Let’s face it.  It’s scary out there.  With the worst economic conditions in recent memory, it’s only natural that employees will worry about their career future, regardless of the health of their company.

So this begs the question:  how do you talk to employees in times like these?  Do you tell them the stark, unvarnished facts, cause mass panic, and fuel the defections of your best talent?  Or, do you just say nothing, and hope employees will assume no news is good news?

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I’m a bit late to post something about this, but for our readers, I just have to include what is truly a p.r. train wreck.  At least it’s a funny one.

Love her or hate her, when Sarah Palin speaks, people listen.  So it’s no mystery why the dashed v.p. hopeful made national news, even while doing the typical holiday “feel good” story, where the governor pardons a thanksgiving turkey at a remote Alaska turkey farm.

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Should Companies “Pay to Play” with Bloggers?

The blogosphere is a bit like the wild west—no rules, everyone gunning for attention, and lots of people searching for the next gold mine.  So with the landscape clogged with millions of blogs, and the dearth of effective blog advertising, it’s no big surprise that many bloggers are now offering to write up a great review for a company…for a price.

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Well, with the presidential campaign just behind us we have all likely had our fill of rhetoric. All the promises that can’t be kept, all the words that were parsed by the pundits, and the meaningless simultaneous interviews that the media call debates are over. And good riddance! And, if we were to take modern politics as the paradigm for rhetoric, then we may say the same to the study of the art of rhetoric.

The problem is that rhetoric is ever present. Rhetoric, which Aristotle defined as “the faculty of observing in any case the available means of persuasion,” is more like breathing than it is like politics. A good communicator, or a good Rhetor as they were once called, is one who can leave an audience with a message and a feeling that what they have in that message is so substantial that it should be acted upon. Is this not what we do in our advertising? Well…it is when we do it right. (more…)