Three reasons to attend Counselors Academy Conference

Since 2005, as many of you know, PRSA Counselors Academy has been my annual must-attend PR event. In fact, I get so much out of the conference I volunteered to be its 2012 conference chair.

This year #CAPRSA is being held in Austin, Texas June 9 to 13, and in addition to the programming and people, it’s a chance to experience Austin without all the hullabaloo of SXSW.

My good friend Dana Hughens, who was last year’s co-chair, steps into the CEO role – that’s Chair Extra-Ordinaire – and, along with the team of volunteers, has assembled a W.E.I.R.D.* and wonderful line-up of content that’s bound to be thought-provoking, creative and fun.  (more…)

What’s new – week of May 8, 2013

Convergence of new and traditional media was an idea that got a lot of play around the turn of the century (I love saying turn of the century and referring to 1999).

The biggest example of course, is the ill-fated Time-Warner/AOL merger. In its day, it was considered to be ‘transformative’ and a sign of the future. But as we all know, it didn’t pan out as planned. Maybe the deal was badly conceived or it just too far ahead of the game or both.

There’s not a lot of news this week, but our theme centres on convergence:  (more…)

The mainstreamification of social media and where we can go from here

I don’t know if you caught the most recent Mad Men episode (and if you didn’t, this isn’t a plot spoiler), but for a show about the ad biz,  it ended with Peggy typing and saying the words, ‘for immediate release’.

Cryptic? Not so much. But when you do watch it, you’ll get a glimpse of the value Don and Co put on PR.

Last week, I wrote a guest post for Spin Sucks on what Mad Men can teach us about becoming the ad (or PR) agency of the future.

It’s based on something I’ve been noticing a lot lately and that we talked about in a recent Inside PR. Let’s call it the ‘mainstreamification’ of social media.  (more…)

What’s new – week of May 1, 2013

So a big TV programming exec jumps ship and moves to Twitter… Seems like that says a lot about where new and mainstream media could be heading.

Here’s this week’s recap:

The news in Canada is not only that Twitter’s setting up shop, it’s that it has appointed, Kirstine Stewart, VP of programming at CBC TV, as the country’s first Managing Director. Ms. Stewart has a long and successful broadcast history. Now she’s going from 22 minutes to 140 characters and six seconds. It will be interesting to see what she brings to Twitter from a content POV. And in a semi-related story ‘live from the Internet’, Yahoo inked an exclusive deal to license SNL’s 38 year archive.  (more…)

What’s new – week of April 24, 2013

In the last week, we saw a fair bit of activity on the mobile front by some of the bigger social networks – and especially Twitter.

Here’s a recap of what’s new:

Twitter
Yesterday the AP Twitter account was hacked and sent out a false tweet about the U.S. President being hurt. This led to a stock market tumble and then a quick recovery when the story was proved false.  It highlights the need for all of us to filter and verify content before we spread it. That may slow us down a bit, but it’s worth it. The latest hacking led to speculation that Twitter will soon launch a two-step authentication process to make its site a bit more secure.  (more…)