Pierce Mattie Public Relations New York & Los Angeles

When Jordane Crantelle arrived backstage at Chanel’s spring 2006 Ready To Wear show, she was totally prepared to perform the normal duties expected of an intern: help dress models, run errands, fetch water and coffee, etc. However, when a model called in sick a few minutes before show time, Karl Lagerfeld called upon the 21 year old to, as they say, take one for the team. Before she could bat a beautiful eyelid, her look went from intern-incognito to runway-ready. Then it was a quick walking lesson from the pros, a prayer to the runway deities that she wouldn’t embarrass herself, and the young Parisian was on her way. As payment for her pounding the “pavement”, she was allowed to select a bag of swag straight from the runway. Talk about a fantasy come true, a living fairy tale, and a severe case of being in the right place at the right time, all wrapped up in one! But before you launch into a chorus of “If You Believe in Magic,” get a load of this.

When a company has set a goal and constructed a strategy around achieving that goal, if a new marketing effort does not help the company achieve that goal, don’t do it. I have experienced this too often in my public relations experience. Frequently businesses want to put out a release or do a promotion, and I ask, “Why? Will this achieve your goal? Will this sell more products, increase visibility, or achieve brand awareness?” Too often the answer is no and these marketing efforts are superfluous and the “why” is not communicated effectively.

Sometimes it is the small touches that make all of the difference. This is why publicists place great emphasis on sending thank you cards to their contacts and clients. But not just any card will do. Publicists want cards that make a lasting impression on their clients.

To hear the interview with Pierce Mattie's LA publicists; Edy & Maryam click here. Visit podcast invite

Pierce Mattie Public Relations and Rachel Bilson presented Chef Yossi to Los Angeles on June 15th at Hollywood’s hottest Southern food eatery, Memphis Restaurant, and helped raise close to $4,000 for the Los Angeles Mission. The party began at 8:00 pm and by 8:30 pm there were already over 115 guests in attendance. Even Edy and Maryam, who had compiled the guest list, were surprised at the lengthy line at the door. According to Edy, “I knew that the line would be long, but I had no idea that so many guests would show up so early.”
Yossi, Rachel, and other stylish stars enjoyed hors d’oeuvres prepared by Yossi’s catering company, Off the Shelf, while dancing to music spun by special guest Jake Hoffman. The Chef Yossi event has been featured in OK! Magazine, E! Entertainment, Angeleno Magazine, LA Splash Magazine, BiZBash, and Los Angeles Confidential.

A Creative Idea

The Chef Yossi event started with a simple goal: to familiarize the press with Chef Yossi, who is a personal chef to the stars and the creator of the first patented odor-eliminating product line for chefs. Edy and Maryam decided that the best way to accomplish this end in Los Angeles is to throw a party celebrating Chef Yossi the person.

Dear Beauty & Fashion Bloggers,

Pierce Mattie PR has worked hard over the last five years to develop unique expertise in beauty, fashion and jewelry communications. We have long recognized the importance and potential of new media, and in 2002 we were one of the first PR firms in our media beat category to launch a blog and begin blogging. We have the highest respect for bloggers and their work, and we treat bloggers with the same attention and respect we have for editors from top print publications.

Last night, Jackie Danicki posted on her blog, Jack & Hill, a piece about Pierce Mattie PR “spamming” other blogs. Please be assured that it is not the policy of Pierce Mattie PR to “spam” blogs (or spam anyone else, for that matter). However, although we were taken aback by Jackie’s ill-informed post, we want to acknowledge some recent missteps on our part that may have led to a misunderstanding about the matter.

