By Danny Sullivan
You may have heard the news this week that the European Commission has cleared the way for in-flight use of mobile phones. I’m sure that within a year or two, this will be standard on airlines the world over.
As a busy professional, my reaction was initially positive. When you work in PR, being able to stay in touch while travelling is important, and the idea of being able to circumvent those long flight blackouts is certainly appealing.
But then I paused to consider the cons. Sitting on a plane for three hours next to the guy who is trying to organize his brother’s stag party in Vegas. Or worse, sitting next to some stressed-out PR coordinating an interview for a client… (hang on…)
Yes, given the choice, even I would not want to sit next to myself in such a situation. While spoken communication is absolutely key in this business, there are still places where I think it should be verboten.
Limiting air passengers to text messages and emails would still be of huge benefit to business travellers, but airlines should think carefully before allowing normal phone calls to become part of our everyday flying experience. Air rage anyone?
By Linda Forrest
I can’t help but share what I think is a brilliant PR campaign by Dr. Pepper. The company has agreed to give every person in America, except for Slash and Buckethead, two guitarists who have famously quit working with Axl Rose in various incarnations of the band Guns ‘n Roses, a free can of Dr. Pepper if the band, such as it is, puts out its long awaited album Chinese Democracy before the calendar year is through.
A little history on Chinese Democracy. It has been in production, supposedly, since the early 1990s. Every six months or so, Axl Rose says that it’s just about complete and that it will be released shortly. Then, some sort of internal strife or label struggle causes an incalculable setback and the album never comes out. Suffice to say that since Bill Clinton had just entered office when production began, Americans will have to find other ways to quench their thirst as it’s improbable, to say the least, that 2008 will be the year that the fabled album makes an appearance.
Okay, so it has little to do with B2B PR, but it is nonetheless a terrific strategy that’s circumventing a lot of the gatekeepers and barriers to coverage that would traditionally exist for a corporate behemoth like Cadbury Schweppes in reaching its target demographic of males 18-34. Kudos to Ketchum for developing and executing this creative campaign.
The tenuous connection between inmedia and a music-themed PR campaign is that in a former life, I worked in public relations for a variety of record labels and recording artists. For those of you playing the six degrees of separation game, I’m the link here, folks.
By Francis Moran
With one foot of this agency firmly planted in Scotland but with a long and fond personal attachment to Cape Breton, the heavily Scottish-tinged northern part of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, I am loath to choose sides in a trademark dispute that earlier this week saw the Federal Court of Canada order Cape Breton’s Glenora Distillers to stop marketing its locally-distilled single malt whisky with the word “Glen” in its name, something to which Scotland’s Scotch Whisky Association had taken grave exception.
Despite the fact that place names beginning with “Glen” are as liberally sprinkled across Cape Breton — indeed, across much of Canada — as sheep on a Scottish highlands hillside, it would seem the SWA believed that using the word in the name of a whisky unduly confused the market. The Scottish distillers trade association said it had found about 30 instances where Glenora’s Glen Breton Rare Whisky was mistakenly identified as Scotch whisky, although its news release failed to provide examples and there was no suggestion the Canadian distillery itself ever did so.
The professional marketer in me was intrigued by the trademark battle but the student of Scottish history in Nova Scotia was saddened that such a turf war would ever be necessary. Atlantic Insight, a long-defunct monthly news magazine in Atlantic Canada, once dubiously assigned this freelance journalist of undiluted Irish heritage to write about the cultural legacy built up by Scots throughout Nova Scotia and especially Cape Breton in the more than 200 years since the first major wave of Scottish settlers came ashore on the Hector in 1773. In many respects, the language, music, dance and literature of the old country was more alive and vital in the new world. For example, among the sidebars to the cover story that eventually ran was a piece on an elderly seanachie, or traditional Gaelic storyteller, whose skills were so outstanding that he often was called upon by groups in Scotland itself to teach his craft in a country where the language was at that time in some danger of being entirely forgotten.
Not that I think it very likely, but God forbid they ever forget how to make whisky in Scotland; after this ruling, they’ll get a frosty welcome should they ever have to turn to their natural heirs in Cape Breton for any guidance.
By Linda Forrest
This is one of those posts that as I’m writing it, I am second guessing my usage of both punctuation and grammar since in this post, I’m hoping to highlight the fact that everyone needs an editor. I need not worry too much since this, like all materials we write here at inmedia, will pass through at least one editor.
Though we are self-professed “word nerds” here at inmedia, we are also human and, as we all know, to err is human. Still, there are a number of ways to mitigate our humanity when it comes to content production, first and foremost being the review of all materials by a colleague before it is sent to a client for review.
In addition to the multiple sets of eyes that will hopefully catch any punctuation or grammar errors before the piece leaves the shop, there are many online tools that can be useful in building one’s skills as a writer and affirming one’s choice of punctuation or grammar before it leaves the desktop.
Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com are useful when you need to confirm spelling or want to branch out from repetitive terminology in a news release or article.
GrammarGirl endeavours to do the impossible — make grammar hip — with her Quick and Dirty Tips.
Eats, Shoots and Leaves is the definitive humorous book on punctuation and a favourite of the inmedia team. (Editor’s note: Linda scored major points in her job interview a few years back when she said she had this little tome on her Christmas wish list!) Online punctuation guides can be found around the web, including this one. It should be noted that a cheeky Gawker post on the death of the semicolon inspired today’s post. May it rest in peace.
Carefully review your own writing before sending it on, and refer to these online resources when determining whether your piece requires a there, their or they’re. Save yourself, your agency and your client the embarrassment of your news release ending up the butt of a PR joke because you confused your its and your it’s, or worse. Don’t let your materials be part of the reported 60% of business writing that contains errors.
By inmedia
I wrote a quick post yesterday about the horrible things that can go wrong at a trade show. Gremlins, clearly, are equal opportunity mischief makers since everything can fall apart at even the most professional and highest profile of events. Check out this story from the BBC that my colleague, Danny, drew to my attention this morning, where comedian Robin Williams had to come to the rescue of the hapless host.
