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

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.

I don’t expect diversity in the New York supermarket business.  Rightly or wrongly, I have long associated chains like D’Agostino and Gristede’s as places managed by brawny Italian-American men.

In the public relations professions, the spotlight has been shining on the lack of adequate representation by non-male, non-white personnel for quite some time.  Similar criticism — and in some cases, litigation — has been lodged against the advertising and financial services industries.

But the world has changed since Don Draper types ruled on Madison Avenue, right?  Surely, the next generation of technology-driven marketing services would be led by people who more closely resemble those who live in our global communities where our clients sell their wares.

If the speakers and attendees at last week’s Inbound Marketing Summit in suburban Boston were an accurate sampling of who’s guiding us through the transformation from command-and-control “push” marketing to online and offline consumer “engagement” by brands, the answer is no.  The vast majority of those behind the books, speeches, opinions, videos and business models showcased at #IMS09 were  white males, mainly in their 30s and 40s.

One exception was Candace Fleming, CEO of the social media analytics platform Crimson Hexagon.  Another was Tina Hoang, whose Palo Alto, Calif., venture capital firm was trolling the event for companies to back.

While at PR Newswire,  where I worked from 1989 until recently, one of our overarching goals was building a healthy corporate culture and products that represented the needs of our communities.  Key to our success was attracting and retaining talent of all shapes, sizes, colors, orientations, religions and ethnicities.  The many postage stamp-sized images of my former PRN colleagues I see on Facebook each day confirms that we made plenty of progress.

Why is this important?

Census data from 2008 shows 54% of the U.S. population will be 54 percent minority groups — that is “everyone except non-Hispanic, single-race whites” — by the mid-21st century.  Professions that continue to rely on pale, male and stale people, practices and ideas are much more likely to be irrelevant.

One recent research paper on the topic, Elizabeth L. Toth’s  “Diversity and Public Relations Practice,” outlined the challenge for our profession.  Organizations like the Public Relations Society of America and the Institute for Public Relations have dedicated resources to address the issue.  But traditional PR agencies and corporate communications functions are morphing into new entities so quickly, it’s questionable how much impact the longtime industry standard bearers will have influencing the fledgling inbound marketing field.

There is  plenty of wildly successful marketing work being done in Africa, Asia, Europe and in the Americas using digital tools and creative  ideas from people who have never written a book or proclaimed themselves social media experts.  Events like the the trends-and-technologies Pop!Tech conference, in Camden, Maine, Oct. 21-24, have a broad roster of philanthropic doers who are glad to share their successes and failures with PR and marketing pros who want to learn new skills.

For people without thousands of dollars to spend on conferences like Pop!Tech and TED, last week’s Inbound Marketing Summit was well worth the time and investment.  I’d love to see next year’s event held in Indonesia, Argentina or Tunisia.  If not there, at least invite some of their digital marketing superstars to visit Boston.

Mirage? M&A drought appears to be ending in PR, marketing space.

After a long drought, M&A is picking up among the service providers relied on by many corporate communications departments and their agencies .

Entrepreneurs seeking funding for their new initiatives are also breathing a sigh of relief that venture capital is again flowing, with the disruptive ad buying network TRAFFIQ getting $10 million in new funding from two firms yesterday.

In the PR space, the perennially loss-making Medialink video news release business was put out of its misery by Shoba Purushothaman’s VC-backed digital video warehousing startup, TheNewsMarket. Medialink needed a new digital business model and TheNewsMarket had to find a way to help its subscribers generate more content, so we’ll see if a merger can be the catalyst for growth.

The place I called home for 20 years, PR Newswire, pulled the trigger on a deal Friday to buy The Fuel Team, the longtime partner behind the PRN “Media Room” and “IR Room products.”  As with the Medialink/NewsMarket, PRN obviously sees the logic in being a repository for its clients’ myriad digital assets  — not simply text press releases.

Another transaction that closed in the past couple of weeks is Techrigy, the social media monitoring company acquired by the fast-growing UK-based marketing automation roll-up Alterian.  Unlike VC-backed competitor Radian6, Techrigy was privately owned and built its business as an OEM solution more than a retail supplier of monitoring.

