Tens of thousands of Oregon schoolchildren who ride buses are exposed to potentially harmful fumes because of fuel system defects, according to the state Department of Environmental Quality.

But two bills in the Legislature that aim to help fix the problem may not advance out of committee, state officials and environmental activists said.

“I don’t think most parents realize that when they’re sending their children off to school, how dangerous it can be,” said Dana Kaye, executive director of the American Lung Association of Oregon, which is helping the DEQ encourage school districts to retrofit faulty buses.

Click here to read the article.

Last week my blog was about my view of technology and small business over the course of the past 29 years.  This week I want to talk about the internet based world of technology today and what it means to my business and to our clients’ businesses. 

Public relations used to be the practice of approaching the traditional media (print, broadcast, magazines) to garner third party endorsements for our clients.  These third party articles or endorsements were valued by our client’s customers and client’s sales rose as a result. Today, many traditional media are shutting down or moving to the internet due to the lack of traditional advertising revenue.   

The internet is an open medium.  Press releases historically were not.  Today, public relations messages placed on the web have the ability to drive client’s sales as well as attract traditional and new media articles.  This is an amazing leap forward in the value of public relations. 

Driving client’s sales on the web means pushing the client name up to the number one or two slot on search engines.  At LANE PR we are now as focused on a client’s search results as we are on the quantity of clips that we garner for them. 

We drive search rankings by optimizing all of the usual public relations tools - press releases, white papers, media kits, with key words and hyperlinks.  Additionally, we are now responsible for our client’s news rooms and monitoring their search rankings and Google Analytics.  Bringing these tools under our responsibility allows us to monitor the results of our public relations efforts.   Social media campaigns provide another very rich opportunity for driving additional rankings and sales for clients.  Public relations can now accomplish organically what pay-for-click attempts to do.  

We have added all of these tools to our public relations tool kit at no extra charge to our clients.     I have always maintained that public relations existed only to drive sales or company value for our clients.  With new media, our public relations strategies can now be directly linked to the client’s sales as well as their news clips. 

As a trained marketing professional, I started LANE PR in 1990 as a public relations agency.  Although I am a strong believer in integrated marketing strategies, I felt that public relations was the most cost effective tool to increase sales and grow value for our clients.  With the advent of new media, public relations has exponentially increased its ability to drive sales and to be the most cost effective marketing tool available.   

Wendy Lane

PRWeek awarded Shannon Riggs of LANE PR its 2009 Young Professional of the Year award, which recognizes the outstanding achievements of a PR professional that has been in the industry for less than three years. The award was presented at a gala event at Tavern on the Green in New York on March 5.

Riggs has been with LANE PR nearly three years and works with Integra Telecom, Umpqua Bank and Miller Nash. PR Week recognized her success on a number of campaigns, including her work on Integra Telecom’s acquisition of Eschelon Telecom acquisition, which doubled revenue for Integra Telecom to $700 million, and on Umpqua Bank’s “Lemonaire” campaign, which helped the bank open 2,331 new accounts and bring in total new deposits of $113 million.

Click here to read the article.

It’s tough to be optimistic about the economy today.  The market remains volatile on a daily basis, the unemployment rate is the highest it has been in 25+ years, G.E. is in trouble (read the NY Times article from this past Sunday), I could go on and on.

However, Justin Fox from TIME magazine had some thoughts this morning about why he is optimistic right now.  While he’s not particularly convincing, and even a little wishy washy on some of his points, if you’re looking for some hope consider his 3 reasons why you should be optimistic about the economy:

1. Stock market not overpriced (Fox says don’t just look at one year of earnings.)
2. Government involvement in fixing the economy (While many would say yikes to this, Fox claims we should be thankful that the government is being proactive, realistic and moving us forward.)
3. Consumer savings rate up (This is good in the long term and even in the short term because it helps us get to the bottom quicker so we can move into recovery.)

