Things are starting to settle down now, and I’m getting back into the swing of blogging. Here are my faves from this week:

1. The top ten reasons why PR doesn’t work. Guy Kawasaki features a list compiled by Margie Zable Fisher. She seems to place a lot of blame on the client. Agencies should put their hands up too. How about “agencies bring in the big stars to win the account and then staff it with inexperienced PR novices”. Or, “agencies under bid the work at the outset and then try to sneak in as many add on costs as possible to make up the difference”? Need I go on?

2. …the world’s leading…points out the unintentional double entendres included in PR Week’s front page story about Edelman winning the Viagra account. The funny thing is, when I first saw the story I wondered why the weekly trade mag didn’t go for a better headline than “Edelman bags Viagra brief”. “Surely with a bit more creativity they could have come up with a slightly more pithy headline than this,” I thought. How about “Edelman rises to Viagra challenge” or “Edelman stands ready for Viagra campaign”. Any more?

3. Sometimes it’s the little things from the Forward Blog is perhaps a bit sappy. But I have to admit it hit home for me this week.

4. The Marcom Maven reminds us how to SEO news releases. I interviewed a candidate last evening who was very interested in e-PR as he called it. He’d find this post of interest.

5. In its McPR post, Screaming Headlines picks up on my McFuture post from yesterday. Peter echos my point that out that you don’t change people’s perceptions by changing dictionary definitions. But we are discussing it and debating the issue as a direct result of the McDonald’s efforts. Isn’t that their real objective?

And what, dear Strivers, have you all been reading?