Friday's Video Views

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The Newspaper, Alas

Here's one person's sobering look at (paper) newspapers' diminished presence in our lives.


(via Nextnik's YouTube channel)


Coupon Crazy

Groupon CEO Andrew Mason via TechCrunch's Evelyn Rusli




Social Talking (PR) Heads

Five dimensions of social media PR by Cohn & Wolfe's global digital president @chadlatz: (via @odwyerpr) Sounds good. Now, I ask, whether the world he describes actually permeates the agency? (FD: this blogger served as C&W U.S. media director from 1988-1993.)




And if one agency's social media methodologies and precepts weren't enough, Forbes CMO Network conducted a video skype call with Edelman's Dave Armano about "How Big Companies Do Social Media."




What's It Like to Work at Google?

One of my #2 son's roommates this summer is interning at Google. (He commutes from San Francisco to the Googleplex in Mountain View via one of Google's free shuttle buses.) Here are 10 behind-the-scenes videos giving a glimpse of what it's like to work there. This first follows: (via @lavrusik, @mashable)




Jon Stewart-->Paul Krugman-->Steve Jobs

After seeing Steve Jobs recently take the stage at one of Apple's fab confabs, songwriter Jonathan Mann decided to feature the business legend in an original song. (via @ParisLemon from @TechCrunch




Birthday Boy

And finally, Happy 5th birthday Pete Cashmore and his winning team at Mashable (#mashbday)

HAPPRO (Help a PR Pro Out)

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HARO founder Peter Shankman

I confess. I've never been a huge fan of HARO, the free crowd-sourced service for journalists seeking topic experts or human examples to validate their story's premise. While following its founder never ceases to disappoint, the service itself, in my mind has fallen short in its net benefit to the PR profession.

Let me explain. The primary difference between HARO and ProfNet, the Dean Forbush-founded crowd-sourced service for journalists seeking experts (only), can be found in their business models.

ProfNet, owned by PR Newswire, makes its money through (pricey) paid subscriptions, while HARO is ad-supported. Every emailed HARO distribution opens with a cutely worded text ad promoting some eclectic product or service, often aimed at PR pros.

Anyone, just anyone, can freely register to receive HARO and respond to its reporters' story queries. While ProfNet's subscription model naturally attracts PR professionals with budgets for such things. BTW, ProfNet's name comes from its first (exclusive) user set -- in-house communications pros at academic institutions who'd mine their professorial ranks for the expertise sought.

By opening up its service to any Tom, Dick or Harry, HARO may broaden the size of the crowd (a good thing), but it also increases the likelihood of superfluous replies arriving in journalists' e-mailboxes from laypersons and PR-wannabes. I'm not saying that PR people are immune to sending reporters such SPAM, but the likelihood certainly is greater with lay audiences.

This model, in my mind, hurts the PR profession, which presumably knows more about deciphering journalists' true editorial intent, and can offer up a more relevant expert. Given HARO's democratic approach, PR pros must also compete for reporters' shrinking bandwidth with small business owners, mothers, and anyone else who fashions him or herself an expert.

That said, this week we learn that HARO's new owner, Vocus, no stranger to PR spam, will introduce a subscription-based HARO as a complement to the free service. I like this idea. Though HARO founder Peter Shankman quickly sought to clarify the news with these comments here.

If Vocus were smart, it would make the paid service for journalists seeking real experts, and the free service for journalists seeking human examples. For example, here's one from today for the free version:

Query:

"I am writing a piece on people who, in mid-career, are either
forced or choose to make a dramatic shift in career. I am
interested in how they overcame doubts and fears, and what it
took to succeed in a wholly different line of work."

And here's another from today, a candidate for the paid service:

"I'm reviewing the most recent audit of a tribal Temporary
Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program that has had
numerous financial accountability problems with state and federal
money in the past, and appears to have some again. I'm looking
for an expert source with a government audit background willing
to give this audit report a look..."

Many reporters' queries could apply to both sets of crowds. Whatever direction Vocus takes HARO, hopefully with Mr. Shankman's blessing, the model of reporters crowdsourcing experts is clearly a sound one and should evolve as the number journalists explodes. Let's keep an eye on it.

Full-Disclosure Filibuster

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Sen. McConnell (R-KY), Chief Obstructionist

There was a time when the PR industry took it on the chin for its supposed lack of transparency. Specifically, groups like PR Watch and others chastised our brethren for failing to disclose who's paying for the hand-out video picked up and used in broadcast and cable news programming.

