Recently, I fell down a rabbit hole because of an Insider article on Snowflake's CEO, Frank Slootman . Following the links, I read a profile in Forbes and then a great interview with Jon Fortt and CNBC . There's one line that stood out to me in the CNBC interview, a question that Slottman asks everyone (or as CNBC put it, claims to ask everyone):  “If you couldn’t do anything this year except for one thing — one thing and you couldn’t do anything else — what would that be?” Now, apparently, my first response would not be the right one as it's to show what you would focus on, and is a hard question to answer. My first thought was, well, personal or professional? I have different answers for both, and my guess it would show that I am able to separate professional from personal (which isn't an easy thing for people to do, especially now working from home).       Personal would be to focus on health and exercise; like most people the pandemic has included weight gain. P

The big hullabaloo the past few weeks was a snark tweet about ConEd and the “intern” handling the Twitter account. Interns don't run the social media accounts of major corporations, especially not in the middle of a communications crisis. I will gladly die on this hill, as a senior social media staffer who has worked late into the night writing apology tweets one by one from a brand account. https://t.co/0KLy2WqCIL — ella dawson (@brosandprose) December 28, 2018 This, naturally, caused a few tweet thread responses that social media executives are not interns, and then another tweet that the current social media executives are the CCOs and CMOs of the future. Adding to this spot-on tweet: social media managers know the following about your company: -Marketing -Comms (especially crisis) -Creative (graphics, imagery, photos, video) -Branding -Industry trends -Customer service -Create/maintain passionate user base Future CMO/CCOs https://t.co/MyBCp7O7Yk — Matthew K

I have been working in public relations for the past 20 years. Part of that time, I have done work in crisis communications, having been called on for crisis counsel with an online influencer/star, working with a consumer-packaged goods company on messaging and plans, and others that I will not even vaguely identify. There's a lot of smoke right now in the technology world, and there are more fires that will soon need to be put out, on the rampant sexual harassment for which women are now coming forward. Today's  New York Times article was both shocking and yet not surprising - especially as I read friends' and acquaintances' names in the article. And the NYT is not the type of publication that goes to print based on one or two accusations. They had a half dozen women willing to risk their own reputations, and two dozen more with whom they confirmed stories behind the scenes. That's why this is both smoke and fire, and we will see many more articles. Based on w

Let's just get this out up front: United Airlines has some issues (and this is just one Google News link). 2017 has not been a kind year to the airline with public relations, and the statements put out by the airline have been tone-deaf, company-first, overloaded with legalese and double-speak. Third time's the charm, but it should not take three times for a CEO to get it right. And of course, the media found a good story and started digging to find other bad stories on the airlines ( CEO bumps passengers to go home is a good one) and started digging into the identity of the passenger (the first story seems too close to a standard crisis tactic - change the story, attack the victim - and the story has been heavily edited since it was first posted). For all the bad aviation news, a #TBT to one of the few times I had a good experience on American Airlines.... 😜 A post shared by Jeremy Pepper (@jspepper) on Apr 13, 2017 at 1:06pm PDT I was not going to wr

Technology companies love April Fools’ Day (too much) . The marketing, public relations and other departments seem to invest good time, money and (some) creativity to their efforts to fool customers and the public into thinking some outrageous thing is real. Or to get the laughs. Rarely are the April Fools’ Day jokes funny, even with all the effort. So why do it all? Well, maybe for the lulz but also it seems to get media coverage and brand awareness. Think about that: it is for media coverage and brand awareness. We see companies ranging from startups to established Fortune 100 companies all attempting to pull off an April Fools’ joke. I even saw a tech reporter’s Facebook update noting that he was pitched multiple April Fool’s Day jokes on embargo. On embargo . Why are PR people pitching these stories? Why are those same PR people not pushing back and saying no? Don’t PR people have much more important stories to pitch for their companies/clients than such unoriginal

July 2, 2003. That’s when I started this blog. I have been writing - off and on - for almost 14 years now. When I started, there were a handful of public relations bloggers and social media was not yet a term. Yes, some of us were doing online PR (remember that quaint term), and some were already doing digital work and coding. We were a pretty close-knit group, with not much drama or jealousy, and mostly egos were kept in check. What we did was try to learn from each other and help each other out. I still talk to many of them and think of them as friends. During that first year, the focus of the blog changed. I started with the issues of starting my own firm but grew really bored with that, and focused on the issues I was seeing - and still see - in the industry. And that industry has expanded to be social media marketing, marketing communications, communications and more. Or is that the lines have become so blurred in all the practices out there, that they are all bleeding int

When I first started this blog, I would do what seemed to be the de rigeur thing to do for a blog: write about how others were doing it wrong. I had a full series that ended after a few posts - the Clueless Train, based on The Cluetrain Manifesto . If you search for the posts, you will be amused by the Technorati tags. The irony here is I never fully bought into the manifesto as it seemed to crap on public relations and dismiss what public relations did for a company, but I digress. Anyway, I started doing what I believed (and still believe) social media bloggers and writers should all do: I did research and called up companies. You know, fact check. And grow up. And when I called out others for spreading wrong information, fake information, dare I say alternative facts and fake news - I was told that “I’m not a reporter, Jeremy, I’m a blogger.” Or as I call it, the laziness of wanting to be a pundit without doing actual work or thinking. In other words, I grew up and matured

