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PR Tips

PR Tips | Choosing a Hosting Provider for WordPress Websites

May 7, 2014
If you're planning on creating a new WordPress website -- or are unhappy with your existing hosting provider -- you'll need to choose where to host your site.  It's daunting to sift through the hundreds of different hosting options to figure out which best suits your needs. Here's a quick primer to make this choice a bit easier for you. For the majority of small- and medium-sized businesses, third-party “shared hosting” is a reliable cost-efficient hosting solution ($5 - $15/month). With shared hosting, your site is sharing a server with several other websites. This is what allows hosting companies to keep costs low. The tradeoff is that if another site on the same shared server sees a sudden increase in traffic, then the server could get bottle-necked and temporarily slow your site down. Shared hosting plans typically do not include site backups and back-end WordPress upgrades, so we recommend having your own backup and upgrade strategy in place if you plan to use shared hosting. Examples of shared hosting companies include ICDSoft, HostGator and BlueHost.

PR Tips | Say it again, Sam

April 29, 2014

People instinctively understand the importance of repetition in advertising. We need things pounded into our heads. The first time you see an advertisement for the Super Bass-o-matic '76, you're probably not ready to purchase it. But by the seventh time, you just pick up the...

PR Tips | The Funny Side of PR

April 22, 2014
As part of the final push before the health care exchanges officially closed, President Obama made a bold, strategic, and surprisingly comedic move to drive young people to HealthCare.gov – he appeared on Zach Galifianakis' online talk show parody, "Between Two Ferns." The show, which airs on the comedy website Funny or Die, is better known for hosting actors and comedians such as  John Hamm, James Franco, and Steve Carell. While it wouldn't be out of place to see these celebrities promoting an upcoming project, the president's decision to appear with Galfianakis to promote the health care exchanges was certainly a novel idea.

PR Tips | RGB versus CMYK

April 15, 2014

To anyone but a designer, RGB and CMKY probably just look like a bunch of letters, but they are essential to the design process -- whether you're creating a website, logo, brochure or business card. So what's the difference and what do these letters mean? RGB is...

PR Tips | Communications 101: Do NOT do this

April 8, 2014

I was in Cleveland over the weekend, where my friends were all riled up about a recent incident related to the professional networking site, LinkedIn. It hit a nerve, being young professionals ourselves. I’m sure you’ve heard about it: a 26-year old girl was moving...

PR Tips | Orwell’s Rules for Writing

March 18, 2014
George Orwell is best known for 1984, his fictionalized account of an authoritarian dystopia in which all human activity is tightly controlled by a central authority. That work has endured because, in addition to being marvelously well written, it’s proven prescient about the inner-workings of modern totalitarian states. But Orwell was also a prolific and powerful essayist. “Politics and the English Language” is one of his most influential entries. And it includes a short set of writing rules that are highly applicable to crafting op-eds. This list is already famous. You might already know about it. But it’s worth revisiting regularly:
  • Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
  • Never use a long word where a short one will do.
  • If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
  • Never use the passive where you can use the active.
  • Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
  • Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

PR Tips | The nuts and bolts of basic op-eds

March 6, 2014
  Op-ed writing is a mix of art and science. As with any form of writing, the art comes with practice -- and lots of it. The science, on the other hand, can be learned. Here are a few of the basics. First, virtually all op-eds are 800 words or less. Seven hundred words is even better. You can't solve all the world's problems in 700-800 words -- but that's all most newspapers have space for. Further, many readers may not make it through many more words than 800. Second, every op-ed should start off with an interesting lede. Newspapers are in the business of, well, news, so a timely opener to your piece -- one that positions it within the context of what's going on in the news world -- is usually best.

PR Tips | Writing better pitches

February 25, 2014
Last week, I was in Napa Valley at the Wine Writers Symposium, an annual gathering of some of the nation’s top wine writers. While there, I spoke to attendees about how to write better pitches and get their stories placed. I was paired with Alison Clare Steingold, a senior editor at C Magazine. Drawing on my experience at Keybridge Communications and as a wine writer, I also coached attendees on query writing in a series of one-on-one sessions. The pitching process changes depending on your goals, of course. Op-Eds, for example, are almost always written before they’re pitched. With magazine articles, writers should pitch editors before they put pen to paper. These lessons also work for conventional PR – there’s no better way to get a reporter interested in your story than teeing it up for her.

PR Tips | Should you use a JPG, GIF or PNG?

February 14, 2014
Everyone uses JPG, GIF and PNG files for photos and graphics. But if you're anything like me, you probably treat them indiscriminately. Well, apparently, there's a real difference. Having been recently enlightened by our web folks, I've decided to pass my newfound knowledge along. Here's a quick primer on the difference between these common file types. JPGs are best for complex graphics and photographs. JPGs use a lossy compression technique. I.e., as the file is compressed, the image loses some of its data. Exactly how much data is lost depends on the amount of compression. The JPG format isn't ideal for text-heavy pictures or simple drawings that don't have the depth to survive the lossy compression. Such images tend to lose their sharpness and clarity when converted to JPG.