Archives: January 2009

Adweek: Superbowl XLIII ads

Associated Press: Study: NFL TV ads full of violence, sex, alcohol

Minnesota Pubic Radio: Senate candidates wage public relations battle

Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism: Bloggers Ponder Every Aspect of Obama’s Inauguration

InternetNews.com: Super Bowl ’09: Social Media Hits the Gridiron

Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.

Today is the last day send in your Bulldog Award entry. Unlike the Sabres, Anvils and others, the Bulldogs are awarded solely on media relations prowess.

Odds are good with 28 categories, and its easy to enter. A three-page maximum description and your best clip is all the panel of judges want to see. The judges are all working journalists including Jeff O’Brien from Fortune, Chris Elliot, New York Times, Tom Hallman, Oregonian and others.

Click here to find the rules and entry form.

[A champion bulldog, via Scott Kinmartin's Flickr]

Jay Carson, Hillary Clinton’s press secretary during her run for President is moving to the greener pastures of Shangri-La…as VP for policy and business development. Carson, who came off in the media as really burnt out towards the end of the fight for the Nomination.

Shangri-La is the music and production company run by playboy Steve Bing, which recently branched out in to LEED-certified construction. The first project was the ultragreen Hanger 25 at the Bob Hope airport, 110% solar powered, and according to the release, equipped with big ass fans to keep temperatures down.

LEED-certified (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) construction is a good place to be. It’s predicted and likely that many new Government buildings will be built to greener code during the Obama administration.

More on Carson’s old life is coming next year: Leoardo DiCaprio is playing a character based on him in the movie version of the play Farragut North.

[via LA Observed]

BUzZGain, the all-in-one web service designed to help small and midsize companies “listen, learn and engage” with a variety of influencers is now in public Beta.

Finding the correct word there is difficult–”influencers,” “stakeholders,” “audiences,” and the more textbook “publics” all sort of fit. The point being, it’s vast, amorphous, and intermingled: “150 Million reporters, bloggers, analysts, micro-bloggers, podcasters & video bloggers” can be identified and tracked.

Co-founders Mukund Mohan and Brian Solis, CEO of FutureWorks PR created what a number of firms have either bought on a bigger scale, or are trying to develop internally: a dashboard for understanding what’s going on with brands online, glean intelligence, and find ways to jump in the pool and mix it up.

MS&L has their proprietary Multiloguer tool for example, and last Fall Edelman chose dna13, which uses “listen, think, engage” as their three areas of reputation management. Both are big undertakings. Edelman’s goal was to have all 3,200 staffers across 26 countries use the product.

Continued after the jump:

Read more

Social Media Explorer: How Quantcast Can Help Bloggers And Public Relations

WSJ: WPP to Ally With Omniture

eMarketer: Traditional Media Use Stabilizes as Online Rises

PR Squared: “I’m Just the PR Person”

PR Rock and Roll: The Invisible Publicist

[image cred]

The NYTimes today announced a decline in digital ad revenues. AOL announced it will layoff 700 employees amid a decline in ad revenue.

Meanwhile, there is one PR “publication” that seems to be doing just fine. Peter Shankman, founder of the popular “match journalists with sources” email list, Help a Reporter Out, said today on his list “We’re now sold out on advertising until April 16th, 2009.”

That means Shankman has filled up his three a day advertising queue for the next 56 business days. Multiply that by $3,150 (the morning and end of day ads costs $1,250, while lunchtime costs $650) and Shankman has secured a whopping $176,400 in HARO revenue – and that’s just for the next two months. Shankman does cut deals to non-profits and other worthy causes, and also likely gives rate cuts to bulk buyers. Nonetheless, that is certainly an impressive revenue stream for a one-year-old, one employee company.

UPDATE: Shankman tells PRNewser, “All ads cost $1,250. Job ads (what we called lunchtime ads) cost $625…but I might go for a month without a job ad – just 3 non-job ads a day.” He continues: “Two employees now, and I’ve lost weight since that photo was taken.”

PRWeb, the press release service owned by PR software company Vocus, added Twitter functionality to their distribution options today.

Kind of like the Shorty Awards, you type in your username and password along with your message, and PRWeb spits out a Tweet with a shortened URL without you having to log on to Twitter. It goes out at the same scheduled time as your distribution to the wire. One less thing think about.

There, now you know. Maybe the industry really is on to something with Twitter. The nature of press releases keeps people from announcing things succinctly. For example, the very release announcing this function runs a hefty 860 words–with two source quotes, two boilerplates, and an SEC disclaimer. Cheers to Vocus’s Director of PR Robin Lane for picking up the phone and calling me about it–another great way to communicate.

Portland Oregon Mayor Sam Adams is mired in a sex scandal and his spokesman has decided he’s had enough. Wade Nkrumah left his position yesterday without giving any reason as to why (feel free to guess) and admitting he had no new job lined up.

According to the Portland Business Journal, “Nkrumah spent his entire career at the Oregonian until last fall, joined Adams’ staff after reportedly accepting an Oregonian buyout that could pay him up to two years worth of salary.”

BuzzMachine blogger Jeff Jarvis nabbed CEO Richard Edelman after a discussion at Davos, to see if “trust” will fall even farther from the dismal numbers just revealed in Edelman PR’s 10th annual Trust Barometer.

Sixty two percent of adults in 20 countries trust companies less than they did a year ago. There was discussion of the media too–trust in newspapers fell to a scant 34%.

So what to do, what to do? Edelman advises companies to clean up ahead of regulation, embrace shared sacrifice and lead from the front of the army. This is textbook advice–textbook theory redlined by market forces every day lately. Existence is the payoff these days, over having merely a decent quarter.

On another note, Adweek’s Brian Morrisey points out via Twitter, that the session Jarvis writes about unveiled a new catch phrase for the PR industry: private sector diplomacy.

The first thing we thought when reading that statement was: “How is it possible that PRNewser gets more pitches than Hollywood Reporter NY Bureau Chief Georg Szalai?” It’s true folks.

Either Szalai has mastered the skill of staying off media lists or he really just doesn’t get a lot of pitches.

On that note, Szalai isn’t afraid to crowd-source stories. “I sometimes post questions for THR or freelance stories I am working on in my Facebook status line…in case a friend has a tip or thought,” he said. Read the full interview here.