Gearheads: The Sterling Communications Blog

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We're an all-Mac shop at Sterling Communications. We're big fans of Apple even when one of their computers isn't a fan of us. So when Steve Jobs resigned as CEO from Apple, we (like most in the tech world) were caught up in the moment, wondering:

• Who is Steve Jobs, really?
• What was his most important product out of all the game-changers?
• Why is Apple so successful, becoming the most valuable company in the world, despite ignoring profit and laughing off Wall Street?
• How does Apple grab two-thirds of all smartphone profits with only one type of phone?
• Who will save us from mediocrity now?
• When will the next iDevice arrive?
• What should we do with ourselves until the Mothership arrives?

And so on.

But the stories that interest me the most have been the smaller but more personal ones. Here's a short tale of mine when I worked at Apple:

PR for the PR Industry

In a recent Gearheads post by my colleague, Jordan Hubert, he mentioned the big screen perception of PR professionals as unscrupulous and shallow manipulators of the truth.  Over the decades, this view has become almost pervasive within not only the Hollywood set, but the journalist community, and even within the walls of the PR industry itself. 

Public Relations Onscreen: When PR Gets the Hollywood Treatment

What does a cop do? Common answer: Watch Serpico or “NYPD Blue.” How about a lawyer? Turn on A Few Good Men or “Law & Order.” The nearly universal mass entertainment mediums of film and television arguably offer the primary source of how people learn about a profession. Movies and TV shows present a view of a job to those who have no personal experience of its practice. As the profession of public relations is not one that people come into contact with on a regular basis like cops, lawyers or doctors, representations in film and TV are often the only frame of reference for many.

PR Considerations for Changes in Executive Leadership

Managing the outreach for a client’s change in executive leadership is not a trivial PR exercise. Often these transitions can be among the most closely watched events in a company’s history and need to be handled with a level of finesse that is not required for simple product launches or thought leadership activities. Here are some of the issues you need to take into consideration when developing your strategy and tactics around such a program.

CES Innovation Awards: 5 Tips to Prepare Your Submission

So your client has decided to submit their product (or many) to the annual Consumer Electronic Show (CES) Innovations Design and Engineering Awards. With the Call for Papers opening yesterday, here are a few helpful tips as you prepare your submission.

Can SEO Be Used as a Weapon?

According to a recent Wired article, yes, it can. 

In the article, author David Kravets points to a website called florida.arrests.org, which functions solely for the purpose of posting Florida mug shots (available via public record, thanks to Florida’s liberal transparency laws), and generates revenue from the Web traffic and resulting advertising. 

Kravets tells the story of Philip Cabibi, a 31 year-old Florida man who sat down one evening to perform a ritual familiar to most of us in the digital generation: “the ego search” or “googling oneself.” You can imagine Mr. Cabibi’s dismay when he realized that a drunk driving arrest from 2007 had come back to haunt him in the form of his mug shot on page one of his search results, thanks to florida.arrests.org.

Five Tips from a PR Recruiter

Whether you’re a recent grad, a seasoned communications professional or someone looking to transition to PR from another industry, it’s a tough job market out there. With slowed job growth in June and the national unemployment rate reaching 9.2 percent, competition for the very few open positions is fierce. But there are ways for candidates to set themselves apart from the herd of applicants racing towards recruiter inboxes. Here are a few of my favorite tips for job seekers:

PR Lessons From the AirBnB Train Wreck

Over the past several weeks, much of the tech world watched the slow motion train wreck of AirBnb with morbid fascination. When an AirBnB customer who had her apartment ransacked and her possessions stolen didn’t feel like she’d gotten much support from AirBnB’s staff, she published a blog post describing her ordeal that quickly went viral. Things only got worse when the victim, who goes by EJ on her blog, wrote a follow-up blog post to respond to what she perceived as inaccuracies in AirBnB’s first official statement. Sensing blood in the water (on the tracks?), tech blogs and mainstream media alike kept the story at the top of the news as the company stumbled and bumbled to come up with a coherent, meaningful response.

This is exactly the kind of PR disaster that companies – especially start-ups – fear: a damaging story that gets widespread attention, raises serious questions about the company’s business model and refuses to die.

Of course, part of the reason that the story kept going like a zombie from The Walking Dead was that AirBnB mishandled it. Badly. The company’s CEO, Brian Chesky, later admitted as much in a blog post of his own. In it, he outlined the business mistakes that AirBnB made, offering them up as lessons for other companies.  But he didn’t really focus on the PR takeaways.  Here are just a few:

Would You Please Please Please Please Please Please Please Stop Talking?

Social media is all about sharing. It offers many channels for those who like to talk about themselves and others, à la Mrs. Kravitz, the archetypal nosy neighbor on “Bewitched.” The person writing can’t see if his or her interlocutor is rolling their eyes or nodding off; meanwhile, the audience can simply ignore the steady stream of posts. Or can they?

Last week the Seattle Police Department (SPD) experimented with its official Twitter feed. (Read one of the many stories, here written by the Seattle Times.) As part of a campaign to make its work more transparent to the community, the SPD tweeted nearly all of its emergency calls during a 12-hour period. Even with the elimination of dispatches pertaining to “sensitive” topics such as domestic violence and child abuse, the message count still reached over 475 by day’s end. While many Twitter followers appreciated this view into a typical day on the force, many others expressed their irritation as the flood of SPD posts clogged the view of their Twitter streams — an average of 40 per hour. That made me think — how much is too much? How many tweets or Facebook posts can you make before your audience cries “Enough already!”?

Free Advice

Tomorrow, the National Student Leadership Conference will bus a dozen or so high school students to Sterling Communications' new San Francisco office. Visiting from around the country, they're interested in journalism and mass communications and will learn a bit about what we do as well as some skills they might need to get an internship or job in public relations.

We've been lucky to visit several clients recently to help them ramp up their social media efforts. The workshops have been well received and are producing some good results, which we'll be sharing with everyone soon, but with the students tomorrow. The professions of PR, marketing, advertising, and reporting are changing, and we're eager to discuss it.

However, in preparation, I kept coming up with random bits of advice that wouldn't neatly fit in the presentation. They weren't skills, exactly, but lessons I learned one way or another in school and as a reporter, ghostwriter, marketer, and account executive. Let me know what you think and whether you have something to add.