What Your Email Says About Your Brand

Digital branding starts in your inbox.

It’s something you take for granted, something seemingly trivial, even mundane. When executed thoughtfully, however, it makes a splash. It says, “This guy is sharp—I want to work with him!”

What is this opportunity, obvious but overlooked? It’s the bookends of your emails: your address and signature block—often, the first and last thing your recipients will see. For better or worse, your email bookends are powerful purveyors of your brand. What are yours conveying about you?

The One Thing PR Pros Can’t Fake

By Jonathan Rick

A version of this blog post appeared in PR Daily on February 21, 2013 and the PRSA-NCC Blog on February 26, 2013.

Anyone can apologize. Indeed, we all do from time to time. But to do it well—to extinguish the fire rather than re-ignite it—ultimately requires the one thing that even we PR pros can’t fake: sincerity.

5 Ways to Transform Your Blog Post Into Endless Tweets

By Jonathan Rick

A version of this blog post appeared in PR Daily on February 18, 2013.

You just finished a killer blog post. Reliving the process: first you had to pitch the idea to your editor. Then you reworked the angle to satisfy his feedback. Then it was research time, wherein you bumped up against facts that challenged your hypothesis. Finally, you penned the piece, sweating over decisions as light as commas, as lofty as conclusions.

Now, the post has been published. And you, like a wide-eyed kitten mesmerized by a shiny new object, sit in thrall to the whimsies of the web—watching, waiting, wishing for the big payoff.

Slowly, the clicks come trickling in. But why settle for a trickle when these numbers could be a raging torrent? As soon as your article goes live, it behooves you to SHOUT IT from the rafters. You labored so long and hard on the writing, shouldn’t you reward your efforts with a little promotion?

Indeed you should. In fact, every hack must now be his own flack.

6 Ways to Better Brand Yourself Online

By Jonathan Rick

For the past year, I’ve had the pleasure of delivering presentations on career development to the Institute for Humane Studies. Here’s my latest, which offers six best practices to establish and protect your brand online:

How KitchenAid Pureed a Twitter Crisis Into a PR Coup

By Jonathan Rick

A version of this blog post appeared in Fast Company on October 4, 2012.

Everyone makes mistakes, the saying goes. It’s whether you learn from them that separates the brands that retain your loyalty from the ones you now drive by.

In this context, consider last night’s tweet from KitchenAid that mocked President Obama:

“Obamas gma even knew it was going 2 b bad! ‘She died 3 days b4 he came president’. #nbcpolitics”

Sent from your personal account, where your like-minded friends would compose the primary audience, the tweet would have been par for the live-tweet course: funny and frivolous. However, sent from a corporate channel, the tweet is no longer associated with a person but with a brand—and its products.

What Tim Cook Knows That Steve Jobs Didn’t: How to Apologize

By Jonathan Rick

A version of this blog post appeared in Fast Company on October 2, 2012.

The new master of the mea culpa

Apple and “apologize” don’t usually fall in the same sentence. In fact, Apple instructs its retail employees to avoid acts of contrition as a matter of principle. “Do not apologize for the business [or] the technology,” its Genius manual commands.

Following this playbook, when faced with the debacle that is Mapplegate, Cupertino’s flacks first tried spin. “We launched this new map service knowing it is a major initiative and that we are just getting started with it,” a spokeswoman told AllThingsD. But the brush-off backfired, hard. As Gizmodo put it, “The New Apple: It Doesn’t Just Work.”

Realizing that the story wasn’t dying down, the time came for the CEO to step up. Tim Cook needed to communicate two things—(1) an apology, and (2) a promise to do better—both of which he did with aplomb.

How PR Pros Should Use Twitter

By Jonathan Rick

A version of this blog post appeared in PR Daily on September 19, 2012.

For today’s PR pro, the question is no longer whether to tweet, but what to tweet. This is, of course, a loaded question—akin to asking, What kind of pet should I buy?

Happily, the answer need not be prohibitively complex. While the specifics will depend on your specialty—crisis, public affairs, B2B, etc.—a variety of best practices cover our profession as a whole.

Here are eight that every PR pro should follow.

Why I Remain a BlackBerrier

By Jonathan Rick

I’ve been using a BlackBerry since 2005. I got hooked as part of the “CrackBerry” generation in Washington, DC, and have gone through scroll wheels, track pads, and touchscreens. I currently have the Bold 9930.

Why am I such a “sucker”? To be sure, I’d be thrilled to get an iPhone. It’s gorgeous. The app ecosystem is unparalleled. And the integration with iCloud and my beloved iPad is tantalizing.

Yet I can’t make the leap for one stubborn reason: when it comes to a phone’s most important facet—its keypad—no one can touch the BlackBerry. For someone like me, who uses a smartphone primarily for email, the ability to type both quickly and accurately is absolutely critical. When I type, I need to think about what I’m saying, not whether I’m making typos (as is the case with my iPad). I need to look forward, not backward. The BlackBerry’s physical keys, curved and tapered, “each one subtly reaching up to meet your thumbs on either side,” as the tech blog Engadget puts it, allow me to do this in a way that I just haven’t found even remotely possible with a touchscreen.

JRG in the News: Practicing What We Preach

By Jonathan Rick

Aaron Sorkin is right: if you claim to be an expert in your field, then it behooves you to boast credentials. This is especially true in a field like digital communications, where if you’re going to sell a client on the value of, say, public relations, then you should have a few clips under your keyboard.

To be sure, that you have 10,000 Twitter followers doesn’t necessarily make you a Twitter expert. But if you want to be considered a pro, then you need to be a thought leader.

Update Your RSS Feed

By Jonathan Rick

If you recently noticed some changes here at JonathanRick.com, don’t change the link. We (finally) spun-off our original blog, No Straw Men (the title of our founder’s column in his college newspaper), into its own entity, at NoStrawMen.com.

How to Make Google Laugh: SEO Your Headlines

By Jonathan Rick

A version of this blog post appeared on Mashable on May 8, 2012.

Why do search engines always rank certain websites so highly? Obviously, their content is kingly, but so is their search engine optimization (SEO). Indeed, for many sites, the search-engine spiders that crawl the Web deliver a third or more of their traffic. Perhaps the most famous example comes from the Huffington Post, which in February reeled in readers with the ingenious bait: “What Time Is the Super Bowl?”

In protest, writers for publications such as the Washington Post, New York Times, and Atlantic each have taken turns slugging the SEO punching bag. The headlines describe their complaint: “Gene Weingarten Column Mentions Lady Gaga.” “This Boring Headline Is Written for Google.” “Google Doesn’t Laugh: Saving Witty Headlines in the Age of SEO.”

In other words, algorithms don’t appreciate wit, irony, humor, or style. As reporter Steve Lohr put it, they’re “numbingly literal-minded.” Alas, Oscar Wilde!

Google News

By Jonathan Rick

In February 2010, I wrote a blog post called “Google News.” In November 2010, I revised it. Yet it took almost another year and a half to finish the damn thing, which appeared last week on Mashable. Since the text from 2012 doesn’t include the text from 2010, I figure I should publish the original for posterity.

Google’s announcement earlier this year threatening to pull its business from China stirred the proverbial hornet’s nest. Leaving aside the merits of what the company did, consider the way in which it broke this news.

As the Wall Street Journal reported, “Google’s vice president of public policy and communications, Rachel Whetstone, began crafting and revising a number of versions of a possible statement the company planned to release publicly.”

Pretty standard fare, right? There’s nothing special about your PR person drafting a statement. But this wasn’t your usual corporate spin. In fact, the statement wasn’t a statement; in its eventual form, it was a blog post.