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 Alayne Martell
To start, a confession – I’m a bit of an Olympic junkie. More specifically, the winter games fuel my fire way more than their summer counterparts. While I can’t remember feeling this Olympic enthusiasm back in 1988 when the games were in Calgary, I have certainly been captivated as our great country prepared to host the 2010 Olympics on home soil.
As the games got closer, it was apparent that the unofficial Olympic sport of pin trading was going to have some competition this go around; social media was poised to step onto the Olympic stage and this has become the first truly social Olympic games.
For an Olympic junkie like myself, the ability to follow Olympians’ tweets and get up to-the-second results on my mobile phone seemed like it would be my own personal Olympic utopia. But then the Olympics started. After a few days in, I am not convinced this new social aspect of the Olympics is a good thing.
Perhaps it was the prolific accounts of Georgian luge athlete Nodar Kumaritashvili’s horrific death or maybe it was the constant criticizing and mocking of every detail of the opening ceremonies (the performers are lip synching, the cauldron is broken, why are all the drunks chasing Gretzy as he holds on for dear life in the back of a pick-up truck, etc.) that has put a bad taste in my mouth. I can’t help but wonder if people actually consider that Nodar has a mother who could be reading this stuff or that the opening ceremonies are a celebration of our entire sporting world and more specifically, our country. Is there no respect in the social media world?
I put an unusual day one aside and was ready to embrace the competition with this new social media eye view. Then I realized that despite all the lists created to help you follow Olympians on Twitter, there was not a lot of information out there. I think a big reason for this is the IOC’s rather vague blogging guidelines that quite literally has Olympians scared to break the rules. On the other hand, you can’t help but think that these athletes, who have being training for years, must have better things to focus on than throwing out 140 character snippets during some of the most important moments of their lives. And really, I guess it’s a bit selfish of us to expect it.
While it is strictly a personal opinion, I don’t think any social media platform can compete with the excitement of sitting on the edge of your seat in front of your television as you cheer on the athletes going for their personal dream. The only thing that could possibly compete with that? Actually being there.
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 Francis Moran
It might be an oversimplification on my part, but from where I stand, much of the global debate around what to do about climate change has split along a fairly classic left-right axis. Those on the progressive end of the spectrum have embraced the environmental benefits of reducing anthropogenic climate change and often cast the debate in traditional liberal terms such as mitigating the impact on the poorest people on the planet, cutting our dependence on fossil fuels and the often-corrupt regimes governing countries where such fuels are to be found, and halting runaway consumerism. For many on the farthest end of the spectrum, fighting climate change is a natural outgrowth of their anti-capitalist convictions.
People on the right, on the other hand, are over-represented among the climate-change skeptics and even when they do acknowledge that something untoward may be going on, they consistently sound dire warnings about the economic disruption that will surely befall us all if we do anything significant to address the situation. Free marketeers and advocates for the smallest-possible level of government involvement in our lives are practically default members of this side of the debate.
There are always exceptions to be found but I don’t think it’s any coincidence that it was a Liberal government in Canada that signed the Kyoto Protocol — albeit without ever doing anything substantial to meet our treaty obligations — while it is a Conservative government that has swiftly back-pedaled away from making any concrete commitments. Similarly, south of the border, the last Republican administration wanted to have nothing to do with the issue while the current Democratic president and Congress are far more engaged in the debate.
I don’t want to belabour the point but a quick Google search finds the following two rather representative comments among hundreds of blogs whose writers have opinions about global warming, its causes and what we should do about it that align rather predictably with their self-identification as liberal or conservative.
“Now world leaders, and even some liberals, are calling man-made climate change what it truly is, a hoax.” — Conservative Politics Today.
“Physical evidence of global warming is widespread and startlingly significant.” — U.S. Liberal Politics
As with many left-right splits on issues of compelling human interest, I find myself a bit bewildered by the near-complete binary nature of this one. While I have no difficulty understanding the motivation and point of view of the left-wing campaigners, I am astonished that those on the right can’t see that, within what I believe is an incredibly urgent requirement that we swiftly and decisively move to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the impact of climate change, there resides an almost unprecedented economic opportunity that ought to warm the cockles of the fattest-cat capitalist.
That’s why I so so enjoyed a blog post I read over the holidays by Ron Pernick, managing director of Clean Edge, Inc. and coauthor of The Clean Tech Revolution. In a column titled, “Don’t think of a solar panel,” Pernick said we need to reframe the debate so as to attract the support not just of “Birkenstock-wearing, back-to-the-earth, environmentalists” but also of the innovators, the entrepreneurs and, yes, the nakedly capitalist and return-hungry investors (my terms, not his) who will underwrite the massive changes that must take place.
“We should be framing the clean-tech revolution not in the context of something as amorphous as climate change and as divisive as cap-and-trade, but instead on job creation, economic competitiveness, energy independence, and national security,” Pernick wrote. ” Instead of leading with carbon offsets, cap-and-trade, and climate mitigation, we should be focusing on energy independence and security; clean-technology innovation; green-job creation; and global resource management and leadership.”
I’ve never made any secret of my socially progressive political views.Indeed, I have often joked that from where I sit on the political spectrum, Canada’s sort-of-socialist New Democratic Party looks dangerously right wing to me. And yet, at the same time, I am a business person, an entrepreneur and an investor of capital in technology and other companies. I see no contradiction in this whatsoever. Reframing the climate change debate as Pernick suggests leaves no contradiction for others who, like me, can’t identify with either the left or the right on this one.
