UNC vs. N.C. State @ RBC Center Sat. 1/31

The Tar Heels travel 20 miles east to face ACC rivals the Wolfpack this Saturday at 3:30.  Good luck getting a ticket (you can try your best here).

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Annuals @ Cat’s Cradle Sat. 1/31

Annuals play this Saturday at the Cat’s Cradle.  If college athletics aren’t your cup of tea, check out this Raleigh-based band for an excellent show.

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Hurricanes vs. Atlanta Thrashers @ RBC Center Sat. 1/31

Stick around the RBC Center after the basketball game to watch another heated division battle. The ‘Canes need a performance like last night’s wild finish against Tampa Bay to stay in the playoff hunt. Click here to buy tickets.

Twitter Increases Traffic by 1 Million in Nov. 08? Zounds!

It’s been well documented that Compete.com may not have the most accurate system of traffic measurement, but if they are even close to the mark on this, it’s an amazing feat for Twitter.  Check out the graph below – notice anything odd?  Traffic to Twitter increased by one million in November 2008!

What do you think?  Do you buy it?  That represents a 27% increase in the period of one month.

To reiterate the subheading… Zounds!  If this is even close to accurate, think about the implications for Twitter in 2009… Hundreds of thousands daily users, instant news and many more fail whales (unless Twitter finds a way to monetize and increase its staff).  Let us know what you think in the comments or on Twitter @MMIAssociates.

University student government associations take themselves pretty seriously and can often serve to paint a fairly realistic microcosm of larger state and federal governments. It’s therefore not surprising that they often run into some controversies of their own and, just like many older, “wiser” government officials, make a complete mess of the situation.

One such example occurred this week and was covered by The Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Recent student elections have sent candidates in a frenzy. They have had to deal with a tedious, perplexing and often contradictory list of do’s and don’ts just to have a chance of getting elected. These rules have been laid out by this year’s Board of Election officials, Chairman Ryan Morgan and Vice Chairman Val Tenyotkin.

The DTH’s largest complaint, but by no means their only one, has been the BOE’s refusal to release the candidates’ petition signature lists.

In order for potential student government candidates to run on the ballot, they first must obtain 800 individual and unique signatures from other students on campus. In the past, the BOE and the DTH have always reviewed these signatures to make sure the candidates are in fact eligible to be placed on the voting ballot. But this year, the DTH was denied that privilege, and is accusing the BOE of breaking the North Carolina Public Records Law.

It seems this paper has built a strong case against the BOE, including speaking to former Chapel Hill student body presidents and University counsel. What has made their case even stronger has been their counterparts’ reaction to the accusations.

The DTH said when it asked Tenyotkin for the petition signatures, the BOE vice chairman told the editors that “Daily Tar Heel members are the only people who care.” Eh, bad response.

Then, Morgan said in an e-mail, “Look, if y’all really have this big of a problem with how we’re running the election, file a case with the Student Supreme Court or state court. I have more pertinent things to do than to comment on one-sided sensationalistic pieces.” Eh, really bad response.

Along with this front page story, the DTH published a pullout about the importance of transparency, a crucial part of any profession, especially those working in public relations.Fortunately, Morgan and Tenyotkin still are students who are learning their way around such public relations issues; unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like they are going to admit fault or defeat anytime soon.

Where is Peanut Corp.’s response?

A week ago, the Peanut Corporation of America (PCA) announced with sincere regret that it was issuing a voluntary national recall of some of America’s tastiest snack foods due to an outbreak of salmonella in peanut products made in their Georgia manufacturing plant. This outbreak has resulted in six deaths and more than 470 sick people across 43 states.

I eat peanut butter every day, so I was quite shocked to hear that my daily source of protein could make me very sick, or worse, kill me. Luckily, word has gotten out fast thanks to an online network of reporters, government officials, PR people and bloggers.

PR Newswire and the FDA Website picked up the PCA press release issued on their Web site on Jan. 13, and from there, papers around the country have printed articles warning citizens of the dangers inside their pantries.

As far as the PR response goes for the Peanut Corp., we’re not seeing too much action. To date, PCA has posted two releases, dated Jan. 13 and 18, on the main page of their Web site.

