We recently did a freelance shoot for Oceanside Building & Realty, which has a luxury home for sale and used Flickr to quickly and easily share the results.

Flickr makes it really easy to add a badge like this to your blog or site.

Plus, you can snap photos to a map – a great tool for real estate folks. Did we mention that’s it’s completely free?

We saw the NYC Condom campaign and thought it’d be worth a post. It’s edgy, speaks to a target audience, builds upon a widely known brand (NYC subway), and isn’t offensive to non-targets.

We’re just jealous because one of us proposed the double-entendre slogan “Get some” for a student organization back in college.

Check out the site when you get a sec. And, if you’re in Manhattan and need some free rubbers, well now you know where to go.

NYC Dept. of Health gets an A in health class this semester. Nice work.

1. Take responsibility not just for your own words, but for the comments you allow on your blog.
2. Label your tolerance level for abusive comments.
3. Consider eliminating anonymous comments.
4. Ignore the trolls.
5. Take the conversation offline, and talk directly, or find an intermediary who can do so.
6. If you know someone who is behaving badly, tell them so.
7. Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t say in person.

This comes in the wake of Kathy Sierra’s disclosure of what’s been going on over at her blog recently.

We will be adhering to these standards here at PRpulp and encourage you and your organizations to do the same.

Papa Jobs’ love letter must’ve had an influence on the good people over at EMI.

Yesterday, The New York Times reported that EMI will no longer be deploying DRM (digital rights management) on the music files that it sells via iTunes. The trade-off? $.30/song more.

The issue of DRM has been one of the most hotly debated topics in the music industry since it sparked on to the scene by Napster and other peer-to-peer MP3-sharing systems.

Today there are several different approaches that music labels use to try and prevent others from mooching off the guy next door’s wad of tunes in his iPod. Sony failed miserably, some prevent use on other devices all together, others can be cracked in seconds.

So as the RIAA is out there trying to stop students from swapping music around at Universities, today’s announcement is somewhat of an admission of defeat.

The math probably went something like: we know x% of people who get access to a music file are going to swap it with an average of x.xx people over a certain period (factoring in those who purchase a file may have different swapping ethical standards), so the premium that we could charge ($.30 in this case, plus they’re offered at higher sound quality) could actually create incremental demand from those who want to legitimize his/her right to swap, and make it work such that it offsets assumed losses from those who won’t buy the song now with those who won’t buy because of the higher price actually allows EMI to break even or make even more money than the status quo.

From the article:

Mr. Nicoli said early market tests showed EMI that consumers widely preferred to buy songs without copy protection, even at a higher cost. Unrestricted tracks outsold the others at a rate of 10 to one, he said.

Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, who shared the stage with Mr. Nicoli for the announcement, predicted that half of the songs available on iTunes would be sold without restrictions by the end of the year. None of the other three major record labels, which with EMI account for 70 percent of songs sold today, have said how they might react.

But then again, we’re just PR dudes who like music.

The brand marketers over at Bacon’s thought that it was in their best interest to take on that battle. In an e-mail message yesterday from CEO Steve Newman, the announcement came fresh with a new logo atop a glassy bar of blue in the header.

Our new name, Cision, reinforces the distinct but related strength of our worldwide organization. It projects our position as a global leader and our commitment to serving our clients seamlessly.

How does a new logo, name, typeface, and colors do this again? We’re big fans of cool branding over here at the pulp – don’t get us wrong – but that explanation is ripe with empty words that are so non-specific, we don’t even want to read them.

The best brand connection is between you and me, 1:1. Don’t make us feel like we’re minions in a sea of ambiguity.

Bacon’s has (edit: had) so much cool brand equity that it could have played off of really well and communicate its transition to a global leader with innovative products for the PR and greater media markets.

For example, the image that a lot of seasoned PR pros still have of the company is that giant directory of media contacts that you can get for some ridiculous fee. Play off of that – shred that puppy to bits and morph it into a Web-based app. Show how many trees they’re saving now. Send out free bacon-for-a-year gifts to best clients. Have fun. Instead, they were always pumping up the communications cycle and its offerings along the way.

A visit over to the now conglomerate’s Web site is just as stale and depressing as the note from the CEO today. So we stared at the logo a bit more and asked to ourselves: is it pronounced siz-e-on or siz-shun? The best we can figure out it’s like a snipped version of the word decision.

One word: booo.

Right around the same time, Vocus reaffirmed its outlook on the year and is shaking the trees with a follow-on stock offering of up to 60M shares.

“Instead of working solely in Wal-Mart’s interest,” the company said, Ms. Roehm “frequently put her own first. She did not merely fail to avoid conflicts of interest, she invited them.”

Wal-Mart backed up its assertions with what it said were e-mail messages sent by Ms. Roehm and Mr. Womack, both married, from their work and private accounts.

