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 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
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.
By Linda Forrest
Several items in my Google Reader caught my eye this morning. Being the amateur philologist and word nerd that I am, titles about “word of the day” and “word of the year” are assured to be clicked.
EMarketer’s word of the day is cyberdisinhibition. Notwithstanding that it may not, in fact, be a word, it’s an interesting concept – people are more inclined to lose their inhibitions online and this could impact your business considerably as customers are more inclined to complain about bad customer service or spread word about dissatisfaction online than they are in the “real world.” All the more reason to excel at customer service. Sites like the Consumerist are devoted to spreading the word about sub-par customer service; this is not a site where you want your company to appear.
In a year when sparkling vampires ruled the box office (and high school locker posters), an exciting new U.S. President held his first year in office, Michael Jackson and other cultural icons passed away, H1N1 threatened health worldwide and the economic bailouts in America overtook international headlines, the Global Language Monitor has just announced the Word of the Year. The winner is? Twitter. The microblogging platform saw incredible year-over-year increases, the linked ComputerWorld article references research that denotes a 1,170% from 2008 to 2009. It’s undeniable that the platform has made the leap from being strictly for tech geeks and now is the communication platform of choice for the mainstream public.
