Atomic PR's NYC office announces 3 new accounts spanning social media, financial services and link shortening/sharing

By Jason Shuffler
August 23, 2010

NEW YORK: Atomic PR has won three new clients in the social media, online, and financial services industry.

The clients are San Francisco-based wealth management firm Baker Avenue Asset Management, geo-social app maker The Hotlist, and edeems, an online link-shortening service that enables people to earn money and donate cash to charities. All the accounts will be handled out of Atomic's New York office.

Baker Avenue CEO Simon Baker said he chose Atomic to tell the company's story through traditional, digital, and social media.

In May, New York-based The Hotlist announced it had raised $800,000 in angel funds and planned to use the money to build the company's website platform and launch mobile apps for smartphones.

Atomic PR wins Netgear review

By Jason Shuffler

August 9, 2010

http://www.prweekus.com/atomic-lands-netgear-account/article/176505/

SAN FRANCISCO: Netgear named Atomic PR its US AOR for a range of communications work, including media and analyst relations, blog design and social media, strategic planning and SEO.

Judy Hoffmann, Netgear's director of worldwide marketing communications, said a group of six "world class" agencies participated in the first round of the RFP, but only two were selected as finalists. Atomic PR was chosen for its experience in the consumer tech industry and the importance the agency places on communications analytics, she said.

"Atomic PR is very modern in its approach," said Hoffmann. "There are a lot of people that do PR, but you don't know what you are getting."

Netgear had been working with incumbent Sterling Communications for about eight years. Sterling Communications CEO Marianne O'Connor said her agency elected not to participate in the RFP, in part, because the agency is moving more into the cleantech business.

Hoffmann, who oversaw the search for a new agency, declined to name the other agencies that pitched or the budget of the account, saying only "PR is a big priority for us," she said.

A core team of six people at Atomic will work on the account, headed by Allyson Stinchfield, director, and SVP Nick Olsson. Both report to Hoffman.

"Our needs changed," Hoffman said. "We needed to have an agency take a fresh look at Netgear."

Chad Giron Joins Atomic PR New York As Account Director

Atomic New York's newest account director, Chad Giron, likes games. As a native Pittsburgher, he can't help but build his autumn Sundays around Steelers games...and then there are the Penguins, too. (He doesn't like to talk about the Pirates - we can't blame him.) Chad has brought his considerable consumer tech, digital entertainment and public affairs game to Atomic New York - adding even more depth to Atomic's already deep bench of tech PR pros.

Chad comes to Atomic with more than a decade of diverse communications experience. He started off at Edelman in Washington, DC (and was a White House intern before that) then moved on to the firm's LA office. At Edelman Chad worked on a selection of blue chip clients including Toshiba, Warner Home Video and the Motion Picture Association of America. He then moved in-house as Director, Global Media for publicly-traded Syntax-Brillian corporation - better known for making Olevia-brand HDTVs and Vivitar digital cameras - and a marketing sponsorship with ESPN that Chad helped to manage.

Chad has a BA in History from Penn State and also studied in a Masters of Professional Writing program at the University of Southern California. He also claims to play a mean game of Trivial Pursuit. With his diversity of experience with major clients and across sectors - and his new media and digital content development skills - Chad's a great addition to the growing team at Atomic New York.

Update: AtomicPR's work for The Trust For Public Land to save Cahuenga Peak - the home of the iconic Hollywood Sign

Sean Mulholland originally posted about this project in February when AtomicPR's L.A. office had just unveiled the first phase of a stunt to cover up the Hollywood Sign, which generated major international media and blogosphere buzz - Atomic's "Hollywood sign" stunt for the Trust for Public Land. We don't always get multiple news helicopters to turn out for all our programs, but it's pretty cool when they do. :-)

By covering up the Sign, the Save Cahuenga Peak project went on to capture the imagination of a wide variety of organizations and people, from Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, to Dame Elizabeth Taylor and Ellen DeGeneres, to Governor Schwarzenegger and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Even the Vatican got in touch- and Hugh Hefner jumped in as the surprise punctuation mark at the end.

The AtomicPR - designed Save the Peak campaign mixed insightful research and strategy with a high-level celebrity and politician evangelist program, strong media relations, a micro-site, active social media interaction, a donation widget, video and real world events. The Save the Peak campaign successfully raised the $12.5 million needed to set aside Cahuenga Peak as an extension of Los Angeles' Griffith Park, and will be enjoyed for generations to come. A detailed description of the campaign and results is here: The Trust for Public Land: From Hollywood to Save The Peak, and Atomic's teams in L.A. and San Francisco had a blast working on it.

AtomicPR Perspective: The SEO impact of Google's new Caffeine index on public relations

Google recently announced a major overhaul of its search index which they've dubbed Caffeine. The new indexing system marks a major shift in Google's ability to index content in near real time - so fast in fact, that some sites report new content being available in Google's search index within minutes.

In the past Google (and all search engines for that matter) indexed content over time, processed it, and used that data to make periodical updates to their indexes. A few years ago one could expect minor updates monthly, with the occasional major shift a few times a year.

Over the past decade the search engines have gone more and more real-time, prioritizing some content over others. Sites such as news sites and higher profile blogs would be crawled and processed more quickly (usually multiple times a day) whereas other websites might only be crawled weekly or monthly. With the advent of truly real-time services like Twitter, Facebook, and others, even this crawling frequency was often inadequate.

Caffeine is a fundamental shift in the way Google indexes the web. Rather than have a layered index with different priority levels, the index is now designed to be instantly updatable.

Previously each layer of the index would have to be crawled in its entirety and then updated. With Caffeine Google now processes all content in smaller chunks and continually updates its index with the new content. In other words, when Google sees your content it goes live.

This has obvious PR implications. Now blog posts can ping Google and be live right away, providing for much richer near real-time content possibilities. Beyond blogging, all new content - be it on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, or anywhere else - can instantly surface on Google.

The implications of real-time search are like hashtags on steroids. Having an understanding of search and the factors influence rank now take on a much broader role, as all content can be instantly evaluated against Google's search algorithms.

AtomicPR has been weaving search principles into its practice for nearly a decade, with several of us having specific backgrounds in search, SEO, PPC, and content optimization. We view search as an intrinsic part of any PR / marketing campaign, not something to be bolted on after the fact. Read more about our approach to search here.