Utah Public Relations Agency, Utah PR, Online PR, PR For Small Business, Utah Social Media Agency, Social Media Marketing

I hear this all the time, “Obama’s such a great president. I voted for him and everything, but I don’t agree with…” or “well at least he’s making a change, except for…” I hear it and I’ve repeated it. Take his issues with smoking. How can a man who still smokes really work on smoking prevention? It’s a feel good, warm fuzzy thing to do in the public eye, to put laws into place that supposedly will discourage lighting up. But I’m not so sure a law put in place by a man who smokes and the tobacco industry is change I really can believe in.

From Slate:

“It’s an uplifting tale of courage against evil. The truth, however, is more complicated. For all his rhetoric, Obama is still apparently a nicotine addict. And the country’s biggest tobacco company, Altria, helped write the bill.”

Social media can do amazing things! Especially in global political action terms. If you’ve been following the news about Iran’s elections, you may know Twitter helped cause quite a stir over there when citizens complained about the possibly fraudulent results of Ahmadinejad’s re-election.

The current government of Iran recently tried to shut down communication about the unrest by not allowing citizens to text message. But thanks to Twitter, they couldn’t stop their people from tweeting about it, organizing protests and spreading the word anyway. Twitter has been such a powerful force through the recent election that the US State Department actually asked them not to perform a routine update until Tuesday. This was just so Iranian citizens could continue to communicate with each other and the outside world during the election process. Tweets are on-going as I write. Citizens are calling for further protests, mentioning arrested citizens and other organization efforts taking place globally.

In China, it was the bloggers who were able to spread the word about government officials taking bribes to direct funds elsewhere instead of building safer infrastructure in schools. When these schools collapsed and killed Chinese citizen’s only children during the major earthquakes this year, all hell broke loose. Goverment officials were actually seen prostrating themselves in the streets, begging for forgiveness. This, even in a Communist country, is the power of social media.

Social media is changing our world in big ways and small. It allows us to communicate directly with one another globally, locally, quickly and on the cheap, too. It puts small start-ups on the same playing field as companies like Coca-cola or Target. It mobilizes the masses. It helps us connect to one another in a way we have never been able to do before as human beings.

If you are not on Twitter yet, don’t have a blog, don’t understand Facebook and have no desire to check out Youtube, you are not alone (though increasingly in the minority). These are the tools that are changing our world and will help you spread your company or individual message in more amazing ways than you can even now imagine. It’s worth it for you to re-visit your profile, your messaging and begin to take hold of this power that is changing our world.

For more great online PR and Social Media strategies call and ask about Big Star Public Relations services today at 801-708-0958.

Any editor knows the secret to error-proof copy is attention to detail. Now, if you are like me, running around, frazzled, with a million things on your mind, clients to think of, creative strategies to come up with…and you tend to think in terms of the big picture rather than the little, itty-bitty, mundane details, this is a challenge. First things first in getting your press release and other marketing copy to be error-proof:

1. Take a deep breath before diving in and scanning over your drafts - this will help clear your mind of all the other things you may have going on upstairs. It will also prepare you to focus on the task at hand.

2.Clean desk = clean copy - This is an old editor’s trick. As simplistic as this sounds, your environment matters. If your desk is littered with papers and projects it makes it that much harder for you to focus on what you are reading and catch those mistakes.

3. Keep consistent - From Ragan’s proofreading tips, “Like typos, inconsistencies in style will break the “spell” enabled by professionally written copy. Don’t, for example, allow a publication under your discretion to refer to “e-mails” as well as “emails.”

4. Proofread copies with a red pen - this will help the mistakes you tend to make pop out. It helps your recognize your weaknesses and look out for them in the future.

5. Proofread using editor’s marks - Sure, this can be intimidating if you don’t know these marks, but learning them and using them will help you in communicating changes that need to be made. These marks are universal and can help someone else out when they go to read your copy as well…Which brings us to the final tip:

6. Have someone else glance over your copy - sometimes we fall in love with what we’ve written, or we’ve read over it so much our minds simply skip the mistakes. Letting someone else look it over with a fresh pair of eyes will help catch those final errors you maybe didn’t see.

Need a fresh pair of eyes? Need someone to write copy or a press release for you? Let Big Star PR help you write or edit that next press release.

Call us at 801-708-0958

As far as online PR and SEO goes, Google has so far been king (64% market share, according to Comscore). But Microsoft may topple the reigning search engine off the hill today with the unveiling of its “more intuitive and user-friendly” search engine, Bing.

This new Microsoft-born search engine could throw your Google-based website analytics for a loop. Here’s what we know about Bing so far:

* It does have a powerful news section that will pick up both press releases sent over the wire and those printed at news organizations.
* It has an “extras” section with listed blogs and a powerful keyword search incorporated to help you find the blog category you are interested in.
* It incorporates Bing411, a search friendly phone database for business numbers (kinda like Google business listings but it also incorporates SMS, make sure you are in it).
* Bing also has a cashback rewards program. Users are rewarded for buying products that they search for (this WILL make a difference with search engine use and could definitely put Bing at number one, though numbers don’t seem to show that yet)

So, how do you make Bing work for you? Bing works by pulling content from indexed websites and displaying the navigation path and variations on the search query off to the side of the page. Searchers click on the new keyword to find information quicker. Problem - it’s going to be a bit trickier to track where searchers are originally coming from this way.

Marketers are going to have to pay closer attention to related keywords and searches to attract new visitors with Bing. Pay close attention to the related keywords and url’s you use in online press releases. The search engine so far has about 9.9% of the market and Microsoft doesn’t seem to be satisfied with that. The software company has poured 80 million into a marketing campaign to give it a real go. Most of us will just have to wait and see how to advance our online message with this new search engine.