The backdrop for this post is snowy Cleveland, where I spent eight of my 20 years working in the commercial newswire business.  A short return visit this week to the Midwest — including stops in Chicago and Minneapolis — brought back a flood of memories that included many victories and a few business SNAFUs.

In the late ’80s, when spell check consisted of a well-worn dictionary sitting next to the editorial desk, we relied on eagle-eyed editors reading each press release aloud to a colleague before hitting the SEND button and distributing the copy to media across the nation.

Our earliest word processing programs –  like Xywrite,  Word Perfect and later, Word — helped catch many typos, thanks to internal dictionaries.  But, as former colleagues and competitors reminded me on my Midwest newswire reunion tour, spell check didn’t stop these doozies:

• In the personnel release announcing my appointment to PR Newswire, I was described as a veteran pubic relations executive.
• A release concerning a sensitive restructuring release for a leading carrier referred to the company as Untied Airlines.
• The surname of John Balch, CEO of vacuum cleaner maker Royal Apppliance, became Belch.
• A big box electronics retailer was rebranded as Best But
• The first name of Goldman Sachs went out as Goddamn

As I looked out my hotel window at the snowy streets of Cleveland and the gathering storm clouds over Lake Erie, I flashed back to those unpleasant phone calls with corp comm execs who rarely knew about the typos until we shared the bad news.  And the worst was yet to come.  After hanging up the phone, we inevitably transmitted a correction that called attention to our mistake and inspired guffaws among those reading the wire in newsrooms and brokerage houses.  The business relationships rarely survived those incidents.

So what’s the current state of affairs in the commercial newswire industry?  A quick search of “manger” revealed numerous instances of a livestock pen being substituted for the word “manager.”   My old favorite “pubic” also gets plenty of play, including a recent Oracle release.

I am leaving my hotel happy that I don’t have to call Larry Ellison’s PR team to grovel.

I grew up in one of the seemingly small number of Rochester families without a relative employed by Kodak.

But that doesn’t mean the once-mighty photographic empire didn’t touch my life. Kodak’s expected bankruptcy filing conjured up memories of sight, sound and even smell.

Anyone who lived in western New York in the 1970s and ‘80s likely remembers the spike in print and broadcast automobile advertising in March when the more than 50,000 Kodak workers cashed their annual “Kodak Bonus” check. The jingle “Piehler, Piehler, the Pontiac Dealer” still echoes in my brain.

Unfortunately, the stench of Kodak wasn’t nearly as pleasant as the Piehler jingle. Smokestacks near Kodak Park spewed acrid plumes and rained gritty particulate onto cars parked downwind.

As a teenage ice cream truck driver, I’d leave my car parked near the Lake and Ridgeway Skippy Ice Cream depot for long periods. The “Kodak rain” prompted plenty of pollution conspiracy theories – and hose downs of our cars. Around that same period, high levels of carcinogenic chemicals were detected in the ground water on nearby Rand Street.

One thing Kodak did very well – in addition to manufacturing film, batteries, copy machines and, more recently, inkjet printers — was generating news.

As the Rochester reporter for UPI, I was on the receiving end of many press releases produced by Kodak’s formidable media relations operation and blue chip PR firms like Hill & Knowlton. While most of the “news” was far from time-sensitive, Kodak’s quarterly earnings announcements were of critical importance.

Because Kodak was a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and other key indexes in those days, the financial newswires like Dow Jones and Reuters routinely issued a headline within seconds of the NYSE:EK release crossing PR Newswire or Business Wire.

But the secretary in Kodak’s PR department openly complained about lengthy service delays at the commercial newswires. Her solution to make sure market-moving news was quickly delivered to the Democrat & Chronicle, Times-Union and Rochester TV and radio stations was to assemble a line-up of taxicabs outside Kodak Office on State Street.

