Search Results (opinion)

Bloggers may soon have to pay for their swag as the Federal Trade Commission prepares to crack down on bloggers who fail to disclose that the product their endorsing is a gift from a company. “This summer, the FTC is expected to issue new advertising guidelines that will require bloggers to disclose when they’re writing about a sponsor’s product and voicing opinions that aren’t their own,” Douglas MacMillan reported for BusinessWeek . “The new FTC guidelines say that blog authors …

Got to hand it to Ford’s marketing department, they are embracing Web 2.0. The (solvent) automaker will hand over the branding and promotion of its new Fiesta model to 100 twenty-somethings with zero advertising experience. Ford will give each of them a Fiesta and for the next six months they will drive the cars and post YouTube videos, blog posts and other social media updates about the car. Here’s the kicker: Ford has no control over the content. Should be interesting.

A big CBS News poll came out this week, which showed Americans support bailing out homeowners more than banks or Wall Street firms. It also revealed that the mouthy Rush Limbaugh has an abysmal approval rating of 19 percent, just one point more than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 18 percent approval. Meanwhile, the overall approval rating of Congress hovered around 30 percent.

With the possibility of a $27 billion judgment looming, Chevron had launched a massive PR and lobbying campaign, Politico ’s Kenneth P. Vogel reported this morning. The possible judgment stems from allegations that for decades Texaco, which Chevron bought in 2001, had dumped toxic waste in Ecuadorian rain forests. Chevron hoped to sway public opinion and earn allies in Congress with their PR and lobbying moves, which according to Rep. Sanchez, a Democrat from California, “are really clumsy an…

PR pros debate the value—and pitfalls—of behind-the-scenes blogging.

There is a mountain of information on the Web about your company and it comes from people who have commented—somewhere—about the service or product you offer. Now if only you could evaluate all that information … “An emerging field known as sentiment analysis is taking shape around one of the computer world’s unexplored frontiers: translating the vagaries of human emotion into hard data,” Alex Wright wrote for The New York Times . “This is more than just an inter…

Are the marketers running the newsroom at the Chicago Tribune ? Some reporters and editors there are concerned that the marketing department has sway over which articles run in the paper. The concern was sparked after newsroom employees alleged the marketing department solicited subscribers’ opinion on stories before they ran. An e-mail signed by 55 reporters and editors—are there that many left at the paper?—questions why the marketing department was conducting the survey and what stor…

A few years ago, before there was Twitter, the company’s soon-to-be co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone planned to start a podcasting company that would include an application that allowed people to send the now famous 140-character messages. They didn’t intend to launch Twitter. “It took us a while to figure out that it really was a big deal,” Williams told the Wall Street Journal. Williams and Stone sat for an interview with the paper. The interview explores th…

Editorial boards can give you instant feedback, good sources and a little more clout.

People have asked, Why should I tweet if I have a blog (and vice versa)? That’s a good question. PRBreakfastClub ’s Danielle Cyr has an answer: “While it only takes seconds to craft a tweet, it can’t always carry an entire message,” she wrote. “So, we stick to the messages that can be effectively delivered in 140 characters. Examples of such include links to interesting articles with a couple of words stating your opinion on same, reactions to an event or experience, s…