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Blowfish: A Private Life in Public Relations – Episode 1
A serialized business noir story- By Steve Lundin
“This is a joke, right Vance? Where’s the real presentation?” asked the only man in the room whose opinion mattered. Vance had been in this shock and awe situation so many times he could play out the rest of the meeting in his head. It was like watching a bullfight in the movie Groundhog Day. Why the clients didn’t just sign checks and let him do his job always annoyed him; anything short of an unequivocal “yes” was a complete waste of his billable time. And in the end the prettiest clients always took their panties off anyway.
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The Heat Is (Back) On: CEO Turnover Rate Rises to Pre-Recession Levels, Finds Booz and Company Study
IR Therefore I Am… By Gene Marbach
As the worldwide economy began to recover last year, CEO turnover at the world’s largest 2,500 public companies returned to rates seen during the pre-recession years, according to Booz & Company’s 12th annual CEO Succession Study. In 2011, 14.2 percent of CEOs at the world’s largest companies were replaced, which matches the historical seven-year average of just more than 14 percent, but is sharply higher than the 11.6 percent turnover rate in the crisis year of 2010.
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Six “Must Have” Qualities to Look for When Hiring a PR Firm
.Biz Builder Magazine… By Evan Weisel, Principal & Co-Founder, Welz & Weisel Communications
Companies hire a public relations firm for all kinds of reasons: to build brand recognition, create awareness for its products and services, help with messaging and positioning within target markets, and ultimately build programs that drive leads to support the sales force (whether direct or indirect). In addition, many organizations just do not have the time to implement and execute a comprehensive public relations program in-house and need to turn to outside counsel to add or supplement what is already being done.
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SEO Secrets of Success: Baking SEO into Fiesta Bowl
By ZOG Digital for the Digital Visibility Channel
Most people tend to think search engine optimization (SEO) is something you add to your website. A more integrated approach would be to view your website as merely one outcome of your SEO efforts. Including SEO from the beginning and throughout web design, rather than as an afterthought, is what we call “baking search in.” When ZOG Digital was tasked with designing and developing Fiesta Bowl’s new website, we made sure to make SEO a priority by doing so.
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Holder Admits White House Helped Justice Dept. Craft Fast and Furious PR Strategy
The Daily Caller
Attorney General Eric Holder admitted on Thursday that President Barack Obama’s chief campaign strategist David Axelrod and the White House are helping the Department of Justice craft its messaging about Operation Fast and Furious.
“We [Holder, Axelrod and the White House] have certainly talked about ways in which we could deal with the interaction between the Justice Department and Congress – about ways in which we would,” Holder said in questioning before the House Judiciary Committee.
Virginia Republican Rep. Randy Forbes pressed Holder further by asking him if Axelrod, Obama’s re-election campaign and the White House were involved in crafting the DOJ’s policy for dealing with press. He said they were …
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Social’s PR Mess: Last.FM Joins LinkedIn and eHarmony in “Beach Week”
PC Magazine
Security journalist Brian Krebs yesterday dubbed the first week of June as Breach Week! Krebs was referring to the three massive password breaches announced this week: LinkedIn, eHarmony, and Last.FM. Attackers hacked into the popular Web-based services and posted online the passwords of millions of their members. LinkedIn, especially, was castigated for failing to take a pretty basic extra step, salting, to secure users’ passwords. This is widely considered a major PR fail for the company that could impact perceptions of social network security in general.
Soon after the LinkedIn breach it was obvious that the company used mediocre SHA-1 hashing to secure its users’ accounts. As a result the attackers cracked away and uploaded a file with nearly 6.5 million users’ hashed passwords …
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Survey: Online Video Grabs More Ad Dollars, Marketers Favor Mobile Platforms
Mediapost
By any measure, video is commanding an ever-greater share of online ad dollars. eMarketer, for one, expects video ad spending to increase by 40%, this year, to reach $3.1 billion.
But, how are marketing execs allocating all that money?
A clear majority, 64%, said they plan to include smartphones in their spend, while more than 50% said they are likely to include tablets, according to new research from BrightRoll. A smaller share, 30%, said they are likely to include connected TV.
