Lo and behold the return of the Bateman Buzz Meter, our ranking of recent newsworthy events based on PR and Social Media effectiveness. As always, please comment on any current news headlines or PR stunts you think are worthy of the Buzz Meter.

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As the year comes to a close and we reflect back, there’s no denying 2011 has been an incredible year for Bateman Group. The surge we experienced in the fourth quarter; however, has truly been unprecedented. Today, we publicly announced our selection as agency of record by three exceptional companies. These recent additions to our client roster include:

Qualys — Based in Redwood Shores, Calif., Qualys is the leading provider of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) IT security risk and compliance management solutions. Qualys solutions are deployed in a matter of hours anywhere in the world, providing customers an immediate and continuous view of their security and compliance postures.

Antenna Software — Based in Jersey City, N.J., Antenna provides mobile business solutions that enable enterprises to build, deploy and manage applications, websites and content across myriad devices for employees, customers and partners.

Sociable Labs — Based in San Mateo, Calif., Sociable Labs provides on-site social commerce solutions for online retailers to maximize social sharing, referral traffic and conversions.

We’ve worked hard over the years to maintain a client roster notable for its diversity — particularly in terms of geography and market position. These recent wins only enhance this by adding an early-stage startup and two fast-growing market leaders that hail from Redwood City all the way to Jersey City. At the same time, Qualys, Antenna and Sociable Labs will strengthen our sector knowledge in IT security, mobility and social commerce markets, respectively. Today we took another big step in our journey to national prominence.

A warm welcome to all three!

The Future of Media Round Up features the top articles and blogs curated by Bateman Group on issues and events related to the convergence of technology, media and communications.

Here’s our take on the most disruptive news, commentary and insights about PR and media from the months of November and December 2011. Please share links to other must-read articles in the comments below if you think we missed anything.

Required Reading:

Redefining Public Relations in the Age of Social Media, The New York Times – From Nov.21 to Dec. 2, the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) sought submissions from public relations professionals, academics, and students and the public to help redefine what “public relations” means. The role of public relations has been significantly transformed by the Internet and social media. PR is no longer about solely managing the message. It has evolved to focus on facilitating the conversation between entities and their audiences. This why PRSA’s “Public Relations Defined” effort is calling for a “modern definition for the new era of public relations.” The last time PRSA updated its definition was in 1982. Interested folks can visit prdefinition.prsa.org to share their definitions.

Social Media Help Bosses Tell Their Story, Financial Times – More than three-quarters of the leaders of the 100 biggest US corporations do not have a Facebook page and only two CEOs use Twitter. But among twenty-something entrepreneurs running online companies, 100 percent are fully involved in the scene. The pros and cons aside, a strong reason to use social media is that can be the ideal platform for disclosing compelling stories that aren’t readily accessible to the public. “More practitioners in business should be out there describing their experiences and giving their opinions. It might help correct some of the misinformation promulgated by anti-capitalists, and the general skepticism about wealth creators expressed by much of the media.”

Occupy Movement Pushes CSR to the Tipping Point, CSRHub – The Occupy Movement is forcing banks to examine whether current  Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) efforts like philanthropy are enough. Facing the movement’s disastrous effects on client and employee loyalty as well as recruitment, financial firms are being pushed to seriously reconsider going beyond old-school deeds to show true leadership in “doing well by doing the right thing.”

Public Relations Won’t Fix Penn State’s Crisis, PRSAY (PRSA) – The multilayered Penn state crisis has raised a lot of questions and challenges around the university’s reputation. From a PR standpoint, “one thing public relations professionals cannot help people understand, and should never have to, are an organization’s moral and legal failings.”  PRSA’s own Keith Trivitt and Arthur Yann give their PR perspectives on the crisis and make the distinction that the crisis is a management issue and not a public relations issue.

Charlie Miller’s Punishment by Apple Tests a Complex Relationship, Huffington Post – Earlier in November, white hat hacker Charlie Miller’s relationship with Apple was damaged when the company said he violated the terms of his agreement after disguising an app to reveal a security flaw in Apple’s App Store. This incident reflects the tension in the partnership between companies and their security experts. Should flaws be disclosed privately to developers or publically? Bruce Schneier, a security expert, thinks that “if researchers don’t go public, things don’t get fixed…Companies don’t see it as a security problem; they see it as a PR problem. And if there’s no PR problem, it’ll never be a priority.”

Follow @BatemanGroupPR for more opinions on breaking news and issues.

Part 1: A Historical Perspective

When I started out in this industry 20 years ago, I loved to hear the senior staff trade anecdotes about the PR agency workplace prior to the PC era. They would have me and my fellow “Generation Xers” in stitches with war stories about press releases written on old fashioned typewriters and mishaps involving poorly applied white out (or “liquid paper”). Or how press releases were sent back and forth to clients via snail mail, so approvals would often take several weeks until the arrival of FedEx reduced this process to a mere 3 or 4 days (still one of the most “disruptive” business services ever launched, IMHO).

Fast forward to 2010 and I find myself in the somewhat uncomfortable position of sharing my own war stories about the PR industry before the arrival of email and the Internet. The “millennials” recoil in horror at my tales of standing at a fax machine for 16 hours straight on the day of a product launch. They laugh when I attempt to convey the pure joy that accompanied the arrival of our first plain paper fax machine, ending years of frustration with chalky, filmy thermal fax paper rolls.

One way back memory members of Generation Y have a hard time believing is this: THE BUSINESS PRESS REGULARLY COVERED NEW PRODUCT NEWS!  It’s true. In early-to-mid-90s, I worked with several product divisions of Digital Equipment Corp  and we could almost guarantee coverage in The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Boston Globe, Forbes, Fortune, Business Week, et al for just about every single product launch ─ even for complex technologies like microprocessors. How was this possible?

