Archive for 'social media'

Word Clouds

Posted 17 July 2008 | By Jeff Stephens | Categories: social media | No Comments

Word clouds are visual depictions of a site's keywords or tags. They give a quick snapshot of a site's content because greater prominence is given to words that appear more frequently. They can be useful on news sites, competitor sites, or individual documents. Using a free service like Wordle, users can enter an RSS feed [...]

Website Optimization for PR Value

Posted 07 April 2008 | By Jeff Stephens | Categories: social media, What is PR? | No Comments

There's value in preparing regular announcements about company activities and feeding them on to the web via online newswire services like PRWeb to increase search engine ranking. As customers, prospects, potential hires, and reporters seek out 'background' information about your company, search engines can provide a virtual storehouse of information. Special emphasis is added because [...]

Blogging in 140 Characters or Less

Posted 25 February 2008 | By Jeff Stephens | Categories: social media, What is PR? | No Comments

One of the biggest (legitimate) concerns about business blogging is the time commitment. "I'm already overextended, how can I possibly start writing meaningful posts that discuss the future of my industry? Rest assured, you don't need to solve the world's problems with your blog; you just need to initiate a conversation that resonates with your [...]

Do Green Blogs Matter?

Posted 23 January 2008 | By Jeff Stephens | Categories: social media, What is PR? | No Comments

That's the important question for green building companies and pr professionals. What exactly is the impact that social media and blogs are having on traditional news delivery? Well, according to a recent survey of US journalists by Brodeur, a unit of Omnicom group, blogs are not only having an impact on the speed and availability [...]

Sharing Videos to Promote Communication

Posted 15 January 2008 | By Jeff Stephens | Categories: social media, video | No Comments

It seems that almost everyone with an Internet connection has seen at least one video on YouTube. Well not quite, but according to a recently released report (January 9th) from the Pew & American Life Project, roughly 48% of Internet users have been to video sharing sites like YouTube. Last year the figure was 33%. [...]

Using Social Media to Rise Above

Posted 03 January 2008 | By Jeff Stephens | Categories: social media | No Comments

For at least the last 6 years, I've been focused on green building, either as director of communications for a third-party certification firm or through Planet Relations. Well today that has finally paid off! According to Grist.org, "green building is the new black". Apparently, the press is just gushing about all aspects of green building. [...]

The Rebirth of the Press Release

Posted 26 January 2007 | By Jeff Stephens | Categories: green building, social media, What is PR? | 1 Comment

In 2006, the press release celebrated it's 100 year anniversary — not that too many people took notice. Since then, there has been a lot of talk in the high tech pr industry about the 'death of the traditional press release' and the emergence of the social media release (aka new media release). The best [...]

Is there a Wiki in your future?

Posted 13 December 2006 | By Jeff Stephens | Categories: green building, social media, What is PR? | 1 Comment

Quick…What's a wiki? A wiki is "a type of website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change some available content, sometimes without the need for registration." The most visible wiki is, of course, Wikipedia.    What's the relevance to public relations? The goal of public relations is to [...]

Removing Barriers to Press Coverage

Posted 12 December 2006 | By Jeff Stephens | Categories: social media, What is PR? | No Comments

How easy is it for the media to cover your company? Are you inadvertently throwing up barriers to coverage?   You are when you don't assemble all of the key facts about your company or organization in one location. An online media kit makes it easy for the media and other stakeholders (e.g., customers, agents, [...]