12 February 2009

Twitter: PR in 140 characters

Anyone heard of Twitter?

In case you haven’t, Twitter is a “micro-blogging”, social networking site, where people can post anything they like, as long as it’s fewer than 140 characters.

Why bother? Well, once you sign on, write a (short) profile and find yourself some fellow ‘twitterers’ to follow, you can build up quite a network. And you it’s not like every post is about what you had for dinner. Read the rest of this post

5 February 2009

Communicating in the economic downturn

For companies and the media, ten years of economic growth has seen a raft of good news stories about growth, profits, opportunities and expansion into new markets. The economic downturn has created a new challenge for the public relations profession – how to communicate bad news.

Danny Rogers, editor of PR Week last month bluntly divided economic cycles into good news (in an upturn) and bad news (in the downturn). He went onto say that good news typically comes in the form of promotional messages, and during upturns PR usually reports into a marketing division. The communication of bad news, on the other hand, usually comes from board-level and takes the form of crisis management or keeping staff informed of major restructuring. Read the rest of this post