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#BringBackOurGirls

May 27, 2014

As nearly everyone knows, 276 Nigerian schoolgirls were kidnapped last month by Boko Haram. Following these horrific kidnappings, two Nigerians tweeted with the hashtag #BringBackOurDaughters. It wasn’t long before the hashtag...

PR Tips | Social TV: Changing the Way You Watch

May 20, 2014
ABC is home to some of my favorite TV programs -- namely, Nashville. I love the main character, country star Rayna Jaymes. Tons of songs are featured in each episode, as you might guess, and they're all sung by the actors and actresses themselves. No faking! I think that's what makes it so realistic. And it became even more realistic when the show used Social TV to engage fans and reward loyalty. Social TV is a term used for technology that encourages social interaction with a television program or related content. ABC employed this new tactic with the latest season of Nashville, which has been about Jaymes’ new album launch. Using its Tumblr to host a competition among fans, ABC asked them to create and submit album cover designs. I can only imagine, as a fan, how cool it would be to see my design used on the show!

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...

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.

Copy Editor’s Corner | Dare to compare, correctly

April 1, 2014
What’s the difference between “compare with” and “compare to,” anyway? Let’s compare the two phrases. According to The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, “To compare to is to point out or imply resemblances between objects regarded as essentially of a different order; to compare with is mainly to point out differences between objects regarded as essentially of the same order.” And The Associated Press Stylebook offers this example: “She compared her work for women’s rights to Susan B. Anthony’s campaign for women’s suffrage.” To simplify both entries from these style gods, use “compared with” to point out a difference and “compared to” to point out a similarity. It’s much likelier that you’ll use “compared with” in a piece than “compared to.”

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.