There are a lot of creative people in this world, and there are a lot of reliable people in the world.
There are far fewer people who are both creative AND reliable.
Mark Mckay is one of those people, and I recently had the good fortune of working with him on the video that accompanied CNW Group's announcement about the launch of the CNW Social Media Release (if you haven't seen the video, check it out now on the release here).
For those of you that don't know him, Mark McKay was the fellow that did the video for the 2nd mesh conference ("The Wacky World of Web 2.0"), and he also hosts his own online-TV show called "Happy Hour with Mark McKay. If you watch MTV Canada, you'll know that Mark has parlayed his online success into a regular gig television gig.
I've always thought he was entertaining, and knew that he was skilled at creating video content for the online space.
After working with him on this recent video project for CNW Group, I can also say that he is also incredibly reliable. When we first met to start the project, he gave me a time line of when he would have certain elements of the video ready, from a draft script to a rough version right through to the finished copy. We agreed on the timeline, and he kept right to it, delivering the final version when he said he would.
The only thing stopping me from recommending his services to other people is that I'm worried he'll get too busy, and that I won't get a chance to work with him again.
Yeah, after a few months of wicked hard work from a whole bunch of different people, the CNW Group Social Media Release has arrived!
If you're not sure what a Social Media Release is, check out this video that CNW commissioned the amazing Mark McKay to do:
If you didn't get it from the video, one of the solid points about the CNW SMR is that everything is embeddable. That's how I got the above video into this blog post.
But what's up with the little round face?
He is CNW SMR - the lines coming out of his mouth represent a message, while the ear represents the comments. Essentially, he's a conversationalist, just like the CNW SMR.
It is also one of the first SMRs to truly offer comments on the body of the release. I'm not sure that everyone will go for this sort of thing, but I think that it is a fantastic idea. If one person has a comment (negative or positive) about your organizations announcement, chances are others will as well. With comments, that one person (or more than one person) can voice their opinion directly on the release, and you as a PR pro can also respond directly on the release. The advantage of being able to have an official reply in an offical place is obvious. (Oh yeah, these comments are RSS enabled as well, meaning that if you want to keep up to the conversation via RSS, you can)
In order to give you social media enthusiasts a better idea of how sweet the CNW SMR is, Todd Defren graciously allowed me to adapt a chart he created a few months ago that aimed to "untangle the various SMR offerings" from major wire services.
What else is cool about the CNW SMR? Well, you should check it out here and see for yourself (or check here for more CNW SMRs). You can also follow @CNWGroupSMR on Twitter to be updated when we issue new Social Media Releases on behalf of our clients.
The whole CNW team was awesome to work with on this project. Product Manger Duane Bayley has done a fantastic job (and if you have any questions, hit him up on Twitter) of working with the design team on getting all the elements right. CNW's in-house graphic designer Kelly also did an amazing job of creating all those little face icons that you see on the release (I've also got a lot of respect for Kelly for being so patient with me and all my last minute suggestions).
I'd also like to give props to MarkMcKay for making the kick-ass video above - he was truly a pleasure to work with. And thanks again to Todd Defren (and the SHIFT Communications crew) for letting us adapt their chart and BrianSolis for being a decent enough guy to provide us with both a quote and a photo for our SMR.
So what do you think? Is the CNW SMR the kind of thing you think you would use? Why or why not? Any thoughts on the topic that you can muster up would be greatly appreciated!
Disclosure: if it wasn't already obvious, I work for CNW Group. However, this is a personal blog and the views expressed on it may not reflect those of CNW Group. Basically, I'm going to say what I want here, event if what I want to say has a lot to do with my work. Hey, it is my life and my blog. And Jens' blog. And to a lesser extent these days, Espen's blog. But you get the idea. Does anyone even read disclosure statements these days?
The two things that crossed my mind after reading this story were "only in Texas, eh?" and that the elevator repairman will be telling this story for the rest of his life.
A great read, and for some reason it reminded me of the Wikipedia article on Bear-baiting that mentions an event from the middle ages featuring a pony with an ape tied to its back against three dogs.
People have been saying that newspapers are dead or dying and although I agree, I can't say I'm happy with it. As I've mentioned before here, one of my favorite things to do on an early weekend morning (or holiday Monday morning like today) is to pick up a copy of the The Globe and Mail and slowly read it over while having a latte from one of my favorite haunts in Toronto's Little Italy area.
One of the articles that I read was headlined "Ads Critical For MySpace" (I'd link to it, but for some reason I can't find it on the Globe and Mail website). I always think it is interesting to read about MySpace because with all the Facebook hype, we often forget that MySpace is more popular in the states, and will probably continue to be for a little while. The article talks about how MySpace now allows advertisers to more directly target users. It seems like a great idea, and similar to what Facebook offers, but I was surprised to read that some advertisers were worried that their ads might show up on MySpace profile pages that displayed risque photos. Is it a valid concern? Possibly. But one that advertisers are going to have to deal with if they want to display their ads in the highly personal world of online social networks.
Another interesting article in today's paper was about an airplane that crashed in BC. Even though the plane's transponder had broken, rescue workers were still able to find the crash survivors thanks to one of them being able to text a friend. I think that as cellular networks have greater range and phones start to come equipped with GPS as a standard feature, we'll see them featuring more regularly in rescues like this.
Another article in the paper mentioned that another Cuban athlete had gone missing at an international tournament in Edmonton. While the article didn't mention what type of tournament the athlete was competing in, it did say that Fidel Castro himself had written a column on the "World Wide Web" criticizing Edmonton for being a "dumping ground for Cuban athletes."
I don't really have an opinion one way or another about the legality of Cuban athletes defecting during mysterious tournaments, but I do question the author's use of the term "World Wide Web." Are we back in 1994?
Maybe I'll make this "Weekend News" type of post a regular feature on BlogCampaigning. I find that I pay more attention to the articles I'm reading when I plan to write about them.
Do you still read paper editions of the newspaper? Or have you moved to completely online versions?
We've always heard that there is more than one way to tell a news story.
In the latest example of this, there are two somewhat contradictory headlines.
For the most part, much of the text in the two news stories is almost identical. Both make mention of the fact that two people were killed and many others wounded while the mostly-male celebrants took off their shirts and waved them in place of flags. The writers at each outlet obviously used the same source.
It really makes me wonder just how much I'm missing when I quickly scan the headlines from online news sources.
PR NewsWire reports that the widely-read conservative blog Power Line has launched a 'Candidates' Forum,' where Republican presidential candidates and their staffers will engage in an ongoing and instantaneous interactive discussion with the site's 412,000 weekly readers. It is the first time a party's leading presidential hopefuls have coalesced at one website to engage in a conversation with the party's most committed members, reports PR NewsWire.
Meet the OPOs via the Washington Post. Who are the OPOs, did you say? The OPOs are the online political operatives – And for the OPOs-- the Internet isn't just a tool. It's a strategy, a whole new way of campaigning, a form of communication, from blogs to MySpace to YouTube, with far more potential than the old media of print and television. So if you want to learn more about the people that work with online political campaigns head to the Post.
We the People: John Edwards asks supporters to put themselves in YouTube ad. TechPresident reflects on the story.
But what's up with the little round face?