By Linda Forrest
It’s been a while since we pointed to other blogs that address public relations issues, so here’s a round-up of some recent posts of note:
Next Communications, in honour of the blogger’s 34th birthday, recently posted 34 Unforgettable Posts for PR People
Journalistics writes about building a better online newsroom whether you’re a big player or a small business.
While it seems that most of the marketplace easily forgets, PR Pros are People, Too, reminds Todd Defren in his post about clients thanking PR pros for doing exceptional work. I was lucky enough to work for a classy outfit called Six Degrees Records, a widely respected world music label for whom I did Canadian publicity many moons ago. After a very successful album launch and a ton of press, the label sent me, quite unexpectedly, a big flower arrangement and a card of thanks. To this day, just the thought of that small gesture makes me smile.
Here’s an article on how the publicity machine keeps on chugging for those who seemingly will say anything to keep their name in the media. Apparently being a blowhard can be a quite lucrative profession. As I Tweeted yesterday, if we stop giving Ann Coulter an audience, she’ll just go away. There is such a thing as bad publicity – the kind that continues to give a forum to people who don’t deserve our attention (see also: Kate Gosselin).
Tip of the hat to Media Monitoring News for directing me to some of these posts (even though the links in its newsletter weren’t working properly…)
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
My husband and I went to see Avatar over the weekend. Wow. The visually stunning spectacle has been director James Cameron’s pet project for more than 10 years, his last major theatrical release being a little movie called Titanic. The movie is in 3D but it’s so unobtrusive and simply enhances the story without going for corny effects, a novel approach to an older technology, enhancing rather than interrupting the storytelling process.
It was an inspired move by Cameron to hire virtual unknowns in the lead roles, but a mistake, despite her considerable talent, that he cast Sigourney Weaver in the film because, more than once, it felt like I was watching Aliens or even Gorillas in the Mist. For the same reason he put faces to those with whom we have had little or no previous associations in the lead roles, he should have cast an unknown in Weaver’s role; this was the only distraction that took me out of the marvelous world of Pandora and back into North America, circa late 2009.
I don’t want to spoil the storyline of the movie for anyone who hasn’t yet seen it but plans to, but suffice to say that while the movie is well worth seeing and elements of the film’s story are absolutely creative and novel, the vast majority of the plot is well trodden territory. Thematic elements are very reminiscent of [SPOILER ALERT!] this, and this.
There’s nothing new under the sun, they say, and the same is true when it comes to marketing. While it’s true that in the realm of technology, there are truly revolutionary products being released, there are also a slate of products that are only slight modifications on existing offerings or have very little if anything unique about them, rather they are “me too!” propositions. That’s okay – consumers need options at different price points with different feature sets, and other distinguishing attributes, however small.
The challenge becomes how to market your offering when the basic story (of your product, your company, your industry …) has been told many, many times before. Take a page from James Cameron’s book and find novel ways to tell a familiar tale, use new technology to do so and make it compelling to your audience. In our terms, this means to use novel marketing approaches like social media to communicate your key messages to your prospects and customers, providing them with the information they need in a format that’s interesting to them and that will get them talking to other prospects about why your offering is the one to see and why your marketing campaign is better than that of your competitors.
