By Francis Moran
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I spent four childhood Christmases in Lesotho, the tiny mountain kingdom in southern Africa where my father worked for the country’s newly independent government. I have vivid memories of our very first Christmas there, which came scant weeks after we first landed in this strange new land. So I know first-hand that several things we take for granted at this time of year simply don’t happen in Lesotho, a country that struggled with poverty and chronic drought when we lived there and whose problems have been endlessly compounded since then by the ravages of HIV and AIDS.
The most obvious difference at Christmas time is that it is hot and sunny in Lesotho, not cold and snowy. Contrary to many people’s imagined vision of Africa, however, it does get extremely cold and snowy in Lesotho during its winter since the country lies at 5,000 feet above sea level and higher. Being in the southern hemisphere, Lesotho’s winter corresponds with our summer, and vice versa.
The next most obvious difference is that very few families in Lesotho will be tucking in to a feast of good food following a frenzied burst of present openings this, or any, Christmas morning. Many families will be led by the oldest child, or a surviving grandparent as AIDS has cut a swath through a generation of parents and wage-earners. And while most will take time to celebrate with joyous song and dance the religious aspects of Christmas in this deeply devout nation of church-goers, very few will be able to join in the secular aspects that, for most of us, now take precedence.
This childhood connection to Lesotho and an awareness that this tiny nation of incredibly resilient and warmhearted people was bearing a disproportionate share of the burden of HIV and AIDS led me a few years ago to look into a unique Canadian charity, Help Lesotho. We have supported Help Lesotho and its unstoppable dynamo of a founder and director, Peg Hebert, ever since. Through the year, we use our media relations skills and do what we can to help Peg spread her message of hope, and at Christmas we forego sending cards and gift baskets to our clients and colleagues in favour of giving the money to Help Lesotho. We will do so again this year.
But I also want to draw the attention of our Ottawa readers to a fundraising sale of Christmas gift items that Help Lesotho will be holding at its offices over the next couple of weeks. Here you can buy one-of-a-kind gifts that will not only delight their recipients but will also help Peg and her team continue their work. You can see a full catalogue of the items on offer here, and the sale itself will be held at Help Lesotho’s offices at the Keller Williams Building, 610 Bronson Avenue (just north of the Queensway) from 4 to 7 p.m. on Thursday, December 4; Friday, December 5 and Friday December 12; and from 10 a.m. to noon on Saturday, December 6.
For those of you not in Ottawa, the same gifts can be bought and the same contribution made to Help Lesotho by clicking on the link in the previous paragraph and shopping online.
By Danny Sullivan
BBC technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, posts an interesting piece on the dot.life blog about the slating of the new BlackBerry Storm by English comedian, Stephen Fry. No, this wasn’t part of a stand-up routine, but rather a series of messages on Twitter, where Fry apparently has a following of thousands.
I note Fry’s comment at the end of the post, essentially stating that he thought one of the results of the Net and social networking has been to make everyone more equal in their influence. But has this truly been the case?
Certainly in Fry’s case it is partially true, but while his newfound influence in the field of gadgets and consumer technology can be attributed in part to the social networking revolution, it is also true that he is a man who had a considerable public profile before the Internet was even considered a medium of any significance.
The web and its associated technologies have certainly given a voice to millions, but in terms of real influence, the masses still invariably turn to those who have commanded attention beyond the four walls of the internet. Of course there are some exceptions to the rule, but the notion that we all have equal influence is generally only as true online as it is in the world at large.
By Francis Moran
An application that allows users to create their grocery-shopping lists online and then see which of their local stores has the lowest total or individual prices for the items on the list was the debut project to be presented at the first-ever exhibition Monday of projects developed by students at the unique VeloCity incubator-residence at the University of Waterloo. With an objective no less ambitious than to “organize the world’s food information,” Grocerus is a nifty app that, covering a limited array of foodstuffs and listing stores only in the immediate Waterloo area, still has a distance to travel before it meets that ambition.
Indeed, the same could be said for virtually all the projects exhibited, where ambition outstripped — sometimes vastly outstripped — their implementation to date. But considering that these are student project teams that have been working just scant weeks, the dozen and a half ideas on display were an impressive array of creativity, imagination and, for at least a handful of standouts, well-engineered product development.
Some, like Grocerus, were strictly local in their initial iteration. For example, Find It Off Campus, which matches available student housing with students looking for accommodations, and Class Album, which helps students coordinate their schedules, both focused exclusively on the University of Waterloo for starters, but their founders expressed every intention of broadening their horizons once proof of concept was established.
