Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Real Women of Atlanta on Hotlanta Buzz Online

Latest Twitter Applications



I wanted the Latest Twitter Application updates to be weekly, but this may turn into a daily thing because I am always finding new things about Twitter.

Here are more new Twitter applications, this should keep you busy for a while.

Celebrity Tweet | Stalk Celebrities on Twitter (as if I wasn't already, I kid)
Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons' Web site GlobalGrind has just acquired CelebrityTweet, a site that aggregates the tweets of famous people, both on the Web and via mobile applications.

Klout | Measuring Influence Across the Social Web
If you work in social media marketing, you already know that measurement-at the end of the day- is KING. Hooray for Klout.

Klout allows you to track the impact of your opinions, links and recommendations across your social graph. We collect data about the content you create, how people interact with that content and the size and composition of your network. From there, we analyze the data to find indicators of influence and then provide you with innovative tools to interact with and interpret the data.

Listorious | Discover the Best Twitter Lists
Twitter's new Lists feature allows anyone to curate the real time web. Listorious makes it easy to find the best lists of Twitter users on any given topic, and for list creator to publicize their lists.

Brizzly | A Better Way to Experience the Social Web
Brizzly is a reader that works with Twitter and Facebook. It simplifies your browsing and updating experience, while adding a few nifty extras. We'll take some of the work out of keeping up to date with the people, trends and news you want to know about.

Flickr2Twitter | Flickr Your Twitter
You can now link your Flickr and Twitter accounts! With Flickr2Twitter you can:

* Tweet any photo you email from your mobile device
* Tweet photos or video from Flickr
* Tweet via the Flickr API

Monday, December 7, 2009

Renowned Art Collector Shares His Personal Collection With Studio Clout Fine Art Gallery




ATLANTA, GA--(Marketwire - December 7, 2009) - Studio Clout Fine Art Gallery will exhibit a segment of The Paul R. Jones Collection of American Art, which, in its entirety, is one of the largest and most comprehensive art collections of 20th century African-American visual art in the world. Studio Clout will host a private reception to welcome Paul R. Jones' personal art collection on December 12, 2009. This visual art exhibit will be opened to the public starting December 16, 2009.

"We are very proud, excited and humbled to house one of the most historic art collections in the country at our gallery," said Linda Lima, owner and art curator at Studio Clout Fine Art Gallery located in the Castleberry Hill Arts District of Atlanta. The art collection was amassed throughout the last four decades by Jones, who has been described by Art & Antiques magazine as "one of the top art collectors in the country."

The art collection originated from Jones' discovery that many art museums he had visited held few works by African-American artists. Throughout the years, Jones' home in Atlanta became too small to hold all his collected art work and after much consideration, Jones decided to donate major portions of his massive art collection to The University of Delaware and The University of Alabama.

"The Jones Collection is remarkable not only for the breadth and quality of African-American artists represented in it, but also because it brings together a body of artists who worked at a time in recent American history when African-American artists were not widely collected," said Dr. Amalia Amaki, author and professor of art and art history.

Jones hopes that his collection will preserve the legacy of artists -- especially African-American artists, spark the interest of future art collectors, and help elevate African-American art in the eyes of the art world. "I want to ensure that this genre of art, which is an intrinsic part of the history and totality of American art, is never lost or forgotten by the art world," says Jones.

Sunday, December 6, 2009

Latest Twitter Applications



Do you ever notice those little Twitter applications with the explanation listed on the right side of your Twitter profile?

If not, you should pay attention to those little apps because there could be something that would be useful for your industry, business and marketing needs.

Here is a brief collection and summary of new Twitter applications. Weekly, I will continue to provide the five latest applications that Twitter has to offer.


Tweet Bookz | Where Can I Put All My Tweets
TweetBookz allows you to create and order high quality books of your tweets. Soft and hard cover versions are available in four unique designs. The books have full color covers and inside pages of black and white. Each one stands 5.5 inches high and 8.5 inches wide and features up to 200 of your tweets, one per page, starting from the most recent. You can chose to remove any tweets you don’t want included. All our products are printed in America on 100% recycled paper.

Blip.FM | What are you listening to?
A blip is a combination of 1) a song and 2) a short message that accompanies it. The way you create a blip is to first search for a song that you want to hear (or a song that you want your listeners to hear), then add a short message (under 150 characters), finally you submit it. Submitting a blip is also referred to as “blipping”, so from here on out, when you read “he blipped my favorite track” it means “he submitted a blip that had my favorite song attached”.

Fledging Wine | How Can I Help?
The Fledgling Initiative aims to make awesome wine for the benefit of Room to Read, a non-profit organization extending literacy and educational opportunities to children worldwide. Every case sold will provide approximately 60 local language children’s books and promote education in the world’s poorest regions.

Trends map | Real-time local Twitter trends
Trendsmap.com is a real-time mapping of Twitter trends across the world. See what the global, collective mass of humanity are discussing right now.

