Today I lost a hero. I never knew him, and I’m not one who normally jumps on the celebrity death hysteria bandwagon. But when I call Adam Yauch, aka the Beastie Boys’ MCA, a hero, as in one I looked up to and who helped me to define my course in life, [...]]]>  

The Beasties all grown up, and probably looking better than the author of this blog will in another decade.

Today I lost a hero. I never knew him, and I’m not one who normally jumps on the celebrity death hysteria bandwagon. But when I call Adam Yauch, aka the Beastie Boys’ MCA, a hero, as in one I looked up to and who helped me to define my course in life, I’m serious as the cancer that claimed his life at the age of 47.

There’s a Beastie Boys album for every season of my life. I bought their first major label release, “Licensed to Ill,” in 1986, along with Run-DMC’s “Raising Hell.” They were the first two tapes I’d ever purchased with my own money, and while I’d dabble briefly in hair metal before grade school was through, it was hip-hop that would define the next decade of my life.

In middle school, I bought “Paul’s Boutique,” and I took it to a football game, only to have my friends make fun of me for continuing to buy music by a band many thought of as one-hit-wonders. After “Fight For Your Right (To Party)” became a runaway success, many looked at them as a novelty act, the great white hip-hope.

I ignored them, popped the green plastic tape in my Sony Sports Walkman and had my mind well and truly altered forever. Time and critical opinion have proven me right to buy that record, which is now known as one of the classics of the genre. But the personal impact was far greater. While the self-destruction in evidence on “Licensed” wasn’t gone, it had been transmuted into something funkier and more full of life. The music reflected their new So-Cal-infused perspective. The pastiche of “B-Boy Bouillabaisse” that closed out side two was absolutely revolutionary, and the funk dripping off songs like “Shake Your Rump” has yet to be matched.

"Paul's Boutique," an album that changed lives.

In high school, The Beasties added live instruments to the mix on the albums “Check Your Head” and “Ill Communication.” Similarly, my tastes had begun to expand, and I was listening to the likes of Pink Floyd, Parliament-Funkadelic and the hardcore punk of the Dead Kennedys. A song like “Sabotage” perfectly brought so many of these strains together, and the video inspired pretty much every bad student film I tried to pass off as a class project during my junior and senior years.

But the Beastie Boys’ perspectives were changing, too, and from what I know, it was largely due to MCA. His awareness of Tibet’s struggle for freedom and the way women were treated in earlier lyrics by the band resulted in songs that were as smart and critical – both of themselves as individuals and society – as they were funky and funny. Just listen to “Bodhisattva Vow” and try not to reach a higher state of being.

At the same time, I was beginning to question my own political views. Was I really the little libertarian I’d always thought, or was there a compassionate streak in me that went beyond my firm commitment to social freedoms? Around that time, I saw a Sonic Youth poster that read, “I believe Anita Hill,” and learning more about that band’s views on women, and the Beastie Boys’ own changing perspective, helped me to realize that, even though I wasn’t yet, I wanted to be a feminist.

In college, there was “Hello Nasty,” a record that kind of got lost in the shuffle for me as my musical tastes blossomed like a mushroom crowd. Of course, the fact that those tastes had been so informed by the Beasties was lost on me at the time, but not now. I was scarfing down records by Can, Bootsy, Gong, Lee Perry and so many other groups I might never have been prepared for if not for the Beasties.

“To The 5 Boroughs” caught me in my post-college malaise, when I needed those stripped-down old-school sounds to remind me of who I was and what I wanted out of life. It and the soulful, groovy instrumentals of “The Mix-Up” propelled me through refining my writing and copyediting abilities at the local newspaper, a period that saw me realize just how important the written word was to my life. Really, words and the ability to communicate with other humans saved me from a deep hole in myself. Words and music, the two things the Beastie Boys gave me time and again.

The Beastie Boys in the "Licensed to Ill" years. In retrospect, photos like this stand as proof that today's punks might just be tomorrow's philosophers.

