We’re happy to be working with Nuance

Read more about The Voce Wall….

We’re happy to be working with Dolby Laboratories, Inc.

Read more about The Voce Wall….

We’re happy to be working with Real Simple.

Read more about The Voce Wall….

In the latest issue of the San Jose Business Journal the top Silicon Valley PR firms are listed and we are excited and honored to see Voce own the #2 spot. We just celebrated our ninth anniversary and recognition like this will give us the fuel we need to march for the top spot in the coming years. Our clients deserve the credit for this one. They entrusted us with their programs and we are grateful.

We told you we were living large in Manhattan at the BlogHer Business Conference and New York City Moms Blog launch party last month.

We knew the Today Show producers were interviewing a few of the mom bloggers at the party and the crew was filming conference panels. But we when we watched this morning’s “Today’s Woman” segment on the growing popularity of momblogging, we were stoked to see that our friends at Silicon Valley Moms Group, Graco and client Yahoo! got air time. Check out the eco-friendly Yahoo! taxis that chauffeured the moms to the party!

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Voce Nation wanted to say thank you to the crew of cardsharks that joined us last week for the second annual Interop Poker Tournament. Voce, NetIQ, and Barracuda Networks hosted the event as a chance for media and analysts to escape the grind of vendor briefings and reporting, unwind with peers and have a healthy dose of competition.

Poker pro Mark Seif was on hand to provide pointers on how to play Texas Hold ‘Em.

Check out Shamus McGillicuddy’s post on the event for a first person account of the tourney.

Larry Howard of Infonetics Research took home top honors and bragging rights for 2008. Will he be able to defend his title in 2009? You’ll have to join us next year to find out.

More pics from the event are on the voce nation photostream.

Rena Stone and Natasha Gonzalez, two of the girls from the Girls for a Change Board are on their way to New York City to participate in a panel about girls and violence on The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet. The show is LIVE and will be on tomorrow (Friday the 2nd) at 9am EST/PST. In San Francisco Bay Area it will be on Channel 2 KTVU

The show is discussing violence between girls in response to the recent YouTube video incident with Tori Lindsay from Lakeland, FL.

GFC is attending with the hope of showing girls in a more positive light. Although many of GFC girls encounter violence in their communities, we’re hoping that we will be able to show that girls are the solution to problems in our communities and through learning to create community change they’ll help to transform violence to positive action!

Tune in and watch!

Just two quick plugs for Josh Hallett and Mike Manuel this week…

Josh has a contributed story appearing in the May issue of PRSA’s PR Tactics, which was published online earlier this week. It’s about how practitioners can use social media to enhance and extend their media relations efforts. He also offers some tips on the importance of blogger relations (an excerpt from the article):

“Using blogs to reach traditional media sounds like the meeting of matter with anti-matter. Some say that blogs are the antithesis of media. Recent studies indicate that ever more journalists are looking to blogs for story leads and quotes, among other things. Combine this with the number of journalists who now count a blog as a publishing medium and the line between blogs and journalism is blurring more than ever.”

And Mike was up at the NewComm Forum this week, co-presenting a case study on corporate blogging with the good folks from PlayStation (an excerpt from his blog post).

“The case study chat with the new media team behind Sony PlayStation’s blog went well yesterday afternoon at the NewComm Forum, we actually covered a lot of ground - everything from content development and technical design to community management tactics and measurement. By the end of our session, the PlayStation guys had shared 15 “lessons learned” over the last year.”

Great stuff….

Last week at the Bulldog Reporter’s Media Relations Summit 2008, I had the pleasure of watching Voce’s own Dave Black deliver a presentation with Jodi Baumann, the Director of Corporate PR at NetApp. The focus of this year’s summit was “The Power of Story: New media, New Technologies, A New Narrative for PR.” Speakers tackled topics ranging from “The Art of Story: Finding the Heart of Drama” to preparing an organization for crisis, to running attendees through a bootcamp on social media strategies for PR. Industry influencers such as Tom Foremski, Robert Scoble, and Don Clark were among the media present for the event.

All good stuff, but what if I’m an in house PR person and my budget has been slated only for “traditional PR” activities (media relations, press release distribution etc.). This is where Dave and Jodi’s presentation, How PR Can Get a Fair Share of the Marketing Budget in a Web 2.0 World, fit into the social media/PR in 2008 puzzle. The presentation focused on how to stop “thinking like PR person” start gaining mindshare in all areas of marketing, and how to use Web 2.0 as a beachhead to support various parts of the company. (Not to mention a brief foray into “what in the world does beachhead mean anyways?”)

A few weeks ago, Fortune Small Business interviewed Richard Brewer-Hay, eBay’s editor-in-chief, to discuss a new corporate blog he was developing called “eBay Ink.” This blog debuted (publicly) yesterday afternoon, and we’re happy to say our team had a hand in the development of this project with Richard and the eBay team.

In addition to this project, we helped launch another eBay blog this week, ebayinsiderblog.com. It’s a group blog for eBay’s ‘Style Squad,’ a collective that writes about pop culture, fashion, gadgets, and home design.

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