“We deeply regret that this has happened,” said Stewart Parnell, owner and president of PCA. “Out of an abundance of caution, we are voluntarily withdrawing this product and contacting our customers. We are taking these actions with the safety of our consumers as our first priority.”

And that’s about it. Luckily for PCA, large companies who use their peanut products such as Kellogg’s and General Mills have reached out to the public and announced their dedication to excellent quality products.

On Jan. 16, David Mackay, president and CEO of Kellogg, said, “The actions we are taking today are in keeping with our more than 100-year commitment to providing consumers with safe, high-quality products. We apologize for this unfortunate situation.”

Kellogg recalled 16 products, but has pledged to get its products containing peanut butter off the shelves of stores across America and to begin running their own tests for the bacteria. Kroger and Safeway, two national grocery store chains, have taken responsibility for the products on their shelves by putting forth the names of products that could contain contaminated peanut butter but have not been added to official recall list.

PCA has not conducted a formal press conference with media outlets, not has it reached out to its consumers beyond a few pages of facts. We think that if you distribute thousands of pounds of peanut butter that contain life-threatening bacteria, you might want to do a little more.

Does your company need a public relations firm? MMI Associates is a full-service public relations firm located in Raleigh, NC. Please visit the MMI Associates website for more information. Any questions? Give us a call at 919-233-6600.

Photo from Flickr

Related Links by MMI and Zemanta

• FDA Pumps Up Peanut Investigation
• Health Buzz: More Peanut Food Product Recalls and Other Health News
• The Pen is Mightier than the Mansion

Search.Twitter.com Will Rock You!

I have totally missed the boat on Twitter searches.  Don’t get me wrong – I’ve known about search.twitter.com for a long time – but I’m only now seeing the value of it as it relates to 1) Our clients 2) Growing your following.

The best part of the Twitter search isn’t necessarily the actual search (although that’s generally useful and entertaining) but the RSS feed that allows you to recieve notifications whenver someone discusses your keywords.  Now I get the actual tweet sent to me whenever someone discusses one of our clients online.  Random and haphazard searches are forever gone!  I get to choose the keywords, get instant updates and then I’m able to follow up almost instantly with the person who tweeted.  I realize that some large (still ahead of the curve) companies have begun to do this, but as we begin to guide our clients in opening their own Twitter accounts, the lightbulb over my head has clicked to the “on” position — and it’s about time, too.  If 2008 was the year of Twitter, I believe 2009 will, well, I don’t know… be the year of Twitter again.

Even if you’ve never used Twitter, you probably know what it is (if not, check out Twitter Users Totally Tweet or Twitter in Plain English). I have been pleasantly suprised over the past several months when discussing Twitter with clients.  They seem very willing to try it and are also willing to do it the right way, having someone in their office take ownership of the account and tweet their brains out.  If you can’t tell, I’m excited about Twitter in 2009 and I think the all-powerful Twitter search will play a big part.

Related Links by MMI and Zemanta

• Twitter Users Totally Tweet
• How to Pick Up Followers on Twitter
• 50+ Semantic Web Pros to Follow on Twitter

Maryland at Duke Sat. 1/24

The Terrapins come to visit rival Duke at Cameron Indoor Stadium on Saturday night for what should be a heated matchup. No love lost between these two, but isn’t that what ACC basketball is all about? Click here for more information.

Photo via Flickr

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The Rosebuds at Cat’s Cradle Sat. 1/24

Seen a Rosebuds show yet? A homecoming show like the one Saturday night at the Cradle might be your best chance. These guys are definitely on an upward trajectory. Check out the Cat’s Cradle Web site for more info.

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Bill Clinton Speaks at N.C. State Mon. 1/26

A week after President #44 steps into the Oval Office, Presidential predecessor Bill Clinton will speak at N.C. State as part of their Millennium Seminars. Check out additional info here.

Photo via Flickr

SEO 101

When talking to clients about their websites, I often get asked, “What about SEO?  What can we do to improve our SEO?”

Let me begin by saying that I do not consider myself a search engine optimization (SEO) expert; that said, I have learned a lot about SEO from my own experiences and by reading information written by the real SEO experts (i.e.: the ones who don’t have to advertise on Google). This is what I tell clients:

Google (from hence forth, when I say Google, I mean search engines) looks at three main criterion in deciding where to rank a Web site:

1) Relevance: How relevant is the content on your website to the keywords searched in Google?

