Years ago, frustrated by the absence of a codified means to assess PR agency job candidates, I developed a questionnaire on media trends, PR, and popular culture. The PR/Media Quiz has evolved over the years but remains a useful, albeit non-scientific barometer of one’s currency and connectivity.

A Conversation with Marian Salzman, Author,  THE NEW MEGATRENDS

Among the challenges facing clients issuing RFPs is providing agencies with the information they need to participate and the confidence of knowing that the process will be fair and time efficient. 

There’s a place on our websites, often under the heading “team” or some other title where we present or march in our backgrounds, our resumes, our experience, hopefully in an impressive way that tells why we’re worth the fees we charge.

First, I must publicly thank David Leonhardt of The New York Times for indirectly giving me some terrific new plot ideas and storylines for my TV series Xtra Terresla now in development thanks to a couple of brave new world investors with herculean guts and vision.  They’ll also get co-executive producer status.

Today’s special guest is Grace Leong, CEO & Partner, HUNTER. 

There are five primary questions communications agencies should ask themselves to improve their new business win ratio. 

The primary and secondary questions outlined here draw on our collective experience from 80,000 agency searches on CommunicationsMatch™, dozens of agency search consulting engagements, research, and leadership roles in companies and agencies. 

This is a good news, bad news, probably essay.  The bad news for some readers is that it’s another column about the International Olympic Committee and the Beijing Olympics. The good news for many readers is that it’s the last column I’ll be writing about these recently concluded Beijing Olympic Games (I’m pretty sure, i.e. probably). But as Tom Brady once said when he was asked about his retirement: "I think that's the best way to put it and I don't think anything, you know, you never say never. At the same time I know that I'm very, I feel very good about my decision. I don't know how I'll feel six months from now.”  I probably couldn’t have said it better about my today feelings, but wish I could.

If you thought we’d reached a point where all businesses were up to speed digitally, think again.  According to a CMO survey, digital marketing spending reached 58 percent of marketing budgets, reflecting 15.8 percent growth over the last year. While most have made a good start, and more than half now report that they are in making good progress, only 11 percent of companies have fully institutionalized the digital transformation process.

We tend to think that we can either advertise our way into people’s hearts and minds, or that high profile media appearances are the route to driving visibility and building a positive company reputation.

The metaverse is a place where the physical and digital worlds turn into one, and where people can work, socialize, and play in a brand new digital reality.

Ever since the first pitch was thrown, pitchers have been accused of “doctoring the baseball,” which means applying foreign substances to the ball that alters its path, making it more difficult for the batter to hit the pitch.

The Museum of Public Relations is now back open for visitors.

Was Will Smith’s resigning from the Academy of the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences same his saying, ‘You can’t fire me, I quit?’

When I graduated from college, my father told me that one of the biggest disappointments in his life was that he didn’t have enough money to send me to an elite school.

It’s true. I once gave a lecture at my alma mater titled “B2B: The Hidden World of Public Relations.” At that time business-to-business communications was, indeed, hidden away — invisible to the average consumer. Practical and transactional in tone and purpose, these comms were tucked away and separate from the other internal and external communications streams. 

For software companies first starting out, it’s difficult to get far without a fine-tuned tech stack — a strategic combination of tech tools that work together to power your platform and inform your developers. The tools within a tech stack can include programming languages, frameworks, libraries, servers, UI/UX solutions, sales and marketing SaaS tools and many others. Each one plays a vital role in developing your software and keeping the business running smoothly.