Don’t let the mustard-colored sports coat fool you.  Tom Kunz is one hip CEO.

As head of Cenury 21 Real Estate LLC, Kunz is in an industry that’s being disintermediated by the Internet      and ravaged by the recession.  Yet I have never met a more positive, open-minded and technology-friendly executive.

What does he do right:

• He’s not afraid to experiment. Century 21 pulled its TV advertising budget and spent the cash to bolster its presence online. Kunz says brand recognition for the franchise was already in the high 90s, so there was no reason to spend millions on 30- and 60-second image spots.  The company is contemplating a switch back to TV, but it would be a web-based format where Century 21 branding was visible at all times on the screen.

• He understands the time-sensitive nature of news. When Congress extended incentives aimed at first-time homebuyers, Kunz dropped what he was doing to record a 2 minute presentation on a tiny, inexpensive Flip video camera. His comments were up on Century 21’s YouTube channel within minutes.  As of today, the video had been watched nearly 1,700 times.
• He takes counsel from Matt Gentile, Century’s 21’s director of corporate and brand communications. In an interview with PR Week’s Eric Iacono, during the Next conference, Kunz talked about making media outreach in local markets a priority.  By incorporating interviews with local print and broadcast media into trips, and inviting local Century 21 franchisees to participate, the organization lands extended coverage rather than the short soundbites afforded by national media.
• He doesn’t hoard good information. While many CEOs would stay silent about marketing strategies, Kunz is a walking dictionary definition for transparency, even sharing his age (61) with the crowd.  As for naysayers, he advises them to watch the AT&T  “Lost Dog” YouTube spot to explain power of social media.

I also liked Tom’s ability to be self-effacing in a manner that seemed genuine:  “I’m a gadget freak,” he told those attending the Next event at the Waldorf Astoria. “It doesn’t mean I know how to use them all, but I buy them all.”

Tom was kind enough to do a short interview with me following his appearance at Next. Please excuse my camera work, as his head is halfway out of the frame for portions of the video.  Yet another reason I never worked in TV.

Zillow just scored a nice Wall Street Journal hit, along with 300+ references in Google News, for its inaugural “Trick-or-Treat Housing Index.”  Timing of its October 26 blog post was excellent, with ample time to spread virally before Halloween.

The premise was to look for the most affluent and safe neighborhoods where the houses are closest together, reasoning that’s where costumed kids could haul the most candy with the least amount of walking.  It’s great branding for the Seattle-based online real estate resource, which promises to spread the index beyond its hometown next year. (Childhood obescity experts will undoubtedly position themselves for the counter attack.)

When I was a kid in Rochester, New York, the Rapp family was the local Canada Dry soda distributor.  They handed out cans of pop to kids in the tony Browncroft neighborhood on Halloween.  (One of the kids, C.J. Rapp, grew up to invent Jolt cola.)

This Saturday night, kids everywhere will readily share Halloween strategies that are not dissimilar to Zillow’s methodology.  But no matter how many Saf-T-Pops, Mary Janes or miniature Snicker bars are proffered, the real prize on Halloween will be figuring out which houses are doling out full-sized candy bars, whole packs of gum  or other top-shelf goodies.

A marketing and PR coup would be a branded mobile app that used GPS and crowd sourcing for strategic trick-or-treating.   Lord knows it’s possible.  Garmin makes GPS navigators capable of displaying known police speed traps, and FourSquare tells me which nearby bar is giving the first glass of wine away for free.

Those who say this could ruin Halloween should look at the benefits before passing judgment:  Kids with peanut allergies could tag houses handing out Skittles.  Vegetarian kids could avoid the Skittles (which contain gelatin).  Dentist homeowners could opt in to author their own “No Candy Here” disclaimer to lessen the chances of getting TP’d for giving away pencils and tooth-shaped erasers.

I’m going to stop now and write my CandySniffer app business plan.  Anyone know which VC funded Webkinz?

Photo credit: amykclark via Photobucket

The media execs attending lunch at the Paley Center for Media Tuesday seemed relieved that they could take a break from watching their P&L’s get jackhammered by scrappy new entrants with tiny cost structures.

Not that the topic of conversation at this week’s schmoozefest, “The Great Digital Debate: Free vs. Paid Content,” was much of a diversion.

The biggest guffaws came when media futurist Shelly Palmer likened the media industry’s focus on free-versus-paid content to worrying about what song the band was playing aboard the Titanic.

The CEO of National Public Radio, Vivian Schiller, sounded a shrill warning for news organizations who might be tempted to begin charging for their content on the Internet.

