By Jim Bucci

For the first time in its history, play at 2008's World Series of Poker would be suspended prior to a champion being crowned. There would be four months—117 days—before players returned to Las Vegas and to the poker table to battle for the Main Event title and the top prize of $9.1 million.

By Frank Zeccola

2008 was a huge year for TiVo, filled with partnership announcements with Amazon, Rhapsody, Picasa, Music Choice and other mainstream brands. Then, in the spring of that year came a cultural breakthrough: YouTube would soon be available on TiVo...

By Frank Zeccola

2008 was a huge year for TiVo, filled with partnership announcements with Amazon, Rhapsody, Picasa, Music Choice and other mainstream brands. Then, in the spring of that year came a cultural breakthrough: YouTube would soon be available on TiVo.

But with all the news and excitement surrounding the earlier partnerships and releases, TiVo feared reporter fatigue would set in when it came time for the YouTube announcement. Together with agency Ruder Finn, they wanted to do something unique from a PR perspective to jolt TiVo back into the news cycle and hit their target audience—the YouTube Generation—with something memorable...

It's now been a year since the banking and financial crisis exploded in the U.S.

In the lead-up and aftermath, more than a few consumers considered—or actually began—taking their money out of banks and sticking it under their mattresses or in shoe boxes. With high-profile banks getting run into the ground by the dozens, this seemed the safest option to some for saving money, even though the FDIC insures up to $250,000 per depositor...

Microsoft had never before connected in an online forum with security researchers attending the Black Hat USA conference. They hadn't invited blog comments or participated in any kind of online dialogue with top researchers at the event.

They were a tech company falling behind on the tech.

Yet for years Microsoft attended the Black Hat conference—the largest security researcher conference in the world. It hosts the industry's most elite security researchers and top-tier influencers. Thousands attend.

These are key audiences for Microsoft that frequently discuss the company, its products and news that affects them...

During the 2008 presidential election, the sound bites "pork barrel spending" and "earmarks" played heavily in both campaigns, as well as in media analysis throughout. And these phrases certainly figured prominently in voters' minds as they stepped into the voting booth on election day.

Two groups partly responsible for the popularity and high media visibility of these concepts during that year are the Illinois Policy Institute and Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW). These two nonpartisan think tanks joined forces in early 2008 with Chicago-based PR firm Mac Strategies Group to promote the "2008 Illinois Piglet Book."

The book highlights $686 million of what the groups consider wasteful or pork barrel spending by the Illinois government. A 2009 edition has since been released, but in 2008, a lot was on the line...

Getting involved with a cause or charity is a great PR strategy. You can score media attention for a company, personality or product and also do good to make the world a better place...

If you're a PR pro who develops campaigns for products of any kind, you know you have to be at the top of your game constantly — because consumer tastes change over time. A product that's flying off the shelves today could fall flat tomorrow. Something better comes out. Something newer, bigger, with cooler features and more benefits...

Can you imagine how much digital information has been created, captured and replicated by computers, telephone circuits, HDTVs and other devices? If I told you the number was 161 exabytes by 2006, would that mean anything?

As you can guess, it's an enormous amount of content. Think of it like this: It's about three million times the information in all the books ever written. That's equivalent to 12 stacks of Harry Potter books extending from the Earth to the sun. And as of 2006, it would take 20 billion high-capacity iPods to store all the information in the "digital universe"...

It started with a viral marketing video that would either take the blogosphere by storm or tank into obscurity. A young, freckled boy with dirty blond hair tells his parents at dinner, "The economy's not what it used to be. It's time to start my own thing."

His "thing" turns out to be a lemonade stand—the original small business. In subsequent scenes, the boy tests lemonade recipes, looks under the couch for spare coins to use as startup money and presents a colorful business plan on an over-sized piece of paper. He then goes to Umpqua Bank and speaks with a loan officer, who approves a loan for the lemonade stand because, "There's no way I could say no"...

As millions of people lost millions of dollars in the dotcom bust, the venture capital community took a huge hit from a reputation standpoint. In fact, it was a full-blown PR crisis for VC investors.

We all know the story. Like Jack Nicholson's Joker, venture capitalists threw truckloads of money around in the mid and late 90s—at any Internet company or stock, whether or not it had any profit or product. This led to the bubble—an overvaluation of technology companies—and sent the economy into a near recession, which became known as the Dotcom Bust...

