When confronted with a brand new calendar, everyone’s natural inclination is to ponder what the next year will bring. This has resulted in the festive tradition of making predictions about what changes will occur over the next 12 months in whatever field you have some expertise.

Lest I be accused of being a Grinch if I don’t participate in the mass prognostications that the season demands, here are my predications for the public relations industry in 2008.

1. The buzzwords of the year—the ones the industry will overuse and be heartily sick of 364 days from now will be: engage, educate and entertain. These three words are becoming the essential descriptors to use when touting mobile marketing, widgets and other Web 2.0 applications, and all three will be bludgeoned to death by sheer repetition by 2009.

2. The PR industry will continue to abuse and overuse the words “viral,” “enable” and “solution.”

3. Somewhere in the world, right this minute, someone is making the daring prediction that Social Media and Web 2.0 are going to change PR forever. That said, the purported wonders of Web 3.0 will begin to creep into client pitches in 2008.

4. Throughout 2008 and into the foreseeable future, press releases will continue to be written in the same format, since we all know that the PR Gods will strike you dead if “XXX company, a leading provider of XXX,” does not appear in the first two sentences of the release.

5. Agencies will continue to send out self-promoting press releases that no one wants to read in 2008, regurgitating the same reasons why their newest client hired them. BTW, has anyone ever seen an agency send out a press release saying why they have been fired by a client? Isn’t that newsworthy? Inquiring minds want to know!

6. In 2008 you won’t read a single release quoting a company spokesperson as saying that they hired this particular PR agency because “our VC firm told us to” or “my CEO told me I had to.”

7. People will continue to go on the record as being very excited about working with other people/partners/companies, all of whom are the leading providers of whatever it is they provide.

8. PR industry seminars in 2008 will not look much different then those that took place in 2007.

9. PR people will spend much of 2008 quietly worried about an impending recession that will slow their business, while simultaneously loudly complaining about being “crazy busy.”

10. Clients will continue to judge agencies by the number of clips they generated instead of against the original submitted proposal that outlined objectives, goals, team and deliverables.

11. At least one reporter in America is lying in wait, happily finalizing his or her plans to insult the PR industry again.

12. Reporters covering the PR industry will finally report about the ongoing civil suit against the fastest growing PR agency in America.

13. The number of PR Bloggers will shrink in 2008 because PR people really don’t want to read blogs about PR. Right?

Have a great 2008.

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Read this off a press release this AM. Stickam.com is the First LIVE Social Networking Website to Implement OpenSocial.

Like to thank the agency and client for letting us know that Stickam is alive, there are others who strongly feel otherwise, and that social networking sites like Linkedin, Facebook or MySpace are dead.

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Or maybe you’re not gay and have no interest spending the holidays in NYC.

Either way, Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air have come up with a PR stunt for those traveling to New York this holiday season.

Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air have announced a new program that will charge heterosexuals 10 percent extra for their air travel to specific locations during the Christmas season.

The company actually offers the 10 percent as a discount but only if the purchaser obtains the ticket through a “gay” page of the company’s website, a location not typically patronized by families seeking travel arrangement.

Better get your tickets fast. I’m guessing this offer is going to cause some unwanted publicity and be pulled.

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Evian Natural Spring Water has just announced its very first venture into the virtual world.

“Partnering with the popular virtual world Second Life, characters…that choose to drink Evian are awarded with a more lively, more inviting complexion. This virtual transformation, while not possible in real life, provides more than just simply a cosmetic change, but indicates skin renewal.”

A note to the individual who wrote and the Evian rep who signed off on the release, thanks for reminding us readers of the difference between reality and fantasy. We get confused.

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Interested in helping your company or client interact with the nation’s premier business and tech journalists and an influential audience of business development executives and investors? Apply today to launch a new technology at DEMO 08, taking place Jan. 28-30 in Palm Desert, Calif.

The DEMO conferences are launchpad events for tomorrow’s cutting-edge technologies, catapulting exceptional products to national and international fame. (Palm, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Danger, Skype and TiVo are a few past demonstrators.) Whether you want media attention, VC money, or Fortune 500 customers, DEMO can help you make the connections your new product needs to succeed.

