Anyone Thirsty?

That's right - it's time for another edition of Thirsty Thursday.

On February 18th, Toronto's finest young (and young at heart) PR practitioners and accounting student (Scotty Mac) will once again be raising a few pints at Pauper's Pub,  located conveniently close to the TTC (more importantly, its the halfway point between where I work and where I live).

Plan to show up anytime after 6:30 pm. We'll probably order nachos.

-Parker

PS: Oh, and if you do plan on attending please RSVP on the Facebook Event

BlogCampaigning: Movin' On Up

Congrats to a few members of the BlogCampaigning crew: The official notice of Heather Morrison's new position at Sequentia Environics went out (over the newswire, no less) last week, saying that she'll "supervise the daily operations and performances of client service teams." A good move indeed; Sequentia is  a digital communications firm that "focuses on the online relationships between companies and their customers." It's also part of the Environics Group.

In other celebratory news, Jens "Schredd" Schroeder sent me an email last week to say that he handed in his doctoral thesis last Monday. "I can't really believe it's over... " he wrote. "But I suppose you never reach the point where you're convinced that it's the right moment to hand in a project of this size." The paper is titled 'Killer Games' versus 'We Will Fund Violence' :The Perception of Digital Games and Mass Media in Germany and Australia, and Jens is hoping to make it available here on BlogCampaigning sometime soon.

-Parker

Everything I Need To Know About Social Media I Learned From The Globe and Mail (THE VIDEO!)

A few months ago, I gave a presentation as part of the Canadian Institute's Managing Social Media Conference titled "Everything I Need To Know About Social Media I Learned From The Globe and Mail." A few weeks ago, the good folks from the Canadian Institute were kind enough to give me that presentation in video format so that I could share it with my readers.

I pretty much walked straight from the presentation to a job interview at MAVERICK PR, where I now work.

For more on this presentation (including my explanatory notes and the slides), please see this post or visit ParkerMason.ca/Globe

Anyways, it looks like the Canadian Institute has another Managing Social Media conference coming up in Calgary in March. I'm sure it will be good, so if you're in town you should check it out.

-Parker

PS: You should totally follow BlogCampaigning on Twitter. It is twice as easy as RSS, and all the cool kids are doing it.

Tricky Flacks, Slippery Slopes and Lazy Hacks

A few days ago, I wrote a post about the case of a journalist that had posted a copy of my friend's news release as if it was his own article. This got me thinking:

The smart newspaper editor (or whatever the title of the guy who is in charge of the copy on a newspaper's website) might see this and start to look at his website traffic more closely. If he was really smart, and had the right information, he'd begin to find out whether it was the articles written by journalists or the news releases written by PR pros and simply posted by journalists that got the most traffic.

The smart editor would also have to pay attention to the types of traffic he was attracting. 1000 visitors that don't click on ads or otherwise generate revenue are worth less than the one visitor that buy's a print subscription to the newspaper, clicks on an ad or otherwise helps them keep the lights on and server running.

The smart PR pro might then realize that they could tilt the balance of things in their favor by writing news releases that can be easily re-purposed by journalists, and that will also result in revenue-generating traffic. It is probably easier said than done, but that doesn't mean it is impossible.

And is it a slippery slope, as Todd Defren writes? Definitely.

-Parker

Coffee Time

For the past few weeks, my employer CNW Group has been hosting a series of informal "Coffee Break" webinars aimed at educating people about our various products. (CNW is WAY more than just a newswire.)

Laurie Smith, CNW's VP of Culture and Communications hosted all of theses sessions, and I joined her to talk about Social Media Releases and CNW's MediaRoom product. I kinda like to think that if we'd done more of these we could have had a chance of becoming the Regis and Kelly of the newswire circuit.

Most of them are now archived on the CNW Group website, and you can access them in the Events section.

