Did Anyone Say Stupid?

Recently, an interesting clash of ideas set off a cultural and religious war in Manhattan. A truly tasteless (and thoughtless) billboard blared: "CHRISTMAS QUALITY, HANNUKAH PRICING!" What were they thinking, indeed?

As completely understandable, and expected, a number of people took offense. The Anti-Defamation League called it "crude and offrensvie," and said that it reinforced anti-Semitic stereotypes.

“Particularly with the long history of anti-Semitic stereotypes about Jews and money, with the age-old notion that Jews are cheap, to use the Jewish holiday in dealing with issues of money is clearly insensitive and inappropriate,” the Anti-Defamation League’s New York Director Ron Meier told CBS.

Here's the company's astounding response: “The inspiration for Hanukkah’s inclusion was anything but anti-Semitic – in fact, we’re likening ourselves to the Jewish holiday,” said Brian Gordon of Miami MG in a statement. “Simply put Hanukkah represents a better value because you get 8 nights for the price of 1 – much like Wodka, more for less.”

“Hopefully this response will help re-focus you on all of the serious places where anti-Semitism does exist – however it doesn’t exist anywhere in our marketing,” said Gordon.
The ad, for Wodka vodka, was down Tues. at 4 p.m., CBS reported.

Anyone, comments?





Deborah Hirsch

Where is PR Going?

Public relations specialists were some of the first people to embrace the power of social media, and as a result they are often the ones leading the way in the social space, whether they are consulting with clients from an agency point of view or strategizing on an in-house PR team, according to Erica Swallow at mashable.com.

She goes on to say that the future of PR is bright – with some caveats. In the past decade, the Internet has had a huge impact on how PR professionals function. Social media, as we all know, is changing the face of PR, and press releases.

“While I don’t believe the press release is dead, it has been transformed, to become this living, breathing thing,” Amanda Miller Littlejohn, founder of Mopwater Social Public Relations, told Swallow. If a release doesn’t have a social element — that is, a way for viewers to comment or share to their social networks — it doesn’t have legs.”

David McCulloch, director of PR at Cisco, comments, “It’s pretty clear where the press release will go next: It’s going to get shorter; link to more sources; be focused on simplification and explanation; and it’ll come in many more flavors. . .the press release of the future will deliver its content in text, video, SMS, microblog and podcast form, to any choice of device, whenever the reader decides, and preferably it will be pre-corroborated and openly rated by multiple trusted sources.”

Adds Lou Hoffman, CEO of The Hoffman Agency ,“I don’t think the news release will die in the foreseeable future, say the next five years. Even if the syndication of this content has little impact on the target stakeholders, they’ll still be generating backlinks, which by themselves deliver a decent ROI.”

What do PR pros need to do most? “The most important platforms for PR pros in the future will be the ones most targeted for their clients,” says Cara Stewart, founder and principal at Remarx Media. “Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook are ‘fun;’ getting nitty-gritty into community sites that are industry-specific is less ‘fun,’ because PR pros have to really understand clients’ technologies, business models, services and more. Really, it’s more about PR pros becoming better PR pros and understanding their clients’ businesses, as well as what their clients do … Social media is not a one-size-fits-all solution.”

Deborah DiSesa Hirsch

Are We or Aren't We Obsolete?

Has the media lost its relevance, and, along with it, PR? A recent post on linkedin.com posed the question. Responses ranged from the fact that technology has opened so many avenues of information today, it’s hard to pay attention to anything other than what interests you, to it’s splintering into fragments, just the way magazines did years ago, to maybe PR should blend with marketing and advertising to be more relevant.

What do you think? My take is that somehow, we need to stay current with social media tools that are most relevant to our industries.

Blogs, Twitter, etc. And speaking of SoMe (thanks, Marian Salzman), here are some new apps to use on them, according to socialmediaexaminer.com (http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/22-hot-new-social-media-tools-worth-exploring/):

• CinchCast.com, which can record audio, either via the web or phone (there are apps for iPhone and Android), so you can share audio messages with your followers
• Skitch, if you constantly need to communicate complex on-page issues to people, then Skitch helps you do it seamlessly from your desktop! Just a few clicks and you have a shareable link that you can send to anyone you like. It’s also free
• Argyle Social, a bookmarklet for easy use and the customization you would need to separate your shares on Twitter from those on Facebook to deliver different messages around the same content
• PostRank, where you can gain an amazing amount of insight into what topics get the most engagement on a particular blog (such as Social Media Examiner) by finding it in their directory and using the Good, Great and Best filters to see what posts have the most comments and social shares
• Postling, which is a tool that brings together multiple social media channels into one interface

Anyone have any experience with these?



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Debbie Hirsch