The New York Times reports that many businesses and industry groups now plan to follow the food industry’s example by offering the public more detailed information about how and where their clothes are made. H&M and Zara have agreed to sign a new “factory safety accord,” and major names like Disney, Nike, and Walmart may follow with campaigns designed to appropriate the “green,” “organic,” and “fair trade” themes favored by food and household goods marketers in recent years. The purpose of this material, of course, will be to highlight the brands’ corporate social responsibility efforts and distance them from horrific accidents like the one in Bangladesh.

It’s nothing new for fashion: upstarts like American Apparel began using their own “fair trade” practices as key selling points some time ago. Yet, despite AA’s success, retailers like Maggie’s Organics and Everlane (tagline “Luxury Basics. Radical Transparency.”) remain few and far between.

Not for long.

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How did an 18-year-old college student in Maryland gain the trust of and get access to TV executives and anchors in New York? “By posting 10 or 15 posts a day meant that the industry knew it was a reliable consistent source,” says Brian Stelter, creator of our sister site TVNewser and now a media reporter for the New York Times and author of the just released book “Top of the Morning.”

As he neared graduation, Stelter had to make a choice: work in TV news, or cover it.

• Part I: Stelter on Being Matt Lauer’s “nemesis”

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Neither of these products were April Fools’ jokes, but they both managed to win mentions in mainstream media outlets like The New York Times, Slate, Fox News, Good Morning America, LIVE with Kelly and Michael and even WebMD. How? They had hooks so dumb that folks just had to click. And we all know that producers are just dying to fill airtime with news about stunt products like a condom that helps “make your meat look like meat” and provides “the utmost safety for when you’re makin’ Bacon” or the “world’s first and only gender-based whole food cereal”, which promises to promote “good nerve function, healthy hormone levels, and an unobstructed blood flow to the pelvic area.”

PR wins all around. And yes, there’s a stupid video after the jump: continued…

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We’re not saying that the many talented reporters at the Times have ignored the trend until now; this Media Decoder post regarding The Atlantic‘s Scientology advertorial scandal mentions the fact that BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post and other top web publishers already maintain sponsored content sections. But the weekend’s article does seem to be the first time the Times has deemed such content worthy of comment in print.

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We recently spoke to Peter Axtman of Sunshine Sachs to learn how he used graph search to score a big PR win for a client with a very specific target audience.

Axtman was working to promote a client called Playground Sessions, an instructional app-maker that is “like Rosetta Stone for piano”. Axtman told us that, though the client had received some “mainstream tech coverage“, he “wanted to talk to niche piano publications” that might appeal more explicitly to the client’s target audience — people interested in learning to play piano or improve their form without in-person training.

So he turned to graph search with surprising (and encouraging) results.

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First comes news that big-name ad agency McCann Erickson will significantly expand upon a unit it founded last year to exclusively tackle social media projects. The unit, now called “McCann Always On” (get it?), will “[build] social media-centric marketing plans” rather than just managing clients’ pages and feeds in an attempt to back up the agency’s “sure, we can do that!” claims.

This announcement follows a telling New York Times article by advertising specialist Stuart Elliot, who reported that a growing number of ad/marketing copywriters have mastered the subtle art of “LOLspeak” as their agencies integrate more social content into client campaigns.

On the PR side, Weber Shandwick just announced its plans to expand upon the traditional definition of a PR firm by launching a new content-focused unit called MediaCo.

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The real value of this app has to be less than the selling price, especially when it faces competitors like Pulse, Flipboard and Pocket. But the move scored the company a first-page New York Times story with the headline “He Has Millions and a New Job at Yahoo. Soon, He’ll Be 18.” Compelling, no? He’s bold, he’s young and he’s a millionaire with his own Wikipedia page. He certainly doesn’t sound like the typical Yahoo user — and that’s the whole point. New York Magazine’s Kevin Roose notes that the last acquisition to get this much media hype was Facebook buying Instagram for a whole lot more money.

So it’s all part of Marissa Mayer‘s carefully planned image makeover.

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It’s kind of a counter-intuitive conclusion: viewers love drama and tragedy when it comes to consuming news, but on the social front they’re far, far more likely to share positive, inspiring content. For example, while local and national news is heavy on car crashes, celebrity scandals and armed conflict, many of the most shared New York Times stories don’t concern financial misdeeds or dirty politics–they’re inspiring/fascinating science and health stories like this one about the famous Mediterranean diet or this one about how owls are totally awesome.

