Today’s Wall Street Journal article about the Silicon Valley start-ups readying themselves to go public signals the reopening — finally! — of the IPO “window.” It’ about time! This has been the longest drought I’ve experienced since I got to the Valley in 1981, and it was historic by any measure.

The notion of a “window” is that there are good times and bad times to take a company public. It mainly has to do with the receptivity of capital markets investors to new issues by unproven companies. When they are in a buying mood, the window is said to be open, and vice versa.

The window has been all-but closed since about 2002 (it never slams shut, it just gets so small that only the strongest companies can get through, such as Google and more recently, LinkedIn). There was good reason, too — 2002 was when the dying embers of Internet bubble finally went out, and lots of people were feeling burned and in no mood to buy shares of unproven, unprofitable web 1.0 companies (furniture.com anyone?).

Now, though, memories have faded, the appetite for new issues has returned and a handful of companies such as Splunk, Infoblox, Workday and ServiceNow are getting ready to test the waters.

If this first batch is successful in going public, you can be sure that many more companies will file in a rush to take advantage.

 

Charlene Li, one of my favorite social media pundits, gave a speech at the PRSA International Conference this week and then gave a “press conference” to those of us (including me) who were designated “press” for the conference.

Li said that like most analysts, she is in the midst of developing her “outlook” report for 2011, and she gave us a preview in the press conference.

The two big trends Li is watching as the year winds down are:

1. the rise of “social data” and “social search” and
2. our evolving feelings regarding privacy and permissions in social media

On social data, Li is watching to see how all the volumes of data we are generating in social media are used. Marketers and others are quickly realizing that social media users are providing reams of valuabe information about brands, trends, likes and dislikes, but are just now starting to figure out how to gather and analyze it.

On privacy and permissions, Li sees us moving away from protecting our privacy and toward managing the permissions we give web sites and our contacts. She likened the transition to what happened when Caller ID was first introduced. Peoples’ first reaction was that it was an invasion of privacy, but after awhile, as they realized that it had value, it became more about giving people useful information that reduced life’s friction.

This may seem like a nitpicky post, but trust me it’s not. It’s 5pm on the first day of the PRSA International Conference and I’m sitting in the lobby bar blogging on the ‘net, rather than sitting in a session, ironically, on using online tools to do and manage PR programs. My colleague Sandra Fathi was trying to give the preso, but she was stymied by her doggy PC and even doggier wifi access.

That she had wifi access deep in the recesses of the Washington Hilton was remarkable enough, since none of the rest of us in the room had it. She apparently had an access code from one of the people in the room [I'm not making this up].

At the Washington Hilton, the only place with free wifi access is the lobby. As we were waiting for Sandra’s presentation to get on track as she dealt with a frozen computer and balky Internet access, an attendee behind me grumbled, “We paid $1,000 to attend this conference, and they couldn’t give us wifi?”

I bolted from the room [sorry, Sandra] and came up here, logged on and pulled up Sandra’s presentation on SlideShare. I’ll review it when I have a chance and can always ping her if I have a question. I was just getting ready to blast PRSA for not offering free wifi when I saw PRSA CEO William Murray across the room. So I went up to Bill and shared my complaint, and his response was simple: the Hilton wanted $200,000 for free wifi for the four-day conference.

Whaaaat??

It’s true. Bill pointed out the contract with the Hilton had been signed years ago, before ubiquitous wifi became the norm. And the Hilton, for reasons I don’t care to explore, apparently wouldn’t budge given the new realities. So PRSA is between a rock and a hard place. He said that starting next year in Orlando, they were able to negotiate free wifi into the contract and that it should be the norm in future years as well.

Why is this important? Because with the likes of Starbuck and McDonald’s providing free wifi, along with countless other locations, people have come to expect that they will be able to log-on when they want to. They don’t want to have to run to the lobby bar as I did. They don’t want to be offline in a room while someone is talking about Internet tools.