The DJ Edits My Blog

Adam Gorley is BlogCampaigning's resident copy-editor, but he also moonlights as a DJ. Here's his take on using a laptop to spin tracks. Imagine this: you’re the DJ at a bar—the night’s entertainment. You’re using a laptop; you’ve got some software that you’ve tried out before and you like better than anything else you’ve tried for the purpose.

Things are going pretty well, until right in the middle of the tenth song or so the application quits unexpectedly with no warning and no message—what! You scramble to switch to another program (iTunes is all you’ve got available) and find a song quickly to fill the gap. Then you load up the application again—it probably just crashed, right?—surely it won’t happen again. But no, it does happen again after another ten songs, and you realize it’s because you’re using a trial version of the software. Well, bloody hell, a little warning somewhere would have been nice, you think, and you spend the rest of the night cueing songs in iTunes and hoping nobody notices—and of course, cursing the company that made that other application.

Well, that happened to me about eight weeks ago at The Painted Lady—the first time I played at that bar—and, man, was I unhappy about it, by which I mean Embarrassed. I won’t name the application that closed down on me, because I don’t want anyone to use it, which is a shame, because otherwise it’s a decent lightweight laptop DJing app.

I might sound like an ass for trying to use a software trial to DJ a party, but, you know what? To me, that’s the purpose of a trial: to try the product out—not for ten songs, not for 100 songs, but until I’m ready to buy it. I would prefer to have the functionality of the application somehow restricted rather than face a completely unexpected shutdown. All I’m asking for is a warning here software developers, that’s all I’m saying.

It turns out that iTunes is an acceptable—if very weak—substitute for bare bones software. (You might laugh—please feel free—but I can say this confidently because I’ve had to use it exclusively on three occasions now.) And by adding a few features, it could actually be good—yes, iTunes could be a reasonably good (basic) DJing application, with the addition of greater crossfading control, current song protection, and two music windows. That’s all. It would be far from great, but in a pinch, I wouldn’t worry about using it.

Of course, none of that can take away the fact that I’m using a laptop and a mouse (or, worse, a trackpad) to DJ, but that’s another story.

So, maybe you can help me find a good free/open source mixing application for Macs?—the simpler the better. And if it’s compatible with the M-Audio Torq Xponent, I like that too.

-Adam Gorley

Check out Gorley's playlist from that night on 199x.org

Everything I Need To Know About Social Media I learned From The Globe and Mail

A few days ago, I gave a presentation as part of the Canadian Institute's Managing Social Media conference here in beautiful, downtown Toronto.

As often happens with these things, I agreed to participate in the conference months ago, and I'm not even sure how I arrived at the title of "Integrating Social Media With Traditional Media" for my talk.

As I began to put my slides together, I realized that I'd need some solid examples of organizations that had successfully "integrated social media with traditional media".

The one that kept coming up was The Globe and Mail, and I think that communicators can learn a lot from the way this organization, which used to be a traditional, print newspaper, has morphed into combination of newspaper and social media portal at TheGlobeAndMail.com.

The main lessons that I think we can learn from them are below:

1.) Make it easy for people to get the information they want in the format they prefer: By this, I mean offer your content across different channels and in different places. The Globe and Mail has a print edition that I can buy at the newsstand, I can download a PDF version from their site, I can subscribe to their news via RSS, or I can read the actual stories on their website. The point is that I can access it in the way that I want.

2.) Embrace multimedia: The Globe and Mail is a newspaper, yet they use audio content in various sections on their site, and they also frequently embed video in their articles. This is similar to point one in that it offers the information in other formats.

3.) Easy URLs: Social media is about sharing. Make it easy for people to share your information (or access it in the first place) by giving them easy URLs. The example I use in my presentation is how The Globe and Mail has done this by telling readers of their print edition that they can access more information about the Toronto International Film Festival at globeandmail.com/tiff09. Its easy to share, its easy to remember and both of those mean that there is a greater chance that people will view it and give it to others to check out.

