By Linda Forrest
This past week, the news was filled with stories about people behaving badly and reminders that electronic communications leave a digital paper trail a mile long.
Personally, I feel so badly for Sandra Bullock being humiliated as she was by her philandering jerk of a spouse, having recently pronounced in front of the world and Barbara Walters how he “has her back.” Well, he had someone else’s front, it seems. And she was happy to spill all her beans and text messages to the highest bidder.
Tiger Woods, whose shoddy attempts at reconciliation with his audience through the media have been ripped apart by PR experts, has just hired a renowned sports crisis communications expert to help him crawl out from under the recent release of his disgusting text messages to a porn star with whom he had dalliances.
The trustworthiness of tattoo covered strippers and porn stars really took a hit this week…
The chair of the Toronto Transit Commission, having already dropped out of that city’s mayoral race because of his affair, has now been discovered to have charged the city of Toronto for a cab ride he took to meet his mistress. Torontonians, already demanding his resignation as head of the beleaguered TTC, are now even more riled up.
While these particular individuals behaving badly have made many egregious personal decisions, it’s astounding to think that it never occurred to them that their text messages and receipts wouldn’t come back to haunt them. In this digital era, almost everything we do is recorded, logged and accessible to refer back to, especially emails, texts, blog posts, Tweets… More than once, this has been advantageous to me when a client or a reporter claims, “I never said that” or, “I never approved that” and I have the email to refer back to. (Thank heavens I’m an electronic packrat!) This can, as we’ve seen this week, work against you if you’ve got something to hide or if you’re trying to cheat the system in some way.
First, don’t be a jerk. Straighten up and fly right; if your moral compass is way off (personally or professionally) you’re bound to get caught sooner or later. Recognize the immeasurable damage that will be done to your brand, your professional standing, your employer and employees, and others if you make terrible decisions and get caught red-handed. Is it worth it? Really?
Second, don’t put anything in writing you wouldn’t stand behind later on. There have been plenty of misguided, poorly conceived reactionary news releases or statements made by executives that have haunted them for years. Don’t be that guy or gal.
By Linda Forrest
This is the second installment in an unintentional series: Blog posts about holidays for which Hallmark doesn’t make a card. Yet. (Grammar Girl made an e-card, however.)
Thursday last week was National Grammar Day in the U.S., a nascent holiday devoted to furthering proper usage of the English language. Because let’s face it, most of us, intentionally or not, make a dog’s breakfast of the English language in casual usage certainly and, more troubling still, in our professional capacities as well. I fear that microblogging and texting are making the problem worse, not better. Any platform that encourages one to drop vowels altogether is fundamentally adverse to proper usage of English.
As we’ve written about previously, we here at inmedia are unabashed word nerds and philologists who love a good pun and get downright angry at the routine butchering of our parent tongue. To give you some idea of how pervasive the love of language is at inmedia, several years ago at Christmas, grammar themed novelty t-shirts were exchanged, completely coincidentally.
Earlier this week, there were egregious errors in major media that caused my blood to boil. National superhero Sidney Crosby had his name spelled incorrectly on the web site of a major media outlet, this after he won Canada the gold medal in what’s sure to go down as a national sports highlight for all time. There were other misspellings I came across as well, obvious mistakes that two seconds of editing would have caught.
While the media don’t always get the facts right, it’s unforgivable that they don’t use proper spelling and grammar at all times. Everyone needs an editor. It’s a fact. There are people that are employed solely to review copy for mistakes at most media outlets; USE THEM.
For non-journalist types, a best-practices approach to writing would dictate that you write to the best of your ability, make use of available tools like spell-check, and then run your content past another human as another set of eyes can often catch thinkos or typos that spell-check cannot.
By Linda Forrest
Last Friday was Help A PR Pro Out day. (Did you get my card? Hallmark truly does make one for every occasion…)
This event, which spins its name from a wildly popular site that provides reporters with sources for pieces they’re working on, aimed to knit together top PR talent looking for work and employers seeking talent. By all accounts, it seems to have been a success.
Here’s the official mission statement of what’s sure to become a recurring event: “Help a PR Pro Out Day is designed to help connect PR job seekers with employers looking for top talent. On Friday, February 19, from 10 am – 2 pm CT PR bloggers, agency leaders, and PR professionals from across the country will donate their time and talents to help fellow PR pros connect with employers as part of the first-ever event.”
Although I’m not in the market for a job, it’s nice to see the PR community working together to help those who may have lost their jobs in the recent downturn to find fulfilling work in their field, or providing those with legitimate talent with the virtual introduction that they need in order to move their careers to the next level.
