The four-day Thanksgiving holiday weekend sees millions of Americans gather with friends and family over turkey dinner and an unprecedented number who follow their Thanksgiving feast with an early-morning trip to the mall for some bare-knuckled Black Friday shopping.  The four days of the holiday weekend are some of the busiest and most profitable in the U.S. travel and retail sectors:  About 42.5 million people are expected to travel by car or plane for Thanksgiving, according to travel tracker AAA, and an estimated 152 million people are expected to shop over Black Friday weekend, according to the National Retail Federation.   If you think Thanksgiving is just about turkey, you are mistaken.  Take a look at a few of our clients’ Thanksgiving-focused press releases and see how they are gearing their content toward travellers, shoppers and chefs.

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There’s little question that for many companies, Twitter is good for business.  With more than 300 million user accounts and about 13% of online adults in the U.S. using Twitter there is increasing potential for companies to build relationships with customers, increase brand awareness and drive revenue.  Twitter has become a hotspot for social media-savvy brands, and the best-of-the-best use creativity and a customer-centric focus to engage their audiences and cultivate true brand ambassadors.  But for a brand to truly succeed on Twitter, they must look beyond the number of followers and retweets, and instead focus on the level of engagement they have with the stakeholders who can – and do – impact their bottom line.  Take a look at ten brands that are doing it right.

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A great team is one with incredible personality, strong spirit and an obvious sense of camaraderie.   Meet the Sysomos team;  the folks who create, support, sell, market and manage the industry’s best social media monitoring tools.  But don’t just take our word for it – watch the video and discover how intelligence, agility and good old-fashioned street-smarts can conquer almost anything.  And, like our team in Chicago, it’s proof positive that when your company is supported by great employees, it shows.

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Let’s face it.  In the business world, despite every terrific tweet, luminous LinkedIn recommendation and fantastic Facebook post, sometimes a little quality time and face-to-face action is just what it takes to really connect with your clients and get the job done.  With this week’s Pulse, we step away from our usual online and social media focus in order to highlight offline hot spots — specifically, some of the best-recommended restaurants from around the world for hosting agency clients.   We know that online presence and audience engagement across the social sphere are critical for public relations and marketing professionals today, but we also recognize that offline “real life” is where some really great stuff happens. After all, contracts aren’t signed on Twitter, and most new business pitches are still sealed with a handshake and a smile.  Here’s a list of ten sit-down social hot spots.

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“Because of the people.” It’s one of the oldest workplace clichés and invariably, one that is almost always true. People don’t just work at a company — they define it and shape its personality. At Marketwire, one of the things that continues to set us apart year after year is our personality. From our editorial and product teams, to sales and customer service, we enjoy what we do and it shows. Our people are second-to-none, and proof positive that “work” and “play” can co-exist and make for a totally awesome place to be.

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If you wonder how much impact social media has on sports, consider two of the most tweeted events in recent history:  Japan’s victory over Denmark in the World Cup (3,200+ tweets per second), and this year’s Super Bowl (4,000+ tweets per second).   In the last few years, professional sports teams from around the world have tapped social media as a new way to connect with fans, allowing them to share the same enthusiasm and team spirit on Facebook that they do courtside.  But what teams are hitting it out of the park when it comes to their social media presence?  Take a look at ten teams who are doing it right.

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You’re on the hunt for a birthday present for your BFF and you’ve come up with a great idea: a year’s supply of her favorite… Kona coffee. So you plug “Kona coffee” into Google and generate 1,800,000 results. After a few false starts you realize you really want to give her “100% pure organic Kona coffee” – and only a five-pound assortment once you realize its high cost. Each time you start a new search, the words you enter become more refined. Then you begin looking for the best deal. In your hunt you’ve landed on, scanned and quickly exited 24 websites before you finally settle on the one through which you place your order.

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Halloween may be over, but the time to change your appearance is about to begin again. November has arrived and to many, this month has taken on the new name of MOvember. MOvember has become a worldwide phenomenon where men donate their faces to grow moustaches in the name of raising money for prostate cancer research. The movement has grown larger and larger every year since its inception and this year will be no different.

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What is the “X-factor” for excellence in corporate reputation? Is it simply how a brand is perceived by the public? Is it company culture? What about charitable activities, community engagement, corporate leadership and work-life balance? It’s all of these things, but we also believe corporate reputation starts closer to home, with employee brand ambassadors who best represent the company online and offline, at work and at home, and via social or traditional media. In our list of ten companies with stellar reputations, you’ll find some unsung heroes—and one guaranteed surprise—in this refreshing collection of small and large companies who value and foster brand ambassadorship.

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With its highly engaging environment and 800 million-plus user base, Facebook represents unlimited opportunity for companies looking to establish brand presence and develop long-standing relationships with customers and fans.  Many public relations and marketing professionals have found success in building communities around their brands (and their clients’ brands) and adapted their communication strategies to be more “Facebook-friendly.”  In this week’s Pulse, see if you can glean some tips from these world PR agency leaders who also lead in connecting, contributing and communicating online. We think you’ll find plenty to learn from here, and even more to “like.”

