Brandscuratecool Sponsorships allow companies to associate themselves with brands deemed complimentary or with a better connection to a target audience. This marketing technique is an art and a science. Association by sponsorship or other means can come off ham-fisted or make it tough to stand out and make an impact.

MINI and Urban Outfitters take a new approach to associating themselves with complimentary brands – serving as curator instead of sponsor.

MINI’s Custom Paint Shop first tapped into its customers’ creativity. This mass customization tool has helped MINI become the car of choice for the creative class and in turn fueled MINI Space.

”MINI Space is an urban initiative by MINI. It's about taking part in creative projects, competitions, events and parties - about getting involved in "Creative Use of Space". >snip< In a nutshell, this website is a hub for connecting creative people, events and projects!

Anyone see a car reference in that quote? This is not a thinly-veiled site designed to get you to buy more MINI. This is a site bringing value to an audience much broader than MINI customers. You’ll see a similar theme at the Urban Outfitters blog.

UO gets local by detailing the cultural scene in local markets. Take Chicago. You can get a quick read on local music,   design and online events of note.

Curating is a different kind of investment for a brand. While a sponsorship can buy access and build awareness, brand curating earns these things while focusing on loyalty. It’s a lot of work. But brands like Urban Outfitters and MINI know this investment pays dividends when you are trying to do more than make a sale.

tags | Urban Outfitters | MINI | marketing | branding | brand

2) How long will it take my marketing to work? | Duct Tape Marketing”I know you need customers, I know you need more business, but marketing is not an event, it’s a business long practice. >snip< Done properly, it is likely going to take six months to a year for you to see the kind of long term momentum that you want.”

3) Are you expecting too much from your marketing? | Drew’s Marketing MinuteDrew builds on John Jantsch’s riff and adds: “If you're not in it for the long haul, you probably shouldn't do it at all.”

4) Social Media is Organic | The Daily LarkDell’s Andy Lark on launching a blog: “success correlates closely with the willingness of the communicators to take risk and embrace the spirit of the medium. And that means letting go.”

Like a motorway. uploaded by CMP73tags | PR OpenMic | social media | marketing

Jeremy Pepper snapped us out of our navel gazing recently with a well-deserved question. “Can Social Media Do What It Claims?”

One of the more exciting opportunities for social media is how it can enable non-profit organizations to boost awareness and support for their causes with powerful stories. Rather than a .org telling you how your support will help someone, the very people you are helping can show you.

So when I saw Tara Met Blog’s request via Peter Shankman’s HARO service, I was excited to participate in a project that will help answer Pepper’s question.

What Do You Stand For?
According to Tara: "My colleagues and I came up with the idea of showing a bunch of images of people holding signs that say why they are standing up to cancer…and why they are tired of this disease affecting their life and taking life. Thus, showing how we are all affected by cancer. After all, no one is immune to the effects."

To be clear, all I did is take a picture telling my story and send it in. The video below is the powerful result of Tara’s efforts.

This is one part of an effort for Stand Up To Cancer (SUTC) that culminates with a telethon on September 5th. You can get involved here. SU2C does not answer Jeremy’s question yet, but I suspect they’ll be able to show that social media can move the needle.

tags | SU2C | Stand Up To Cancer | social media | consumer-generated media

Soul_men This is being posted here while Blogger holds the Bad Pitch blog hostage.

I'll spare you the explanation of why I posted this.

But I would like to extend my sympathies  to the families of Bernie Mac and Issac Hayes.

Subject: Is Samuel Jackson Next? Death Comes in Threes…

From: Daryl Toor
Date: August 10, 2008 9:23:38 PM EDT

Yesterday, it was Bernie Mac. Today it was Isaac Hayes. Could Samuel Jackson be next?

Daryl Toor, president of Attention!, an Atlanta based publicity firm, a former music reviewer and record company executive notes:

"This photograph, taken from Isaac Hayes' official site is as eerie as the time I read a newspaper obituary on its own obituary writer…."

Daryl Toor
CEO & Chief Awareness Officer
email, phone
agency URL

tags | public relations | PR | media relations | media | good pitch | bad pitch | bad pitch blog

Wtf_google_1

Last week there was a snafu at Blogger and a robot mistakenly identified a lot of blogs as being spam. Blogger claims to have fixed that problem.

Then on Monday, the Bad Pitch blog was locked out. Nearly a week later, we’re still waiting to get access. Somehow it’s fitting I’m alerting you via my Typepad blog.