A bit of history first. From 2002 to 2004, only two people at Pierce Mattie PR – Pierce and I – were permitted to post on the Pierce Mattie PR blog. By 2005, however, we took note of the increasing importance of blogging to the public relations industry and began encouraging all of our brand advocates to submit blog posts. This eventually turned into a requirement that each brand advocate submit at least one blog entry per week. The project has been unequivocally successful: brand advocates are pushed to think creatively and they take pride in their submissions, and our increased profile has been great for the firm and our clients. Although our firm’s policy requires blog entries to be approved before they are posted, we encourage our brand advocates to push the envelope with their posts and we give them a large degree of freedom and license.

Here is the first segment of the Fashion and Beauty Bloggers Event. Unfortunately we had to brake it up into a ten-pack, 10 min segments because of the YouTube file size requierments. If you want to automatically be notified when we post the rest of the segments just subscribe to our YouTube channel. In this segment you will find:

- Introduction to Host and guest speakers - How did the the fashion and beauty blog community of 180 industry blogs start? - Who are the bloggers in the community? - Treating bloggers with the same respect as journalists and editors and what bloggers should do to earn that respect when a blogger has no formal journalism training or experience working with publicists. - The basics, fact checking - RSS feeds make it hard to retract bad facts in posts - The value to a blogger working with a publicist

We invite you to join the discussion on the site and participate in educating bloggers and publicists on how to work together professionally, ethically and effectively in this "new" publishing platform. Get more information at on the Public Relations Roundtable website.

Other links: Flickr | Myspace | YouTube |

Interesting interview with Cathy Horyn of the New York Times. Cathy shares Julie Fredrickson's viewpoint on the need to take bloggers seriosly. Also discussed, Cathy's take on personally blogging and the "imaginary" conflict that some luxury brands feel when it comes to blogging about luxury. I'm sure if Billy Daily was still working at KCD he would have let Julie from Coutorure Media in to see the Mark Jacobs show at the Spring collections fashion week. Other sources for coverage are: New York Magazine, Fashion Week Live website, with coverage by Lauren Ezersky

We already use bacteria to inject under the skin to get rid of laff-lines. Why do we love these wrinkel creating viral videos so much? "Ugly" men get "hot chicks" when they have a good sense of humor. The message, subliminal or viral, does seem to go down easyer with humor as a chaser. Viral videos are everywhere. It’s hard to escape the swarm of links I get from friends, family and colleges. These free, interesting and sometimes amusing videos spread over the Internet in almost pandemic speed. I have to admit, I've been guilty of forwarding them on to others when the clip makes me giggle (like a school girl) or those I find clever enough. Not all videos are truly viral marketing. In fact, most clips are just creative expressions, which entertain. Obviosly where ever you have an audience and peer-to-peer networks your going to find marketers trying to relate and persuade and advertise.

Here are a few videos, can you spot which one is viral and which are just entertaining?

Treadmill Fitness Equiptment Viral Or Music Video?

Last night I was watching the classic “Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead” starring Christina Applegate and I realized she was the original Project Runway. Sue Ellen (Applegate) took staid and boring uniforms and turned them into high fashion taking a dying company and giving it new life. She had a rare moment in life where vision and opportunity allow for great achievement.

It got me thinking about innovation and how we see new businesses and new ideas and think, “Wow! That is innovative! Why didn’t I think of that?” We see businesses succeed every day because they tapped into a previously untapped market and have reaped the rewards. Whole Foods back in 1980 was just a natural food grocery in Austin, Texas looking to serve a niche market. Well that niche market grew and spread across the country and now Whole Foods has 187 stores nationwide.

Last week I was out for cocktails with a few other business owners in the service industry. One was a skin care manufacturer, the second was a clothing line designer and the third was the owner of a large fitness chain of health clubs.

We got into an in depth discussion about managing client relationships

We were discussing how to repair a client relationship where things have gone wrong, for example clients whose expectations are unrealistic, clients who are abusive towards the staff and those clients who for whatever reason have become dissatisfied with their service.

The Wall Street Journal had run an article on entrepreneurs a few years back where I was quoted by saying “My New Year’s resolution as a business owner is to only work with people, places and things I really care about and that respect my team, work and over-all business ethics.”

