You are waiting in line to order your coffee and while the six people in front of you are going through excruciatingly long orders, you happen to glance at a display next to you featuring a Bruce Springsteen collection you’d never heard of. All you need to do to own the Boss’s greatest hits is take the small credit-card-sized iTunes card to the barista and gladly hand over your $9.99, plus the cost of the latte you ordered, drive that puppy home, turn on your computer, log onto iTunes, type in a 10 digit code, download the album and sync it with your iPhone! In just seven easy steps, you can be listening to “The River” and “Pink Cadillac” and just a few hours prior, you had no idea that you even wanted to.

While it is certain your life is now more enriched, one may ask – why in the world did you go through all of those steps, when you could have just opened up iTunes from your iPhone and downloaded the album? The answer is simple. It’s for the same reason millions of people have bought magazines in grocery stores for more than fifty years, when they could get a subscription for nickels on the dollar.

Impulse zones.

You had absolutely no idea you needed Bruce Springsteen until you saw his mug on a display . . . in the impulse zone. That special place where we, as consumers, lose all of our inhibitions and simply must have whatever it is that is in that place. Magazines have been successful at this for decades; so have candy bars, gum, mints and overpriced flavored water. Impulse zones are the highest revenue generating areas of any retailer and often have sales per square foot that by far surpasses any other square foot in the store. It is also the most competitive part of a store, usually costing marketers a pretty buck to put their product there.

Marketers are increasingly trying to figure out how to reach audiences in the digital marketplace, since that is where a massive upward moving trend indicates buyers are now going. The challenge, however, is that online marketing has a tremendous amount of clutter to break through. If one is marketing a product in a brick and mortar store, they simply need to secure placement near the cash registers to improve sales velocity. Online, the cash registers are embedded with the actual product. So, apart from spending an incredible amount of advertising dollars and implementing extensive word of mouth campaigns, how does one get through the clutter online and be noticed by a potential consumer?

Impulse zones.

Online marketers need to remember that there is a real world too. And in this world, there are plenty of brick and mortar stores. Apple demonstrates this perfectly with its iTunes/Starbucks partnership. All digital marketers need do is bridge the offline world with the online world, using the impulse zone. With that strategy in place, tons of tactics pour forward: coupon codes on countertop handouts, QR codes on countertop displays, promotional giveaways referring visitors to a website, location-based social network promotions, etc.

It amounts old school marketing, but in the new world of communications. Find where your customers are and reach them offline in order to influence their behavior online.

This tweet showed up recently: “The Uni of Iowa is offering a $37K scholarship to its b-schl fr the bst tweet by a prspctive MBA student.”

Strange to see this from an academic institution… It makes the “de rigueur” misspellings that are so intrinsic to the Twitter format seem OK.

Still, if the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business wanted to break through the clutter and get attention from potential business school candidates, it certainly got what it wanted, for this tweet went viral with a whirlwind velocity. Why not? Seems an easy and quick way to vie for a full scholarship. Even business publications were all over this including Bloomberg, Business Insider and BusinessWeek blog, as well as the French publication Atlantico, albeit the latter promptly declared that this would attract mediocrity rather than motivated students.

Not necessarily.

It will also attract savvy students wishing to compete on a creative level rather than just on their background information. It also fits in very well with Tippie’s need to get more aggressive in finding students to fill their school’s full-time MBA program, considering that they only had only 307 applicants. Moreover, it keys in with the school’s admissions officers’ increased curiosity in knowing a candidate’s social media voice in addition to their academic achievements.

It’s a creative pioneering gesture to interest applicants through a medium that really belongs to that generation. But the required tweet to compete for the $37K is in addition to the regular application form and resumes, not instead of, and that seems to dull the ”newness” of it all. So, armed with all the traditional information required, except for the usual 800 to 900-word essay, just how much weight will the tweet carry when it comes to in winning the scholarship?

There is something that I do not quite get…. I am thinking of all those spelling bees that kids try so hard to win over their early years, only to have a college give permission to misspell as a lure to apply.

It’s a clever attention grabber, but a stunt none-the-less, one that does not seem to be on message for an institution of higher learning…or is it “hier lrning.”

The article in the July 5, Sunday edition of The New York Times (NYT) titled “Spinning the Web: P.R. in the Silicon Valley,” has the PR world “a-twittering” because it brought to the fore the evolutionary changes in the PR industry on the front page of the business section. How great is that…

Although the article’s focus was on PR and the Silicon Valley, its main point – that capturing attention for clients with mentions in print and on television, or even spotlights on technology Web sites and blogs is no longer enough, cuts across the PR industry.  Accordingly, the PR professional now needs to also “court influential voices on the social Web to endorse new companies, Web sites or gadgets — a transformation that analysts and practitioners say is likely to permanently change the role of P.R. in the business world, and particularly in Silicon Valley.”

Some say, a transformation.  I see it as a “changing of the guards.”  PR has always been about finding the influencer, the person, entity or even the public at large — that can shape the way a company or its news is heard and perceived.  So now the players have changed, and with it, the “tools of the trade” as to how to reach the influencers, but the very premise of PR has not.

Look, it’s not new that with the advent of “citizen journalism,” the lines have blurred between journalists and everyone else.  Nor is it new that the metrics of calculating the number of impressions an article gets, either by estimating a publication’s circulation, article’s column inches or pass-along rate, are now more and more calculated by the number of followers twitters may have tweeted, or the number of re-tweets or clicks on links, as well as traffic from Facebook and other social networks.

The NYT article focused on a publicist whose main purpose as she first set out to be a publicist, was to develop one-on-one relationships with “hundreds of bloggers, writers, pundits and then boasted that her extensive list of “friends” who are on her “who’s who list” is the “value” she offers.

Which reminded me that PR at its core, has always been about relationships. All one has to do is look at the word itself, as in the Relations part, of Public Relations. Years ago there was the case of a PR practitioner whose sole activity was to have breakfast, lunch and dinner six days a week with prospects or clients during which he opened up his then “Rolodex” and became the facilitator for needed connections.  That too was about relationships.

The players and processes have changed and the means with which to spread the word, but building and maintaining a network of contacts, be they traditional media, new media, talent agents, bloggers, twitters, etc. has never been disputed as to its value for clients.

Relationships matter, but content is always “King.”  Relationships should be viewed as a starting point that eases the path for a story to be heard.  But it is always about the story, how it is told to what influencers or decision makers, how it gets spun or socialized and within what context it is presented and viewed. Only then can the relationship hold up and do its part.

The more that changes, the more remains the same…