PR Week Competition
One of the first posts we need to publish will congratulate Vove Nation for their win in the PR Week blog competition. Both of our blogs had more votes than anyone in the first round of competition (A and B) so far. It's hard to be anything but thankful for all of the folks who voted for us. And losing to folks like Josh Hallett and Mike Manuel at Voce Nation is easy to accept.

Nothing is Free
It’s hard being patient waiting for a human at Blogger to correct a robot’s mistake. And it’s been impossible for me to find a phone number or email to an actual Blogger employee. In the meantime, Blogger has our data…our posts, our code – everything.

Find us on Facebook
While we figure out our next move, we created a fan page for the Bad Pitch blog on Facebook to keep in touch with folks.

tags | public relations | PR | media relations | media | bad pitch blog

2011_trendspotting Richard Laermer’s 12th book* is, to quote Nettie Hartsock, “a decadent read.”

The book is also now 100 percent FREE as Laermer and McGraw-Hill are offering full access to the book for gratis.

“The World is Flat” author Thomas Friedman started giving his book away recently in iPod-friendly audio installments as a way to promote his next book.

These unconventional examples of open-source publishing are just one facet of the new and creative approaches being taken to promote books today.

Serialization of Content
One of the trends Laermer details in this 300-page, fast read is serialization. Technology like iTunes and TiVo are making content more fluid to keep up with our time-starved attention spans.

Even his book reads more like a blog with 77 chapters and plenty of sidebars. You can dive in and out based in your interests.

One of the reasons I most enjoyed 2011 is that I did not agree with everything Laermer suggests in his book.**

That said he does provide insight into how society, religion, media, technology and even language/communication skills are all changing. More than just trends, Laermer gets the reader to think about what it all means. 2011 looks towards a bigger, more important picture. You may see it differently, but this book helps you expand your focus.

Bottom Line?
As my cover shot shows, 2011 is a good summer read. You should check it out…and not just because it’s free.

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*Full Disclosure: I write the Bad Pitch blog with Richard Laermer and he gave me a review copy to read.

** Among the items I disagree with in the book includes Laermer’s posit that McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It” campaign was a failure. For different reasons, I think it was a success. The sing-song audio branding used with the I’m Lovin’ It tagline helped McDonald’s spend less on advertising as those ads were more effective.

tags | trend | marketing | book | branding | 2011 | Richard Laermer

There is a lot of information here, but you get the idea pretty quickly. And ultimately this can become a poster to raise awareness or even a reference of sorts.

For more on visual thinking, I recommend Information Aesthetics for a left brain perspective and Post Secret for some right brain inspiration.

Blogcompetition_par1a50d3 Keith O'Brien just announced a PR Week best blog competition that is making headlines.

PR Week is pitting 32 industry blogs against each other -- tournament style.

Vote for the Bad Pitch blog. Click here, then scroll down to the four graphs/charts and click on Bad Pitch blog until it stays bold – you can actually see your vote getting counted. And please do so before end of day, Tuesday, August 5th.

Bad Pitch Blog is my other blog. It focuses solely on media relations and even managed to win a Bronze Anvil award of commendation from PRSA recently.

And if the contest seems a little high school in nature, keep in mind this is back to school season. This video clip best captures how I view the competition.

tags | public relations | PR | media relations | media | good pitch | bad pitch | bad pitch blog | PRWeek

Cardcatalog From the “kids get off my lawn!” department:

It bugs me when people treat social media as a final destination. Social media is part of a circuit that’s completed through personal interactions. Terms like lifestreaming imply that someone’s whole life is online. And, well, it’s not.

This adds to my growing concern around online’s unintentional negative impact. Take reading for example. Part of my attachment to print media is nostalgic. And I realize that the newspaper industry’s failure to evolve its business model is bringing its current pains.

But Andy Lark points us to an article noting how we read can impact our critical thinking.

Back to my nostalgia, and the point of this post…at the Mercantile Library’s First Annual Cincinnati Blogger convention, I spoke with the library’s Executive Director, Albert Pyle, about the demise of the card catalog.

While computer tracking of the books is more efficient, card catalogs offer the reader a form of discovery and I’m told sometimes contain more information about each book than most library computer systems.

The Mercantile Library cannot afford to keep its card catalog as up to date as they would like. And as a result Pyle levels a challenge to anyone that feels passionate about the card catalog system. “If you like it so much, then use it.” Point taken.

