I was perusing around the web aimlessly just a few minutes ago, hoping to find something entertaining.  I opened up my trusty Google Reader that always brings in the freshest and best stuff (mostly because I chose it, of course) and sure enough…something leapt out at me.

Imagine, if you will, minding your own business when this headline hits you:

Cold sheets? Hire a human ‘bed-warmer’

Human ‘bed-warmer’? Upon further reading, it turns out that Holiday Inn is offering the option to have an actual person (dressed in a fleece sleeper suit, with their hair covered) to come into your room and warm your bed before you sleep. At first, I thought this was a bit of a publicity stunt. And, of course, I’m sure it is. As the article in MSNBC points out, they didn’t exactly address why this couldn’t be done with, oh, an inanimate object meant to warm things up like a hot water bottle and not a human.

Then again, I suddenly recalled a story that I read ages ago from Roald Dahl in his book, Boy. He talked about how during his days at boarding school, the upper classmen would basically pick on the younger students and make them do menial tasks. One of the tasks was toilet-seat warmer…and he happened to have one of the toastiest bottoms around.

I just have to wonder - how much would someone need to be paid to be a furniture warmer? Would it be minimum wage, or would it be a bed by bed basis?

Oh, the things you learn on the news these days.

Thus begins the first day of my holiday season, and it was made even more special with a brand new LAPTOP! 

Woo hoo!!!

Who says holidays are just for kids?  I love Santa.

On a not so related note (but related to an earlier post), I received a copy of a link to this post by David-George Cosh.  I thought it was very thoughtful, and definitely fair.

http://strangehold.com/blog/?p=18

Is the embargo really necessary?

Techcrunch’s Mike Arrington has widely announced his complete reluctance to deal with embargoed information. Is he right? Maybe.

Although I’m going to try to write a story reflecting what the PR firms I deal with think about this issue, let’s assume Arrington is absolutely right.

Some firms will stop talking to us (yeah! less email), but we’ll find other ways to get the news. Others, who haven’t read this post because they don’t read TechCrunch, will be unpleasantly surprised. Maybe if we cause enough pain then PR firms will start to take action against those publications who break the rules.

Embargoes are really widely used to curry some special favour with journalists who promise coverage in exchange for a certain level of exclusivity or timed media coverage. Personally, I love embargoes but would say I’ve actually engaged in them roughly two-thirds of the time. It’s always a nice break to be granted something in advance so I can walk, not run, to the editor, have a leisurely chat, not a rushed one, and decide if this is something I’d cover.

Although I really don’t get embargoes that much, I’ve also never, ever broke them and will never understand why someone would break a promise to report on it ahead of schedule. Call me a professional, but there’s to do otherwise is highly unethical, which is why I’m not applauding Arrington wholeheartedly here.

Arrington also describes the actions of one Lois Whitman, who appears to spam her targets with her PR pitches to the point of complete annoyance. Based on the evidence presented in that blog post, I’d say it’s a fairly easy to throw the rulebook out of the window. I’ve dealt with a few Lois Whitman’s myself and frankly, it’s easy for these types of PR professionals to be lumped with their peers into the single annoying flack category. As some of my colleagues would like to point out, this has made me very frustrated, something I hope people would understand given the amount of pitches I get daily.

The problem, as PR blogger Brian Solis says, is two fold. One is opportunistic bloggers or reporters looking for an edge will break a story ahead of the agreed-upon embargo and the other is just PR firms leveraging the embargo while privately knowing that the “scheduled” wire broadcast time isn’t that important anyways.

Hopefully, the outcome of Arrington’s lead could be a decidingly shift in how PR works with blogs and the mainstream media. If this concept of ignoring the embargo begins to take off, this will undoubtedly create a shift in how coverage is awarded to certain organizations. Will this make the reporters job harder? I’d like to hope not. But it might help the whole process between PR and reporters better.

Even though I’m not a blog writer (although I’m sure one day that will happen), the embargo will always be a welcome tool to my coverage. But it shouldalways, always, always be up to the PR rep to have an understanding of how the media works and what makes a good story will always win out in the end, something I rarily have seen during my experience with PR folk.

Trust and relationship building, as Allen Stern notes, is certainly part of the equation, but if Arrington’s ways catch on and PR folk can’t rely on their most powerful weapon in their arsenal anymore, I can only hope that the only outcome of this movement will force blanketing of cut-and-pasted pitches to die a welcome death.

One of the things that my mother asks me (over and over) is…what exactly do you do?  Short of drawing diagrams and taking her to my office, I usually just tell her that I help with media relations for clients.  I help clients relay their news, their story, and pass it along to the media who are (for the most part) reputable and admirable news mavens.

Every once in awhile, I get a lot of harsh responses from journalists.  Some yell, some belittle, and some just get crotchety.  I understand the frustration (after all, nobody likes to be bombarded with emails and phone calls) but at the same time, I sometimes wonder why some people feel it is perfectly justifiable to lash out.