If you're thinking about pitching an expert to the media, stop immediately! Read this right now: You might be on the verge of making a huge mistake. In fact, you might be about to engage in one or more of the most annoying PR practices that journalists complain about constantly. This, of course, includes pitching "experts" who aren't really experts—and tenuously tying your expert to a news event. These pitches will never land ink or air, and could instantly land you on the "spam" list. Trust me, as an editor, I may have placed you on my own "spam" list if you've sent me pitches like that...

With the economy in a potential meltdown phase, many companies will struggle with under performing product lines over the next year or more. However, an effective communications campaign can take a product or company from ­slump to winning streak in any economic climate with a small investment in PR. 

If you have a slumping product—or worse—and want to bounce back, you know that you need to refocus on your brand's core values to rebuild brand loyalty among your target audience.

This can be accomplished in a number of ways. And often, the most successful branding campaign is the most altruistic. At a time when consumers favor brands tied to everything green, clean, healthy, helpful and caring, now is when you may want to think about finding a great cause to get involved with...

Between 1999 and 2007, the VH1 Save the Music Foundation raised nearly a million dollars benefiting music education in Cincinnati. Yet in all that time, Cincinnati media hadn't covered a single story on the Foundation and its work or mission in the area...

There's no doubt that videogames have been hot the last few years. With franchises ranging from great off- and online games like Guitar Hero and World of Warcraft to futuristic systems like X-Box and Nintendo's Wii, gaming is one "brand-wagon" that everyone wants to jump on. But this hype has created an environment of fierce competition for products and brands vying for attention among gaming consumers and media. And while some games and systems have thrived, others have experienced severe ups and downs as technology and consumer tastes shift and move forward...

Any PR pro can go online for free and set up a YouTube account, a MySpace or Facebook profile and make Twitter posts — and pray that the campaign goes viral. But how do you know that anyone will actually pay attention? How do you integrate it with traditional offline media to get the most impactful results for your time and investment? And how do you translate it into brand equity — and sales dollars — for the company or client?...

If you work for a small company that prints everything in black and white because color is too expensive, you're in luck. Xerox now offers the Phaser 8860, which prints color for the price of black and white. It's also more environmentally friendly than other color printers on the market, so you can feel secure in that...

By Frank Zeccola

By now, every PR pro wants to know how to use YouTube, company websites, blogs, Facebook, Twitter and everything else in cyberspace to drive PR programs and media results. At the same time, it's important to keep in mind that you can't exploit new media in a cyberspace vacuum — you have to make traditional and new media work together. It's truly a case in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. As you will see in the case study below, the keys to success are consistent messaging across all platforms combined with targeted outreach to the specific audiences you want to evangelize your brand...

By Frank Zeccola

The anniversary celebration is a common pitch that lands in the email inboxes and fax machines of almost every business and lifestyle editor in the country, regardless of their outlet's focus, coverage or location. Here at Bulldog Reporter, for example, we constantly see pitches for the anniversaries of everything from law firms and banks to makeup companies, film festivals and dog–walking services. As a trade publication covering the PR and media industries, this is puzzling...

The police officers, sheriffs, prosecutors and other law enforcement leaders on the frontlines of fighting crime know that among the most powerful weapons against deviance violence are preschool programs that help children get ahead from an early age. A national organization called Fight Crime: Invest in Kids is dedicated to this mission...

Building a cool, heavily trafficked website is the goal of most companies and even a lot of individuals. But with millions of sites on the web, standing out from the crowd and monetizing or using your site as a marketing platform involves a lot more than just getting a free Blogger account and posting every once in a while. Sometimes, it involves sophisticated design and technologies. But more often, building a lucrative website boils down to PR basics: offering news, knowing your audience and crafting compelling, relevant messages...

If you think it's counterintuitive to keep a product a total secret right up until launch, you should consider that the top-secret "T.M.X" Elmo launch not only reinvigorated sales for the fallen-from-grace Elmo toy, but it also sparked the toy industry's most prolific sales day in history. It was September of 2006, and the media began calling it "The Elmo Effect" as shoppers infiltrated malls to begin holiday shopping more than three months before Christmas. It was an unprecedented start for holiday retailers...

With the toy industry rebounding from slumping sales and revenue due to iPod mania and videogame addiction among kids, Lego Systems set out to reinvigorate the struggling Lego brand by redesigning and re-launching the innovative Lego Mindstorms product. The robotic toolset was originally introduced in 1998, and it hadn't seen a redesign since...

Any company that wants to exploit the new-media environment from a PR perspective needs a pressroom optimized for Web 2.0. And any pro knows that technology has clearly changed the way PR outreach is conceptualized and executed. For example, new media formats like blogs and other online channels have created challenges and opportunities for reaching journalists, while tools like web video have added to the marketing arsenal of the savvy pro...