As we lose tactile experiences like the card catalog and print media, do we lose (discovery, an extra level of information) as much as we gain (efficiency, accuracy)? Or am I just showing my age?

Card Catalog – Use it or lose it uploaded by prblog
tags | public relations | PR | media

Royjohnmacworld2 “I heard the news today, oh boy…”

PimpMyNews is a new, free service allowing you to hear the latest news from your personally selected mix of news sources and blogs. Anyone with an MP3 player and Internet access can use it. CEO John Atkinson will be speaking at the next Cincinnati Social Media Breakfast* so we did a quick Q&A with him to give some background on the event’s special guest.

1) PimpMyNews is a great name and service. What’s the inspiration behind each?
My Co-founder Roy Georgia and I used to always struggle to keep up with news and current events (editor’s note: John and Roy are pictured here to the right and left respectively). Before starting PimpMyNews, we were both "road warriors" in our previous jobs and we could never find the time to read newspapers, or to tune into scheduled TV or radio news broadcasts.

Using the Internet for news and blogs required us to be at computers- searching, sifting and reading. So, we came up with the idea of a service that would automatically find breaking stories from your favorite sources on the Internet and read them to you wherever you happen to be - kind of like TiVo for news and blogs.

Our users say that the strongest benefit is the "productivity benefit" of being able to get current on their favorite news and blogs by listening on-the-go, while they do other things like, drive, workout, ride the train and more.

After considering over 200 different names, we chose "PimpMyNews" because we feel that it conveys the "personalized news" aspect of the service - and because it seems to get people's attention ;)

2) How do you determine which news sources you cover?
We pride ourselves on PimpMyNews being a source of solid, trusted and obscure news and blog content.

There are so many news and blog sites out there that "information overload" is a real issue. Technorati reports that it tracks over 112 million blogs world-wide. To arrive at the roughly 1,200 sources we have in PimpMyNews, we reviewed tens of thousands of the world's most popular blogs and categorized the blogs that passed our editorial review into 59 unique categories.

So whether you're interested in Technology, Politics, Business, Sports, Entertainment or something else, there's a good chance you'll find it on PimpMyNews. We also receive a lot of suggestions from users. Anyone can suggest a blog by emailing Feeds AT PimpMyNews DOT com.

3) What's next for PimpMyNews? Scoble dubbed PimpMyNews as one of the best iPhone apps prior to the 3G release. Any plans to offer PimpMyNews as an application?
Because of the uniqueness of our service, we've received a lot of press, for which we're very thankful. Our current iPhone Web Application works on all iPhones and iPod Touch devices, including iPhone 3G. Anyone with a computer or an MP3 player can also use the service.

Our goal is to continually increase the mobile platforms we run on. In the near future, we'll be rolling out a native iPhone application that will be accessible through Apple's App Store, as well as applications for other mobile devices.

4) What do you think the news landscape will look like five years from now?
There's never been a more exciting time, or a more volatile time, in the news industry than right now. According to Pew Internet, nearly one-third of Americans now use the Internet for news. Ten years ago, only two percent of us used the Internet for news. The trend of people shifting from "traditional" news sources to "new media" sources will continue and accelerate. Personalized, mobile, social news is the new frontier, and we think that the smart phone explosion - sparked by the iPhone - will bring the market to a "tipping point" in the next couple of years.

Mobile "applications" (versus "sites") will instantly deliver the exact news you care about from thousands of sources - in the format you desire, no matter where you happen to be. Publishers who have great content and who embrace new digital distribution methods will thrive.

5) What are your personal favorite news sources? Same applies to gadgets (top 3 favorites).
I have the following sources in my PimpMyNews Playlist - I listen to them every day.

TechCrunch - A great source for news on Web 2.0 startups.
Mashable - I love their focus on social networking & social media.
Seth Godin - The world's best marketer

My number 1 favorite gadget is the iPhone - no surprise there. I'm curious about all of the alleged "iPhone-Killers" being rolled out by the wireless carriers. I'm also intrigued by the Amazon Kindle, but I haven't purchased one yet.
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*The Cincinnati Social Media Breakfast is SOLD OUT. However you can get on the waiting list by sending me an email.

Cross-posted to the Bad Pitch blog and Social Media Breakfast blog.
tags | John Atkinson | PimpMyNews | social media | media | news