Post, Like, Share…Save a Life?

Facebook has made it easier for us to reconnect with old friends, meet new ones, and share content. And now, Facebook is making it easier for us to make an impact and potentially, save a life.

Last Tuesday, the world’s leading social network announced it will allow users to include an organ donor status on their timeline. It is an unprecedented move for a social networking site, but one that can have profound impact.

According to the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), more than 114,000 Americans are currently on waiting lists for transplants of kidneys, livers, hearts and other organs. Last year, more than 6,600 died waiting for an organ.

The In-person Media Tour is Dead

There. I said it. The in-person media tour is dead. In the 1990s, “desk-side” briefings reigned. We regularly tracked executives’ travel schedules and lined up press meetings in New York, San Francisco and Boston, often with five or six each day. These often took place months in advance of an announcement, back when lead times for some print publications that published on a monthly schedule were as long as six, or even eight months.

A “Twitter Friendship” is all about Communication

On Monday, InkHouse tuned into PR News’ webinar “How to (Really) Use Twitter to Advance Your PR & Marketing Efforts.” We learned that as Twitter turns six years old and the site is averaging 230 million tweets per day, the main obstacle users face is how to make their voice heard.

The speakers in the webinar visualized the Twitter community as a cocktail party, but I saw it as more of an opportunity to grow a friendship.

Learning To Love Media Training

This has probably happened to all of us at some point in our PR careers: we’ve worked hard to develop messaging and positioning with our client or internal spokesperson, prepared the press release, developed unique story angles and pitches, gone through revisions and feedback sessions, and finally pitched the story. And, voila! We landed some interviews. But when the spokesperson starts telling the story, your jaw drops because they are telling it in a way you’ve never heard before. Why? Maybe it’s because we forgot to carve out time in the lead up or simply ran out of time to do some basic media training. Even here, we are guilty of occasionally lining up that last minute interview without always thinking through prep.

Tina Cassidy’s New Book, Jackie After O, Debuts Today

We are thrilled beyond words for InkHouse’s Tina Cassidy, whose second book, Jackie After O: One Remarkable Year When Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Defied Expectations and Rediscovered Her Dreams, debuts today.

In the book, she takes a look at the year 1975, in which Jackie Kennedy becomes a two-time widow and begins what Tina calls her “third act.” That year, Kennedy embarks on a campaign to save Grand Central Station and becomes a book editor after a long absence from the world of writing.

What a top tech blogger has to say about journalism

I recently had the pleasure of attending a journalism conference in Cambridge organized by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy,  Harvard’s Nieman Fellowship, and the Graduate School of Design.

One of the speakers was Kara Swisher, the founder of AllThingsD.com, an immensely popular tech, media and Internet news site (4 million readers) which she launched 5 years ago after she personally began to think that printed newspapers were becoming irrelevant.

Swisher doesn’t mince words. You would expect nothing less from a hardened journalist – one who turned down a gig covering the White House when she worked at the Washington Post because she was interested in a new phenomenon: the Internet, and AOL.