While acknowledging the difference between NPR’s charter, which prohibits charging for content, and commercial journalism, Schiller said pay walls demonstrated “elitistm” and threatened to alienate the very audiences with which media organizations should be engaging.

Steve Brill, the founder of American Lawyer and CourtTV, now runs Journalism Online. He dismissed criticism of his latest company’s business goal — to provide publishers with mechanisms through which they can charge for content.

Brill asserted that no news organizations have been able to survive on advertising alone, saying that publishers have always had to balance circulation revenue with advertising and other factors to arrive at the right mix.  One example he gave was the free magazines provided to passengers on the Delta Shuttle, on which hundreds of thousands of well-heeled business passenger have flown for years.  While readership could easily be puffed up through such giveaway programs, there was a price to pay on the subscription side of the business.

Commodity content — weather, lottery numbers and roughly 90% of the material most news organizations present on their web sites — would not be good candidates for subscriptions, cautioned Brill.  The other 10% could command a fee, and Brill claimed to have received 1,200 inquiries from “affiliates” eager to begin charging.

A video of the entire discussion was added today to the Paley Center website.

We’ve all heard how Orson Welles made his radio theater production of “War of the Worlds” so realistic that it panicked among many listeners who honestly thought earth had been invaded by Martians.

True masters of radio broadcasting understand how to dazzle – how to describe a scene and then deliver the goods in a way that is more personal and vivid than film or video.

One such person was Stacie Hunt, who concocted a phony Woodstock-sized outdoor rock concert festival that was simulcast over an ad

hoc network of mainly FM stations in the 1970s, years ahead of MTV. Such care was taken to make the concert marathon sound authentic that the on-scene deejays described food, rockers’ clothes and even the weather. I swore at the time that I could smell pot smoke coming from my stereo’s speakers.

It was that ability to suspend reality in the process of promoting something – in this case, a bunch of rock bands and the advertisers who paid for spots during the concert – that made the company started by Stacie and her business partner, former Entertainment Tonight director Sally Jewett, such a success.

On the Scene Productions (OTSP), along with Medialink and several competitors, benefited from the Reagan-era decision to allow the use of satellites for commercial use rather than just military, government and academic communications.  PR professionals instantly welcomed video news releases, satellite media tours and other electronic publicity tools as a way of telling their story to TV and radio listeners.

The era is quickly ending.

PR Week’s Tonya Garcia broke the story yesterday that OTSP, which had been sold to the investment firm Socious Capital, had furloughed its employees and faced bankruptcy.  That followed by one week the approval of a deal that merged the formerly formidable Medialink into the tiny, VC-backed digital video warehousing company TheNewsMarket.

It’s ironic that government deregulation gave birth to an industry that has withered largely because of a misguided Federal Communications Commission decision to blame VNR producers and their customers for sloppy newsroom practices at TV stations.

For those who haven’t followed the issue, there were a number of highly publicized instances of corporate- and government-handout video being aired by TV stations that did not attribute its source.  At least one station was fined and the industry collapse began.

The loss of pillars of the electronic PR service sector is certainly unfortunate for the employees and investors. But mourning is done best while recalling the unique and wonderful attributes of the deceased.  In the case of OTSP, I am convinced that many of today’s experts in digital communications have been inspired by the company’s professionalism and creativity.  They will remain “on the scene” for years to come.

The whole concept of a sabbatical is foreign to those of us who haven’t worked in academia. For someone who bought his first police scanner at age 14 and who has measured time in news cycles ever since, taking a pause to refresh was heresy.

Yet I found myself on “garden leave” – the term the British use to describe the time a departing executive is dormant before getting back to work –for much of 2009. The irony is that the only thing resembling a garden at our New York condo is a window box. Despite the lack of a plot to plant, I can honestly say the last few months have been exhilarating.

While I thought my work-life balance was in check before, now I actually know my daughters’ shoe sizes and the menu at the soup kitchen where my wife, Maureen, cooks gourmet meals three days a week. I also experienced the joy of mentoring two recent City University graduates, and helping low-income women gain self-sufficiency through a highly effective program called First Step.

On the networking front, I have been awed by all the brilliant entrepreneurs who are introducing fascinating and disruptive ways to do tasks that have long confounded marketing and PR pros. In private equity and venture capital, I have new respect for the discipline and guts it takes to find, fund and execute. And on the customer desktop, I share your pain that it’s possible to order a pizza through your Tivo but automating a MarCom department remains but a dream.