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Perhaps more often than anything else, I am asked about press releases and their continued role and relevancy as communications vehicles. “Has social media made traditional media irrelevant?”  “Can the process of distributing a press release simply be replaced with a tweet?”  “Have companies abandoned releases as a means to share their news with stakeholders?”  My answer to all of these questions is quite simply, “No.” 

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When it comes to work, money means a lot – but it doesn’t mean everything. That’s why, in our quest to find the leading “money meccas” for public relations, we chose our top ten cities based not only on highest salaries, but also on the concentration of available jobs and quality of (city) life. The resulting list reveals PR-rich cities, where an exciting variety of opportunities is available to upwardly mobile communications professionals. You’ll discover what U.S. cities have a three-fold greater availability of PR jobs compared to the national average, and which cities have the highest concentration of “PR specialist” jobs. You’ll even learn more about the “2011 Eastern European Consultancy of the Year,” and the top “2011 PR Agency in Europe.” Grab your passport and work permit, and take a look at the 10 best cities for top-paying PR jobs.

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When many of us think about buying a product or service, whether we’re in the consumer or B2B space, there is no better source for insight and opinion than a “trusted advisor” or colleague. We can ask what their experiences have been with a similar product, how it excels (or falls flat) in the marketplace, etc.   Yes, we can go to a company’s website or talk to a sales rep for information (or a competitively slanted response), but at the end of the day, that kind of research might not really help us make decisions.  In the past, when I needed to find information, get reviews or decide on the brand or product I wanted to buy, Google was my first choice. Today, though, for me and many others, this isn’t always the case.  Social media – and social search – are changing the way we find vendors, get advice and eventually make purchasing decisions.

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There are a lot of PR blogs and bloggers out there – and that’s a good thing.  From Richard Edelman to Brian Solis, many are RSS and TweetDeck mainstays, and whether you follow industry giants or niche writers, some of the most insightful and foreward-thinking blogs about communication, social media and audience engagement are authored by those in the PR space.    With “The New Breed,” we set out find ten PR blogs we could recommend to you that offered a unique mix of content and personality, and gave you some new ideas and fresh thinking when it comes to public relations. 

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I’m a huge fan of online networking.  When Marketwire introduced the Social Media 2.0 press release in 2008, I was encouraged by my colleagues and managers to start experimenting with social media as a way to communicate with my clients, prospects and industry peers.  It worked.  Not only have I kept up with my social networking, but I’ve made some incredible connections.  With what I’ve learned, I’ve also become a resource for others who are looking for help with their online networking efforts. Here are my ten rules for online networking:

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We’ve all heard the mantra “content is king” – a quote originating from an article Bill Gates wrote in 1996 in which he stressed that content sites, not ecommerce sites, would generate the bulk of income in the years ahead. In fact, content has become as essential to a company’s success as its products and service. But now, content – text, images, video/flash, audio – can simply overwhelm. “Everyone” is publishing content and it is “everywhere,” ranging from blog posts to white papers to videos posted on YouTube. With all this noise, the content we post on our websites may not be attracting our target audiences and achieving expected results. So how do we open the door to greater content-publishing and audience-engagement success? Like anything else, the devil’s in the details.

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In today’s digital landscape where content, SEO and social media collide, your headline is more important than ever.   Whether it’s at the top of your blog post, press release or online article, the key to grabbing attention and getting your message across is to start with a captivating headline.  You not only want your news to be read, you want it to be optimized for search and easy to share.  When you write your headline, you need to consider writing to accommodate search engines, social networks and human readers alike.  Lofty goals for a dozen words, indeed.  Here are a few quick tips to help you with your headlines:

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We’re inundated with stories about the failure of mainstream media to rise up to the challenge and expectation of social media stakeholders and digital consumers, and with accounts of iconic enterprises scrambling to find a way to deal with steadily declining paid subscribers and advertisers.  There are, however, nimble adapters – even media icons – that are not only learning to survive in the new media era—they’re thriving in it.  Some even lead the charge when it comes to breaking ground in innovative uses of social media techniques to gather, report, publish and distribute the news.

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A traditional press release is still relevant in today’s evolving PR landscape. But more and more companies are complementing their traditional releases with social media press releases (and even replacing them) because a social media press release is a vehicle to tell a fuller, richer story by offering multimedia assets and a way for your audiences to easily share your content through their social networks.  When you take the time to properly plan your social media release, you increase your chances for getting your content read and shared with greater frequency.

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Many North American employees spend as much time (if not more) at the office as we do at home, so it’s little wonder that we want our workplace to be more than a sea of cubicles bathed in fluorescent light and muzac.  But what makes a great space?  We set off in search of the coolest PR and marketing agency reception areas knowing we’d see some pretty incredible spaces:  exposed brick, funky artwork and open, welcoming interiors. We didn’t expect to see the utterly amazing, quirky, and just plain fun alternatives to traditional office design, including an antique carousel, a barista bar and even a “WOW” bell for clients to ring when they experience great service.  Equally impressive was the extent to which these agencies and their employees personified the social media ethos: collaborative work environments, Wi-Fi lounges, breakout spaces that foster creativity and sharing.  Let’s take a look at ten of the places some very fortunate and creative people call “the office.” 

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