4.) Do It Live: The Globe and Mail used to print a paper edition once a day (they might have also had an evening edition or something), as most papers did. However, they constantly update their website. They also frequently hold live chats with reporters and cover events live using tools like Cover It Live. Communicators can adapt this kind of strategy by holding press conferences online, or making their spokespersons available for online discussions.

5.) Keyword-rich, easy-to-understand headlines: Admittedly, this isn't something I learned from The Globe and Mail, but another source. (Props to my friend Michael Allison for pointing this out to me!)

6.) Be part of the community: Inspired by a quote I heard attributed to Mathew Ingram, that "Linking to other sources and reading comments makes journalists stronger", I suggest that the lesson for communicators is to get involved in the community they are trying to reach. Their messages will be more relevant, and chances are the community will be more likely to accept the messages if they come from a trusted member.

7.) Keep it fresh: The reason people read the newspaper everyday is because it has new information everyday. Stories have updates. The take-away from this is that once a story goes live, you don't have to forget about it. Follow up on it, provide more information, and keep the story alive in the public eye with a new angle.

8.) Try new things: As I said in a post earlier this week, stop thinking about best practices and case studies and just go out there and do something new and interesting. The Globe and Mail is undergoing all sorts of change, and I'm sure they are the first ones to try some of the things they're doing. Let's learn from that.

I've embedded the slide show below. Since I'm as much of a student of the Masnickian school of Powerpoint presentations as I am his thoughts on economics, the deck has 103 slides that I covered in just under 40 minutes.

Integrating Social Media With Traditional Media

You can also download it at ParkerMason.ca/globe. Thanks to the Canadian Institute for giving me the chance to speak and to everyone in the audience for listening.

And special thanks to Joe Thornley for preserving on his blog what the Twitter community said online during my presentation. Credit for the photo above also goes to Joe.

-Parker

Less Talk, More Do

In my last post "Toronto Meet-Ups and Greet-Ups", I highlighted some of the main social media and communications events in Toronto. Today, I noticed a tweet by @malcolmbastien which read "Chatting About Event Overload in Toronto" with a link back to his blog. The post features a discussion between himself and Justin Kozuch (founder of Refresh Events), emphasizing that the increasing number of meet-ups in Toronto is not generating higher quality conversations. If anything, the discussions are becoming more fragmented and the groups more obscure. Malcolm's post got me thinking. Many of us go to a number of events for different reasons (mainly networking and knowledge accumulation), but after a while you start to realize you've heard it all before. I'm not knocking the events that I attend, or any of the hundreds of other ones out there—they all have a certain value to their participants. What I am saying is that as time goes on I am learning less and less new information and coming away from the events feeling less accomplished than I might have a year ago.

I wonder how the Toronto community can change this current trend. How can we make the events not only relevant and topical, but beneficial and useful from a practical standpoint?

Idea: What if some of the larger, more established events set up wikis where members of their community can submit problems, campaigns or current projects. Attendees and other members of the community could then put their names beside projects of interest until working groups were formed. I think something like this would allow us to use the knowledge we have accumulated and directly apply it, while still networking and continuing our education. When a group solves a problem or puts a project to bed, they could share what they learned with the rest of the community.

This is obviously only one suggestion. I've always preferred to learn from practical experience. I'm interested in putting the question out there: how do you think we can make these events more beneficial and useful to you? How would you like to see them grow? What would inspire you to attend more of them? Would you be interested in forming working groups to work on solving projects of interest?

Have A Coffee And Learn About Social Media Releases

Starting next week, CNW Group will be hosting a series of coffee-break webinars every Wednesday at 3pm EST.

The topic of the first one will be Social Media Releases, and I'll be stepping up to the mic (handset? speakerphone?) to tell you everything I know.

There will be plenty of time for questions, but are there any you think I should specifically address?

I promise that I'll try and make it both informative and entertaining, so grab a coffee and log in from your desk. It'll be like hanging out with me for a few minutes, but you can count it as doing work.

