A new Miami-based company, MyGallons.com is offering consumers the chance to purchase gasoline at current prices and then fill up later when prices will be inevitably higher.

MyGallons offers two annual membership plans ranging in price from $29.95 to $39.95. Members can access their accounts by visiting the MyGallons Web site to check how much they are saving, transaction history, balance, and pay for additional gas to add to their account.

Customers will be contacted via email and text message when their balances are getting close to zero, so they can add gallons to their account.

Members will receive a MyGallons card after registering on the Web site and opening an account. The card can be swiped at the pump just like a debit card.

The price per gallon at the time of purchase is based on the average gas price in the zip code of a members billing address. MyGallons says its service is accepted at 95 percent of gas stations nationwide.

"By allowing consumers to pay for quantities of gas at current prices, MyGallons provides them with a solution to cope with gasoline price increases," said Steven Verona, Founder and CEO of MyGallons.

58,000 gallons of oil were released into San Francisco Bay, and only around 12,000 gallons have been contained, according to CNN.  Google comes into the matter with a post on the LatLong blog; James DeBoer writes, “The San Francisco Chronicle’s map provides numerous pictures of the slick and cleanup.  The KCBS map also shows areas affected and roughly how far the oil has travelled.”

Of course, that announcement amounts to a relatively minor role; it’s the users of Google’s software that are doing the heavy lifting.  The search giant is probably proud of this, though, since it means that things are moving forward without money and a PR machine behind them.

Google Maps and Google Earth have now been used to cover fires, floods, and a bridge collapse (in addition to the oil spill).  Various news programs employ the software on what seems like a daily basis, as well.  Google’s not omnipresent quite yet, but it’s definitely getting there.

Attention, executives at wire services and industry magazines, before you jump into the comments section here, believe that I fully acknowledge your good intentions. However, perhaps your excitement and enthusiasm may have clouded your judgment and inadvertently encouraged the infamous PR spin to shape your announcements and articles, which ultimately added more weight to the designer luggage that PR, as an industry, is forced to lug around.

Back to my point…

The conversations still continue in the blogosphere, which is an exciting representation that the PR industry is participating more each day.

This is why as much as we’ve discussed Social Media in the past, there are new people joining the discussion every day looking to learn and hoping to engage. We can’t talk about how to improve PR enough, especially as the industry attempts to keep up with the rapidly changing landscape of influencers and communications tools.

Remember, PR suffers from the lack of good PR. And there are several smart people out there who view Social Media as an opportunity to reinvigorate PR as a rightful resident in the royal court of marketing.

There have been several great posts out there discussing the MarketWire/PRNN deal, and not only what it means to Social Media and PR, but also analyzing the distribution of the news itself as a case study in understanding the differences between how Social Media and Traditional PR can work together.

One of the more common reactions out there has been that we’re leading a charge that calls for the death of the press release as well as the wire services.

First, let me be clear. I’ve said all along that wire services have a place in the PR arsenal of broadcasting news and SEO, especially as the Web becomes the dominant source of information in our daily lives. I am simply stating that in the realm of Social Media, we examine other ways of getting our news in front of people in order to spark meaningful conversations across the Web and expand the overall reach of company news and information.

No one is calling for the death of the press release per se, we are calling for the end to the bull shit – honestly, cut the hyperbole, the corporate speak, and the messaging pyramid from the dialogue. Wire services aside, it’s the PR people that are pumping this stuff like toxic waste hoping to get out there over the wire and end up miraculously on the desk of the lead WSJ reporter. We all know things don’t work that way.

So without getting into the debate about Social Media and wire services, let’s fix traditional media before we start advertising new ways for PR people to package the same old crap in a new way.

No wire service ensures that messages are compelling or that they will be widely heard. They do, however, provide a channel for the news to reach communities and influencers, but there is a proactive step required of people in order to find the information. In most cases, they have to be looking for something that matters to them, whether it’s Key words. Tags. Referrals.

Don’t get me wrong.

Wire services do work in different, yet still valuable ways. But let’s be clear, it’s up to PR to be intelligent about how to make them most effective.

My only cause here is to ensure that Social Media doesn’t end up as polluted as the majority of the traditional media infrastructure. Remember, this entire “Social Media meets PR” revolution was sparked by journalists demanding a change, demanding improvement…not by PR people or wire services.

See, I’m of the full belief that traditional media can complement social media. But they each require a completely different approach and mindset.

Think about it.

This conversation continues to take place across the web and is still evolving through the comment sections of every post. That’s why the Social Media Release should be based on a social platform in order to complement its traditional counterpart.