1. Choose clients carefully

4. Live Up To Your Own Standards. Give What You Expect, Set The Example.

If you have done all your work working with your clients and have defined what you can achieve and there are still insurmountable problems, then it is time to re-evaluate whether that client is appropriate to have.

About a month ago we had a client call the office and demand that I get on a conference call. The brand was new to the market, had very little distribution (only one salon in New York) and the consumer awareness was simply not there (she refused to do salon events with us). The owner had worked with two other PR firms before us (our biggest competitors) for about two years who both did not secure the regional and national glossy press that the client was looking for. We were given about 3 months to change her entire media platform and correct the damage that the other PR firms had done during the course of two years. Naturally I slipped off my dress shoes, undid my tie, sat back in my chair practiced my breathing exercises and then took her call.

Everyone wants to know what is going to be the "next" big thing. The idea that you will somehow be in the know before the guy sitting next to you is an incredibly tantalizing prospect. Fashion and beauty live for the thrill of the "next."

Of course, plenty of people claim to have their pulse on exactly what is happening in the here and now. Whole sites are dedicated to scoping out what is cool and happening. But in a world saturated by information it isn't surprising that it is nearly impossible for one individual person to keep up, no matter how good their taste.

One of the many intriguing realizations to come out of the Web 2.0 phenomenon is that we can harness the wisdom of many people such that we all derive benefit from our collective wisdom. Now us girls are certainly familiar with leveraging the wisdom of our girlfriends, mothers, and shopping buddies to make better style decisions so it should come as no surprise that we are equally willing to seek guidance from like minds no matter what their geographic origin.

Thus let me introduce you to ThisNext. Have a look at the ThisNext blog after you check out the site.

ThisNext is a shopcasting network where you can recommend, share and discover great products. ThisNext believes that better buying means better living. Great products can help us do, be and experience the things that make us happy. Our goal is to help people discover great and deeply gratifying products.

I have received fully six invitations to the Maja Ferme "Nymph" Fashion Show.

Normally I am pleased to have a publicist follow up on a subject. As a blogger and online fashion editor it helps to be reminded of new and interesting subjects as we new media types are often inundated with information making it quite possible that things slip through the cracks. In fact, more often than not publicists ignore the new media altogether.

But I admit I reached a certain point where I felt I had too much information on the Slovenian designer. I received email invitations, personal invitations, and invitations in the mail. Everyday it felt like I was being subtly reminded that I simply must RSVP to the "Nymph" showing. I have actually gotten to the point where I feel slightly guilty that I haven't followed up. Disregarding the fact that it said opportunity to buy clothing after the show in small type at the bottom of the invite as opposed to cocktail reception afterwards which is a sure way to turn off any editor, is it wise to so constantly assert your client to the press? When does it become too much?

I am sure there are many schools of thought on the issue and few publicists would argue that gaining maximum visibility for a client is a bad thing, but is there an ideal level of communication? In this particular case, Maja Ferme may have gotten her wish. I feel I simply must attend the event if her publicist made such an extreme effort to gain my attention. I only hope that there are cocktails afterward.

Strike Two for Edelman PR as Their Second Fake Wal-mart Blog is Revealed, via B.L. Ochman's What's Next blog

WallStrip, via Repliqa is a RocketBoom format web-show that profiles a different public company on the stock exchange every day .

Sofia Speaks The face (errrr cartoon illustration) of the Holy Mud Company rants about beauty, fashion, art, pop culture and...Politics!

Next Generation Insights (Young Adult Panel) The panel itself is informative, the technology (video tag) is cool too.