CNW Group Coffee-Break Webinar Series

-Parker

Thirsty Thursday on September 24th!

If you've been to a Thirsty Thursday before, you know how much fun Chris, Scotty, Cathy and I  have at these semi-regular events. You've probably had a good time, too. If you haven't been to one, now is your chance.

While these events are normally reserved for PR practitioners and crazy communicators, we're loosening the rules a little bit because one of our own, Scotty Mac, is leaving the industry to go back to school.

Since he'll be studying accounting, this is probably his last chance to have a good time. Think of it like a stag party for his career.

And help us decide where to hold it! We've celebrated Thirsty Thursday at Sneaky Dee's, Pauper's Pub, and the Victory Café before. Where should we go this time?

Some suggestions:

- Fionn MacCool's (Adelaide + University) - Elephant & Castle (King + Simcoe) - Temple Bar (King + Brant) - Duke Of Gloucester (Yonge + Charles) - Paupers Pub (Bloor + Bathurst) - Duke of York (near St. George station)

The ideal location has a patio, is central (or close to transit), and can accommodate a large group.

UPDATE: Our good friend Wilkey suggests that we all hit the Jay's game that evening and sit in the cheap seats at the 500 Level. Any thoughts on that?

Leave your thoughts (and let us know you'll be attending) in the Thirsty Thursday Facebook event!

-Parker

Toronto Meet-Ups and Greet-Ups

If you're part of the PR, tech, communications or social media community in Toronto you can pretty much fill up your entire week (and sometimes weekend) with different industry events. There are so many of them that it's sometimes hard to keep track, and even harder to know which ones are worthwhile. As September begins, bringing with it cooler weather and an end to the summer vacation mindset, Toronto's networking community is back in full swing. Here are some regular events to check out this fall:

1. Third Tuesday: Organized by Thornley Fallis, Third Tuesday is a long running social media event featuring discussions and presentations by industry professionals. Past guests have included Steve Rubel, Jeremy Wright, Mathew Ingram and Amber Mac. Third Tuesdays are a good venue for anyone just getting into the industry as well as self-proclaimed veterans. The networking at Third Tuesdays always adds value. I have made many great connections by simply attending and engaging in pre- and post-presentation discussions.

Cost: $10.00

2. SproutUpTO (formerly Wired Wednesday TO): Sprouter's SproutUp events are geared towards the tech, online and geek communities. They bring together start-ups and entrepreneurs as well as some PR and communications professionals. Recent events have seen presentations by Saul Colt and Stuart MacDonald. I find the networking at these events to be really top notch and have met great people and learned something valuable every time.

Cost: Free

3. Toronto Geek Girl Dinners: I wrote about these in a recent blog post on Toronto Uncovered. Food, girls and geek talk. Need I say more?

Cost: $10.00 (to hold your spot), plus cost of your dinner

4. GenYTO: Less formal events held at different watering holes throughout the city. These meet-ups are for young professionals working within the tech, communications and social media fields. Upcoming events and news/dialogue are streamed through their Facebook page.

Cost: Free

5. Thirsty Thursdays: Similar to GenYTO, Thirsty Thursdays are usually held once a month, or once every couple of months at different bars in and around Toronto. This is a more intimate event, where you can count on a good mix of professional and not-so-professional topics of conversation. They're always a lot of fun, and a good way to meet people in the industry.

Cost: Free

Canadian Law Firms And Their Use Of Social Media

My CNW Group colleague, friend, teammate, and BlogCampaigning contributor, Heather Morrison, has put together a great report about the way that Canadian law firms are using social media. Omar Ha-Redeye said it "is likely to become one of the primary sources for Canadian firms looking to enter this area."

Steve Matthews called it "a nice overview of the benefits of social media investment."

And Garry J. Wise wrote that it "thoroughly canvasses the key social media platforms and provides much-needed context via thoughtful comments from several Canadian lawyers who are constructively engaging online."