Trazzler | Where Should I Go?
Trazzler is a website that helps you answer the question, "Where should I go?" by recommending hand-picked trips unique to your location and Travel Personality. The Trazzler Buzz list is created from the volumes of information being transmitted to Twitter every second about 10,000 spots in 50 cities, plus festivals and outdoor destinations all over the world. We rank the list according to a formula that measures volume and recent activity on Twitter. The buzz list is the ultimate source of research on where people are going (or want to go) right now. Trazzler.com goes beyond the buzz and transports you to these places—and makes savvy recommendations based on your preferences—so you can find out where you should go on your next trip.

Hollywood budgets are tight, so they call on PR

Ad Budget Tight? Call the P.R. Machine
By BROOKS BARNES


LOS ANGELES

Hobbled by a depressed DVD market and drooping sales of movies to foreign television networks, Hollywood studios are finally reining in runaway marketing budgets. Lionsgate, already one of the leaner operations, boasted that it cut marketing expenses by 66 percent in the second quarter from a year ago, while Disney dismissed about a dozen marketing executives early this month in an effort to shrink spending.

But don’t think that Hollywood believes it can get by with less promotion. This, after all, is the place that perfected the hard sell. As studios cut “paid media” (newspaper ads, television spots and billboards) they are leaning more heavily on armies of publicists generating what they call “earned media,” free coverage in magazines, newspapers, TV outlets and blogs.

The biggest movies are still backed by megawatt ad buys. On the other hand, Paramount Pictures did not buy a single billboard to promote “Paranormal Activity,” its recent horror film. The studio also saved tens of millions of dollars by forgoing a national television campaign. Instead, Paramount depended on its publicity arm to fan interest on blogs and in traditional media. The flack attack worked: the film, made for just $10,000, has sold $104 million in tickets.

Over at Disney, publicity executives are coordinating their efforts more closely with those of their advertising counterparts: If the P.R. team for the company’s ABC unit can land an article about “Dancing With the Stars” on the cover of TV Guide, for instance, the network will make certain not to also buy advertising space in that issue to push the show.

Disney recently went so far as to develop a computer program to help it determine how much monetary value was coming from such publicity efforts. It can quickly plug in data — “Access Hollywood” had a 30-second interview with a star of “The Middle,” a new ABC comedy — and the program spits out what that same 30 seconds would cost to buy.

There is another advantage to a publicity machine on overdrive. “At least with publicity — placed stories — there is a feeling that the message has gone through a filter,” said Paul Pflug, the co-owner of Principal Communications, a public relations firm that specializes in entertainment. “Journalists and their editors had to consider the pitch worthy of space. The message has been vetted in some way.” He said an article was more valuable to the studios because it is more credible to viewers than an ad.

Social networks like Facebook and Twitter have also changed the publicity game in Hollywood. The P.R. apparatus has largely assumed the responsibility of monitoring, shaping and creating attention on that part of the Web. Movie characters now have Twitter profiles and Facebook pages, for instance. Guess who updates the accounts?

The Web has also given studios a way to bring consumers into the movie-making process long before the first ads roll out. Casting announcements are one example. Five years ago, nobody but the trade newspapers cared who was cast as the third lead of “Inglourious Basterds.” Now teams of digital publicists convey every little pip and squeak of the early process to hundreds of bloggers.

And because one errant blog post can start an online brush fire, publicists do reconnaissance on bloggers — What is their audience reach? Is their writing snarky? Which other blogs pick up their links? — and manage accordingly.

Universal Pictures, looking for a way to bolster coverage of “Couples Retreat,” a comedy starring Vince Vaughn about an island vacation, decided to stage a lavish junket, one of those all-expenses-paid promotion-a-thons for writers and TV reporters. Instead of hosting the event at a Los Angeles or New York hotel, as is standard practice, Universal flew the participants to Bora Bora.

It cost about twice as much as a standard junket, but generated at least four times as much media coverage, the studio estimated. (The New York Times and many other media outlets ban the acceptance of these freebies on ethical grounds, because there could be an appearance of buying favorable coverage.)

“You’ve got to remain responsible with your resources while continually finding new ways for your campaigns to stand out,” said Michael Moses, Universal’s executive vice president of publicity.

Standing out on the cheap often means staging silly stunts that entertainment news outlets are happy to consume. The divisions responsible for pushing DVDs, particularly desperate for attention now that sales are declining, are big fans of this tactic.

Trying to drum up publicity for the DVD of “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs,” 20th Century Fox invited reporters to witness the construction of a 48-foot-tall ice sculpture resembling the star of the movie, Scrat the squirrel. To promote the DVD release of “Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure,” Disney publicists went so far as to get the United Nations to name the character an “honorary ambassador of green” to help promote environmental awareness among children.

AT a time of supposedly stark cuts, studios still send loads of giveaway items to the news media in the hope that it will prompt coverage. Disney just shipped jars filled with 90 toy soldiers to promote “Toy Story 3,” which doesn’t open until June. (“Attention troops!”) The studio, which has lost money in the last two quarters, also found the cash to send one-pound boxes of beignet mix to promote its animated musical “The Princess and the Frog,” which is set in New Orleans.

And to support “The Informant!” earlier this year, Warner Brothers shipped, at four pounds each, gallon-paint canisters filled with popcorn kernels. We guessed that the tie-in was that Matt Damon’s character in the film works for a company involved with corn syrup, but we still aren’t sure.

