Would you like to meet us? Email info@marchpr.com.
In this day and age of the distracted consumer, I thought advertising was having to work harder and be more clever to engage customers.
Apparently not in McDonald’s case!
At least the PR people seem to have thought about it a bit and gone with associating smoothies and McDonald’s healthy ingredients with the Games through various campaigns…
Bloom Energy launched today to much fanfare and business celebrity attendance…Arnold Schwarzenegger, Colin Powell, Larry Page were all their amongst others.
Bloom Energy produce tiny fuel cells, each about the size of a brick, that convert fuel into electricity. They are basically filled with sand, can convert fuel at twice the rate of legacy technologies, are situated onsite so avoid distribution losses and are also capable of energy generation and storage.
Sounds too good to be true doesn’t it?
One fuel cell produces 25 watts, and a stack would be enough to power an average U.S. home, and with the fuel source incorporated would create a unit the size of a fridge.
Here’s an animation explaining how it works..
Cost is the big issue for now. At $700K per Bloom Box, households are hardly going to flood forward. However, founder KR Sridhar reckons they will be down to $3K within a 5-10 year timeframe and that there will be one in every US home.
Ebay, as well as Google and Walmart, have been testing them and they claim to have saved $100K in fuel costs in the last 9 months.
So I hope its good and true!
Is this finally a viable energy alternative?
Every year, I look forward to Boston Restaurant Week, as it’s a great chance to try the exciting eateries Boston has to offer at a lower cost. Typically offered twice a year, the winter promotions will be taking place from March 14-19 and March 21-26, 2010. Restaurants offer prix fixe menus for both lunch and dinner. Two course lunches cost only $15.10, while three course lunches cost $20.10 and three course dinners cost $33.10. Being an avid food and wine connoisseur, I simply cannot pass up these offers!
As a public relations professional, I enjoy examining how Restaurant Week is promoted to the community. Since the social media boom, Twitter and Facebook have become the mediums of choice for restaurants to promote their menus and offerings. Through social media, companies are able to reach a wider audience to generate business, not having to rely on word of mouth alone. Since most consumers spend hours behind the computer, social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook make it easy to interact with the restaurants and chefs to find out which Restaurant Week menu suits them best.
So which Restaurant Week destination will you pick? Visit the Insider’s Guide to browse menus by Boston neighborhood.
After hearing about this supposed “next big thing” called Chatroulette on the radio the other morning, I had to check it out for myself. Chatroulette is a brand new service for one-on-one text-, webcam- and microphone-based chat with people around the world. The site was created just a few months ago by Russian teenager, Andrey Ternovskiy. A recent New York Times article calls it surreal, unnerving, and distasteful, yet, at the same time, enthralling.
Though not brave enough to try the latest fad myself, it’s not hard to gather what happens. Essentially, you’re thrown into a game in which the site scans the thousands of newcomers joining each day for you to chat with. Don’t like your result? Just hit next and you move on to the next stranger. Don’t worry though, you won’t be chatting by just going to the URL, you have to first click “play.”
The user interface (UI) is quite simple with just a chat box and a video screen for yourself and your partner with boxes that appear as you scroll over, allowing you to select if you would like to receive video or not. You can see in the top right hand corner that when I went to the site, there were already some 20,000 people using it at that moment all over the world.
While this may be an interesting way for people to generate conversations out of thin air, I can’t help but think that many users are in it for the “shock and awe” factor, especially with several sources saying “nudity is hard to avoid.” So, with that in mind, perhaps it’s just shockingly awful. And while inappropriate usage is specifically not tolerated, as outlined in Chatroulette’s terms of service (below), one has to wonder how much good that one bullet point actually does. Additionally, with many Chatroulette episodes now being broadcast on YouTube, does this raise greater privacy concerns? …but what is privacy these days anyway, besides harder and harder to protect and maintain?
It will be interesting to see how this grows, evolves, or dies over the next few weeks, months, years… but for now, if you’re brave enough, play the game and let me know how you fair.
Mistakes get made when the pace of the day-to-day reaches uncomfortable speeds and today is no different than 10 years ago in terms of blow back. Case in point, I offer last week’s Computerworld slam on a disgraced former contributor:
Editor’s note: The person quoted in this story as “Craig Barth” is actually Randall C. Kennedy, an InfoWorld contributor. Kennedy, who presented himself as the CTO of Devil Mountain Software, no longer works at InfoWorld. Given that he disguised his identity to Computerworld and a number of other publications, the credibility of Kennedy’s statements is called into question. Rather than simply remove stories in which he is quoted, we have left them online so readers can weigh his data and conclusions for themselves.
