Okay, time for some major horn tootage.

I’m a big fan of Peter Shankman’s “Help A Reporter Out” service, which helps link journalists and expert sources. HARO struck again last week!

A reporter from the Wall Street Journal was looking for vacationing folks who had ended up staying at more business-oriented hotels. Since I fit the bill perfectly, I pitched myself and ended up in the Wall Street Journal’s June 5, 2009 story, Hotels Mix Business and Pleasure: Facing slowdown, business hotels court vacationers with spas, deals and movie nights

With a print circulation of over 2 million, this is my biggest PR placement ever. And that doesn’t even count all the friends and immediate family to whom I flogged the online version.

Well, turns out that was just the start of an exciting PR weekend.

Last week, my client Scott Sandland, C.Ht., mentioned that he was irked by press reports circulating about NBA Lakers player Lamar Odom. (Word on the street was that Lamar had a “Skittles problem” and was consuming vast quantities of sugary treats and junk food.)

As a lifelong Lakers fan, and professional hypnotherapist, Scott had a strong opinion of the press coverage, and an interesting viewpoint about how hypnosis could help Odom, if he indeed had a sugar-coated monkey on his back.

Of course, being a PR wonk, I thought it might be a good idea to put out a news release about it.

Scott emailed me during Game 2 of the NBA finals with a link to the LA times story, Lamar Odom May Not Be Getting Sleepy Anytime Soon. (I nearly fainted, as Scott may as well be in a secure, undisclosed, hardened bunker during Lakers games. He’s simply inaccessible.) Scott happened to be leafing through the print edition of the Sunday LA Times when he saw his name on Page 2 of the Sports section, with two juicy quotes taken word for word from the news release.

Even now, it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. PR is so much fun when it works.

Geez…now I have to follow this up with something even bigger next week…

Los Angeles Times story quoting my client Scott Sandland on Lamar Odom's alleged sugar addiction

Imagine That Creative has been active on Elance.com for nearly two years now. We’ve met some great clients through the site and landed some very interesting projects.

Although we haven’t been as active on Elance in the past six months, we were thrilled to learn a few days ago that Elance ranks ImagineThatCreative 6th out of 4,758 worldwide service providers in the Sales and Marketing category. (We also rank in the top 1% of providers in the Writing and Translation category.)

Screen capture from Elance.com shows Imagine That Creative's #6 ranking in the Sales and Marketing category.

Elance explains,

Elance service providers earn points based on their activity and achievements on Elance.

The point system rewards providers who market their services effectively, deliver great work, maintain high levels of client satisfaction and develop lasting client relationships on Elance. At this time points are only visible to you in My Stats (Statistics). Starting this summer points will determine your rank in search results and will also be displayed in profiles and proposals.

The point system is category-specific and based on key performance indicators: Service Delivery, Client Relationships and Marketing.

Thanks, Elance! Needless to say, we’re 100% in support of the new points system. 

This past week I was down for a few days with something I’m going to call the flu. Not bad enough to go to the doctor, but bad enough that I felt like crap and productivity ground to a halt. I passed the time by posting quasi-cranky marketing-related rants at HypnoThoughts.com, a social network I have started to frequent.

It became immediately apparent that some members of the site (most of whom are professional hypnotherapists and stage hypnotists) had a dim view of the marketing profession. And who can blame them? When most people hear the word “marketing” they think “commercials.” (For  those of you with TiVo, commercials are those intrusive, hype-filled messages that allow you to get to the end of an episode of “24″ without having a stress-induced cerebral hemorrhage.)

I’ve been working in marketing and PR for 20 years now. I get it. Normal people do not like advertising, or marketing, PR, or the browbeating pushiness that is the hallmark of the “hard sell.” And why should they? Nowadays marketeers are perceived as only slightly less slimy than politicians.

But I can’t do something I don’t believe in. And I believe that marketing and public relations have the potential to be noble professions.

Here’s why.

Most of the marketing I do is pain-driven. Because pain in the here-and-now is the most persuasive emotional state when it comes to making a purchase decision. As humans, we strive to avoid pain before we strive to achieve pleasure. And for most of my clients, prospects in the most pain are what I call the “low-hanging fruit.” If you have a limited amount of time and money to invest in marketing, you’re most likely going to get the highest ROI by targeting the ripe-for-your-solution low-hanging fruit.