This is not a trend. This is already present reality and a given for the future. I give PRSA a pass on it this year given Murray’s explanation, but going forward, it’s a no-brainer.

The PRSA National Delegate assembly voted down a non-binding resolution today asking the association’s Board to regularly consult the elected delegates on “issues of concern” by submitting them to the  assembly’s electronic discussion group. The vote was 95 for, 118 against.

Unfortunately for PRSA, this vote told me that the association is even more entrenched in its business-as-usual way of doing things than I thought. Further, it told me that a broad cross-section of the association isn’t prepared to embrace the present and future of communications and engagement.

PRSA formally created the “Leadership Assembly” last year as an acknowledgement of the need for broader input into the association’s future role in PR and communications. The Board is supposed to seek advice and counsel from the assembly, as opposed to its prior role of simply doing the legal business of a membership organization. Along those lines, the formal business of the assembly was limited to the first half of the day today, followed by a discussion of the near-term future of the PR industry in the afternoon.

As noted by the advocates of the resolution, the electronic discussion group gives the Board the ability to consult the Leadership Assembly throughout the year, but it didn’t do so. The authors, tech-savvy PR people from Boston and the Bay Area, hoped that the resolution would help move the association in that direction. It didn’t happen.

[2010 PRSA International Conference]

Steve Jobs has always had a reputation in Silicon Valley as an asshole. A brilliant asshole, and one that I greatly admire, but an a-hole none the less.

So it was almost refreshing to know that some things don’t change, when a Long Island college student shared with Gawker her exchange with Jobs about trying to get someone from Apple PR to comment for her story about her college giving incoming students an iPad.

Until now, I did not know that Mr. Jobs actually engages with some of the people who send him email to his Apple email address, sjobs@apple.com. So that’s interesting. You can read some of his replies to people at a site that compiles them, Emails From Steve Jobs (what a world, eh?).

Anyway, Jobs decided to respond to this young lady, who was complaining to him that the PR department wasn’t answering her emails and calls, and that this meant she would not get an A on the assignment from her teacher. Jobs actually writes to her that “Our goals do not include helping you get a good grade” and ends the exchange by saying, “leave us alone.”

There’s the Steve I remember from my days in the Silicon Valley press corps.

This isn’t really a lesson for PR people, because every CEO is different when it comes to media relations. But this is a good lesson for aspiring journalists. The lesson is this: the PR department is not the only place to get a comment from a large corporation. In fact, a good journalist uses the PR people to get an interview with actual executives and decision makers. Furthermore, why not go down to the local Apple store and get a comment from the store manager? Why not do some research and find an Apple exec who focuses on the college market and contact them directly. Don’t wait to be spoon-fed by the PR department! The most ridiculous part of the whole exchange is when she writes that she has questions that “only Apple Media Relations”  can answer.

But here’s a memo to Apple PR: for gosh sakes, couldn’t you have written back to the student with a one-sentence answer? Are you really that busy and/or self-important?

News flash: I just moved to an office in downtown San Francisco — woohoo! I love The City, and now I have a chance to be here everyday again. I last worked in SF in 1997.

One thing that has changed since 1997 — there are a LOT more Starbucks in downtown SF. No duh. There are Starbucks EVERYWHERE in the U.S. — 6,700 total locations [probably excluding franchisees, such as those in museums and Barnes & Noble].

Now there is going to be reliable, free WiFi hotspots all over urban/suburban America in Starbucks starting July 1.

As soon as I heard this news, I immediately started reconsidering my expensive $60/month broadband wireless card. Yes, it comes in handy when I really need it, but it is becoming less and less necessary as more free hotspots crop up. And if I drop it, with the money I will save, I can always splurge on hotel WiFi when I need to.

But this isn’t about me.

This is about the larger question of free municipal WiFi — something that you may remember was touted as a slam dunk by now, but hasn’t happened. Why? Because it’s harder to do than it looks, and where it is installed, it’s largely unreliable.