The traditional release about the PRNN acquisition could be covered by PRWeek and Bulldog and the SMR can be read and discussed in the blogosphere and in social networks, thus reaching the right targets and continuing the conversation – directly.

What if we viewed my original post on the acquisition (just a bit more focused on the deal and its relevance and hosted on a formal company news platform) as a representation of the kind of SMR I’m talking about?

Blogging platforms, thus far, are proving to be one of the most effective social tools for sparking and tracking online conversations.

Comments

The doubling of gas prices over the past few weeks has people angry about seeing otherwise disposable income shift from their pockets to their gas tanks. Yet every other car on the road appears bigger than the average post-World War II starter home.

If people are concerned about gas prices, or alternative vehicles like hybrids, Hitwise analyst LeeAnn Prescott isn’t seeing it:

When prices first spiked in after Hurricane Katrina in September 2005, people went online to find the cheapest gas stations in the area and find out more about fuel economy, at sites like GasBuddy.com and FuelEconomy.gov. Now it seems inevitable – saving a dollar or two doesn’t seem worth the cost of driving a few extra miles.

The oil companies and the traders who have been gleefully bidding up oil prices over the past month have the upper hand. It’s their world, and we’d better be happy just to drive in it.

We must be pretty happy. Searches for ‘gas prices’ and ‘hybrid cars’ for the week ending May 12, 2007 were respectively 92% and 82% lower than it was during the week ending September 3, 2005, according to Prescott.

If the conspiracy theorists can be believed, we’ll see gas prices fall before the next Presidential and Congressional elections. OpenSecrets can tell you more about who’s enjoying oil & gas money ahead of those elections, in case anyone was wondering why America doesn’t have an intelligent energy plan yet.

Conducted by Gelb Consulting Group in February of this year, The Microsoft High-Performance Computing Oil and Gas Industry Survey indicates that providing geoscientists with the latest and greatest in computing technology could increase overall oil and gas production.

Gelb tallied results from over 100 oil and gas industry experts from around the world. Findings of significant mention from the study include:

·    Eighty-one percent report that more ready access to high-performance computing capability could increase oil and gas production.

·    Eighty-six percent have computing power at their deskside, and 69 percent prefer computing power at their desktops.

·    Sixty-one percent believe that having the capability to run additional tasks and iterations will reduce project risk.

·    Fifty-six percent prefer to schedule their own jobs to a technical computing or HPC cluster rather than refer to a cluster administrator to manage the job queue.

·    Forty-seven percent say their computing-intensive scientific applications require multiple iterations.

·    Twenty-five percent of computing-intensive scientific applications still take from overnight to more than a week to run.

“Since the mid-1990s, the upstream oil and gas industry has had the goal of achieving dramatic cost savings in the area of technical computing,” said John Elmer, president of Gelb Consulting Group.

“This goal is being achieved today. For example, it used to be the case that geosciences applications managers would not let go of their UNIX machines for mission-critical applications. The tide has now turned with smart-client PCs and applications reaching a level of maturity, reliability and stability that has caused even the skeptics to trust a move to Microsoft Windows.”

“This new approach to high-performance computing doesn’t replace supercomputers in oil and gas. Instead, it makes technical computing more available to more people at a lower cost,” said John Fikany, vice president of the U.S. Manufacturing Group at Microsoft.

“By using Windows Compute Cluster Server, geoscientists are empowered to more easily access, analyze and garner deeper insights from complex data and information — ultimately getting oil and gas from the subsurface to the pump faster, more efficiently.”

Americans love to shop. They hate gas prices that make them look wistfully back at $1.80 per gallon retail. These two factors could lead to some serious sales for the online retailer with the savvy to capitalize on them.

Big names like Amazon and LL Bean will get their share of customers without too much marketing exertion. The rest of the web will have to work a little harder, though. A profitable holiday sales season can get a business through the other three quarters of a year.

A WebTrends survey of online retailers that we covered recently shows free shipping as the big promotional offer for the holidays. The big retailers will utilize that strategy. Smaller ones might take a hard look at their margins and see if it makes sense for them.

Keyword strategies and SEM initiatives with Google, Yahoo, etc should be continually reviewed and tweaked. But unless a dedicated team is in place, businesses may not be spending the time they should working on getting searchers to their landing pages, and converting them to customers. Poorly performing keywords and combos should be ditched.

Don’t neglect previous customers in the race to find new ones. An existing customer converts to a repeat buyer much more easily than a new customer does. Free shipping or other value added actions like gift wrapping may be what it takes to get these profitable customers online and ordering.

Sometimes, bad things happen. An item goes out of stock as it proves a hotter holiday “get” than anticipated. The retailer that deceives a customer into thinking the item is on the way, dodges questions about availability, or otherwise conceals a problem will be punished.

