Back in the days, you would need a lot of time, sharp networking, luck, and an Omnibus deal with a market research company to achieve what I did yesterday in one hour in Twitter.

#Prstuchat is just one of the many PR conversations that take place in Twitter and manage to gather PR pros and educators from all over the world. It is organized and moderated by Deirde Breakenbridge, PR 2.0 expert and coauthor of the must-read “Putting the public back in Public Relations”, along with Valerie Simon, successful PR professional and columnist.

Takeaways of the sessions will be available at Valerie Simon’s column at The examiner,  spoon fed by the author, and a full transcript is available here. However, I personally believe that real insight stems from having participated in real time, retweeted, replied, and bonded with your tweeps.

Although tweeting has some science behind it, is easy and painless to get doing it. Nevertheless, if you reckon the tweets resemble a mark-up code, or if you don't quite figure what to tweet about or what strategy undertake, drop me a line and we'll take it form there.

There are many other conversations happening right now, mere clicks away. Next time you ponder about doing a focus group, think twice. It is all about the people, it is all about the talk.

The ban has been lifted. Be ready for your heroes munching a KitKat bar while they beat up villain, to your drama queen weeping on a Kleenex after being dumped and to your Coronation Street beloved characters boozing branded beer.

We all are hearing that Marketing and PR has dramatically changed. You may turn a blind eye at it, but while newspapers struggle to do business as usual and yesterday’s spin doctors are today’s bloggers, how long will it take you to own up to it?

Surely the new mediascape is scary and complicated. Basically, because is different. But the truth is, this new scenario brings you endless possibilities to reach your audiences directly and meet your communication goals much more cost-effectively.

This implies inevitably getting down to your computer and grasp the web 2.0 inside out. Good news is David Merman Scott will give you a quick, fool-proof, jargon-free, customer-centered, no nonsense advice on how to deal with and master all the new technologies that you need to talk to your audiences. Instead of getting carried away with the latest of the latest, the author goes through all the main categories of tools, providing case studies and detail on how to use them.

By mastering blogs, podcasts, wikis, social media and website management, you could be talking to your audiences directly, portray yourself as a thought leader, save tons of wasted advertising money and have fun doing it. What is more, you don’t have much of a choice. Stop making excuses and downplay the relevance of the new rules. Believe in them and take an advantage. This will book will help.

We all know how important is cutting back our  carbon emissions and how far is the global warming getting.

However, when you are trying to elicit social response, you need a sticky message. Busy as we are, we need a soundbite, we need an image that does the talk. We need to be constantly reminded with a message easy to understand and share. Something that travels fast and is able to find a small stop in our brains. Like the Andrex puppet, like the Cadbury Gorilla.

And here it comes the easy, convenient, memorable message. Let's cut off 10% of our emissions by 2010. Let's back up the 10;10. Is a SMART objective.

Read on for the full article from The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/01/10-10-campaign-explained

http://trendistic.com/

Hiring a celeb can be a very successful way of boosting your marketing communications and PR.

Whole Foods can’t stop being in the news. Desperate with the dramatic sales plunge, John Mackey, CEO of the company is trying to draw the media’s attention, although hardly in a beneficial way.

Last week, he cried “Whole Foods sells crap” a bold statement to secure full pages in the nationals to announce a repositioning towards “healthier foods”. Of course, he made it to the headlines. I applaud the brave move and eagerness to widely apologize for having let down its stakeholders. However, this begs the question, how sensible is to offend your current customers claiming your food is junk?

Yesterday, he came back with more. And this time you can’t argue he was absolutely thoughtless.

In an editorial column on the Washington post, called “The Whole Foods alternative to Obamacare” he rallied against the Obama health plans arguing that Americans would be better off with a healthy diet.

“The last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system”….” Recent scientific and medical evidence shows that a diet consisting of foods that are plant-based, nutrient dense and low-fat will help prevent and often reverse most degenerative diseases that kill us and are expensive to treat”

The online response has been huge. A boycott has been already orchestrated and surveys points that around 50% of Whole Foods target market consider the boycott justified.

Is Mr. Mackey finishing off the already damaged Whole Foods image?