In the latest installment of AM:PM PR’s “We’re Better at PR” series of videos, the gang tackles yoga, with typically inept results. AM:PM PR is a public relations firm based in Portland that believes humor is one very important tool of good communication. If this video makes you chuckle, drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter.
Media Advisory
July 12, 2011
503-232-1015
PORTLAND, OR – (July 12. 2011) Portland-based communications team AM:PM PR celebrates a year of doing things differently during the month of July. This time last year, public relations veterans Allison and Pat McCormick left a more traditional, established firm in a downtown high rise in favor of Portland’s Central Eastside.
Choosing a renovated historic firehouse in Buckman has given AM:PM PR the chance to be a real part of a neighborhood – a seeming impossibility downtown. Making friends in Distillery Row and with People’s Art of Portland has shaped the celebration of AM:PM PR’s first year in business.
That diversity of character also defines AM:PM PR’s work with clients including Motorola, Unified Grocers, Oregon Association of Hospitals and Health Systems, and 7 Apps.
“Rather than picking clients based on their size, we have looked for companies with stories worth telling,” says AM:PM PR’s Allison McCormick.
“Part of doing things differently involves being generous with our knowledge and experience,” Pat McCormick adds.
For every nationally recognized name AM:PM PR takes on, it’s central to its mission as a company to help out businesses from the neighborhood. As the term hyperlocal helps to redefine journalism, it’s also helped to chart AM:PM PR’s trajectory. Working with Alder Pastry & Dessert, Oregon Distillers Guild and Bremik Construction have strengthened the firm’s relationships in the neighborhood and helped the organizations maximize their reach outside the neighborhood.
In honor of the company’s first birthday, AM:PM PR launched a new website, which Allison and Pat hope will exemplify many of the characteristics they recommend to their clients. It’s social, visually engaging yet clean, and is constantly updated with new content – sharing industry insights with personality.
AM:PM PR’s Birthday Bash on July 14 will serve not just as a celebration of prospering during a time of economic uncertainty, but also as a celebration of the community it calls home. Local businesses ranging from its Distillery Row neighbors to Cascade Brewing, Eat Your Heart Out Catering, Flux Salon, Portlandia International Language School and more all have pledged their time and services to make it an affair to remember.
AM:PM PR is a Portland-based public relations firm established in July 2010, and specializing in marketing, integrating social networking into strategic communications, qualitative research and corporate communications. The firm represents the consumer product, healthcare, telecommunications, technology, construction, non-profit, business-to-business and waste industries. For more information about AM:PM PR, see its website, www.ampmpr.com, follow it on Twitter @AMPMPR, or like it on Facebook. Or, just stop by Fire House No. 7 and introduce yourself.
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– by Jake Ten Pas
The revenge comedy “Horrible Bosses” opens this weekend, and I’m kind of looking forward to seeing Charlie Day, Jason Bateman and Jason Sudeikis stick it to Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Aniston and Colin Farrell. Not necessarily because I’ve had a lot of bad bosses in my day, mind you. Sure, there was my white-boy-thug-life boss at the Eugene Toys ‘R’ Us, who loved to point out my unflattering swoop-part hairdo by constantly calling me Little Nicky in reference to the Adam Sandler movie. But he was the exception rather than the rule.
I’ve probably been blessed with more cool bosses in my 34 years than most folks get in their whole lives. I worked at a new and used record shop called Happy Trails in Eugene and Corvallis, and my bosses there were total music geeks who loved to party, so you can imagine how bad that sucked. Then there was my boss at the fruit stand, who always had two kegs on tap in one of the coolers. I even lucked into a string of nice bosses at the corporate movie chains I worked right out of high school and the newspaper I worked at after college. Sure, my publishers/editors and I went head-to-head over some of my more controversial columns, but that’s just because I’m a rebel maverick renegade bad boy hell raiser with thunder in my soul and hot lava flowing through my veins. They can hardly be blamed for making the mistake of trying to contain the human equivalent of weather patterns.
Ahem.
All this brings me back to my current bosses, a plucky father-and-daughter team that gave me a shot at the glamorous world of public relations when I was still just a street urchin selling newspapers to buy a crust of bread for my purebred dog. Many of you reading this are familiar with Pat and Allison, so I’ll spare you the bios. If you want them anyway, click on their names.