To qualify for DEMO, a product must:
· make its public debut at the DEMO conference;
· make a significant contribution to the state of the art in its target market;
· change the dynamics of the marketplace into which it is introduced; and
· be backed by a management team capable of delivering the product to market.

To learn more about launching at DEMO, and to find the online application form, visit http://www.demo.com/launch.php. The deadline for applications is Nov. 9.

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Did we go too far or was it sheer brilliance?

By now you’re all familiar with Chris Anderson’s, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, email list of blackballed PR firms.

A quick glance over the list reveals email addresses from Edelman, 5W PR, Fleishman-Hillard, Ogilvy, Lippe Taylor, Morris+King, SS PR, Weber Shandwick, and dozens more.

Well being the aggressive PR firm that we are, BlinnPR’s business development team emailed some of the clients represented by these PR firms. We let their clients know in no uncertain terms that they’ve been blackballed by Wired and who knows how many other unnamed publications.

Oh and by the way, BlinnPR is not on the list and our clients enjoy unfettered access to Wired and a host of other publications because of our no-nonsense, get the job done without annoying reporters approach.

Needless to say, two PR firms didn’t appreciate our aggressiveness. One going so far as to try and entice our clients and employees to leave by promising greener pastures. BTW, it has been 10 days and still none of our clients or employees has left.

Maybe it’s me, but why would our clients and employees leave in the first place. For a PR firm who has been blackballed by Wired and can’t say for sure what other publications are trashing their emails? But that is a discussion for another day.

Anyway, some people thought it was a brilliant move on our part while others felt otherwise.

Personally, I’m not apologizing for what we did. A day doesn’t go by when our clients are not being courted by other agencies. If you think it doesn’t happen you have your head in the sand. As I see it the differences is in the approach.

Fact is, BlinnPR aggressively goes after new business and represents our clients with the same fervor.

I would like to hear your thoughts. What do you think? Did we go too far or was it sheer brilliance.

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Can you make a topic in your area of expertise exciting, entertaining and “watchable”?

Optomen Productions is looking for science and history authors, professors and experts interested in hosting their own science, history or other factual program or series.

Send them a brief audition tape showcasing your talent. A public screening will take place at the 2007 World Congress of Science & Factual Producers, an annual event bringing together the top producers and broadcasters working in specialist factual television, including PBS, BBC and the Discovery Channel. A distinguished panel of three TV insiders will watch this “Presenter Idol” and judge the entries. The winner will be exposed to top programming professionals from all over the world who need hosts and talent for their top rated shows.

Send an e-mail to optomencastingscience (at) gmail.com and request a release form.

Beyond that, send your DVD to: Optomen Productions, 100 Avenue of the Americas, Floor 12, New York, NY 10013. Fax: (212) 431-4641. Include the release form with your DVD submission.

You can also submit release forms and clips online by e-mailing optomencastingscience (at) gmail.com (if the file is too large to e-mail, use MailBigFile.

If you have not been contacted by Nov. 28, you can assume your video did not meet their criteria. Videos will stay in the possession of Optomen Productions and will not be returned.

This competition in no way guarantees that your idea will be produced, and Optomen cannot guarantee the protection of such show ideas.

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Paul Chase, produces a segment for CNN.com called “Show and Tell,” where they feature cool and unique gadgets.

He’s looking for new cool stuff to feature. Contact Paul at paul.chase (at)turner.com.

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Strategic Insight, a mutual fund industry research firm, is preparing a report on closed-end funds. SI is looking for Brokers, Advisors, RIAs, and Financial Planners who use closed-end funds for their clients and can talk about how they use closed-end funds within client portfolios.

Strategic Insight provides research and consulting services to the U.S. mutual fund industry. This article is for publication in their research newsletter, Windows into the Mutual Fund Industry, which is read mostly by asset management firms.

Please contact Loren Fox at (212) 944 4460 or lfox (at) sionline.com

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