It got so bad that hearings were held on Capitol Hill to ferret out the perpetrators of this hoodwinking of the American people. I wrote about it at the time, and followed up with a second post talking about how more and more digital marketers think it's cool to create edgy (and virally aspirant) video without identifying the sponsor.

This practice is wrong, if not downright deceptive. Yet, here we are today confronting a much more sinister threat to full disclosure, brought about by the most conservative Supreme Court in decades. The GOP has threatened to filibuster a decidedly consumer-friendly legislative effort that will simply require political advertising to reveal its funders. Sure sounds like a good idea, right? Here's what our President had to say:

"You'd think that making these reforms would be a matter of common sense, particularly since they primarily involve just making sure that folks who are financing these ads are disclosed, so that the American people can make up their own minds," Obama said. "Nobody is saying you can't run the ads; just make sure the people know who in fact is behind financing the ads."

Don't you want to know, or have the right to know, that Exxon-Mobil has underwritten the ad campaign to re-elect Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), a notorious climate warming-denier?

Yet, for whatever reason, there's no appreciable public outrage. If there is, it is sadly diffused or muddled across this atomized media landscape. As a result, a most worthy piece of legislation may just fail at the hands of the Party that puts the replenishment of their own financial coffers and their re-election above the interests of the American people. Shame on us for letting it happen.

Friday's Video Views

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Apple on the Skewer

As if Taiwanese video re-enactment of Al Gore's alleged trysted massage wasn't enough, we now have an animated take on six months' worth of foibles by everyone's favorite Cupertino-based company (h/t The Next Web):




Flipped Out

While we're talking Apple, the launch of this week's latest and greatest tech product generated so much buzz that the company's servers crashed leaving legions of early adopters in the lurch (and more than a bit pi**ed off):




Courting Influence

My buddy Chris Abraham sent me a link to his company's newest promo video in which "the importance of being influential" reigns supreme among his PR staff.




Twitter Moods

And lastly, our friends at Mashable tweeted this video, which cleverly "shows the mood in the U.S., as inferred using over 300 million tweets, over the course of the day. The maps are represented using density-preserving cartograms." More here.

PopScreen...please

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Who among us still doesn't get that digital video rules when it comes to gaining pubic traction for a client's product, service or POV? Be it HTML-5 or Flash, aren't all the plugged-in PR/marketing trendsters touting the persuasive powers of moving images to get the job done?

And who can keep track of the volume of original content filling the video-streaming and hosting channels from YouTube to UStream to Blip.TV to Vimeo? (If you do want to keep abreast of the burgeoning digital video space, follow my buddy Andy Plesser's video blog at Beet.TV.)

Yesterday, eMarketer analyst Paul Verna posted a piece on the growth of video as a marketing tool, especially among retailers:

"Recent studies have shown that growing numbers of retailers are adding video capabilities to their sites. Surveys of Fortune 500 companies also indicate a broad-scale increase in the use of video for marketing purposes. In this sense, video has gone from a luxury to a near necessity for companies seeking an edge in marketing their products."

Yet, I wonder how much video is produced that doesn't find any appreciable audience? How do those digital marketers make a video go viral? I mean don't you just love hearing industry colleagues touting their plans to create "viral videos" for their clients or prospects?  If only!

Even the Old Spice social media team didn't have the hubris to foresee or predict that their video-driven campaign would ultimately eclipse Obama and Susan Boyle in virality:

"The initiative resulted in more than the 180 videos, which generated n̶e̶a̶r̶l̶y̶ ̶5̶.̶9̶ ̶m̶i̶l̶l̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶v̶i̶e̶w̶s̶ "35 million video views in seven days" and 22,000 comments. As ClickZ notes, the final video in the series generated more than 2.5 million views and nearly 6,000 comments. Old Spice's YouTube channel was the most viewed last week and is now the third most subscribed channel ever, according to the source."

Now we hear of a site that claims it can predict a video's prospects for achieving viral immortality. It's called PopScreen and its getting props from all the right influencers. From SocialTimes:

"The site tracks over 10,000 online sources, including YouTube, Vimeo, 5min, FunnyOrDie, Dailymotion and more, and predicts which videos are going to become popular."

While the jury may be out for some on whether an algorithm can determine the online fate of video, the need for such a tool cannot be questioned. If only I had more faith in those claiming to have the secret sauce to video virality.