Today, as I prepare to begin a new chapter as a board member and vice chairman of dna13, I want to thank the many friends, peers and complete strangers who embodied the very spirit of social networking by brainstorming, opening their Rolodexes and challenging my preconceived notions about how PR, media, marketing and sales are intersecting, and the role that technology will play in that convergence.

Most people have never heard of dna13. Compared to an entrenched giant like PR Newswire, this Ottawa-based software company is very, very small. Yet dna13 is a wonderful example of how someone who’s an expert in his job – dna13 founder Chris Johnson worked in corporate communications for Bell Canada – can bring a fresh solution to market and watch it grow.

What does dna13 do? In short, users of dna13 software can listen to what is being said about their company across all channels — print, major market TV, online and social media. When the SM (social media) or MSM (mainstream media) hits the fan, the dna13 platform has cool permissioning features so subscribers can securely align team members to plan the synchronized delivery of messages. (Note: those who love managing their 500+ Google Alerts, emailing multiple “track changes” documents to their CEO, or plugging their good, bad and neutral hits into a spreadsheet should not look at dna13.)

dna13 is moving from entrepreneurial to growth phase. Because it’s set up in the Software-as-a-Service model, product development is nimble. I have never seen a better technology organization – moving from white board to production in days and weeks rather than months and years.

My new colleagues include seasoned sales, marketing and product people, super-capable COO Kevin O’Neil, as well as board support from software veteran Howard Gwin (PeopleSoft, IBM, Pivotal), Tom Birch of Propulsion Ventures, Inc. and Pierre-Andre Meunier of Celtic House Venture Partners.

To all those who invited me into their homes, offices, industry events and social networks during my transition, please know that I’m happy to repay the favor. Just say the word.

Chocolate’s in the news today.  If Cadbury is gobbled up by Kraft — or Hershey or Nestle for that matter — how would that impact you or your clients?

With gold surpassing the psychological barrier of $1,000 an ounce, eBay reported 14k gold was the “biggest mover” today.   Not surprising, similar action is being seen on Craigslist. Investment advisors and consumer protection agencies should be having a field day.

The United Nations General Assembly is preparing to meet in New York September 15.  If your organization is gathering at the same time, can you draw parallels and attract attention?  Or maybe you have some wonderful gridlock-busting technology you should be showcasing in Manhattan during the mayhem.

Look out Conference Board, The Economist claims its Big Mac Index is an accurate financial indicator?  If you represent a global product or brand (and don’t mind calling attention to market-by-market pricing), challenge the sandwich to a duel.

Friday marks eight years since the attacks by al-Qaeda on New York and Washington. Is there a tasteful angle that points to ways you or your clients are dealing with the memory of the attacks, helping the families of victims or contributing to a safer world?

Red hot on Twitter over the past 48 hours are thousands of postings under the heading “When I was little, I…” Does this data reveal anything useful? Any emblematic kids’ products or insightful parenting authors want to jump on the bandwagon?

September is when thousands of green interns arrive at PR agencies to make a substantive contribution.  Too often, they are told to organize messy stacks of magazines and newspapers or validate media lists — anything to keep them from jeopardizing actual client work.

If you feel like trying something new — even beyond monitoring calls for help via ProfNet and HARO –  challenge your interns to establish a real-time assignment desk of sorts?  Have them monitor what’s happening right now, not events that occurred last month, last week or even during yesterday’s news cycle.

Very few agencies look at early social media indicators to predict what stories will spill over into mainstream media in the coming days or weeks.  Those who do often look only for specific keywords, like their clients’ and competitors’ brands, personnel and hot issues rather than taking a blue-sky approach that invites more creative connections to less obvious events and topics sure to command media attention.

By training the interns — and potentially a more experienced in-house staff of  “war room” news hounds — to use readily available, free Web resources, they can surface trending topics and match them against issues your clients are facing.  Account supervisors and management could hold a huddle each morning or afternoon to review what the interns have discovered.

Key to making this work is understanding the type of expertise you can offer influential bloggers and media covering a given story.  Are there experts within your client’s organization who could be interviewed? Do you have b-roll or digital photos to illustrate a point?  Is there any current research that could be summarized and distributed?

Any smart PR agency pro knows that this kind of approach could backfire if an ill-prepared client expert is powdered up for hastily prepared CNBC interview only to bomb on-camera.  Advance media training and content development are key. So is production and digital warehousing of media assets that can serve as sidebar material to amplify the points you’ll make in writing and on-camera.

Many of us continue operating as though year-old editorial calendars, quarterly account reviews and weekly client-agency conference calls are adequate to maximize opportunities — and minimize risk  — in a new generation where user-generated content contributes to a more fluid and often volatile online presentation of hot topics and news.

