PRx Inc - A Leading Silicon Valley Public Relations Agency

Medicine gets personal

We attended day one of an amazing event, the PMWC 2010 (Personalized Medicine World Conference) today. In just a couple of hours, we heard presentations from companies doing the following;

• building apps that turn your smart phone into a Personal Genome Assistant
• taking cancer marker tests right into the heart of actual cells
• creating algorithms that blend genetic analysis and lab tests to create cardiac treatment plans
• delivering an interactive map of individuals’ genomes
• genomic tests that can eliminate unnecessary visits to the cath lab

Most of the companies are based on the white-hot field of genomics, but some are marketing products around the globe, some are planning to be bought out before ever taking a product to market, some are barely past the conceptual stage and are looking for partners.

There is a new wind blowing in Silicon Valley, and conference co-hosts SilicomVentures and Stanford University Medical Center are showing the way with this first conference. The excitement is palpable, and I can’t wait for Day 2!

Marketing, Nexus One and strip shows…

The whole point of a strip show is that the lady is naked underneath. That’s the audience’s expectation. If she turns out to be wearing long underwear, it’s going to be a big disappointment.

Google just introduced the Nexus One mobile phone. Leading up to the launch event, Google gave demo phones to selected reporters and provided leaks and hints about how revolutionary the Nexus One would be. At the event, Google execs referred to the Nexus One as not just a smart phone, but a “super phone.”

So reporters and the buying public were ready for an Apple-like shock and awe launch. They didn’t get it.

Brin and Page weren’t even there. The event went on too long, and a reporter actually had to ask Google execs why they were going into the cell phone business.

According to the media coverage, the phone offers a bit more in some ways than the iPhone, and a bit less in others. The Mercury News had a nice little chart with the two products compared feature-by-feature that puts the Nexus One ahead of the iPhone in five out of six features.

But the big mistakes were made way before the event - they promised a naked lady. That the actual stripping down to long-johns was tedious and unfocused is almost beside the point. And here’s where marketing’s most fundamental principle comes into play. It’s all about expectations.

It’s also about positioning, but I’ll save that for a subsequent post.

Google may have a good product, but this launch didn’t do it any favors (great phone, granny pants).

More links on the Nexus One launch:

“The Nexus One press event held by Google today was largely underwhelming, in my opinion.” PC World

“When you look at how Google (GOOG) tried framing its Consumer Electronics Show announcement of the Nexus One telephone, what comes to mind is a loud buzzer as the failed contestant is marched off the stage.” BDNet

PRx Holiday Potluck - With Recipes!

Once the holidays roll around, many of the people here at PRx start baking and bringing in homemade goodies to share, myself included.

This year we decided to have a Holiday Potluck Lunch, asking everyone to either bring in a homemade item or just something tasty to snack on. We had quite the menu this year! Some of the items we had were:

• Handmade Gyozas by Sue
• Nutty Pumpkin Trifle by Jen (me)
• BFF Bread by Eva
• Shroomapalooza Soup and Patafla by Elisabeth
• Chocolate-dipped PB-Ritz Sandwiches by Jodi

We had an assortment of other goodies like cheese and pepper tamales, spinach and blue cheese salad, chips and salsa, holiday sugar cookies, egg nog and apple pie. It was quite the feast!

If you’d like to make some of these yummy dishes – here are the recipes!

Nutty Pumpkin Trifle
Super easy and not a very official recipe; first prepare your layers:

1. Bake one box of Spice Cake (I used a 9×13 dish so the cake would not be very thick. Let it cool.
2. Cook your pumpkin filling; I cooked mine in a glass pie dish – no crust! Let it cool for about and hour and a half to 2 hours.
3. Toss a large bag of pecans with about a cup “or so” of brown sugar and one stick of melted butter. Bake pecans on a cookie sheet (350 degrees) for 10+ minutes. (Just watch them or find a real recipe on how to make candied pecans.)
4. One large container of Cool Whip (or two normal sized ones) – make sure they’ve been in the fridge and are nice and whippy.
5. Sugary syrup! Little bit of water and a lot of granulated sugar and brown sugar with a few good shakes of cinnamon melted on the stove will create a super sweet syrup.

Now you take your trifle dish – an important piece to making a trifle – and begin to fill it with your layers.

