links for 2009-08-20

Evan White and Jason Sadler wear t-shirts. But not only to do they wear shirts, they wear shirts for a living. This year, working by himself, Jason made $70,000 selling ad space on the t-shirts he wears, and if you think the current economy has slowed him down, you’d be mistaken. Jason has joined forces with Evan for next year and the pair have already sold 164 days.

I have two accounts on Twitter – the @labnol handle that I use for writing personal tweets and the other account is @labnolfeed that some people use to follow this blog on Twitter. If you are like me and have multiple accounts on Twitter, you are probably aware of the fact that you cannot associate the same email address with multiple Twitter accounts. Try that and Twitter will throw up an error saying – "Email has already been taken".

Lost In The Outreaches is a collaborative fiction Universe with a SciFi setting. The entire franchise is licensed under a Creative Commons license. Anyone is allowed to join, add, and have fun with the fictional universe.

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Indignant letters, e-mails and phone calls can still get results for unhappy airline travelers, but more are finding that if you really want to vent your frustrations, you can now be loud and fast and public. At least that's the buzz on Twitter, where airlines are discovering that fuming passengers who have been stranded, delayed or just plain piqued are increasingly letting their undiluted rage fly around the Internet, often from the confines of their cramped airplane seat.

PC World runs down three lessons they've learned about containing the email beast, and at least one of them is worth contemplating for your next multi-recipient email. In short, BCC isn't just a privacy tool, but a reply-all killer.

Last week we conducted the first ever Eventbrite Hashup Contest to reward the event that generated the most tweets. PodCamp Boston was the winner with over 3600 hashtagged tweets over the course of the eight days! They used the hash tag #pcb4 and watched as both attendees and want-to-be attendees chattered away about the event over Twitter.

Alysha brings nearly 8 years of strategic communications experience to the DGC team, with expertise in media relations, social media PR, event management and speechwriting. Most recently, she served as Corporate Communications Manager for Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG), a global brand communications organization. At SMG, Alysha was instrumental in landing consistent, featured coverage in major publications, securing industry recognition and building internal/external communications programs for SMG's dedicated search, multicultural and performance marketing agencies.

DiGennaro Communications is an independent NYC-based communications agency specializing in business-to-business public relations. Our hallmark: Strategic thinking. Positioning your company. Developing messages that evoke a response. Our core strengths: Building brands. Raising profiles. Creating buzz in the press, on the speakers’ circuit, throughout the industry. We offer our clients access to leading business reporters, influencers, bloggers, award shows and trade organizations. We deliver results.

Entrepreneurs, senior executives and serious career employees have known for a long time that the "work day" is all day — and all night. (And if you're doing what you love, it isn't work at all.) Meanwhile, the tools that we have been afforded have allowed the boundaries between work and play to become effortlessly intertwined.

Ms. Brody may in fact be a wonderful PR professional who used poor judgment in an isolated case. But it’s important to learn from certain mistakes so that small business professionals and entrepreneurs can avoid going down the same path.

The old way = a “numbers game.” Send out 1,000 pitches and 5 people get interested? — that’s a win, given how cheap and easy it is to send out 1,000 emails. It sucks, it’s on the wane, but because it still works, bad PR will never disappear completely. Sorry to say.

So this morning a pretty standard email pitch came into my inbox. It wasn’t my cup of tea, so I ignored it. But then someone responded to it, and I saw that response. Uh, oh, I knew immediately where this was going. Sure enough, minutes later dozens of others were responding, most saying something along the lines of “take me off of this list” — of course, whether they realize it or not, they were sending that very message to everyone on the list.

Today, along with a few hundred other influential bloggers, journalists and industry leaders, I received an unsolicited email from Beth Brody (beth@brodypr.com) with a press release in it about Jump Start Social Media Publishing a New E-Book on Social Media Marketing For Small Business.

Today's events reminded me of how cruel kids can be when laughing at the clumsy one who tripped over an untied shoelace while getting on the school bus. We thought the one-to-many concept that e-mail brought us was powerful, it's got nothing on social media. It's not especially revealing to say as much, but the incident today made it crystal clear: check out the Twitter stream. The whole bus is laughing.

This week has been an interesting one in the PR and marketing world. There has been a ton of discussion about Brody PR's "fail" yesterday, where Beth Brody, President of Brody PR, sent out a pitch via email to a large group of professionals in PR, social media, marketing, and advertising, as well as some very well-known bloggers and journalists…and used the cc: field, instead of the bcc: field.

Blame Brody PR all you want for what it should have done this morning–but the very fact someone is commenting with the same text on every blog is indicative the PR firm doesn’t view bloggers as people. One can argue a generic comment is better than no comment–but in this case, there is zero value when Brody PR is using the same comment to Chris, Ken, Jennifer, and Nick. Brody did not write a “personal apology” or it would have been personal, aka different for each recipient. I hope other companies heed the lesson well.

A good PR makes things easy for journalists. They coordinate things behind the scenes. They follow up promptly on requests for further information or interviews. The understand the subject matter and how the journalist / publication plays a part in communicating news to a wider audience. And they do not try to pull the wool of your eyes.

A bad PR can be ill-informed, demanding, haughty, deceptive, intrusive, and sometimes plain idiotic.

So if you work in PR and want to improve your game then try to avoid any of the following. Any of these things will harm your personal reputation, and damage the chances of gaining coverage for your client.

Besides the shotty pitch and the reply-all maddness, what many people were complaining about was the total lack of response from a Brody PR rep. Chris Abraham of SocialMedia.biz says it well, “The real issue here is that Beth Brody and Brody PR completely missed an opportunity to throw herself into the conversation. This didn’t have to go nuclear…” “There is a very valuable lesson here for one and for all. On the surface, it seems like the A-lister email blast and the open CC were the kill shots, but they were just contributing factors. Beth Brody and Brody PR, your error was in the realm of crisis management and a failure to respond.”

Public Knowledge will celebrate its 8th Anniversary and 6th Annual IP3 Awards at a ceremony on Thursday, October 15th, 2009. Awards are given to individuals who over the past year (or over the course of their careers) who have advanced the public interest in one of the three areas of “IP” – Internet Protocol, Intellectual Property and Information Policy.

Connect2 Communications is a public relations and corporate communications firm specializing in the enterprise and telecom networking markets. We work with our clients to develop robust outbound communications programs, which include forward thinking communications plans, comprehensive competitive messaging analysis, values based messaging, and development of industry advocates.