Master Curators

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I enjoy sharing with my Facebook friends and Twitter followers noteworthy items culled from the voluminous number that incessantly cross the screens of my iMac, MacBook and BB. In fact, the act of curation in and of itself has become a contentious topic in the context of assessing editors' changing roles in journalism's new digital order.

One British blogger had his fill of the debate with his post titled "Let's Stop this 'Curation is King' Crap Right Now" in which he wrote:

"Yes, curation is an important part of how information is disseminated online, but in a networked environment curation doesn’t belong to us. It belongs to the behaviour of a million internet users measured by an algorithm, and to the six degrees of separation in our social networks. We’re in there somewhere, like an Indian traffic policeman, but let’s once again not conflate the act with the platform."

I don't intend to feed the debate on whether curation is the new must-have skill set for editorial decisionmakers. After all, journalists have always made decisions on what merits sharing with their readers, viewers and listeners. It's when we're talking about aggregating and sharing other peoples' work that the debate can get surly.

Most of the posts and tweets I link-to or re-tweet tend to originate from the carefully curated list of people I follow on Twitter. For example, on Fridays I embed in this space a handful of notable videos discovered mostly via my Twitterstream during the previous week. In fact, Twitter is among the biggest driver of visits to YouTube.

But I want to get back to curation, and share some of my favorite content curators if you happen to work in the PR, media, technology or marketing space. They include:

Media ReDEFined's Jason Hirschorn

• Jason Hirschorn's Media ReDEFined, run by the former co-CEO of MySpace, Media ReDEFined is a daily compendium of coverage (weekends too) that captures the latest news in the media, entertainment and technology space, with a digital flair. (Follow via Twitter, email or elsewhere).

• Thomas Power, the chairman of UK-based Ecademy who keeps his finger on the pulse of the latest machinations in the worlds of social media and marketing. (via Twitter)

• Mediagazer, a relative newcomer to the media content aggregation scene, Mediagazer aspires to capture and share all things media. (via Twitter and the Web.)

• Mediaite, the brainchild of NBC legal analyst and former MSNBC GM Dan Abrams, this year-old site is chock full of original content from the likes of respected media watchers Rachel Sklar, Glynnis MacNicol and others, but also features links to others' media-centric content. (Via Twitter and the web.)



Mediaite's Dan Abrams

• Huffington Post - What list of content aggregators would be complete without the world's most visited weblog? Huffington Post has a number of channels one can follow, including a media channel edited by Daniel Shea. The site is ostensibly a combination of exclusive staff-written content, contributions from outside (unpaid) thought-leaders, and links to coverage from other outlets that its editorial curators deem post-worthy. (via Twitter, the web)

• Newser - Veteran journalist, Vanity Fair contributor and Rupert Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff started Newser as a means to put his curatorial imprint on the day's news (and the future of news display). The aggregation of stories, culled exclusively from other sources and his own musings, does not focus on the media or marketing beat per se, but the Newser "grid" usually has some editorial fare of interest to those in the biz. (via Twitter, the web)

Alltop's Guy Kawasaki

• Alltop, Guy Kawasaki's vasty rich (and holy kaw!) well of aggregated content, has something for everybody. One can follow voices in PR or social media, media, marketing or social media, or drill down for greater granularity, e.g., SEO or start-ups. (via Twitter (Guy Kawasaki) or Alltop or the web)

• Techmeme - For the tech set, there are numerous sites and feed that aggregate content. Perhaps the most prominent is Mediagazer sister sites Techmeme and TechmemeFH (for Firehose). (via twitter, Techmeme and TechmemeFH, and (via Twitter and the web)

Obviously, there are numerous other content curators and aggregators worth including in this rather random round-up. Please send along any that you feel offer value to the PR, media, marketing and social media communities. Thanks.

Friday Video Views

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What would this week's edition of Video Views be without this timely homage to the now immortalized iPhone 4 Antenna?

The iPhone Antenna Song




My buddy, Eric Schwartzman (quite the video impresario himself) captured some PR pundits' perspectives on LeBron. (Is anyone really thinking about LeBron any more?)

LeBron Lives On




As a natural follow-up to my previous post on the much-ballyhooed Aaron Sorkin film "The Social Network" (about the social network), the full trailer for the film (October release) bowed this week. Could the movie's website URL coincide with FB's 500 million user milestone?

Trailer Trash?




