Now we can begin our holiday shopping!

The final Sugarloaf Craft Festival of the season was this past weekend in Chantilly, Virginia. Lines of eager shoppers extended out the door to get into the show, and once inside, they were buying! Local media seemed to be buying it too, especially the online outlets important to local craft lovers. Check out these features on the Kingstowne Patch site and DC Metro Mom blog. And an even better holiday present was that attendance was up 20% over last year!

Also this past weekend, we concluded the holiday events we coordinated around the country for one of our financial clients. We were in Frederick, Maryland, to see the Kris Kringle Procession - and the thousands of residents at the event.

Today feels a little like the day after Christmas. And we got everything we asked for.

The holidays began at Himmelrich PR this past weekend; we promoted three holiday kick-off events and are celebrating their success.

Oklahoma City welcomed the season with the lighting of its Bricktown Canal Lights on Saturday night. Hundreds of Oklahomans enjoyed water taxi rides, refreshments, live music, Santa on a Segway, and the official switching-on of the lights along the mile-long canal in downtown OKC. We were there coordinating our client’s title sponsorship. The only drawback to the event was that the fleece jackets we ordered for their employees went unused – no one anticipated 80 degree weather in November.

The fleece jackets did come in handy in Columbia, South Carolina, at Saturday’s opening of Santa’s Village at the Riverbanks Zoo and Garden. We arranged our client’s sponsorship of the main attraction here, too, (although Santa had to use his own two feet to greet the hundreds of kids at this event).

It wasn’t just the start of the holiday season for us, but also for more than 20,000 craft-lovers who attended the Sugarloaf Crafts Festival (our client) in Gaithersburg, Maryland. With holiday lists in hand and noticing scads of media mentions, attendance was up 10% over last year… a wonderful start to the holiday season.

We’re back to boating – and in a big way.

Himmelrich PR has been retained by the National Marine Manufacturers Association to handle media relations and social media for three boat shows this coming winter. We have promoted the Baltimore Boat Show for many years, and last year, handled the TV for two other shows - but this year, we are charting the media course for the Progressive Insurance Baltimore Boat Show, the Progressive Insurance Atlantic City Boat Show, and the Progressive Insurance New England Boat Show.

Full steam ahead!

This time of year, our weekends are as busy as our weekdays, what with our clients’ events and festivals. Take this weekend, for example.

The Sugarloaf Crafts Festival is in Gaithersburg, Maryland, with more than 250 artists displaying and selling their handmade creations. Sugarloaf (and Himmelrich PR) is expecting a great crowd, due in part to media coverage including features in the Washington Post, the Gazette newspapers, lots of coverage by Patch websites, and a live paper-making demonstration on WJLA-TV.

We had an early morning at the Maryland Home and Garden Show as we helped WBAL-TV and Fox 45 film their segments about the weekend show. There are more than 300 exhibitors offering everything you could want for getting a home ready for winter - through Sunday at the Maryland State Fairgrounds in Timonium.

The Maryland Science Center is hosting the annual conference of the Association of Science and Technology Centers - 2,000 museum professionals gathered in Baltimore for four days of seminars, speakers, and socializing. The highlight of the conference so far has been the full-size model of the Webb Space Telescope, as reported by the Baltimore Sun, the Daily Record, and dozens of national and international media outlets.

We are ready for the weekend.

This past weekend, Sugarloaf Crafts Festivals kicked off its Fall season of shows - and we kicked off our season of promoting 14 shows and events in nine markets over the next nine weeks.

We are all off to a great start. Attendance at last weekend’s craft show in Timonium was up 20% over last year and set records for artist sales. On Friday, Jennifer Franciotti of WBAL stopped by the Festival to check out the latest fashion accessories and gourmet food, WJZ’s Mike Schuh had hands on fun on Saturday morning, and WBFF-TV spent a morning meeting artists.

After seeing the packed booths, happy exhibitors and eager visitors, we are excited for the rest of the season. See you in New Jersey… and Philadelphia… and Dayton… and Oklahoma City…

Ahhhh…..there is nothing like live TV in the morning. Although some would call us crazy for enjoying a 3:00 am wake-up call, here are the top reasons we love to do morning TV.

1) The roads are empty at 4:00 am. Perfect for setting records on home-to-work drive times.
2) We get to watch the sun rise.
3) Spending five straight hours with camera people, clients, and on-air talent is not just a good way to build relationships—it’s fun!
4) We are the first to get coffee when Dunkin Donuts opens.
5) If we can’t fit everything we want to say into the 5 o’clock hour, we can say it in the 6 o’clock hour.
6) We are the first ones to make the switch to “good morning” tweets in our Twitter feeds.
7) Most importantly, morning TV is a great way to get our client messages out to the public.