“I hate not being able to call you or write you,” Ms. Roehm wrote early last fall, according to an e-mail message Mr. Womack’s wife provided to Wal-Mart. “I think about us together all the time. Little moments like watching your face when you kiss me.”

Hey now! Someone didn’t pass the HR exam on the way in.

Okay, back to our regularly scheduled postings…

Via NYT.

That’s what we think Coke is up to in its new packaging for Coke Plus, a vitamin enriched soda.

Check it out:

Here’s Centrum:

Via NYT.

That’s what Richard Houng’s company exploited when it decided to license the Westinghouse logo from CBS to slap on lower-priced flat-panel TVs.

BusinessWeek ran the article last week, which brought to light the thin margins that manufacturers are making these days on LCD TVs.

In there, however, is a great point about the power of branding and exploiting consumers’ perceptions. From the story:

Like just about everyone else checking out the flat-panel TVs at Best Buy in Manhattan, graphic designer Roy Gantt came in coveting a Philips (PHG), Sony (SNE), or Panasonic (MC). But after seeing the price tags, he figured a Westinghouse might be a better buy. At $800, the Westinghouse 32-in. set seems like a steal compared with $950 to $1,400 for better-known brands. Plus, the name sounds comfortingly familiar. “I think they make home appliances—things like that,” says Gantt.

He’s right, but that’s a different Westinghouse. In fact, the name didn’t appear on U.S. TVs for more than three decades. Then in 2003, a startup founded by two Taiwanese-American entrepreneurs licensed the brand and distinctive W logo from CBS Corp. (CBS) subsidiary Westinghouse Electric Corp. Today, Westinghouse Digital ranks No. 5 in liquid-crystal-display TVs in North America, with 7.7% of the market, according to researcher iSuppli Corp.

Now, if this guy stares at this screen long enough and then looks at a white wall, what colors will he see?

We got a kick out of Jon Fine’s recent piece.

In the piece about citizen ads, he lauds several clichés and we thought we’d repost in agreement.

To start, he shortens “‘consumer-generated advertising’ and ‘consumer-generated marketing,’ down to ‘citizen advertising’ and ‘citizen marketing.’”

Then there’s:

• engagement, interacting with the brand
• community
• authentic
• breaking through the clutter

We’ll add Web 2.0, social-based, and viral to the list.

Sometimes it’s hard to hold back on when you’re surrounded by nightschoolin’ MBA candidates who cite Peter Drucker in meetings to not try and squeak in the latest term to explain an idea. After all, you’re trying to stay on the cutting edge, right?

With experience comes wisdom, but in its absence, hold back. Or find and use tools like Jargon Finder to help you keep your feet on the ground.

The story of Kodak is bittersweet. A fixture of upstate New York, its gold and red 400 ISO 35mm film used to be as much a fixture in the check-out lane as a pack of gum. That was the hay day of print film. Then digital arrived and Kodak refused to believe it would overtake print. They stuck to their money cow – after all even though digital was starting off, people still needed 35mm film to get the hi-res color rich shots they were used to. Then, digital caught up.

Kodak missed the digital boat big time – or did they? Today Kodak holds many patents that banks royalties off of pretty much every digital imaging device that’s sold today. That translates into about “$123M, or 82% of its operating profits” in recent quarters.

All while it’s seen its 35mm film business go out the window, Kodak has been taking the time to reload and has the consumer printing business square in its sights.

The news came to our attention in last week’s BusinessWeek. BW clearly had an exclusive on the story, but interestingly it hasn’t made much of a splash.

Kodak’s plan: unleash a new generation of ink jet printers that use ink that costs 50% less.

It comes at an interesting time when consumers are printing less as a result of getting burned by exorbitant fees associated with ink cartridge replacements. Similar to the old, razor is free, razor blades cost big bucks scenario. A quick visit over to Kodak’s site shows a preliminary line-up of printer/scanner combos that use the new ink.

We’re optimistic about the big bold plan. After all, we hate spending upwards of $.75/sheet for an ink jet photo print-out just as much as anyone else. But this requires people to buy a new printer, which will come out in March starting at $199.

Quick back-of-the envelope math tells us that if you typically go through a black and color cartridge every quarter that it’ll take you about 2 years to pay for that new printer. That’s probably why they integrate the scanner in and on some models, the color LCD screen to preview images – features that most consumers don’t already have already.

We’re curious about the communications strategy moving forward. They unveiled things to the media earlier in the month at NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” studio – pretty posh for a company that lost $1.6B in ‘05 and $600M in ‘06. All-in-all, the company finally squeaked out a profit in Q4.

The press release is here. And points to a few mildly interesting PR and marketing resources:

• B-roll
• Podcasts, product photos, and fact sheets
• and a developer blog.

There’s this too, but we’re not convinced a minisite like this is going to make most consumers run out and jump on board for the new technology. As always, PRpulp will be watching.