Get Out of Your Own Way at Work...
And Help Others Do the Same: Conquer Self-Defeating Behavior on the Job

A good book I would recommend to any manager in the PR industry. This follow-up to 1996's Get Out of Your Own Way diagnoses 40 business situations in which workers exhibit symptoms of self-defeating behavior, from "Not Being Able to Take No for an Answer" and "Being Competent but Out of Touch" to "Not Delegating" and "Assuming Others Understand You." Goulston's focus, however, is not on workplace effectiveness but on "earning self-esteem-and its twin sister, success." He devotes a chapter to each workplace issue: first, highlighting a case study that refers to a client from his consulting practice or, tangentially, to one of his hospital patients and, then, explaining how to remedy the behavior. In addition, each chapter is topped off with an aphoristic "Usable Insight" and a to-do list of "Action Steps." People are inclined to commit "hari-kari at work," Goulston says, because of "fearful aggression" and "fearful avoidance," two traits that he traces back to humans' "early-neural, unthinking, animal nature." While his insights are pedestrian-his advice can be boiled down to "be more self-aware"-the structure of the book makes it easy to cherry pick chapters that may apply to you.

Still warming up to Second Life? I am asked about it almost daily and wanted to get some basic info posted for those friends who read our blog consistently. Backstory is here. Follow the links.

New World Notes

From April 2003 to February 2006, I was a contract writer for Linden Lab, creators of Second Life, primarily hired by the company to cover SL as an embedded journalist in an emerging society-- its controversies, its personalities, its innovations and ambitions, along with larger themes of identity, social norms and organization, and cultural expression important to online worlds in general.

That contractual relationship has ended, but the story continues here. -Wagner James Au

Second Thoughts Do's and Dont's for Big Business.

"Every human being is interested in two kinds of worlds: the Primary, everyday world which he knows through his senses, and a Secondary world or worlds which he not only can create in his imagination, but which he cannot stop himself creating." W.H. Auden

Second Life Herald The Second Life Herald was founded on October 23, 2003, by philosophy professor Peter Ludlow. Its mission, as described the next day, was to observe, record and study "the legal, social, and economic implications" of life in the virtual world. Originally established as the Alphaville Herald and reporting for the most part on life on the Alphaville server of The Sims Online, the Herald soon branched out into coverage of other massively multiplayer online games and virtual worlds -- helped along by the murder of Herald publisher Urizenus (Ludlow's avatar) after Electronic Arts got wind of the stories the newspaper was printing about the scams and cyber-prostitution that were taking place within its game, and the company's indifference to reports of real-world violence.

Todays photo is from Patrick Marella. It's both cravable and breathtaking, reminds of growing up in Oregon, (Coos Bay) our high school track team would meet at 5AM to get a run in before first bell. Oregonians are big on running, Steve Prefontaine was from Coos Bay and of course Nike Global headquarters is located in the neighboring town of Beverton. Everything looks better in twilight. Think about it, all the coffee commercials that you've seen, they bask in twilight. Paris gets more twilight then any US city and It has been said lovers prefer twilight to daylight. Twilight represents hope, or if your a New Yorker you may think of the nightclub. But, I digress. New York is beautiful this time of year, thanks Patrick, for capturing so well a "feeling" I'm fond of. You can see more of his work on Flickr or JPG - The magazine of brave new photography.

• Communication Arts: This year’s interactive design winners were selected by our distinguished jury from a group of entries including Web sites, Kiosks, CD-ROM projects and PDA's.

• Strategic Public Relations: PR Industry: Improve Your Writing -Kevin Dugan

• Salon.com: Fake News, Fake Reporter: Why was a partisan hack, using an alias and with no journalism background, given repeated access to daily White House press briefings? -By Eric Boehlert

• Online Media Daily: Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) Puts Edelman Public Relations on probation for creating fake Blogs (flogs) for client Walmart

• Customer Listening Blog: WOMMA Ethical Blogger Contact Guidelines: 10 Principles

Do you seem to be losing customers lately? Is your customer base and sales simply not increasing? Consumers are telling you all of the time what they want, but are you paying attention? Do you genuinely listen to what they want? Or do you feel comfortable with the way things are?

