Guest post by Dana Hughens, CEO of Clairemont Communications. While Juliet surely meant well when she said to Romeo, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” she might not have been very concerned about how marketable the flower was. In a few weeks, I’ll experience my annual ritual of kicking off Fall Furniture market by ... Read More

It’s supposed to be the Arment Dietrich Facebook question of the week via video, but I’m fighting some kind of flu and would rather write today than record something. Sorry. Writing is more comfortable for me…but I’ll be back next week! But that doesn’t mean I can’t answer a question and today’s comes from Carmen Krushas. Carmen and I met several years ago when she was ... Read More

Guest post by Abbie S. Fink, vice president/general manager of HMA Public Relations. As Jewish people around the world welcome the year 5771, I thought I’d take this opportunity to share with the readers of Spin Sucks seven questions to reflect on in the New Year. I know, I know, it’s September. But the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, took place last week. The High Holidays, ... Read More

During the summer I fell off the InsidePR bandwagon. Not in terms of recording, but in terms of talking about it here. But I’m baaack! And this week, Martin Waxman, Joe Thornley, and I discuss preparing students and young professionals for the business world. We’ve talked here before about using the social web to find a job, but this discussion is a bit different. With school ... Read More

Guest post by Valerie Merahn Simon, senior vice president at BurrellesLuce. There’s been a lot of debate lately about free versus paid content online. All this talk leads to one simple question. What features will motivate readers to scale the paywall? Back in college I found myself at the campus store with less than a dollar in change in my pocket. To the left of the ... Read More

I’ve been reading a lot recently about skunkworks teams and why they don’t work. If you aren’t familiar, according to Wikipedia, “skunkworks is used to describe a group within an organization given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, tasked with working on advanced or secret projects.” In other words, it’s a formal group of people who work solely on innovation – coming up ... Read More

Guest post by Joe Pulizzi, CEO of Z Squared Media and author of “Get Content Get Customers.” You would have to be from another planet not to be bombarded with the “we’re all media companies now” mantra coming from many of the leading marketing websites . But what does it mean…to be a media company or publisher (what I call content marketing)? If you look at ... Read More

If you don’t know Sasha Muradali, go on over to her blog, Little Pink Book PR. That is where this post first was published and it came to life because we are both huge Mad Men fans. If you already read it there, by all means, ignore me today. If you didn’t read it on Sasha’s blog, welcome to my obsession of Mad Men. I love the storyline, ... Read More

When I saw David Meerman Scott, author of “The New Rules of Marketing and PR,” (affiliate link) speak at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in March, I was pretty impressed.  After learning about his six rules of the rave I was intrigued enough to wait in the long line to receive my free copy of his newest book, “World Wide Rave: Creating Triggers that Get Millions ... Read More