Pylon Sounds

Idea Grove President Scott Baradell is among the speakers at next month’s 2013 PRSA Southwest District Conference, where he will participate with four other PR professionals in a panel discussion called Tackling Media Relations.

The panel will explore how dramatically newsrooms are changing and how PR practitioners must adapt their strategies to better meet the needs of journalists. Scott will talk about the importance of creating publication-ready content for use by media organizations, in the form of byline articles, infographics,  and more.  He will also discuss how a company can use a single content idea across both its inbound marketing and media relations programs.

Appearing with Scott on the Tackling Media Relations panel will be:

• Alexis Patterson Hanes, associate director of Public Information for the Austin Community College District
• Lauren Butler, vice president/group manager at Ketchum
• Casey Norton, vice president of Media Relations at Weber Shandwick.
• Sarah Marshall, senior vice president of Phillips & Company, who will moderate.

The conference is sponsored by the Austin chapter of the Public Relations Society of America and takes place June 5-7 at the Omni Austin Hotel Downtown. The three-day event offers PR professionals everything from sessions on managing a crisis and making an impact to free yoga on the hotel’s roof.

We have a winner! Mike Drago has won our Way to Grove Award, which recognizes members of the team who achieve notable and tangible results for clients.  Mike won for his work helping to oversee a thought leadership website that has grown a sizable community and greatly increased online visibility for the client’s technology offering.

ServiceVirtualization.com was launched in April 2012 by the Application Delivery business at CA Technologies. The site focuses on a field of emerging software solutions that enable faster, better and less-expensive application development. Idea Grove was called upon to develop and oversee content on the site’s blog, which Mike began editing in October 2012. He quickly grasped both the complex technology and the community of people with an interest in it.

The site now ranks second in native search for “service virtualization” behind the Wikipedia definition. Along with the improvement in online search visibility, the ServiceVirtualization.com community has grown to thousands of members, and Twitter feeds that support the blog have nearly 1,200 followers (@svcvirt and @virtualization6).

“These kinds of tangible results are essential for Internet marketing firms; and they are clearly helping fuel the incredible business growth our agency has experienced over the past year,” said Idea Grove President Scott Baradell. “Since we are so focused on getting result for clients, it seemed only fitting to celebrate the most noteworthy ones with a quarterly employee award. Mike’s stellar work on ServiceVirtualization.com is exactly the kind of effort we want to be about as a company, and it was most worthy of this recognition – and a $250 prize.”

Mike joined Idea Grove in 2012 as vice president of content after more than two decades writing and editing for The Dallas Morning News and The Associated Press. At Idea Grove he specializes in content development and curation, focusing on our technology public relations clients.

Hey, Mike, way to Grove!