While BrightRoll’s 2011 survey revealed that video had become a staple of online ad buys, this year’s survey shows that advertisers are embracing the viability of a new digital video viewerscape across four unique screens: computers, smartphones, tablets and connected TVs …
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LinkedIn’s Security Woes Pour Salt On Social Media’s Exposed Wounds
Marketing Pilgrim
LinkedIn’s latest problems are around the phishing attacks on LinkedIn users that can be attributed to hacked passwords being handed out like candy on a Russian hacker site. This is the latest in a series of security issues that has plagued the social network choice of the professional set. The New York Times Bits blog reports: “The phishing attack marks the third headache for the professional social network in 24 hours. On Tuesday, security researchers said that a LinkedIn mobile app had been leaking sensitive calendar information to LinkedIn’s Web servers without their knowledge. On Wednesday, the breach exposed vulnerabilities in LinkedIn’s data security practices, specifically that the social network did not isolate users’ credentials on separate, secure machines and failed to “salt” passwords by appending random characters to them before encoding them …
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Economy: Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke Warns of “Fiscal Cliffs”
The Los Angeles Times
Fears about a looming fiscal crisis at the end of the year are starting to pinch job growth and threatening to undercut the nation’s fragile recovery, a growing number of economists and employers say.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, in testimony Thursday before Congress, repeatedly warned about the so-called fiscal cliff – a reference to the expiration of tax cuts Dec. 31 and the imposition of automatic spending reductions Jan. 1.
By some accounts, the U.S. economy could see an unprecedented fiscal hit of as much as $720 billion if the slated changes take effect. …
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Shareholder Spring? Not So Much, New Study Says
Thomson Reuters
There was speculation this spring that shareholders at a lot of companies would seize the opportunity of advisory say-on-pay votes to express irritation with unresponsive boards. But according to a study by Davis Polk & Wardwell that was published on Thursday at the Harvard Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation Forum, shareholders have been slower to storm the barricades than the Citi vote suggested. “The proxy season,” said the study’s lead author, Richard Sandler, “hasn’t been as exciting as people thought it might be.”
According to Davis Polk, only about 2 percent of the 639 large companies to report proxy results as of May 18 failed say-on-pay votes, about the same percentage as in 2011. (A June 6 study by Semler Brossy of say-on-pay votes in the Russell 3000 found 40 of 1,594 corporations, or 2.5 percent, have failed so far this year.) Ninety percent of the large companies won at least 70 percent approval from shareholders in say-on-pay votes …
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Corporate Social Responsibility: A Lever For Employee Attraction & Engagement
Forbes
In a survey by the nonprofit Net Impact, 53 percent of workers said that “a job where I can make an impact” was important to their happiness, and 72 percent of students about to enter the workforce agreed. Similarly, Research conducted by Cone Millennial Cause group, detailed in The 2020 Workplace, found that 80% of a sample of 1,800 13-25 year olds wanted to work for a company that cares about how it impacts and contributes to society. More than half said they would refuse to work for an irresponsible corporation. What’s more, according to research conducted in The 2020 Workplace, by the year 2020, Millennials will be 50% of the workforce …
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Employee Communications: Penn State Now Making Workers Report Abuses
The Associated Press
Penn State on Thursday instituted a new policy requiring all employees to report suspected child abuse to state authorities and take part in annual training.
School spokeswoman Jill Shockey said the policy goes beyond current Pennsylvania law, which requires only certain people to make such reports. Any employee who willfully fails to report suspected abuse could face disciplinary action including dismissal, the university said in a statement.
“These and other new policies and adjustments to existing ones are part of a focused and concerted effort by the University to become an academic and research leader nationwide in the protection of children,” the statement said …
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Branding: Tylenol’s Ailing Reputation Recovers to Top BrandIndex
ADWEEK
After years of recalls and plant shutdowns, the pain reliever’s reputation bounced back, landing it at the top of YouGov BrandIndex’s list of brand gainers for the month of May. Barnes & Noble and the Nook also made the list of top 10 gainers after the launch of the Nook SimpleTouch With GlowLight and Mullen’s “Read in Bed” campaign. The research service polls people on their perception of 1,100 brands and assigns a score ranging from 100 to -100.
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Study: Sexy Advertising On the Rise, Reaching Levels of 27%
Huffington Post
Sexy ads are up in magazines according to new research from the University of Georgia. Since 1983, the percent of ads using sex to sell products rose from 15 percent to 27 percent by 2003. Researcher Tom Reichert, a professor of advertising and PR at the University of Georgia, and his colleagues analyzed 3,232 ads published between 1983 and 2003 in Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Esquire, Playboy, Newsweek and Time. A full 27 percent of clothing ads showed sex appeal during the study period, compared with 23 percent of travel ads and 21 percent of entertainment ads. The overall uptick in sexiness was driven by increasingly sex-obsessed ads for alcohol, entertainment and beauty products. In 1983, only 9 percent of alcohol ads used sex to sell booze. Today, that number stands at 37 percent. Sexually arousing entertainment ads increased from 10 percent in 1983 to 33 percent today, and 51 percent of beauty ads now include sexiness, compared with 23 percent in 1983 …
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