Who will buy Radian6 and lesser known SM monitors like Crimson Hexagon?  What about legacy VNR producers — like KEF Media Associates and On the Scene Productions – suffering from shrinking demand for glossy, made-for-TV productions?

Another potential acquisition target is Peter Shankman’s advertising-supported ProfNet clone, Help a Reporter, and Feedroom, which suffers from a TheNewsMarket-vs-Brightcove identity complex.

In their quarterly communications with shareholders, the publicly traded PR services firms Cision and Vocus revealed their M&A agenda. Vocus, which hasn’t had a blockbuster acquisition since buying PR Web in 2006, said it would prefer not to use its extra cash for a share buyback.  Rather, CEO Rick Rudman, said he’d target companies that provide one or more of the same services as Vocus, to expand the customer base; or firms that could be added into the Vocus platform to create a new capability; or an organization in an attractive geographic region not currently served  by Vocus.  Cision, on the other hand, is plagued by debt and actively divesting its European media monitoring businesses to concentrate on its software product, CisionPoint.

Other entrenched PR/IR/marcom services players with money to spend include Berkshire Hathaway’s Business Wire; Thomson Reuters; Nasdaq OMX, which owns Globe Newswire and the IR web-hosting service Shareholder.com; and Jorn Lyseggen’s unconventional sales powerhouse Meltwater Group, which recently began selling a social “buzz” product on top of its inaugural media monitoring service.

With circulations and ad sales down, staff cuts up and red ink flowing out of control, it’s easy to draw the conclusion that the coroner has official pronounced mainstream media dead.

However, only a handful of corpses, like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Rocky Mountain News, have turned up at the morgue. There are still tens of thousands of dedicated, though deeply worried, employees at print, broadcast and Internet newsrooms who have yet to receive the memo that instructs that last one out to turn off the lights.

With newsstands selling newspapers, TV stations airing the six o’clock news, cable networks programming shows around the clock, and radio producers booking guests for talk shows, the public relations profession continues to define mainstream media placements as the Holy Grail.

Clearly, the more progressive PR firms and companies are using Twitter and Facebook, and communicating directly with consumers and influencers through social media. But it’s the crisis situations – like the unfortunate YouTube video by bored employees at a Domino’s pizza shop or the outrage expressed over Motrin’s mommy-sling ads – that come anywhere close to equaling the giant audience delivered by mainstream media.

At PR firms across the world, smiling and dialing, pitching and bitching, continue at this very moment in quest of a hit on NBC’s Today Show or a CEO profile in the Toledo Blade.

But the sad fact is most “professional” communicators are not agile or spontaneous enough to take advantage of on-the-fly opportunities to garner coverage for their clients or employer.  There’s too much advance scripting of pitches, most of which are not relevant to a reporter at that moment in time, and not enough help being offered in the coverage of the big event of the day.

This week, swine flu is the hot topic. You don’t have to be the Centers for Disease Control to become part of this story.

CVS should be donating soap and paper towels to schools to promote proper hand washing.

Deloitte and Mercer should be placing their practice area experts to discuss the importance of corporate planning for heightened absenteeism.

IBM, Google and GoToMyPC.com should be talking up the fact that commerce does not have to stop in today’s age of telecommuting.

Even Hasbro and Nintendo have an angle. With students staying home in Mexico and at the Queens school hit by swine flu, parents will want to stockpile more than facemasks and antibacterial wipes. Wii, Monopoly and Scrabble seem like good choices.

Any authors of parenting books out there? Their publicists should be offering them to assignment editors today to discuss 10 tips for keeping kids calm during pandemic mania.

In short, the only reason the news hole disappears for many PR pros during big stories is because of their lack of creativity in giving the media what they need when they need it.

Recently, while judging an awards competition involving the employees of Makovsky + Company, I was impressed to hear the agency has a daily “war room” session where the media’s focus is prioritized over prepared client pitches. A number of Makovsky’s biggest hits came because they swiftly matched client experts with the media while a story was at its peak.

If swine flu does not dominate the airwaves all week, dig deep into your roster of clients to see if you can help the media cover the other biggies: Obama’s 100^th day in office, Chrysler’s likely bankruptcy and Italian wedding, Bank of America’s shareholder meeting, and how the jobless will celebrate Mother’s Day this year.

Pounce now!