Prior to the Internet, coverage of the technology industry was dominated by two dozen or so companies. Among them were familiar names like IBM, H-P, Intel, Texas Instruments, Oracle, Dell, Cisco and Sun Microsystems along with fading brands such as Digital Equipment Corp., Silicon Graphics, Data General, Wang and Informix. The media’s obsession with entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley start-up culture had yet to materialize.

With less companies to cover and lots of print pages to fill, it was common for business media to agree to pre-briefings on product news on Friday and hold it over the weekend under verbal embargo until Monday morning. That’s when the coverage would literally pour in from all the trades and business media. We would average about one new product launch each month, which allowed all of us to amass impressive clipbooks ─ not to mention forge genuine relationships with the members of the business media. I took this all for granted for a long time and boy I sure do miss this pre-Internet phenomenon.

Obviously, today things are much different. Not only in terms of how embargoes are received, but in the kinds of news items that capture a writer’s attention. Just a few years ago, product news still held some allure in the trades. News coverage relied on a steady stream of products and their new capabilities and enhancements. Since 2007; however, there’s been a slow shift with fewer journalists covering product launches. Three reasons for this change are abundantly clear:

1) Shortened News Cycles: The Internet has reduced news cycles from days to seconds.

2) Page View Journalism: The rise of digital media and its ability to measure page views is providing journalists and bloggers with insight into what readers actually want to read about. Concurrently, publishers are increasingly focused on driving more traffic and page views to appeal to advertisers.

3) Increased Noise Level: Unless you’re a closely watched brand like Apple, Google or Facebook spending millions on a product launch event or a pedigreed start-up with tier one investors and well-known entrepreneurs at the helm, a story on your product launch is unlikely to cut through the clutter.

So, the question remains… Is the product launch dead?

Whether or not we like it, things are changing fast. I don’t believe product launches or embargoes are dead just yet, but they are going by the wayside, slowly but surely. Whether you have an embargo in place or not, the quality of the content, the media strategy and, once again, the content, is what will get you maximum results. We as PR professionals need to adapt and evolve our strategies for the product launch. In part two of this series, we’ll be sharing some of our newly formed best practices and recent successes helping clients launch new products into this new environment.

Behold the Labor Day edition of the Bateman Buzz Meter (technically #5), our semi-regular ranking of recent newsworthy events based on PR and Social Media effectiveness.  As always, please comment on any current news headlines or PR stunts you think are worthy of the Buzz Meter we may have missed.

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Today’s post is the first in a new series debuting on Bateman Banter we’re calling: “The New J-School”, a semi-regular examination of the evolving nature of journalism in today’s digital age. The month of January brought to light some interesting developments we feel signal the start of a much larger trend — one that could swallow the conventional ad-supported media whole — the rise of corporate-sponsored journalism.

In the last week, two former BusinessWeek editors disclosed new deals to write for the corporate blogs of companies they used to cover. Steve Wildstrom, until recently the Personal Technology editor for BusinessWeek, forged a relationship with graphics chip giant NVIDIA to write for the company’s popular nTersect blog. This kicked off with a well-publicized trip to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas where Steve reported live from the show floor. Wildstrom’s former BusinessWeek colleague Steven Baker also announced ongoing deal to write for SmartData Collective, a community of blogs sponsored by data warehousing leader Teradata.

Either by choice or necessity, more and more journalists are becoming independent agents forced to fend for themselves in the open market. Wildstrom and Baker are at the forefront of this new breed of journalist cutting their own deals, and, in the process, figuring out how to do the reporting, get paid and deal responsibly with ethical issues. As these free agents seek out new opportunities to make money, they’re finding very little coming from traditional advertising-based media outlets. There are, however, an increasing number of corporations producing their own content and becoming media companies in their own right, and many of them need help.

For even the largest companies, maintaining a corporate blog with the kind of content needed to become the “must-read” site in a given sector is an uphill battle. At best, there may be 2-3 budding thought leaders in every organization, but the responsibility of writing thought-provoking, compelling content week in and week out is burdensome when it’s an adjunct to a full-time job. The burden is then passed onto the PR team to clean up poorly written or conceived copy until it’s suitable for publishing; nudge others to complete their drafts; and source more and more “content creators” within the company to share the burden.

Cutting deals with former journalists brings a new level of professionalism, respect and credibility to a corporate blog while alleviating the burden that has fallen on the marketing and PR professionals who produce it. Moreover, these deals allow the newly freelance journalists to remain a part of technology sectors they’ve followed for years. Without a masthead to call home, fewer PR people are calling them with breaking news or to broker meetings with their CEOs. These journalists are worried, and rightfully so, that their value in the marketplace will diminish as their relationships with story sources and C-level executives erode over time.

If approached the right way, the rise of corporate-sponsored journalism sounds like a win/win for the reporters and corporations, but it also raises several questions. How will this impact the quality of the reporting long term? How will this benefit readers, if at all? In the tech sector, the number of journalists considered truly credible is quite small. With the publishing industry imploding, who’s grooming the market influencers of tomorrow?  How long before demand soon outstrips the supply? Could companies that fail to broker deals with newly independent journalists ahead of their competitors soon discover there aren’t any good ones left? Worse still, could a Cisco or Oracle or EMC swoop in and buy all the quality ones up?

Next time on “The New J-School”, we’ll attempt to address these “what if” scenarios and share our thoughts on effective ways to integrate corporate-sponsored journalism into a marketing strategy.