I read publications. A lot of publications. It’s what we as PR professionals do, read publications, look for trends, use the information we read to counsel our clients.

Somewhere along the line I started receiving a subscription to Packaging World. And when it arrives, I flip through it. I don’t have any clients in the packaging space, per se. But I like to think that all my clients “package” their product, and so I read the articles with that in mind.

The most recent issue arrived this morning. Now one of my quirks when I receive magazines is that I always flip to the last page. Something about the column at the end of a magazine. Every Sunday, I flip to the last page of The Washington Post Magazine and read the latest from Gene Weingarten.

So when Packaging World arrived, I flipped to the back of the magazine. And the column hit me…this is why I read all these publications, even if I don’t have a client in the space. Ernie Pang talked about “The Four Cs” and how they drive innovation. The Four Cs are: Consumer, Customer, Category, Company.

Ernie goes on to talk about packaging design and how “Changing an existing package configuration in an attempt to better meet a Consumer need will often add unit cost and capital. The more radical the change, the higher the cost and therefore the greater the business risk.”

I think this can be said of any industry. Just replace “existing package configuration” with your company’s product and the message is the same. But isn’t risk the only way to reap reward? I like to think so.

And so moving forward, I’ll be sure to tie in the four Cs in my messaging, what does this mean for the company, the category, the consumer and most importantly, the customer? Focusing on the four Cs seems like a ticket to the top of the innovation chain, and that’s where I want my clients to be!

You don’t want to miss this Sunday’s episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.

You might remember my behind-the-scenes look at Extreme Makeover in Washington, DC last year. Airing on Valentine’s Day, this episode will feature not one, but two remodel projects. And if you’ve seen the show before, you know these remodels are over the course of just seven days. Quite a feat.

Our client, Serious Materials, donated their windows to both projects. What makes these remodels special is that both were built to be as near to net zero energy buildings as possible, meaning near zero net energy consumption and zero carbon emissions annually. The products included to make this happen were SIPs panels provided by Winter Panel, solar electric systems from Aurora Energy, insulated concrete foundation forms from Leep Green, and super-insulating high R-value windows from SeriousWindows.

It’s interesting to see a mainstream, primetime show like Extreme Makeover put the focus on energy-efficiency. Not surprising, though. As we saw at Greenbuild late last year, greenwashing is going out of style. Builders and consumers alike are looking for the most eco-friendly, energy-efficient products out there protect our environment and make buildings as sustainable as possible.

So tune in to ABC this Sunday at 9/8 Central for an episode that will leave you reaching for the hammer and ready to start tackling those home improvement projects. (Oh, and Tyler Perry makes an appearance!)

I am on a small propeller plane flying from the lovely hills of Donegal, Ireland to the hustle and bustle of Amsterdam for a tradeshow.  I started my vacation nearly 11 days ago with a week in Dublin, followed by a long weekend in Donegal.  Dublin, as many of you probably know, is like many big cities.  There are restaurants and stores and lovely hotels for tea…and occasionally you’ll find a Wi-Fi hotspot.

The later part of my vacation however, was very different.  You see, Donegal is the home of my grandfather.  Instead of spending my time searching for a Wi-Fi hotspot, I sat with my great aunt and great uncle and heard stories about the birth of my grandfather and his 8 siblings and what life was like 70 and 80 years ago.  We sat at her kitchen table, drinking tea and eating scones and virtual time stood still.

During my time there, we visited relatives. They all live within a few kilometers of each other – aunts and uncles, 2^nd and 3^rd cousins….all sharing the common bond of our family matriarch – Granny.  I had tea, ate biscuits and took pictures.

The second day of my visit, we woke to a strong frost and a light snow.  There were no cars on the road so it was in our best interest to wait until the afternoon to drive, when the frost would melt.  In the meantime, I sat in the kitchen with my Great Aunt and worked on the family tree for my generation – all of my 3^rd cousins (all 118 of them!) their ages and the number in each limb in the family.  My aunt would talk and she would bake. Then, she would talk some more and she would bake some more.  In all the hours that we sat there, my cell phone never rang and the beep of an email never interrupted…you see…I was unplugged.

In the precious moments of the last few days, I learned an important lesson that you can not come across easily.  As hard as we work most of the year, it is vital that we sit back and take time to get back to our roots.  For me, that meant unplugging.  My time of being unplugged has come to an end as I head to the ISE tradeshow in Amsterdam.  And as irony would have it, I will continue to stay in connection with a handful of my cousins…through Facebook.

Krista and I are attending the AHR Expo in Orlando, FL this week – and we had a great first day yesterday! Co-sponsored by ASHRAE and AHRI, this is THE show for the air-conditioning, heating and refrigeration industry. There is some great stuff that I didn’t want to miss. So I walked the entire show floor yesterday. The amount of Band-aids that I put on my blisters this morning is proof of the size of the show.

Of course, our clients have some exciting stuff happening at the show, too.