All of this spurred from a recent article (no, not the infamous Chris Anderson letter from WIRED)…without further ado, check out the latest from Tech Crunch - justified, or someone just having a really bad day?

On one hand, I can understand a few of the complaints, and I understand his stance and somewhat convoluted encouragement to the industry to improve the way they conduct business.  Yet, on the other, I can’t help but think - Ok.  We get it.  You hate flacks.

Can’t we all just be friends and get along?

Any objective third party thoughts?

PR firms are out of control. Today we are taking a radical step towards fighting the chaos. From this point on we will break every embargo we agree to.

Background:

Tech companies are desperate for press and hammering their PR firms for coverage on blogs and major media sites. That in turn means that PR firms hammer us to get us to write about their clients. Gone are the days of polite pitches and actual relationship building. Today, PR firms email a story to us as many as 20 times, and call every TechCrunch writer on their cell phones repeatedly. If we say we won’t write a story (which is most of the time), things often turn nasty (check out Lois Whitman at HWH PR/New Media for a fine example).

For the most part we’ve dealt with the problem quietly over the last couple of years, other than the occasional lashing out on Twitter. Others, like Wired Magazine’s Editor In Chief Chris Anderson, have been more public with their frustration.

But now a new problem has emerged that we won’t ignore.

A portion of the stories we write are “embargoed” news items. They aren’t stories that we’ve dug up ourselves. Instead, PR firms have pre-briefed us on the news and have asked us to write, if we choose to, no earlier than a set time.

A lot of this news is good stuff that our readers want to know about. And we have the benefit of taking some time during the pre-briefing to think about the story, do research, and write it properly. When embargoes go right, we get to write a thoughtful story which benefits the company and our readers.

But there’s a problem. All this stress on the PR firms put on them by desperate clients means they send out the embargoed news to literally everyone who writes tech news stories. Any blog or major media site, no matter how small or new, gets the email. It didn’t used to be this way, but it’s becoming more and more of a problem. As the economy turns south, PR firms are under increasing pressure to perform and justify their monthly retainers which range from $10,000 to $30,000 or more. In short, they have to spam the tech world to get coverage, or lose their jobs.

One annoying thing for us is when an embargo is broken. That means that a news site goes early with the news despite the fact that they’ve promised not to. The benefits are clear - sites like Google News and TechMeme prioritize them first as having broken the story. Traffic and links flow in to whoever breaks an embargo first.

That means it’s a race to the bottom by new sites, who are increasingly stressed themselves with a competitive marketplace and decreasing advertising sales.

A year ago embargo breaks were rare, once-a-month things. Today, nearly every embargo is broken, sometimes by a few minutes, sometimes by half a day or more.

We can’t continue to operate under these rules.

Our New Policy

The reason this is becoming a larger problem is because there is no downside to breaking embargoes. The PR firm gets upset but they don’t stop working with the offending publication or writer. You get a slap on the wrist, and you break another embargo later that day.

There are a few (very few) exceptions. One is Waggener Edstrom, who handles PR for Microsoft. Their embargoes don’t break because they’d unleash hell on the offender. Another is Google. The few times they’ve had problems they’ve chosen the nuclear option and banned the offender for as much as a year. As you can imagine, Google and Microsoft embargoed news doesn’t break early.

We’ve never broken an embargo at TechCrunch. Not once. Today that ends. From now our new policy is to break every embargo. We’ll happily agree to whatever you ask of us, and then we’ll just do whatever we feel like right after that. We may break an embargo by one minute or three days. We’ll choose at random.

Some firms will stop talking to us (yeah! less email), but we’ll find other ways to get the news. Others, who haven’t read this post because they don’t read TechCrunch, will be unpleasantly surprised. Maybe if we cause enough pain then PR firms will start to take action against those publications who break the rules.

There will be exceptions. We will honor embargoes from trusted companies and PR firms who give us the news exclusively, so we know there won’t be any mistakes. There are also a handful - maybe three - people who we trust enough to continue to work with them on general embargoes (if you are a PR person and wondering if you’re on that list, you’re not). But for the vast majority of news we get in our inboxes, we’re just going to fire it off to our readers ad hoc whenever we please.

This policy stays in effect until I update this post, which won’t be any time soon.

I’ll also be publishing a blacklist on TechCrunch listing every firm, company, publication and individual writer involved whenever an embargo is broken. Of course, given our new policy, I’ll be putting us at the top of that list.

I have a Christmas tree!  After work today, two friends and I decided to go out and buy ourselves some noble firs to adorn with twinkly lights and ornaments.  After shoving one in the back, one in the trunk, holding on in our laps and getting many…MANY stares…it was well worth it!

It got me thinking about how great the season is - despite the increasingly chilly weather (well…as ‘chilly’ as it can be in San Francisco) there is something really warming about the whole month.  Despite the stress of buying presents and scampering around running errands, you can’t help but feel your spirits lift when you glance at the decorations and at the faces of HAPPY people.  Right now I am just happy to have my first ever Christmas tree all by myself.

