By Jill Pyle
Over the last few months I’ve had a lot of fun pitching gift ideas to daily news media on behalf of our friends at Help Lesotho. Now that Ottawa is covered in a blanket of fresh snow, I can’t help but feel festive. In the spirit of the fast-approaching holiday season, I’ve decided to pull together a gift guide to help anyone who has a public relations professional to buy for this holiday season.
Students studying PR, young PR professionals and veterans alike should always have a style guide on hand. Some of our favourites include The Canadian Press Caps and Spelling, Eats Shoots and Leaves and Globe and Mail Style Book. If the PR professional in your life doesn’t have one of these or similar titles, you should be able to cross them off your list by visiting a well-stocked local bookstore. Books about grammar fundamentals may not be very exciting but they certainly are useful. Dictionaries are also great to have on hand. For the terminology-saturated person working in technology PR, try Chambers Dictionary of Science and Technology. If you think flipping pages is too low-tech, a subscription to the online edition of the Chicago Manual of Style may do the trick.
For PR pros who frequently travel, there are a wealth of gadgets you can buy to help them stay plugged in. While an iPhone or iTouch may be a bit pricey,
consider springing for a country-specific SIM card or a gift certificate to a phone-unlocking specialist like Warlox Wireless. After reading about the positive experience Francis had with his unlocked GSM smart phone loaded with a pay-as-you-go SIM, I don’t think you can go wrong. Skype credits aren’t a bad idea either. For the earth-conscious gadget lover on your list, Amazon Kindle, a souped-up e-book reader that allows for wireless e-book downloads, would make a great gift.
For social media-savvy PR folks, a bottle of Stormhoek‘s Blue Monster is guaranteed to win smiles. Thanks to Hugh Mcleod, this wine is well known amongst those who frequent geek dinners. Other great gift ideas include flickr pro accounts, tickets to popular conferences like SXSW or cool t-shirts from the likes of Threadless. Grammar gurus are bound to appreciate the They’re, Their, There shirt.
That’s our list. Feel free to share your ideas in the comment section. You can also check out Chris’s gift guide for marketers, which Seth’s Blog pointed me to.
By inmedia
The Register reports today that Google’s philanthropic arm will invest tens of millions of dollars in renewable energy.
“Cheap renewable energy is not only critical for the environment but also vital for economic development in many places where there is limited affordable energy of any kind,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said.
In true tongue-in-cheek Register fashion, the reporter notes, “Google’s founders believe the firm’s experience in data centres and bot-vs-bot advertising mean this relatively small investment will nonetheless overturn the established energy economy in short order.”
By Peter Kemball
If you think your business requires tough decisions, you would agree that they are trivial compared to the late President John Kennedy’s during the 13 days of the Cuban missile crises. The world teetered on the balance of massive nuclear explosions and a wrong decision would have killed millions of people in Canada, the USSR and the United States. Nor was this the only time. On at least two occasions, military officers faced the apparent prospect of incoming missiles. For them the decision to retaliate or not had to be made in minutes. In one case, the officer wondered why there were only five US missiles on his radar screen. The answer was that he was looking at five birds!
Recently Ted Sorenson, a key advisor to Kennedy during the missile crises, set out his view on how a leader makes tough decisions in the face of conflicting advice. Speaking in Ottawa and Toronto a week or so ago, Sorensen advised executives to picture their options creatively. For example, Kennedy didn’t call it a “blockade,” which would have meant that any ship sailing towards Cuba would have been turned back. He labelled it a “weapons embargo,” thus allowing key non-military supplies to reach Cuba and make it clear to the world that Cuba was not the enemy. A nice byproduct was avoiding the alienation of people elsewhere in the Caribbean whose lives would have been disrupted by a blockade’s automatic triggering of wartime marine insurance rates. Reach out for support, Sorenson advises. Kennedy sought cooperation from all nations. And communicate directly with your opponent rather than through agents.
Above all, Kennedy was a realist. When the crisis had passed, an aide urged him to use his status to intervene in the Sino-Indian War. “But you are 10 feet tall,” the aide said. “Oh, that will last a couple of weeks,” Kennedy replied.
Technology executives may face just as much uncertainty as Kennedy did, and need to apply the same creativity to their problem solving.
Peter Kemball is CEO and founder at Acorn Partners, an innovative firm that helps B2B SMEs finance their success.
By Danny Sullivan
During the five-year period in my life when I made my home on the Western side of the Atlantic, I was always interested to note the subtle differences in the way that the general population responded to marketing when compared to my native Britain.
The UK is a generally more sceptical country and, in my experience, its inhabitants tend to expect a bit more effort from the companies that are trying to sell to them.
One memory leaps to the fore: Coca Cola’s miserable attempt to sell its Dasani water product in the UK. After quickly becoming the second-biggest selling bottled water product in the US, Dasani hit the shelves in the UK in 2004, only to be pilloried for being nothing more than purified tap water. It lasted only months before being pulled from the shelves, along with planned launches in France and Germany.
A study by GfK NOP released today puts me in mind of those days. Apparently the i-Phone isn’t doing as well in the UK as Apple might have hoped. Only 2% of those surveyed were thinking of putting the uber-gadget on their Christmas list this year. While the main reason for this is almost certainly the hefty price tag, I can’t help but feel that there are other factors at play too.
Richard Jameson of GfK NOP sums it up nicely:
“This is a highly competitive market and the mobile phone manufacturers have very strong brand loyalty. Apple needs more than cutting–edge design to penetrate this market and will have to work much harder in the UK than it did in the US to make iPhone a mass-market proposition.”
I wholeheartedly agree with Jameson’s perspective and would recommend his words be considered by any North American company that intends to target the UK market. Common language aside, the similarities end there.
By Francis Moran
Canada’s national broadcaster, the CBC, is airing a special series on its national radio news programs called, “How may I help you?” I caught the first in-depth piece yesterday evening and I so badly wanted to call in immediately and share my endless stack of customer service horror stories. Many fellow listeners obviously felt the same way; as of late this morning, fully 279 (!) individual stories of lament had been posted to CBC’s web site.
The issue put me in mind of an article, authored by Graham Technology’s Frank Kirwan, that we secured in Customer Management magazine earlier this year.
As I was listening to the radio piece last evening and reading some of the horror stories posted online this morning, the key point that kept coming back to me from Kirwan’s article “Dissatisfaction is a greater driver of (customer) defection than satisfaction is of retention,” he said. And judging from the number of CBC listeners who wrote that they would never again do business with that bank, telephone company, travel agency or whatever, clearly it takes just a single outrageous example of lousy customer service to trigger that defection.It really doesn’t have to be that way.
Because we have been working with Graham Technology for about a year and a half now, and with other companies like PIKA Technologies and Vocantas whose products and services can help companies sharpen their customer service, we know that the effective deployment of the appropriate technology solution can dramatically improve what seems to be a near-universally dismal record. The irony is that technology implementations are often cited by customers as the most egregious part of the problem. (Bell Canada’s voice avatar Emily surely would be hung in effigy from city to city across Canada if she was anything more corporeal than the ultimate in service-preventing disembodied interactive voice response (IVR) systems!)
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