American Hometec (booth #3419) is launching its Model AHQ-C-1o tankless water heater at the show. The response on day 1 was overwhelming, and we are looking forward to many more great meetings today.

CALMAC (booth #3542) is discussing various case studies, most notably the Sarasota installation which has saved the County’s school system over $8 million in energy savings. At the show this week, CALMAC will be a part of the ASHRAE Golden Circle Recognition.

And IES (booth #2066) is part of “The Software Center” – a feature at the Expo showcasing the latest software applications for the HVAC&R industry in one place.

This show is a great way to kick-off 2010 – and we look forward to a notable year in the HVAC&R industry…the bar was set high this week at the Orlando Convention Center.

See you in Vegas in 2011!

2009 – the end of a decade and hopefully the beginning of a new chapter. We witnessed one of the worst economies in our lifetime, lost a pop icon and wondered if our AT&T calls would ever go through, and yet we still think it was a pretty good year. As we start off a new year at Vantage Communications, we’re looking forward to what 2010 will bring – will Twitter survive? What’s the next big thing in mobile devices? But as always, you can’t look ahead without contemplating where you’ve been. Here’s a look back at the year and some of the many things that Vantage accomplished in ‘09.

Net New Clients

Even in good economic times, the reality is that any agency will end relationships with various clients for one reason or another. For Vantage, while we did amicably part ways with a few clients, we added a whopping 19 new clients in the cleantech, green, Web 2.0, semiconductor, virtualization, mobile and trade management software industries to our roster.

Expansion of Green Practice Area

As an agency, Vantage Communications believes in and is committed to the environmental movement. In 2007, we took our commitment to the next level by broadening our practice areas to include cleantech, smartgrid and green building. We extended our services to increase the awareness of pioneering new companies who have the same passion to preserve our Earth. Each year we’ve steadily increased our client roster with some of the most forward-thinking cleantech and green companies in the industry. In 2009, we took our dedication up another notch beyond providing our PR expertise to clients and became a strategic partner for VentureBeat’s inaugural Smart Grid conference, GreenBeat 2009. We also hosted a bi-coastal Vantage Earth Day event, complete with live streaming of a panel discussing “Sustainable Innovation in a Recession.”

Growth of Social Media Services

In 2008, our CEO, Ilene Adler, recognized that social media would impact the PR industry and we successfully re-launched the company to reflect our social media offerings. In 2009, we continued to build upon these services with the launch of Vant.edge, a program providing clients with social networking promotion, corporate blog development, blogger relations and more. At one of the largest green building conferences of the year, the Vantage Video team broadcasted live from Greenbuild in Phoenix in November.

Client and Vantage Awards

Awards are an integral part of our PR campaigns, and 2009 was a year of many wins for our clients, some up against large public corporations – a feat on its own.

Two of our clients, Serious Materials and Verayo, were selected for the Wall Street Journal Technology Innovators Award, arguably one of the most sought-after awards of the year.

Two clients (out of a total of 26 companies) were named winners of the World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneers Awards, another prestigious and competitive industry technology award.

In other awards: Ixia won the 2009 4GWE LTE Visionary Award from TMC and Dilithium Networks’ Dilithium Content Adapter (DCA) was a runner-up for the Best of 4G Awards. ANDA was a finalist for Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal’s 2009 “Fast 70” and On-Ramp Wireless was a finalist for San Diego’s CONNECT MIP Awards. Xelerated was a winner for the Global Semiconductor Alliance’s Outstanding Financial Performance by a Private Semiconductor Company award. And rounding out the year, YKK AP was the winner of the 1^st Annual Green Design Award.

Not to be outdone by our clients, Vantage won the 2009 Hermes Creative Award for Best Product Launch and was named a finalist for the Stevie Women in Business Awards for the Best Overall Company of the Year (up to 100 Employees category) – an honor among many outstanding firms.

Vantage strives to provide our clients with top-notch, strategic public relations campaigns. Celebrating twenty years in 2010, Vantage Communications continues to produce tangible, high-impact results for our clients. Since 1990, we have built strategic relationships with editors and analysts, and more recently, with bloggers and citizen journalists, generating awareness across all outlets.

If you have to ask if your PR program is working, it’s not. It’s time to rise above.

We’re both celebrating a 20 year milestone this year!

Friday’s USA Today piece is something we hope people say about us as well.

Overachiever — and proud of it.

For 20 years, Vantage has experienced much success, with highlights such as launching Samsung’s first CDMA handsets in the U.S. in 1997, and launching Serious Materials’ first product to the green building market in 2007. Over the past two decades, Vantage has continuously expanded its offerings to meet the demand of the marketplace, most recently including wireless and mobile applications, clean tech, medical devices and social media, adding to our existing practice areas of enterprise/SMB technology, consumer and semiconductors.

While The Simpsons aired their 20th Anniversary episode last night, we’ve got some exciting things in the pipeline to celebrate throughout the whole year. So check back often for details!

Here’s to 20 more GREAT years!