For too long, to me at least, it has seemed that PR professionals are very territorial and secretive about sharing their contacts and about extending a hand to their fellow practitioners.
When I was a PR professional in the music business, just as my involvement in the industry was winding down, I and a number of other colleagues formed an informal, regular get together to chat, share and support one another. For so many years, we’d been competing with one another and guarding our contacts and insider information with ferocity. When we broke down those barriers and began communicating with one another, we found that we had tapped into a wonderful resource where we could share ideas, develop strategies and heck, even find opportunities for one another’s clients to work together. When we stopped feeling threatened by one another, we recognized the synergies that existed and determined how best to exploit them, which, in the end not only benefitted us, but our clients as well.
Three cheers to the organizers of the event; here’s hoping that this marks a turning point in our industry and that we learn to better collaborate with one another, whether it’s over a social media channel or a pint at the local watering hole.
By Linda Forrest
While I was on maternity leave last year, inmedia went virtual, meaning we sloughed off the shackles of the commuter lifestyle and now all work remotely, communicating regularly by phone, email, Twitter, smoke signals… As such, earlier this week was a banner occasion when inmedianauts from around the country and across the globe gathered in Ottawa for briefings on a new client that we’ll be launching later this month. To most people, it isn’t novel to see one’s coworkers but for us it is. We’ve quickly established effective systems and processes that enable us to work as a cohesive unit, whether we’re in the same time zone or not.
Companies like ours have so many resources at their fingertips that enable telework to, well, work. With information in the cloud or on remote servers, we can all be connected to our data, and to each other, with ease. The telephone works well – we’re all talking to one another every day as well as to clients, prospects and media and analysts – as does email and Twitter and LinkedIn.
Should we actually need to physically be in one another’s presence, we can converge on a shared workspace like the CodeFactory, as we did earlier this week. As @FrancisMoran noted earlier this week, most of our clients never saw our office and there are multiple clients for whom we’ve done scads of work yet have never met face to face.
It was nice to see the rest of the inmedia team in person earlier this week, but it did remind me that while there’s something to be said for “face time,” we are pretty damn effective as a virtual unit.
By Linda Forrest
Mickey Mouse, that is.
I just returned from another glorious vacation to Walt Disney World, our first trip with our toddler. We had an absolute blast. The weather was great, the food incredible, our accommodations spacious and affordable, and as usual, the customer service we received was outstanding. This is our fourth trip to Disney since 2004 and every time, we’ve marveled at the incredible customer service and impressive systems in place at the parks, restaurants, cruise ship, hotels, even the parking lots to ensure the best experience possible for the guests.
In fact, Disney has written a (the?) book on customer service called Be Our Guest that details all the elements of superior customer service that the company works so hard to achieve. Most of the time, it succeeds.
Traveling with a little one, you’ve got a lot of gear to lug around. Inevitably, things will get left behind or misplaced. So exceptional is the lost and found system in the parks and on the entire property that even though we lost several items over the course of our stay, most of them came back to us – from our son’s beloved stuffed animal to our rental car keys (thank god!)
It’s the systems that the company has in place that make it almost impossible to do the wrong thing.
For example, when they’re filling the massive parking lots for the parks, there are dozens of staff in the parking lot directing traffic so that the cars coming in single file are parking in order, side by side, with no room for error. There’s no parking willy nilly, instead it’s an orderly process and makes things easy for the staff and the guests. Clear signage makes it easy to remember where you parked and trams shuttle guests from their cars to the front gate on an endless loop.
Another great example is the proliferation of garbage cans on the property. Extensive studies were done to see how far a guest would be willing to walk to deposit trash in the proper receptacle, rather than just throw it on the ground. Subsequently, trash cans were placed at these specific intervals and this, paired with the many people cleaning the park, results in an almost impeccable environment. It would be more difficult for guests to litter than to just place their garbage in the trash can.
How does Disney do it?
The company works tirelessly to gather visitor data, with researchers at the entrance to the park surveying the guests, and now even some touchscreens in rides that ask questions, ostensibly to enhance the rider experience, but clearly to also gather market data.
The amount of staff it must take to operate a park on a daily basis is bewildering, but there’s always a friendly “cast member” whenever you need one. I have yet to encounter someone there who doesn’t seem to love their job, though a quick search on the internet sees that some ex-staff refer to it as Mouschwitz, which doesn’t exactly communicate happy images. Still, I can only speak to my experience as a guest, and that, on the whole, has been wonderful.
The magic one feels at a Disney park takes a lot of work, but no company does it better and you’d really have to try hard to have a bad experience on those grounds. It’s a well-oiled, well thought out machine and what it produces is nothing short of, well, magic.
