and getting in to teaching the good by way of a webinar next Wednesday. The Crappy PR URL is to get your attention.

What caught our eye is the focus on pitching, rather than on things like how understand metrics, or build a Facebook page, or managing your Twitter feeds.

Much of what's lost lately among the many Tips & Tools blog posts (including within our own category), whitepapers, and vitural conferences is getting to the Why. As Dugan explained in a recent post, understanding Why over What--or "tell me why I give a sh&#" as I sometimes say--is an important exercise.

For 50 bucks you get to tune in and interact with the bloggers, and you get an e-copy of Laermer's Full Frontal PR book as well. Plus there are ten scholarships, or freebies, available: five for students, and five for the unemployed. Chosen scholars will get a chance to pitch Bad Pitch Blog's readers sometime after the webinar. I guess for jobs.

Kevin Dugan and Richard Laermer, the PR execs behind the Bad Pitch Blog are going beyond writing about the bad, and getting in to teaching the good by way of a webinar next Wednesday. The Crappy PR URL is to get your attention.

What caught our eye is the focus on pitching, rather than on things like how understand metrics, or build a Facebook page, or managing your Twitter feeds.

Much of what's lost lately among the many Tips & Tools blog posts (including within our own category), whitepapers, and vitural conferences is getting to the Why. As Dugan explained in a recent post, understanding Why over What--or "tell me why I give a sh&#" as I sometimes say--is an important exercise.

For 50 bucks you get to tune in and interact with the bloggers, and you get an e-copy of Laermer's Full Frontal PR book as well. Plus there are ten scholarships, or freebies, available: five for students, and five for the unemployed. Chosen scholars will get a chance to pitch Bad Pitch Blog's readers sometime after the webinar. I guess for jobs.

Muck Rack, the site that tracks journalists on Twitter, launched a short-form press release service today. For a buck per character, releases get posted on MuckRack.com and Tweeted as soon as they're submitted.

For example, here's one from HootSuite this morning, announcing who their clients are:

HootSuite's media clients now include @peoplemag , @tmzaol & @theeconomist - private betas here http://ow.ly/hz3C

It makes sense, and is recommended to point to a site, or a full press release with a trackable, shortened link from Bit.ly or Ow.ly. According to Gregory Galant at Sawhorse Media--Muck Rack's parent company--the releases are indexed by Google, but not yet by Google News.

Related: Filter the MSM's Tweets By Beat with Muck Rack

Technorati launched in 2002 and became a critical tool in the years that followed as blog relations became an important skill for the PR industry. It was the easiest way to find out when bloggers picked up on a pitch or covered a trend, and who was linking to those posts. Today, posts from top blogs are picked up by Google News, Google Blog Search, IceRocket, and even the staid Lexis-Nexis.

Technorati is attempting raise its relevance again with the launch of Twittorati, a tool to show Twitter activity from bloggers in the Technorati 100. It's powered in partnership with Sawhorse Media, makers of Muck Rack, an aggregator of journalists on Twitter.

Despite accusations of TMI from TechCrunch, it holds promise for PR in that it's built on the premise that blogging and Twitter are now symbiotic. It tracks which links are being shared the most, which hashtags are trending, as well as which Technorati tags are trending. It also has functionality to track the Tweets of all the writers at a given blog, not just one.

While you're considering the debate spurred by the big New York Times feature on Brooke Hammerling this past weekend on whether or not encouraging a few good Tweets is in fact PR, you might want to take Twittorati for a spin.

What's slightly ironic is the treatment of the Top 100 as the only gatekeepers of information, which feels like the circulation charts of yesteryear. Technorati does plan to increase the number--we hope it grows to a hundred times that many.

Related: Filter the MSM's Tweets By Beat with Muck Rack

The Firm Voice, the Council on Public Relations house organ has a 9-step program for responding to RFPs in a way that wins business--despite the quality of the RFP--without giving away the store.

Top PR thinker Jerry Swerling, director of the Strategic PR Center at the Annenberg School for Communication at USC says that it's a risk worth taking. If you don't offer a strategic vision, you lose your ticket to the rodeo.

This article caught our eye in light of the survey we covered in April, revealing 90% of our U.K. brethren found ideas within their proposals stolen by potential clients.

Some of the points may seem obvious, yet are pervasive in agency work, such as avoiding typos and boilerplate proposals. A summary of the CoPR's nine step program are after the jump:

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Our newest sister blog Baynewser, explains this morning that Google News now has byline search functionality.

This is a big development for anyone responsible for media relations. Since Google came on to the scene, many of its products and approaches to information have helped PR people do their work--especially Google News and Google Alerts--and have in turn, quickened reaction time and made monitoring and client reporting easier, and cheaper.

Looking at a journalist's byline history is an obvious strategy, yet it's continually something that gets public relations people in to trouble. When pressed for time, account executives give in to temptation and skip their Lexis-Nexis research (an expensive product) and begin blasting out pitches. I've always argued that PR isn't deteriorating, just that journalists now have new steam valves in which to out bad pitching and pushy publicists, seen in the early Tweets of AdWeek's Brian Morrissey, for example.

Startups such as PRMatchPoint and HARO have taken different approaches to reducing PR spam.

Like the classic NBC PSAs say, "the more you know".

Older companies like and services like Lexis, Profnet, Cision, and Vocus may see their subscribership deteriorate--even though they're constantly improving and innovating--as Google and others develop free products.

Byline history was available on Google News all along, though not hyperlinked, and not available in search window functionality. The former allows you to track a journalist even if they change jobs. The tea leaves get harder to read if you choose to do an Archives search.

Information on how to use Google Byline and a screenshot (courtesy of BayNewser) of a typical search are after the jump:

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BuzzStream, a CRM/contact management service geared towards social media, launched in private beta today. One of the cool things about the service is how it can be installed into your web toolbar, allowing you to easily bookmark a blog post, article or tweet into a contact record for that blogger/reporter, complete with a variety of influencer metrics and contact info added automatically. You can then filter your contacts on a variety of levels as well as track all previous interactions with the contacts in e-mail and Twitter. Strategic Public Relations blogger Kevin Dugan may be disappointed to find out he only has a "medium" influencer rating.

One of the things BuzzStream doesn't do is provide a media list database service. So, you will still have to import your lists from Cision, Vocus or your good ol' homemade Excel or Outlook contact lists. The other option is tagging content and building as you go. Founder Paul May told PRNewser that the service is in beta for the next six to eight weeks and "we'll launch as a paid product" after that.

PRNewser has 100 beta invites for our readers to test out the service for free, available at a first come first basis until June 19th.