By Francis Moran
For too long now, I have been painfully aware of just how dimly acquainted technology is with marketing.
I’ve heard all the usual reasons; hell, I’ve even subscribed to most of them myself at one time or another. But these excuses simply don’t hold up to scrutiny.
Technology companies tend to be engineering-driven and gears just don’t get marketing, goes perhaps the most common refrain. It’s true that most technology ventures are engineering ventures but I think marketers are letting themselves too easily off the hook by bleating that the engineers don’t understand what we do and that’s why they won’t support it. We’re supposed to be in the explanation and persuasion business; if we can’t explain ourselves to our own bosses and clients and persuade them why they should invest heavily in what we do, then we deserve the dim respect marketing so often seems to attract.
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By Francis Moran
I heard the saddest story the other day.
A few years ago, we worked on the launch of a new personal finance website developed by a veteran personal financial advisor. The site was detailed, secure, incredibly useful and solved a sharp, expensive and disruptive pain that the advisor had been running up against his entire professional life.
Our media launch went well. We got some decent coverage, both in mass media and, more valuably, in the trade media reaching financial advisors. Although the site was designed for individual subscriptions, advisors were identified as its most important channel to market since they were expected to counsel their clients to use it.
We were a little confused when the campaign was not continued past that initial launch, especially since some of the best opportunities we generated for the client were over the long term, including, for example, an agreement to have the site’s creator contribute a regular column to one of the key trade publications in the space. From the other folks working on the launch we heard encouraging news about the possibility that the site would be white-labelled by one of the largest firms of financial advisors on the continent, and other early signs of traction. So we were at a bit of a loss when everything went unexpectedly quiet.
Still, it wasn’t the first time that a client had invested in a launch only to tell us they would be unable to continue funding the program so we moved on, occasionally curious about what had become of the endeavour.
Then, last week, I heard the full sad story.
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By Francis Moran
I really don’t know what I think about the recent editing of Mark Twain’s classic American novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to replace the offensive word “nigger” with the more prosaic “slave.” The objectionable word was common parlance when Twain wrote this masterpiece of life along the Mississippi River in the southern United States in the mid-1880s and I am loath to see anyone tamper with an original work of such brilliance.
I do know that when I shared Huck with my then-tweenaged boys as part of our long-standing nighttime story-reading ritual, that I felt just as uncomfortable as Michael Chabon, although, unlike Chabon, I opted not to substitute something softer. I had ploughed through the far fewer iterations of the word in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, albeit with some trepidation, and I saw no reason to do otherwise with the sequel. Equally difficult were references to the character “Injun Joe” and the persistent use of vernacular speech that made Jim sound very much like the social and intellectual inferior he was held to be at the time. But I read aloud every word that Twain wrote.
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By Francis Moran
Wednesday of this week marked World AIDS Day and although the pace of this pernicious destroyer of lives, families and entire national economies seems to be abating just a little, the numbers continue to be startling. More than 60 million people have contracted AIDS worldwide. The disease has killed more than 25 million. More than 14 million children in southern Africa alone have been orphaned. Nearly 35 million people around the world live with AIDS today.
The beautiful, tiny, mountainous African country of Lesotho, called “The Kingdom in the Sky” because it is the only country in the world that is entirely above 1,400 metres, is one of the hardest hit by the AIDS pandemic. Nearly one in four people in Lesotho has AIDS and, perhaps even more tragically, one in three children has been orphaned by the disease.
Some of the best work to help combat this situation has been done by a Canadian charity founded right here in Ottawa that we at inmedia have been proud to support for several years now. Help Lesotho, now nearly six years old, works at a grassroots, community-based level to tackle the pandemic with awareness, education, empowerment and practical support of the grandmothers and young people, usually young women, who have been left with the task of raising families.
For most of its six years, Help Lesotho has lived its own hand-to-mouth existence, cobbling together the resources, facilities and personnel necessary to deliver its ambitious, multi-dimensional and hugely impactful programming. For the past few years, the charity’s Lesotho headquarters has been the ramshackle little cottage you see below, with its many program directors, volunteers and participants shoe-horned into this woefully inadequate space. With its heavy emphasis on educating and empowering a new generation of young people in Lesotho who will be the catalyst for change in their own country, Help Lesotho has struggled since its earliest days to find the space to bring these young people together while the challenge of housing them for what needs to be weeks- and months-long programs is even more daunting.
All that is about to change when Help Lesotho moves into two amazing new buildings that are almost ready for occupancy in Hlotse, the administrative centre in the region of Leribe in Lesotho’s remote northwestern corner where Help Lesotho is based. (In sharp contrast to most NGOs that prefer the relative comfort of the country’s capital city.)
While in Lesotho in October, I had the privilege of seeing the new Seotlong (Sesotho for “A place to share ideas.) Centre when Help Lesotho’s resident Canadian, gender program manager Gillian Walker, was gracious enough to take time out to bring me and my wife up the road a bit to view the final frenzy of activity as the new buildings are made ready.
The building on the left is a Support Centre that will house Help Lesotho’s local staff as well as its rural outreach programs in support of grandmothers, orphans and schools. The larger Graff Leadership Centre on the right has a dormitory on the top floor that will eliminate one of the biggest hurdles faced by Help Lesotho’s most significant program by providing a comfortable and secure place to live for the 40 young women who spend their full school year taking classes and participating in a leadership program. Offices, meeting rooms and an industrial-scale kitchen occupy the lower floor.
It can be difficult for any charitable organisation to justify spending large sums on buildings rather than on human support programs. In Help Lesotho’s case, it had become impossible, even counter-productive, for the organisation to continue trying to deliver its programs out of inadequate space. These new buildings make it possible for Help Lesotho to accelerate its work, an effort that in just six short years has directly assisted tens of thousands of rural people in this beautiful but challenged country.
For the past five years at inmedia, we have opted not to send Christmas cards or baskets to our clients, suppliers and friends of the agency. Instead, we have made a cash donation to Help Lesotho, over and above the pro bono media relations work we contribute to help them get their message out. We will be doing so again this year and thank you all for your continued support of this worthwhile cause.
By Francis Moran
Thankfully, we don’t get many pitches to this blog from fellow PR types trying to get us to cover their stuff; it’s obvious to all but the most dense that this is a corporate blog that really isn’t a conduit for media relations or blogger relations activities.
But such is the sad state of the PR business that it does happen. And it happened this morning.
Donatien Ratke from a French company called MailerLite — I’m deliberately not linking to the site — sent me not one but SIX emails this morning suggesting this blog write about his company’s “Next-generation email marketing tool.” That he even pitched this blog is a PR failure. Worse, though, is that I assume Donatien used his own new, next-generation email marketing tool, resulting in six identical emails, a clear failure of the software itself. Further, since I have absolutely no relationship with this company, have never given it permission to solicit me and the email has no opt-out mechanism, the whole thing qualifies as the worst sort of spam. That a so-called “next-generation email marketing tool” would even allow such grievous breaches of anti-spam regulations is a further catastrophic failure.
So, Donatien: Welcome to the harsh new world of blogger relations. You got your write-up, but it’s probably not what you were seeking. I hope the users of your new tool don’t make such a total hash of things.
