How To Win a Whole Mess Of Awards

Interested in streamlining that heap of admin required to run your awards program for clients? Interested in winning your own nifty bronze and iron awards named after medieval weapons and tools? Don’t have the time to manage scores of submissions? There’s a tool for that.

A “marketing modules” company called mBlast Inc. launched a free award information aggregator today called AwardSynch. If you want something more powerful, mBlast’s software-as-a-service (SAAS) Awards Management platform allows you to streamline and “automate every step of a global awards program from inviting participants, to judging, to ecommerce, to reporting.”

mBlast is all about automation, and in some respects frighteningly so. There are many, many PR firms and trade media publications using mBLAST’s marketing and media services. Media companies are using mBlast for data gathering for directories and buyer’s guides, PR firms for contact management and media credentialing.

In one mBLAST whitepaper, “The New PR Challenge: Establishing Data Relationships with Market Influencers,” the author argues that data relationships, or “machine-to-machine” connections are the new ‘ante’ for being in business–including PR and IR firms. The examples within pitch the new age of PR right from a Philip Dick story. One IT news publisher tells how information from all online sources–including press releases–is sucked in to create one big data bolis so reporters can write stories quickly without even going online. Another takes no calls from PR people, explaining they “simply don’t need any extra context to kick out relevant news stories quickly.”

I’m sure mBLAST makes some fine products (over 70 apparently) though if those examples are the future of PR and media, we really should pack up and close shop today.

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