Is Personal Branding Overrated?

By Jonathan Rick

Would you hire this self-described Internet strategist? He rarely blogs, doesn’t much tweet, and uses YouTube for quick and dirty videos filmed with a Flip camera.

No? Would your mind change if you knew he were a veteran of Microsoft and Yahoo, whom the Washington Post described as “one of the elder statesmen in the … class of online political operatives”? What if NationalJournal.com credited him with expanding the Republican National Committee’s e-mail list from 1.8 million to 12 million, and “dramatically improving the party’s social media outreach”? His name: Cyrus Krohn.

The Pros and Cons of Communicating via E-mail

By Jonathan Rick

I love e-mail. I think of it as I think of Google: I’d be lost without it. Indeed, with the exception of family and close friends and personal situations, I prefer communicating via my inbox.

I enjoy the challenge of converting my thoughts into words, of committing something to paper. I appreciate the chance to think before responding. And, above all, I embrace the opportunity to stay organized and keep everyone accountable. Here are two examples of the latter:

How Bloggers Differ From Reporters

By Jonathan Rick

In my first op-ed in a while, I answer this question today at PRWeek. Here’s the text:

Clients often ask, What is new media? To answer this, I like to step back and ask, What is public relations?

Public relations is the practice of improving public perception. In a word, it’s promotion. A corollary of this is strategizing: What media should you use to get your message out?

New media is simply one of these outlets; specifically—and appropriately—it’s the newest outlet. But instead of developing relationships with producers on TV and radio shows, or editors and reporters at newspapers and magazines, we new media folk work with online sources: bloggers, podcasters, Web masters, news aggregators.

Our old media colleagues spend their days on the phone with journalists, meeting them for coffee, drafting press releases, crafting pitches, and compiling media lists. In essence, we do the same thing, but with a different vocabulary and under different rules.

Should You Advertise Online?

By Jonathan Rick

In the continuing debate over new media vs. old media—what’s online vs. what’s offline—the sub-debate about advertising is instructive.

On one hand, online ads are vulnerable to the tyranny of choice. The metrics can be overwhelming, the jargon can be off-putting and success can be mistaken for failure. Moreover, unlike traditional ad buys, online campaigns demand continuous monitoring and fine-tuning.

On the other hand, if you’re tired of one-off shots in the dark—where your one-page spread for life insurance runs opposite to an article on video games, or your spot for an SUV runs in the middle of a segment on high gas prices—then online ads may be right for your organization. Here’s why:

How Would You Respond to This E-mail?

By Jonathan Rick

In the first week of my first job, my boss sent me the following e-mail:

“Jonathan: Please find out who voted for BCRA.”

My first instinct was to reply, “Hi Bill: So sorry about this, but I don’t know what BCRA is.” Fortunately, before clicking Send, I rethought my response and instead Googled “BCRA.” Ten seconds later, I found the answer: BCRA stood for the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, otherwise known as McCain-Feingold.

These differing responses represent the two types of employees. The first response, which foists the burden back onto the questioner, comes from the slothful employee, who wants to go about his job without exertion and who does not seek success. The second response, which embraces the burden, comes from the achiever. He may not know the answer—and even be utterly ignorant of the subject—but he takes it upon himself to learn. He is averse to answering a question with a question, and considers it a failure if he cannot do what is asked, even with limited information. (A third response, research without success, is fine, as long as the research is undertaken in good faith.)

A Day in the Life of Susan Davis International

By Jonathan Rick

Recently, PR News named Susan Davis International a finalist for Small PR Firm of the Year. As part of this process, SDI was asked to submit a one-minute, day-in-the-life-of video. Our submission, called “Check,” was produced in high definition by Jon Miles of Lagnaippe. My cameo comes at the :31 mark.

This Is How You Pitch a Blogger

By Jonathan Rick

The below excerpts come from e-mails between Marshall Manson, of Edelman, and Rob Port of the Say Anything blog. They span a two-month period in 2006 — though the first four selections all come from the same, original e-mail.

When Does Google Change the Logo on Its Home Page?

By Jonathan Rick

They changed it today, for Veterans’ Day. But as the Los Angeles Times reported last month, they didn’t do so last year:

Should Blogs Be Independent of, or Integrated in, Their Host Organization’s Web Site?

By Jonathan Rick

Congratulations to Citizens Against Government Waste, which recently launched a blog, Swineline. Unfortunately, Swineline suffers from the same irritant that afflicts the blogs of the Cato Institute, Americans for Tax Reform, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and the Project on Government Oversight: It resides on a domain independent of the host organization (e.g., www.swineline.org instead of www.cagw.org/blog).

To me, this is myopic and counterproductive. Why build and drive people to an entirely new site when, by integrating the blog into your already developed site, you can centralize your traffic?

Gotcha

By Jonathan Rick

To both protect oneself and to target one’s opponent, David All has proposed “five essential tips for the YouTube campaign trail.” His suggestions are groundbreaking and thoughtful, but I’d like to add one more, albeit unrelated to YouTube: Develop software to download your opponent’s Web site once a day. You need not download the whole site, but, like a good backup program, only the pages that have changed since the last download.

Savvy readers will point out that Google already caches pages for free. In fact, Google’s cache was the source of this gotcha blog post by the Politico’s Ben Smith. This method is fine if you know that a change occurred within the past week or so, but if you don’t, your only other option is the Wayback Machine, which archives entire sites, but only twice a year.