The closest thing that I have to a school-year cycle is my ongoing work for the Chicago District Council of the Urban Land Institute (ULI). Last week, with “Defending the `Burbs: An Investment Outlook for Chicagoland Suburbs Compared to the CBD,” I began my fourth year of writing summaries for ULI Chicago at the monthly […]
Four of the top reasons why publicists should shoot their own videos: 1. It provides another avenue for communicating directly with your target audience. Uploading a clip onto a site like YouTube creates a permanent home for you to convey your message, long after the story pitch’s original timeframe. 2. It is a helpful tool […]
Groupon is without a doubt one of the sharpest double-edged swords in marketing and public relations today. On one side, it can slice through the marketplace chatter and clatter and get your company’s message out to large chunks of the population in a single, smarmily scrawled offer. On the other side, it can irritate existing […]
You don’t grow when people don’t tell you anything you didn’t already know. And you don’t grow (at least in a healthy way) when people tell you how wonderful you are. As I tell everyone who becomes an Inside Edge PR associate, failure to personably push back (to question, to challenge, to offer a different […]
747, the digital clock declared. When I first opened my eyes on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, that was the time in Oak Park, Illinois. I thought of 747 model airplanes, then briefly drifted back to sleep. As I later discovered, only a few minutes earlier a group of terrorists had crashed into a tower of the […]
A few hours ago, I came across a typo on a major newspaper chain’s website. It had misspelled the name of one of the towns in its drop-down index. I alerted an editor I know, and he got it fixed pronto. “Thanks,” he wrote me. “I can’t believe no one (including me) caught that.” I […]
If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then two remarkably reminiscent photos ought to be worth at least a 250-word blog post. Two weeks ago, as I loaded my kids into the family van outside my office near downtown Oak Park, I noticed two men playing chess on the trunk of a taxi. It was too cool […]
Happy new month, even if it means yours truly is no longer receiving as much exposure on calendars throughout the Oak Park-River Forest-Forest Park area. For 31 days, some 5,000 calendars in the area displayed my alter ego from late 2009, Super Shopper Spotter. It was a character I developed for the “Shop the Village” […]
The headline today in Ragan’s PR Daily reads, “Study: LinkedIn top social media site for journalists.” So, at first blush, it might be tempting to fire off that next news release straight through LinkedIn to your target list of media members. And while that may well be the eventual path you take, it behooves you […]
Hurricane Irene is making quite a name for herself. Any organization looking to do the same ought to consider how their products or services can dovetail with Irene in a legitimate, winsome manner. This is hazardous PR terrain and going about it clumsily can backfire on you. A triumvirate of “S”-ential points to consider: Be […]