So that’s where I stood on the mornings Kodak issued its earnings. As Joan Miller delivered envelopes to the cabbies, I ran with the press release to a bank of pay phones at Kodak headquarters and called in the earnings numbers to UPI’s financial editor, Dottie Brooks.  By 1985, I was using my first laptop computer — a Radio Shack TRS80 Model 100, complete with an acoustic cup modem — to write Kodak earnings stories.  

Beating AP, Dow Jones and Reuters consistently on breaking news from Kodak was an obsession.

A defining moment in my relationship with Kodak came after a federal judge ruled that Kodak had infringed Polaroid’s patents in the creation of a Kodak instant camera. My editor at UPI, Steve Geimann, jazzed up the headline: “Kodak Convicted of Stealing Polaroid Trade Secrets.” The comms guy at Kodak, Charlie Smith, went too far in expressing his displeasure over the headline. A bridge was burned.

From that day on, I shot Fuji film.

John MacLeod Williams, who led PR Newswire through tremendous sales growth in the 1990s and successfully extended the paid press release business model into China in recent years, died suddenly Tuesday in Chicago.  He was 66.

John, an avid boxer and exercise buff, had been working out when he collapsed, said his wife, Donna Manke Williams, who on Thanksgiving had not yet finalized funeral arrangements.  He and Donna lived in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and also owned a home in Granville, Vermont.

Facebook tributes to John from current and past PR Newswire employees poured in this morning within minutes of a posting about his death. Many highlighted his inspirational leadership style and outsize personality.

“He was an Alpha Male for sure. He took a bite out of life and let the juices run down his chin. I’m sure he packed more living in those 66 years than most do in a hundred,” wrote Jeff McHugh, a software engineer who worked in PRN’s Philadelphia bureau.

John joined PR Newswire in 1986 from Business Wire, where he helped establish a New York office for the rapidly growing San Francisco-based company.  At PR Newswire, which had pioneered the commercial press release distribution industry in 1954, John set about creating a culture of sales, service and product innovation.

He emphasized media relations, understanding that unless reporters and editors used the content they received from PR Newswire, sales would founder.  Dorthea Brooks, a legendary business editor for United Press International, was recruited.  John also hired former Unipressers Jerry Mitchell, Tom Madden, Fred Ferguson, Neil Hershberg and me.

From 1989 to 2008, John was a constant source of inspiration — and occasional irritation — as he continually questioned the status quo, demanded better performance from the finance and technology departments at PRN, and took jabs at British parent company United Business Media their laser focus on profits over investing for long-term success.

In addition to accelerating PRN’s growth through broadcast fax and fax-on-demand products, John added theatrical touches that at times proved hilarious.

At a sales conference in the early 1990s, he donned a Fruit of the Loom grape costume. At another, he tried to recruit Mr. T to promote the launch of an early Internet “T Button” that allowed interactivity on press releases.  During the inaugural PRN “President’s Club,” John chartered deep-sea fishing boats and arranged for a private helicopter tour for the elderly father of one sales exec.

In 2002 John volunteered to expand the commercial newswire business model to China, where a relationship with Xinhua News Agency gave credibility to PRN and allowed it to thrive.  During one of my last business trips with John, he bore wounds familiar to many Beijing locals — injuries suffered in a bicycle crash.  He kept his bike in the kitchen of his apartment.

Fitness was at the center of Williams’s life since he stopped drinking in 1989.  A fixture at a swimming pool near PR Newswire’s former headquarters near Times Square, Williams also boxed.  It was not uncommon for a young, fit PR Newswire employee to arrive in the office with a broken nose or a black eye, trophies of a boxing session with the boss.  When we discussed partnering with AudioNet, the event streaming business started by Mark Cuban in 1995, the deal was sealed when John hopped into the ring with Cuban’s female biz dev executive, Julie Smith.

Outside the ring, John took delight sharing his fortunes with others.  When he built a home in rural Vermont, he invited PR Newswire employees for camping weekends, drawing into the woods some nervous visitors who had never before left the five boroughs.  In a very private case of philanthropy, John met a quadriplegic man in the same rehabilitation facility treating his  father.  John donated a computer equipped with a head visor that allowed his new friend — a former author and academic –  to move the cursor with puffs of breath, freeing him to communicate via email.

