Pepsi Refresh: Success Or Failure? — Soap Box Included. I was quoted in the linked story on Pepsi’s Super Bowl venture. In the end, Pepsi took a chance that they could hook consumers through a social media experiment, and through getting attention by not advertising at the Super Bowl. Ron Antonette, a communications professional from Long Beach, CA sums it up with his belief that “the decision proved to be a correct one, as instead of...

I’ve been fortunate to work with some of the brightest and most creative people in the communications business, both as bosses and mentors and as colleagues and, most luckily for me, as direct reports. One of my bosses always used to say that everything was analogous to dating. Another that the PR business, mostly about service, always comes down to waitressing — taking the order and organizing all the chairs in the room. (To this...

Jose Canseco was tweeting about his life before there was Twitter. I’ve been following Canseco’s media soundbites since college: When I was at USC, we used to dial up his old “Jose Canseco 976-number” as a college radio bit. They were actual, daily updates recorded by Jose himself. We may have been the only callers to his hotline, but it made for interesting discussions in the studio afterwards. Those old updates were unscripted,...