The group’s last album, “The Hot Sauce Committee Part Two” came out last year, and I watched the epic 11-minute video for “Don’t Play No Game That I Can’t Win” at my desk at AM:PM PR, the public relations company that is my newest endeavor. It was the video I’d dreamed of making as a kid, full of action figures, zombies, explosions and dope beats. It was probably the video they always dreamed of making as kids, too. Well, they did it.

MCA, Ad-Rock and Mike D lived their dreams, and they lived my dreams, too. Plus, when my life wasn’t as cool as theirs, they always reminded me to stay true, keep trying and never stop growing. If those seem like trite expressions of an infinitely more complex truth, well, there’s a reason I’ve never gone on a world tour with Run-DMC or met with the Dalai Lama.

When I heard the news today, oh Boys. I had to storm out of my office like Ben Stiller at the end of “There’s Something About Mary.” The tears were streaming no matter how soft I felt for not being able to stifle them. In a weird way, I think MCA would have been OK with that. In a genre known for absurd posturing, he was a voice of enlightenment and sensitivity, even when he was handing out lyrical beatdowns.

I’m not one to get all choked up over celebrity deaths. I don’t feel the need to mourn somebody just because everybody else is or because they made one single that I slow danced to one time at a middle school party.

But when somebody made songs – or films or books – that helped to define damn near every age of your life? That’s something much bigger. That’s somebody who grew with you, who grew as an artist as you grew as a person. I don’t know where MCA’s music ends and my life begins sometimes, and I wish I didn’t know where his life ended. How the hell am I supposed to face my 40s without a Beastie Boys record to help me make sense of it all? Namaste, you gruff-voiced truth spewer.

The multitude of smartphone and tablet apps in existence has reached an unnecessary level – over 500,000 in Apple’s App Store alone. While many are hugely helpful and timesaving, there are many others that are extraneous and redundant.

This redundancy has come to my attention lately when looking for technology-driven ways to help me [...]]]>  

The multitude of smartphone and tablet apps in existence has reached an unnecessary level – over 500,000 in Apple’s App Store alone. While many are hugely helpful and timesaving, there are many others that are extraneous and redundant.

This redundancy has come to my attention lately when looking for technology-driven ways to help me stick with a new dietary style. While I haven’t eaten meat in years, I thought ditching dairy and eggs too sounded like a fun challenge. This prospect isn’t too terribly difficult living in a city like Portland, but it still takes some planning. When I can’t plan ahead and pack provisions for the day – or even if I just want to plan to go out for some food – it’s sometimes difficult to figure out where to go. The handful of places I know end up being in my rotation constantly and therefore get old quickly. And while vegan dishes can be found in most restaurants, all vegan dishes are certainly not created equal. Finding a spot with above-average ingredients will keep me hooked and coming back.

Vegan Steven displays the vegan spots nearest to the office.

I went in search of an app that could tell me what vegan fare was nearby and perhaps some reviews to tell me whether it was worth the trip. I found an app called Vegan Steven which does just that. Emphasis on just. This app is like many others in the app market that do one, highly specialized thing. While Vegan Steven and others like it are free to download and use, I find them to be an unnecessary use of precious gigabyte space. Why have four or five apps taking up space, when I could have just one meet the same needs?

An example of this multitasking functionality is the app version of the recommendation and review site Yelp. I’m sure most people have used at least the website version – it’s a one-stop shop for finding any number of businesses, whether vegan or otherwise. It’s easy to use and has a great built in filter feature. You can search by neighborhood, business type, cuisine type, and the list goes on. With an app or website that provides info on such a wide variety of businesses it’s difficult to justify bothering with the hassle of a bunch of specialized, one-task apps.