Born near Buffalo, in Dunkirk, N.Y., John M. Williams grew up in the newspaper business.  His great grandfather founded the local daily, The Observer, in 1882, where John’s father MacLeod was editor.  John earned a degree at Syracuse University, enlisted in the Air Force and served two tours in Vietnam.

His career at UPI involved assignments in New York and Los Angeles, where he covered the murder trial of Charles Manson. He never stopped playing copy editor at PRN, alerting staffers to grammar and spelling mistakes and insisting on prose that would impress our two key audiences — PR professionals and journalists.

In addition to his wife, John is survived by two sisters, Julia MacLeod Williams of Richmond and Sarah Williams McCrane of Poquoson, Va.

John meant a great deal to me and hundreds of people who worked with him through 30+ years in the newswire business.  Rest in peace, John.

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From the Cartmell Funeral Home (link)

The funeral service for John Williams will take place on Sunday at 5:30 p.m. at the Cartmell Funeral Home, 150 Court St., Plymouth. Friends and relatives are welcome to the visitation at Cartmell Funeral Home on Sunday from 3:00 to 5:30 pm. Cremation will take place at Vine Hills Crematory, Plymouth.

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I attended John’s funeral yesterday in Plymouth.  Other PR Newswire people paying respects included Charlie Morin, Jerry Mitchell, Todd Grossman, Larry Thomas, Dave Haapaoja, Mark Nowlan, Mary Salzillo Levine, Heather Schwanke and Michelle Beaudreau.  Donna appreciated the show of support for John’s work at PR Newswire.

Consulting giant Booz Allen Hamilton's uber-professional booth awaiting shipping on the final day of PRSA.

For the entrepreneur founder of a startup, exhibiting at a trade show is like being a gum chewer in Singapore.

Rules are going to get broken.

At the just-concluded Public Relations Society of America conference in Orlando, a walk through the exhibition hall was a study of extremes – from deep-pocketed corporations with dedicated events staffers to tiny tech firm with products barely out of beta.

The legacy companies were resigned to the fact they had to pay hundreds of dollars a day to the on-site exposition management company to rent little things most of the conference attendees don’t even notice – items like tablecloths and skirts, booth carpeting and monitor stands.  Because the larger corporations had already invested five figures on construction of custom booths, shipping and sponsorship fees to PRSA, the added fees were little more than a nuisance.

For mid-sized companies like the fast-growing firm I just joined, Critical Mention, there’s a bit more fiscal scrutiny.  My colleague, Steve Shannon, did a quick calculation and determined we could save $1,100 by buying TVs at an Orlando Best Buy rather than renting.  Of course, shipping the TVs back to headquarters in New York would add to the bill and most likely damage the units, so Steve made a second smart decision and donated the brand new TVs to Give the Kids the World, a Florida charity for children with life-threatening illness.

At the extremely frugal end of the trade show spectrum, there are startups who are just starting to bill for their product but not yet making any profits.  In one case, the founder and CEO just about choked when he saw the ridiculous list of rental charges.

There was no way in hell this guy — who still pulls all nighters writing code and knows each of his accounts on a first-name basis – was going to pay a multimillion-dollar expositions company to drape his table with a $20 skirt that would cost him hundreds of dollars to rent for three days.  So he took the risk of getting busted by the trade show police and bought a black bed sheet at Target and used it to wrap his table.  Then he hit Lowe’s and picked up a gray carpet remnant to cover the hideous orange pattern of the ballroom carpeting.

Another decision would happen after PRSA ended, the CEO confided.  If he didn’t pick up any business at the show, he could always return the items for a refund.

I took an instant liking to the guy.

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.

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.

An odd benefit to growing up with two legally blind sisters in the 1970s was my very early DJ career.