At any rate, I thought this article was quite appropriate for today -

Strangers May Cheer You Up, Study Says

How happy you are may depend on how happy your friends’ friends’ friends are, even if you don’t know them at all.

And a cheery next-door neighbor has more effect on your happiness than your spouse’s mood.

So says a new study that followed a large group of people for 20 years.

“Your happiness depends not just on your choices and actions, but also on the choices and actions of people you don’t even know who are one, two and three degrees removed from you,” said Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School and an author of the study, to be published Friday in BMJ, a British journal. “There’s kind of an emotional quiet riot that occurs and takes on a life of its own, that people themselves may be unaware of.”

In fact, said his co-author, James H. Fowler, an associate professor of political science at University of California, San Diego, their research found that “if your friend’s friend’s friend becomes happy, that has a bigger impact on you being happy than putting an extra $5,000 in your pocket.”

The researchers analyzed information on the happiness of 4,739 people and their connections with several thousand others — spouses, relatives, close friends, neighbors and co-workers — from 1983 to 2003.

“It’s extremely important and interesting work,” said Daniel Kahneman, an emeritus psychologist and Nobel laureate at Princeton, who was not involved in the study. Several social scientists and economists praised the data and analysis, but raised possible limitations.

Steven Durlauf, an economist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, questioned whether the study proved that people became happy because of their social contacts or some unrelated reason.

Dr. Kahneman said unless the findings were replicated, he could not accept that a spouse’s happiness had less impact than a next-door neighbor. Dr. Christakis believes that indicates that people take emotional cues from their own gender.

A study also to be published Friday in BMJ, by Ethan Cohen-Cole, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and Jason M. Fletcher, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Public Health, criticizes the methodology of the Christakis-Fowler team, saying that it is possible to find what look like social contagion effects with conditions like acne, headaches and height, but that those effects disappear when other factors are considered.

A BMJ editorial about the two studies called the Christakis-Fowler study “groundbreaking,” but said “future work is needed to verify the presence and strength of these associations.” The team previously published studies concluding that obesity and quitting smoking are socially contagious.

But the happiness study, financed by the National Institute on Aging, may be more surprising. What about pleasure in someone’s misery or envy when a friend lands a promotion? “There may be some people who become unhappy when their friends become happy, but we found that more people become happy over all,” Dr. Christakis said.

John T. Cacioppo, director of the University of Chicago’s Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, who was not involved in the study, said the results suggest that unconscious signals of well-being packed more zing than conscious feelings of resentment. “I might be jealous of the fact that they won the lottery, but they’re in such a good mood that I walk away feeling happier without even being aware that they were the site for my happiness,” he said.

The subtle transmission of emotion may explain other findings, too. In the obesity and smoking cessation studies, friends were influential even if they lived far away. But the effect on happiness was much greater from friends, siblings or neighbors who lived nearby.

A next-door neighbor’s joy increased one’s chance of being happy by 34 percent, but a neighbor down the block had no effect. A friend living half a mile away was good for a 42 percent bounce, but the effect was almost half that for a friend two miles away. A friend in a different community altogether can win an Oscar without making you feel better. “You have to see them and be in physical and temporal proximity,” Dr. Christakis said.

Still, the researchers said, it is not clear if increased communication via e-mail messages and Webcams may eventually lessen the distance effect. In a separate study of 1,700 Facebook profiles, they found that people smiling in their photographs had more Facebook friends and that more of those friends were smiling.

The BMJ study used data from the federal Framingham Heart Study, which began following people in Framingham, Mass., after World War II and ultimately followed their children and grandchildren. Beginning in 1983, participants periodically completed questionnaires.

They also listed family members, close friends and workplaces, so researchers could track them over time. Many of those associates were Framingham participants who also completed questionnaires, giving Dr. Christakis and Professor Fowler about 50,000 social ties to analyze. They found that when people changed from unhappy to happy in self-reported responses on a widely used measure of well-being, other people in their social network became happy too.

Happiness also has a shelf life, the researchers found. “Your happiness affects my happiness only if you’ve become happy in the last year,” Dr. Christakis said. Another surprising finding was that a joyful coworker did not lift the spirits of colleagues, unless they were friends. Professor Fowler believes inherent competition at work might cancel out a happy colleague’s positive vibes.

The researchers cautioned that social contacts were less important to happiness than someone’s personal circumstances. But the effect of social contacts even three degrees removed — friends of friends of friends — was clear.

People in the center of social networks were happier than those on the fringes.

So should you dump melancholy friends? The authors say no. Better to spread happiness to people you know.

“This now makes me feel so much more responsible that I know that if I come home in a bad mood I’m not only affecting my wife and son but my son’s best friend or my wife’s mother,” Professor Fowler said.

When heading home, he said, “I now intentionally put on my favorite song.”

Still, he said, “We are not giving you the advice to start smiling at everyone you meet in New York. That would be dangerous.”