Welcome one and all to "The Week that Was: PR & Technology". Early Monday morning a question was posed amongst my Twitter friends, "Is it worth the one day off for a shortened and chaotic week?"  Now that we are here on Friday morning and I am sipping on my second cup of "Dark Magic" coffee I'll say definitely...if you had asked me yesterday at noon perhaps my answer would have been different. We may have only had four days in the work week, but thanks to our friend Steve Jobs it felt like an eternity.  If you want coverage of the iPhone/iPod debacle/apology, go elsewhere, it's being covered enough.  I'm going to stay out of that conversation.  Now hold my hand and let's go through my top five stories that made this The Week that Was.

Everyone is Doing It
That seems to be the refrain this week as tech behemoth Cisco put out a Social Media News Release....wha-wha-whaaat?  I appropriately heard about it from Todd Defren's Twitter.  This follows in the footsteps of HP and other large corporations embracing SMNRs.  Shel Holz has a good post on the developments and points out that one of the really cool aspects of this SMNR is the embedded video, which you can quickly put up on your blog.  Which I did...and got a comment from a fella at Cisco. I'm totally impressed.  This is a big company who gets what social media is about and how it can help them market and communicate!  I also hope this is the norm soon, but I fear we still have a long, long way to go.

Forget SMNR...be a Living News Release
Oh yeah, I may officially be taking this Twitter thing way too far.  I now can walk about town and folks can immediately add me to their Twitter...or just mock me and use the word 'twitter' in a derogatory manner towards me.  Either way I get them talking.  How cool would this be to use for a SMS campaign to promote a product launch or to create some viral buzz?  I actually wrote about this back in June and what I wrote then still stands:

Check out this post over at Brains on Fire.  They are talking about Reactee, a very cool company that allows you to buy a personalized t-shirt that pushes someone to text your keyword and get a personalized message from you.

Imagine the use of this for a product launch?  I can already see if you are targeting a specific demographic within the tech industry, say enterprise architects or DBAs, create a shirt with a pithy one-liner and the keyword.  When they text to the number they are then pushed to your website through a give-away.  Let's scrap the SMNR and just have TMRs (that is t-shirt media releases)!

My question...has anyone used this or done this at all??  Give me a shout!

Watching Out for Wikipedia
Big topic of conversation this week amongst us PR folks has been how to guide our clients when it comes to Wikipedia.  This comes in the wake of this piece about Wikipedia banning Overstock.com and the fury over the Astra Zeneca changes.  Here was the advice I posted earlier in the week:

One great comment to my post from Nancy Buccino of SolidWorks:

Here’s another article about this topic (about my company and our competitors). Wikipedia Scanner tracks IP addresses, so even if you create your own account, it will be public information that someone at the company made the changes.

In marketing, we’ve made it a policy to only edit our entry with truthful statements (I know, it’s hard to believe coming from a marketing department), and we will continue to do so on a fairly regular basis. We do not edit competitors’ entries, but it’s evident that other employees have been. It’s worth educating ALL employees about the pros and cons of making edits because the smack talk comes across as pretty immature to customers and the media.

Justice Department says NO to Net Neutrality
Just yesterday the U.S. Justice Department said ISPs should be allowed to charge a fee for priority Web traffic.  As someone who canceled my cable television (yes, my beloved Red Sox and Patriots can now be only HEARD by me each night) because of the sick amount of profits Comcast likes to pull from my hard working family, you can imagine that this announcement reeks to me.  Reminds me of the old communist days back in the U.S.S.R. where Politburo members had a special fast lane to drive in.  Don't tell me this is a 'get what you pay for' decision.  If that were true I could have just paid for ESPN, NESN and the Food Network and still watch my Sox take the division from the Yankees. 

Making You More Productive...again
As I did last week I will now bestow unto you some ways to increase your productivity.  Check out these "40 Unusual Websites".  Many of these are really useful, some...not so much.  The one I've been trying out this week has been Jott.  Want to use your mobile to quickly sent yourself text reminders, or better yet update Twitter?  Jott is the service.  I've been using this to Twitter, but I really think the main help will be to quickly leave myself notes and to-do's that will be sent along to my email reminding me to get stuff done.  This is particularly good for those of us who are texting and emailing while driving lighting fast down the freeway (you know who you are).

My Video Clip of the Week

I mentioned it above, so here is the Cisco video featuring KISS:

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