There are exceptions to that rule. Veggie Passport is an app that I think has unique functionality that would make it worth the gigabyte space and the $.99 it costs to purchase. In my ideal world I’d travel to foreign lands regularly. It would be a lot easier to avoid inadvertently ordering meat or dairy if I had an app like Veggie Passport to translate the phrases I needed to communicate. Translation technology is notoriously inaccurate, which is why I’d hesitate to use just any old translation app for something as serious as meat (I know that sounds ridiculous, but meat freaks me out). Veggie Passport’s translation has been vetted by native speakers for each of the 33 languages it covers, so I’m betting it’s rather accurate.

The ideal vegan app, however, has yet to be created. For some, veganism translates to only concerning yourself with not eating animal products, which doesn’t necessarily mean making healthier dietary choices. Hence folks who eat only Lay’s potato chips for dinner and call it good. It seems like there’s a niche for a “Veganize My Meal” app, which would allow folks to enter in their dream meals – if animal products were not an issue – and it would tell them how to use veggie-based ingredients to achieve similar flavors. It could also include info on nutritional stats for meals to help make sure things are balanced.

Maybe an app like this already exists and I just don’t know about it yet. With more than half a million apps to search through in the App Store, there’s a high likelihood that I could have simply missed it. If you know of this magical app or any similar apps – not the calorie counting/food tracking type, please – feel free to share it with me.

Can you hear me now?

How about now???????????

Do all those question marks make my query more apparent, or were you able to use your brain and understanding of context and punctuation to detect that I was asking you a question without all those unnecessary appendages?

I ask because while having a conversation with [...]]]>  

Can you hear me now?

How about now???????????

Do all those question marks make my query more apparent, or were you able to use your brain and understanding of context and punctuation to detect that I was asking you a question without all those unnecessary appendages?

If you don't want the Internet to look like Tony Montana's mansion at the end of "Scarface," ease up on those exclamation marks, mang.

I ask because while having a conversation with a friend recently, he informed me that people can’t hear you if you only use one exclamation mark to punctuate your sentences online. Basically, his point went like this:

“If you just use one exclamation mark, nobody even notices. It’s like you’re just kind of excited. But if you use three exclamation marks, then it’s like you’re really excited. If you use even more, like eleven exclamation marks, then you’re really, really excited.”

My side of the conversation is irrelevant, because very few people online appear to subscribe to any reasoning other than what my friend put forward. For kicks, let’s assume, briefly, that this isn’t the case, and I’ll thank you later for indulging me.

Those of us who have been expressing ourselves through the written word for longer than we’ve been on Facebook – or online – see things differently. Exclamation marks, or points, are like the grenade launchers attached to the bottoms of our M16s. We only use them when we really have to blow something up. When used all the time, the result is an Internet that looks like a lunar landscape. At first, it’s as full of craters as a strip-mining site, and eventually it’s just a void where once there was the potential for well-appointed discourse.

Notice how few exclamation points I’ve used in this blog entry so far. When I say, “Wake up and smell the brimstone! This collective punctuation abuse is dragging our language straight to hell!” Well, I think you probably get that I’m screaming it at you, or possibly from a window, a la “Network.”

If you’re a business, or just an independent contractor operating a Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or any other similar account in a professional capacity, it’s important to remember that, just because you hold the exclamation point button down, it doesn’t make your fans/followers automatically care. It just makes them deaf, so if and when you post something that actually matters, they won’t hear you. The same applies to all-caps, just in case you were about to ask.

Because I know some of you still will disagree, I’d like to show you a chart that I hope illustrates my point.

I hope that helped to clear it up for you. If you still have questions, make sure to tag the subject line of your email with 66 question marks (and mark it important) or I might not see it in my inbox.

Oh, and thanks!

In 1990, when Sir Tim Burners Lee created the first ever web page, he imagined the web being a worldwide tool. I doubt, however, he ever could have imagined that in 2012 there would be more than a trillion web pages on the net. In fact, the Internet has [...]]]>  

In 1990, when Sir Tim Burners Lee created the first ever web page, he imagined the web being a worldwide tool. I doubt, however, he ever could have imagined that in 2012 there would be more than a trillion web pages on the net. In fact, the Internet has become so large that one of Tim’s latest jobs has been to figure out a way to measure just how big the Internet really is, in both size and impact.