So what are you waiting for? Download the PDF via the link below:

Canadian Law Firms And Their Use Of Social Media

-Parker

Did Mainstream Media Win The Online Journalism War Against Bloggers?

Like Christie Blatchford before him, David Olive is one newspaper reporter that really doesn't understand blogs and the internet. In his recent article on TheStar.com ("Bloggers hitch wagons to the traditional media") he argues that... you know what? I'm not really sure what his argument is. He seems to be critical of bloggers and seems to be trying to defend traditional media.

The problem is that he doesn't do a good job of either.

After dismissing bloggers as nothing more than "Internet diarists," he applauds Newsweek, The Atlantic, Maclean's, The Nation and even his own Toronto Star for either hiring bloggers or turning their journalists into bloggers.

Just one paragraph later, he says that the reason these bloggers are turning to newspapers is because "there is little 'stumble upon' factor in blogs—strangers who come across a website by accident and become fans. You won't stumble across the website of prolific blogger Mark Steyn at the dentist's office as you will Chatelaine."

I find fault with this statement for a couple of reasons. The first is that if the major problem for bloggers is the lack of "stumble upon" traffic, why would writing for a newspaper website get them greater visibility than writing for their own website? Similarly, if blogs result in such little traffic, why is David Olive so happy to let us know about the prestigious print publications that now have their journalists spending time writing blogs on the publications' websites?

I'd also argue that blogs DO get a lot of stumble upon traffic—both from the fact that they link to other blogs (something David Olive doesn't seem capable of doing) and because of a little something called StumbleUpon. Most of the blogs I read today I read because I've come across them via a link from another blog. Either that, or I've found them via StumbleUpon—a tool that plugs into your web browser and lets you stumble around the internet.

I also question the validity of his statement that "the lifespan of the average blog is two to three months." I don't know where he got this information, and I'm not doubting it. I've got plenty of friends that have thought it was a good idea to set up a blog and given up after only a post or two. However, that's because the barriers to entry are so much lower for starting a blog than for starting a newspaper. If you honestly want to compare failure rates, how many people have given up trying to start a nationwide print publication after coming up with an initial idea and perhaps drafting one or two articles?

David Olive might declare that the war is over and that the mainstream media have won it, but I disagree.

I don't think there was a war in the first place. I think there was an evolution, and that the media everywhere is changing. Bloggers are thinking more like journalists, while traditional journalists and editors are thinking more like bloggers. If anything, the borders between the two are blurring.

For a guy writing an online article with a comments section (despite the lack of links), he's doing a pretty good job of not understanding what a blog is or how it works.

-Parker

CorpComm vs. IT: A Mythic Struggle?

A few weeks ago while giving a presentation for work, I stated that the battle for control over the corporate website between communicators and IT teams was a "mythic struggle". IT and web teams want control over the corporate website for security reasons, and because traditionally it was their realm—their area of expertise. In this age of online communication that we live in, the CorpComm team also wants control over the website: they want to be able to update their online information quickly, get information about visitors to the site and generally have at least as much control over it as the IT team.

The reason I was giving the presentation was to help introduce CNW Group's latest product (and the reason I've been so busy lately): the MediaRoom. Hopefully, it will be a peaceful resolution to any disagreements between IT and communications.

What is the MediaRoom?

The MediaRoom is a Web Content Management System designed for corporate communicators. It integrates easily with your existing website, and is easy to use so that the media section can be updated quickly and painlessly. If you can send an email, you can update your website with this. Anyone familiar with blogging tools like Wordpress or Blogger will be able to understand the MediaRoom CMS pretty easily.

As my boss, Nicole Guillot (CNW Group's Vice President, Product Management and Operations),  said:

“In today’s 24-hour media environment our clients need to communicate their messages—or respond to a crisis—with complete immediacy. CNW newswire clients can set up their CNW MediaRoom to automatically post news releases as they cross the wire. They can make any other changes or uploads anytime and anywhere there is an internet connection.”

