Product announcements are no doubt an exciting time for a company, its stakeholders, partners and PR team. We recently completed a project for Swan Island Networks and its announcement of TIES for Microsoft CityNext – a partnership built to help local and regional governments “tie” together a wide spectrum of existing information, from both public…
Thought leadership has become a big part of organizations’ communications mix, even for companies like our clients who are selling solutions to government agencies and other businesses, especially here in DC. The idea behind thought leadership is to take the focus away from products and direct it towards the underlying issues that our clients’ solutions…
As PR professionals in DC, it’s our job to monitor the federal marketplace for trends that inform our clients’ communications and marketing strategies. One theme we’ve heard a lot about lately is that in this era of flat or declining government budgets, it’s become almost clichĂ© to talk of agencies “doing more with less.” How…
The news that the U.S. government is giving up control of the Internet – that is, the Department of Commerce announcing it will end its oversight of ICANN, the non-profit that administers Internet domains – brought me back to a time in my public affairs career when I learned first-hand about managing controversies, especially those…
This year the convergence of conferences our clients are attending and our staff are supporting has grown to epic proportions. Okay, maybe not epic, but given the snowy winter this year, these conferences could not have come at a better time to drag folks out of the doldrums. Nearly all of our clients will be…
I read a Washington Post blog recently calling 2013 the year of cybersecurity. While the year saw a profusion of data breaches and leaks, it’s more accurate to call 2013 the year of cyber violations – not cybersecurity. I think it’s more likely that 2014 will be the year of cyber solutions – maybe the…
There is nothing more frustrating than spending time revising a document and emailing your feedback to your team only to discover seconds later that another person was doing the exact same thing at the exact same time. Version control is such a vital piece of group projects and manually reconciling different versions is a huge…
Last week, New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Segal aired his grievances about untargeted PR pitches in an article titled Swatting at a Swarm of Public Relations Spam. He called blanket PR pitching antiquated and a waste of money, urging fellow journalists to contact Vocus, Cision, and similar services and ask to be removed…
These are heady times in the public relations industry with news of layoffs at some of the larger firms and the continued transformation of traditional media practices by social and digital. At RH Strategic, we have always been proud of our position in the PR landscape; our ability to garner great results; and our success…
Seattle, which is one of the home bases for our PR firm, is a hugely crowded technology market. Between the excitement of the startup community in the city and the marketplace domination from the tech behemoths like Microsoft and Amazon, it can be really tough for mid-sized B2B enterprise technology companies to get attention from…
There seems to be a day, a week or a month for just about everything these days – from National Grilled Cheese Day (yes, you can look it up) to World Space Week to International Walk to School Month. Some of these are more interesting and important than others, and some are so important that…
PR pros pride themselves on mastering the art of the written word, but it’s time to get into a new mindset. Pounding out prose to populate press releases, fact sheets and talking points can be all consuming, client-pleasing and often mentally rewarding (“I nailed that lead”). No matter how perfectly fashioned, words on paper sometimes fail to…
