version 2.0 | 103 posts since 11.03 | 
I’m a big fan of Marginal Revolution, one of the best blogs focusing on economics. Tyler Cowen makes a great in a recent post that there’s a huge amount of confusion over basic policy issues.
What does this have to do with communications and PR? A lot. Read on.
John over at Duct Tape Marketing makes a great point about the power of personal notes: They work precisely because they’re so rare these days.
Too rushed to go read the link? Commit this to memory and do it:
Every Friday I make a point of jotting off 5 handwritten notes. I say thanks, I say howdy, I say let’s have coffee, I say saw you in the paper last week…whatever comes to mind.
I came across CommLog today — the weblog of CRA, Inc. I’m a little (OK, more than a little) appalled that I didn’t know about it already, since the archives go back to 2002 and it’s full of damned smart writing on all manner of communications issues.
PR Weblogs seem to fall into two categories and two form factors. There are those that are more PR and media centric vs. those that discuss broader communications and marketing issues; and there are those that are primarily comprised of shorter, newsier posts vs. those that do longer, more analytical pieces. My stuff tends to be wider in topical breadth and more analytical — at least when I’m writing the way I want to — and so I’m drawn to similar blogs like CommLog.
Go read it.
From The Crossroads, a new-media weblog based in my home market of Kansas City, has smart observations about the Kansas City Star’s new PDF subscription offer.
Travis has a lot to say, but his main point (greatly paraphrased) boils down to: PDF? WTF?
The one point I’d quibble with is this assertion:
… Any readership stats from the digital delivery is just a guess… What would really help them determine how well their stories are doing is to determine how many of those 6,000+ readers actually wanted to read the whole story. I guess big newspapers don’t care about pesky things like conversion stats.
Oh, they care … but they care more about advertising revenue — revenue that comes through content bundling. Read on…
Yes, it sounds like the name of a pop band. No, it’s not.
CommLog, however, has a great post on confidence markers — the verbal and non-verbal clues we give off to denote certainty — and how they weren’t in overwhelming evidence in Condoleeza Rice’s testimony last week.
Alan Nelson does a great job of laying out the basic markers, and it’s something every communications pro and business development professional should commit to memory for greater success.
(Standard disclaimer: Engage is about communications, not politics. Got comments about the former? Love to hear ‘em. Comments about the latter? Take ‘em somewhere else.)
This from Slashdot:
hrbrmstr writes “Marcos Weskamp and Dan Albritton have created Newsmap, an extremely cool way of visualizing news stories. The site takes the aggregated content from Google News (globally) and maps it out into a visual space. That way, you get an immediate feel for news patterns (what the media in any particular region is gravitating to) - there’s quite a bit of potential here.”
This is very interesting stuff, but also very useful for PR professionals who want to visually show how much weight their clients’ stories have in the media marketplace.
