I’ve always thought skunkworks projects were pretty sweet.

As a kid, I earned the name Fingers Armon because my friend Jimmy Fiddler and I disassembled lamps, radios, and other gear – rarely managing to put them back together properly.  My respect for electricity came early, too, as I occasionally touched the wrong two wires and sustained some nasty shocks.

Fortunately, a career in media and PR has allowed me to avoid 110-volt jolts in favor of the intellectual and commercial buzz emanating from skunkworks inside the larger service providers and smaller shops alike.

Here are three innovations that PR practitioners should consider trying:

• Meltwater Press is a radical new take on building a media list.  The tried and true method of pitching a story involves a PR pro targeting journalists and bloggers based on their geography, the type of media outlet for whom they work, and their assigned beat.   The approach Meltwater is advocating doesn’t involve searching a media database.  Instead, PR pros are asked to upload the content they plan to pitch — a press release, backgrounder, speech or other similar text document – for analysis by a natural language software program.  Meltwater then spits out the bylines of reporters who have written about similar topics.  The concept is not new.  When I was still with PR Newswire, we cobbled together a test that used content from eWatch and Dialog, and journalist contacts from MEDIAtlas to see if we could generate relevant media lists using natural language processing technology.  The results were underwhelming and the product was shelved.  A few years later, PR agency veteran Peter Himler teamed up with a firm then called ENR to introduce MatchPoint, but I haven’t heard boo about the product since then.  While I have not seen a demo of Meltwater Press, I’m guessing that artificial intelligence software is getting better and better.  In an era when IBM’s Watson can win against Jeopardy’s top champions, it’s only a matter of time before a media list can be churned out by a machine.

• Times Square sign placement of PR content evokes a kind of visceral reaction from clients.  No one can make the argument that posting a photo on an electronic billboard for a few seconds can drive sales, build a brand or repair a reputation.  But clients love this service. Since Times Square photos were suggested by former PRNer Jonathan Evans, who now works for the press release aggregation company Noodls, tens of thousands of bright, digital photos and captions have appeared on a sign that’s 20 stories tall in the “Crossroads of the World.”  The cost is negligible – just a few hundred bucks.  PR Newswire client images appear on the Thomson Reuters Building for a few seconds at a time, and clients receive an email showing their image as it is being displayed (with passers-by, buses and the occasional Naked Cowboys appearance adding a bit of extra sizzle).  PR images may also be projected on sign at the impressive NASDAQ Market Site in Times Square.  That service is available through NASDAQ’s GlobeNewswire.

• dotSUB eliminates language as a barrier for web video.  Any organization, product or brand whose consumers speak multiple languages should consider posting their video to the dotSUB site.  This New York-based company offers a free tool that allows users to upload a script or type in the words spoken on the video, and to match the video to the precise time each word is spoken.  The result is instant subtitles, just like the closed-caption feed on TV.  After one language is subtitled, users can select additional languages and Google Translate will go to work.  Not happy with the accuracy of machine translation?  dotSUB offers really inexpensive professional translation services for clients from Sony to Nokia to the famous California TED conference. The founder of dotSUB, Michael Smolens, is PR-savvy and has been known to offer ingenious ideas for the best use of this world-flattening technology to communications pros who take the time to ask.

There you have it:  Three off-the-beaten-path tools from smart folks who have produced skunkworks projects that merit attention.

I’d love to hear your nominations.

Photo credit: Sony Pictures

Actor Abe Vigoda knows what it’s like to be dead even while still very much alive and kicking.

Known best for his roles as Sgt. Fish on the 1970s TV sitcom Barney Miller and Sal Tessio in The Godfather, Vigoda has been prematurely killed off by People magazine and dozens of other media outlets.

It’s the same “dead before my time” syndrome suffered by the lowly press release.

In 2006, the technology and media blogger Tom Foremsky declared the press release dead on his Silicon Valley Watcher blog.  His post started a useful discussion about social media, and the introduction of disruptive products from both legacy and new service providers.  PR professionals who understood the new paradigm also began to accept the fact that the era of command-and-control communications would be replaced by a more open dialog, in which consumers shared the stage with powerful brands.

So what’s the condition of the press release five years later?

In short: very healthy, but less profitable for the legacy market leaders. In the five years since Foremsky’s death declaration, millions of releases have been posted to web sites to be indexed by Google and other search engines, pushed via email and RSS feeds to media and other audiences, and transmitted by both free and paid distribution services.

Not only has this mainstay tool of professional communicators not succumb, it has bulked up beyond text to include photos, video and social sharing features.

The two largest commercial newswire services, Business Wire and PR Newswire, have seen a stabilization in press release volumes – which were as high as 200,000 releases a year each at their peak — after a decline driven by regulatory changes, the recession and increased competition from Marketwire, NASDAQ, Thomson Reuters and Vocus.

