Last week, I received an email pitch from a PR agency looking to feature their client on my blog. The pitch was friendly enough, but had one glaring error. Here’s the pitch: Hi Danny, Thanks to social giant Klout, Badgeville gamification customers can now associate a numeric score with social interactions. Bottom line: companies will find it a whole lot easier to influence the behaviors of their customers. Badgeville will leverage Klout’s influence-ranking technology to help enterprise leaders increase online…

This is a guest post by Stacey Acevero. The rise of social media has created all sorts of new opportunities for small business marketers to get the word out, but it has presented challenges too. The days of sending press releases to media outlets with the hopes of being lucky enough to get some coverage are long gone, morphing into constant opportunities to catch the next social media sharing phenomenon. Today, it’s not enough to hit just those traditional media…

Take a look at the video at the end of this post. It’s a fan-made homage to the band Dashboard Confessional and their song So Long, So Long. There’s nothing special about it. It’s a simple piece of video, made with Windows Movie Maker then put up on Youtube for the creator’s friends to see. And yet… Its simplicity is also its strength. The mood and pace of the video complement the song perfectly, and doesn’t take away from the song itself. There are no…

There’s a great scene in the movie Jerry Maguire. In it, Tom Cruise’s sports agent character has finally lost it with his one client (a football player brilliantly played by Cuba Gooding Jr.). Frustrated by Gooding Jr.’s frosty relationship with the media, Cruise implores, “Help me to help you.” It’s a pivotal moment in the movie for both characters – and it’s one that should be used more in the PR industry. Although it’s true of many industries, public relations…

So, Morton’s Steakhouse is making waves online at the minute, due to them delivering a steak to HARO founder and social media guy Peter Shankman. If you’ve not heard it, the story in a nutshell is this – Peter faces a long flight home and is hungry, so tweets to Morton’s that he’d love a steak delivered and waiting for him at Newark Airport. Lo and behold, when he arrives and goes to his car, the steak and a tuxedo-wearing…

Sometimes you read something, or you hear something, and it just makes you stop and say, “Seriously?!?”. Often this is from a pitch selling a company’s products or services. It can be from the company directly, or it can be from their marketing or PR agency. Note – there are many great PR and marketing agencies out there doing great work. This just makes the crappy ones stand out even more. So it was when I heard about this pitch….

One of the biggest questions most businesses have about social media is what you should do when someone posts something negative about you. This could be a tweet, a Facebook status update, a mention in a LinkedIn group, a blog post, a video response to one of your YouTube videos – basically, anywhere where there’s a chance to post something, there’s the possibility of a negative mention. So the question is – when do you respond, and when do you…

There’s an old saying that any publicity is good publicity – but is it? Kenneth Cole might be questioning it, after the tweet in the image above – that tied his retail chain’s sale into the devastating events currently happening in Egypt – was picked up and discussed on various PR and marketing blogs and news sites. I’ve also written on here before about examples of bad PR and PR that takes advantage of tragic or upsetting situations, and questioned…

This is a guest post from Gini Dietrich, CEO of Arment Dietrich, Inc. Nearly three years ago I had to make the transition from working in the business to working on the business. It was a difficult transition (sometimes still is) because no one tells you how to do it. When I asked my peers, friends, and family what a CEO should be doing, no one could give me a straight answer. I read a ton of books. I read…

By Geoff Livingston and Danny Brown. Cross-posted on Geoff’s blog. Contrary to Violet Blue’s disappointing stance about women in tech in 2010, this year saw a terrible new trend, the outright enforcement of the glass ceiling in technology. First there was Michael Arrington’s terribly ignorant rant, followed verbally by the likes of Robert Scoble and Ms. Blue, as well as the visual use of boobs to sell copies of WIRED by Chris Anderson and crew. Before opining too much, here…