Weather this was a misguided public relations tactic or not is unclear and not really the point. Transparency is the point and as a case study into why this is important I present the following.
Further media reports highlight the importance of strategic communications thinking before engaging publics (or stakeholders in any form). Here is some good reading by well respected journalists to highlight this point (note the reader participation of these articles).
Wall Street Journal’s Nick Wingfield, February 22, 2010
IT Business Edge’s Don Tennant, February 22, 2010
Tom’s Hardwar’s Tom Yam, February 22, 2010
ZDNet’s Larry Dignan, February 21, 2010
eWEEK’s Nicholas Kolakowski, February 20, 2010
Is social media creating problems with interpersonal communications? After reading an article in Network World today, I’m beginning to wonder.
According to research conducted by UK- based discount code website, MyVoucherCodes, 25% of women surveyed would dump their partner for Facebook flirting, while 19% of the men polled would do the same. But what counts as “Facebook flirting?” Tending to a cute guy’s sheep in FarmVille? Hooking a lady friend up with some ammo in Mafia Wars?
And let’s not forget about Twitter too. 22% of women and 17% of men would kick their partner to the curb for sending saucy messages to their Tweethearts.
The research also concluded that a majority of Brits found flirting via email to be worse than explicit text messages, flirty Facebooking or tacky tweeting.
As if men and women didn’t have enough problems to worry about in a relationship, now we have to worry about crossing the “cheating” barriers with social media. Just be cautious and practice safe social networking! (That doesn’t mean hacking in to your boyfriend’s Facebook account to see who he’s poked recently.)
If you follow PR professionals on Twitter, you have probably seen a ton of tweets this week about “HAPPO.” HAPPO, which stands for Help a PR Pro Out, is an event taking place on Twitter today from 11 a.m. – 3 p.m. EST. The main goal of this event is to connect job seekers with companies and agencies looking for talented PR pros.
If you are a job seeker, put together a creative blog post, pitching yourself to prospective employers and share it on Twitter by using the hashtag #HAPPO. Other PR pros that see your tweet will help you out by retweeting and connecting you with companies that are a good fit for you.
For employers looking for their next PR rockstar, you can tweet your job openings using the hashtag #HAPPO along with a regional hashtag. HAPPO will spread the word throughout the community and help you find the perfect match for your opening.
I think HAPPO is a great idea and it’s encouraging to see that people in the PR industry are willing to help each other out. In today’s economy, it is even more difficult to find your dream job and this event is the perfect way to bring people together.
March PR is currently looking for a talented account executive with 2-3 years of tech PR agency experience. We will be keeping an eye out today for HAPPO tweets, maybe it will help us find the newest member of our team! If you are interested in finding out more about our position, email Liz@Marchpr.com.
As I noted in my post last week, To Blog or Not To Blog? Join The Conversation!, actively participating in social media, like blogging, is hard work that takes time and resources. And, guess what? Twitter is no different.
In a recent Wall Street Journal article, How to Channel Your Twitter Voice, Diana Ransom states this perfectly, noting that “for all the benefits social networking delivers — simple, inexpensive and viral — it’s also time consuming. And if you’re not prepared to devote a sizable portion of your day, or, at least, ask an employee to step up, aimlessly participating in social networks can quickly become deflating.”
According to some recent data from comScore, 75 million people visited Twitter in January of this year. So with all those people potentially listening to what you have to say, wouldn’t it be best to tweet wisely?
So, assuming you have the time to devote to social networks, like Twitter, how should you proceed? Diana Ransom notes that companies embarking on this venture should:
Her points about listening and producing content go hand-in-hand with what I’ve said many times – the key to social media is balancing observation with participation. How will you know what to say if you’re not listening to what your key markets, fellow industry members, and consumers are saying and looking for? But once you’ve established your niche, not trying to be everything to everyone, and know what to contribute, making your contributions interactive by adding links, pictures, or video has shown to generate more of a following.
Many more helpful articles about how best to use Twitter may be found on our Social Media Tool Academy page, so check it out and start tweeting!
The last few years of telecoms evolution has seen the rise of the App Store, the promise of faster networks, a massive increase in mobile broadband use, the launch of sophisticated services like mobile TV and location-based services (LBS), and a vast proliferation of ’smart’ devices to better consume them. After a lot of predictions and previews, it now seems like all of these recent developments might come together to really start impacting the future of the communications industry.
