Positively Connecting Your (Seemingly) Disconnected Past With Your Present

Erik Knowles, the new fitness director at Five Seasons Family Sports Club in Burr Ridge, spots personal trainer Mike Sullivan last week at the club. What does military service have to do with being a fitness director at a sports club? When it comes to forging relationships with your audience, it’s essential to take the […]

NFL Referees’ Return Highlights This Truth: In PR, Grassroots Trumps Management

Last night, National Football League referees got a standing ovation when the first “regular” crew arrived for Week 4’s first contest: the Baltimore Ravens game against the Cleveland Browns. Good for them–this one time, anyway. After having been locked out in a dispute with the NFL, the crew must have loved it but, on some level, […]

A Recent Reminder on the Power of Brevity–More or Less

As of this writing, there are about 65 million pages that pop up when you type “Les Moore” into Google. More or less? There are about 1 billion pages with that phrase. But “less is more” really takes the cake. With that piece of pithiness, 2.95 billion (with a “B”) pages emerge. Less really is […]

Chicago Public School Teacher’s Strike Sign: The Power to Amuse & Annoy

  I don’t know if this sign, of a striking Chicago Public School teacher, is more amusing than annoying. What’s amusing: that the individual who made the sign–presumably a school teacher–gets an “F” for punctuation. (There should be a comma between “this” and “honk.”) Obviously, this is hardly the most credible sign, if the teacher […]

In the Midst of The GoDaddy Hacker Debacle, A Media Relations Lesson

Thanks to some dastardly GoDaddy hacker, my email and  Internet access was shut down for more than three hours this afternoon. The outage came shortly after 1 p.m. Central time, just as Inside Edge PR was about to wage outreach with the Chicago-area media about an 11th anniversary observance of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. […]

Mickey Straub’s `50 Capitols in 50 Days’: A Story You Can `Get’–And Get Behind

  Mickey Straub and the Lincoln Town Car that he’ll use to criss-cross America over a 50-day span starting on Sept. 4th. Pitching a story can be much like selling a product–if you can command attention and capture imagination from the get-go, then you’ve got a clear advantage over your competition. Such is the case […]

Willingness to be on marketing edge marks legacy of Downtown Oak Park leader

Last week was the last one on the job for Pat Zubak, executive director of Downtown Oak Park. After seven years at the helm of the organization, she is retiring. Her presence will be missed, as Bruce Ingram noted in a story about Zubak’s farewell in last week’s edition of the Oak Leaves, part of […]

From the Willis Tower to The Mamas & Papas, Stop the Apostrophe Apostasy!

It’s really a shame that the apostrophe is so massively misused, sometimes in embarrassingly public spaces. For example, daily thousands of people are on the Willis Tower Skydeck, as I was recently during an excursion in Chicago. Among other amazing sights, including a fun foray onto the Ledge, I beheld a most prominent display of what […]

For Marketing & Public Relations Strategy, Quality of Questions Helps You Hit Target

The quality of your work is directly related to the quality of questions that you ask–and often, those queries should be targeted squarely at yourself. In developing public relations and marketing strategy for my clients, these questions in the bulls-eye graphic (click to enlarge) are among the first ones that I ask. The Q & […]

The Connection Between an Upcoming Fundraiser & Mom’s 1972 Brain Aneurysm

It’s one thing for a business to talk about its commitment to “community,” whatever that may mean. But people pay closer attention (and assign much more weight) to action. In 2007, when I began providing public relations support to the Burr Ridge and Northbrook locations for Five Seasons Family Sports Club, one of the core […]