Our family had a pretty wild experience this weekend. Being in the PR business, I try to keep an
ear to the ground as far as what stories the news media are working on. My colleague Lisa alerted me that The CBS Early Show was looking for a family to test out a new mobile application for an exclusive story they were pursuing.
I am normally camera shy, and so is my wife, but my two teen daughters are constantly wondering how their dad’s somewhat baffling profession can somehow get them on TV. To my wife’s chagrin (and daughters’ delight), I volunteered us for the story.
This resulted in the CBS team – including CBS News Contributor Natali Del Conte, and producers Matt and Joy coming to our house on Saturday and spending lots of time with us. They were an extremely professional crew, and a pleasure to work with.
Unforeseen glitches occurred when Google ran into problems (see the InformationWeek story). Also, cell phone coverage is spotty in our area, particularly for T Mobile, the network for the Android pones they equipped us with. This made it a little harder to capture scenes in which we were using the phones and application – a location-based service called Latitude that combines Google maps and cell technology to help friends and families keep tabs on one another. Also, the scarcity of cell towers in our area made it a bit harder to pinpoint our specific locations because the technology relies on triangulation (the advantage, on the other hand, is that you do not need special GPS-equipped phones).
They left us with the phones, and video cameras to record our experiences. When it turned out they needed more footage, Joy gamely came out to our house at 4:45AM on Monday morning to capture a morning-in-the-life (my wife is up and out of the house very early) on camera. Joy then proceeded to follow me onto my Metro North train and film my morning commute, which was bit surreal.
They say in the PR profession that you are not the story, we generally labor away behind the scenes. Having said that, being part of this story was a great learning experience for me. From a tech PR perspective, I learned more about CNET’s integration with CBS news (Natali is also host of Loaded on CNET TV), and how a piece like this gets produced. I got a chance to meet Natali and the others (I joked with them that they would never get rid of me now).
We had the opportunity to work with a pretty cool application, and had great fun with the Android, a super phone. And it was a blast for the entire family, to be on a major network news show.
Click here (inactive) to view the finished piece, which ran this morning