Here are five things that consumers want from a business both online and offline:

Funny when I was in Las Vegas this week for the ISPA show the taxi driver that picked me up was complaining on how the town was blowing things up. Little did I realize that it was the famous Stardust. The home of my favorite cheesy movie; Showgirls! As most hotels turn into resorts and expand their spas like Caesars Palace did this month with their new spa tower, the old players cannot keep up.

The Stardust, the neon-wrapped casino with a mobbed-up past whose 1,065 rooms once set the standard for size on the Las Vegas Strip, witnessed its last roll of the dice Wednesday.

Wistful longtime employees and loyal gamblers gathered for a last farewell to the iconic 48-year-old institution, which is to be razed early next year to make way for Boyd Gaming Corp.'s planned $4 billion Echelon Place resort.

The Stardust opened July 2, 1958, as the world's largest hotel and catered to middle America with $6-a-night rooms and low-minimum stakes gambling.

But as bigger, classier casinos sprung up around it in the late 1980s and '90s and patrons began shelling out more for rooms, food and drinks, its luster began to fade.

"I'm really going to miss this place," said Jimmy Kunihiro, a 60-year-old Honolulu resident, as he took a last pass at the craps table. "It's a home away from home."

I often get asked where my phone skills come from -- as a publicist, I can pitch over the phone like no one's business (toot-toot, goes my horn). Little do some know that I spent my senior year of high school as a telemarketer selling timeshares on the beach over the phone. Yes, in less than two minutes, I would talk, pitch, book and invite you to come to a new condo complex on the Gulf of Mexico to meet with a realtor. Today those phone skills are used daily and I encourage our team to "get on the phone." Email over the years has replaced the pitch calls.

However, trends come and go and this season, the phone will re-establish itself to become "the new email." This holiday season, the next marketing call consumers receive may not be from a credit card company or a politician. A growing number of apparel chains are making personal-sounding phone calls to tout sales events or the arrival of new merchandise, according to Marshal Cohen, chief analyst at NPD Group Inc., a market research firm.

Automated calling services or store clerks who might otherwise be folding sweaters are dialing past customers - using phone numbers gleaned at the cash register - in an attempt to woo them back, he said. Some might even address the former customers by their first names to establish a kind of pseudo-familiarity. Cohen noted that the number of retailers vying for customers by phone has risen from about six to more than two dozen in the past year and a half. Chain stores such as Victoria's Secret, Limited Too and Lane Bryant started adopting the approach during the back-to-school period last year, he said.

Cohen said he expects a flurry of retailer calls after the holidays, when they will be trying to draw consumers into their stores to use gift certificates. "The bad news is the more stores that do this, the less effective this becomes" because customers may stop answering the phone or simply run out of money, Cohen said.

Although Blogging has been around for years, approaching Bloggers to review or pitch your products is fairly new and growing in momentum. If you are thinking of approaching a Blogger to review your products, there is a protocol that sometimes many companies do not invest their time to understand and follow.

As a beauty Blogger, I receive many emails on a weekly basis from companies and PR firms big and small to find out if I am interested in reviewing their products on my two beauty blogs. There are some that exude professionalism both in the way they approach me through their emails, through the way the package is sent and in their follow up. Then there are the mass emails, lack of PR materials with the product, presentation of the product and lack of follow up. The difference between the two potentially means your emails go in my trash folder.

Things you should not do when you approach a Blogger:

Send out a mass email, most notably saying “Dear Bloggers” or having no greeting at all. While some newer Bloggers may respond to this, many seasoned Bloggers won’t. It is the sign of a company simply harvesting your contact information and not taking the time to personally contact you, as they want you to personally review their product. It is a two way street.

Have the expectation that the Blogger will want to review your product simply because you offered it for free. Bloggers know their readers and most will only review products that are 1. Related to their blog and 2. Something that would be of interest to their readers.