1. Spice Cake layer – slice up the cake, maybe a half an inch thick max, and layer the bottom of your trifle dish.
2. Drizzle some sweet syrup over the cake, be sure to get some into the nooks and crannies on the sides so you can see it in the trifle dish!
3. Spread a layer of pumpkin filling over the top – again, make sure there is a sufficient thickness (half inch at least) that is viewable from the side of the dish. This is important!
4. Sprinkle Pecans on the pumpkin filling. Sample a few just make sure they’re tasty. (Do I need to remind you to make sure you can see the pecan layer?)
5. Cool whip layer!
6. REPEAT! Cake, syrup, pumpkin, pecans, cool whip…
7. A traditional trifle is a repeat of the layers, three times… however if you can only squeeze in two repeats –that is OK.
8. Optional – sprinkle some shaved dark chocolate on the top Cool Whip layer.

Chocolate-dipped PB-Ritz Sandwiches
Jodi’s recipe for her snack is: Spread creamy peanut butter on one Ritz cracker, and place another Ritz cracker on top to make a sandwich. Melt chocolate or vanilla almond bark or melts according to the package instructions. Dip the sandwiches in the chocolate with a fork, making sure all surfaces are covered. Remove and set on wax paper, sprinkle with candy sprinkles and let cool.

Patafla
Elisabeth’s Patafla recipe comes from a book called A Book of Mediterranean Food. You can find the recipe here, on page 154. She says she leaves out the gherkins, amps up the quantity of capers and adds a couple of cloves of crushed fresh garlic.

Elisabeth’s “Shroomapalooza Soup” recipe can be downloaded here.

BFF Bread
Eva makes one of the best versions of Friendship Bread and she has a lovely PDF you can download so you can make your own BFF Bread at home. Granted, to make this recipe you either have to have a starter bag already OR know how to make a starter yourself.

Now you have a few more items you can add to your holiday menu.
Happy Holidays from PRx!

A meeting in the Brain Injury Rehab Unit

This morning I was sitting in the lobby of the Rehab Center at Santa Clara County’s public hospital, Valley Medical Center. I’ve written about the specialty rehab practiced there, for traumatic brain and spinal cord injuries. I’ve detailed the advantages of having a Rehabilitation Trauma Center as part of the services offered. I really didn’t “get” it until just now.

I was there to take notes and video a nice human interest story – the visit of the almost-winner of this year’s Heisman Trophy, Toby Gerhart, taking a break from the Stanford team’s practice to visit a local high school football player who suffered a traumatic brain injury on the field on Thanksgiving.

Matt Blea, whose dad helps coach his son’s San Jose High School team, almost died that day. Emergency brain surgery saved him. He was stabilized, transferred for healing to his own hospital, then 12 days ago came back to SCVMC for specialized rehab.

I watched ambulatory patients come in for therapy sessions, I heard sirens as a fire truck pulled into the Emergency Department. Finally I saw Matt meet a young man just a few years older than him, and saw the respect and happiness in his eyes. “Dude, I’m such a fan, I just have to say it….” Matt told Toby.

Matt almost died a month ago. His hoodie covers a gnarly incision across the top of his head. He went jogging this morning, the rehab nurse told us. And he’s being discharged from the Rehab Unit on Christmas Eve.

We weren’t publicizing this event, and I was lucky to see it. Lots of hope, lots of respect, lots of team spirit and a couple of young men who are facing obstacles with courage.

(Matt Blea and Toby Gerhart with Blea’s family)

TurningWheels for Kids Bike Build 2009

On Saturday, December 12th, TurningWheels for Kids, a program under the auspices of the Valley Medical Center Foundation, presented Bike Build 2009 – the fifth annual holiday drive to provide free bikes for children in-need. More than 600 volunteers gathered at the San Jose Convention Center’s South Hall and built more than 2,000 bikes to distribute to local children’s charities.

Facts about Bike Build 2009:

1 past bike recipient now volunteers with Bike Build every year. Herb Bonales, of San Jose, received a bike from TurningWheels for Kids four or five years ago, and he returns every year to help build bikes for other kids.

3 53-foot semi-trucks filled with boxes of bikes were unloaded by volunteers on Friday night to prepare for the event.

5 TV stations reported on the day’s happenings; KTVU [clip], Univision, KNTV, KPIX, and NTD-TV.

18 children from CityTeam Ministries who helped build the new bikes that they wheeled home from Bike Build.

20 nonprofits received the bikes and will distribute them to the children before Christmas.

52 community groups helped build the bikes.

600+ volunteers were involved in making the event a success.

1,225 locks were given to kids for their bikes.

2,258 bikes were built and will be distributed during the holidays and throughout the year with TurningWheels for Kids’ programs (such as Dr. Dan Delgado’s Pediatric Healthy Lifestyles Clinic).

2,300 helmets were on-site, and most were given out at the Bike Build.

