By now you’ve probably heard the story of the HMV employee gone rogue as a group of them were let go at once.

“We’re tweeting live from HR where we’re all being fired! Exciting!! #hmvXFactorFiring,” read the initial message from @HMVtweets, which has more than 70,000 Twitter followers.

This happened while 60 employees at the 91-year-old company were laid off during a round of downsizing.

Through seven subsequent tweets, Poppy Rose Cleere, the company’s newly axed 21-year-old online marketing and social media planner, aired the company’s dirty laundry to the world. Continue Reading »

Today’s guest post is by Victoria Harris.

Many PR consultancies spend a significant amount of their time and resources on proactively searching for new business and developing proposals.

Some larger agencies will have teams who spend all of their time on this area.

However, with increased competiveness due to the challenging economic climate, agencies would be short-sighted to focus disproportionately on generating new business, while neglecting retained clients.

Loyalty from retained clients can no longer be seen as a given.

In the 1980s, the average client-agency relationship lasted seven and a half years; yet by 2007, this was down to just three and a half.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are more than 7,000 public relations firms in the United States, so competition is fierce. Continue Reading »

I hate PR people.

I can say that because I am one, but also because those of you who do blogger and media relations disappoint me.

Greatly.

It’s rare these days for me to go out with friends without hearing a story of how a PR person didn’t do their research or prepare their client for an interview before a blogger or “social media influencer” was approached.

In fact, it’s become a game to see who can tell me the worst story they’ve had of late. Their ultimate goal is to hear me yell, “I hate PR people!”

Unfortunately, it’s a refrain both friends and my Arment Dietrich team hear a lot. Continue Reading »

Welcome to 19th edition of The Three Things, the weekly update of three links, podcasts, videos, or books you can’t miss from Michael Schechter (Honora, A Better Mess), Howie Goldfarb (Sky Pulse Media, Web Choice Consulting), and me!

For those of you new to this series, The Three Things arrives in your inbox on Sunday mornings (unless you don’t suscribe, but that can easily be fixed if you hurry over and enter your email address or add to your RSS feed) so you have some extra time to spend perusing the obscure content we’ve curated for you (and one another) before your week begins and deadlines, meetings, and work takes over.

This week we have thoughts on how your industry must change and adapt to new customer needs, the death of the news release, and the glorious English language.

Happy Gini birthday reading to you! Continue Reading »

Well, here we are again. Another Friday. Another week that went by way too quickly.

The storm the east coast is getting started here yesterday, but it must be picking up steam as it moves because we really just have one giant snow cone without the syrup.

I’ll admit I’m insanely jealous you’ll be getting two feet of snow. I still haven’t been able to use my cross-country skis. Even Toronto is getting all sorts of snow. I know this because Lindsay Bell won’t shut up about it. It’s as if she knows she’s ripping my heart out of my chest every time she tells me how much snow they have.

But you know what? It’s my birthday weekend and if Mother Nature doesn’t want me to have skiable snow, so be it (wondering if reverse psychology works on her).

This week’s Gin and Topics are brought to you from Terreece Clarke, Kat Krieger, Rebecca Todd, Mr. D., and me. Continue Reading »

Elissa Freeman and I first met on Twitter, of course, but she happened to be in Chicago a couple of years ago and we met for coffee.

Of course, we became fast friends and get together whenever possible; the last was in July in Toronto at SocialMix.

When I searched the blog to see when was the last time I featured her here, I quickly discovered we shared a #FollowFriday, where she detailed her five brain crushes and I did mine.

She’s also guest blogged for us a few times, but she has never had her very own feature.

So here we go.

She is, first and foremost (at least career-wise) a communications professional.  When I met her, she was hiring the team at Toronto 2015 Pan/Parapan Games at the vice president of communications on the organizing committee. Continue Reading »

Today’s guest post is by Jim Delaney.

During the last few months, we’ve heard a lot of chatter about big data and how to leverage it for public relations.

Armed with intelligence from the millions of status updates, photos, videos, check-ins, and other digital breadcrumbs on the Internet, PR pros can uncover meaningful, valuable insights.

But it can be an overwhelming task to sift through mountains of intelligence to decipher how to best act upon that data.

Last March on Spin Sucks, Kami Huyse shared the five essential skills PR pros need to master when it comes to big data.

She said when it comes to math and analytics, it’s not exactly love at first sight in PR.

We need to adapt. It’s important to remember just how integral research is to securing and keeping client business. Continue Reading »

I was trolling through our Google analytics the other day and found several people had come here by Googling,”How to be successful in PR.”

Spin Sucks is the first listing in search rankings for that phrase. Which is great! But it isn’t.

You see, the post is more than two years old and it’s written by a guest author. Not that that’s bad. It isn’t. We love our guest bloggers, which is why Lindsay Bell honored the top 10 from last July through December just yesterday.

But the post is more about how to be successful with media relations than public relations, overall. And, if the vision of this blog is to change the perception of the industry from one of spin doctors, we might need to own more than the first listing in search results for that phrase.

So here you go…five ways you, too, can be successful in PR. (By-the-way, trolling through your analytics to see how people are finding you is an excellent way to curb writer’s block. You know, not that I have it or anything.) Continue Reading »

Today’s guest post is by Lindsay Bell.

Here at Spin Sucks we highly value our amazing community (the crazies, as Gini Dietrich affectionately calls you), and our incredible (and ever growing) roster of guest bloggers provide an invaluable resource to each and every one of us.

That old adage “you learn something new every day” certainly rings true for me as I get to work with each of you prior to publication, and then read and engage with the comments and added insights from our community.

There’s nothing like seeing the flip side of the coin on an issue or an industry trend.

So, without further ado, gather ’round for a special edition of Spin Sucks. Drum roll please…..!!

Today we announce the top 10 guest posts from the last half of 2012 (July 1 – December 31). Continue Reading »

Several years ago, I was leaving the office. I had on my coat and hat; I was holding my gloves until the moment right before I stepped outside. My bags were full of things to take home to work on. And I stopped in one of our account executive’s offices to say goodnight.

She was sitting there with two other colleagues and they were talking about video.

The one account executive who was not intimidated by me and had no problem giving her opinion said to me, “You travel the world telling business leaders about how important video is in telling a company’s story, yet we don’t do any of it.”

I looked at her and said, “I agree. But we sit behind our computers all day. What the heck will we talk about on video?”

(Cough, cough.) No one said I’m not stubborn or close-minded occasionally. But I am willing to listen and to think. Continue Reading »