Late last week, I set out to write a blog about our year anniversary party, but got sidetracked talking about the experience of starting a business. I ended up scrapping it and starting over, and the results were posted Tuesday. As for the aborted version, it basically said that when the McCormicks proposed the idea of leaving our old firm to start a new one, I not only didn’t bat an eye, but my eyelashes actually froze with a sense of inner peace and stillness the likes of which they’ve never before experienced. Especially not during The Great Four Loko Binge of 2010.
While starting a small business has undoubtedly been a lot more stressful for Pat and Allison, who’ve born the economic brunt of the endeavor, it’s been a lot of fun for me. I knew that I’d follow them wherever they went for two reasons. First, they’re both energetic and creative, loyal and savagely witty (wait, is that more than one reason?). Second (or fifth), they recognize my strengths and let me do the jobs around AM:PM PR that cater to those proclivities. I get to write constantly, meet new people, brainstorm and come up with creative ways to market our clients and company. And, as several friends have noted, there seem to be an absurd number of opportunities to drink on the job. I don’t want to paint myself as a lush or anything, but if the tumbler fits, drink it. When your job entails doing stuff you’d do for fun anyway, you’ve probably found a pretty decent fit for yourself.
So, take that Mr. Toyz’N’The Hood. And to anybody who goes to see “Horrible Bosses” in the near future, remember to take a moment and appreciate the good bosses you have or have had. If, on the other hand, your boss reminds you of those portrayed in the movie, just remember: There are plenty of ways to get revenge that don’t involve murder. As I mentioned, I love to brainstorm.
While it’s only been 10 months since our launch party, it’s been a full year since the actual launch of this crazy public relations space ship we call AM:PM PR. Sure, there have been a few asteroids, black holes, unhappy aliens and bounty hunters with personal vendettas along the way, but for the most part, it’s been smooth lightspeeding.
Whether or not you believe that, you can trust me when I say that the party we’ve got planned to celebrate our year anniversary/first birthday with our sister firm, 7 Apps, is going to be visible from space. OK, so maybe that’s still hyperbole, but it is going to be super fun and so packed with local goodness that, if we were to broadcast the soiree live to the web, people all around the world could put their differences aside and be united in wondering why they don’t live in Portland.
Given that Pat and Allison have real work to do, and Cam’s been scalp-deep in a redesign of our website, Alexis and I took it upon ourselves to round up some of our favorite neighborhood and greater-Portland-area people to show off how well connected we are, and, we hope, look all the better by our illustrious associations.
We’ll have six different distilleries on hand, including Deco, Sub Rosa and Integrity Spirits from our neighbor Distillery Row. Ashland’s Organic Nation, Wilsonville’s Vinn Distillery and Portland’s own Bull Run Distillery will also be with us. Our association with the Oregon Distillers Guild has yielded some tasty results, as you can see.
If that’s not enough, Will Smith from High Ball Distillery will bring products from his other endeavor, Great Western Spirits – such as Four Roses Bourbon – to further increase our range of offerings. His partner in Distillery Row Tours, Mike Heavener, will be on hand to tell you all about what’s going down with The Row.
Then there’s the beer and wine. Our favorite makers of sour beer, Cascade Brewing is sending over a keg from its
Barrel House, and Oregon’s greatest microbrewery, Ninkasi is donating cases thanks to the involvement of two artists we’re fortunate to have in the neighborhood, but I’ll get to that in a minute. First, I have to mention Zanzibar Cellars who’s graciously donating a bunch of vino for the cultured sippers in attendance.
To soak all this up, or maybe to make you thirsty in the first place, we’ll have the fabulous finger food of Eat Your Heart Out Catering for your snacking pleasure, as well as the sweet treats of Alder Pastry & Dessert. If you need a pick-me-up, Nossa Familia Coffee will be percolating your perfect cup. Helado, we’ve even got frozen yogurt thanks to one of our newest neighborhood friends, Active Culture.
But back to the art. If you were at the launch party, you likely noticed the colorful paintings punctuating the white space of the walls. Those were courtesy of artist Chris Haberman and PoBoy Art. This year, Haberman and his partner in the Peoples Art of Portland, Jason Brown, and an armada of their artist buddies will set sail for the shores of your pleasure centers. This imagistic invasion will be propelled by the sounds of DJ Hasselhoff, aka Zach Hoffman of Phoogoo.
