The Luminaria Media Blog

Hello, everyone. It’s been a crazy couple of months around here. Those of you following me on Twitter and Facebook know that I’ve been keeping relatively active in Social Media land, but clearly not here on the blog.

Part of it has to do a whole lot of busy, which is what I like to be. Some great new clients have boarded — including the National Trauma Institute, dedicated to the funding and development of research addressing trauma injury in the United States, and Sugar Mama’s Bakeshop, the best dessert bakeshop in Austin, largely responsible for the completely awesome Cupcake Renaissance we’re experiencing in Austin. Also, my longtime client, the National Hispanic Institute, celebrates 30 years of developing Latino leadership this year with a full slate of summer programs.

Part of it also has to do with deciding what to do with the blog’s direction. Blogs are especially fascinating to me when you’re able to witness them evolving. Initially, I’d intended for this blog to be observations about PR and the media as a PR practitioner. I still think that’s valuable — but I want to make sure it’s rooted more in my day-to-day and week-to-week than the esoteric. Plenty of PR blogs address questions like “Is the press release still valuable?” (A: Yes, as a backgrounder to support the direct contact you’re making with a media person), but not enough answer tougher, of-the-moment questions like “What do I do about that client who owes me $2,000?”

So my intention is this — soon, every Friday (and whenever else the mood strikes me), once I’m through what is turning out to be a very busy summer, you’ll see insights about what I learned or what was reinforced for me during the week.

This week, it was about working beyond the 9-to-5 work day window. I’ll do that for my clients. There’s a point at which I want to unplug from the work day, of course, but sometimes, 9-to-5 isn’t enough to contain everything that’s happening.

This week, I had an author through on a leg of his book tour, and one bookstore called after his reading Tuesday night with questions about whether he’d left behind too many books. It was worth it to hear the event coordinator declare her and her co-workers “groupies” (their choice of words!) based on the reading. This morning, I met that client outside my office before 8 a.m. with promo materials for a future date before he drove nine hours to another tour stop. President Obama gave a speech in Cairo of great import to another client, and did so at 5 in the morning our time. Last night, I interviewed several members of an organization I work for to prep for an article I’m writing for the group’s publication — and the only time we could all get together was 7 at night. It’s part of doing PR in 2009, and I’m fine with that, though I suspect that I owe my kids a trip to the zoo to make up for it.