Polly's Power-PR

Meg Hirshberg told her story of persistence last Thursday at the Enterprising Women of Excellence Awards, sponsored by the Richmond Chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners. Meg is a columnist for Inc. Magazine and the wife of entrepreneur Gary Hirschberg, co-founder of Stonyfield Yogurt, now the largest producer of organic yogurt in [...]

Social media offers opportunities for us to connect and to influence. Connection is a social function: We seek to link with friends, family and close business associates. I wrote about connecting in my blog on February 20: Power-PR: Connections are King-Makers. Influence goes a step beyond connection because you produce and share information and insight [...]

Again, women must have patience…. A subcommittee from the Virginia General Assembly tabled SB 651 that would have required the State of Virginia to give more contracts to women and minority-owned businesses. The bill will be reconsidered next January. A delegation from the Richond Chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owner testified on [...]

“Content is King.” Bill Gates is credited with coining the phrase in 1996. According to Onlinebusinesslab, “Content is what drives the web. The phrase can be interpreted to mean that without original and desirable content, any website is likely to fail through lack of appealing content, regardless of other design factors. No original quality content, [...]

An article in today’s Work It, Richmond email caught my attention. The headline – “VCU, UR offer lessons on taking advantage of unexpected publicity.” The article was written by Jacob Geiger, the man about town for the Richmond Times-Dispatch’s online portal, Work It, Richmond. Geiger’s article makes an interesting follow-up to my blog posting of [...]

If you have a message to deliver, you can benefit from researching the views of your target audience and knowing the media they watch or read. This approach argues against a shotgun theory of PR – trying to disseminate your message everywhere – and suggests that you be more selective in where and how you [...]

Uggie the Jack Russell Terrier “stole the show” at Sunday’s Golden Globe Awards. He interrupted an acceptance speech and won an interview with People Magazine. Of course, we live with a Jack Russell Terrier and they are natural attention-getters. Uggie is the canine character from the movie, The Artist, which won the award for best picture (comedy [...]

Everybody loves a winner! That point hit home when I attended a Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) basketball game last week – the 11th consecutive sold-out game of the season. Wow! VCU is my alma mater. I went to VCU’s night school to earn two degrees – a BA and an MBA. Everyone in Richmond, Virginia, knows [...]

Link-building is the name of the game today in public relations. A well-planned PR program builds inbound links to your website through news release distribution, article placement and awards nominations. In a commentary on OpenForum, “6 Common SEO Mistakes on Small Business Websites,” Rae Hoffman-Dolan describes the importance of links: “Links are still widely believed [...]

The legend of Santa Claus is one of the world’s best PR campaigns. Think about it. Santa Claus is known world-wide, sometimes by different names. He represent love and giving and children. People have added to Santa’s retinue over the years, with Mrs. Claus, the elves and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, but Santa remains a [...]