Social Marketing Expert Story idea. Link in with restaurants, churches, local politicians, and promote on social media / traditional media.

Celebrate Family Day Monday, Sept 28, 2009 - A Day to Eat Dinner with Your Children TM is a national movement to inform parents that the parental engagement fostered during frequent family dinners is an effective tool to help keep America’s kids substance free. Family Day reminds parents that  Dinner Makes A Difference!

From 2003 to 2008 research by The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University has consistently found that children who have frequent family dinners are less likely to use marijuana, tobacco and drink alcohol.

CASA research reveals that compared to children who have frequent family dinners (five or more per week), children who have infrequent family dinners (less than three per week) are two and a half times likelier to have used marijuana and tobacco, and one and a half times likelier to have drunk alcohol.

“Parents who make every day Family Day are taking a positive step toward raising children who are emotionally and physically healthy, academically successful, and drug and alcohol free,” said Kathleen Ferrigno, CASA’s Dir. of Marketing.

“Family dinners do make a difference. America’s drug problem is not going to be solved in courtrooms or legislative hearing rooms by judges and politicians. It will be solved in living rooms and dining rooms and across kitchen tables – by parents and families,” said Califano. “It has less to do with the food on the plate and more to do with what is happening at the table. Gathering each night lets children know that their parents are available to them and it serves as a simple and powerful way to foster an excellent parent/child relationship.”

http://casafamilyday.org/familyday/

For those of you who don’t know, Chris Anderson, author of the acclaimed book The Long Tail, is also the editor of Wired Magazine. Like so many journalists (and increasingly these days, bloggers) Chris is inundated with email pitches from PR folks, many of which are completely off target.

It got to the point where he decided to take a very public stand on the matter, writing this post on October 29th, 2007,

I’ve had it… Lazy flacks send press releases to the Editor in Chief of Wired because they can’t be bothered to find out who on my staff, if anyone, might actually be interested in what they’re pitching. So fair warning: I only want two kinds of email: those from people I know, and those from people who have taken the time to find out what I’m interested in and composed a note meant to appeal to that. Everything else gets banned on first abuse.

He then published, in their entirety, the email addresses of offenders from the previous month.

What have the consequences been? Well, the post generated a lot of discussion and garnered dozens and dozens of comments, negative and positive, some from former staffers lamenting the fact that, “Everyone in the world aims their spam guns at Wired and the volley is deafening.” The consequence for PR folk has been that it has become incredibly difficult to get placement in Wired; the pipeline just got a whole lot smaller, and fear of being banned has created a chill.

Since throwing whatever you’ve got against the wall and hoping some of it will stick is not longer an option, what are the other opportunities to get the attention of writers and editors at one of the most influential publications in the world?

How about letting them pull the content they want from you?

On April 18th, Wired’s Autopia section ran a story called “Econoboxes Come Roaring Back With Flair”, noting that,

The Ford Fiesta (photo after the jump), which has been kicking around Europe for more than 30 years, gets a redesign based on the Verve concept car. At long last, it will be coming to North American in 2010.

The article used assets, information and linked to the Ford Fiesta SMPR.

Since we can safely assume that the writers and editors of Autopia have figured out the whole RSS thing, they will be automatically notified of updates to the Fiesta SMPR, and that when something is of interest to them, they will run a story on it.