Social psychologist and author Jonah Berger explains: “…when you share a story with your friends and peers, you care a lot more how they react. You don’t want them to think of you as a Debbie Downer”. It’s a very relevant quote to every social media manager–even if we knew it already.

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Here’s how it will work: in order to get viewers to actually, you know, watch ads instead of going to the kitchen for some dip or fast-forwarding their TiVos, The Food Network, The Travel Channel and others will partner with brands (and agencies) to create commercial spots and campaigns tied to popular programs and personalities. For example, Stuart Elliot of The New York Times notes that Don Wildman, host of shows like Off Limits and Mysteries at the Museum, created a series of promos for the Land Rover that fit quite nicely with the programs themselves. Here’s one:

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As expected, former VP Xi Jinping officially assumed the presidency after receiving a ridiculous 99.8% of the vote in The People’s Congress. Xi posed as a reformer, and his primary goal is to convince the growing number of Chinese citizens who aren’t happy with their government that his administration is more concerned with improving quality of life than lining its own pockets.

In order to do this, he’s taking some steps right out of the political PR playbook that will look familiar to anyone who has suffered through an American presidential campaign.

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Himler’s main point: a significant number of the students in the journalism program where he spoke last week don’t want to write for The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal–they want to go into PR and advertising. They want to write sponsored content, not investigative journalism. Of course this makes sense, because journalism can be a very tough and often underpaid pursuit.

Himler, like many in the industry, believes that the always-challenging relationship between hacks like us and pitchmen/women has taken a turn for the worse. Yet we agree with his conclusion: this marriage may be strained, but it’s hardly broken.

On Monday Lindsay Goldwert called on her journalist friends to make a list of “do’s and dont’s” for PR pros. Himler’s piece includes both sides of the equation, so we’d like to flip the script: how should journalists and bloggers interact with PR folks? Himler’s suggestions and our comments after the jump:

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I wish I could take credit for Listening Post, Hotwire’s new influencer analytics platform, but it was in development long before I arrived. What I can do is to draw a line under why it’s so important to our business here in the US and what I think it says about our agency.

Data has a big role to play in PR.

There are lots of influencer management tools already available to communications pros. It’s easy to dismiss the proliferation of dashboards, scores, and workflow tools by the sheer number of them that are on the market. (And, in some cases, by their complexity, price point, and lack of understanding about how PR people actually do their jobs.)

But a booming market for influencer management software is testament to just how unwieldy the challenges of effectively managing important relationships have become. The volume of data contained in the social graph, and where it intersects with proprietary client–and agency–information is too rich to be ignored by PR folks. In many cases, it contains the very proof that we’re doing our jobs effectively. Who’d want to ignore that?

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Of course, in order to receive such press mentions, businesses usually require the services of people called publicists or PR professionals who specialize in pitching the story of the scruffy startup to big name glossies, trade papers–or even lowly blogs like ours!

But for those who want to get all those press mentions on your website without actually, you know, doing the work, we present The Startup Legitimizer–a single webpage that can fill all your startup PR needs with a few simple clicks. Which publications would give your cred the biggest boost? The New York Times? TechCrunch? BuzzFeed? TED Talks?!

These famous names, divided into the “kind of legit” and “really legit” categories, even come in pre-organized bundles like “innovators” and “game changers”, which are totally different things. Just choose your favorites, copy and paste the HTML code and say goodbye to pesky PR flacks forever! Check us out!

(Just kidding. Startups absolutely should invest in PR services. And thanks to Digiday for the tip.)

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But can games truly educate the public in the interest of facilitating widespread social change? Games for Change certainly thinks so. We’ll refer to what they do as “advocacy gaming”–and it makes a lot of sense.

The brand’s latest, most visible project is a collaboration with New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof, best known for his reporting on international human rights and gender equality abuses. It’s called “Half the Sky”, and it’s truly a multimedia effort: the Facebook game debuted this week, but it all started with Kristof’s book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (co-written with his wife and fellow Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sheryl WuDunn).

The book inspired a spinoff series on PBS–and then Games for Change got involved with the help of social gaming leader Zynga and other big-name sponsors.

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We’d say this promo campaign, complete with fictional stories that ran parallel with the show’s plot points and an ominous dragon shadow splayed across two pages of newsprint, proves that newspaper advertising can still generate some serious buzz when it’s done right.

Of course, HBO isn’t relying on print alone for its major GoT marketing campaign; in a follow-up to the NYT ad, the premium cable giant decided to take the duck-and-cover dragon shadow to the next level by featuring the image on the facade of its own Los Angeles high-rise last Tuesday.

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