Six months and change into 2019, and I’ve written a grand total of one post on President Trump. I’d like to call that progress. I suppose it also reflects fatigue.
This is the time of year when I take a breath, scan the body of work this year and select what I consider the best posts (not to be confused with the most-viewed posts).
Here goes:
1. I Wrote 1,000 PR Blog Posts and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt
The blog odometer hit 1,000 this year. I figure developing each blog post takes around two-and-a-half hours, so I’ve devoted roughly 2,500 hours to the blog. If we assume a 50-hour work week — perhaps conservative by Silicon Valley standards — I’ve spent a year on the blog with two weeks of vacation thrown in. I’m lucky there’s no one chirping in my ear to allocate more time to billable client work.
2. A Clinical Look at Huawei’s Reputation Management
EE Times asked me to write an essay on Huawei’s PR woes. Later I decided to expand on this piece with 2,684 words on Huawei’s fraying public image. Huawei’s communications to the outside world have become a spectator sport. The anti-China rhetoric from the Trump administration only magnifies the drama.
3. Our Take on Storytelling in 2018
The communications profession tends to undervalue the expertise that goes into this form of discovery — the interviewing techniques, research, dot-connecting logic and that scientific quality called persistence. This leads to our mantra for 2019: “The story is always there.” I’m not calling this a theme or a branding campaign because such labels short change the value of knowing how to go from point A to point B to point C, which ultimately gets you to Point D where the good stuff resides.
4. Social Media Can Baffle the Suits
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Most high-ranking executives value control. They want to control their products. They want to control their work force. They want to control the ratio of raisins to oats in the communal trail mix. Which explains why they still haven’t come to terms with social media and U.S. Patent No. 1,242,872.
5. Why SEO is a Natural Fit for the PR Industry
We got the SEO religion in 2010. I figured we’d have a year or two head start before the rest of the industry woke up. It still hasn’t happened. In this post, we document an experiment in which we purposely did not optimize a post for search and then returned to the post roughly one month later to add one-page SEO. This should dispel any doubts on whether optimization influences Google and the SERP (search engine results page).
I’ll publish the rest of the list on Thursday.