Tim McGraw via last.fm

One of the tricks of country music song writers that are out of fresh ideas is to write a song that does nothing, but drop proper names, such as people (Conway Twitty rhymes with so much), places (Cabo is a fav)  and things (happy hour).  You don’t even need to be a country music fan, and I’m sure you have a jukebox of bad music in your head right now.

Well, I’m going to test one of the worst offenders of this:  a song called Southern Voices that is sung by Tim McGraw and was written by  Bob DiPiero and Tom Douglas — to make sure the blame is spread fairly.   The opponent Zemanta and their semantic web publishing tool.  I’m afraid to paste in the lyrics, because this thing will explode. The song is nothing but a name dropping brain dump in the hope that somewhere ol’ Tim will be able to hit the right note with the music public to make you, yeah you, want to buy this drivel.

(Now, before some heads explode, please note that I am not condemning the names in the song, which range from Charlie Daniels to Jesus. I’m a big fan of these people. It’s the shameless use of their names that is bad.)

Ready… time to hit ctrl-v, and I’ll tag the names that Zemanta finds:

Hank Williams sang it

Number 3 drove it

Chuck Berry twanged it

Will Farmer wrote it

Aretha Franklin sold it

Dolly Parton graced it

Rosa Parks rode it

Scarlett O chased it

Smooth as the hickory wind

That blows from Memphis

Down to Appalachicola

It’s hi ya’ll did ya eat well

Come on in I’m

Sure glad to know ya

Don’t let this old goat cross

In this Almond Brothers t-shirt and throw ya

It’s cicadas making noise

With the southern voice

Hank Aaron smacked it

Michael Jordan dunked it

Pocahantas tracked it

Jack Daniels drunk it

Tom Petty rocked it

Dr. King paved it

Bear Bryant won it

Billy Graham saved it

Smooth as the hickory wind

That blows from Memphis

Down to Appalachicola

It’s hi ya’ll did ya eat well

Come on in I’m

Sure glad to know ya

Don’t let this old goat cross

In this Crimson Tide t-shirt and throw ya

It’s cicadas making noise

With the southern voice

Jesus is my friend

America is my home

Sweet iced tea and Jerry Lee

Daytona Beach

That’s what gets to me

I can feel it in my bones

Smooth as the hickory wind

That blows from Memphis

Down to Appalachicola

It’s hi ya’ll did ya eat well

Come on in child

I’m sure glad to know ya

Don’t let this old goat cross

In this Charlie Daniels t-shirt and throw ya

We’re just boys making noise

With the southern voice

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

Southern Voice

I got a southern voice

A southern voice

Now, let it be said that I’m a big fan of Zemanta and their publishing tool is great for making the blogging process easier. However, Zemanta tried, but it was just overwhelmed by the country music hit formula. 10 of the 24 proper name references that I found as ‘in-text links’, but it did much better finding 20 of 24 pictures, and it offered a wide range of related articles to choose from.

To the Zemanta people and power users: If there is a way to request more in-text links, let me know and I’ll send it through again. This song should become the benchmark for all future improvements.

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Citi Field - First Game

My tickets for the Red Sox / Yankees on Oct 2 at Fenway came in the mail today — only 161 games away.  The key to getting these was that they were single seats, but directly behind each other in rows 12&13 behind home plate.  Which is cool.  The thing is that the game time is TBD, so I have to hope it is a day game, so we can take the Little Monster to see the Green Monster, though that probably means that it isn’t a big game.  Again just 6 1/2 months away.

The real downside to this is that there is no way I can keep Colleen a Mets fan considering that the first game she went to was a Mets/Nationals battle for last place last September. Now it the Yankees/Red Sox, and I can only dream that it is a battle for last.

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It has been an interesting few days.  On Monday, we officially announced that BlueStorm hadd aquired CYBERCity, another Binghamton-based computer services firm.  The merger is a solid mix of CYBERCity’s personal-to-small business market and BlueStorm’s small-to-medium business focus.  We are looking to expand our enterprise infrastructure business and use the advances in enterprise infrastructure technology to make them available to smaller organizations.  The big upside is in the managed services business where both teams have been having success, so we see this as a great growth opportunity (trying so hard not to use the word synergy, but this is a text book example).

It was a fun strategic/tactical exercise to roll-out news to each outlet.  The first step was to coordinate website updates to show a co-branded presence. This had to be done before I posted the announcement on our Twitter and  Facebook because  of the immediacy of those outlets, so I had somewhere to link readers.  I also wanted to make sure news outlets had a chance to confirm (because they still do that) and assign the story, so sending out email and faxes (yes, dialed it myself) also had to be sent before the social media postings.  The big surprise was having one of the local TV news stations call so quickly that I had not yet received the fax confirmation.

Here are the steps I followed –
A week early:

1. Create a call sheet – name, email, fax, and Twitter accounts
2. Sign up to follow their twitter accounts – You want to give them time to follow you

Day of the announcement:

1. Update website — In case  news people go there to confirm
2. Send out faxes and emails
3. Post on BlueStorm’s Twitter and Facebook — It’s also good to have some of your co-workers on-call to RT and “Like” so the message spreads virally
4. Post on local third-party or business blogs — The local news site allows the public to create their own blog space, so I posted the release on BlueStorm’s PressConnect page
5. Send direct message to reporter’s Twitter — I only did this to those that I had a prior relationship
6. Good old-fashioned follow-up — This worked great because I found that my local press contact was out that day from her voice mail.  I was able to connect to the news desk and placed a press release based article at the top of the Business section. That would have been an embarrassing miss.

The Results The story ended up in the lead segment of two local news broadcasts, including this report on Newschannel 34.  We also had the Business section headline in the Binghamton Press and appeared on the front page of the Binghamton Business Journal.  The only downside was that the WBNG-TV News interview and Press articles were not posted online even after I called.  My lesson there was that next time I needed to include the web producer on my release list.

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