Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

As the old adage goes, the only two certainties in life are death and taxes. And with tax season looming near, there is no better time to get your finances in tow. To assist with this task, we’ve ranked the top 50 independent finance blogs in North America. The bloggers range in age, experience and ideology, rendering a well-rounded snapshot of the financial blogosphere. The list was created using Cision’s media database and blogs are ranked based on our Cision Influence Rating. Whether you’re after general market news or personal finance tips, these blogs have you covered with a wealth of information.

The shady individual who put up a faux press release on PRWeb about Google acquiring ICOA, the “neutral host” broadband wi-fi provider, for $400 million, got away with it long enough for several news organizations, now red-faced, to have picked up...

 

... the fake news release and distributed it. Also, long enough for a short-lived, but significant bump (a fivefold increase), in ICOA stock and for someone to pocket the profits before the stock plummeted again very quickly upon discovery.

In the wake of it all, ICOA said the story was a hoax, Google declined to comment, several high profile news publishers got egg on their faces, among them Associated Press, TechCrunch and The Washington Post — publications that ran the story and later had to issue retractions and PRWeb was forced to issue a mea culpa of sorts, an embarrassing apology after posting false news....

 

[The challenge of fact checking in a 24 x 7 news cycle ~ Jeff]

Investor relations doesn’t get quite as much media attention as some of the more colorful aspects of the PR industry, but IROs (investor relations officers) are extremely important to most firms.

 

In many places, IR still runs on traditional paper documents–but quite a few organizations have begun using mobile technology to further empower both IROs and invest0rs.

 

We recently had a chance to speak to Jeff Corbin–an author and PR veteran with 15 years of IR experience whose team created theIRapp to help facilitate IR’s move into the 21st century–about what this development means for the future of the practice....

Some chief executives are getting themselves into trouble over social media messages, The Wall Street Journal reports. The Securities and Exchange Commission may bring suit and a cease-and-desist proceeding against Netflix and its CEO Reed Hastings, because of a Facebook post he wrote in July that said Netflix had exceeded 1 billion hours of video streaming in a month for the first time. The post may have violated rules of fair disclosure for investors, the Journal reports.

In a Facebook post on Thursday, Hastings said that further disclosure wasn’t necessary at the time because he had more than 200,000 subscribers to his Facebook page, making it a “very public” forum. Netflix shares jumped 6.2 percent the day he made the disclosure....

I recently participated as the designated “social media expert” as part of a crisis communications case study session at the 2012 NIRI Southwest regional conference. This year’s conference was held in New Orleans and the session centered on a fictitious publicly held bead manufacturing company (apropos for the conference host city) that found itself suddenly facing a major environmental crisis. During the true-to-life exercise, attendees took on the roles of the company’s corporate communications officers and were tasked with implementing all aspects of the crisis response plan.

 

In their new roles, the attendees had to make a number of decisions relating to the immediate actions of the fictitious company, “Beignet Beads & Baubles.” For example, should the company proceed with a press conference with the governor announcing a state grant that afternoon? Should management go forward with a scheduled presentation at a major investor conference in New York the next day?

Should a planned announcement of a major plant expansion be delayed? As typically happens with a real crisis, the Beignet Beads & Baubles “crisis team-for-a-day” was given an increasing amount of information to complicate their decision-making process....

 

[An excellent tabletop crisis PR exercise worth reading ~ Jeff]