Examples of the MediaRoom technology in work can be found on the newsrooms for Kellogg's, Match.com and Delta Airlines. I think the only downside of these examples is that they don't show how truly flexible the MediaRoom is, and how much you can do with it.

PR in Canada wrote about the MediaRoom, as did CMS Wire. You can also find out more about the CNW Group MediaRoom offering by visiting Newswire.ca/MediaRoom or by checking out the Social Media Release CNW put out about the MediaRoom.

If you've got any questions about it, I'd be happy to answer them for you (mostly my roommates are just sick of hearing about "content management systems" and I'm still pretty excited about the MediaRoom).

-Parker

Say Hello To @AdamGorley, Copy-Editor Extraordinaire

The whole reason I got involved with BlogCampaigning was to check the grammar on Espen's English writing (he's Norwegian, in case you missed it). When Jens started writing for us, I edited his posts as well (based on my small sample size, I'd say that Norwegians frequently mix-up singular and plural when writing in English and Germans write paragraph-long sentences rather than using a few periods). Now, we've got someone else to do that copy editing: Adam Gorley. He's a Toronto-based professional copy editor, and he volunteered to have a look at each of our posts before they go live. I've never thought I was a perfect writer, and I'm sure that long-time readers of this blog will have noticed a few typos, grammatical errors and even unfinished sentences here and there. I don't envy the work he's going to be doing on Jens' posts.

I'm hoping that with Adam Gorley's touch, these things will be a thing of the past.

He's @AdamGorley on Twitter and he also maintains his own blog of miscellany at AdamGorley.Blogspot.com. While he's gainfully employed right now, I'm going to go ahead and say that if you need any help with Copy Editing, he's probably your man.

-Parker

(PS: I wanted this post to be a surprise for him, so he didn't actually get a chance to edit it. Any errors are mine)

(PPS: Once I saw Adam play a 90-minute game of Ultimate frisbee wearing only sandals when everyone else was wearing cleats - that takes guts)

Congratulations to the CNW Group Scrabble Team!

Every year, CNW Group and a number of "top corporations from Bay Street's financial, legal, technology and accounting sectors" competed in a Scrabble competition for a chance to win the TMX Cup. The competition is in support of Frontier College, an organization with the goal of helping people improve their literacy skills.

I was pleased to hear that on Wednesday, March 11th, the "Newsmakers," a team representing my employer CNW Group, won the TMX Cup. I was pleased about this news, but not surprised. I've seen some of the CNW team play Scrabble before, and they're pretty good. Reportedly one of the members on the team played the word "Footage" on a triple-word score for 98 points.

Great work, Newsmakers.

And congratulations to the other winners, as well as TMX Group and Frontier College for organizing another successful Scrabble contest.

In related news, Futility Closet reports that if you combine all 100 scrabble tiles you can spell:

COUNTRYMEN, I AM TO BURY, NOT EULOGIZE, CAESAR; IF EVIL LIVES ON, BEQUEATHING INJURY, GOOD OFT EXPIRES: A PALSIED, AWKWARD DEATH!

Corporate Sponsorship

These days, people expect to get things for free.

They expect to things for free because they should be getting them for free.

I'm not talking about hard goods like cars and clothing, but rather information. Mp3s, video files, newspaper articles: all of these things are nothing more than information that are processed in different ways by the end user. It costs nothing to reproduce them.

However, it costs something to initially produce them. Musicians need to buy instruments and recording equipment, and they spend long hours writing and crafting their songs.

The recent public support for the four founders of The Pirate Bay shows that people aren't going to give up their ability to get free content that easily (swelling membership in Sweden's Pirate Party supports this as well). As Mike Masnick has demonstrated time and time again on Techdirt, this kind of model is also capable of supporting musicians (but maybe not the record labels).

