Doug Haslam

I often remind myself that we are products of our surroundings, and we solve our problems and generate our ideas based on our surroundings. The risk is getting stale. How to avoid that? – Change your surroundings. Get out of the office, go to events, bring things into your office, expose yourself to media (blogs [...]

I was surprised to hear via Utterli last night about gas shortages in North Carolina. Later a neighbor told me her friend in Georgia is experiencing even worse shortages. I did a Google News search this morning and found only local coverage. Where’s the New York Times? The Today Show? It’s possible I missed some [...]

Last night I was fortunate enough to be invited to a book signing for Stephen Baker’s (longtime businessweek reporter) "Numerati." Thanks to Scott Bauman (http://twitter.com/sbauman) of Greenough Communications for inviting, and Communispace for hosting. I have yet to read the book, so no review here, but a couple of thoughts; – Baker was genuinely excited [...]

Do you remember where you parked? We all need a point of reference to keep us from getting lost. Similar to my idea of learning the rules before you can break them, you need a familiar spot to return to so that you can explore the unknown. For the disorganized mind like mine, these frames [...]

In the rush by many of us to embrace all things social media, sometimes we in public relations need to step back and ask- is this productive? Why should we pirsue the latest social media fad if only a fraction of the masses are using it? I have a few thoughts on why we don’t [...]

Well, well, well- here we are in the first presidential race in the Twitter Age. While some candidates used Twitter- John Edwards did it best I thought- it’s the discussion among the rest of that remains. Political discussion online is not new, but Twitter places these discussions right in the middle of everything else that’s [...]

Are you afraid you are cat-blogging? I don’t mean literally (heaven forfend), but are you afraid your content is trivial? Don’t be, for two reasons. First, better to get your content out there and let the readers decide. Your nose for what works improves over time. Second, who are you to say your content isn’t [...]