So far, the ways invented to deal with this growing glut of web pages have come in the form of lists, directories, search engines and wikis. Even with all of that, the internet has become nothing more than semi-organized noise. All of these technologies are helpful but, with Internet users worldwide spending a collective 35 billion hours of time online every month, if you don’t know exactly what you are looking for, navigating the internet can be a huge waste of time. How can we use that time more efficiently and find stories that are interesting, timely and relevant even if we don’t know they exist?

Currently this is accomplished in one of three ways:

1. Professional Curation – This is what we normally think of as news. For example, CNN.com. An editor there decides what information is important for you to see. This is good for world and national news. Websites linked to TV stations and newspapers are often the most trusted, but they may be poor at targeting your personal interests. They’re not extremely timely by today’s Internet standards, where a story that is 15 minutes old is considered stale, and they tend to lean toward the sensational.

2. Social Curation – This is the information that your friends share on places such as Facebook.com. It’s great for finding information that is of personal interest, obscure or local, but generally poor at finding the types of items a professional curator would choose.

3. Trending Curation – This is the opinion of the masses, as found on sites such as Google Trends or trending on twitter. These work well to keep you informed of up-to-the-minute breaking stories or the latest cute cat video, but information can be misleading if it turns out to be based on rumor.

If we are to stay sane and on top of what is happening in the world, we need to bring the concept of web curation to the next level. All the pieces are in place. It just comes down to combining them correctly. Easier said then done.

What will this information source look like? How could these sources be combined to use each one’s strengths to limit their weaknesses? That is the part I haven’t fully figured out – yet. Maybe it will be some sort of dashboard that has a column of the most immediate trending information along with top stories from news organizations all vetted for truth and tailored to your specific tastes, geolocation and what your friends are posting about.

With Google Plus’ recent update to include trending information, I believe they are getting very close. The problem is, they don’t, at this time, have the same strength of social graph that Facebook has. Facebook also could attempt this, but it does not have the strength of search that Google has. Even if Facebook partnered with Bing or bought Yahoo!, both have less than 5% of the search market, so it’d still be a stretch.

What do you think the future of Sir Tim Burners Lee’s creation looks like? What would be the most useful combination of these three types of content for you to keep up with your friends and the world at large?

As AM:PM PR approaches its second birthday, we’re changing how we sell our services. We’ve packaged services for clients – creating a prix fixe menu of options rather than the usual ala carte list.

We think bundling services and pricing them clearly will make it easier for clients to understand what they’re [...]]]>  

As AM:PM PR approaches its second birthday, we’re changing how we sell our services. We’ve packaged services for clients – creating a prix fixe menu of options rather than the usual ala carte list.

We think bundling services and pricing them clearly will make it easier for clients to understand what they’re buying. It also recognizes how different the practice of public relations has become in the 24/7, constantly connected world we live in today.

Historically agencies based their pricing on billable hourly rates, much like lawyers and other professionals. Clients that have little experience using public relations agencies struggle to understand why services are billed hourly. Those with more experience may understand billable hours, but many don’t connect hours billed with results achieved.

The truth is that not every hour we work produces the same benefit for clients.

Over the Holidays, I read a book (The Marketing Agency Blueprint) and shared it with my colleagues. It triggered our effort to rethink how we price what we do so it makes more sense to our clients – and to us.

Much like Progressive, we think bundling our services together might help us better serve our clients' needs.

“The traditional billable-hour system is tied exclusively to outputs, not outcomes, and assumes that all agency activities … are of equal value,” declared Paul Roetzer, the book’s author and founder/CEO of PR 20/20 in Cleveland.

Today’s communications landscape has radically changed the contents of our PR toolkit. It requires us to be full-time listeners, even for our smallest clients. In the digital world, opportunities and risks don’t wait patiently for open times in our schedules.