The new crop of interns might just teach us all something if given the chance.

Most Americans associate summer’s three-day bank holidays with barbecues, trips to the beach and  family vacations.

I think of corpses.

Not that I am morbid or have a desire to work as an undertaker.  I simply had a recurring assignment early in my journalistic career to keep track of fatal car accidents on New York state highways each Memorial Day, Independence Day and Labor Day weekend.  And I had fun doing it.

Working out of United Press International bureaus in Rochester and Buffalo in the 1980s, I was the only staffer on duty  between New York City and Cleveland Sunday mornings.  My task was to scan newspapers and check in with UPI’s stringer network — friendly news people at local TV and radio stations  across the Empire State — for the day’s top stories.   UPI paid $40 per story, though the company’s numerous bankrupcty filings made the promise of receiving a non-rubber stringer check a running joke.

On the long  holiday weekends, UPI’s state and national wires  kept a tally of the number of people killed in auto wrecks.  We called this the CAX count, an acronym that meant something like car accidents or casualties.   The National Safety Council, an advocate for seatbelt use, would make a prediction about how many unfortunate drivers, passengers and pedestrians would expire between midnight Friday and the end of travel period on Monday.

Vincent Toffany, who headed the safety council, understood that the news cycle was typically very slow on these weekends.  His organization received branding and reinforcement of their messaging.  The American Automobile Association used this release-news-when-it’s dead approach, too, as did gasoline price survey author Trilby Lundberg.

What used to infuriate UPI’s archrival, The Associated Press, is when our prowess on the telephones with state police or stringers would yield an extra victim or two.  In some cases, UPI would be a tad liberal by counting a drunk who died by falling off a highway overpass or the victim of a pre-holiday crash who succumbed after the clock struck midnight.  AP usually relied on “electronic carbon” stories from its member newspapers, which meant AP broadcast subscribers in New York got late, stale news.

In any event, the UPI totals got a helluva lot more airtime and print coverage because I had a higher CAX count every time.

With UPI a shell of its old self — it’s now owned by Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church and its News World Corporation, publisher of the Washington Times — and Reuters and Bloomberg doing a nice job with international and business news, there’s little traditional wire service competition for AP in the United States.  But demand for content among local print and broadcast outlets is down, too, as they lose audience and advertisers to an increasingly fragmented online media landscape.

The Associated Press still makes a significant amount of money off its 50 state reports, thanks to correspondents covering legislative news in statehouse bureaus and a policy not to display the content online, where it could be pirated.  But a reduction in the size of AP’s editorial staff and similar news cutbacks among media outlets that used to feed items to AP, has left huge holes in coverage.

What’s filling the gap? Regional newspapers are banding together to form cooperatives that may make even AP state reports unnecessary in the years ahead.  The Ohio News Organization is one such effort.   Politico also represents a significant threat, as it readily barters editorial coverage of Washington news for advertising inventory in local media outlets and web sites.

There are also some dark horses in coverage of the nuts-and-bolts local news.  Atlanta-based CNN has its own editorial staff plus a large network of domestic radio and television affiliates that both broadcast content from and contribute news to CNN.  The so-called CNN Wire has not yet become a comprehensive state-level news service, but it could.

Not surprisingly, newcomers without legacy business hindrances seem to be doing a fine job breaking news locally and globally.   The micro-local Watertown, NY, site Newzjunky is kicking the digital ass of the century-old Watertown Daily Times and making money by selling advertising.

Twitter is the no-cost platform through which the Dutch news service Breaking News Online reaches the majority of its 1.1 million followers, though it is also emailing and using RSS.  In a short time, BNO has gone from solely aggregating third-party news content in under 140 characters to a growing amount of original reporting.  While there’s no apparent revenue model, it wouldn’t surprise me to see local, state, national and vertical beats pop up under the BNO brand as consumers get hooked on digesting tweets and SMS headlines.

The word “wire” is less about a strand of copper these days.  I think of it as an acronym — World Instantly Reached Electronically — and relish the fact that so many content producers are joining in the fun.

Most corporate communicators would steer clear of a news event involving charged racial tensions and the police.

But President Obama’s use of a “beer summit” to calm the war of words between Harvard University scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cambridge, Mass., police Sgt. James Crowley opened the door slightly for gutsy PR pros who might want to latch onto the wave of media coverage surrounding the issue.

The new owners of my hometown beer, Genesee, in Rochester, NY, timed their pitch to perfectly, landing a nice item in Jennifer Rossa’s Private Equity Beat Wall Street Journal blog and a bunch of other TV, radio, newspaper and social media coverage.  Genesee brewed up a controversy over Obama’s choice of Bud Light as the beer he will be drinking tonight.  Bud’s parent, Anheuser-Busch InBev NV, is based in Belgium.

