SEPTEMBER IS CHILDHOOD CANCER AWARENESS MONTH!

Good Morning:

Yesterday was my day off and I spent a large portion of it with follow-up calls to Fed Ex letters I shipped over the past week to some very important people who are in a unique position to help us with "A Concert for Trevor". The results are encouraging and in the days ahead, I look forward to sharing that information with you!

For almost 20 years, I have been a broadcast journalist. Before I entered the world of Radio and Television, I served on a non-profit board for Lupus Awareness. I was initially approached to fill in for "just a few weeks" after a Chairwoman of Public Relations resigned during a very stormy board meeting. At the time, I was dating a young woman who owned her own fashion accessories design business. She also was a Lupus patient, and I witnessed what the disease was doing to her life. While we stopped dating and chose to remain friends, I remained on the board and wound up taking (or dragging, in some cases) a medical doctor who was a specialist in rheumatology on over 40 radio and television public affairs programs. After we completed taping each segment, I was encouraged by our host or producer to pursue a career in the industry with my bass baritone voice and so-called gift of gab. While that was a tremendous compliment, I was busy paying attention to something else I noticed: the sheer power of the the spoken word on radio, and the visual image playing out on television screens reaching hundreds of thousands of people, usually on a Sunday morning. This was in Dallas, Texas--a market with almost 4 million people (when I last lived there in 2003) combining the populations of Dallas and Fort Worth (considered by Nielsen and Arbitron rating companies as one market--"Dallas/Ft. Worth", a Number 5 market among the 212 surveyed). I tried to Imagine how many people were brushing their teeth with our program playing over the radio in a nearby room, how many were having their breakfast and coffee dressed in their pajamas, or otherwise enjoying a lazy morning reading the newspaper while our broadcast ran in the background or on the television set as they glanced up from the Sunday Comics every now and then? I was new to the business and had marketing and promotion experience, but absolutely no way of measuring just how many people were really listening to our appearances. When the donations started rolling into our local non-profit chapter, I started to get a clearer picture!

Today, Blogging has suffered a slight fall off to more fun and social media alternatives such as Facebook or My Space. But as a guy who likes to hang in for the long-term, I know that Blogger has already taken away market share from newspapers. I have a friend of mine who travels weekly to newspapers across the country as a consultant, and she can tell you how many cities still have dual newspapers (less than a handful)--or worse, how many newspapers are shutting down--a fact that bothers me. At CNN and other news networks, many news anchors have their own BLOG Pages and (trust me) this electronic medium will ultimately rebound and see a resurgence. There have been other changes too. This time around, I have business metrics (hard numbers) to back up my observation. Let's look at just the past 90 Days on this site for example.

• In June, 19,448 people visited my Blog site (I hope they were also encouraged to take more than a casual look at my full website this Blog is a component of).
• In July, 17,628 people stopped by (with vacations in full swing).
  
• In August, with vacations continuing on East Coast beaches from the Carolina's to St. Thomas, 18,183 people managed to visit me. This brings me to a question:
  

Have you ever been to a sports stadium that was half-full? Well, these numbers will fill up almost half of any large sports stadium in the United States, so these are serious numbers for a guy who isn't currently on an ABC, CBS or NBC affiliate station at the moment. With my Website, the worldwide web--once called "the information super-highway"--is a powerful tool to communicate with others 24 hours a day/7 days a week. In fact, on my NEWS Page, I often post a "tongue-in-cheek" byline that states: "Visit my Full Website 24/7 at: www.michaelmanning.tv".

On a more serious note, September is National Childhood Cancer Awareness Month! After signing a petition here at: Cure Childhood Cancer - Raise Awareness & Funding - The Petition Site, I decided that sure, I'll post some casual Blogs about a variety of cool subjects that cross my mind. But among them will be information about brain tumors children are diagnosed with such as Glioblastomas, DIPG (Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma) and Infiltrating Astrocytomas. Why? Because children are our future and we have a responsibility to do every single thing we possibly can to "raise awareness and funding" that will lead to improved treatments and ultimately a cure for these diseases. I might as well tell you now: I have two surprise Guests who will be stopping by on "The Interview" as well. In this regard, I must tell you as I sign off. I tend to think a bit "outside the box" on many projects. This is one of them. As such, I don't view September as a sad month; I view September as a month to Celebrate the lives of brave children who deserve a voice, and a fighting chance to live a cancer-free life. To the best of my ability, I will strive to deliver that in the blog posts ahead. Thanks for stopping by and I hope your week is a good one!
Michael