Straight Talk PR .com

Making Thoughts Apparent Globally is Obama's Internet Touch

UPDATED 11:30 a.m. 4 June 2009 -- I also liked receiving an email from David Axelrod, senior advisor to the president, with a link to video of the speech. The White House is pushing this content out beautifully.

ORIGINAL POST:

It is thrilling to see how fluid President Obama and his team have become at making his thoughts and policies apparent to as many people as possible globally using the Internet. The latest piece of evidence comes from the White House's buildup to the Cairo speech today.

According to a New York Times report, "In a bid to make sure that Mr. Obama’s message will be heard, particularly among young people, the White House has mounted an unusually aggressive campaign, including a Web site created in Arabic, Persian, Urdu and English where people outside the United States can sign up to receive the speech via text message. The State Department is to translate the speech into at least 13 languages."

This is a great commitment. I like the idea of people worldwide debating the speech in its original text, even in a U.S.-disseminated official translation text, on their own phones or laptops today. Great move!

Global Warming: Gore Eloquent in Nobel Peace Prize Speech

Al Gore's speech yesterday accepting the Nobel Peace Prize is a classic. I loved its eloquence and its imperative.

A speech is a derivative of face-to-face contact. A good speech can change the world. In the case of this particular speech, I certainly hope that it does. Al Gore is one of my heroes.

Online PR Featured in New Issue of Canright Communicates

Introducing: Canright Communicates for November-December, 2007.

We feature Barbara Rozgonyi, founder of CoryWest Media and blogger at Wired PR Works, who I introduced earlier. And a how-to piece on putting more interactivity into PDFs. Our milestones include showing off an ad for Blackman Killick atop the new Crain's Chicago Business list of largest accounting firms.

There's also a "web-only" piece -- as the MSM say -- that expands the discussion with Barbara Rozgonyi into blogging itself, as opposed to the wider topic of Online PR.

And no issue would be complete without the ever-popular Canright team's reading/watching/listening/viewing suggestions.

Which Came First - The New Employee or the New Employee's Blog?

It's a joy to see the devotion of cutting-edge companies like Cisco to a cutting-edge panoply of blogs.

But I had to chuckle when I read the Chicago Sun-Times story about Padmasree Warrior, age 47, who on Monday departed Illinois' Motorola, where she was chief technology office, to take up the same post at California's Cisco.

Howard Wolinsky reported on Tuesday in the CS-T that Ms. Warrior made the move on Monday. He added this: "In her personal blog at Cisco, she said: 'It is an exciting time to join Cisco. Cisco is the company whose leadership legacy defines ‘The Network’ in many ways. Today, it is a company driving many new paradigms in communications and information technology. In the future, it will be a company poised to lead the industry to the next phase of Internet.'"

Now, that's speed! She leaves on Monday and has a blog post on Tuesday. Kudos! (Here's the link.)

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.

We Interrupt This P.R. Blog for an Indiana Politics Break: (1) Gary Mayoral Election and (2) *Sigh* Major Moves, Again.

Two quick comments on the p.r. perceptions of Indiana and its politics. We're going to (1) take a surprising twist on the surprising mayoral developments in Gary and then (2) we're going to return, God help us all, to the bipartisan gridlock on the Major Moves transportation highway funding program.

As always with these Hoosier-centric posts, readers are encouraged to move along if the minutae of Indiana state affairs is of no interest.

Guiding Light: Ethics in PR

This post is about ethics.

If you think this is sanctimonious stuff or ho-hum stuff, go ahead and move on.

But if you are interested in the role of ethics in my profession, read on.

Why Blogging is Hot, Even for Businesses

For the second time in as many posts, I am indebted to the wise observations of Denise Wakeman of Build a Better Blog. Ms. Wakeman reviews a podcast by Robert Scoble of Microsoft in which he discusses five reasons "why blogging got hot" -- to use Ms. Wakeman's phrase.

[Link to Build a Better Blog post - Link to Robert Scoble podcast]

Forward-thinking Hoosier businesses should pay attention to this.

Ms. Wakeman's summary of the five reasons blogging is hot are (and we quote her):