A revenue-sapping trend affecting each of these commercial newswire services is a phenomenon some have dubbed Web FD — a relaxation of disclosure regulations from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that allows publicly traded companies to post their material news on their web site, as long as they have told their key audiences how they intend to circulate news.

The list of companies that once paid hefty fees to Business Wire, NASDAQ’s Globe NewsWire, Marketwire and PR Newswire but that now self-disclose includes Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT),  General Motors (NYSE: GM), Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX), Marathon Oil (NYSE: MRO), Expedia Inc. (NASDAQ: EXPE), Tellabs Inc. (NASDAQ: TLAB),  BGC Partners (NASDAQ: BGCP), SVB Financial Group (NASDAQ: SIVB), Investors Real Estate Trust (NASDAQ: IRET), and Steinway Musical Instruments, Inc. (NYSE: LVB).

Also cutting into the highly profitable regulatory segment of the press release business is a relatively new offering from Thomson Reuters, which hosts the investor relations websites and streams the quarterly earnings conference calls for thousands of public companies.  After the acquisition of the little-known Norwegian financial news distribution company Hugin Online, Thomson Reuters began offering its clients a low-cost disclosure service – pitching it as a way to cut Business Wire, GlobeNewswire, Marketwire and PR Newswire out of IR budgets.

While this bloody battle rages for hundreds of millions of dollars in press release distribution revenue associated with disclosure of market-moving news from public companies, the highest growth in release volume is coming from marketers and small business owners.

One only need listen to the quarterly investor conference call of PR software maker Vocus for proof that sales and volume growth are exceptionally strong.  Vocus bought PR Web in 2006 and has registered steady gains by posting non-regulatory content from marketers and small business owners.

Unlike Business Wire, GlobeNewswire, Marketwire and PR Newswire, PR Web relies principally on SEO rather than the expense of maintaining a global network of feeds into newsrooms and paying distribution infrastructure companies like Acquire Media and The Associated Press.  Because the issuers of press releases via PR Web don’t care that their release doesn’t arrive at the Bloomberg newsdesk at precisely the same second as it gets to The Wall Street Journal, pricing is substantially lower.

Another selling point that appears to resonate with customers of PR Web are access report demonstrating page views, click-throughs, sharing, pickup and other data.  While Business Wire, Globe Newswire, Marketwire and PR Newswire each offer some level of post-release reporting to issuers, the data is incomplete because the newswires cannot track interactions with the content on third party sites (like Yahoo Finance).

Among management at the major newswires, there is a strong desire to expand from PR and IR to the marketing communications departments at larger enterprises, and into small- and medium-sized businesses, as a hedge against declines in regulatory release revenue:

• PR Newswire is a gold sponsor at this week’s Content Marketing World conference in Cleveland.

• GlobeNewswire has started distributing releases for customers of Cision, who can now build and distribute to a custom media list and also send their content over CisionWire.

• Business Wire sells an SEO service called EON – Enhanced Online News as a standalone while including the feature in other wire distribution circuits.

Watch for both scrappy entrepreneurs and larger players to bring new services to the distribution market in the months ahead.

On the scrappy end of the spectrum, tiny Wyoming-based PitchEngine (where I have acted as an adviser for some time) continues to enhance its social media release platform and forge partnerships so the technology is available to a broader set of customers.

A larger player, the fast-growing Meltwater Group, based in San Francisco, already sells its Buzz, News, Press and Reach products to the PR sector. I’d be surprised if a distribution product was not on the way.

There are undoubtedly others making inroads into a crowded market that shows no signs of taking Tom Foremsky’s advice.  Let me know what you are seeing out there.

Just as the web-and-mail video rental business model of Netflix spelled doom for Blockbuster’s bricks-and-mortar outlets, it was only a matter of time before Sean Morgan’s introduction of the real-time TV monitoring business Critical Mention forced the once-dominant VMS into extinction.

It took eight years.

The death of Video Monitoring Services of America LP, a firm that once employed more than 1,000 people and generated sales of more than $50 million, was etched on the www.vmsinfo.com web site Friday like a gravestone inscription:

The VMS Board with the input of qualified professionals have elected to close VMS.

Unfortunately almost all VMS personnel have been terminated effective today.

The decision has been made after exhaustively evaluating many different options and with sadness for our loyal staff and customers.

At some point in the very near future a Trustee will be appointed to liquidate VMS. We anticipate the trustee will make future communications with customers.

VMS thanks all customers for their loyal support.

For those of us in the PR services sector, it was apparent VMS would be toast when Critical Mention launched a platform delivering real-time email alerts that not only informed clients when their key words were heard on television, but also allowed subscribers to view the video clips instantly.

