Earlier this month, I read a blog about mommy wars. I quickly clicked away, hoping never to see it again. But the blogger went on a morning show. And there was a newspaper article about it, and my cousin in her wonderful way blogged about it….there’s no doubt that the alleged hostility between working moms and stay-at-home moms is news again. To summarize: according to the theory, stay at home moms think working moms are selfish and are damaging their children; working moms think stay at home moms are boring and are living a sad, sheltered suburban nightmare.

The first time I read about “the wars” was in 2001, after my own return to work following the birth of my first baby, sweet little Grace. Immediately I became wary of my new neighborhood friends – many of whom were stay at homes. Evidently, despite their warm and welcoming smiles, secretly they thought I was selfish and hurting my child by going to work, while they stayed home and did flashcards and watched Baby Einstein videos with their offspring.

As time would teach me, nobody but me was judging me, and eight years later those neighbors are among my best and dearest friends. Whether I work or not has no weight in our friendships, they watch my kids in a pinch when our nanny is sick or I’m out of town and my husband can’t get home, and I help them with their kids when they need to go to a school event or meeting at night. I admire them for having the stamina to stay home with their kids all day, for being “aunties” to my children, and for being the kind of friends and support system that I literally could not live my life without.

My experience is that motherhood is a bond of similar experiences (sleeplessness, worries, discipline techniques, funny stories, cute pictures, big dreams for our children, embarrassing moments) more than it is a battleground over what makes us different (home vs. working). And in my own corner of the world, my female friends cheer each other on in our own, personal successes – whether that’s mastering a new art class, running a half-marathon, or helping a storage company become a global breakthrough technology company.

So why write about it on our Matter blog? I think the media is doing a disservice to women by giving this story life. Today’s workforce – and the PR industry in particular – is full of bright young women, who may someday decide to have a child. I would hate for any woman, including my daughter, to make her choice about children and work based on the misguided notion that having a child means that you either are doomed to be bored at home, or face a life of apologizing for selfishly working.

It’s time to get over this non-story and move on before a new generation of women starts second-guessing their decisions instead of focusing on achieving their own personal best, which will undoubtedly make for happy children – whether mommy goes to work or stays at home.

This morning a group of us met with our client for a quarterly planning meeting. Four times a year, we get together and sit at a table to recap recent successes, challenges and plans for the next three months. It’s an efficient process and one that keeps us focused on what we need to achieve to get to where we want to be at the end of the year. (It’s also nice to get some extra face time with our client, since they’re a great group of people and we always look forward to seeing them in person.)

From time to time though, when we’re presenting progress against metrics, we need to address an area where we’re falling short. Most of the time these meetings give all of us an opportunity to celebrate a job well done and talk excitedly about how we’re going to maintain the momentum. But for a variety of reasons, every now and then there’s something that just isn’t exactly where we would like it to be. Shifting priorities, stalled approvals, a change in the competitive landscape…it happens to all of us: no matter how kick-ass our results are across the board, we are occasionally faced with challenges that keep us from achieving something we set as an objective. When that happens, though, we don’t sweat and get nervous. We don’t dread going in for that quarterly meeting. And we certainly don’t spend time thinking up excuses or ways to defend ourselves.

We sit down and honestly answer the question: what are we going to do to fix this?

In PR, and I suspect in most industries, on any given day there are an infinite number of variables that can cause plans and expectations to change dramatically. Instead of letting those things derail and unnerve us, we have to remain focused on end-results and really, truly come up with a plan of attack that helps us move past a specific issue and move towards our overall goal. Some of our best and most valuable meetings with clients happen when things aren’t going exactly as planned with a program. Our clients know we aren’t going to waste anyone’s time by fumbling around trying to justify why a metric wasn’t met, or a plan wasn’t executed. Instead, they know we’re walking into that meeting with some solid recommendations on how we’re going to make sure we meet the metric next time, or why our strategy might need updating. They count on us because we’re able to adapt quickly, come up with a new game plan and put it into action right away.

At the end of the day, clients need to know they can trust their PR partners to be honest and thoughtful, and level with them about what’s working and what isn’t. Excuses don’t work. Fresh ideas do. So if something isn’t working, ask yourself why and what you can do to fix it. And then fix it.

As PR pros, we’ve been following the shrinking media market and modifying our strategies with new ways to get coverage for our clients despite a dwindling audience. Pursuing traditional media coverage will often be top priority, but as the number of journalists and outlets lessen, we have to get more and more creative with our messages and find new audiences.

Yesterday, Ad Age noted that one way companies have modified their strategies to the changing landscape is by creating content for and pitching directly to consumers. While Twitter is old news to some people, many companies are only just diving into social media to reach consumers. Many of us have found that one of the best ways to reach new audiences is getting our clients active on Twitter.