If you're considering a job at a mainstream media outlet, here's how one imagines your (social) media orientation will unfold:

Mainstream Media Orientation

Breaking: Apple Presser Friday

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Andy Grove

Steve Jobs

So the folks in Apple's beleaguered PR department seemed to have prevailed in convincing the powers-that-be to directly address the PR imbroglio catalyzed by Consumer Reports' thumbs down rating of the iPhone 4. Other than the company's super-controlled theatrical product launches, I can't remember Apple ever holding an old-fashioned presser. Can you?

The question I have is whether Apple's plan to submit to a live-tweeted public announcement this Friday at its headquarters, which will include, I assume, a (Steve Jobs?) Q&A with a potentially hostile (hand-selected?) group of reporters is the right antidote to put this (foreseen?) controversy to bed once and for all.

I'll always remember another iconic tech brand's handling of a similar PR peccadillo. The company was Intel, and the issue involved a flaw in its consumer-branded Pentium chip. The rumors of Pentium's problems started online in the geek-populated user groups, and soon migrated to EE Times, which piqued the interest of the late Steve Young, CNN's tech reporter. Young's TV News package gave the issue bona fide "crisis" status. (MSM coverage had a way of doing that.)

At first, Intel was in denial. Then, it contritely decided to offer those who could prove they had a flaw a refund, which caused an uproar (and a precipitous decline in its stock price.) It wasn't until Intel's esteemed CEO Andy Grove pronounced that the company will replace Pentium PCs -- no questions asked -- that life at the world's largest chipmaker, and its heretofore ascendant stock price, resumed normalcy.

So, Mr. Jobs, will you offer to replace -- no questions asked -- the 3 million+ iPhone 4's you've sold in the last 80 days? And if so, is it really necessary to face the media live in order to make this pronouncement? Couldn't you just post on the Apple website one of your famous, periodic missives that have invariably set tongues a-waggin'?

I recognize that a full recall is an enormously expensive proposition, but with Apple's market cap dropping by 8 percent following Consumer Report's caustic report, wouldn't this avenue be justified? And would any other solution, duct tape included, satisfy Apple-watchers? Even Consumer Reports has called for Apple to do the right thing.

The Search for the Relevant PR Pitch

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I found it ironic that the author of Groundswell, a book/movement/phenomenon that describes how ideas germinate from the ground up -- without top-down influence -- devoted space in his blog to the PR practice of pitching stories to influencers (e.g., "anyone with an audience") from the top down. The book posits:

"When consumers you've never met are rating your company s products in public forums with which you have no experience or influence, your company is vulnerable."

Could it be true that the art of engaging (and influencing) reporters to favorably portray one's clients' products, services or POVs remains valid in this socially driven day and age?

Of course it's true, but that wasn't the point of Josh Bernoff's post. Instead, he proposed a radical "new" idea to eliminate the "99% waste" in his and other influencers' e-mailboxes. He gave it the obligatory acronym: HIRPS for "Highly Relevant Pitching System," and proceeded to describe a closed system whereby journalists would list in detail what interested them editorially. PR peeps would then pay to gain access to this information and the right to contact the influencer within the system. What's more, pitches would be limited to 1200 characters and recipients would rate the quality of the overture.

Josh Bernoff

Mr. Bernoff even went so far as to share his idea with the folks at Cision, which, along with Vocus, dominate the media database management and distribution (and some would say PR spam) business. He reports that the idea was received favorably.

Kvetching about PR spam is nothing new. (Thank you, Chris Anderson.) I've written about it from this blog's nascent days and even went so far to co-develop with the team at eNR Services a proprietary system that also strived to eliminate PR spam.  In so doing, we hoped to revive the dying art of engaging journalists with viable story ideas, and hopefully restore the value PR pros bring to the media relations equation.

As for HIRPS, I'm not convinced that journalists will take the time, let alone see the ROI, in registering for the service. Sadly, a bi-product of their years of receiving misguided (if not inane) PR queries, plus the online proliferation of alternative story sources and story-parsing software, have lessened their perennial reliance on the outside PR professional for timely and credible information.

The platform we developed, named Matchpoint, doesn't rely on the benevolence of journalists to share their editorial proclivities.  It instead aggregates the journalists' bodies of work and matches the PR person's story query against it. The search results produce a list of journalists (and their contact info) whose editorial orientation is quite clear. What's more, the system allows the user to directly engage the journalist with a customizable pitch -- one reporter (or blogger) at a time -- and lets the journalist rate the sender/pitch.

