Putting the PR back in...

After reading the first chapter, I found myself somewhat overwhelmed with tips, hints and do's and do not's. I've come to the conclusion (which you may or may not agree with) that this book was written for people who already have a foot in the industry. Of course, that's not a bad thing, and after I managed to figure out some of the jargon, I did find much of it helpful, if not a little confusing at first.

What I like about the book is that the authors make it clear that this is not a book to point fingers, but to give advice on how to advance the PR industry into the burgeoning era of social media.

some points I found most interesting

-Don't speak in messages

-DON'T spin. The point of PR is not to sell, but inform

-Communicate regularly

-Stay intune with social media. As the authors put it, this is a social industry, so social media is becoming increasingly important.

While I found the book informative, it also gave me some worries. How am I going to be able to keep up with all this? I guess I'd better stock up on red bull.

Bing brings new search feature

According to Mashable.com Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, has launched a new way to search. The aptly named "visual search" will allow a user to go through a grid of images, allowing the user to search even if they don't remember the name of whatever it was they were looking for. The visual search breaks the images up by category, making the search relatively user friendly. According to mashable, the feature is "powered by Silverlight, and the content for Visual Search is provided by several sources, one of them being MSN." What I'm looking forward to is Google's response to this challenge from Microsoft.

above is a screen shot of the main visual search page

Of Ethics

Today in class, we discussed ethics in PR, particularly in terms of research.

The class started off by going over the PRSA Code of Ethics. Then Ellen went over some basic principles of ethical research.

Some main points Ellen discussed:

-participants must be willing
-they can withdraw at any time
-they must understand what they're volunteering for
-info must remain confidential and anonymous (with extreme exceptions)

She also discussed what to do after said research was done. Sensitive information should be destroyed as soon as you're done with it and should remain confidential.

She also brought up an interesting scenario. What if the boss wants that information? Since the info is often the property of the company, you could end up in a sticky situation.