Don't let publicity slips trip you

🦋 Follow me on Bluesky 🦋 for a growing social media community.

** Breaking PR News: Southwest Airlines adds an exclusive chapter to my someday book, What were they thinking? You can’t trash the feature that helped you build a successful business, then point fingers to say your neighbor did worse.

In other news …

Diversify to publicize – If there was ever a time to keep your publicity options open, Twitter going down this week was an in-your-face reminder. Ironically, it happened as NFL's free agency kicked off, which didn’t bode well for the all-eggs-in-one-basket pros. The platform is still a go-to for some sports media, so reporters scrambled to find other ways to communicate with their audiences. (Bluesky saw a surge in users as a result.)

Ask yourself: How can you avoid getting stuck on a one-way publicity street? Don’t solely count on social media you don’t own to carry your message. 

••••

Don’t make a Mountaineer of a mess with your message – We don’t know how West Virginia’s 2025 football season will play out, but will banning TikTok dances, as coach Rich Rodriguez did, help a team win ballgames? Will players take the Mountaineers’ coach literally — and move their dance vids to YouTube?

Publicity Tip – Don’t be a RichRod. (If we’re talking about college coaches, aim for a Vic Schaefer... more on his story to come.) Trust that you’ll expertly coach your people while you’re with them. And if your message is to prioritize team over individual highlights like Rodriguez’s, maybe — a team dance👯🕺🏼? Just saying …

••••

Proof positive that editors are undervalued – Even for this newsletter some might say 🤪. But especially when you’re spending big bucks on merchandise.

In Major League Baseball’s (MLB) What Were They Thinking, 2025 Edition, the 10-year-olds among us are giggling at some of New Era’s MLB Overlap caps (most which have been removed from shelves). The other side of our brains is asking, Who proofed those designs and thought, Yeah – put in an order for eleventy-thousand units.💬

Hopefully, this wardrobe malproduction, unlike last year’s Oakland A’ss caps or see-through unis publicity, doesn’t linger in the media cycle. Let’s appreciate the lesson and hope MLB finds a way to put caps that read like Tetas (Texas Rangers), Ashos (Houston Astros), Anaels (Los Angeles Angels) or Dolaers (Los Angeles Dodgers) to good use. Clever charity promos write themselves, despite reminders of what went wrong.

Publicity Tip: 🎵Proof, proof, proof for your home team; if you don’t you might be ashamed. 🎶

Publicize wisely, proof relentlessly and for the love of sports (‘n’ more), check your merch before it hits the shelves.

© 2025 Gail Sideman; SIDEbar; gpublicity.com

###