Surprised to learn that Mr. Bernoff was not aware of this service, but glad to see his implied endorsement of the age-old and still valid practice of media relations (or rather, "influencer engagement").

Friday's Video Views

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Tooling around on the Mashable site this week, I stumbled cross a section called Mashable Battles in which the site's sociable editors pit two digital platforms, gadgets, smartphones, whatever, against one another. The latest battle asked readers to weigh in on the perennial leader in online video, YouTube, versus the upstart Hulu. Is this a PC vs. TV battle all over again?

Hulu Hoopla

Separately, but hardly unrelated, we found Hulu founder Jason Killar chatting it up with AllThingsD's Kara Swisher:




Leanback and Veg Out

But YouTube is not sitting still. This week it debuted Leanback in an effort to make one's online video viewing a better experience - no matter what the screeen. Here's the company's video clip about it:




Pass the Popcorn

Leanback didn't go unnoticed by Beet.TV, which grabbed the designer of the product's interface for a few bites.




Ubiquitous Check-In

Moving on, if you hadn't gotten your fill of FourSquare and Gowalla of late, here's a "location-based check-in app" for homebodies, GetGlue:





Etsy Anyone?

Finally, it appears the make-it-yourself e-commerce space is booming. Etsy is hiring and created a video to let everyone know:

"The Social Network" Campaign

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Facebook's user stats are astounding, and with each day, even the most diminutive details of the company's evolution make breathless copy via the real-time social eco-system known as Twitter.

Geesh. If only my clients without that social media "je ne sais quoi" could commandeer such robust attention! But then again, maybe my Twitter follow strategy is lopsidedly social and needs broadening to include those not so fervently obsessed with the machinations of Mr. Zuckerberg & company? (Do such Tweeps even exist?)

Today we find ourselves fully immersed in a media environment wherein Facebook, Twitter and perhaps, FourSquare reign ubiquitous. It begs the question: how could a film with the title "The Social Network," written by Aaron ("A Few Good Men," "The American President," "The West Wing," "Charlie Wilson's War," etc.) not be a boffo hit?

The film's marketers at SONY/Columbia Pictures, it would seem, would not have to do much to garner attention for the world's most discussed and dissected social phenomenon ever, let alone the company that's leading it. About a year ago, we were treated to a video clip of Mr. Sorkin outlining his vision for the film.

Then, three weeks ago, Columbia released the film's first trailer, which quickly rose to the top of the social media hierarchy...as a trend on Twitter.



Today, both Gizmodo and Mashable picked up on the film's second trailer.



Ironically, the one ad-supported channel wherein we will see zero advertising to support the film's October release is Facebook itself, or so reports the inimitable Kara Swisher of AllThingsD. SONY's PR guy explains:

“Facebook’s advertising guidelines don’t allow ads to reference the company unless Facebook has cooperated with the object of the ad,” said Steve Elzer, SVP of Media Relations for Sony (SNE) movie unit Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, in response to a BoomTown query. “So, we won’t be advertising there given these parameters.”

But then again, the film's reportedly less-than-flattering ("a conniving punk") portrayal of Mr. Zuckerberg, makes the policy more than a bit convenient for FB's founder and CEO. From Swisher's piece:

"Facebook PR honcho Elliot Schrage confirms that Facebook won’t be taking any advertising dollars from the Facebook movie. 'My understanding is that they asked us for our ad guidelines and decided not to advertise on us after receiving them,' he said. 'I don’t think they ever submitted ad copy for us to review.'"

No matter. The amount of expected Facebook user-generated and shared content about "The Social Network" will far and away trump whatever command-and-control ad campaign SONY can conjur up on the channel aimed at the half-billion users with more than a passing interest in the film's subject matter.

LeBron Links

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When last we visited the wide world of sports, it was to look at the world's most famous golfer and the PR machinations he undertook to minimize the hit on his reputation. I for one found it curious how Mr. Woods initially took to his own website as the sole (controlled?) means to deliver his message.

Ultimately, he acquiesced to (a journalist-free) on-camera appearance, and then, as the dust settled, a regular presser...prying reporters and all.

Flash forward to today as another of the sporting world's biggest stars prepares to make news that also carries extraordinary career implications. As with Tiger, every self-respecting journalist is clamoring to get ahead of this story, but unlike Tiger, the media spotlight is anything but harsh.

