prSPEAK.com

That’s what Chicago Sun-Times sports columnist Jay Mariotti has to say. We keep hearing about, reading about and seeing the shift in the way traditional news sources (papers, magazines, nightly news) have gone about covering news - but is this a sign that traditional papers are going bye-bye? Is it just the big city and national outlets - will this trickle down to local and regional outlets? We shall see. One thing I have noticed is the quick growth of visuals in news outlets - in reading my hometown paper and others such as the Boston Globe, video and user generated content is everywhere. Is our attention span really down to a three-minute video clip?

PAN is on its annual pilgrimage to San Jose for the W. Coast version of the Search Engine Strategies conference series. Although they’re all great, we love this particular location because the vibe is so different from New York and Chicago. San Jose and the rest of the Valley is the unofficial heart of the innovation economy, and that thread runs through the entire show. You simply can’t come here for a search engine marketing conference and not also become (or become more) enthralled with the web’s startup culture.

But back to the show. Although not official, it’s becoming clear that engagement, or how to measure peoples’ attention on the web, has risen as a key performance factor for all things search.

Microsoft’s keynote, delivered by its SVP of Search, Satya Nadella was interesting for the obligatory facts and figures–it’s a $15 billion dollar business right now and growing; MSFT’s share of the search market finally grew to 9.2 percent, or more than one billion searches in June; and so on–but in his talk were ideas more notable for trying to define engagement.

Did you know (or care) that more than 50 percent of searches conducted last longer than 30 minutes? Even if it’s not interesting to you, it’s definitely of interest to the search engines. Think about it: web sites have to work hard to keep users on them longer, but search engines actually own those searchers for all that time. So what do they do with them? The same thing they’ve always done, serve ads. The engines are realizing there has to be more ways to monetize searchers’ engagement, right?

One vexing issue to measuring engagement is figuring out intent. The engines still don’t know with real accuracy what you the searcher want to do. All they really know is where you’ve been. It’s even more difficult to divine searcher intent when close to 50 percent of search sessions are for things a particular person has searched before, so there’s a lot of wasted effort compounding the problem. Social search engines are beginning to address this and again, engagement seems to be a key in narrowing focus.

Measuring engagement is even more important with multimedia content flooding the web. There’s more of everything now–especially video–and the social interactions around that content and its context, such as comments and tags are great tools for measuring engagement.

There’s a nice cottage industry popping up around engagement now. One of the better tools for it is Summize, which tracks topic conversations on Twitter. If a measurement of engagement includes conversations, and conversations are markets, then the guys at Twitter may have just bought one of the best market barometers around. If they keep the Fail Whale from finding it Summize could become as important to search as contextual advertising has been over the past decade.

Many of us here at PAN follow Chris Brogan via his blog and Twitter (gotta love the random one-liners). He had an especially good roundup of “50 Online Applications and Sites” that people should consider on his blog today that caught my eye. I’m happy to say that I’m using many of them including: Twitter Search (good one for our clients), Twitter itself, FriendFeed, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pandora, Yelp, Digg, Reddit, Delicious, and Wordpress among others.

I can’t believe how many of these there are, but must say this is one of the best roundups I’ve found to date. Plus it’s so well organized, and we know I love organization!

So if you’re feeling a tad bit… overwhelmed shall we say, by all the social media and online applications out there, use this list as a good starting place and pick out some new sites to try. Also add Scour.com - the new social search that pays you to search and give feedback on results - to your list of favorite sites. It just launched and though it’s not on Brogan’s list, it’s an amazing online tool!

HARO - Help A Reporter Out - created by Peter Shankman is a brilliant media relations tool that connects ordinary people and companies to journalists.

It started as a group on Facebook and today it has more than 14,000 members.

In an effort to continue to build this great resource, today Peter is asking all of his members to post the following on their Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other pages over the next 24 hours:

“Get Sourced. Get Quoted. Get Famous: www.helpareporter.com - Putting Journalists and Sources together, one quote at a time.”

So, will you help a reporter out today?

Is the PR industry’s reputation getting worse, or just suffering from a lack of understanding?

A post put together for today’s internal brown bag discussion…

We’re all working through that question, as more “bad pr” pitch / stunt / email / telephone call blogs become popular among reporters, bloggers and even the PR industry itself. “Outing” particularly grievous PR errors has become a sport, and dustups between annoyed pitchees and pitchers has overshadowed the value good pr brings to organizations. It’s a frustrating cycle and there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight.

Examples of “bad pr” sites include this recent addition, the original “bad pitch” blog , and there are many more.

We need to revist this question more frequently now that there are so many new channels for communicating with each other. Just the other day I had a conversation with a PR Week editor working on a story about how social media tools are changing the way PR communicates with its audience of editors, reporters and bloggers.

The conversation revolved around whether or not social tools were appropriate for pitching the media. (for the sake of this post, “media” will be an all-encompassing term). I couldn’t think of an easy answer because I believe it’s a matter of preference for each party. Some media are perfectly fine receiving pitches through Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and other social sites. Others are very definitely not fine with that approach.