Our ability to help a client requires a high level of trust in us, as communicators and strategists. Trust takes time to build. Our service packages anticipate that we will work with the client for a minimum of six months. It’s a step away from casual dating. It signals our priority is on building long-term, mutually beneficial relationships.

We’re eager to talk about these packages with prospective clients, and learn from them whether this new format helps them better understand what they will get in working with us. Like everything in our business, the packages are subject to change. Our hope is that they will form the foundation for some great relationships.

First of all, we want to make it [...]]]>

Enjoy the new and improved AM:PM PR website - Now with even more 7/Apps!

The word is out. Thanks to Gawker blogging about it, Perez Hilton tweeting a catty remark in regards to it, and Lady Gaga wearing an outfit made entirely from computer screens displaying it, you’ve by now heard that AM:PM PR has a new website.

First of all, we want to make it clear that this isn’t how we wanted to roll out the new site. We wanted you to find out by us telling you about it right here. But, as the recent media circus has made undeniable, the cat’s out of the bag. We might as well address a number of questions/misconceptions that have already popped up in our conversations with the media.

Claim: The website is based on complex numerology decoded from a previously unpublished section of “The Wu-Tang Manual.”

Reality: This is true.

Claim: Using AM:PM PR’s website can help cure depression, freshen breath while you read.

Reality: Again, this is true. Perhaps we’ll move on to some misconceptions.

Surgeon General's Warning: Staring at pictures of Alexis too long can make you go cross-eyed.

Claim: Staring directly into Alexis’ eyes in the group shot on the homepage can make you go cross-eyed.

Reality: OK, also true, but only in extreme cases. This isn’t going well. Let’s give it one more shot.

Claim: This website revamping is a shameless promotional ploy for Pat’s upcoming, last-minute presidential run.

Reality: While Pat does have designs on world domination, and his common-sense perspective would certainly make for a refreshing alternative to some other candidates we might name, he won’t be running for president. At least not in 2012.

Speaking of Pat, stay tuned to this site for his upcoming blog post, which will offer an in-depth look at our new package-pricing system, and how we think that it will help us help you to reach what science has coined “maximum awesometude.”

In the meantime, know this:

- Yes, our new site will better emphasize the strategic relationship we have with ace app developers 7/Apps.

- No, you won’t be able to control our new website with your mind, a la Clint Eastwood’s jet in the film “Firefox.”

You can't control our website with your mind, but we highly suggest you make a YouTube video of yourself trying really, really hard.

- Yes, site design and navigation have both been improved, creating an experience that one critic has called, “THE feel-good action-packed romantic rollercoaster thrillride of this year or any other.”

- No, no McCormicks were harmed during the making of the new site. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

- Yes, you will still have access to all the same great videos, hyperlocal storytelling, and dangerously sharp snark as before, but now it will have 30% less MSG.

- No, we haven’t yet made a sequel to our galaxy-famous “We’re Better at PR Than Breakdancing” video, but when we do, Variety is reporting that it will be called, “We’re Better at PR Than Breakdancing 2: Electric Flakaloo.”

Stay tuned, friends, family and cabal mates. The future is now, but we’re only leaking it one day at a time.

But this month, after [...]]]>

It may be obvious that I enjoy dressing up our logo for different holidays. Less obvious is the reality that I’m not the best at being decisive. I like to create lots of versions for each holiday. Usually I ask my coworkers to narrow down the options and choose from there.

But this month, after Groundhog Day, Tu B’Shevat, Valentine’s and President’s Day coming up next Monday, my colleagues are exhausted.

And there are still two more holidays to pick fitting logo frippery for. So I am turning to you, our devoted fan club, in hopes of crowdsourcing the best logo for Mardi Gras and Leap Day.