From all of us at Vantage Communications – Happy Holidays!  Enjoy some time off, relax and spend time with those you love.  We’ll see you back here in 2010!

No, this post isn’t about the song played at every wedding this year from Beyoncé. (Although this clip from SNL puts a smile on my face every. single. time.)

Denis Pombriant wrote a great piece earlier this month for CRM Buyer based on new research from Pingdom indicating that most social networking and social media sites are frequented by more women than men. As a woman, I don’t find this all that shocking. Not only do I have more female “friends” on-line, but based on the actual interactions from these friends on social networking sites, it’s clear who the social sex is. I had to set up my own husband’s Facebook page just to get him to join! But I digress…

What I did find interesting (and Denis does, too) is what the data doesn’t illustrate. He says, “Think about the skill set that we prize in sales and marketing people. How does that skill set align with the people in the social strata?”

So what does that mean for those of us trying to reach out to consumers? In PR in 2009, we have been telling our clients to jump on social networking sites and get involved. But given this new data, we must take it a step further and explore whether or not we are missing a large portion of the population who aren’t on these social networking sites.  And those that are on the sites, well, we need to ensure our message is clear to the audience.

As we close out another year and look to what will work in the PR industry in 2010, the discussion will continue – how do we bridge the on-line vs. off-line gap. And the age-old question, how do we bridge the gender gap?

I welcome your comments.

We have finished up our participation in GreenBeat 2009 conference on the Smart Grid.  Vantage Communications was a strategic partner for the event, which provided me with a unique view of a major green conference that I would like to share.

1. “VentureBeat is doing its first green conference. Would Vantage be interested in participating?” Andie Rhyins, Publisher of VentureBeat

Actually, I answered yes, before Andie finished the question.  I knew if VentureBeat was putting together a show, this was a rare opportunity to be part of an important event from the beginning.  As the first GreenBeat event, we had a clean sheet of paper and the opportunity to provide a defining voice for marketing and PR that would help attract attendees, sponsors and speakers. It also was a bit scary knowing that our white board scribble and initial PowerPoints needed to be made into a conference with topics, speakers, attendees and press in very short order.

2. “Fw: Al Gore has agreed to come to GreenBeat” Matt Marshall

This was the header of a late Friday e-mail at the end of August. In less than 10 words, the bar had been raised for everybody. It also meant that we had to rethink our media outreach for the show. You may be asking why a conference run by a highly influential blog needs to do outreach to other media?  Part of the attraction of a conference for high-level speakers is the ability to reach a large number of highly influential people. Approximately 500 people attended GreenBeat in person. However, the number of people that read about the show can be in the hundreds of thousands. While VentureBeat does provide in depth coverage of the show to its readership, it is important to maximize awareness by being seen and heard on multiple channels. Media coverage for GreenBeat inlcuded the New York Times, CNET and Earth2Tech which has an aggregate audience in the millions. Immediately following the show, Techmeme  had VentureBeat ranked #5 of the sources most frequently posted to Techmeme.  This  was a higher ranking than even the New York Times.

3. “My name is Jim Rogers and I’m one of the speakers” Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy

What as particularly impressive about GreenBeat is that despite the large number of high profile speakers and attendees, there was virtually no attitude or hubris. The CEO of Duke Energy attended without entourage, and the above quote is how he introduced himself. He made himself available to anyone who wanted to talk with him. Vinod Khosla was in the lobby for much of the morning available to talk to anyone. In his talk, John Doerr gave his e-mail and invited start ups to send him business plans. I attend many conferences and I never have seen a friendlier conference than GreenBeat. This is a real testament to Matt and the GreenBeat team. I look forward to seeing you at GreenBeat 2010.

When you work for a company, you know that its product is the hottest thing on the market, right?  And you can talk for hours about what it does and how innovative it is because let’s face it – it is.  But to be recognized by a third party for being the best in the business is another story.  Industry awards, and especially mainstream awards, can lend tremendous credibility to a company and its products, not to mention takes the company’s visibility up a notch.

Something we regularly do for our clients is to manage their awards program.  And 2009 has been a strong year for our clients.  Two of our clients, Serious Materials and Verayo, were honored in September with the prestigious Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Awards. These companies were chosen from among nearly 500 applications and were recognized for their promising technology and innovative contributions to the overall industry.

And today, we are proud to acknowledge that our clients, Dilithium Networks and Serious Materials, were two of the 26 companies  named 2010 Technology Pioneers by the World Economic Forum (WEF).  The WEF is the prestigious group that puts on the Davos conference which is attended by global leaders (including President Obama) every year.  Its Technology Pioneers are nominated by the world’s leading technology experts for having a deep impact on business and society.  Each winner is now featured on the WEF blog along with video interviews from the winning CEOs.  Take a look and see what makes these companies unique – and how their technology might just have an impact on your day-to-day life.  We congratulate our clients today as they join the ranks of previous WEF award winners including Google, Red Hat, Paypal and Sandisk.