PRWeek’s Lindsay Stein reports that Finn Partners has acquired Horn Group for an undisclosed sum to boost its tech practice.After more than two decades in the business, Horn said she started thinking about selling, and Finn Partners was attractive …

Updated: December 1 — PRWeek named Weber Shandwick a Best Place To Work 2014 - Large Agency, for the second year in a row.I've been spending a lot of time in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood, working with teams on Weber Shandwick's Mediaco …

Nathalie Tadena at the Wall Street Journal reports on Weber Shandwick's partnership with Niche, an aggregator of more than 5,000 "social media celebrities." Among the social media celebs in Niche's network with the biggest reach are Nash Grier, a …

It might not seem surprising to my readers that I'm working on a project with Mediaco, a Weber Shandwick business that advertises, "We Help Every Company Become A Media Company." Helping companies be great media companies is a noble calling these …

Richard Edelman (center) at a Churchill Club event in February 2013.Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman, the world's largest privately held PR firm, recently wrote about his "Decade of Blogging." His first post was September 29, just 10 days after my …

Sam Whitmore of Sam Whitmore Media Survey, at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco.Jack Odwyer reports that Bulldog Reporter, a service for PR agencies, has closed after 35 years in business. That's a shame because I've taken part in many Bulldog …

By Andrew Barnett, partner and head of the SEO practice at digital marketing and public relations firm Elasticity. Organizational structures are notoriously rigid, often lacking the agility and flexibility to respond to changing market forces. Over …

Luca Penati (above), a former senior executive at Ogilvy has joined Weber Shandwick as General Manager of its San Francisco and Silicon Valley offices. He spent 9 years at Ogilvy, mostly as Global Managing Director of Ogilvy's technology …

All the evidence gathered from PRWeek's investigations over the past month points to a couple of crucial conclusions...Danny Rogers, Editor-in-Chief of PRWeek spells out the future in his recent column: The death of PR agencies -- as we know …

I'm looking forward to speaking at FutureComms14 conference in London Wednesday (tomorrow). It's a brand new conference organized by Mynewsdesk, a Norwegian media technologies company that provides companies with a digital newsroom.The …

I'm setting off to London and Warsaw (above) and will be back in early July. Next week on June 18 I will be speaking at FutureComms14 in London, a brand new conference organized by Mynewsdesk, a Swedish media technologies …

Above, Search Engine Land shows traffic plunge for Businesswire for certain search terms.Google's latest algorithm update, Panda 4.0 appears to be punishing sites that host and distribute press releases, by demoting them in its search rankings …

The first Hubbies awards (winners above) were presented in San Francisco earlier this week recognizing breakthrough digital creative work. It is organized by a new publication The Hub, a sister publication to PR Week.Steve Barrett, (below, right) …

When I first introduced the concept of every company is a media company in 2005 there were very few people that understood what this meant. Today it's an accepted fact and it's why there's a massive surge in what's called content marketing.With so …

Richard Edelman (right) with Steve Barrett, Editor-in-Chief of PR Week, at a Churchill Club event in 2013.Can PR companies “Show Up Differently” as Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman, the world’s largest privately held PR firm, wrote in his New Year’s …

The media industry has been dragged kicking and screaming into the modern world and forced to adopt new media technologies and drastically overhaul its operations.The successful new media model is a combination of three components: professional …

The recent SF Creators Salon focused on the topic of trust and content marketing and as usual, it was a lively evening hosted at InPowered’s community space in San Francisco.I Interviewed the two  founders, the brothers Peyman Nilforoush and Pirouz …

David Matahai, Director of Marketing Communications at Hyundai.Holmes Report conferences are rapidly becoming my favorite conferences and last week’s Innovation Summit in San Francisco was excellent — and not just because I won a top 25 Innovator …

Richard Edelman (right) with Steve Barrett, Editor-in-Chief of PR Week, at a Churchill Club event in 2013.The advertising industry is going through big changes and that means opportunities for PR firms to compete for large marketing budgets normally …

I hate blowing my own horn but I’d like to thank The Holmes Report for recognizing my work and naming me one of the top 25 innovators of 2013. Aarti Shah wrote:For having the foresight to see that every company is a media company even before the …

Earlier this year Google began filtering email newsletters into a separate folder in user's inboxes. The move was explained as a way to help users organize their mail but in reality it was aimed at hampering Google's competitors: other marketers and …

Big or small, the Facebook strategy for most brands has been to collect as many "likes" as possible. Facebook is now planning to monetize that strategy by charging companies for newsfeed distribution.For much of this year Facebook has been gradually …

Thanks Bill Sledzik! It’s interesting to see that others sometimes agree with me :)From Ragan: Coca-Cola digital chief: ‘Kill the press release’

Promotional email has long been an effective way of delivering opt-in commercial messages and many marketers have rediscovered this method after experimenting with advertising, social media campaigns, and other novel forms of online …

Lot's of great discussion around my recent posts about Google and PR.[Did Google just kill PR agencies?]Sam Cooke: "It's been a long, a long time coming. But I know a change is going to come, oh yes it will."I've long warned that PR companies would …

Google has updated its webmaster rules on the use of links and keywords in press releases and it doesn't look good for PR agencies and their current suite of services. The details on the changes are here: Link schemes - Webmaster Tools HelpAny links …

A warning to PR agencies, Google is in the business of promotions and it doesn't like competitors! Google recently updated its webmaster guidelines: Watch your keywords and don't use them for manipulating your client's site's rank or your client's …

From left: Peter Burrows, Eric Brown, Mary Dent, Richard Edelman, Jeffrey Pfeffer.Richard Edelman, the head of the world's largest privately held PR firm, said that the Edelman Trust Barometer, an annual global survey of 31,000 people, revealed a …

 Edelman PR sponsored a debate on "Trust" Monday evening at the Computer History Museum. Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman PR discussed some of the findings of the 2013 Edelman Trust Barometer global survey. Here are some extracts. A full report is …

Ryan Holiday, writing for the New York Observer, has discovered something very important about the media industry today:The widespread belief is that the media has "reach." Trust me, they don't. Not anymore. It's become almost pathetic.It hit me the …