02.25.06
Posted in General at 9:46 pm by Paloma Cruz
Business First has a great article on the buying habits of women. “Buying attitudes: Good value counts for a lot when women go shopping” provides information on types of purchases, attitudes and money spent.
According to Winston-Salem, N.C.-based market research company, Frank About Women, some trends for women shoppers are:
* They’re doing more comparison price shopping.
* They’re more aggressive in their search for sales.
* They’re spending more conservatively because of concerns about the economy.
In fact, 51 percent of woman say they have a new value mindset when it comes to shopping, according to a 2003 study, “Retail Rituals,” by the research firm.
Whether they like to shop or not, today’s shoppers are looking for a good price, unique products and convenience.
Nice to know if you or your client is trying to sell to this market.
Permalink
02.24.06
Posted in General at 9:58 pm by Paloma Cruz
Buried in an article about how women get paid less than men is the following:
The survey also found that female marketing and sales managers earned $46,696 in 2004, compared with $74,932 for men [snip]
Oh, happy happy joy joy! 
Permalink
Posted in General at 9:39 pm by Paloma Cruz
Entrepreneur.com has a list of 12 myths that can kill your public relations plan.
Say It Isn’t So
Are these 12 media myths killing your public relations plan? Find out how to get media-savvy–fast.
The myths:
- It’s important to put a positive spin on everything.
- If you don’t want to answer a reporter’s question, change the subject.
- You should participate in every interview that’s requested of you.
- Reciting how many other media interviews you’ve done impresses journalists, producers and editors.
- A good news release is the best way to get media attention for your company.
- Mention your company, product or book as often as possible.
- Whenever you don’t want something printed or broadcast, just say it’s “off the record.”
- Answer every question so that you look like the expert.
- If you advertise in a medium, they’ll give you better coverage.
- The bigger the words, the smarter you sound.
- Never show emotion.
- Media training is what you need most to be successful in media relations.
They also give five rules to live by:
- Respond promptly.
- Never say “no comment.”
- Never lie or speculate.
- Know the medium’s audience.
- Stick to what you know.
Of course, the article gives tips on the right way to approach reporters, information on the myths and why you should live by these rules.
Permalink
02.23.06
Posted in General at 2:15 am by Paloma Cruz
Just for the record, the argument over whether or not you need to track conversations in the blogosphere is done. It’s over. If you’re not already doing it, you need to start now.
[[did that sound obnoxious enough?]]
The real question is, if you aren’t already doing it, how do you get started?
FeedForAll’s “Ego Searches & RSS” is a great place to get your tracking activities off the ground.
Ego searches are free and simple searches designed to monitor blogs and news portals for mentions of your company, product, competitors or other specific keywords. Conducting ego searches not only allows you to stay informed, but also allows you to maintain a strategic advantage over competing companies. A number of new Internet services are freely available that make these ‘ego searches’ painless and easy.
Dynamically created keyword based RSS feeds, update in your RSS reader or news aggregators, each time new information containing the keyword appears in the searched resources. The dynamic feeds match requests against new information, as it comes online in real time.
The tools covered by this great post (with details, tips and locations):
- Google News
- BlogPulse
- PubSub
- Technorati
- Ice Rocket
- Find Articles
- NewsTrove
- BlogDigger
- DayPop
- Yahoo News
Ego searches, monitoring your image on the blogosphere, isn’t as hard as you think. But it will require a bit of learning and a step outside your comfort zone.
Permalink
02.19.06
Posted in General at 1:15 am by Paloma Cruz
Some recommended reading, from the news and blogs:
Permalink
02.17.06
Posted in General at 1:59 pm by Paloma Cruz
Do You Have the #1 Leadership Trait for Tough Times? asks an article at HispanicAd.com.
If you’re like me, your response was: depends… what is the #1 Leadership Trait for Tough Times?
Their answer: Courage
Courage is not a quality that you’re born with or without. It can be developed and nurtured. And if you commit to leading with courage, and consciously work toward that goal every day in every decision you make and every action you take, acting courageously will soon become an automatic response.
In Leadership Isn’t for Cowards, Staver explores what courage really is, why it matters so much, and what you can do to bring it out in yourself and the others in your company. He says the path to courageous leadership has six components–and they can be summed up using the acronym “ATTACK”:
What does “ATTACK” mean?
