May 21st, 2010 by Brittany
Some questions have no easy answer. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll pop?
Add another question to that list: What happened to all of the men in PR?
It wasn’t all that long ago that a bunch of men established the public relations industry as we know it today. Innovative businessmen like P.T. Barnum first pushed the limits of publicity, and were followed by enterprising young men like Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee, who met a need that executives all over the world didn’t know they had yet.
The world’s largest and most successful PR agencies were, not surprisingly, founded by men. Still today, the executive leadership of global media conglomerates and smaller, privately held PR firms alike is largely male. But one look around the office, and it’s obvious things have changed in the last fifty years. Our own Ketner Group office is a microcosm of this gender imbalance, with our lone male, our agency principal, outnumbered five to one. Read more »
Tags: career, gender imbalance, salary disparity
Posted in Ketner Group News, PR and Marketing | No Comments »
April 5th, 2010 by Valerie
Right after SXSW Interactive, I promised a comprehensive recap, and I have a confession to make – this Word document has been sitting here in blog post purgatory for over a week (literally!) now, because I’ve realized that: A) I’m not an authority on this event, since it was my first time going, B) there are tons of great posts out there recapping the event as a whole (check out see Omar Gallaga, Jay Baer, and Chris Brogan’s helpful and thoughtful posts), and C) while SXSW was incredibly valuable to me overall for reasons I mentioned in the previous short post, there are only a few things that I took away as total “a ha!” moments in terms of bringing new ideas and practices to Ketner Group and our clients. One of those was definitely Brian Solis’ session on How Your Brand Can Succeed in the New Web, but I’d much rather speak about that after I’ve read his new book, Engage! – and how handy that I asked a question during the Q&A portion of the talk and scored a crisp hardback copy! Be on the lookout for my review on that book soon.
For now, I’d like to dedicate this post to the other session I felt most interesting and pertinent to the work we do here at KG, Stephen Anderson’s talk on the Art & Science of Seductive Interactions – basically, how we can apply the principles of human psychology to creating a better User Experience (which can apply to developing products, websites, etc.) I love the study of psychology, and in fact I also recently discovered a great lecture series on the Mind & Brain from the University of Arizona available for free download from iTunes U – I highly recommend checking that out. Anyway, Stephen Anderson’s main point in his SXSW panel was that, when we are creating something for other people, we need to get back to the basics. What makes successful experiments, products, and campaigns work? Generally, at the root of it is human psychology. Are you building your product or website or campaign by starting with a basic assessment of what you want people to do and how you can incent them to do so?
Read more »
Tags: Brian Solis, Marketing, psychology, Stephen Anderson, SXSW, user experience
Posted in PR and Marketing | 2 Comments »
March 24th, 2010 by Valerie
In case you haven’t heard, TOMORROW (3/25) is the big day for the Global Twestival! Caitlin and I (Valerie) will be there to show our support of the great cause this Twestival benefits (details on that below) — and also to represent Ketner Group, since we signed on as a sponsor of the event.
We really hope you can make it out, too! Mark your calendars for 7pm tomorrow, Thursday, March 25 for Twestival Austin at Molotov downtown! RSVP here now.
About the Twestival (from the website):
On Thursday, March 25, people in hundreds of cities around the world will come together offline to rally around the important cause of Education by hosting local events to have fun and create awareness. Twestival™ (or Twitter Festival) uses social media for social good. All of the local events are organized 100% by volunteers (in Austin, this Twestival effort is being led by the awesome @michaelpearsun) and 100% of all ticket sales and donations go direct to projects. If you would like to get involved, please Register your City, Register your School, or Volunteer and we will get in touch. Organizers will be given a handbook and invitation to our collaboration workspace. Follow @twestival for updates.
Read more »
Posted in Ketner Group News | No Comments »
