Bringing Editorial Calendars Into the Social Sphere

For years PR and advertising professionals have come to rely on the trusty editorial calendar. These are published and updated frequently by most trade magazines and some newsstand titles, newspapers and web sites.

You can find a bunch of "edcals" here, including PC Magazine, Variety, InformationWeek, Sports Illustrated for Kids, the Los Angeles Times (PDF) and American Lawyer. A few online media outlets have editorial calendars. CNET has a good one of their upcoming reviews.  Time.com has one too.

Editorial calendars break out some, but not all of the major feature articles an outlet plans to publish.  This helps PR professionals target their pitches to fit into these stories. However, it's really intended for media buyers so they can purchase ad space near very relevant articles. These are guides and the information changes frequently. Stories are dropped, others added. The information is usually part of a media kit. They tend to be sparse too.

There's a lot of room for innovation when it comes to editorial calendars. For starters, why shouldn't they be social? I would love to see someone take what Dell is doing over with Ideastorm and port that same crowdsourcing model to an edcal. This is another way to let readers have a direct say in what editors cover.

Bloggers, vloggers and podcasters don't have formal editorial calendars - nor do they need to. However, I am thinking that it would be helpful to those who a) receive a lot of PR pitches, b) allow advertisers to purchase space or c) both. This is a leadership opportunity for big blog ad networks like Federated Media, Gawker Media and Weblogs Inc to grab. Big media bloggers might want to consider it too.

In the interest of furthering this discussion (and structuring my life a little bit) I have published an editorial calendar for my blog. I am using Google Calendar here, but you can use any number of tools including 30Boxes, Outlook, iCal and Windows Calendar for Vista to do the same. You can also subscribe to it via RSS or view it on the web. It's also embedded it below. Right now I only have topics for this week listed. This is an experiment. Let's see where this goes. If it's a hit, I will continue it.

Note that the information in my edcal is sparse. I am not giving away my thesis or stealing my thunder. It's just a guide so you can see what's coming and provide ideas. Yes, it's a bit of a tease too. I admit. However, that's not the big idea here.

Hopefully this will make the PR pitches I receive more targeted and my posts more interesting. (I don't run ads on my blog so there's no need on that end). Pitch me via email with the word "edcal" in the subject or leave a comment below. You can comment on Google Calendars but I would rather it be here where everyone can easily react.

Further, I have appended/tagged all listings with the word "edcal." Now they are searchable from within Google Calendar. If you try this at home, use the same tag. That will create a giant searchable database!

Anyone else care to join me - at least for a week? Bueller? Bueller? Other ideas?