The United States Census Bureau has been a bit on edge ever since Congress suggested gutting the American Community Survey. So, in an effort to prove their worth, the Census has launched an online PR initiative called How Do We Know, which includes this nifty infographic just in time for Independence Day.

May the US Census Bureau and the rest of America have a happy, healthy 4th of July!

For our Stamford BNI (Business Network International) Visitor’s Day I created two email blasts that were sent separately over the preceding two weeks.

I used MailChimp to manage our list of invitees (collected from our membership over the year) and to send/track the email blasts themselves. With a highly targeted list like this one, we expect a high open rate but for August a 58% is not bad.

In the past I’ve recommended the poor man’s online reputation manager was to use Google Alerts with Social Mention. Google today expanded Alerts with a new feature to your Dashboard called Me on the Web (located right under the Account info). This works much like Alerts where you can be notified about “mentions” on a weekly, daily, or real-time but the really nice touch is that you now have an easier way to remove unwanted information about yourself from Google Search. Learn more reading this post by Google’s Product Manager Andreas Tuerk.

New online support community DivorceCandy offers content and services to help divorcees move on and stay positive. Leveraging social media as an integral part of their PR initiative, we created this Twitter  Revamp, Rejuvenate and Rebuild Sweepstakes that invited people to tweet their “life after divorce” stories for a chance to win prizes pertinent to the cause. The sweeps ran for 3 weeks in April with one winner per week. It generated over 500 entries, drove thousands of visits to the website, and grew Twitter followers into the triple digits.