Here’s where the nobility comes in.

Two people are standing in an elevator. One is in gutwrenching, soul-level pain, and will pay nearly anything to relieve it. The other can stop that gal’s pain quickly and easily, unbeknownst to her. But unless they speak to each other before they hit the lobby, neither will know how much they could have meant to each other.

My job, as a marketing and PR practitioner, is to help spread the good news to a client’s target audience that “there is a cure for your pain.”

I can help people end their suffering and dramatically improve the quality of their lives, just by communicating with each other.

That is crazy fulfilling. And kinda noble, even.

Controversy erupted recently over the issue of “ghost tweeting.” Former “Apple Evangelist” and current venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki has built a sizeable following on Twitter, the micro-blogging site that will soon be getting its own satellite TV channel (kidding–it already gets enough exposure on CNN).

About 35 “tweets’ (messages) are broadcast to Kawasaki’s 90,000+ followers every day. Many are his own observations about technology and whatnot; others promote his current website project.

He recently admitted that much of what goes out under the name @GuyKawasaki is written by ghost tweeters–people who scan the internet for interesting and useful things that Guy’s readers may enjoy.

And people are up in arms over what they consider to be a betrayal of trust.

These people cannot possibly be marketing copywriters or PR flacks. We, more than almost anyone, know how often we create copy that goes out under someone else’s name.

Why? Because writing is hard. Good writing is really, really hard. Not everyone can do it well. Some can barely do it at all. The speeches that come out of the mouth of Barak Obama are written by someone else, prompting some to give more credit to his teleprompter than his own powers of oratory.

Knowing how common ghostwriting is, I’m more surprised when I discover that a celebrity or other notable is actually writing their own material. Senator John McCain (of all people) apparently does all his own tweeting. (My man Ron Paul doesn’t tweet–yet–but he does still hold the one-day record for Internet fundraising, so at least he knows how to monetize an online presence.)

Yes, it would be lovely to think that when you DM Sir Richard Branson(@sirdickbranson) that he actually reads your tweet (DM = “direct message,” for the non-Twitterati) and taps out a reply on his Virgin Mobile phone. I don’t know if he does or not. But I suspect Sir Richard has better, more revenue-producing things to do than reply to random people such as myself on Twitter. (So far though, most of his tweets are signed “~SirDick,” so maybe he really writes his own tweets.)

So is ghost-Twittering good or evil?

Since I’m apparently going to hell if it’s evil, I’m going to vote for “good.”

It’s good because the alternative could be either no communication at all or dreadful, muddy, ill-thought-out, banal, pointless, self-aggrandizing dreck. Because, simply put, that’s all some folks are capable of.

It’s no commetary on them as human beings, don’t get me wrong. Writing is a special skill. For most people it takes study and years of practice to get good at it. PR and marketing writing are even more demanding flavors of writing. And writing coherent and value-packed 140-character tweets can actually be something of a challenge (I am finding, to my surprise.)

But there’s a bigger question here. Is ghostwriting of any kind acceptable?

Again, I come down on the side of “yes” rather than “no.” And not just because otherwise, I’m out of a job.

Human beings are individuals and we each have our own set of talents and abilities. I personally can’t do math at all. At. All. So would it be a mark of ill character if I hired an accountant to do math for me?

Are autoresponders evil because they’re not really personally sent by the person who signed the message? What about CRM? Customer Relationship Management software remembers things about your customers so your salespeople don’t have to. Good CRM software can really make it seem like your employees give a crap about your customers and helps your company give them better service. Is that wrong?

And what about Mail Merge? Mail Merge allows you to send out personalized copies of sales letters, hundreds or thousands at a time. Each one personalized so it appears that the recipient is getting a personal communication. Good or evil? You make the call.

Perhaps I really am going to Writer’s Hell for saying this, but no, I don’t think Ghost Twittering is immoral.

I can’t cut my own hair (trust me on this). So I have someone else do it.

I can’t make my own shoes…so I let folks in China do it for me.

I often let other people cook food for me to eat.

So if a client were to hire me as a ghost twitter, I’d take the gig (assuming I liked them and the money was good, of course.) I feel fine ghost-twittering. Just as I feel fine when I’m ghostwriting a press release, or a brochure, or a letter to the editor, or  web content.

Let’s get some perspective, folks.