Using Technology for Public Relations

In most large corporations, one of the chief jobs of public relations directors is to put together a clip book. A clip book is the daily/weekly/monthly/yearly report on all the places and press stories the company has appeared in. For many of the larger corporations, the PR director sometimes has two or three full-time people working on the clip books. This sometimes meant that somewhere hidden deep in the company office was a room that was full of ripped up newspapers, cut apart magazines and destroyed books. But today, there are many "press clipping services" that take care of the dirty work.... and believe me its dirty work. Just try rubbing your hands on newspaper for an hour.

With technology today, many indies have resources at their finger tips that accomplish many of the same tasks. Both Google.com and Yahoo News provide excellent news clipping services. That way, whenever GarageGames or the Torque Game Engine appear on the internet in some sort of news item, I get emailed with the link. While Google and Yahoo can take care of most of the main stream media, Technorati can take care of a large portion of the huge blogosphere. Technorati is currently tracking over 17 million sites and about 1.5 billion links. Just by searching the word "garagegames" (http://www.technorati.com/search/garagegames), I can now take a look at what the average Joe is saying about the company. Plus Technorati now gives you the ability to "Add to Watchlist" which will keep a constant watch over the important news items.

Now I do have to warn you, that many times you can get some strange links through the Google and Yahoo News Alerts. For example, One of my Google Alerts looks for "Marble Blast Gold". One of the big things a PR Director fears is that one day he/she comes into work and finds a disaster waiting that they will have to kick into overdrive and start working to fix the situation. Almost a year ago, I had one of those moments. Coming into work that morning, I checked my email and there it was, a link that said Marble Blast Gold had killed a little boy. This could have been even bigger than the "Hot Coffee" scandal. I clicked on the link, fearing the worst, and read the news item. "...Deep in the heart of India, a bomb exploded on a train traveling to Mumbai. The bomb had been hidden beneath the Marble tiles with Gold trim. The Blast killed a small boy..." Ok... so Google news isn't perfect, but it does save me lots of research time every day.

But, back to the old clipbooks. I thought I would leave you all with a really cool clipping I took from CPU Magazine (September 2005) issue. This quote is from the middle of the clipping, "...If you know the Unreal, TORQUE, or Source game engines, then you might be qualified to design complex real-time military sims..."

So pull up your chair, get involved in the GarageGames community, cause over then next few weeks, we've got some really cool stuff to tell you all about. Torque 1.4 is rockin and now it's even easier for new people who have never done any game programming before to dive into TGE.

Links:
Technorati - http://www.technorati.com (To set up a watchlist: 1.Create an account on Technorati 2. Type the search word that you want to keep track of into the search bar. 3. Then once the results appear, click on "Add to Watchlist" in the upper right.)
Google News Alerts - http://www.google.com/alerts?hl=en (If you need a Gmail account, let me know)
Yahoo News Alerts - http://alerts.yahoo.com/