By Leo Valiquette
I still remember the day on the schoolyard when I picked up a pair of bent twigs to serve as an imaginary pistols and offered one to my classmate for an impromptu game of cops and robbers.
“I’m not allowed to do that,” he told me solemnly.
“Do what?”
“Play with guns.”
“But it’s just a stick,” I said. “It’s not a real gun.”
I was around eight years old at the time and it came as quite a shock to learn his parent’s religious convictions precluded my classmate from participating in what I considered to be a harmless bit of fun. Cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians and various other activities now tarnished by PC’s broad brush were an integral part of my childhood.
But, thirty years later, with a boy of my own, that perspective has obviously changed. That’s not to say my son won’t enjoy these kinds of activities with his old man (he is the proud owner of a plastic sword complete with light and sound effects, after all), but I’ve become much more sensitive over the years to the insidious influence of the almighty dollar on the marketing agenda of big business, especially when it comes to marketing merchandise to children.
Case in point. My wife is a volunteer tester for the Canadian Toy Testing Council. Every month there’s a new batch of toys that are supposed to be appropriate for children my son’s age (three+), to be tested, reviewed and, well, played with.
A recent item was a pair of over-sized foam Incredible Hulk Smash Hands that kids wear like boxing gloves. The kid is encouraged to smash and bash, with each impact generating some suitable sound effect or a quote from the Hulk’s extensive vocabulary. My son hates the things. One parent for whom my wife provides home daycare services said they wouldn’t even have accepted them for testing.
For the record, the Incredible Hulk was rated a relatively kid-friendly PG-13 (not that I put much faith in the movie ratings system. A rant on that subject you can find here from my days at the Ottawa Business Journal). There are plenty of toys out there too for the latest Batman flick, The Dark Knight, which also gets off easy, despite its dark and violent tone, with a PG-13 rating. The recommended age range for these toys starts at four years old.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I have a problem with toys being marketed to a kid who can’t even see the movie for another nine birthdays. I’m glad the marketing PR services I provide usually involve technologies and products that would bore a four-year-old to tears.
By Francis Moran
Who’d have thunk that my self-professed word nerdiness could come together with my social conscience on a single web site with a terribly addictive premise?
Well, in the world of the web, all mash-ups are possible, and the quirky but fascinating site Free Rice manages to marry these seemingly disparate interests of mine with a little game that sees rice donated to feed hungry people with every correct answer visitors give to a vocabulary question. For every word you get right, the site’s backers donate 20 grains of rice through the United Nations World Food Program to help feed hungry people. The money to buy the rice is generated through banner ads on the site.
Twenty grains of rice doesn’t sound like much, but since launching the site in October 2007, Free Rice has donated more than 41 billion grains of rice to people in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Uganda, Nepal, Bhutan and Myanmar. That’s an amount approaching 900 metric tonnes of rice!
And the game is dangerously addictive. You rise through levels as you play, climbing one level every time you correctly answer three questions in a row. Get one wrong, though, and you slip down a level. A little counter at the bottom tracks your progress. I got to level 48 before having to quit yesterday evening so I could join my family in that other highly addictive current preoccupation, the Olympics.
(I am indebted — I think! — to Nicole Ferraro over at Internet Evolution for bringing this site to my attention. I am afraid, Nicole, to go anywhere near the other great time-wasters you list…!)
By Francis Moran
I originally wrote this post for DangleTech, Canada’s largest community-sponsored website dedicated to the issues surrounding Canada’s technology sector, where I contribute a weekly blog called “In the media: It’s where you need to be.” But my editor here at inmedialog, who’s been itching all week to see a post on this subject, decided we should also post it here.
One of the most frequent and, to tell the truth, most boring and least helpful, themes in the blogosphere is the all-too-common declaration by one blogger or another that PR is dead. With all the authority of his well-read blog, Robert Scoble started the ball rolling again this week with a post Monday that celebrated the fact that he actually heard about a new company – more of a raw beta concept, really – from some source other than a PR or corporate flack.
Leaving aside for the moment the question why this should be so noteworthy – Hey, Robert: It’s a rare day I don’t learn something new or hear about a new company, product or service with no involvement whatsoever from a PR or corporate flack. I call it waking up, opening my eyes and walking down the street! – he went on to extrapolate from this that PR is dead.
I’m not going to weigh in with comments on all the arguments raised both pro and con the silly idea. If you really have nothing better to do, if Canada’s not doing well enough at the Olympics to draw you in to all the TV coverage and you have time to kill, then you can see a good round-up here.
Notwithstanding the tediousness of this apparent fixation on the part of a lot of the blogosphere to bury PR and speak its eulogy, two useful points emerge.
The first is that when it comes to understanding public relations, the full scope of activities that fall under its rubric and the even fuller scope of marketing activities of which PR is merely a subset, Robert Scoble is strictly a blind man touching an elephant. Like many of his blog brethren, all Scoble ever sees (touches) is the story pitch. And since they are on the receiving end of a staggering number of poorly written and badly targeted pitches, it’s no wonder these guys see no value in what most PR people are doing with them.
