In our house, Sunday dinners are special. It’s the one time each week when we make a point of being together as a family. When the first person is nearly done their food, they start Appreciations and Complaints, listing the people or things that caused grief or joy during the past week. Here are my social media appreciations for the past few years. I have Appreciations for: Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz, who showed the way for many in the public relations field with their enthusiastic coverage of all things social. They led by example, week in, week out. A particularly good example, at that. Shel’s blog. Neville’s blog. For Immediate Release podcast. Kami Huyse for pushing at the edges of public relations blogging to examine... [Read more]

If Microsoft doesn’t want to buy Yahoo, why do executives keep talking about the acquisition-gone-wrong? The continued dribble of comments about potential side-deals and semi-deals must be distracting to Microsoft employees, who are in the middle of the company’s transformation from Bill Gates’ company to an entity that embraces open architectures and web-based apps interconnecting in a cloud. Does MSFT even know what messages it wants to be sending investors, regulators, the public and customers? Microsoft Says Chances of Yahoo Takeover Negligible (Reuters) Shocker: Yahoo Shoots Carl Icahn as Microsoft Messenger (Kara Swisher) For a mega-corporation, Microsoft is acting like a teenage boy at a high school dance, not wanting... [Read more]

Even if you don’t know the original source for a fact or a quotation, you need to indicate that it’s not your idea. Otherwise, your audience will assume you are either too dim to know that you’re borrowing from someone else, or that you are too unethical to acknowledge the debt. Either way, you have everything to gain and nothing to lose. If you have time, track the information back to its first author. And for facts and statistics, it’s worth doing a quick check about the validity of the statement. Commonly-accepted pseudo facts like “You should drink eight glasses of water a day,” and “Lemmings will follow each other off a cliff,” have been repeated so often that they are taken as gospel. You... [Read more]

I’ve been to a lot of funerals this year.  Too many of them have included a sales pitch for the religious choice of the deceased. This strikes me as an odd choice. The religious affiliation (or lack thereof) of the people attending could be all over the map. Yet, like clockwork, the kindly person running the memorial service starts explaining that we can all breathe easier because the person who died backed the right horse in the religion sweepstakes. They have gone to heaven because they chose (insert name of deity or prophet here). It goes without saying that anyone in attendance who has not chosen that deity will burn in hell, or suffer a similar unpleasant fate, depending on the religion and sect. Think about a Mac users group,... [Read more]

Thanks everyone who sent me a note about guest blogging or co-blogging on Common Sense PR. For the time being, I’m going to step back from postings here. Not sure when things will resume, and whether I’ll be part of the mix. But for now, I need a break from feeding the machine day in, day out. I’ll be spending some time in August prepping for a public relations class I’m teaching this fall, and relaxing at the beach, on the golf course and in the back yard. What I won’t be doing is writing regular posts for this blog. I’m tired. I want to not have a public opinion about everything I see. And if you aren’t absolutely driven to blog, you shouldn’t be doing it. After a bit of pruning, I plan to resurrect... [Read more]