Common Sense PR

May 10th, 2008

Marketing and PR News and Ideas, May 10, 2008

Worth reading:

I Want to Speak Like Steve Jobs - Drew McLennan, like a lot of us, is a student of one of the geniuses of the personal presentation.

The ‘Mystery’ of Lousy Customer Service - An adversarial attitude toward customers or employees is a sign of a company that doesn’t know how to behave, says Mary Schmidt on Lipsticking.com. Mary also has her own marketing blog.

300 Free Employee Engagement Keys - David Zinger has a free downloadable e-book with tips on employee engagement. Link via Phil Gerbyshak.

Creativity Slayer - Communicatrix Colleen Wainwright looks at how creativity is affected by procrastination in Steven Pressfield’s book The War of Art.
Steven Pressfield Discusses The War of Art for Entrepreneurs - Pamela Slim points to a podcast about the book. Links again via Phil Gerbyshak.

Marketing the Charity Auction - Seth Godin wants charities to rethink the bargain-hunter approach in auctions, and promote the idea of overpaying for auction items. This puts the emphasis back on giving.

Previous News and Ideas posts.

Photo via iStockphoto by Pali Rao.

Technorati Tags: public relations, events, thinking, seth godin, steven pressfield, entrepreneurs, business, communications, blogs, communicatrix

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By Eric Eggertson -- 0 comments

May 9th, 2008

Getting Beyond Short-term Thinking

When politicians and business leaders spend all their time worrying about the next election or the next quarterly sales announcement, you have to wonder who’s looking after the whatever lies beyond that time line (ie. our future).

There are a few examples out there.

Steve Jobs, for one, is a corporate Svengali capable of seeing past the next quarter.

British Columbia premier Gordon Campbell surprised just about everyone by mapping out an environmental strategy for the future. Is it the right strategy? Who knows. Is it better than hoping that climate change won’t devastate the world? I hope so.

Has our society developed an incurable case of ADHD, or is someone else out there capable of overcoming immediate gratification in order to make decisions for the long term?

It’s a wonder Barrack Obama is doing so well in the Democratic presidential race. He’s talking about issues and the future, instead of spouting platitudes and demonizing straw men.

Maybe we’re ready for reality therapy, after the multiplayer worldwide role playing game that has been the worlds of business and politics for the past 8 years.

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By Eric Eggertson -- 0 comments

May 9th, 2008

The Story Behind the Story - ‘Happy Birthday’

You think you know the facts about something that’s common knowledge. Not so, unless you check the facts.

Techdirt’s Mike Masnick points to a copyright blogger who notes a paper that details the incorrect assumptions about the popular song that pulls in millions of dollars each year on a copyright that may not be valid. (background on Masnick)

And did you know Paul McCartney doesn’t get the royalties?

Never forget that Snopes.com is available to keep you from passing on an urban legend as fact.

Photo copyright Eric Eggertson.

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By Eric Eggertson -- 1 comment

May 7th, 2008

Perception of VOIP 9-1-1 Access Fatal

Customers of VOIP phone services are supposed to alert their service provider if they move, so the instructions can be changed for emergency services responding to a 911 call.

But that doesn’t mean the company is off the hook. A family in Calgary lost their 18-month-old son after ambulance crews were dispatched to an old address.

The parents thought their address changes had been processed, since the company sent a bill to the right house every month. What they didn’t know was that the database of addresses for 911 calls was separate from the company’s billing addresses.

I’m willing to a lot of customers make the same assumption.

“I hope they go back into the whole setup, look at their procedures and see where they need to improve,” a family friend told the Globe and Mail, about the communications company’s 911 processes.

Designing a customer service website seems pretty dull, until you consider that lives might be at stake if the instructions aren’t clear. Can someone who doesn’t understand the underlying technology figure out that 911 service is handled differently? Could someone understand the instructions even if they aren’t very good at the language being used?

If you don’t know the answers to these questions, you have work to do.

Photo by Rob!, used under a Creative Commons attribution licence.

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By Eric Eggertson -- 1 comment

May 6th, 2008

The Inefficiency of Conferences

I work with someone who’s convinced that conferences are inefficient ways to learn useful skills and gain knowledge.

(Sounds like the same criticism Churchill made of democracy: It’s the worst system of government, except for all the other methods.)

Of course conferences aren’t efficient! You’re lucky if you find one mind-altering session at a conference, much less two days’ worth.

Since when is efficiency what you’re looking for when doing the professional development / networking / seeking enlightenment dance?

Shouldn’t the desired result be your improved professional effectiveness? Whether that takes place in a linear, efficient fashion, or by osmosis while hanging upside down at the spa, isn’t the result more important than the method?

Here’s what I want from a conference or workshop:

• Make me see myself doing something I thought was impossible.
• Show me how to tackle a specific challenge.
• Scare me away from disastrous career moves.
• Put me in a room/hallway/bar with interesting people.
• Nudge me to recognize what my subconscious already knows.
• Take me somewhere that gets the office out of my head.
• Inspire me.
• Point me to resources that make my work easier.
• Remind me that my personal life needs as much “development” as my professional life.
• Point me to great places to eat, dance and shoot photos.
• Make interaction easy, without opening the floodgates to trade show exhibitor spam.