This morning, the WBFF morning crew camped out at the Maryland Science Center observatory to talk about NASA’s Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite falling to earth. Jim O’Leary, Maryland Science Center space expert, discussed where, when, and how the satellite will return to earth after 20 years of orbit. We loved setting up these eight live segments and we loved being there—for all of the reasons listed above.

This has been one of those weeks that reminds us of who we are – and how we are. Here are some reasons why, and what we believe it says about us.

Happy to be Here: Summer vacations are over. Kids are back in school (and the traffic is back, too.) And we are all genuinely happy to be back in the office – together. We believe that good people do good PR. We like what we do, and we like doing it together.

Back to School: Two of us returned to class – one to complete a master’s degree and the other to start earning one. We believe in smart people doing PR, and we always want to be smarter.

Cancellation Notice: One of our clients asked us not to renew his media monitoring contract. His reason: “My goal isn’t a book of clips. It’s people through the door and sales. If you are generating enough media coverage and buzz, then the results will be in the attendance, and you won’t need to provide it with clips. You don’t need to show me the clips – I see the sales.” We believe what blogger Rebecca Denison wrote this week - “the granularity of your metrics and measures should depend entirely on your goals.”

Coming Soon: We received a pretty nice email on a rainy Friday afternoon from a soon-to-be-client: “Himmelrich is our PR firm of choice for our upcoming shows.” We believe she made the right choice.

A Friday afternoon in late August… always a quiet time. Few phone calls, not many people around, a good time to catch-up and wind down. All is calm.

This Friday afternoon in late-August really epitomizes the proverbial “calm before the storm.” Despite what it now looks like outside our window (the above photo) the forecast calls for Hurricane Irene to hit Maryland sometime on Sunday, resulting in power outages, flooding, and a whole lot of inconvenience for a whole lot of people. We may be a little put out – after all, local TV has made our building a media star because our parking lot is frequently flooded during storms. (The building’s notoriety is also helped by its proximity to three TV stations; to paraphrase Tina Fey paraphrasing Sarah Palin, we can see them from our office (shown in the above photo).

As we prepare for the storm, we are reminded of how weather events impact public events – and public relations people. The first craft show we promoted was cancelled the morning of the first day because of a tropical storm. In our nine years of working with the Baltimore Boat Show, there have been three major snowstorms during the winter event. Last year, we handled media for two woodworking shows held during blizzards.

Here’s hoping that Monday morning is as calm as Friday afternoon.

In directing Twitter followers to his blog post about this afternoon’s earthquake on the east coast, former Washington Post columnist Rob Pegaroro tweeted: “Being a writer means you’re compelled to post your take on any epic distraction you may experience.” Because we are PR people, we are also writers. So here’s our post about this afternoon’s epic distraction.

This afternoon seemed like a Snow Day in Baltimore. After the jolt at 1:50, most people around town (and from what we could tell from Twitter and Facebook – people everywhere) were preoccupied. We too were glued to news on our computer screens and on TV. The parking lot of our building was pretty empty by 4:30, and not a lot of emails or phone calls were coming in.

But we were working. When you represent a science museum, you have access to experts who know a thing or two about earthquakes. So we spent a good part of the afternoon making the staff at the Maryland Science Center available to the media. We arranged for live shots from the museum, and relayed images of the Science Center’s Seismic monitor. We set up coverage from Science on a Sphere, which displays live satellite images on a 6’ illuminated orb.

All in a day’s work – on a day when there is an earthquake.

This summer, the Maryland Science Center has been busy

—and so have we. We’ve promoted lasers and rock-and-roll; bubbles, bangs, and booms; cooking; and crazy experiments. It hasn’t only been food fans, laser lovers, eager experimenters, and traveling tourists who have been rushing to the Inner Harbor hot-spot

—a multitude of media have managed to meander over to see what the ballyhoo was all about.

Baltimore Sun explored the Fun with (irresponsible) Science, took shots of bubbles and the culprits behind their popping at Bubble Days, and snapped photos of a chef demo in action for the Baltimore Diner blog. WBAL-TV got the inside scoop on all things irresponsible

—like exploding ping pong balls and burning bubbles.

The Davis Planetarium’s Laser Rock shows were selected as a WBFF-TV Hometown Hotspot, with another day devoted to the blockbuster exhibit, Summer of Irresponsible Science. The Washington Post featured the Summer of Irresponsible Science in its Kid’s Post, and the Baltimore Business Journal reported on the great attendance.

Ahhh… summer. Success.