I spent much of the summer and fall of 2007 assembling my first electronic book on social-media strategy, There Is No Secret Sauce.

Last fall, Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson posted an entry on his well-read blog, "The Long Tail," that informed the PR industry he was fed up with e-mail pitches deemed blatantly misdirected, poorly researched, or thinly veiled spam. In his frustration, Anderson publicized the e-mail addresses he felt associated with these poor pitches.

Changes in technology are impacting all facets of communications.

When former Sen. George Mitchell released his anticipated report on steroid use in baseball this past December, it included Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte.

Executing strategic public relations programs that are designed to call attention to corporate benevolence in regards to climate change may seem like the "thing to do" this year, but be careful.

Go online and you'll see plenty of commentary about drug companies.

It appears that the trend of trying to pass off guaranteed placement as something other than advertising has grown.

Last night at 8 pm, anywhere in America, you could have turned on the TV and found 300 advertisements coming at you from just as many channels - at just this one point in time. How can any company expect a single message to break through that much clutter? The answer lies in one small word fraught with so much apprehension: Integration.

If Abraham Lincoln was alive today and advising PR executives how to stave off recessionary budget cuts, he'd probably suggest taking a big picture perspective. And, I'd like to think he'd call it, "of the client, by the client, and for the client."

We're a unique generation. We ended a war (or so we think); we were foot soldiers in the civil rights, women's rights, and environmental movements.