The key for anyone in PR is to do their homework, not be lazy and remember that social sites are first and foremost, social (although you can make an argument for LinkedIn as the most business-oriented). Even though these sites are always on I’d equate pitching someone through them to getting work calls long after hours. It’d be annoying to you, and its annoying to media (again, with the caveat that if you’ve been invited by a reporter to contact them that way, all the power).

I’m of the mind that social media tools used in business are primarily for “gathering intelligence,” rather than first contact. If you’re fortunate enough to be brought into someone’s social circle, don’t immediately and foolishly take advantage of that access. Use the tools for what they’re good for: learning more about the person sharing their lives through them. You’ll be a much better PR person if you do more listening than talking, and benefit from creating pitches with real value to the particular target.

As someone who focuses on message development and media training for our clients, I know we all look for ways to be able to stay on message during media interviews. In training sessions, we teach techniques called headlining, blocking and bridging. Simply put, there are several sentences you can learn to use that will help you get back to message and highlight your company’s product or service. Here are a few sentences to keep in your arsenal — or better yet, practice before your next interview:

“The most important thing to remember is …”
“That speaks to a bigger point …”
“What I really want you to remember is …”

Want to see first hand how it’s done? We all have a golden opportunity over the next few months to learn from the best by watching some of the media interviews with our two presidential candidates. One of them is actually phenomenal at using these techniques effectively (in my humble opinion) and one – well, not so much. Next time you’re listing to an interview on a difficult topic, listen for the number of times a candidate says “the real issue is …” and totally shifts the subject!

For those of us on the East Coast, it was hard to stay up to watch the Celtics/Lakers game on Father’s Day, but we all did regardless. The beginning of the game seemed like a replay of Game 4 and Boston fans hoped for another historic comeback, which simply didn’t happen. Boston is clearly the better team, they have team chemistry, they have veteran experience and they’re even tempered and mature. The Lakers, on the other hand, are inconsistent, they can’t seem to figure out who to match their guys up with, and there’s overall tension on the team (random thought: is anyone else disturbed by Lamar Odom’s tongue flapping sessions?). They were lucky to win Game 5 - their home court definitely gave them a slight advantage.

I think Celtics fans are a tad bit happy that there’s going to be a Game 6 in Boston – we would’ve loved to have won a championship in LA on Sunday…but winning at home, in the Garden, well, there’s just nothing like it…

Here’s to Game 6 – let’s hope it’s one sweet victory – something Boston fans haven’t tasted since 1986…

Last night was one night where the local PR community came together to recognize the tremendous work generated on behalf of our clients and organizations. The Publicity Club of New England hosted the event at the Westin Waterfront in Boston.

PAN Communications walked away with Six Awards last night - clients that were recognized included KANA Software, PlayNetwork, Commonwealth Worldwide Chauffeured Transportation and Hydro International. A nice mix of representation from all three of our portfolios…

And I can tell you that we’re already eyeing many more next year based on the tremendous work being generated here…..

Congrats to all the winners last night.

As of this typing, Wayne Gerdes is attempting to drive a Toyota Prius from Chicago to New York City on only one tank of gas. One tank of gas you question? Yes, as part of the CBS morning program, “The Early Show,” Wayne Gerdes is trying to drive this car roughly 792 miles with only one fill up of a less than 12-gallon gas tank.

It’s a great segment and ultimately will have valuable information (when he gets to NYC this evening) when facing gas prices estimated to rise above $4 per gallon within the week. Wayne Gerdes operates the blog, cleammpg.com, that is designed to help balance the environment and raise mileage per gallon - the term is called hypermiling. Hypermiling is not new, Mr. Gerdes ran a very thorough post on his site nearly two years ago about hypermiling with a very detailed “how to” that explains the concept.

As discussed during the program, hypermiling will definitely tick off other drivers, especially those in a rush, but it will save on fuel consumption considerably. When I purchased my Subaru several years ago, it cost $15 to fill the tank, today it’s above $50 and rising. Crazy. So while I am interested in purchasing a larger SUV, the hypermiling makes me think twice about what vehicles I do want to drive and may even help me conserve should I get my larger vehicle.

We look forward to hearing what you have to say on the topic of hypermiling … can you do it?

The media has made it clear that they detest being spammed with press releases and off-track pitches. In fact, many bloggers and editors alike have published lists of Naughty Spammers, calling out repeating offenders. Their requests for researched and customized pitches that offer unique and useful data, experts, and insight is of course legitimate. No one likes spam.

So it has been noted - A pitfall PR professionals must work to overcome is how we utilize one of our most basic tools, the press release. So, how do we walk the fine line between newsworthy and spam?

Brian Solis of FutureWorks contributed a noteworthy blog post to TechCrunch on this subject and outlined the different types of releases (Traditional, SEO, and Social Media). More importantly he discusses how the press release can still be relevant if developed correctly for today’s more diverse media/new media landscape.

“Let’s help them, help us in the process,” Solis states. By golly I think he may be onto something.

Check out the post and feel free to share your thoughts on what you see in the future of the press release. It’s not a static subject and deserves some discussion!