80,000 square feet: the size of the South Hall of the San Jose Convention Center that was filled with bikes and volunteers on Saturday.

$150,000+ was raised to buy bikes for kids in the Bay Area.

The executive director, Sue Runsvold (photo at right), is extremely dedicated and started TurningWheels for Kids because she grew up in a single-parent household and, as a child, she worried that she wouldn’t receive a present for Christmas. She has a huge heart, and started the organization because she didn’t want any other kid to experience that feeling. What better gift than a new bike?

For more information: www.turningwheelsforkids.org

Score-Card: Crisis 5, Tiger Woods 0

We’re weighing in on this because it’s such an extreme example of what NOT to do if you are the center of a crisis. By the way – most PR people define “crisis” with the worn-out Chinese ideogram of “danger + opportunity.” To PRx, “crisis” is just a problem that the media have found out about. Why is that a better definition? Because every organization, every celebrity, every human enterprise has problems. Just knowing that any one of those problems is a potential crisis is an important starting place.

So let’s review where Tiger is on the five steps to crisis recovery:

Can’t wait for the next chapter. Who is advising this poor guy?

Tiger Woods “Whiffs” Crisis Management

PRx Founder and CEO Brenna Bolger was interviewed yesterday by KRON 4 in regards to the public relations aspect surrounding Tiger Woods and his response, or lack thereof, to the media and his fans.

Educating on Renewable Energy

Dr. Richard Swanson, co-founder, President and CTO of SunPower, recently gave a talk for the Commonwealth Club in Silicon Valley on the state of the solar industry today and the potential for future growth.

He made some excellent points about the important role that communication plays in the future of the industry. This is due to the fact that energy policies and incentives at the national, state and even regional level are going to be key influencers in determining how quickly renewable energy markets (solar, wind, biomass and hydroelectric, for example) expand in this country. Who makes those policies? Of course, our elected officials do, and in order for them to get behind the right policies, they need to see strong public support for renewable energy.

That public support isn’t fully there yet, because many of us don’t really understand where this country and the world stand in terms of our energy use. Though most Americans know what a gallon of gas is and how far it will get them in their car, we don’t know the basics of energy consumption: for example, the relationship between a joule and a Kilowatt-hour (often seen on household electricity meters) or what either means in terms of energy usage.

There is still a tremendous amount of education that needs to be done to give consumers the facts about energy and its basics. With a better understanding of energy, we will be more likely to support a future where renewable play a major role in the energy mix. This will give our politicians the encouragement to support policies that will spur clean tech growth in this country.

A Major WTF Moment in Media Relations…

As public relations professionals, we get used to being turned down by the news media.

But every so often, we have a client whose cause is so right, whose news is so timely, that not being able to get media coverage is like a trip to the Twilight Zone.

We have a client that raises money to build schools in Pakistan, which has virtually no public education, where 41 million children don’t go to school - unless they are boys, and can attend the extremist-run madrassas… And girls? Forget about it.

Our client, The Citizens Foundation, has built 600 schools serving more than 80,000 children in Pakistan. These are co-ed schools, where all the teachers are women, trained and supported by TCF. Funded mostly by Pakistanis living in the US, it’s the largest educational charity in the Muslim world.

Bet you’ve never heard of it.

So far, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the rest of our influential media don’t seem interested in changing that state of affairs. So we’re taking it to the streets, or maybe “taking it to the tweets” is more appropriate. This blog posting is step #1. Next step is setting up a Twitter hashtag - #pakistanschools so we can get the word out that way. We’re becoming TCF fans on our personal and PRx Facebook pages.

Come on, Nicholas Kristof and Rachel Maddow — get interested!

If you want to know more, go to www.thecitizensfoundation.org – and tweet about it!

“You Make Me Sick!” - High School Kids Fight H1N1

“You make me sick!”

That’s the slogan for a promotion that especially a high school kid would love…

People under the age of 25 seem to be particularly vulnerable to the H1N1 flu bug, so Santa Clara County’s Public Health Department has called on high school kids to help.

The idea — a competition for short video “ads” promoting flu prevention tips. All the the videos will be posted on YouTube. There will be five categories of winners, including funniest, and the members of the overall winning team will receive iPod nanos, the new version with a video camera built in.

Thanks to PRx’s unbelievable contacts, the iPods and all the other prizes – gift cards and movie passes – were donated.

The contest was kicked off at an event October 1, at a local elementary school, and California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell was on hand to salute the Santa Clara County Office of Education partnering with the County Public Health Department.

Just makes me proud to live and work in a county and a state that despite all the economic woes, is putting creativity and good will to work for the common good