Straight Talk PR .com

A Wonderful Photo, A Thousand Words and More

I absolutely love this photo. It appears with an article in Thursday's New York Times on nice homes in unfortunate locations. This home in rural Connecticut is in a great location, exception for the 7:30 a.m. daily freight!
(Photo by Jennifer May for the NYT)

Query: Looking for Archive of Front-Page Headlines

A friend is looking for a website that displays major news stories (or just headlines) from any day in the recent past. Surprisingly, I'm finding it hard to locate anything that does what I want. I liked the New York Times' front-page archive at its online store. But I found it hard to display the date I wanted. Newseum looked like it had a good archive. Alas, not searchable. Matthew Somerville of Dracos in the U.K., is putting together an archive of the BBC News home page. But it doesn't seem to have enough horsepower vis-a-vis depth of archives yet. But to solve my friend's need, it holds the most promise of anything I found this afternoon. Suppose I wanted to see the headlines from, oh, Sunday, November 18, 2007? Where should I go to find what was in the news that day? (I suspect the answer to this is going to be obvious and sort of a V-8 moment for me.)

Chicago Tribune hesitant on Saturday morning re: Biden. Is it still that "Dewey Beats Truman" thing?

Was the Chicago Tribune feeling tentative for some reason, compared to the snappier Chicago Sun-Times? Is the Tribune still acting out over that "Dewey Beats Truman" thing from 1948? Wasn't that 60 years ago? These are the news racks at one of the entrances to Rush University Medical Center this afternoon.

Who's on First? Some Copy Editor at the Trib, that's Who

Best headline of the week:

"It can snow in Chicago? Who knew?"

That was the main headline on the Chicago Tribune's coverage of the first of two less-than-blockbuster snowstorms this week.

There ya go.

LinkedIn.com Update - 29,000 New Connections and Counting!

I've got people. Since starting my LinedIn.com profile on Sunday, I have now built a network of 359,924 people who are either:

-- friends (in business, at least)

-- friends of friends, or

-- friends of friends of friends.

That's just an amazing number to me. More than many people, I often isolate myself. This process has demonstrated that, in fact, I can be part of a very large world of people.

By the way, world, I suppose I cannot promote my LinkedIn profile enough!

Technorati Tags: LinkedIn, Social Networks, Marketing, Public Relations

Talk About Personal Public Relations! Within a Day of Getting Going on LinkedIn.com, I Have 330,115 New People in My Business Network

The heck with six degrees of separation. I'm pretty impressed with LinkedIn.com, which I embraced and began to work with about a day ago. Fewer than 24 hours later, I am connected to 20 people personally. They have a total of 2,300+ connections on LinkedIn. And those people -- who are just one introduction away from meeting me -- have a total of more than 330,000 connections on LinkedIn. So by going to friends or to friends of friends, I can access 330,115 people. That's just three degrees of separation! Maybe there's something to this social networking stuff after all! My public LinkedIn profile is starting to fill up. If this story appeals to you, I recommend checking out AskDaveTaylor.com, written by a blogger I met at the Blog Business Summit in Seattle last fall. He has a dozen or so posts on how to take advantage of LinkIn. I know that I'll be reading them during the next few days.

Technorati Tags: Bloggers, Blogs, LinkedIn, Social Networks, Taylor, Dave

A Subtle Way to Help Make Indy a World-Class City

My hometown, Indianapolis, is capable of wonders few other cities its size consistently achieve. The latest improvement will show that an upgrade in customer service will improve public perception of the city. And this action will be in an oft-overlooked area: parking meters.

Deputy Mayor Steve Campbell tells the Indianapolis Star that electronic parking meters that take charge cards -- plastic! -- will be a winner with motorists (think: public parking customers) angling for a metered space downtown or in the Northside entertainment distrit of Broad Ripple.

Campbell cites convenience, and of course he's right. But the electronic meters support the image of Indy as a 21st Century World-Class City, which is what all of us want -- at least those people who care about Indy's future. Perception of the city will move up another notch on the hip scale, and that's good news for bringing people back to our fair and hospitable city.

You Can Take Good P.R. With You - But You'll Need Help

Why lose the opportunity to make positive news about yourself after you die?

Samuel Goldwyn said, "I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until they're dead."

Not to be outdone, Sir Winston Churchill said, "History will be kind to me for I intend to write it."

Writing your own history after you die might at the least prove challenging. Our recommendation: Obtain the assistance of the most recently deceased accredited public relations counselor.

... In Which We Enter the Brave New World of 'MoBlogging'

The previous post is the result of our first succesful "mobile blogging" -- a.k.a. "moblogging" -- posting from my Treo 600 smartphone using NormSoft's "hhBlogger" software. Wait until we try to moblog with ... pictures! As they say, "Film at 11 o'clock."

In the World of Reputation, Can an Evangelist Work for Your Company? I Think Not.

As readers know, much of my practice of public relations consists of gigs with Indiana companies. One of the companies I work with often has designated -- if informally -- one of its senior executives as the "evangelist" for this company's line of products.

In thinking about this, I think -- from the marketing perspective -- this is wrong.

I'm fairly sure it was Kevin Eikenberry who told Rainmakers -- a local business networking organization -- that evangelists are customers, not employees.

In fact, evangelists are quite special customers. They are the customers who are so sold on your company that they preach the wonders of your business to other customers; in other words, they evangelize. This is a powerful concept, representing the pinnacle of customer satisfaction.

In fact, I think of myself as an evangelist for this very company. But if an evangelist works for the company, he or she cannot be a customer.

Perhaps the in-house "evangelist" would be better termed a proselyte.