“We think it’s great that the President is getting together over beers to have an important discussion. A lot of good solutions have surfaced when people can relax and talk over a couple cold ones,” said Rich Lozyniak, CEO of The Genesee Brewing Company. “We just hope the next time the President has a beer, he chooses an American beer, made by American workers, at an American-owned brewery like Genesee.”

The lesson here is that every big news story — in social media as well as mainstream print and broadcast — creates demand for sidebar material.  Cheers to the Genesee beer team for understanding the news cycle and pouncing.

The shooting death of a Kuwaiti businessman this past weekend is a sobering reminder of how wrong things can go when misinformation is used to pump up stock prices.

Whether Hazem Khalid Al-Braikan killed himself or was murdered isn’t the point.  What is clear, no matter how the CEO of Al Raya investments died, is that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission had frozen his assets because of suspicious and potentially profitable trading that occurred just before the release of news on a bogus tender offer.  (Read the full account here)

The credibility of time-sensitive, market-moving corporate news is central to the smooth operation of our global equities markets.

There’s a place for humor, such the ongoing spoof between Apple and Google on the BBspot blooper site and other venues clearly marked as parody.  But the biggest trusted providers of financial information — Dow Jones, Reuters and Bloomberg — are fighting an increasingly difficult battle to screen out bogus data from legitimate news on their closely watched platforms.

Hats off to astute newsroom staffers who rejected the fake release concerning Harmon International and Textron this past weekend, having questioned why those  NYSE -listed companies would not have issued their statements over PR Newswire or Business Wire.  Phone calls and faxed releases from Kuwait were deemed suspicious.

BW’s Neil Hershberg, a former colleague of mine at PR Newswire, noted today that we are approaching the one-year anniversary of an odd SEC statement that gave corporations the green light to experiment a bit more in the way they disclose their material news to investors.  During the past 12 months, the vast majority of companies have continued to broadcast their full-text news to the media, investors, employees, customers and other audiences via the security-obsessed commercial newswire services — ranging from industry stalwarts Business Wire and PR Newswire to Nasdaq’s Globe Newswire and the upstart Marketwire — rather than risk raising questions about the authenticity of their information.

Certainly, some innovation has taken place: 

• Ebay supplemented its use of BW with Twitter to snap highlights during the company’s quarterly conference calls
• Nasdaq-listed BGC Partners, Inc. issued a short statement over PRN saying its earnings release had just been posted to its website.  The downside of “notice-and-access “release is that investors have to take an additional step to download the company’s data, and opening additional browsers is potentially slow and cumbersome

As the C suite and investor relations officers strive to stand out from the crowd — especially when the economy begins to grow again — there will be new models and exciting ways to share information.  High atop any list of possible disclosure solutions should be the question, “Will investors trust that this information is legitimate?”

Every time I walk through the cluttered aisles of the deep discounter Ocean State Job Lot in Rhode Island and see ill-conceived products like green tea soda or Maalox Whip, I smile and think of Bob McGrath.

As a young reporter at UPI, I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon with Bob in his quirky Museum of Failed Products, in New York’s Finger Lakes region.  From eggs designed to cook in a toaster to New Coke, the collection of tens of thousands of consumer flops were a reminder that smart business people often make expensive mistakes.

The same thing happens in the B2B world — even on Twitter.

Journalist feed aggregator Muck Rack’s attempt to make money by sending paid content to its own audience of followers may be one such cock-up, though only time will tell.

Despite the fact that the @muckrack Twitter feed has fewer than 3,900 followers, Gregory Galant believes issuers of news releases will be willing to spend $1 per character on the chance that a tweet release will yield some coverage.  The minimum fee is $50 and the max is $130 to use the Muck Rack service, which precedes each paid tweet with the “RELEASE:” disclaimer.

While it’s certainly a wonderful aspiration to think that every journalist whose tweets, retweets and article links show up on Muck Rack will read each mini-release and dutifully click on each miniturized URL, the reality is that most of the followers aren’t even in the media, don’t blog and have only a small number of followers.

A much better approach for issuers with newsworthy items is to use Twitter Search to identify people who write about topics related to your news.  Follow those people.  Comment on their posts.  Build online relationships.  Contribute to the conversation.  That way, when you have news, they’ll find your release interesting and may actually retweet it — free of charge — to their followers.

That’s called earned coverage.  I promise you’ll like it more than green tea soda or Gerber’s failed baby food for adults.