Twitter is one of the easiest and fastest growing ways to broadcast news about your client while creating an engaging relationship with consumers. We just launched a new Twitter account for one of my clients and I am excited to see the new audiences our tweets will reach and the conversations they will create.

How are you finding new audiences and engaging consumers?

Last night, the Yankees won their 40th AL pennant by ousting the Angels 5-2 in Game 6 of the ALCS. While the victory has already brought about the usual parade of cringe-worthy quotations from Mr. Kate Hudson (“I couldn’t be more excited,” he said. “I feel like a 10-year-old kid.”) and I, admittedly, hate seeing the Yanks win anything, the franchise’s accomplishment got me thinking about sustained excellence.

Many Sox fans make the evil empire, buying-all-up-all-the-talent argument to explain the history of success in NYC. I suppose that’s fair, but it certainly doesn’t negate any triumphs enjoyed; it’s just smart business, and, in truth, the Sox have patterned themselves after this in recent years. I think whether it be by aggressive investment or disciplined preparation, the elite teams, companies, PR people, et al. stay at the top of their game by maintaining a distaste for the mediocre and the idle and by labeling anything less than outstanding as unacceptable.

Of course there are times when, as PR people, we won’t get ink on a story angle we’re pitching or a new social media program may be slow to get digital word-of-mouth flowing. (It’s been six years since the Yankees have been in the World Series, after all, even longer since winning the Championship.) What we have to avoid is hanging our hats on past successes and letting our creative energy and tenacity for results stall.

One of my biggest pet peeves, both in and outside of the world of PR, is lethargy and excuse-making. Whether it’s the fear of the seemingly insurmountable tasks before a complicated event or program, or the memory of past challenges, we have to avoid self-created distractions and keep focused on fresh strategy and smart, sustained execution to create continued production for our clients. Keeping a steady eye on why something won’t work shutters inventiveness and is a major drag on any team.

So, in honor of The Pinstripers, I encourage you to keep your rally caps on all week and pursue success with some good, old fashioned greed. Stay thirsty, my friends.

As our clients will attest, we’re a pretty creative group of people. Clients praise our fresh ideas, journalists respond to our creative pitches, and our people are full of imagination.  Yet, I’ve worked with people who didn’t always connect the dots between creative juices and actions/results – leaving me to ponder what role pie in the sky thinking plays in our business.

“We need…  to dispel the misconception that to be imaginative and creative means to proceed without limitations of any kind, to do whatever you want,” say Michelle and Robert Root Bernstein, authors of the blog Imagine That.  The authors go on to say “…creative imagination works best when faced with explicitly understood constraints.”

We agree. That’s why we apply one constraint: will it work?  By putting all creative ideas through a series of tough interviews, we conduct our due diligence to determine whether a new concept is appropriate. Can the idea be executed? Can we make this vision come to life with the resources available? Is it the right scale? Does it accomplish the goal(s)? Can it be measured?

We love creative thinking, entrepreneurial approaches and the energy that brainstorming provides. Most importantly, we love connecting creative communications programs to measurable business results.  After all, like our clients, many of us enjoy a good pie – apple, blueberry, pumpkin is a particular favorite this time of year – but we prefer it à la mode, not in the sky.

I’ve been at Matter for almost five years and in the PR agency biz for a dozen. I can safely say that I have never experienced a busier, more demanding time than Matter is experiencing right now (yes, yes…much better than the alternative!). Between new clients, new projects, new people, multiple launches and an upcoming tradeshow (at which several of our clients will be present…oh, and we have our own booth!), we are are all redlining. A slightly less obvious, but perhaps more persistent demand on us all is “staying informed” through reading/watching/listening to content related to our clients, industry and interests. (Information overload is familiar to you, no?)

We have tools to combat this threat on our sanity, however. They are called organization and efficiency.

While I believe it is critical for everyone to have a productivity system, there is no right one for everybody and others explain those better than I would anyway. I’m going to focus this post just on my favorite tools for managing information, which is an important part of any productivity system.

Information sources

News, correspondence, status updates, brilliant musings in 140 characters…these are the streams of my personal fire hose.

1. Email – at work, we use Microsoft Outlook / Exchange. For personal email, I have a couple Gmail accounts (each with a distinct purpose). My preference for Gmail has less to do with liking Google’s way of handling email (it’s fine, but it doesn’t wow me) and more to do with the tight integration with other Google tools (see below).  My iPhone is indispensable for being able to check them all from one screen. I aim for Inbox Zero in each. I’m probably 80% there. I am a liberal user of “unsubscribe” and “add sender to blocked list” functions.