Now, there’s going to be a free, RELIABLE alternative — Starbucks, and likely the sidewalks right around your closest ‘Bucks, and probably around lots of other coffeeshops that will no longer be able to insist that you buy something before letting you use their WiFi. [Not to mention the 11,000 McDonalds that already offer it]

What Starbucks did for lattes — made them easy to get and reliably prepared — I predict they are going to do for WiFi.

Brilliant move by Starbucks — but — what about the money? Starbucks charges ~$3-4 for a premium cup of coffee, but they are giving away the WiFi — how’s that going to work?

The answer to that is in the second part of their release, about the Starbucks Digital Network. For now, they are talking about the free content that their WiFi users will have access to, but just you wait — they will figure out ways to separate you from your money through this network, I’m sure of it. And that’s how they will make some money on this, while changing the equation of whether you need your own network access service anymore.

Why send a plain old written PR pitch when you can send a “vitch” — a video pitch?

That’s right, the new thing is to make your pitch via video. It’s certainly simple enough to do — plan your video, shoot it with an inexpensive video camera, upload it to Youtube and spread the link.

Makes a lot of sense, too. Video is such an incredibly powerful medium, and now, through the evolution of technology, we can all be fast and cheap video producers.

The key thing here is that a “vitch” can’t just be you reading your boring, stilted press release into the camera. You need to show something — the newsmakers, the location, something, anything tangible. This, by itself, takes PR people out of their jargon-filed comfort zone.

I just picked up on this word so I don’t have any good examples of video pitches and their results, but the whole thing makes a lot of sense to me. I plan to try it this month just to see what happens.

HuffPost has a “top 11″ list of tech products of the decade, and I was stunned at how many of them were communications tools that radically reshaped the way we think, interact, and entertain ourselves.

Among HuffPo’s top 11:

• iPod: little needs to be said, except, do you remember your life before having gigabytes of music in your pocket to listen to on demand?
• iTunes: made digital music downloads mainstream
• TiVo: the neutron bomb that hit TV. Do you remember when you had to watch TV in the order it was presented, or pop in a VHS tape to “time-shift”? How last millennium!
• Blackberrys/crackberrys/iPhones/PDAs in general: a computer on your belt or in your purse that is way more powerful than the computer you used to have on your desk, and it’s a phone and it’s connected to the web too!
• Kindle: still on the upswing, but do you remember where you were when Gutenberg invented the printing press? (don’t worry, it was 1439). You’ll tell your grandkids about seeing the first e-book. Yes, it’s that big.
• USB flash drives: flash memory in general is an absolutely revolutionary tool, as it allows us to record visual images (photos, video) on tiny devices that can go anywhere and record anything (which can then be uploaded on the worldwide communications platform we call The Internet). It also allows us to carry up to 300GB of data in our back pocket and hand it (say, nuclear secrets) to anyone we want.
• HDTV: 50 years after the commercialization of TV, the next step in picture quality, opening up all sorts of possibilities, but mostly, allowing men to watch football on giant screens.

Huffpo’s list is mainly “gadgets,” in other words tech hardware with some nifty software inside. What about things that were either sold or used only as software, on existing hardware? No diff really, but Huffpo skipped those, so here are a few I’d add:

• Google: came out in 98-99, but it didn’t gain popularity until 2000. Changed web search from a frustrating and incomplete exercise into an extension of our brains and thoughts.
• Facebook: changed online personas from sock puppets/imaginary selves to real people knitting their lives together.
• Twitter: it’s the first wave of the ‘real time web’ where information is shared almost as soon as it is created
• Blogging/content management systems: Took the creation of web content away from computer professionals and put it in the hands of everyone.
• Wikipedia: the open documentation and organization of all the world’s information
• YouTube: the first major step toward moving TV/video content onto the web. Trust me, by the end of the next decade, you won’t use a satellite dish or cable or rabbit ears to get TV content. It will all come over the Internet.
• Skype: buh bye, copper phone lines. Hullo, cheap voice and video phone calls over the web.
• BitTorrent: An amazingly simple way to share huge files containing entertainment (movies, concerts) over the net. I can now download a three hour, 1GB Springsteen show in about 15 minutes. At the beginning of the decade I was trading audio tapes by mail with people. How easy will it be in another decade?