Some of the applications are trying to dig value out of social networking trends. Gruup aims to use Facebook and other sites to bring consumers together for group discounts on products while Emoshion wants to lever social networks to help people uncover rare or hard-to-find fashion items such as limited-edition sneakers. Giftah, whose site is not yet live, wants to capitalize on the 15 to 20 per cent of gift cards that never get used by making a convenient marketplace where they can be bought and sold.
One of the more polished presentations was InPulse, a so-called “smart watch” that will use Bluetooh connectivity to convey key information about incoming emails, SMS messages and calls from your mobile phone to your watch. “Send me an email directly to my watch,” founder Eric Migicovsky said in what had to be the most original line of the day.
The judges bestowed their blessing and $1,000 on Sparknav, which will allow users to download to their phones content about their surroundings, such as directions, tour information or even exhibit details at museums, art galleries or zoos.
Two other good reports on the day’s activities at GlobalNerdy and StartUpNorth provide excellent analyses of how the students’ shortcomings in terms of effective business models and presentation skills can be addressed by getting executives and technology professionals more involved in VeloCity, something to which inmedia is committed as a partner of this fascinating endeavour.
By Leo Valiquette
As a former journalist, nothing warranted a head shake more than PR folks who weren’t interested when opportunity came knocking.
Sure, there are always situations in which a journalist is a burr under the saddle, pricking away at tender spots that an organization would rather keep out of the public eye. But I’m talking about positive media opportunities or, in some cases, followups on pitches that have been made by the PR practitioners themselves. As a journalist, I personally experienced situations in which a PR person would make a pitch, then disappear or stonewall when we expressed an interest in pursuing the opportunity.
Michael Hammond, a reporter at the Kitchener-Waterloo Record and former colleague from the Ottawa Business Journal, pinged me today about three separate examples of apparent PR apathy towards the media this week that caused a great deal of teeth grinding and hair pulling in his shop. And again, these were positive story opportunities that were brushed off.
I invited Michael to appear on our blog with a guest piece about these incidents, but he was so incensed he had already published his rant on the Record’s blog, which you can read at A necessary evil.
The moral of the story? Take all the good press you can get. Duh!
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Boldy going where we’ve gone before … sort of
November 21, 2008 by Leo Valiquette
By Leo Valiquette Say what you will about the mindset of Hollywood executives, they do like to reuse and recycle, even if the concept of “reduce” remains beyond their grasp. We’ve seen the bigscreen reboots of such classics (I use that term loosely) as Charlie’s Angels, Starsky and Hutch, The Dukes of Hazard, Get Smart, The Fugitive, […]
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Customer service so bad it wins an award
November 18, 2008 by Francis Moran
I don’t know if it’s because we have a client whose software helps companies vastly improve their customer service, or whether we, like most others on this planet, rage against lousy customer service when we are victims of it, but it simply defies comprehension that companies would willingly lose business because they can’t seem to […]
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Top tech PR cliches
November 17, 2008 by Danny Sullivan
By Danny Sullivan Over on the BBC web site, readers have submitted their personal choices for the most-hated cliches in current circulation. Reading through the article was a painful exercise, and I’m sure most of you will also recognize many of the expressions as appearing frequently in your own day-to-day vocabulary. The technology sector is rife with such cliches, and I’ve […]
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Getting covered by Tier 1 business media
November 13, 2008 by Danny Sullivan
By Danny Sullivan So, you want to see your story make the pages of the major business media? Well, if it truly merits that level of attention, then applying the right mix of patience, persistence and PR savvy should pay off… or perhaps you could try a somewhat less orthodox method to guarantee front page attention. Yesterday’s […]
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Getting attention in the 500-channel universe
November 10, 2008 by Leo Valiquette
By Leo Valiquette A new study commissioned by Microsoft finds that Britons spend about one quarter of their daily television habit flipping channels. But it’s hardly an attention-deficit trend limited to the U.K., or to television for that matter. Bombarded as we all are by the sheer volume and variety of media each day, it’s a struggle […]
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Sometimes you just never know…
November 07, 2008 by Danny Sullivan
By Danny Sullivan As a PR practitioner, once in a while something happens to make you scratch your head and revisit the question we all wonder from time to time: what qualifies as newsworthy on any given day? Of course, there are certain things we know about this question (known knowns, if you will). For example, that size matters – the big news always […]
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Breathtakingly audacious
November 05, 2008 by Francis Moran
By Francis Moran More words will be written today, perhaps, about yesterday’s presidential election in the United States than have ever been written about a single event in living memory, but I feel compelled to add my own few since rarely in my life have I seen something transpire that I frankly never expected to […]
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Happy birthday to us
November 05, 2008 by Francis Moran
By Francis Moran Although it had its genesis in a consulting practice that was already several years old, and its first employee had been in place for several months, inmedia Public Relations Inc. was legally incorporated on November 5, 1998, and so today is our tenth birthday. I would be less than forthright if I […]
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