2) Authority: Do other important sites link to you?  What’s your Google PageRank?

3) Longevity: How long has your website been around?

Most people can’t do anything about the last point, so let’s focus on relevance and authority.  How can you increase your website’s relevance?  The first step is doing some research and figuring out the keywords in which you’d like your company to rank.  For help with keyword research check out Google’s keyword tool, or for more robust applications, try Wordtracker.

How can your website become an authority site?  It’s all about the links — creating links from your site to other sites and having other authority sites link to your site.  All links are not created equal.  Domains that end in .edu or .org are worth more, and the Google PageRank is of the site that you are linking to is also considered.  Caveats on linking strategies…

• Do not buy links — Google is cracking down on this.
• Many websites make use of a “nofollow” tag which make the link useless from an SEO perspective (see the related links at the bottom for info on nofollow tags).

Remember that optimizing your website is a process and that taking shortcuts that appear to good to be true can have disastrous long-term effects on your site.  Feel free to rant, rave, yell and even agree with any of the points that I have made in the comments section.  Keep in mind that SEO is forever changing because Google is in a constant tug of war to return the best search results, but the three points above have stood the test of time for improving your websites organic search results.

Photo from Flickr

Related Links

• SEOBook.com
• Google Webmaster Central
• Hang 10 with Comment Kahuna and Backlinking
• Google’s Explanation of NoFollow Tags

After some deliberation, we have decided to retire the PR FAIL of the Week post from the RPR repertoire.  It’s been an incredibly fun post to write, but I’ve struggled the past several weeks with what the PR FAIL post adds to conversations about Raleigh and public relations.  My conclusion: not much.  More often than not, the post doesn’t focus on Raleigh or even North Carolina.  Recently, the PR FAIL post has discussed the worst news story of the week and put a PR slant on it.  We read two excellent blog posts this morning on topic of criticizing by Beth Harte and David Mullen which finally persuaded us to put the FAIL out to pasture.

It’s one thing to thoughtfully criticize an individual or organization, but it’s something else entirely to jump on the bandwagon and add nothing to the conversation.  So, speaking as a reformed bandwagon-jumper (sometimes I make words up), you will no longer see a PR FAIL of the Week post on RPR.  That’s not to say we’ll never criticize a poor public relations strategy or misstep, only that we won’t create missteps to reach our quota.

In conclusion, if you didn’t read the posts by Beth Harte and David Mullen above, do it now, and don’t forget to check back at RPR for public relations news, tips, and opinions.

Related Links

Beth Harte - An Open Letter to Johnson & Johnson, Kathy Widmer, VP of Marketing

David Mullen - Three Reasons Our Monday Morning Quarterbacks Should Stay Off the Field

ESPN College GameDay @ Smith Center (UNC vs. Miami) – Sat. 1/17

The Tar Heels return to Chapel Hill to take on Miami Saturday, but the party starts at 10am, when Rece, Digger, Hubert and Jay bring ESPN’s College GameDay program to town. Admission is free, but be sure to bring some signs. Visit TarHeelBlue for more details.

Photo via Flickr

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Carolina Hurricanes vs. Toronto Maple Leafs @ RBC Center - Thurs. 1/15

The ‘Canes are coming back from a rough road trip without a win to show for it. They’ll get their first crack at two more points tonight against the Leafs.  Stop by Suite 218A to see Bobby, Kate and Jill (regular contributors to the blog) Tickets are available here.

Photo via Flickr

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Presidential Inauguration – Mon. 1/20

Tune in Monday morning to see the swearing in of President-elect Barack Obama. Meanwhile in Raleigh, DesignBox at 323 W. Martin St. is hosting the Obama Inauguration Art Show from Friday through Jan. 30. The show features the works of local artists.

Photo via Flickr

It’s a familiar story these days. Small to mid-sized businesses  have not migrated en masse to Web 2.0. I know all of you PR professionals out there have looked at a new clients’ website and held back a groan because you don’t know how to tell them that they need to go out and spend a bucket of money to upgrade it. How can you retain their trust when your first act is to suggest that they spend thousands of dollars (sometimes tens of thousands) on their website? Find out the best way to discuss website upgrades with your clients below the fold.

» Continue reading “Raleigh NC| Moving Your New Clients To Web 2.0″