It’s that time of year again: Conference Season. While brands and public relations agencies are preparing their 2013 outlook, bloggers are doing the same, which includes budgeting for conferences and attending networking events and seminars to help them become better writers, photographers and publishers. Many bloggers opt to attend conferences with a sponsor, which helps them …
Read more »When you decide to hire a public relations agency, your mind is probably full of the questions that you want to ask your prospective candidates. As a publicist, I field a lot of questions from prospective clients, some more focused and direct than others. While most prospective clients ask thoughtful, intelligent questions, occasionally we receive some …
Read more »When your business has a conservative marketing budget, it might be tempting to hire a so-called public relations professionalwho costs less than the others. Before you hire that person or agency, it’s important to ask, “How much professional experience does s/he have?” Some people have extensive PR backgrounds and were professionally trained, while others have simply …
Read more »I have worked in the public relations agency world as both an employee and a freelancer over the course of my career. I’ve also been blogging and running websites for the past five years. At one point, a friend who was launching a new company offered to provide me some pro-bono PR services and I had the …
Read more »Colleagues have asked me if being a freelance writer and blogger in addition to my work in public relations (PR) ever poses a conflict of interest. My answer is always an emphatic “no” and in fact, being a freelance writer who is frequently on the receiving end of public relations pitches has actually made me …
Read more »When I was at my first job, as an account coordinator, my team was extremely short-staffed. For more than six months my boss and I managed three clients and a workload that four or five people probably could have shared. One night, as she was leaving the office at nine o’clock (an early one for …
Read more »Next week I am helping a client, a healthy snack foods company, organize and execute a Twitter party to help promote its new line of baked, bean-based chips and crackers. A Twitter party is an online chat about a predetermined topic that helps brands meet potential or existing customers, launch a new service or product …
Read more »The FTC has guidelines that mandate bloggers to disclose any “material connection” to an advertiser, including payments for an endorsement, advertising sponsorship or free product. Since many bloggers promote their posts to their network of Twitter followers, this is where the line gets blurry. Last night on Twitter I caught wind of a conversation between two food bloggers on …
Read more »These days, pitching media means pitching bloggers. For some topics, a blogger may even be the more influential expert. Still not all publicists have refined their blogger pitching methods. Three years ago when my coworkers discovered that I had a blog – or maybe I sent it to them, begging that they become my first five …
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