Thursday, December 3, 2009

A PR Perspective on the Tiger Woods Debacle

Playing a bad lie: How Tiger botched a PR opportunity
By Ari B. Adler

By not addressing his infidelity right away, Woods let rumors aggravate a bad situation

Sexing, texting and vexing—it’s a perfect storm of reputation destruction, and its latest victim is Tiger Woods. To make matters worse, instead of facing the publicity storm head on and getting control of the story as quickly as possible, he went into hiding. That left the story angles to those less concerned about his best interests.

It’s probably a sad testament to the times, but when Woods’ SUV ran over a fire hydrant and into a tree around 2:30 a.m. one night last week, there were plenty of people who immediately thought, “drunken driving.” When it became clear that wasn’t the case, the rumors started to expand to include painkillers, speeding and his wife chasing him out of the house with a golf club.

While the rumors and the news reports about them began to grow, Woods stayed mum. He would not talk to the press. He would not talk to police. Therefore, instead of having a bad-news story last a couple of days, he has instead been faced with a nonstop, daily thrashing of his reputation. Breaking news alerts and breathless anchors eager to share any update have now given way to the online posting of a voicemail to and “sexts” from an alleged mistress.

This type of rumor, innuendo and celebrity smackdown news has always been a possibility, but it was generally dealt with by PR pros with a shrug and, “Well, it’s the National Enquirer—no one really believes that stuff, anyway.” Now, what used to be considered salacious material best left to the tabloids is finding its way to online powerhouses like the Huffington Post and to mainstream juggernauts like CNN and ESPN.

The tagline from that 1990s cult-classic television show “The X-Files” has never been more relevant. “The truth is out there,” we were told, week after week. These days, however, PR pros need to remember that not only is the truth out there, it’s now available in electronic formats that are easily reproduced and distributed.

That means they need to be even more aggressive—both with their clients and with the media. They need to get clients to be 100 percent upfront with them about every potential PR attack. Then, they need to go on the offensive and get control of the story immediately.

In Woods’ case, the story became the story, which is the last thing he needed. In the statement he finally issued, Woods said, “Personal sins should not require press releases.” He should stick to golf and stop trying to dabble in public relations. Often, in media cases like this, a coverup becomes a bigger story than the initial indiscretion. Though it may be another sad testament to the times, a famous man cheating on his wife is a one- or two-day story. The ones drawn out in the headlines for weeks at a time are those in which only a few details are revealed at first and the rest trickle out.

Consider what would have happened if Tiger Woods had held a press conference upon being released from the hospital. It’s quite likely the basic story would have been:

“Tiger Woods announced today that his car accident occurred after he left his home following an argument with his wife over an extra-marital affair. The golf pro allegedly had a long-term relationship with a woman he met just months before his wife gave birth to their daughter. Woods said he is working through the matter with his wife and asked for privacy for all parties involved to assist in his family’s healing process.”

Anyone going on the offensive after that would have been seen as opportunistic and risked their reputations. By confessing and repenting publicly with the whole story, Woods would have positioned himself as a potential victim.

Going on the offensive isn’t going to change the facts, but it will make them less captivating and, therefore, less newsworthy. Besides, with today’s incredible-story-of-the-minute news industry and their attention-deficient audiences, it never takes long for the spotlight to shift.


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Ari B. Adler is a media relations professional with experience as a newspaper reporter and editor as well as a government and corporate spokesperson. You can follow him on Twitter at @aribadler.

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Where does your Facebook Fan Page Rank?

From Mediabistro:





Ever since Facebook upgraded its fan pages so that brands, celebrities and organizations became equivalent to human beings in the social network -- i.e. content from fan pages is displayed in one's feed, just like with friends -- we've received a barrage of requests to fan just about anything you can imagine, including about 20 PR agencies.

One social media analytics company, Sysomos, took a look at nearly 600,000 Facebook fan pages and found only 297 -- or 0.05% -- have more than one million fans. Other interesting findings:

Michael Jackson is the most popular page on Facebook, with 10 million fans; he is followed by actor Vin Diesel (7 million) and U.S. president Barack Obama (6.9 million).

On average, a Facebook Page has 4,596 fans.

Four percent of pages have more than 10,000 fans, 0.76% of pages have more than 100,000 fans, and 0.05% of pages (or 297 in total) have more than a million fans.

95% of pages have more than 10 fans

65% of pages have more than 100 fans

23% of pages have more than 1,000 fans

4% of pages have more than 10,000 fans

0.76% of pages have more than 100,000 fans

0.047% of pages have more than one million fans (297 in total).

Melyssa Ford + Derek Blanks: Thick Skin versus Thin Skin


If there is anything I've learned from working with Melyssa Ford is that you have to have Thick Skin while working in this business. Here is her Derek Blanks Alter Ego photo Thick Skin versus Thin Skin.

Here is the press coverage secured:

Necole Bitchie.com gets approx 351,300 site visitors per month*

Miss Jia.com gets more than 42,900 visitors per month*

Madd Fashion

Honey Magazine 13,700

* according to Quantcast