By Linda Forrest
Unlike a few of my colleagues here at inmedia, I fell backward into public relations. The first professional internship position that I held just happened to be in publicity and I quite unintentionally ended up staying on this career path. For the duration of my career, I have been working in media relations. And I have thanked my lucky stars day after day that I’m doing this job in the Internet age.
There is plenty of talk about the future of the PR business given the advent of social media. Some would even have you believe that PR people like myself are nearing extinction. This post isn’t meant to inspire people to take sides in a “where do we go from here?” conversation. Instead, for a moment, I would like to contemplate how PR was done in the past. Francis, our managing partner, tells us stories of his reporter days, typing with carbon in between sheets of paper to make copies. The hubris of my ever-receding youth screams aloud in my head, “you had to do WHAT?!?” Meanwhile, it boggles my aging mind that the younger generation can’t grasp the ethical connotations of the financial relationship between copyrighted material and the consumer. Kids today… but I digress.
I spend my work day in front of a computer – developing material, typing and editing, changing words on a whim, spelling things incorrectly (only very occasionally, of course…), absorbing the day’s news, researching material, learning about various subjects, blogging, reading RSS feeds and more. Now, remove the computer and the Internet from these activities. Truthfully, I have trouble even comprehending the mechanics of my job outside of the context of the Internet and computers. How would one do adequate and up-to-date research? Or develop an accurate and appropriate media list? Or not plough through large swaths of the rainforest because of the reams and reams of paper used every day? Or not constantly struggle with spelling and typographical errors?
Let’s say that one did, miraculously, develop and manage to type an error-free news release that took into consideration the information already published in the media marketplace, then how was it distributed? Sometimes our media lists have hundreds of contacts on them. Did my predecessors spend two days by the fax machine? What about in the time before fax? It is too much for me to comprehend.
I’m so glad that Al Gore invented the Internet. I would be lost without it.
By Linda Forrest
This past week, Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize for raising awareness about global warming. No recount was necessary.
The blogosphere’s response, as is often the media’s reaction to anything pertaining to Mr. Gore, ranges from adulation to vitriol.
We have had the pleasure of doing some work to promote local presentations of Mr. Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth slide show about global warming, as presented by the Delphi Group’s president and CEO, Mike Gerbis. The Delphi Group is a strategic consulting firm operating within the spheres of health and the environment, clean energy, climate change, environmental technologies and organizational sustainability.
Mr. Gerbis was one of 1,000 people and one of just a few Canadians who were selected to train personally with Mr. Gore as part of the Climate Project and is officially sanctioned to give his slideshow presentation as seen in the Academy Award-winning film.
Mr. Gore, who sits on the board of directors for Apple, has had more than his fair share of trouble with the media, but that hasn’t stopped him from spearheading a novel approach to television with Current, a web site that has for the past several years accepted submissions from professional videographers and as of Monday now asks viewers to submit content in order to create broadcast news. Read more here.
While it appears that the site incorporates some elements of other popular video sites, the real distinction is that the best of the online content runs on Current TV, a cable and satellite TV network that according to the site airs in 52 million homes around the world. As with YouTube and Joost, content will determine the success of the site itself but if Current can bridge the gap between video on the Internet and content on the television, Mr. Gore will have another winner on his hands.
By Linda Forrest
My Dad is what is called an “early adopter.” I’ve always given my parents jocular grief about the many “gadgets” that they have but their interest in cutting edge technologies has been prevalent throughout my entire life and provided me with an advantage in my education and later, my career.
A tremendous gift that my parents gave me was the introduction of computers to my life at a very young age. I literally do not remember a time before computers, which is rare amongst my peers in their late twenties and early thirties. I was typing before I could write longhand and have used a plethora of applications through the years, from word processing on up to audio engineering software.
An incredibly intelligent man with a technological mind, my father was always interested in computers and wrote programs for my brother and me when we were young. The family loves to tell stories about me, a toddler, being held upright by my brother so that I could type “run” on the keyboard to make the application do its thing.
As technology has advanced, my Dad has kept up and is without a doubt the most tech-savvy sixty-something that I know. He was a webmaster for the site of my parents’ business and his various social groups before most people knew what a web site was. He got involved with a messageboard that connects him with people he hasn’t seen in 50 years and uses Skype to talk with his old shipmates around the world.