2. Twitter (and related) – I’m in a constant on again / off again struggle with Twitter. (I think it is tremendously valuable for businesses and I personally hate using it.) During “on” cycles, I use TweetDeck on the computer and Echofon (formerly TwitterFon) for my iPhone.

3. RSS – I’ve tried a bunch and have settled on Google Reader. Again, this is more because of my desire to centralize on Google than because of a particular preference for its handling of RSS.

4. Social networking sites – I have LinkedIn, FriendFeed and Plaxo profiles, but Facebook is the only site that I actually use. I don’t love some of the newer features, but it has helped me re-establish some old relationships and strengthen existing ones. And there’s definitely some decent entertainment value.

5. General news – I have the luxury of reading daily industry news summaries my teams put together for our clients, so the only news source I actively go to daily(-ish) is the New York Times. At my computer I go to the site and Iaside from industry-specific stuff

Information processing

I have a rule that any session checking Google Reader must end with zero unread items. Here’s how I do it:

1. Scan headlines and preview posts that look interesting (ignore posts that don’t)

2. For posts that I can / want to read in preview mode (e.g., aren’t too long, don’t have embedded audio or video), I do

3. For posts that don’t lend themselves to preview reading, I click through to the full post. If it’s too long or off topic for that moment, but I want to read it later, I use the Firefox add-on Read It Later and, naturally, its iPhone app. (Tip: I like to save things for offline viewing, too, so I can read things on planes or trains.)

4. Items that I want to save long-term all find their way to Evernote. No more bookmarks of the browser or social variety for me!

Email processing is similarly simple and decisive. I preview subject lines and open items that appear interesting (or required), while delete those that don’t. Upon opening an item, I either…

1. Do and delete / file

2. Respond and delete / file

3. Delegate and delete / file

Information capture and storage

Matter has a server for client and company files, but increasingly, we are also turning to Google Docs. In addition to the ubiquitous access it provides and the fact that it’s right there in your Google account with Reader, Gmail, Tasks, Calendar, etc., the benefit of Google Docs is it allows easy collaboration and version control without the hassle and confusion of emailing drafts around. If I won’t have access to the server or the cloud, I rely on Lexar JumpDrives (yes, a client plug, but it’s true!)

Finally, for capture of offline info, I love Field Notes and Gold Fibre Retro Writing Pads. (I’m a sucker for Old School.)

My preference is to simplify, consolidate and prioritize whenever possible (hard to do in this biz!), so there is WAY more absent than present on my list. This isn’t to say there aren’t other good tools out there. I’ve tried a bunch and these are just my current favorites.

More interestingly, though, what are YOURS?

Coverage of last week’s “Balloon Boy” episode has been overwhelming, if not completely annoying. Now that it has “officially” been certified a hoax, people are weighing in on everything from how the media attention will affect little Falcon Heene to how aggressively child protective services should be intervening. One of the most spot-on observations I’ve read over the past week was in a blog entry from someone I worked with back in Buffalo when I was learning the PR ropes, which examines the topic for what it truly is – an ill-conceived publicity stunt.

These days, we don’t actually use the phrase “publicity stunt” that often…we usually refer to “events” or creative programs. For non-profits or charities, we might organize a protest or rally and then invite press. For technology clients, we’ve planned fun and playful programs where e-commerce technology executives stand outside their offices in Santa suits in the summer heat to provide a photo opp. demonstrating the “final days” that e-tailers should be making major tech decisions to gear up for the holiday season. For consumer clients, we’ve staged tailgate parties and “Supermarket Sweep” style visits to drugstores to deliver truly exciting broadcast segments that leave viewers with a lasting impression of everything they can get at a particular store. Yet the main considerations we always take into account when recommending these programs are: can anyone get hurt? what are the risks and rewards? will this really attract the kind of attention we want? how can this potentially damage our client’s brand or backfire?

It appears Mr. Heene didn’t ask himself these questions and in the end, his publicity stunt was the worst kind – a PR nightmare for him and his family that resulted in a huge cost to taxpayers, who knows what kind of lasting effects on his children, and the possibility of enormous fines and potential jail time. Not to mention, whatever small chance he had of getting a reality show deal before this whole ordeal is almost surely gone now. What production company or network wants to be associated with this mess?

Time and time again, we hear “there’s no such thing as bad publicity!” but it’s one of the most misleading statements about PR. Certainly, the Balloon Boy publicity stunt was a terrible one for a number of reasons. And while some may argue Heene accomplished what he set out to do by making sure that the majority of households in America are talking about him…I hardly think that what we are saying is in line with what he was aiming for.

One of my Sunday rituals is to get-up, make a pot of coffee and watch CBS’ Sunday Morning. With my tivo intact, I can’t say I watch it “live” every week, but love knowing it is there when I need it. This past week’s program caught my interest with its “Free for All, Profit for Some” story and got me thinking.