- A: Accept Your Current Circumstances.
- T: Take Responsibility.
- T: Take Action.
- A: Acknowledge Progress.
- C: Commit to Lifelong Learning.
- K: Kindle Relationships.
Hmmm…. I don’t know if I would consider myself a coward, but wearing the label of courageous seems like a challenge of some sort.
I like the components of courage. I think I might be able to master that.
Permalink
02.16.06
Posted in General at 11:12 pm by Paloma Cruz
- Texas A&M to resume journalism program
- Lorelle resigns as KPRC anchor after 16-year run
- PRSA to Host Hispanic Media, Electronic Publicity, Media Training Book Related Teleseminars
“The Public Relations Society of America will host two Hispanic market teleseminars based on three chapters of Hispanic Marketing & Public Relations. Entitled ‘The Changing Face of Public Relations: Latino Media Issues, Including Electronic Publicity and Media Training,’ this teleseminar is delivered as a two-part series. The audience may register for one or both parts.”
- Listen to Podcast Interview with Innovations in Hispanic Marketing Conference Representative
“A podcast featuring an interview with Juan Ochoa, director of Program Development at MFM Trade Meetings, is available in the Podcast Section of Hispanic Marketing & Public Relations, HispanicMPR.com. During the podcast, Juan discusses in detail the upcoming Fourth Annual Innovations in Hispanic Marketing Conference to be held in Miami, March 14-16, 2006 with Elena del Valle, host of the HispanicMPR.com podcast.”
- The flattening of the press world
“Trouble is that the world of PR is changing. Back in the 1980s you only needed to deal with a few people to get the message out. But now a kid sitting in Australia with only a handful of readers can go from obscurity to the front page of the New York Times in, what, 48 hours? (I’ve seen pretty much just that happen).”
- Tips on “Being Able to Write: Lessons from Other Writers, New and Well-Seasoned”
- Write a lot.
- Read a lot.
- Schedule your writing.
- Seek the community of other writers.
- Read your works in progress out loud.
- When in doubt, when you don’t know how to begin, when the well is dry: open in scene.
- For pieces longer than several pages, outlines are essential.
- Don’t give up too early on a piece that isn’t working well.
- Always carry a writing notebook (or stack of cards, or p-slips for you old-school librarian types).
- As you write, keep a scrap file for those out-takes you can’t bear to leave on the cutting-room floor.
- As you draft, be liberal with establishing new versions, but number them precisely.
- Reduce, reuse, recycle.
- Back up your work.
- Be careful who you listen to.
- Send out your best work, and send it out religiously.
- If you do any fact-based writing, save and organize your citations.
- Good writers are never quite satisfied with their work.
- Be nice to librarians.
- Claim the name, “writer.”
- Blogs to Riches, The Haves and Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom.
“By all appearances, the blog boom is the most democratized revolution in media ever. Starting a blog is ridiculously cheap; indeed, blogging software and hosting can be had for free online. There are also easy-to-use ad services that, for a small fee, will place advertisements from major corporations on blogs, then mail the blogger his profits. Blogging, therefore, should be the purest meritocracy there is. It doesn’t matter if you’re a nobody from the sticks or a well-connected Harvard grad. If you launch a witty blog in a sexy niche, if you’re good at scrounging for news nuggets, and if you’re dedicated enough to post around the clock—well, there’s nothing separating you from the big successful bloggers, right? I can do that.
In theory, sure. But if you talk to many of today’s bloggers, they’ll complain that the game seems fixed. They’ve targeted one of the more lucrative niches—gossip or politics or gadgets (or sex, of course)—yet they cannot reach anywhere close to the size of the existing big blogs. It’s as if there were an A-list of a few extremely lucky, well-trafficked blogs—then hordes of people stuck on the B-list or C-list, also-rans who can’t figure out why their audiences stay so comparatively puny no matter how hard they work. “It just seems like it’s a big in-party,” one blogger complained to me. (Indeed, a couple of pranksters last spring started a joke site called Blogebrity and posted actual lists of the blogs they figured were A-, B-, and C-level famous.)”