The Mobile World Congress conference has become the industry’s go-to platform to announce and discuss the biggest trends in the industry. This year’s event, and some of the lead-up announcements to it, provided many indicators that the communications industry is indeed at the doorstep of some very significant changes that will affect not just the communications industry but also broader ideas of general consumer behavior.
Thinking about all these new technologies gets my imagination going. Here are some of the bigger things I find promising for how the mobile industry is evolving:
1.) Verizon & Skype: Verizon will soon release an application with Skype to allow mobile VoIP calling. With it, mobile users can make free calls to other Skype users using their data plans and not using up voice plan minutes. They can also use standard Skype Out calling rates to make international calls, again simply by using the data plan. The quality over Skype is pretty decent, so I’m forced to wonder: just what would keep people subscribing to traditional voice services? More people, especially in younger generations, are going mobile phone-only. My friend’s company, although it is relatively small, recently cancelled all of their land line services and bought all of their employees iPhones instead. There are also still plenty of rules about how voice plan minutes get used when calling ‘inside’ a network (ie, an AT&T subscriber can’t call their friend with Verizon service without using their minutes). If everyone starts using Skype, though, this whole model becomes increasingly irrelevant. This is hugely significant for service providers. Telecoms’ bread and butter for as long as they’ve been around has been voice service. Now they are starting to say it’s not nearly as necessary as it once was. This is not just a novel technology move, this will really shift the telecoms business model towards a new dynamic.
2.) 4G mobile and advanced fixed-line networks: Significantly faster mobile broadband speeds will be a true reality before the year is out. 4G/LTE deployments by TeliaSonera, Verizon Wireless, MetroPCS, NTT DoCoMo and AT&T will begin delivering speeds up to 6x faster than current 3G networks. These are the type of speeds that will make things like live mobile TV, on demand video streaming and p2p content sharing actually something you might want to do with your phone. No more jittery, low-quality YouTube home videos. These are speeds capable of streaming HD movies. Additionally, Google’s announcement it will build trial fiber optic networks to demonstrate the possibilities of super high speed broadband, and the FCC’s own intentions to push for higher speed connections, will bring further innovations to market in the coming years.
3.) Symbian 3 and content consumption: This one really got my imagination going. The latest version of the World’s most popular mobile operating system platform (no, the iPhone hasn’t officially taken over the World just yet…) will, among other interesting features, provide HDMI support. In short: this is awesome. Throw out your Blu-Ray player and ditch the jumble of ethernet and AV cables you use to hook your laptop up to your TV. With the reality of 4G mobile network speeds fast enough to stream HD videos over the air, peoples’ behavior for how they consume content and the devices they use to do so will change. Additionally, the WAC initiative from 24 of the world’s largest service providers aims to create a standard way for content companies like Paramount or distributors like Netflix and Hulu let consumers buy applications on any phone or network to stream HD movies over mobile devices. All of a sudden, who needs a Blu-Ray player? Or a DVD player? Or a subscription HBO TV service? Or even a DVR when you can just pull your phone out of your pocket, search for your favorite movie or TV show and plug the phone in to your TV?
There’s plenty of work to be done to make all this actually happen, but it’s not hard to imagine these types of situations becoming reality in the next few years. With all of this in the works, just imagine where the industry will be by 2020. How do you see your life changing as a result of these technological breakthroughs?
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of presenting at Emerson College in Professor Julie Lellis’ Principles of Public Relations classes. My chat focused on how I fell into a PR career, and the steps I took to get here. I also provided a history of March Communications and tactics behind successful client campaigns.
The students were particularly interested in my discussion on social media, because it’s something we live and breathe every day. I asked the students who has a Twitter or Facebook page and everyone raised their hand. I went into detail about how March incorporates social media into each PR campaign, which they all found fascinating!
I spoke at both the noon and 6 pm classes and made a mental note of my favorite question from each class. One student at noon asked me how I made the transition from makeup/beauty PR in Manhattan to tech PR in Boston. I explained to her that I was looking for new challenges to bring the PR tactics I’ve learned throughout my various internships and undergrad studies to another level.
My favorite question from the 6 pm class came from a student in the back of the room. ”What do you think is the next social media tool after Facebook?” I started to laugh because I didn’t have an answer. We brainstormed as a class for a few minutes and came up with the same answer… no answer! Such a great question, but only time will tell.
Thanks again to Emerson for providing me with this opportunity! I love sharing my experiences with talented and promising students.
