MatchPoint: Finalist for PR Innovation of the Year at PRWeek Awards

 

I am pleased to pass along the good news that MatchPoint has been nominated for The PRWeek PR Innovation of the Year Award!

Full disclosure: I’m a member of the development team for MatchPoint.  Additional disclosure: I am freakin’ thrilled about this!

 
A tip of the hat to all nominees:

Edelman and American Thoracic Society The TB Advocacy Toolkit

Ketchum The Ketchum Media Optimizer: Adding Discipline to the PR Discipline

Ketchum Virtual Meeting Mashups – Reinventing Online Events

Waggener Edstrom Worldwide What’s on Your Mind? Now Anyone Can Decipher Twitter Discussion with the Help of twendz!

eNR Services, Inc. and MatchPoint MatchPoint for PR

 
Saying it’s an honor just to be nominated along with these top global PR agencies is not just an old cliché in this case. I cannot think of a previous year where any non-agency PR application, software, or service was nominated for PR Innovation of the Year.  

See you at the PRWeek Awards  on March 11 in NYC!

I’m So Busy! Oh, Shut Up.

The PR and Media Relations industry is made up of people who are chronically busy. But…are they really?
 
We all have those people in our lives who take every occasion to tell you how busy they are. These are same individuals who can’t make a deadline or return a call promptly. But, they have plenty of time to update their Facebook status with how busy they are, how they are longing for the weekend, or what they’re having for lunch.  Lunch?!?  Hmmm, I thought you were really busy…   
 

If you’re one of these offenders: Stop! Do yourself a favor and stop!
 
When you tell people – especially business associates – that you’re “so busy,” you’re really telling them that:

•You are a poor time manager
•You cannot handle your current workload, and therefore…
•You could not take on more tasks and so could not be of much help to anyone else
 
Face it, you’re no more busy, stressed, or under pressure than ANY of your peers, co-workers, or clients. If you truly believe you are, then it’s time for a change! The New Year is a perfect time to make that change – or suck it up.

I’ve seen many lists over the past two weeks of buzz words for PR pros to avoid in 2010. Let’s make “busy” one of them!

New PR Tool: Pitch with Me

  
A new free online tool was added to your PR Workbench this month: Pitch with Me.

We have seen many new media relations tools and apps launched this year claiming to be more useful than the rest. Most of these are just more of the same: new ways to blast out PR Spam, SEO “experts” who think they know more about Google than you do, and Social Media monitoring tools that actually do nothing but look cool. 

Pitch With Me rises above this PR app jam not with a glitzier app, but with a new concept in media relations. Or rather, a time-tested and proven concept put into an online form.

The idea of teaming up two or more clients for a story pitch has worked inside large agencies for decades. Agencies not only created a more attractive package, but also created efficiencies with resources and time.  But smaller firms and independent practitioners often saw an industry peer as a competitor rather than a symbiotic friend.

Journalists will use what they need and toss the rest anyway, so why not offer more to potentially use? And you never know when your partner’s a story may be what grabs someone’s attention.

Kudos to Heather Whaling for creating this online bullpen of potential collaborators! You can check out co-pitching opportunities on the site or by following @pitchwithme. If anyone has used Pitch With Me already, please share your comments here.

Media Trends: Animated Christmas Specials

The animated holiday specials of the 60s and 70s had death, terrifying situations, and narration by actors so old no kid had ever heard of them.

In Christmas cartoons created in the past few years, you will not find any of the above tragedy and anxiety-inducing melodrama. For the past few weeks, I have been studying the Christmas specials of three popular current kids’ series (and by studying, I mean a constant viewing every evening with my daughter):

• Nick’s Diego Saves Christmas

• PBS’s Super Why and ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas

• Disney’s Little Einsteins and The Christmas Wish

In these recent shows, I found no character’s mother dying, Misfit Toys, evil Burgermeisters, scary wizards, or killer magicians. All you find in the above three is positive messages, interactivity, learning, and good animation (well, not so much in Diego).

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Now let’s talk about the best Christmas Cartoons of the pre-PC media era, filled with oddities and freaks:

#7 Frosty The Snowman

Nothing merrier than a cartoon where our star snowman melts into a pool of water and dies.  Merry Christmas, kids! Spoiler: He comes back to life in the end. 

#6 Nestor, The Long-Eared Christmas Donkey

I’m only including my wife’s all-time fave to keep peace at home this holiday season. It does have some catchy tunes by country-folkie Roger Miller and, yep, Momma donkey dies. Nice.

