Never a dull moment for our Analyst Relations team, even during the dog days of summer. Following a series of successful AR seminars in London, we are hosting the next one in New York, designed for the East coast’s large community of financial technology vendors.

Taking place Thursday, August 6, at the Warwick Hotel in New York City, the breakfast seminar is focused on helping technology vendors capitalize on analyst relations. The seminar will share insight from the industry’s best and brightest on developing a winning analyst relations program which will help you stand apart from the competition.

We’ve got some experienced practitioners along to give you the inside track, including David Potterton, vice president of global research for Financial Insights and George Ravich, EVP and chief marketing officer for Fundtech. From our side, Tinne Teugels and Mark Provost, will moderate the event. Mark will lead a session highlighting key elements for a successful analyst relations program.

If you want to attend drop me a mail.

How much are we loving our NYC colleagues right now?

Last night, Metia’s New York office scooped the award for most effective B2B communications campaign in the Tri-State Region at the 2009 PRSA Big Apple Awards with our client GlobeOp .These awards run by the New York Chapter of the largest professional organization for public relations practitioners in the US, have been running for some 22 years and this year they received a record number of entries, so we are just chuffed to come out on top.

Our award winning campaign had all the components of what makes us rock: our passion to get deep into the subject matter, knowing what an industry’s hot topics are and how to play them to our client’s advantage, a creative approach to pitching complex ideas to the media, an energized team with the tenacity to secure top interviews, and of course, a fantastic client.

The end result was a great set of performance metrics: 456 pieces of coverage, 165% above target, from 83 media briefings, 184% above target, including coverage in the NYT, WSJ, IHT, FT, Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, Dow Jones, et al.

What better start for a well-earned Memorial Day weekend?

I saw this list of the 50 best publicity stunts collected by consumer agency Taylor Herring and had to share it.

While, the list doesn’t completely validate the professional discipline of PR – especially for those of us working at the B2B end of it – it does demonstrate that, when correctly applied within a campaign, a little creativity can have dramatic results.

Since I started off my working life sitting in a glass cubicle wrapping presents in Harrods, my personal favourite is the gift-wrapped helicopter. Fortunately that wasn’t on my shift, the worst I ever had was to wrap a bicycle. Seven of them actually, and it took till midnight. Another customer did once demand I wrap a red rose along with a four foot long eel, which he had brought with him in his overcoat. He was more than a little strange and distinctly smelly, so security removed him.

So if you want to be amazing, first make sure you don’t have any eels in your pockets, then inspire your agency to be creative and they just might be able to sort it for you.

We don’t really have a, down-the-pub-on-a-Friday-afternoon, type of culture; we’d rather keep on trucking and leave for the weekend with a clean conscience and a clean desk.

But this Friday, even for us, was horribly frenetic with just about all of us sporting please-don’t-talk-to-me auras: interns assembling and re-assembling press packs; account execs printing schedules with a flourish only to bin them ten minutes later; AR and PR account managers intent on taking multi-tasking to new levels, seemingly on several calls at once, emailing and IMing all at the same time; harried-looking event planners scuttled around with lengthy guest lists, muttering darkly about being 25% over capacity already; while account directors looked increasingly dismayed at their calendars for the following week and the number of back-to-back briefings wedged in them. As for me, my own concerns cantered around my new smart phone the current embodiment of a contradiction in terms and seemingly designed to thwart me on every level. Owl post would be a definite upgrade. Conversations were terse and the regular flurries of expletives remained unremarked, while Haribos and Americanos were being consumed at the optimum ulcer-inducing capacity.

So what’s all the fuss about?

I’ve been crowdsourced!

Sadly this doesn’t involve leaping off the main stage to be held aloft by the Glastonbury faithful. Indeed, I feel that moment may have passed me by. But it did involve a cute campaign and an unscheduled retro chocolate purchase.

So there I am tapping away on the laptop when a very simple pop-up pops up with a choice of six voting buttons and asks, ‘Which Revel will you vote out?’ Now, while I’m not that clear on the relative merits of our main political parties and a fair few religious faiths, I do have an instant opinion on which lack-lustre flavour should be summarily evicted.

As soon as I’d voted, the pop-up disappeared. No one demanded my details, my socio-demographics or to know how I’d heard about them. And no one wanted me to create a password that was a mixture of letters and numbers and to type it in twice. Those nice people at Mars just wanted to hear which chocolate I wanted out and I was happy to tell them. That’s crowdsourcing.

No doubt the results will provide the next installment of the print and TV campaign. Then it will be back online to vote for a new flavour to replace the hapless evictee with the results of that survey be pumped back into offline vehicles again. And at that point I’m just going to have to buy a bloody bag because I’m engaged now, I have a stake in this, and I need to have a view on the new flavour on the block. Clever.

I’m explaining all this to Lynne, my very world-weary and delightfully cynical friend, as we queue for the flicks. But as we head over to the popcorn, she stops and stares ruefully at the sweetie stall before saying, “But what if orange really is evicted. This might be our last ever chance…”

As for rock-and-roll moments, I may never have got to crowd surf, but last week, as I finally extracted myself from a rather messy team karaoke session, I did get to say, ‘My name’s Sam Howard. Goodnight!’

That is until the genius that is SWIFT decided to bring Sibos forward to mid September.

Now, if you are into financial transaction and payments technology, it’s unquestionably one of the biggest and most prestigious events in the calendar, but Sibos is eye-wateringly pricey to exhibit and quite often the dearest line item by a mile in any marketing budget. So if you’re going to do it, you need to extract maximum value from it, just going because all your competitors go, surely can’t still be the only validation you need, even the aim of ‘creating awareness’ seems a bit fuzzy to me. If you are exhibiting at Sibos, shouldn’t it be with the concept of contributing to the payments debate, helping to set the agenda for 2009 and initiating a dialogue that ultimately leads to sales?

This will be our twentieth Sibos, and  we’re representing 14 clients, with a view to creating one-to-one appointments with key analysts, global trade & regional press and also, most importantly, setting up one-to-one sales appointments with their prospects.

Which is great. No, it is really. It just means that, since several of these campaigns need a good six weeks to set up, we are up and running already.

And that’s my point, running, in August? That must be a contradiction in terms, aren’t I liable to spill my drink?