Insincerely attempt to flatter them. So many companies do it and many times I receive the same email to each of my accounts for my blogs when the company doesn’t even realize they are sending it to the same person. Bloggers can read between the lines.

There is a little text book that was written for the PR firm managers that I often refer to from time to time to keep me on the straight and narrow. Well at least on the narrow. It’s called Managing a Public Relations Firm for Growth & Profit. The author A.C. Croft really is a genius with his delivery and instructions. You are able to apply everything to your PR firm that he teaches regardless of your size or media specialty.

One section of his book that I think is imperative this week can be found in Chapter 21 – New Year’s Resolutions. Here Mr. Croft gets frank and honest with what you as PR practitioners should set as your resolutions.

Since this year there seemed to be an unusual graying of the lines with the definition of PR I thought I would take it upon myself to give us all a refresher course in things to remember for 2007.

1. I will not lose my head when everyone around me has already lost theirs.
2. I resolve to take no more lip than totally necessary from clients.
3. I will cherish all freelance writers, photographers, artist and vendors.
4. I will take what I make and invest it into technology that can better my business.
5. I will pay attention to things that motivate my team and make them eager to come to work.
6. I will continue to train, inspire, and help grow my team and their activities while pushing them to go for the gold.
7. I will remember that there is life outside of Pierce Mattie PR (really?)
8. I will delegate responsibility and authority to my senior VP’s. (Watch out guys!)
9. I will encourage our publicists to not overwork themselves on their accounts and that clients are willing to pay for excellence but they are not willing to pay for perfection.
10. I will continue to listen and learn from my clients and provide good service that addresses their media needs and impacts their ROI.

PR professionals are laid off, change careers, rotate agencies and some individuals even start up their own shop around this time of year. The years end is a natural time for corporations to evaluate their talent pool and make appropriate changes. We've had a fantastic year of tremendous growth which has required constant tweaking of our staff to better serve our clients and provide our team with the best tools and resources available.

Of course, good people are in high demand. It’s always been my manner that if an employee doesn't love working with us, then I always feel like it's my responsibility to find out why and fix it! This was a year of change and growth for our firm; we've said goodbye to a senior staffer, switched up players on our different teams, beefed up our training and mentoring program, restructured reporting relationships in all three offices, promoted two directors to vice presidents and we added two new senior vice presidents to help lead the charge in 2007. It's been exciting to see the positive results in the last few months!

I hear stories all the time of an employee jumping ship and starting their own agency and stealing a few clients as they pick up the last paycheck. While it may be a common practice in our industry, this type of behavior does not display the level of professional ethics that are so vital in business. In fact, we're proud to help employees transition out of PR when they realize it's not for them any longer.

Here are some guidelines that every PR professional should understand:

1. PR firms own relationships both on behalf of the clients they represent and for the staff that they train and mentor.

2. PR firms should be compensated if those relationships are jeopardized or challenged.

3. Employees are accountable to their PR firm first and foremost rather than clients or the media.

4. It is always better to take the high road; business relationships are recycled everyday and you never know whose path you will cross again, so never burn bridges.

My golden rules for maintaining integrity as a PR professional are:

If you are going to a party or out on the town this weekend, of course you want to shine. To show how to add that sizzle to your outfit like the stars do, Dawn Yanek, editor-at-large at Life & Style Weekly magazine shared these tip with us.

Glittery drops:

• 14K white gold diamond earrings (2.02 carats), Endless Diamond Collection, $2,544 at Macy's, Zales and several independent jewelers nationwide.
• Bakers, $14, Bakers stores nationwide
• Express, $22.50, Express stores nationwide. For help finding an Express store, click here.
• Aqua, $28, Bloomingdales stores nationwide, or try Bloomingdales.com

The area in which I live is known to have character. Each house is different, or has historic presence, and stands out among other places nearby. There really is no “big business” in our area overcrowding every street corner and making their over domineering corporate-America presence known. This is a place that embraces entrepreneurs.