A comScore study contends 50 million US visitors read blogs. Some of them will discuss a business that is less than upfront with customers. No business wants to disappoint a customer, but at least being direct with them when problems arise means the worst complaint that customer could make would be disappointment.

Most retailers know to do these things now. Continued high energy prices and greater broadband penetration will drive more people online to at least consider shopping via the web. Be the business that makes them glad they did.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

“Since we are in the middle of harvest, we’d prefer hot, dry weather,” said Texas Cotton and Grain Association executive director Jeff Nunley. “If we could have gotten these rains back in June, they would have been very timely.” AP reports:

Although wind gusts as high as 50 mph hit Harlingen, any crop damage will come from heavy rain, said Webb Wallace, executive director of Cotton and Grain Producers of the Lower Rio Grande Valley, which serves a four-county region. The quality of a cotton boll’s fiber suffers under heavy rain, he said.

Farther inland, Emily brought rain and occasional gusty winds as storm bands crossed South Texas.

“Compared to what we were thinking, we’re tickled,” said one Texas cotton farmer, Sam Simmons. “We managed to dodge a bullet.”

The hurricane did slow down energy production in Mexico. Exports, many of which were going to the U.S. were halted, and contracts have been delayed.
“We are not talking about losses, because these are shipments that were only deferred,” said a Pemex spokesman. “The contracts will be met.”

Pemex, which is the 9th largest crude exporter in the world, has begun production again. The spokesman said that shipments may be stepped up to meet needs.

Chris is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.

Cnooc made a cash bid of $18.5 billion to acquire the 8th largest US oil producer, Unocal Corp. But that offer was passed over by Unocal in favor of $17.1 billion in cash plus an attractive stock offer from 2nd largest producer Chevron Corp. Cnooc has until August 10 to up the ante. But most believe Cnooc will not attempt to beat Chevron’s offer.

Bloomberg reported, “Chevron has probably knocked Cnooc out of the water,” said Stephen Leeb of Leeb Capital Management in New York. Cnooc may decide “to bid for another American oil company without the sort of competition they’re facing now.”

The other for-sale oil companies include Houston-based Marathon Oil, the 4th largest US oil producer, Amerada Hess, or Murphy Oil.

US legislators have already threatened to block Cnooc’s bid for Unocal for fear that Chinese ownership of vital US infrastructure would be a threat to the economy and national security. A switch in intentions to a much larger producer won’t ease any tensions, especially as China inflates its currency against the dollar.

Cnooc said today that it won’t up its bid for Unocal.

“We’re making a rational bid in the light of shareholders’ interests and there is no plan to change the current offer,” spokesman Xiao Zongwei told Bloomberg.

For the past three years, state-owned Cnooc has been buying up stakes in oil and gas projects in Canada, Australia, Indonesia, and Kazakhstan as China attempts to boost supplies to hungry, rapidly growing economy.

A Chinese acquisition of an American oil producer wouldn’t be the first time US interests have been sold to state-owned companies. Saudi Aramco, Royal Dutch Shell Plc, and Venezuelan-owned Citgo Petroleum Corp. already own US refineries.

No comment came from Marathon spokesman Paul Weeditz when asked about Cnooc’s interest in the company.

“The Chinese are not going to stop trying to acquire American oil assets,” said Leeb. “The Chinese believe oil is an ever more dear commodity that is going to just get harder and harder to find.”

Oil prices dropped significantly after shooting up to $58.30 this morning. Prices began to plummet dropping as low as $56.10 before closing at $56.72 for the day. Heating oil dropped as well opening at $1.65 a gallon and going down to $1.59 a gallon. Gasoline barely moved at all going up less than a penny. The August contract closed today.

Oil refineries continued to pull their weight despite being forced to drop production under 93% because of the storms hitting the Gulf coast. Distillate levels increased by 2.3 million barrels to 122.7 million barrels, up 5% over a last year.

Gasoline levels dropped 1.3 million barrels to 211.3 million over all, running about the same as last year. Crude oil dropped 900,000 barrels to 320.1 million. That total is 7% over last year and a much better number than anticipated. Most analysts were expecting something closer to twice that number.

While Cindy and Dennis slipped past the oil fields in the Gulf, Emily has worked over Mexican oil futures. Pemex, the state owned oil company, said they slowed production by 3 million barrels, most of which heads north to the U.S.

Traders remain jitter regarding oil futures. As other tropical cyclones form in the Atlantic and some eventually hitting the Gulf region, futures will shoot back up quite quickly. Refineries will need to continue to work diligently not only to keep up gasoline levels but also to reboot heating oil levels as well. Right now the balance between the two could mean the difference.

John Stith is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.