 

#5 A Charlie Brown Christmas

“Isn’t there anyone…who can tell me…what Christmas is all about?”

This poor bald kid had the first documented case of childhood holiday depression. Relax, Chuck. It’s all about a dog saving your crummy tree, Linus’ sermon which I always tuned out, and Dolly Madison commercials.

#4 How the Grinch Stole Christmas

Stop with the Jim Carey remake already and watch the original with narration by Boris Karloff.  Yeah not too freakin’ scary.

#3 Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town

Best line by Keenan Wynn as the deadly Winter Warlock: “Hey, maybe I’m not such a loser after all!”

 

 

#2 Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer

Cool: Island of Misfit Toys (yeah!) which is so weird yet cool that Verizon effectively uses it to slam AT&T 40 years later.

Not cool: Rudolph’s voice is the most grating sound of the holidays

 

#1 Year Without A Santa Claus

Five words: They. Call. Me. Heat. Miser.

 

 

 

 

 

****Honorable mention (not fully animated): ***
The Star Wars Holiday Special which included Wookies celebrating … something. But it did feature the whole Star Wars cast along with special guests Harvey Korman, Bea Arthur, and Jefferson Starship. I can’t make this stuff up! Hey, if you were a kid in 1978, this is why TV was invented. It was the closest thing to seeing Star Wars again in the pre-home video age.

Dear CEOs: Social Media Is Not E-Commerce

The first Black Friday and Cyber Monday since the Great 2009 Social Media Explosion are now behind us. The first reports are in and it looks like many retailers had a great week.

I wonder if any CEOs who recently “gave in” to their marketing advisors and signed off on SM efforts are right now going over sales figures for the year and wondering why they’re not seeing a big payoff from Social Media.

The reality is Social Media is not e-commerce.

I’m not criticizing any CEOs who don’t get that…yet!  For now, I am finding fault with any marketing directors (and God forbid any PR managers) who sold Social Media efforts internally as online magic that makes cash registers ring.

I fear that some people in the marketing and communications industry have set unreachable goals in order to sell their CEOs on Social Media Campaigns. Or perhaps they are measuring social media mentions in terms of Revenue per Tweet.

There IS an online community where any company can expect the cash register to ring the moment they establish a presence. It’s called e-bay.

But unlike social media, e-commerce and auction sites won’t allow an organization to engage with its customers, learn from them, build loyalty, and all of the things that social media can do that we haven’t thought of yet!

Thanks to my colleague Jeff Tidyman of eNR Services  for suggesting this topic. End of rant and enough blogging for today… I’ve got to go check on how my eBay auctions are doing. That’s where the big money is.

Media Of Futures Past

In 2010 there will be no universally-watched media entity in the US that can influence everything citizens do. No, I’m not referring to Oprah’s recent decision to end her show. I’m saying that my favorite films and other media of the 1980s got it wrong!
 
Throughout the Eighties and into the Nineties, films – particularly in the action genre – portrayed life 25 or so years in the future (that would be NOW) as dystopian societies where a single media outlet controlled everything. Often times, it controlled the government and military.

The All-Powerful ICS Network's Top Show: The Running Man

My favorite example is The Running Man with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Cue the Don LaFontaine deep voice-over: In a world where Arnold is accused of crime he didn’t commit, he must play a deadly game live on the world’s most popular TV game show hosted by the evil and scene-stealing Killian (Richard Dawson). It’s a great view of an oppressed society obsessed with media. We see criminals executed live on TV for big ratings and gems like “court-appointed publicity agents”. I love that last part!

These films were supposed to take place in the future but sure still looked like the 80s as far as synthesizer music, clothes, and smoking habits.

 

Apple's 1984 Superbowl Ad
Arnold Watches The Only News in Total Recall
The State-Run Media Is Called "The Mouth" In the 1982 Comics and 2005 Film V For Vendetta
The Core of T2's "Skynet" Which Gained Sentience Shortly After Going Online
Jonathan Pryce As A Media Mogul Bond Villian In Tomorrow Never Dies

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fast forward to the present or our past’s future, and we have moved in the opposite direction! Media today has been completely fragmented and splintered into millions of TV channels, online sites, blogs, audio programs, and more. Today’s citizen journalist has the same opportunity to reach an audience as “Killian” did in The Running Man. Better yet, that citizen does more than just broadcast to an audience; he can actually engage with the consumer.