I am one who believes there will always be a chasm between the media and PR, unless and until the media dies and all media is PR. Which I hope does not happen.

I’ve been working on the media/PR divide much of my career. I was known as a sympathic media person who helped PR people figure out if they had a story for me, and as a PR person, I’ve worked hard to teach PR people how to do a better job interacting with the media.

I’ve mostly considered it a lost cause to try to educate the media about PR, even though that was one of my original goals. Media people generally split into two camps: those who “get” the role of PR and deal with it, and those who “hate” PR and always bitch about it. Sometimes those in the latter group migrate to the former, but they need to do it in their own time. No use trying to teach them — their ears do not hear.

Despite this persistent divide, some people obviously think it can be overcome. At least, that appears to be the gist of the strategy of a new company, Plato’s Forms, which says is mission is:

developing solutions for companies and journalists that help address some of these challenging aspects of communications in the online media environment.

At this time, they say no more. In Silicon Valley-speak, they are in “stealth” mode, meaning they are developing their offering behind closed doors and plan to make a big splash when they unveil it at a later date. For now, they’ve got a half-mil to work with, partly from the pocket of founder Darryl Siry.

Their name, btw, refers to the philosopher Plato, who, their web site says, “held that we could not comprehend the true form of things, and could only grasp the reflections of their true meaning, as if they were shadows reflected on the wall.” At least one philosophy major disputes this reading, however, judging from the comments about the company on a TechCrunch post.

The PR industry has typically had a serious East Coast slant, mostly for good reason, and that means the biggest PR events usually happen in New York or Washington. Many of the biggest companies in the world are located in the Northeast Corridor, as is the stock exchange, the capital, and the media industry. Here in the West, we have Silicon Valley and Hollywood, and that’s about all.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been involved with PRSA’s Silicon Valley Chapter, and our big event of the year is “Media Predicts,” a lively dinner, networking opportunity and panel discussion of predictions for next year in technology. It’s on Wednesday, Dec. 2 at the Computer History Museum, and it draws 300 people and dozens of top tech PR agencies and corporate PR departments.

This year, we’ve added two new wrinkles — an opening stand-up comedy monologue by name-brand comic Will Durst, and a “Student Silent Auction” in which top PR students from San Jose State are auctioning themselves off [proceeds to their school's PR program] to be PR interns at agencies or companies.

As my title implies, I think this is turning into the top must-attend event in PR on the West Coast, assuming you have a business interest in technology [and these days, who doesn't?]. It’s a see-and-be-seen opportunity for the tech PR community, which is especially valuable in this Twittering/Facebooking/email world of impersonal communications.

Here’s the list of tech media speakers, followed by a list of the companies who have already signed up to sponsor this event and host tables. For more information, go to the PRSA Silicon Valley page or the registration page.

• Ben Worthen, Wall Street Journal & Digits
• Brad Stone, New York Times & Bits Blog
• Byron Acohido, USA Today, LastWatchDog
• Connie Guglielmo, Bloomberg News
• Matt Marshall, VentureBeat & DEMO
• Om Malik, GigaOM
• Steven Levy, WIRED
• Jim Goldman, CNBC (moderator)
• Duffy Jennings, SFGate (emcee)

Sponsors so far:

Premier Event Sponsor:

• Yahoo

Platinum:

• Microsoft
• SAP

Gold:

• Blanc & Otus
• Market Wire
• Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide
• Trainer Communications
• Weber Shandwick

Bronze:

• Access Communications
• A&R Edelman
• Brunswick
• Dell
• Eastwick
• Fleishman-Hillard
• BusinessWire
• SanDisk
• Voce
• Waggener Edstrom