Search Results (opinion)

Forget all these yearend lists about PR blowups. The Business Insider went for it; the blog waded through the last 10 years of Fineman PR’s annual lists of the top 10 PR blunders and picked the finest ones (in their opinion). “Racist board games. Wardrobe malfunctions. Oprah-induced chicken riots. The past decade had several memorable corporate PR disasters,” Bianca Male wrote for The Business Insider . The list is heavy with 2009 entries (though several do date back to the early aughts…

The eBay blog  Ink attracts more than 10,000 unique visitors each month, and its  Twitter feed tops 4,300 followers. “But [ebay Chief Blogger Richard Brewer-Hay] emphasizes that, most importantly, [the blog] has become a forum for the tightly-knit eBay community to voice their opinions and get direct access to the C-suite,” reports The Business Insider . Brewer-Hay shared 10 social media tips with Business Insider , including No. 10, in which he explains why corporate blog…

Don’t blame Richard Heene, father of the Balloon Boy, for exploiting his family to find fame and fortune, Frank Rich wrote in Sunday’s The New York Times . Blame our culture. “Heene is the inevitable product of this reigning culture, where ‘news,’ ‘reality’ television and reality itself are hopelessly scrambled and the warp-speed imperatives of cable-Internet competition allow no time for fact checking,” Rich said. Related Associated Press Sheriff in Balloo…

Although 52 percent of small-business owners in the U.S. believe social media is important for them, a mere 16 percent (4.75 million of the 29.7 million small businesses) actually have a social media presence, according to the Small Business Opinion Poll. Sounds like there are opportunities for PR firms and social media consultant.

Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thomson had some harsh words for Google and other news aggregators: you’re “parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet,” he said in an interview with The Australian newspaper. Related New York Times The Associated Press is taking on Web aggregators insisting they either stop running AP stories or start sharing revenues. Related Newser Here’s how Michael Wolff, founder of news aggregator site Newser, reacted to Thomson&#8217…

Think your client or boss should pen an opinion piece? Want it to run in one of the nation’s largest newspapers? Check out this video of Carol Stevens, USA Today ’s managing editor of news, sharing tips with PR pros who want to pitch Op-Eds to the paper.

The 44th president offers 16 lessons in framing a message.

A PR pro from New Zealand reportedly paid for Japanese spy planes to keep an eye on anti-whaling protesters. Yikes . Turns out this public relations man, Glenn Inwood, is a former journalist and that made PR pro, Gerry McCusker, consider the people who populate the profession. “Another ex-journalist-turned-PR is at the center of a whale fishing/spy scandal PR disaster in Australia, proving that a decent hack doth not a good flack make!” He wrote on his blog, PR Disasters . “In my h…

Look out Astroturfers, the government’s on the case now. The Federal Trade Commission is moving quickly to enforce regulations that prevent companies from paying private citizens to provide their—ahem—“unbiased opinions” on the Web.

This month, Liam FitzPatrick, head of Bell Pottinger Change and Internal Communications,  argued in a blog post that writing is not an essential skill for communicators — a post that  raised a few hackles among people in the industry. It’s an interesting question, and it inspired communications consultant Shel Holtz to ask it of eight people in the business. Check out their responses.