Celery recently launched a PR guide for startups. It gives some great advice I think:
PR Advice from Facebook’s Head of Tech Communications
11–16 of 16 posts
Re: PR Advice from Facebook’s Head of Tech Communications
#12This article is a rambling, formulaic mess of non-information. I mean, the "7 deadly sins"/"virtuous habits"... didn't BuzzFeed teach us the inherent dubiousness of that framework? If you're adding or removing items to match a nice number, then you're not choosing which content to present based on its usefulness.
All writing on business and/or productivity flirts with the prospect of being a negative ROI time investment since it keeps you from doing business and being productive. This one offers no game changing incites, so falls squarely in the negative ROI pile (which is much larger than the positive ROI pile, incidentally).
It also falls into the winner worship category of business lit. To dismissively paraphrase, "These things are the right thing, because it's what winners did". Luck goes unacknowledged. Unfortunately, you, the reader, despite any other similarities the two of you may have, are despairingly unlikely to have Mark Zuckerberg's luck.
Re: PR Advice from Facebook’s Head of Tech Communications
#13tl;dr: Use buzzword bingo. A lot.
Re: PR Advice from Facebook’s Head of Tech Communications
#14This article is a rambling, formulaic mess of non-information. I mean, the "7 deadly sins"/"virtuous habits"... didn't BuzzFeed teach us the inherent dubiousness of that framework? If you're adding or removing items to match a nice number, then you're not choosing which content to present based on its usefulness. All writing on business and/or productivity flirts with the prospect of being a negative ROI time investm…
> All writing on business and/or productivity flirts with the prospect of being a negative ROI time investment since it keeps you from doing business and being productive.
You seem to have overlooked that this writing was posted by a PR flack, and got Facebook on the front page of a popular website.
Re: PR Advice from Facebook’s Head of Tech Communications
#15This article is a rambling, formulaic mess of non-information. I mean, the "7 deadly sins"/"virtuous habits"... didn't BuzzFeed teach us the inherent dubiousness of that framework? If you're adding or removing items to match a nice number, then you're not choosing which content to present based on its usefulness. All writing on business and/or productivity flirts with the prospect of being a negative ROI time investm…
> All writing on business and/or productivity flirts with the prospect of being a negative ROI time investment since it keeps you from doing business and being productive. You seem to have overlooked that this writing was posted by a PR flack , and got Facebook on the front page of a popular website.
I'm speaking of ROI to the reader. Of course the business/self-help/productivity literature industry extracts a lot of return for its authors/publishers/distributors without necessarily providing equal value to its customers. This is not what I'm commenting on, nor is it interesting to me. So I didn't overlook the point so much as not give a shit about the undeserved return that the author got from writing this drivel.
There are a lot of self-proclaimed gurus that will come up with numbered steps and claim that they are broadly generalize-able, but are in fact just too vague to easily disprove. I think that this is a destructive act on balance, for various reasons, and so it is worthy of derision. In fact, it's kind of funny that this article specifically claims to be "actionable" when it's anything but. It's a collection of vague and unoriginal principles. And like so many of its ilk, not worthy of anyone's time.
Re: PR Advice from Facebook’s Head of Tech Communications
#16The whole last section of the article on "seven virtuous habits" corresponds 1:1 without attribution to Steven Covey's "seven habits of highly effective people."
It never ceases to amaze me how many people and self-help practitioners borrow shamelessly from the seven habits and never once expect that any of their audience might just recognise where the material comes from.
I agree completely. I recognized it instantly and wondered how many people wouldn't.