Mardi Gras aka Shrove Tuesday, celebrated February 21st this year.
Which logo is your favorite?:

Leap Day, February 29th. Vote for your favorite logo in the comments below:

Are there other holidays I should be dressing up our logo for?

It is true. Go check his page. I am not kidding. He is awesome. There is something about him, about the way he is using his Facebook page. It makes you want to gush about him.

A couple of months ago I [...]]]> George Takei is the best thing on Facebook.

It is true. Go check his page. I am not kidding. He is awesome. There is something about him, about the way he is using his Facebook page. It makes you want to gush about him.

A couple of months ago I realized that one of the funny photos my friend shared on Facebook, was originally posted by George Takei. I did not believe it. Sulu-from-“Star Trek” George Takei? The real one? I went to his page to investigate. It was true. It turned out that the majority of the funny images my friends were sharing were from his page. So, I went ahead and “liked” him.

Now, I am not a fan of “liking” pages on Facebook. I realize that in my business, I should not be saying this, but the vast majority of businesses and fan pages on Facebook are boring (except ours … and our clients’, of course). Besides, I am there to keep up with my friends, so I am very particular about when I will actually click that ‘Like’ button on a fan page.

But George Takei is brilliant. He is the perfect combination of gently political, informative and entertaining. His variety of posts offer something for everyone, whether about sex, religion, technology, science, politics, or pictures cute cats (nudge, nudge, Alexis). When he posts a photo or cartoon, his caption is almost always punny. And there is an ever-present undercurrent of tolerance. He mixes smarts and heart in such a captivating way.

I don’t know that anyone is better at engaging a fan base. When he posts a funny photo or cartoon , it gets thousands of likes in a matter of seconds. Wait a couple of minutes and the comments and shares of his posts reach into the thousands. He so easily earns your trust, that when he posts something political with an action item, he barely has to even make the suggestion and his fan base takes action. His role as an influencer is increasingly undeniable.

It is possible George Takei’s popularity is on the rise because he called an Alabama School Board member a douche bag. It could be one of his appearances on NPR talking about growing up in a Japanese internment camp. His advocacy of civil rights issues is definitely worthy of fandom. And of course, one cannot discount the enormity of the Star Trek fan base.

A couple of months ago, when I first “liked” his page, it had just over 400,000 likes. Eighty-eight percent of his followers were so intrigued by him that they were actively talking about it.

Even more impressive, on January 11, his fans surpassed 500,000. Exactly a month later, on February 11, he got his millionth fan. As I write this blog, he has 1,048,065 fans and 886,267 people talking about him. That is 85% – 85%!

Takei posted this picture on his wall, asked for caption suggestions, had his fans vote on those suggestions, and this was the winner.

To give a point of reference, Whitney Houston, on the Monday after her passing, had 2,038,390 people who “liked” her on Facebook, and only 41,057 talking about her. That is 2%. Arguably the biggest news in entertainment from over the weekend, and not only are 845,210 fewer people talking about her than those mentioning Takei, but with a fan base twice as big, still only 2% of them felt compelled to mention her on Facebook. I bet all of you know who Whitney Houston is, even if you do not care for her music. But you probably had to think, or maybe did not even know, who the heck George Takei is, or why I would write a blog about the guy who played Sulu on Star Trek.

But I am betting that will change soon. If you don’t know him, or ‘like’ him right now, you will soon.

More of my favorite posts from his page:

What goes better with birthday cupcakes than oblivion? Seriously, we’re asking you. At AM:PM PR, oblivion is the ice cream to our cake. Rather than candles, we like to blow out each others’ birthday wishes. Just in case you’re wondering, that isn’t a laugh track. This “We’re Better At PR” video was filmed in [...]]]>

What goes better with birthday cupcakes than oblivion? Seriously, we’re asking you. At AM:PM PR, oblivion is the ice cream to our cake. Rather than candles, we like to blow out each others’ birthday wishes. Just in case you’re wondering, that isn’t a laugh track. This “We’re Better At PR” video was filmed in front of a live studio audience.