Here’s the full CNBC segment with Justin Fox: http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1057945685&play=1

During an amazing two-week adventure in western and southern Ireland, I saw and tasted dozens and dozens of loaves of soda bread.  What I found to be most fascinating were the variations in taste, texture and color.  While some differences were more subtle, others were more dramatic, including the addition of such ingredients as caraway seeds, dried fruits and nuts.

Much to my delight, soda bread (often called “brown bread”) was served at every meal in Ireland.  At breakfast, I’d slather a warm slice with chunky orange marmalade made by the owners of our B&B; at lunch, as an open-faced sandwich topped with thick slices of heavenly smoked salmon and a side of greens; and at dinner, to sop up the remains of my seafood chowder, soup or Irish stew.  

Soda bread’s roots trace back to the 19th century, when baking soda was introduced as a leavening agent. Combined with flour and buttermilk, and salt, it’s extremely simple to make.  The Irish are committed to safeguarding the tradition of soda bread.  In fact, there’s even a “Society for the Preservation of Irish Soda Bread.”

Just in time for St. Patrick’s Day, the following is a basic recipe, courtesy of EatingWell.com.

Whole-Wheat Irish Soda Bread

Ingredients
• 2 cups whole-wheat flour
• 2 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 1/4 cups buttermilk

Directions
Preheat oven to 450 degrees F. Coat a baking sheet with cooking spray and sprinkle with a little flour. Whisk whole-wheat flour, all-purpose flour, baking soda and salt in a large bowl. Make a well in the center and pour in buttermilk. Using one hand, stir in full circles (starting in the center of the bowl working toward the outside of the bowl) until all the flour is incorporated. The dough should be soft but not too wet and sticky. When it all comes together, in a matter of seconds, turn it out onto a well-floured surface. Clean dough off your hand.
Pat and roll the dough gently with floury hands, just enough to tidy it up and give it a round shape. Flip over and flatten slightly to about 2 inches. Transfer the loaf to the prepared baking sheet. Mark with a deep cross using a serrated knife and prick each of the four quadrants.

Bake the bread for 20 minutes. Reduce oven temperature to 400° and continue to bake until the loaf is brown on top and sounds hollow when tapped, 30 to 35 minutes more. Transfer the loaf to a wire rack and let cool for about 30 minutes.

I am getting into Twitter more every day.  It’s exciting to see which companies and brands are using Twitter and how they’re using it to promote their business and/or product.  Last week I went to Voicebox (www.voiceboxpdx.com), a new karaoke hot spot in Portland.  It’s not a typical karaoke bar; you rent private rooms for 10-12 people.  When we arrived, an employee promptly got us set up in our private room and took our drink orders.  He announced that if we were on Twitter and started “following” @voiceboxpdx on Twitter, or even just gave them a shout out, we would receive two-for-one drinks for the entire evening. 

I thought it was a genius idea. Voicebox makes instant Twitter followers with every group that comes in.  And because I now follow @voiceboxpdx on Twitter, I am privy to Friday tweet specials.  Last week’s special was the first two groups to “tweet” that evening got a private room for 18 people at half the cost. If you’re on Twitter, check them out.

It’s hard to miss the blue and white windmill embossed on dozens of Dutch Bros. drive-through coffee stands planted around the state. The quirky logo is going to be even more common as the company plans to expand in the middle of one of the worst economic downturns in U.S. history.

What makes the Grants Pass company seemingly recession proof?  Convenience and value, according to co-founder Travis Boersma. Dutch Bros. puts more espresso shots in its steamed drinks and charges less than Starbucks. And raising prices is the last thing Boersma plans to do.

“Customers want value; they want more bang for their buck,” he says. “Especially when times are tough.”

Click here to read the full article

I had the pleasure of sitting in on a middle market private equity company’s annual meeting last week in Chicago. It’s always interesting to get different perspectives and predictions on the state of the economy and the timeframe of its recovery… as well as how that recovery will actually happen.

A private equity investor with a 30+ year tenure in the industry finds the following:

• PATIENCE: We must be patient – this is a process, not an event.

• LOW GROWTH: for the next three to five years we will be in an “L” recovery (versus U or V) and experience low growth.