Along with magnifying glasses and the weekly large-print edition of The New York Times, our house also had a collection of state-supplied audio equipment that was way too tempting for a pre-pubescent boy fixated on Top 40 radio.

So when my siblings’ specialized phonographs – so-called “talking book machines” that played vinyl records at 8 1/3, 16 2/3 and 33 1/3 RPM – were dormant, I put them to use playing music.  I learned to cue records to start at precise beats, and how to transition music seamlessly.  I also quickly wished for a fourth speed, 45 RPM, to play singles.

That early comfort with technology and music turned me into a radio station groupie, a volunteer answerer of the request lines at Rochester’s WAXC, WHAM’s on-air traffic reporter at age 15, and a DJ at WDNY in Dansville and WTLB in Utica during high school and college.

Despite my sabotage of their talking book machines, Shelley earned a master’s degree and Shifra a Ph.D.  My radio career ended when I joined PR Newswire in 1989, but I never forgot the connection with an audience that could be forged with two turntables.

Fast forward 30 years and it’s no surprise I was mesmerized when I met Rob Principe and learned how he built Scratch Music Group around DJ training schools in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami, and how his national network of 700+ A-list DJs were routinely performing at corporate events for brands from H&M and Google to Diesel and ESPN.

Chronicled in his book, On the Record: The Scratch DJ Academy Guide, Rob founded the business with Run-D.M.C. DJ Jam-Master Jay in 2002 and has an all-star list of current and past instructors.  A testament to the genre’s massive popularity: the book’s forward is written by Moby.

Rob and his partners, Mike Cannady and Colin Kelly, have ambitious expansion plans for Scratch.  I was thrilled when they invited me to help them further leverage their unparalleled network of DJ talent into new vertical markets and geographies.

So if you get me on the phone and hear a pulsating beat in the background, I’m probably taking a lesson.  And if you see a tweet with a DJ term you don’t understand, we’ll get you a lesson.

Budget season is in full swing inside organizations with calendar fiscal years.  Chances are a few new line items have made their way into the public relations spending plan for 2011.

More than any other corporate function, PR is leading their organizations into social media, says Charlene Li, founder of research firm Altimeter Group and author of the best-selling business books Groundswell and Open Leadership.

Li, a former journalist, was a keynoter at the Public Relations Society of America International Conference in Washington, DC, this week, telling 3,000 attendees that PR continues to outpace, by a good distance, the customer service function in the use of and spending on social media engagement.

Although Li maintained the dollars required for social engagement are modest, when contrasted to other corporate earmarks, I have noted four or five separate buckets that many organizations are now funding. The addition of staff for social media community management, a platform for monitoring and analysis, and publication tools for scheduling posts are routine investments for any company or agency trying to meet business objectives on the social web.  Many consumer-facing companies are going a step further, spending on technology to build Facebook applications or integrate social into CRM systems.

My interview with Li will continue next week, focusing on how companies cope with the departure of highly recognizable community managers, and the use of digital agencies versus social platform specialists.

Image credit: Tom Humbarger

For those who see the glass as half-empty, don’t worry.  Marketers and PR folks will start focusing on you in 2011.

Jonathan Evans, my longtime colleague and friend, attended the annual Public Relations Society of America International Conference in Washington, D.C., with me over the past few days.  Like Jon, I suffered social media overload.

Which brings me to Jon’s snarky prediction for the possible theme of the 2011 conference in Orlando:

“Anti-social media: How to reach those who are not interested in you, indifferent to your products and are quite frankly annoyed with human interaction.”

Jon had his tongue firmly planted in his cheek while prognosticating about the next big thing in PR.  But I don’t think we should be so quick to dismiss the concept that there’s a large group of constituencies who consciously choose not to engage.

These are the people who like phones that just make calls, proudly show off their small TVs without cable, and love New Hampshire’s “Live Free or Die” mantra.

The first step to luring this crowd into social media is in Facebook’s hands.  Introduce the ”Don’t Like” button, Mr. Zuckerberg, and you’ve got ‘em.