Also along for the ride will be Leslie Hand Painted Glass, PDX Seamsters and a bevy of other Portland businesses. Donating items to our raffle this year will be Nicholas Restaurant, Flux Salon, Portlandia International Language School, Three Friends Coffee, Distillery Row Tours, FH Steinbart Homebrewing Supply Store, Enso Winery, Zell’s Cafe and Floyd’s Coffee. And Ankeny Hardware will once again loan us garbage cans to keep the party as clean as possible. There will even be a lemonade stand operated by three of the cutest kids you’ve ever seen, and I’m not just saying that because they’re Allison and Juan’s.
Finally, we have to mention our new best friend, Jack Hopkins, who was generous enough to loan us the huge parking lot behind our building free of charge. It abuts Cornerstone Automotive Group and NW Medical, and we hope to see their employees making with the merriment at our Birthday Bash.
In the past week, we’ve been diligently trying to invite everybody we know, love, “like,” and do business with, but it’s a long list. If we’ve forgotten you, drop us a line, and we’ll get you an invite. This party is going to be one for the ages, and it’s our little way of thanking the city and neighborhood that have nourished us along the way. We welcome the chance to nourish you right back. Cheers.
I just finished reading a great article by Steven Levey over at Wired on the back story of Google’s most recent push into social networking, Google+. It’s a lengthy piece, but I would definitely recommend the read.
The top topic buzzing around our office lately is our upcoming first birthday bash . Like our launch party last year, we plan to highlight the wonderful wares of our neighborhood – distillers, caterers, brewers, bakers, artists, winemakers and more.
As much as I’m looking forward to the party, looking back over the past year makes me grateful just to be part of AM:PM PR.
I’m the old guy in our group – literally the father figure to my partner, Allison, and our Human Infrastructure Technician, Erin. (I had to use “literally” in my post because it irritates Jake when people use the word inappropriately. I, of course, used it appropriately.)
When we set out on this adventure last year, I had this quixotic hope that spending my days working with young professionals would be invigorating. Turns out, I was right.
Instead of working in the Class A office space I enjoyed for more than 20 years downtown, we looked to the evolving east side of Portland’s Willamette River, where industrial operations mix with hot new restaurants, artist studios and a vibrant creative community. We ended up in a historic firehouse (lovingly restored by Venerable Properties and Bremik Construction).
Our group wanted open space, not private offices. They wanted to sit together around a big table. For an old coot like me, it’s strange. But my colleagues are comfortable with it. Collaboration is natural and creating privacy simply requires putting in their ear buds, or taking a call in our toy room.
Clients have helped us better understand what business we’re in. We knew interest in social networks was escalating exponentially, but we were surprised so many clients in the business-to-business categories – law firms, construction companies, architects, engineers, trade associations, etc. – are eager to learn more about and use social media.
Of course, one reason to celebrate is that we’re still here. Starting a business in the midst of a dismal economy is anything but ideal. Surviving and succeeding is worth celebrating.
But my main reason for celebrating is the gift I get from working with young professionals who respect traditional principles of successful public relations and teach me new insights about how to use today’s constantly changing communications tools.
It’s been a great ride this year. And we plan to have even more fun in the year ahead. Hope you can join us for the party.
Dr. Seuss’s wise words for the young and old can be applied to every part of life – even in the PR business. Some of his best quotes have PR lessons within.
The most read blogs are 150 words or less. This blog is about three times that length, so I’ve chopped it into bite-sized nuggets for easy consumption. If you want to get your message across, whether by blog, email, video or media pitch, keep it short. Shorthness will increase the likelihood that your message is remembered.
We often get requests from prospective clients who need help with outreach, but have no plan in place. Developing a strategic plan that integrates all outreach enhances the effectiveness of your efforts. Creative brainstorming and planning will also provide social networking content ideas and pitch angles throughout the year.
Don’t create messages you think your audiences want to hear. People want to hear truth and will respond to it. For example, don’t say you’re green if you haven’t made real strides in the area. Your words won’t ring true.
So much fear still exists around embarking on social networking.
Complicated questions: “How can we control what our employees will do when given access? How will we respond if someone trashes our good name? We’re already so busy; how can we do it all? These are just a few of the questions we hear.
Simple answers: Trust your employees. Criticism is unlikely for most businesses. When it does happen, respond transparently and your fans will come to your defense. Social networks are where the conversations are happening. Transition is a must.
Be prepared. Create a crisis communications plan. It’s one of those things, like a will, that you know you should have, but it’s easy to keep putting off. Being prepared for anything will help ensure that you maintain a consistent message and increase the likelihood of preserving a positive reputation in the face of a crisis.