Back in January, Jeremiah Owyang posted about the need for a Presidential tweet crisis contingency plans. This spurred a good number of (threaded) comments on my Facebook post, and I noted that I had pitched a SWAT team at a PR firm, but nothing ever happened with the idea (good idea 10 years ago, even better one now - and with better tools). And a few of the comments noted that most PR people nowadays do not have crisis communications experience or skills, especially the startups with young “senior” practitioners. Yes, I know, I need to blog more often and faster since others are having these conversations now … when I was having them in early January. And, in an informal survey of friends, those that are qualified to have plans noted that they do not have a social media crisis plan written out, nor the talent or bandwidth on the social team to be able to write one that would actually work. That makes sense to me - not a good thing, but it makes sense. The skills and soft tou

Since the beginning of this blog 13+ years ago, I have hammered on one thing consistently: as professionals in public relations and communications, the collective group has to go above and beyond the conventional blogging or social media norms to act above reproach and set standards. This call to establish better standards never really caught on, as the desire to be the first to publish was – and still is – more important than the whole truth. I argued with others in this industry that as professionals in public relations, we have an obligation to allow our fellow industry colleagues to get facts on the record before making claims or debating issues in public forums. The fact that I wrote about this 11 years ago and things still have not changed is just sad. Back then, FedEx Furniture was all the rage and FedEx was vilified in social media dialogue. I called up, and interviewed the communications person at FedEx and got the full story from both FedEx and the furniture builder. Pl

On Thursday, right before the start of the Fourth of July weekend, Reddit let go of its communications person, Victoria Taylor . Beyond running communications - or as part of running communications - Taylor appeared to run point on the iAmA (Ask Me Anything) subreddit. In such a tight-knit community as Reddit is, there's no surprise it turned into a shitshow with various subreddits going dark in support of Taylor. And not surprisingly, it also turned into blaming  Interim CEO Ellen Pao for Taylor being let go, although there's no proof it was Pao or someone else who made the call. Gawker has a good run-down with time-stamps of the whole debacle , including a statement from Pao sent by a PR executive, Heather Wilson. Who happens to be an executive vice president at Abernathy McGregor , a crisis communications specialty firm. And the firm has been working for Pao since her sexual harassment lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins. So let's put that all together: traditiona

As we all get settled into watching the series finale of Mad Men , let's take a look back at the half-season: the good guys of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce (SCDP) have been bought by the evil machine of McCann Erickson . And once they get fully swallowed up and SCDP gets put out to pasture, the pure lechery of the firm comes to the forefront. They only care about the big accounts, they don't respect women in the workplace or treat them as sex objects / weekenders, it's a man's world, it's life as a cog at a large agency , etc. You're likely watching the show, you know what's being shown. Now, the first time that McCann showed up on MadMen, the New York office decided to respond after the principals refuse to become part of the agency and start their own agency (the above-noted SCDP) - with some choice quotes about McCann .  The McCann response was clever - if not typical advertising heavy-handedness - with ads taken out in the trade press,

Ello launched - to a lot of hype - the past week. It's the Facebook killer, the latest and greatest in that category (pulse check on Facebook ... yep, still alive and pretty strong) and done with a great (albeit not that true) backstory that should make any public relations person proud: we're ad-free, we're not taking funding (oops, turns out to be a lie), we're community friendly! And almost immediately, I started to see marketing and communications professionals on Twitter and Facebook adamantly scream their need to be contrarian (read as slow and followers, those late to everything and never on top of things) and claim that they'll never  join Ello. Which is great. We need more followers in the public relations, social media and overall marcom industries. We don't have enough original thinkers, and it's better to have followers that will not bring counsel, strategy, original thought to clients but rehash old and tired ideas or just knee-jerk follow

Melancholy. That's probably the best word to describe BlogHer 14; it wasn't just me, but in talking to the women I've become friends with (around the world) at BlogHer, many of the veterans came to say goodbye to what has been an amazing 10 year ride.† My first BlogHer was the second year. I could't convince work to pay for it, or to allow me to skip work on Friday (amazing how the agencies wouldn't really grok it for a while - or still, for some struggling with social media and paid/earned media) but I went down to San Jose on Saturday and was allowed in (thanks Jory, I never forgot that). I came with a bit of a chip on my shoulder - check out the  snarky T-shirt on (thanks Irina for the photo!) - but lost that pretty fast. But what was more important was that I sat down and talked, and discussed and met with a group of women (and very few men) and had no problem listening and talking. And engaging. And finding out what people were thinking and doing in this n

Pick up the fucking phone. NB: I'm testing out Upworthy-style headlines for my posts. You like?  NB: There's likely going to be an uproar about ethics and such from organizations that purport to represent PR. Ignore them. Those groups don't do PR in a real world, but in their own little fantasy worlds. The sky is probably pink there and there's only black and white, no grays. NB: If you don't know what Bridgegate is, and you're in PR, you're really depressing and should learn to read all news. Here's a link . NB: FUD always works. Always .

My blog-iversary was July 2 . Nine years of semi-blogging on this Blogger platform that I pretty much refuse to leave, even though I have jspepper.tv to do something with (the eventual idea was to aggregate everything on one page but my About.me page does that well enough anyway). Plus, hard to replace SEO for 9 years. In the 9 years - yes, 9 years, longer than most other people besides a handful of others - I have seen people come and go. I've seen the "popular" bloggers in public relations turn to social media advocates, and then fall to the side of less importance because they, well, never stuck out their necks on issues or just followed trends. I see the new group of SM bloggers that have risen to the top - some are cream, some are artificial, powdered cream - and while the cream is imparting wisdom, the powdered kind is glomming onto hot topics and rehashing others' posts, with no original content or thinking. I've also seen the original group of PR b