I will put up with travel problems, boring keynote speakers, product/service floggers disguised as panelists, awkward cocktail parties, confusing signage and bad coffee, if a conference hits two or three items on my list. Hell, I’ll settle for just one item, if it’s the right one.

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By Eric Eggertson -- 0 comments

May 6th, 2008

Your Non-digital Life Has no Meaning

(Warning: I have been known to get cranky about bombastic overstatements by the digerati.)

If you don’t have a Twitter account, your career may be kinda meaningless.

That’s the provocative statement teasing readers to visit Todd Defren’s PR Squared blog.

It’s been proven time and again that this technique works. Provoke discussion by making a blanket statement that everyone - author and readers alike - knows is only a device to get your attention.

Twitter, like Flickr and Second Life and Facebook before it, is the Flavor of the Month. I love its simplicity, and the way it allows me to bathe in a stream of ideas, humor, factoids, personal revelations, and breaking news. It’s one of the most personal social media tools to come along, so it has tremendous potential for networking.

You will have to rip my Twitter account from my cold, dead hands.

But if I ever suggest that your life has no meaning if you aren’t linked in to the same conversational tools that I am, please slap me once or twice. I’ll thank you for it.

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By Eric Eggertson -- 8 comments

April 30th, 2008

Yes, Words Matter

Some people throw out ideas in roughly-hewn sentence fragments, using whatever words come to mind.

Others obsess over finding le mot just. Their dictionary is not far away, and they are constantly rediscovering turns of phrase that they read or heard years ago, and trying them out.

There is generally no definitive way of writing or speaking. One can be more “correct,” if grammar and established usage is your goal.  Being imprecise, or grammatically challenged doesn’t mean you can’t communicate.

Still, I’m with the Tod Maffin school of obsessive language use. I’m always testing word choices like “more than” versus “over.”

When I’m editing, one of the most common changes I make is to replace “over” with “more than.” I’m not sure why it comes up so often in business writing, but people constantly use “over” for dollar amounts, numbers of people, ages, height, and so on.

I can’t necessarily justify this prejudice. One of the commenters to Tod’s blog post explains that “more than” is more precise, whereas “over” is a metaphorical way of saying more than.

For emphasis, you might use “over,” but in most cases les mot justes are “more than.”

Where do you stand on this weighty issue?

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By Eric Eggertson -- 8 comments

April 30th, 2008

Some Lawyers Know Dick about PR

Lawyers are often very good at helping organizations achieve their goals. But when it comes to plotting effective public relations moves, they too often forget how that legal action can be seen as aggressive overkill to the average person.

Case in point, the chill effect attempted by lawyer Clifford Shoemaker on behalf of his clients, who are suing to prove the generally disproved theory that mercury formerly used in vaccinations may have caused autism. Their son was diagnosed with a form of autism.

(I work for a health care organization and have an autistic son. Writing that last paragraph without adding five or six more disclaimers gives me the willies.)

Shoemaker dispensed a subpoena to at least one critic of the conspiracy theory, Kathleen Seidel. He also went after the medical/science committee that released a finding that there was no proven link between vaccinations and autism.

As a legal tactic, this may have been the right thing to do (but I doubt it).

As a method of forwarding his clients’ cause in the arena of public opinion, his bully tactics totally fail.  The clumsy legal maneuver gives the appearance that he and his clients are abusing the legal system to go on an information fishing trip, squelch criticism and root out confidential information that has no connection to their lawsuit.

Seidel wrote an amazingly good legal motion for a non-lawyer, and succeeded in having the subpoena quashed. Shoemaker now has to respond to Seidel’s motion, which called for sanctions against him for using a subpoena as a harassing blunt instrument.

Legal action against bloggers may seem like a good idea because so few of them have the time and money to invest in a legal fight. But what they’re good at is drawing attention to heavy-handed legal tactics, and rallying bloggers and mainstream media to their cause.

Clients who blindly follow their lawyer’s advice run the risk of alienating the public, regulators and others. They need to map out the public relations implications, not just the legal strategy.

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By Eric Eggertson -- 0 comments

April 29th, 2008

Quick Tip: Settle for ‘Good Enough’

There are times when it’s important to pore over a document (or a video, or whatnot), refining until you’ve got it perfect.

Then there’s the rest of the time, when getting close to perfect probably took more time than the task was worth.

If you find it difficult to complete tasks because the thought of making a small mistake interferes with your sleep, you need to take a few chill pills and call me in the morning.

The advantage of good enough is that you can do it quickly.  In the time it would take to endlessly recraft a message, you can get a message out there, see how people are reacting to it, and make some tweaks.

The law of diminishing returns comes into play all too often for the perfectionists among us.

Aim for good enough, and learn to live with the knowledge that you could have done better, but no one would have noticed.

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By Eric Eggertson -- 0 comments