Boomerang

For me, Easter weekend will forever be associated with one of the most traumautic, yet ultimately inspiring, events in my adult working life. It was five years ago in April 2002 that Wilson McHenry Co. (WMC), a very well-respected tech PR firm in Silicon Valley, closed up shop following the Bay Area tech collapse. I called in from Palm Springs for an all-hands staff meeting on Easter Sunday to learn that negotiations to be acquired by another larger firm had ultimately fallen through. There was no longer a WMC to return to after my holiday road trip.

In 1999, I moved from a smaller sports marketing agency to WMC during the height of the tech boom, and my first technology client was Maxtor Corp., which, at the time, was the world’s largest hard drive company. After learning the ropes of technology PR from colleague Erin Hartin during my first weeks at WMC, our expanding agency team eventually grew Maxtor into our largest account. Back then, one of our biggest wins for Maxtor was launching the first-ever external storage drive, which became the Maxtor OneTouch family of products. The brainchild of Mike Cordano, EVP, and his Maxtor Branded Products Group team, it became the #1 brand of external storage devices for consumers in the world.

Eight years down the pike, I’m still working with Erin Hartin, now my Fabrik client, and Mike Cordano, Fabrik CEO. In fact, I’ve done so at three different agencies over the last five years; we keep following each other wherever we go. Two of my Cohn & Wolfe colleagues who also work on Fabrik, Annie Longsworth and Tony Obregon, are also former WMC-ers who worked on the Maxtor team. We’re one big happy family.

It’s incredibly satisfying to work with this dedicated and talented team - and the depth of industry knowledge I’ve gained after eight years working the same “beat” is probably the closest I’ll ever come to working an in-house PR gig.

This year’s Easter was filled with anticipation and excitement leading up to today’s launch of the first wave of new offerings coming from Mike and his innovative R&D team following the recent SimpleTech acquisition. The Fabrik team is building out a personal media web of software, services and devices that will make managing, sharing and publishing content more simple than any of us can imagine.

You can hear more about that in Mike’s vision for Fabrik, and the latest offerings hitting the market this week, in recently recorded podcasts for today’s launch.

It’s been a great eight years. Here’s to many more. Cheers!

Whether you credit Katrina, rising gas prices, polar bears drowning in melting glacial waters, or years of persistent work from many dedicated souls, you cannot deny that Green is finally having its day. Al Gore, of course, also gets a huge nod for the huge wake-up call that turned Green from important to imperative in both red and blue states, as well as around the globe. After you watch An Inconvenient Truth, how can you not take the cause seriously? The real challenge of the movie, however, is not sitting through the Powerpoint slides, but the dearth of solutions offered at the conclusion. What role can we each play, beyond recycling and composting, in helping to save the planet?

In a survey conducted by Cohn & Wolfe client Landor Associates and sister company Penn Schoen Berland in 2006, we learned that a disheartening 58% of the population put themselves in the “disinterested” category when it comes to Green issues. We also learned, however, that consumers who do care are willing to switch brands for a cause if price and quality are equal. That said, more than half of the people we surveyed were unable to identify the steps companies are taking towards greener strategies.

It got us thinking: If Green is a competitive advantage, how can we help our clients communicate their strategies?

From there Cohn & Wolfe blossomed (pun intended) with new ideas about the role marketing can and should play in sustainability. Green is no longer about “Give a Hoot! Don’t Pollute!” as it was in the 1970s. Nor is it acceptable for a company to hope that a recycling program will garner enough goodwill that it doesn’t need to address its deeper impact on the environment. It is now a fundamental and critically important business issue that can result in both profit AND a better world.

The result of our thinking, research and hands-on experience is the introduction of CW Greenworx – a new global practice designed to assist clients with external and internal communication strategies around sustainability, alternative energy and environmental strategy.

We are currently at work on the second annual Green Brands Study, and I will wager that the percentage of people who call themselves “disinterested” has dramatically decreased. If you’d like to get the results in April, let us know at greenworx@cohnwolfe.com.

I was recently interviewed by San Francisco City College’s ID.TV for a segment on Green trends in business. Below is a short clip with some of the footage shot for the segment airing next month.

Thanks to everyone who now participates in the online world in some way or another. We have artists, writers, educators, and experts sharing their stories and experiences with the world. Social media tools like blogs, tags, and widgets help us understand our cyber neighbors better.

As we all know, the web is an interconnected force that evolves daily. Messages move at the speed of light. Online networks can build very quickly. Written words live on the Internet forever. So how do we maintain balance and harmony when speaking to the entire planet? Rules, my friend, rules. Nobody knows that better than Tom Foremski, who has launched a new blog called New Rules Communication. As Tom puts it, “There are new rules emerging that will become the basis for best practices in communicating ideas in what is becoming a conversational, social media world. We don’t yet know what the new rules will be, we know some of them but there are lots more to discover –and that’s what’s exciting because we all get to participate in creating the new rules.”

While people are connecting like crazy every which way, some folks are helping to establish more order to this online ecosystem. Foremski is one of those people with a mission to provide common sense and standards among communicators. We applaud him for his efforts and take full pleasure in being a major sponsor of New Rules Communication. So we thought it was only fitting to pull together our own rules to live by in this social media world. Therefore, the Boomerang Blog offers its rules for “active listening” to start 2007 off right. As we see it, the online “playing field” will undoubtedly change but good rules will still apply.

The Topix search engine, which covers both blog and news sources, has updated itself with an interesting new feature: When searching for a particular news or blog item, Topix provides an interactive graph that shows the highs and lows of mentions over a one year period. Clicking on a portion of the graph will narrow results to that particular period of time. You can also easily segregate blogs and news sources. This is a valuable tool for PR professionals who regularly monitor and report on news and trends.

TechCrunch has an interesting article up about Bix, an online service (currently in invite-only beta) that allows sponsors to easily create and control contests. Sponsors can allow entrants to submit video, audio, or photo content and can even allow voting if they are really after the “American Idol” feel. For marketers, Bix provides an opportunity to interact with target customers and provides opportunities not just to increase brand visibility, but to offer such things as coupons and offers.

Blog SolutionWatch reports the launch of new service Commentful, a tool that allows users to keep track of discussions on new media sites. Users create a watchlist of sites to track and are notified of updates when they log into their account. A FireFox extension is also available, which provides real-time updates. This is useful for anyone who needs to keep track of ongoing discussions that might affect their clients, but doesn’t have the resources to baby-sit the conversation. Oh, and Commentful isn’t the first in this space – competitors include coComment and co.mments.