In a press release this morning, The National Cancer Institute has awarded a $55.4 million, multiple-year contract to Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center to become the nation’s sole operator of its Cancer Information Service Contact Center.

Since Fred Hutchinson is located in Seattle, it looks like a few more jobs will be added to the local economy with the contract win.

The NCI, the nation’s lead agency for cancer research, established the CIS in 1975 to educate people about cancer prevention, risk factors, early detection, symptoms, diagnosis, treatment, and research. The CIS is an essential part of NCI’s cancer prevention and control efforts.
“We are the voice of the National Cancer Institute,” said Dawn Sittauer, Seattle CIS contact center manager. View the full press release

Search just got a jolt as Microsoft and Yahoo pull together in a 10 year deal to combine search efforts. Yahoo reported that with the Microsoft’s success with Bing, the two of them will work to divert ad revenue from Google.

Yahoo Inc. shares plunged $2.08, or 12 percent, to $15.14 as investors expressed disappointment over the absence of an immediate windfall. Microsoft Corp. shares gained 33 cents to $23.80 while Google Inc. shares shed $3.61 to $436.24.

Read the article on Yahoo’s Tech site

With a mix of PR software tools available now as SaaS, there are lots of choices available to help make media relations easier. I’ve been evaluating a few of them over the last few months to determine what best fits the needs of the small technology company that I’m working for. Ultimately I ended up deciding to go with Vocus as our PR software solution and I’m pretty happy with our decision. It wasn’t the cheapest solution but it has a good user interface, robust database, has good customer support and the ability to track projects, emails and social media all from within the one software application. What I didn’t expect was the awesome abilities of PRWeb as an integrated component to Vocus for distributing our press releases and media communications. The analytics are great and the SEO features and coverage we’ve received since switching has been ten times better than the prior PR release service we were using.

Here is the shortlist of the evaluations worth mentioning. Continue Reading ->

What do you do when you are faced with upper management that doesn’t understand Social Media and why it should be an important part of the marketing strategy? I stumbled across a great presentation by Chris Brogan today that pretty much sums up the question of “How to Convince Your Boss that Social Media has Value”. It’s on HubSpot and I highly recommend that you check it out. It was recorded earlier this year but is still very applicable

Interesting trends on email marketing in new report by Mailer Mailer

http://imagehosting.mailermailer.com/email-marketing-metrics-2008h2.pdf