Do you ever wonder who coined certain turns of phrase? Take “smile and dial,” for example, which refers to the practice of cranking out phone calls in some sales-frenzy fashion. I’ve got to believe that expression emerged some time in the last century, most likely in the last 50 years and certainly post-1876, when Alexander […]
Category Archives: Public Relations
Photos told most of the story, but a few select words also caught my eye in this Medill magazine essay. Is there an echo around here? Last week, I wrote about one of the signs of an effective publicist: that he or she is, essentially, invisible. Likening the PR pro’s role to that of a […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 & […]