Placement: Meet the Geek of the Week

This blog is (mostly) about my experience in marketing communications and PR. My goal with MarCommMan.com is to provide the reader a glimpse behind the marcomm curtain by revealing some of the tricks of the trade, while having a bit of fun along the way.

I’ve got a quick one for today – good PR is about people. Maybe that’s too obvious an observation. After all the “P” in PR stands for public, and the public is made up of people. The difference is that the public is a vague, anonymous mass while people are individuals. People are funny and interesting. You can form an emotional relationship with people. Facts and statistics have their place when you are trying to get your message across, but a good people story is engaging to read, and therefore often more effective.

Which brings us to the Geek of the Week. GeekWire’s “Geek of the Week” column is one of the site’s most popular standing features — spotlighting the geekiest characters of the Seattle region in profiles that are informative, entertaining, and inspiring. GeekWire.com reaches millions of readers with over half a million unique visitors per month and well over 30,000 followers on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

This week’s Geek of the Week is my friend Kevin Hall, CEO and Founder of Snackdish, a social TV and movie application. (Update: Snackdish closed shop in 2018.) I wrote about Snackdish last month in my Cracking the Second Screen post. It was an insightful look at the current state of social TV, if I must say so myself. But it isn’t as engaging as reading a bit about the geek who’s building this new service. Take a look at Kevin and the other people profiled. It’s fun and addictive reading.