• Have a voice and stay on message (themes)
• Be authentic, honest & ethical
• Get ready for a long-term commitment
• Provide value, not noise
• Aim for quality, not quantity
• Share & play nice in the social media sandbox
• Bring online relationships offline
• Measure, tweak, repeat

To learn more, read the full article here.

I checked out the PR blogs on Alltop (great resource) a few minutes ago to see whether I’m the only April Fools Day hater out there. Here are what a few other PR bloggers had to say on the topic:

• It’s like releasing some insignificant tech news during CES…you’ll get lost in the shuffle. The Crowded April Fools Market, Voce Nation
• [...] there’s really no need for April Fool’s Day this year. We’ve been living it every day for a while now. Let’s Skip April Fools Day This Year, Beyond the Hype
• Virtually anyone can post and get some exposure for even a false and misleading story these days. That should be a concern — and don’t think for a minute that there aren’t people out there trying to figure out how to do it and how to get away with it. April Fools and the My Bad Strategy, PR on the Run
• BusinessWire got in touch to say they weren’t accepting any tomfoolery and were on high alert. April Fool’s PR Foolishness; BusinessWire Won’t Play, PR Newser

The symbiotic relationship between PR and holidays isn’t going away. What I am suggesting is that April Fools Day, from a PR perspective, has officially jumped the shark. It’s no longer the wacky second-tier holiday no one else thought of. So use it at your own risk.

Image credit @karihanson

Kudos to the team there for poking a little fun at their industry in the name of good PR. We often encourage our clients to look for opportunities to drop the veil of seriousness in order to make a media splash. This is a great case in point:

Even if user experience isn’t your thing, if you’re looking for an interesting way to promote your company’s services without coming across as heavy handed, check out the Bad Usability Calendar minisite. It features a modest About Us tab directing to the NetLife Research corporate website. The PDF calendar itself is also discreetly branded with the company’s name, URL, phone number and blog, which my upcoming Swedish language lessons should help me decode (it’s in Norwegian, though, so we’ll see. Hope I didn’t offend any Scandinavians with that statement).

Oh — and don’t forget to check out the LOLspeak version

Dell’s simple request: Post your ideas and tell us what products and services you like, what you don’t like.

There are four tabs: “Post…your ideas for new products and services”, “Promote…interesting ideas you want to see”, “Discuss… with Dell” and “See…what Dell is planning to develop”.

Within weeks, people started posting ideas that you could comment on and “promote” or “demote” to gain recognition. To date, the site has around 76,000 comments and around 10,000 ideas.

By being asked to voice their opinions and participate in forums and programs like these, customers feel good, valued and important. This leads to customer loyalty, great and effective word-of-mouth marketing, which in turn, positively impacts the bottom line of any business. Watch jebBlue and Dell take off again.

It’s a win-win.

In a 2005 piece in the Times, Jon Pareles called the British rock group Coldplay “the most insufferable band of the decade,” and he placed the blame on the band’s front man and singer, Chris Martin, whom he called a “passive-aggressive blowhard.” Earlier this year, in a study sponsored by the hotel chain Travelodge of the bedtime habits of 2,248 people in the U.K., Coldplay topped a poll of music choices that would help people fall asleep. Coldplay apparently relieves what Travelodge called the “pressures of modern living.”

That’s right. Travelodge (in this case, Travelodge UK), the low-priced hotel chain trying to shed its crusty image, just got a hit in The New Yorker by surveying its customers on what music they listen to for a good night’s sleep. The accompanying press release, NOTES FOR A GOOD NIGHT’S SLEEP: THE A TO ZZZZZZZZZ, notes that the music of James Blunt, Snow Patrol, Take That and Norah Jones also beats counting sheep.

Why This is Awesome
1. It proves what PR pros have always said: surveys have legs! The survey results were announced in April, and this is an August issue. And when a survey has its own legs, that means less legwork for you, the PR practitioner, because…

2. It proves that putting survey results out as press releases works! Unless someone at Travelodge PR pitched Mr. Frere-Jones (highly unlikely), it appears that big-time journalists actually do subscribe to Google Alerts and read press releases distributed by wire services. NME and Contact Music also picked up the announcement, so it’s equally likely that Mr. F-J read it on one of these music sites.

3. It proves that the surveys that succeed are the ones that aren’t always 100% “on message.” I can hear the naysayers in the conference room now — But we aren’t a music company. We’re doing PR for Travelodge, not Coldplay. Shouldn’t we ask customers how many fresh towels they expect upon arriving in a hotel room instead?

Props to the Travelodge UK PR team for fighting the good fight and providing an excellent case study on the PR power of surveys.