Jeremy Wright also spoke about this at the recent Third Tuesday Toronto event. When commenting on the future of advertising, he mentioned that there will probably be more examples of "great content, great conversation" brought to you by a corporate sponsor, rather than "sponsored" posts written by that sponsor.   (I'm writing this from memory, so please correct me if I'm wrong about what he said or what he meant).

In the same way that corporation's might have the opportunity to sponsor "great conversation" in an online environment like Jeremy Wright's blog network,  I think we'll start to see examples of corporations sponsoring music and other types of art. Fans and the general public will be able to get the music for free, while the artist doesn't starve to death. Its really a win-win situation.

I think that some people will frown upon this model, and will see it as another way that corporations are manipulating our culture for their own benefit. If that is the case, then these same people

I, however, don't see this model of corporate sponsorship or patronage as a bad thing at all. I think it will create all kinds of new opportunities for artists in many different mediums to create art.

What are your thoughts on corporate sponsorship?

-Parker Mason

Martin Waxman for CPRS Mentor of The Year

I have recently been informed that Martin Waxman has been nominated to be the TorontoCanadian Public Relations Society's Mentor of the Year award. Until today, I wasn't even aware that this was an award category One of the first emails that I received after joining the CPRS was one asking me if I would be interested in the CPRS mentorship program. With no formal PR schooling behind me, having very few contacts in the industry, being new in the city and generally not knowing a whole lot about the field of Public Relations, I thought that this was would be a great opportunity.

I was matched up with Martin Waxman, co-owner of Palette Public Relations and he has been an amazing mentor.

Although we both have busy and varied schedules, we have managed to meet up for breakfast or coffee about once a month or so. He has always given insightful answers to my questions about the work within a PR agency, and has also provided me with valuable career advice. More than than, Martin has treated me like a colleague and a friend and I like to think of him the same way. I've always enjoyed our conversations, and always look forward to the next one.

I also know that Martin has donated a great deal of his time to be involved with CPRS Toronto, and for this I think of him as a sort of mentor to the greater PR community.

If you're reading this, thanks again for your time, Martin. I look forward to meeting up with you again in a few weeks.

-Parker

Blogger Outreach (Podcamp Toronto 09)

I know that PodCamp Toronto was almost a month ago, but I'm still catching up on some of the videos of the sessions that I missed. One of those sessions is one on Blogger Relations that Eden Spodek recently wrote about. The session was moderated by Keith McArthur and featured David Jones and Mathew Stradiotto representing the agency side while Eden and Anita Clarke represented the blogger side.

If you are in PR and interested in reaching bloggers, the session is definitely worth a view:

Some of the main points are:

While I don't want to say that the

Anita: "Good pitches always included a lot of information, and gave it all up front so that I didn't have to ask a lot of questions."

"I don't like being bothered every other day, whether the post has gone up or whether I'm going to do this, because I have a full time job." And I think that most bloggers have a full time job. If they don't, and the blog is their primary job, then they are probably equally busy. Either way, the message is that PR practitioners should respect the bloggers time.

"people from the states pitch to me, and they don't sell

Congratulations To FASHION Magazine!

In the face of what is unfortunately gloomy news for print publications, its great to see that some are still succeeding. FASHION Magazine recently announced that they are the first Canadian fashion magazine to reach 2 million readers.

My house used to get a copy every month as part of my roommate's subscription to Toronto Life magazine, and I'm sure that this bundling strategy certainly contributed to the magazine's large readership.

I'm also fairly certain that my two male roommates and myself aren't the target demographic for the publication, but it still made for great reading at the breakfast table.

Although I think that fashion publications have a better chance of existing as dead-tree publications more than other types of magazines, it is also great to see that FASHION hasn't ignored the online, and frequently reminds the reader to check out additional content (including videos) on their website.

Its just great to see any publication (particularly a Canadian one) succeed these days.

-Parker