Because of his interest in and willingness to learn about new technology, my parents have the whole world at their fingertips – emailing, surfing the web, online banking, VoIP and more are a snap for them. My friend’s mother communicates with her and her brother almost exclusively by text message. Family friends in their 70s who travel a lot keep us up to date on their journeys via email. In stark contrast, I know people in this age group who don’t have an answering machine and are still convinced that this “computer thing” shall pass.
As our population gets older and the huge numbers of baby boomers enter their senior years, which group do you think is more prevalent – those who embrace technology and are learning how to use it to enrich their lives? Or those who want no part of it and are convinced that the ATM is no substitute for going up to the teller? How will marketing to this age group change as time goes on?
By Linda Forrest
Yesterday, Joost, a peer-to-peer streaming TV service, launched its public beta and the blogosphere is aflutter with comments – some positive, some negative but most fall into the wait and see category. Web-savvy folks have been beta testing this system for quite some time but now, it’s open to everyone.
As with most new content aggregators on the Internet, only time will tell as to whether it succeeds or not, but I’m inclined to agree with Smithick, a commenter on the New York Times’s Bits blog, “Content is king. People will put up with a crappy experience if they can get the content that they’re looking for. Joost will only take off when you can find a majority of topical, popular content on the site.”
Such is not the case at the moment and unless the site quickly supplies users with the content that they want, I’m afraid it will suffer the fate of other once promising P2P sites that couldn’t find a way to rationalize high-quality content with worldwide licensing and copyright issues. YouTube‘s popularity is due in large part to the illegal uploading of copyrighted content, though the Google powers-that-be have quelled the practice considerably since acquiring the site last year.
The idea of allowing users to access the television programming that they want to see, when and where they want to see it remains, for all intents and purposes, elusive at the moment, but with so many vying technologies, PVRs, myriad set-top boxes and P2P TV sites, it’s sure to be resolved in the near future. Stay tuned!
By Linda Forrest
Sometimes, it can be challenging to draw the connection between technological advancements and one’s personal life. Such is definitely not the case with a recent media launch that we did for a new client.
Earlier this year, inmedia had the incredible experience of being responsible for the worldwide media launch of Touch Bionics’ i-LIMB Hand, the world’s first commercially available bionic hand. I completely understand the life-changing potential of this product because of personal experience.
My wonderful mother has always been able to do anything she put her mind to and has never let the fact that she was born with an abnormal left hand slow her down. Throughout my life, if people would ask about what happened to her hand, I would wonder why they were asking as she is so adept and resourceful that I would often forget that she had anything different about her hand.
At birth, her hand was misshapen due to a birth defect. As it was the early 1940s and medical science wasn’t nearly where it is today, the doctors made the poor decision to give her hand massive doses of radiation, resulting in severe radiation burns. Her parents were left with the choice between amputation and a “hook” to act as her hand or doctors could attempt to save her hand and lower arm with groundbreaking plastic surgery techniques developed on burn victims from WW2. They opted for the latter.
The many plastic surgeries and surgeons’ best efforts resulted in a patchwork of various skin grafts and immobile fingers that by her early 60s have poor circulation and have caused her near constant pain. At the onset of these problems, one of my mother’s great fears was that she would have to have her hand amputated. In fact, her situation had worsened in the past year and she had her baby finger amputated in February.
As I started to learn about Touch Bionics and the i-LIMB Hand, I kept her informed, sent her to the company’s web site and our whole family marveled at the technology and what it means not only to the prosthetics, science and medical communities at large and to amputees, but to us personally.
Although she does not currently have a requirement for the i-LIMB Hand, this development has truly made her feel more comfortable with the idea that should she need the remainder of her hand amputated at some point, there is a viable option for a replacement.
Near the launch, she said to me, “This is all so fantastic. I no longer need to be afraid I’ll lose my left hand as FINALLY a really amazing option is available. I’ve only waited my whole life for this!!!”
Thank you to Touch Bionics for the piece of mind that you’ve given my family and others like us. Your work is truly making an important difference.
