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.

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.

Graphic from Time

Pfizer’s Twitter feed seems to be benefiting from the same ingredient that powers its blockbuster erectile drug.

After only six days @pfizer_news had jumped to 631 followers by 8 o’clock this morning.

Kudos to communications SVP Sally Sussman and global media VP Ray Kerins for prevailing in a heavily regulated industry whose litigation-wary greybeards are notoriously conservative when it comes to social media.

Pharma lawyers have argued that any communications through channels feeding directly to patients — without the traditional bureaucratic review of copy, photos, video and other content — could go south quickly.

“What if” scenarios abound.  In a litigious world where the prescribing information required by regulators is often the size of an encylopedia, it’s easy to see a plaintiff complaining that he or she notified a drugmaker about an adverse reaction via Twitter but got no reply only to suffer….

For those and many other reasons, pharma has arrived later to the Twitter party than many other consumer-facing brands.  Those brave enough to tweet about remedies, clinical trials and medical conferences have taken markedly different approaches.

The most conversational pharmatweep this far is Johnson & Johnson’s Marc Monseau, who is followed by 1,745 and follows 1,096.  He has updated 316 times since launching the @JNJComm feed to supplement the New Jersey firm’s two-year-old “JNJ BTW” blog.

Novartis, based in Switzerland, has published 86 updates on its @novartis Twitter feed since November.  Unlike Monseau, there’s no named personality behind the tweets,  which are mainly 140-character teasers of releases on the Novartis media web site and some occasional industry news.  The lack of interaction is stark — with the company following only 10 on Twitter despite attracting an audience of 2,328.

Germany’s Boehringer was lauded by Jim Edwards on the life sciences news site BioValley Basel for allowing its Twitter personality — 2,178 followers and following 1,657 — to “engage in some harmless banter” rather than toeing the corporate line.

Merck seems to be using the Twitter community only as a recruiting tool, but I question how many Twitter users want to work for a company that’s afraid to engage in a more meaningful way.

In New York, Pfizer’s new Twitter staffers were quick to reply today when I sent a direct message to ask why there were a separate @pfizer (”it’s not Pfizer and not official”) and @pfizer_news Twitter pages.  That kind of willingness to snap quick replies to customers, media and others can only help build trust and goodwill with everyone except the legal department.

New Yorker Sandy Cohen has started an unconventional translation company, Speaklike.  Rather than thriving on the conversion of encyclopedia-sized documents from English into Arabic or Portuguese, Sandy’s start-up offers Twitter users an inexpensive way to translate their 140-character messages into just about any language.

At about 25 cents per language per tweet, this can add up in a hurry.  But it’s a godsend for B2B and B2C users of Twitter who cater to multicultural and global audiences.   His service could also be used in the email and Web fulfillment world.

In another departure from the mainstream, Sandy is taking a play out of the Wikipedia playbook by crowd-sourcing his network of translators.  The similarity to Wikipedia ends there, though, as a fraction of each micropayment  will trickle down to the translations.  (Will this be the basis for a new Twitter economy in Brazil and Belarus?)

I just started using SpeakLike today and look forward to seeing if anyone in the Spanish-speaking world cares about my tweets.  My new Latino persona is @SenorDaveArmon.

The other interesting crowd-sourced translation business model involves Web video.  dotSUB , created by Michael Smolens, is free for users to upload video and a transcript so each spoken word appears as closed-captioning on the bottom of the video  (click on the “CC” button at the bottom of the player).  Those two steps opens up your video to the hearing-impaired audience.

For video producers who want to reach those who speak another language, dotSUB has a network of professional translators who will do the work for a few bucks (the charge was around $10 a video minute the last time I checked).  There are free translators who know how to use the dotSUB tool, but the content has to be interesting enough for someone to volunteer their time to convert your video into something that will win an Oscar in the Ukraine or Nepal.

There are already a few examples of marketing programs taking advantage of dotSUB and Speaklike.   Use the Comment function below to let me know your thoughts about these tools.

The world is full of creative and interesting people.

Some of them will be on stage in the next 24 hours in Long Beach, California, at the annual TED conference:

• The creator of the first African online ad network and the African equivalent of The Huffington Post

• A New Zealand physicist who discovered the hidden mathematical patterns of warfare

• The founder of an international women’s inventor network

• An Indian design researcher dedicated to improving the lives of children

• A Korean-American actress whose one-woman show tells the story of a North Korean spy”

Even though it’s virtually impossible for ordinary people, and even for some CEOs and dignitaries, to score tickets to TED, organizers of the event have worked extra hard to show their commitment to the Open community.  Today, I spotted a list of movie theaters across the United States that would be beaming in a live broadcast of the Ted Prize, for the admission price of $20:

When: Thursday, February 5
Start time: 5pm Pacific / 7pm Central / 8pm Eastern
Tickets: $20
Theaters include:
Laemmle Music Hall, Beverly Hills, CA, 310-274-6869
Laemmle’s Playhouse, Pasadena, CA, 626-844-6500
Michigan Theatre, Jackson, MI, 517-783-0962
Bryn Mawr Film Institute, Bryn Mawr, PA, 610-527-9898
Jane Pickens Theater, Newport, RI, 401-846-5252

There’s also a webcast, which is free.

Of course there are many Twitter users and bloggers at TED, so we’ll get the back story alongside the more polished content on the web and in theaters.

My friend Michael Smolens, founder of the translation and subtitling community dotSUB is there.  Through Michael, I have met a number of remarkable individuals who are committed to shaping their careers around open access, globally, to quality media content that can lower communications barriers and maybe even make the world a better place.

Before last week, I only knew Jesse Dylan as Bob’s son.  Now I have deep respect for his documentary filmmaking and activism around the topic of medical information.  After all,  “Yes We Can” helped get Barack Obama elected.

Rob Hof also uses the art of filmmaking to tell his stories, captured aboard railroad trains in foreign lands ranging from Turkey to Cambodia.  I can’t wait for his Future Express series to debut this spring.

Today, I started looking over the work of Neil Sieling, who shared an amazing story about the cable TV industry grousing to the FCC that it wanted to be freed from having to allocate precious channels for community access.  DirecTV and Dish Networks don’t have a similar public service requirement, the cable guys argued.  The unintended result was that Wayne’s World and local PTA meetings stayed on cable and the satellite TV industry was forced to add public service programming for the first time.  LinkTV was born.

The common thread with these individuals is that they like to share.  They welcome newcomers to their network and don’t throw an NDA in front of you before ordering lunch.  It’s a refreshing way to do business, and to learn.