Permalink
02.12.06
Posted in General at 8:45 pm by Paloma Cruz
Fixing Mexico’s sordid image
Nation hires a Dallas PR firm to emphasize its trade importance, downplay violence
– reported by the Houston Chronicle
Public relations savant Rob Allyn took on a tough job when he signed with the Mexican government in December to massage that country’s image among uneasy U.S. citizens.
But the task of spinning Mexico as a good neighbor has grown to uncomfortable proportions in recent weeks, thanks to a series of headline-grabbing border incidents — many of them violent, all of them drug-related.
And Mexico’s image is not just a Mexican problem any more.
The city of Laredo, Texas, has hired its own PR firm to shift the focus away from the gunplay and drug violence in its sister city across the Rio Grande. Just last week, gunmen attacked the offices of a Nuevo Laredo newspaper with automatic weapons and grenades in apparent retaliation for coverage of drug-related crime.
Allyn, a Dallas-based American, is a polished professional who trained for a career as a diplomat before discovering politics and public relations. He stays unswervingly on message.
[snip]
Allyn knows Mexico, thanks to a crash course in culture and language he absorbed while advising Fox’s history-making presidential campaign in 2000. Fox’s victory ended the 71-year rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.
Fox’s staff kept Allyn’s role under wraps then, frequently registering him in hotels under an assumed Spanish surname to avoid controversy over injecting a foreigner into the campaign.
Allyn already had experience in a different type of fiction, publishing a political novel in 1990 about two Texas politicians whose lives are intertwined in a messy web of sex and violence.
But it was Allyn’s Republican pedigree that first interested Fox when they met in May 1997. Allyn’s image-building campaign work for President Bush and virtually every Republican officeholder in Texas looked helpful to the Mexican businessman just testing the political waters.
Allyn calls his contract “honorable work,” but it’s made him a target.
Anti-immigration bloggers lobbed verbal grenades at him across the Internet and a pair of Mexican-American leaders in Dallas questioned why the $720,000 contract had not gone to a Mexican firm.
[snip]
Permalink
Posted in General at 8:27 pm by Paloma Cruz
According to Fast Company, Public Relations is a Top Job for 2006:
[snip]
In the end, we arrived at the list you see below. The outlook for each of these occupations should be bright. And more generally, as demographic trends progress, prospects for skilled and educated workers should only improve, notes Dr. Kevin Stolarick, an assistant professor at the Information Systems Program at Carnegie Mellon University and an expert on the Creative Class. As baby boomers enter retirement starting this year, for example, employers may be hard pressed to fill their positions; for every two people leaving the workforce, only one new person is entering, Stolarick says. “You can’t spontaneously create a 21-year college graduate out of thin air, South Korean cloning notwithstanding,” he says.
All of which means that your dream job may be closer than ever. We can’t promise that you’ll find it here, but this list should be a good place to start.
Top Jobs 2006 List
- Lawyer
- Personal financial advisor
- Sales manager
- Management analyst
- Computer and information systems manager
- Financial manager
- Securities, commodities, and financial services sales agent
- Marketing manager
- Computer software engineer
- Chiropractor
- Postsecondary education administrator
- Medical scientist
- Market research analyst
- Dentist
- Medical and health services manager
- Producers and directors
- Financial analyst
- Wholesale and manufacturing sales representative
- Engineering manager
- Advertising and promotions manager
- Compensation and benefits manager
- Clinical, counseling, and school psychologist
- Real estate sales agent
- Training and development manager
- Public relations manager
Permalink
02.07.06
Posted in General at 10:26 pm by Paloma Cruz
Super Bowl
Since I didn’t watch the Super Bowl, I also missed the ads. This is the first year that’s happened. Laura Ries gives a synopsis of Super Bowl Champions. It’s a good read.
Small Businesses
Study: Federal government not helpful to small businesses
– reported by the Houston Business Journal
A new poll says an overwhelming number of small businesses do not seek assistance from federal agencies.
The poll of 438 small businesses in 18 states, conducted by American Management Services and Suffolk University in Boston, found that 93 percent of small business respondents say they have not worked with any federal agencies to receive assistance.
Only 7 percent said they had.
[snip]
Permalink
« Previous entries