While VMS management scrambled to save their burning house, Morgan, the Critical Mention CEO, went on an R&D offensive and offered update after update to his software and an expanded trove of content that today includes every major U.S. over-the-air market, cable and satellite TV programming, as well as many foreign sources, and even web video from online news sites.

There is no shortage of entrepreneurs, like Morgan, who are licking their chops over the prospect of disrupting other legacy players in the billion-dollar PR services sector.

But why haven’t they declared victory?

In upcoming posts, we’ll take a look at the disruptors in four segments of the services market: Distribution, Targeting, Monitoring and SaaS (software as a service).

Next week: Distribution

Services like Marketwire, PRWeb, PitchEngine, GlobeNewswire and Hugin Online have had an impact on the legacy market leaders PR Newswire and Business Wire.  We’ll dig in to see who is growing and why.

(Disclaimer:  The vast majority of my career has been spent in PR services.  My only current role in the distribution arena is as adviser to PitchEngine. The views expressed here are my own.)

Today’s introduction of a new automated evaluation tool by London-based Lewis PR got me thinking:

• Are service providers in the PR space not innovating fast enough?

• Or are PR agencies no longer able to grow simply by selling billable hours?

By bringing LSCORE to market, Lewis joins a growing list of public relations agencies that have developed, branded and launched products that are positioned to fill a void in the market.

A few years ago, Waggener Edstrom strayed into “vendor territory” when it started selling an “Influence Toolkit.”  In the 1980s, Fleishman Hillard took a similar tack with its Wire News Network, ostensibly a miniature newswire that operated as a profit center and made PR Newswire and Business Wire insane.

The mammoth advertising and PR services holding company WPP — owner of Burson-Marsteller, Hill & Knowlton and Ogilvy, among others — has plunked down some serious coin in this arena.  Cymfony, for example, is now under the WPP roof.

Strategically, services like the WaggEd and Lewis offerings seem to make sense as long as the firms did not spend too much developing the technology.  The agencies will likely upsell most of their own clients to the new platforms and non-clients who inquire will share information about their PR goals that make them more likely to become consulting clients.

But outside of those two pools of clients, it’s pretty unlikely competing agencies would recommend LSCORE or Influence Toolkit.  Without sales of their software through third-party agencies, the return on investment is harder to achieve.

That “I’ll-be-damned-if-our-agency-is-going-to-recommend-your-firm’s-software” conundrum is one reason PR services suppliers unaffiliated with agencies should continue to prosper.  After watching the success of Cision in selling hundreds of Radian6 subscriptions to PR clients, Vocus developed its own social media monitoring and analytics service and integrated it into its SaaS platform.  The new social product, according to Vocus CEO Rich Rudman, is selling like hotcakes.

In London, Glide Technologies has leapfrogged both Cision and Vocus with a very sophisticated, next-generation sentiment analysis and media evaluation tool.  Expect further innovation in this arena in the coming months from other suppliers.

We will keep an eye on LSCORE to see how extensively it is marketed outside of core Lewis clients like Lexmark, Mozilla and Pret a Manger.  In the meantime, we’ll watch competing firms like Weber Shandwick — which for years has been quietly supplying clients with monitoring and measurement through an extranet dubbed WeberWorks — to see if they jump on the selling-software-to-non-clients bandwagon.

OpenTable ended the unpleasant ritual of waiting on hold for a snooty hostess to  book your dinner reservation for a popular restaurant.

GPS devices from Garmin, TomTom and Magellin have made the concept of getting a TripTik from AAA seem almost quaint.

Calling a radio station DJ for help in identifying a song is no longer necessary, thanks to the Shazam iPhone app, which matches the digital fingerprint of a song and instantly displays the artist and title.

With all these technology advances, why is it so damn challenging for today’s time-constrained public relations professionals to shortcut the process of identifying and engaging with influential audiences, and  track the outcome?

My years with PR Newswire and subsequent board roles at Techrigy and dna13, taught me plenty about the never-ending software development process and the need to balance immediate code fixes with longer-term customer requests for new data and functionality.  Now that I’m enjoying a stint as an unbiased industry observer, I figured it was appropriate to ask the community using Cision, Dow Jones Media Relations Manager, VMS Insight and Vocus — and those who wish their budget could support such a luxury — to chime in with their wish list for the next generation of PR automation and software tools.

Ironically, it’s free software from Google, Moderator, that allows me to query the public relations industry and to tally votes on what questions should be asked of PR services providers.  With many of us gathering in October at the Public Relations Society of America international conference in Washington, DC, we should have a timely, specific and crowd-supported list of features to hand over to the development community.

Please take part in this exercise.  Sales professionals have Salesforce.com.  Finance people have their Oracle systems.  It’s only fair that PR officers push software suppliers to stay current and provide tools that will enable you to do your job as it evolves in 2011 and beyond.

A link to the Google Moderator survey on PR services is here:  http://goo.gl/mod/Cry4

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.