So when driving down a road I haven’t traveled in a while, I noticed something out of the ordinary; cookie cutter houses. A new development was being built and each house looked exactly the same. Their yards were the same, with the same tree in the same spot, and the grass all the same length. Nothing about these houses or this development had anything exceptional to them. They lacked character.

I decided to share what the topic was at "show and tell" time in our weekly management meetings in the New York Office. This weeks discussion was a review of Liz Wilson's Telling It Straight article. I will post the article here, then invite Pierce Mattie members to comment along with any comments you may have.

What quality do employees most want from business leaders?

A clear vision of the way ahead, perhaps? A charismatic leadership style? Political or business acumen?

Of course, we demand all those qualities in leaders. But a recent piece of research points to a different quality as being the top priority for many employees.

A survey of over 1,000 employees found that what they most want from their leaders is authenticity, honesty and clear communication. In other words, straight talk.

Many professional communicators already sense this and are counselling business leaders to adopt more open communication measures. But this message isn't always getting through. "Too much value is placed on charismatic leadership: Boards select leaders for their dazzle and the biggest plaudits are saved for those whose profile is often bigger than that of their organization," notes CHA, the consultancy that commissioned the research.

The straight talking survey identified four communication styles among business leaders:

Controlling
Understated
Charismatic
Considerate

Controlling Communicators don't really communicate at all. They are perceived as arrogant, cold and insincere. In the workplace environment, they are seen as strong on business acumen but failing to provide staff with enough information. Rupert Murdoch, boss of News Corporation, is cited as an example.

Lumalive light-emitting textiles create a magical lighting experience in anything made of fabric, from clothes and backpacks to soft furnishings and the upholstery of furniture.

Behind the outer fabric, you will find a layered system containing flexible arrays of colored light-emitting diodes (LEDs), only visible from the outside when the display panel is switched on. The system is modular and can be removed easily when you want to wash your garments or clean your soft furnishings.

Lumalive textiles bring inert objects to life by integrating flexible arrays of multi-colored light-emitting diodes (LEDs) into fabrics without compromising the softness of the cloth. The integration of electronic lighting devices into textiles is groundbreaking. Clothing, towels, upholstery, and drapes might at first seem unlikely hosts for intelligent and interactive systems, yet they figure prominently in our lives and as such present a wide spectrum of opportunity.

In my personal Blogging, I’ve come across many brands without a publicist or PR firm representing them. Many cosmetic brands that contact me are well aware that I am a Blogger for Pierce Mattie PR and will sometimes ask me, “What does a public relations firm do?” The key thing I have found is that these brands do not fully understand what public relations can accomplish for them and more so, how to effectively communicate to the media and public about their brand from within their own company.

When you think about your brand, have you thought about all aspects of it? From the customer service representative to the sales persons, everyone employed by your company should all consider themselves on the same team. Not only because everyone’s paychecks are written by the same company, but also because together, your employees are the force behind your brand. No job title within the company is too small or nondescript to be left out. They are the eyes and ears (and heartbeat) of your brand, and how they view and feel about your products affects how others—your consumers—see it as well.

Every report that comes to my inbox each day continues to debate over the value of social media and Blogging and its effects on a brand’s value and reputation. Many question if big media, brands and PR firms yet understand the value and impact blogging has as an overall tool to facilitate communication with their target market (obviously we do). I have to wonder why it is taking so long for others to recognize this form of citizen journalism and taking advantage of its positive aspects to enhance a brand’s image.

There is no doubt that entering into the blogosphere is tricky from a PR and brand perspective and should be done with thought and caution, but nonetheless should be done. As we all know, many times we are met with skepticism and many times we approach blogging in the wrong way. There is one thing that links us with a common bond; respect. The Blogger wants respect, the PR firm expects respect and big media and brands demand respect.