I'm talking LeBron, of course, and his decision -- expected tomorrow -- on the team (and city) for which he'll play for the foreseeable future. His flirtations are now over, as are the over-the-top overtures by many cities to land him. I love the chutzpah of New York's Mayor Mike as he launched a celeb-filled campaign and made a personal plea via YouTube to land LeBron in the Big Apple.



What interested this blogger most is the rumor that LeBron will forsake holding a formal press announcement, in effect bypassing the media filter, at least initially. Supposedly, he plans to opt instead to posting his decision on his new website, which his digital consiglieres are rushing to make ready as I pen this post.

No matter how Mr. James decides to break the news, it's ironic that he is one athlete who has thus far not embraced social media as a means for forging closer ties with his fans. Could this change in teams also usher in a new, more social LeBron? (Didn't he just join Twitter?) And what does the use of his own media channel to make news -- absent a crisis -- portend for relations between superstar athletes and sports journalists?

Update (July 7): LeBron to announce his next move -- the old fashioned way, via ESPN. Even so, one still has to be impressed by his ascendancy to 100,000+ followers on Twitter...with just one tweet.

Friday's Video Views

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This week's edition of Video Views looks at opinion journalism, Woot/Amazon, and a collection of iPhone 4 videos.


Op-Ed Anyone?

The Journalism of Opinion in which Columbia University hosted a conference on opinion journalism Daily News columnist and author Stanley Crouch, Bitch Media founder Andi Zeisler, New York Times op-ed page staff editor Mark Lotto, and BlueMassGroup co-founder Bob Neer. Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation, moderates:



Woot!

Woot created this music video to mark its acquisition by Amazon:




The iPhone 4 Video Collection With the iPhone 4's momentous debut, the amount of video on the latest must-have smart phone exploded.

Gadget guy Rojas's take

WNYC Radio's Brian Lehrer chats in-studio with Gdgt guy Peter Rojas about the iPhone 4:




IPhone 4 vs. Flipcam

The Business Insider does the obligatory comparison:




IPhone 4 Blended

It was inevitable that Blentec would glom onto the iPhone 4 frenzy with its own mash-up...literally.




HTC Evo beats iPhone 4



iPhone 4 Beats HTC Evo:



Hat tip to Max Kalehoff.

The Weather is Great

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I'm thinking of selling my Lowe's stock. It's a wonderful company and given the state of the economy, the DIY crowd clearly has reason to shop there.

Yet, as good as its gardening department might be, its PR department left me scratching my head.

Today, this PR blogger received an unsolicited 652-word "news" release, pasted into the body of an email and also attached as a docx document with the following subject line:

The Weather is Great - Wish You Were Here!

The lede read:

"Surprisingly, 34 percent of Americans didn’t take all their vacation days last year and others skipped vacations altogether. What to do? Take a Staycation by turning your backyard into a relaxing getaway you can enjoy every day of the year....[blah blah blah]."

"Staycation?" The last time I checked, the subject matter of this blog hadn't strayed into the outdoors or home improvement area. Could my post earlier this week on crowdsourcing a solution to clean up the oil spill have earned my inclusion on the pitch list? I mean Lowe's does have a fairly robust selection of cleaning solutions, some even to remove oil stains. Nah.

It then came to me. Last week I received a story pitch that opened with "Hi there!" and proceeded to tell me about an entrepreneur who at the age of 14 allegedly "built his first company, brokering helicopters," and is now "helping hundreds of thousands of people defeat this economy with his newest book, 'Become Incredible.'"

That pitch also prompted me to wonder why I had the great fortune of receiving it. A little due diligence provided the answer: the release was sent by a bot from that famous V company. Rather than ignore the pitch nor blast the "sender" for not doing her homework before allowing this vendor to spam me, I dropped her a hopefully helpful note to advise her of the dangers of mass e-mailing bloggers without knowing what they cover. (The sender did not respond, but she did start following me on Twitter.)

As for the pitch from Lowe's, I was relieved to deduce that it came to me by name directly from a person inside the company's PR department. Now if only she knew:

• Never send an unsolicited news release as an attachment
• Keep the email short...provide a link to the full "story"
  
• Pick a subject line that had a modicum of timely news (e.g., 34 percent of Americans to stay home this July 4 Weekend)
  
• And, most importantly, spend time to research the journalist's editorial orientation before hitting the send button.
  

With that, I wish you a wonderful July 4 weekend whether you're at the beach, in the mountains, or in your backyard power-washing your patio.