• SAVINGS: We must change the way we look at our assets and how we both spend and invest our money.  For Americans, homes were once our primary asset, but now we need to become savings driven, not real estate driven.

• THINK LOCAL: Recovery will begin at the local level with small business and grow outward from there. Innovation is key to helping move this recovery along.

I met with a member of the Forbes Chicago bureau this week. We had a lengthy discussion about the shift to media consumption online and how that has changed her job.

She informed me the big push now is for “snippets” – very brief online news pieces that are constantly being replaced by other snippets as news is pumped out in real time.

However, she said what she most enjoys is investigative reporting and in-depth feature stories. So in order to best serve both her interests and her editors’ push for frequent, brief online posts, she is now producing what we decided to call “snippet features”. 

Can a feature story also be a snippet? This is the reality for many reporters today.

This is my first blog about technology and truly, my first blog ever.  I would like to talk about technology and business from a historical 10,000-foot level.  As a public relations practitioner, I remember when key client messages were delivered by snail mail and the telephone.  My children will tell you that they remember stuffing envelopes full of press releases in front of Sesame Street.  

I was at another advertising and public relations firm in the 1980s.  I attended a KPMG breakfast that featured Regis McKenna.  Regis was the person who used public relations to launch Apple.  He told our morning audience that the future was bright.  In 10 years we would all have amazing computing ability that would allow us more free time.  Regis was a very bright guy, however, I don’t think that he understood human nature and could envision how much more people would allow those computers to cram into their 24/7 days.

Also in the 1980s, Waggoner Edstrom hired our firm to help launch Microsoft Windows at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.  They told me that Windows was the equivalent of a new typewriter and wanted to portray the influence of the typewriter through the ages on business as one walked up the curved galleries at the museum.  It was a big, visual idea.

Around that time came the age of the fax, and fax machines initially couldn’t talk to fax machines from other brands.  This seemed a complete waste of time as no fax brand rose to gain the majority market share.  Fortunately, technology that allowed cross-branded fax machines to talk to each other came on the market.

In the early 1990s I attended an Internet conference in Los Angeles.  There were over 500 people in the room and the Internet on the screen was black and white, no picture, and plain text.   A marketing fellow from a national beer brand stood up to demonstrate the first Internet sales promotions that I ever saw.  It was pretty rough.

But Web sites were growing in importance and programmers seemed to be making their development as mysterious and expensive as possible. My firm had a rather large client who wanted a Web site.  We obtained three price quotes and the best one was for $200,000.  Obviously, the client decided not to be first to market with this new technology avenue.

Starting my company, LANE PR, in the 1990s, I made the personal commitment to spend any cash reserves on high quality talent and the latest technology.  As Web sites and e-mail became important, my spending on technology increased.  Then we started to attract technology companies as clients.

It was the late 1990s heyday.  Public relations firms became totally focused on technology.  VC firms referred their favorite public relations firms to their portfolio companies.  The average public relations retainers in Silicon Valley were $60,000 per month.  Advertising was growing as well, so the technology and business magazines became two inches thick.  The entire strategy was to launch a company, gain market share through public relations and advertising in an 18 month period (18 months was deemed the viable business window for most technology ideas), and sell or go public.

I liked technology clients.  They were smart, visionary and confidant.  Unfortunately, March 2001 came around with a technology-based recession.  The technology companies whose only business model was market share tanked.  The media was roundly blamed for not understanding traditional business models and drinking the Kool-Aid with these confident technology CEOs. 

That brings us to the post-technology recession period.  I will talk about that in my next blog.

Wendy Lane

We’ve heard a lot about sustainable building and LEED certification, but how do you get the funding to turn well-meaning ideas into reality? One of our clients, Umpqua Bank, worked with Energy Trust of Oregon to create an innovative new lending program that’s filling this gap. Called GreenStreet Lending, it offers financing options designed to help small businesses and homeowners manage rising energy costs by making it easier to invest in energy efficiency and renewable energy projects. What better way to spur economic growth than with green-building projects?