As you may know, The Associated Press and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation both said this past week that they hope to rein in the internet free-for-all . . . and get more users to PAY for online information. While this would be a big inconvenience for all of us, especially in PR, I think it is worth a discussion. As a publicist, I tend to scan for news all day and night, visiting multiple news sites all over the world, for free. The “for free” part makes my life and others extremely easy, but more and more publications are closing there doors due to low ad-revenues, while we are able to sit back and search for content at no cost. If all the publications created a hub, and offered a certain amount of content on a subscription basis, they would probably generate enough funds to create jobs, sustain its print component and become profitable again. Some experts say that iTunes “saved” the music industry, by generating a new revenue channel. Don’t you think its time for the media industry to try and “save” our resources? 

The thought of another historically paper “dying out” or a glossy magazine that I’ve read since a teen is no longer in print is a bit depressing to me, what about you?  Would you pay?  Just something to think about.

Our team at Matter has always acted as a tremendous resource for our clients at industry tradeshows, regardless of the event size, topic and media following. But nowhere do we get more of an opportunity to show our capabilities than at the major imaging shows that mark the calendar, including the upcoming PhotoPlus Expo taking place at the Javits Center in New York Oct. 22-24.

Matter has always had a significant presence at this event, but this year – with seven Matter clients exhibiting – I’m proud to say that we’re truly going above and beyond to maximize the visibility for our attending clients. Our clients already make a significant investment when they choose to exhibit at a show like PhotoPlus and this year, as in years past, their relationship with Matter will have a major impact on their tradeshow returns.

First, from its own booth on the tradeshow floor (booth #1036 – co-located with our friends and clients at Lexar) Matter will welcome members of the media throughout the event, giving them a place to briefly relax, catch-up with industry colleagues, find out the latest news from our clients and conduct one-on-one briefings. This will culminate in a social hour on Friday, Oct. 23 from 4-6 p.m., where we’ll be sharing drinks and conversation with our media friends, as well as any fellow exhibitors and interested parties.

To drive traffic to our clients’ booths, Matter is holding a Passport Giveaway that is sure to draw a crowd. At the Matter booth or those of its clients, PhotoPlus Expo attendees can grab a Matter Passport. From there, they’ll be asked to get a stamp and swipe their ID badges at the various client booths at any point during the event. A completely booked passport can be returned to Matter’s booth for a chance to win one of three great prize packages, including brand new, must-have photo gear and software. For more info on this very fun twist on the same-old tradeshow agenda, check it out here.

Finally, the intrepid team of Matter execs attending PhotoPlus cannot and will not forget about our social media followers. We’ll be tweeting about great companies we meet throughout the show and sharing photos and videos of noteworthy exhibits, speakers and events. Check Matter Chatter next week for impressions of the show and a discussion of our experience in trying to bring new thinking and more excitement to the typical PR agency’s show participation.

Onto the Big Apple — see you next week!

Earlier on Matter Chatter I posted about the FTC’s approach to bloggers and how integrity and respect is an important part of the PR process for all parties. I’d like to revisit this topic, if I may, to discuss an update. A few days ago, the FTC released guidelines meant to further clarify their rules on paid advertisements, especially as they pertain to bloggers. It’s important to note that these rules, the Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising, were last updated in 1980, so this is a clarification, not an alteration.

The guidelines are meant to clarify a blogger’s disclosure requirements: “the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.” Therefore, if a blogger receives free products from a company, they must disclose this stipulation in a review post. Importantly, bloggers or advertisers also could face injunctions and be ordered to reimburse consumers for financial losses stemming from inappropriate product reviews.

As might be expected, the response from bloggers was swift and questioning. Fast Company, one of my favorite sites to visit, posted an interesting article in response to this announcement. Taking concerns from bloggers to an assistant director at the FTC, the article addresses some specific comments posted by the people who these regulations effect the most. The largest takeaway from this interaction is that while a fine does exist for violating these guidelines, the likelihood that a blogger will actually encounter the fine is very small, and should never happen on the first violation (call it a built-in freebie for those that are not aware of the rules). Additionally, and quite logically, smaller blogs will not be a target of the FTC when cracking down on violators – advertisers and larger outlets will have to be more careful.

As PR professionals we know that the face of mass media is changing constantly, and just as we evolve in our jobs to accommodate these changes, so is the FTC evolving to protect consumers. We will have to be more diligent in our communications to urge bloggers to disclose their relationship with us and our clients, but this will not mean a large-scale change in protocol – at least not yet. As always, if you’ll forgive me for the idiom, honesty continues to be the best policy.