Let’s not be too hard on the screen writers of the 70s and 80s; the Cold War and the rise of certain media outlets along with the distrust of big government would be hard themes not to tackle. We would not have paid to see a movie about the future with someone updating their Facebook page.

The Greatest Thanksgiving PR Stunt of All Time: WKRP

"As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly."

Several years ago, I had the privilege of meeting Gordon Jump, aka Arthur “Big Guy” Carlson of WKRP in Cincinnati. He was passing through town on a PR tour for Maytag (he was the Maytag Repairman in the commercial campaign at the time) and did a live studio interview at the radio station I was programming.
 
What a pro! Mr. Jump was a PR person’s AND a media outlet’s perfect interviewee: he promoted the Maytag event for which he was the guest, but also was open to reminiscing about his WKRP glory days. It was near Thanksgiving, so he gave us his best on-air recreation of his classic quote from the WKRP turkey massacre episode. He was thankful to have had such a good run and to still be acting and portraying fun characters.
 
In honor of the late Mr. Jump’s spirit of thankfulness for lasting in his chosen industry, here’s my list of just a few of the PR industry folks who I am thankful for having worked with on some level recently:

@kstrumpf

@sjlz

@Hopes_BTW

@ArJay_Hayes

@payne_me

@jtidyman

@gojohnab

@tressalynne

@eckertt

@ThePRDoc

@stephkrol

@amylitt

@ginidietrich

@ShowhomesThomas

@PeterHimler

@9inchmarketing

@AlbertMaruggi

@ajeffrey1

@ggetto

@Chad_Cohen

@kdpaine

@sjshannon

@gail_nelson
 
Thanks Tweeps!
-Jack

 
Oh the humanity!
-Les Nessman, WKRP news

Pitching Bloggers

I’ve been working on a research project for the past few weeks regarding the pitching of bloggers. I’m reaching out to thousands of bloggers on behalf of the MatchPoint application for PR pros to gauge their interest in receiving pitches, news, notes, and social media news releases from MatchPoint’s clients.

The team that developed MatchPoint decided (thankfully!) to make it an Opt-In service and ask bloggers’ permission to provide the bloggers’ email addresses to MatchPoint’s clients. Many bloggers have been rightfully outing PR people for spamming when they use old school databases that mass-blast PR Spam from their media lists.

 
Of those bloggers with whom I spoke:

•12% expressed not wanting to have their email address visible to PR people nor wanted to receive pitches via email

•52% said they would be open to emails from PR, BUT ONLY if the pitch was exactly on point, relevant to their blog, or from a PR person who has obviously read their blog posts

•36% said they would opt in to receive PR emails and in fact rarely get any PR pitches
 
I think that last point is most significant. There are many bloggers who have a huge appetite for your news content! It’s notable that this is not an obscure group of bloggers; all were in the top 100,000 blogs by traffic. Most likely, that last group of bloggers is not in most PR Spam databases.

So go get ’em! Just be sure you know each blogger’s preferred method of receiving pitches whether it’s email, via their blog, DM, or carrier pigeon. Also make sure your content is relevant to what they typically write.

New Header Design

I want to take just a moment to thank my friend Stan Phelps for designing a new header pic for this blog. Stan is the EVP at Synergy Events who I met at the recent PRSA conference in San Diego. He did a nice job of taking my probably poorly described idea of what I was trying to do on this blog and made it look exactly like it did in my head!
 
You should also check out Stan’s marketing blog and be sure to ask him about “Marketing Lagniappe”!

 

PRSA 2009 Conference in San Diego – Tweetup Roundup

 
There are several Tweetups planned during the PRSA Conference in San Diego. The links below will take you to the RSVP site for each. They are all great opportunities to network and engage others in the industry!


Shonali’s Tweetup
Basic
410 10th Ave
Saturday Nov 7, 5-7pm
http://twtvite.com/okxl1p 


San Diego Media & PR Tweetup
Vin de Syrah
901 5th Ave
Sunday Nov 8, 6-9pm
http://twtvite.com/chjl0t/1


PRSA Tweetup
Tin Fish
170 6th Ave
Monday Nov 9, 7:30-8:30pm
http://tweetvite.com/event/PRSA09Tweetup 
Hosted by PRSA Tech Section!


Monday Night Tweetup
Basic
410 10th Ave
Monday Nov 9, 8-10pm
http://twtvite.com/38n3yy 
Sponsored by Mashable, PitchEngine, Technorati, and Comet Branding

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I’ll add to this list as more are organized. Please email me at jmonson@enr-corp.com or Tweet me @jackmonson if you have any to add!