In fact, the pitch is the very end of a lengthy and intensive process that, if done properly, creates tremendous value, both for the idea being pitched and for the person to whom it is being pitched. It’s merely one arrow in a PR quiver that, in turn, is merely one weapon in a marketing armoury.
The second useful point is that in many ways, Scoble and his colleagues are right. PR is dead. At least, PR – as it has been practiced by too many for far too long – is dead. That old way saw (mal)practitioners source huge lists of so-called contacts from commercial media directories, mail-merge them with their news release or story pitch, and then blast it out to hundreds, if not thousands. It didn’t work in the old days any better than it does now. All that has changed is that the targets of those useless pitches are naming and shaming those who do it. (I did weigh in on the death of the media directory.)
Far from the blogosphere sounding the death knell for PR, it has focused attention on the most egregious practices of the industry. While I still find most of the arguments tendentious and silly, at least they’re serving this one useful public service.
By Leo Valiquette
There’s been no shortage of commentary about the threat and opportunity posed to traditional media, and the PR profession for that matter, by social media (reference too, my post of yesterday). But, while these new tools of mass communication and interaction are truly disruptive, have we developed the maturity to use them wisely?
Chris Brogan today offered some key etiquette points to keep in mind with social media, whether it be basic e-mail use or the more advanced features of Facebook. It’s by no means an exhaustive list.
There mere fact that Chris finds it necessary to start off his list with the email etiquette, of all things, demonstrates the utter thoughtlessness many of us demonstrate with the casual click of that Send button. Email is the original social media tool (no doubt, others will disagree about that). It’s been widely available to the masses for more than a decade, and yet we still have to be reminded about how to use it judiciously?
It’s the utter convenience of these things that I believe is the problem. These tools are so ubiquitous and available it’s easy to focus on employing them as the ready means to a goal without giving sufficient thought to the impact on those with whom we’re trying to communicate, or those around us we shouldn’t disturb.
Mobile phones are the ultimate example of this. Movie theatres still find it necessary to preface the feature presentation with that annoying “Please, don’t add your own soundtrack” PSA to ensure ringtones have been muted. And that’s a casual social setting. I’d estimate that 90 per cent of the time when I am attending some kind of business function that includes a presentation, at least one person in that audience will receive a call with their ringtone at full volume to interrupt the speaker. Rather than mute the volume, quite often they’ll leap up and sprint from the room with the phone still ringing.
The important thing to remember in this age of instant communication — all communication doesn’t have to happen instantly, people don’t have to respond to you within minutes and the world really doesn’t need to know what you had for breakfast or share in that snazzy new Facebook app you’ve found.
By Leo Valiquette
Yesterday I enjoyed a lively piece from PR executive and co-manager of The Bad Pitch Blog Richard Laermer about the gradual extinction of the newsprint dinosaur or, at least, the dinosaur mentality of those who run the old-school journals of record.
He asserted that traditional media suffer from a fatal self-importance (I’d say arrogance) that sees most media empires failing to appreciate the threat and opportunity that is social media. As evidence he cited the mass layoffs taking place at major dailies across North America as advertising revenues droop. For PR practitioners, It’s a problem exacerbated by clients who don’t see the value of online media coverage if there isn’t also some ink to stain their fingers.
Bottom line: Blogs, Twitter feeds and the like are giving consumers of information more nimble, responsive and interactive channels through which to get the news and comment most important to them. It’s a point not to be overlooked by PR types either.
As a former journalist, I wholeheartedly agree that print media outlets must go far beyond simply offering their content online, even offering exclusive online content. They must be ready to engage directly with their audiences and provide the news in a much more dynamic fashion than has been the norm.
A perfect example of the way in which a newspaper can take advantage of the tools offered by social media (and one that also demonstrates there is hope for change) cropped up today at A Shel of My Former Self. Shel Holtz talks about how two local newspapers are using Twitter to cover a sensational murder trial in Idaho. One is simply using Twitter to alert interested readers of when there is new content available to read, while the other is taking the truly pioneering step of providing real-time updates of the proceedings direct from the courtroom. Now that’s what you call dynamic news coverage.
There is hope after all.
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Are you ready to execute a PR program?
August 11, 2008 by Danny Sullivan
By Danny Sullivan Working at an agency, it is always interesting when you first sit down with a prospective client to find out more about them and determine what their requirement for PR might be. Often, companies have not given much thought to what it is they are hoping to achieve through media relations, but simply feel […]
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Ottawa has the best coffee (machine) in the world
August 11, 2008 by Francis Moran
By Francis Moran I have been an enthusiast of the Clover coffee brewing machine ever since the new Bridgehead café a few blocks from our ByWard Market offices opened up a year or so ago, featuring one of these shiny devices that brew a perfect single cup of steaming hot Java exactly to my taste […]
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Something very strange came in the mail …
August 08, 2008 by Francis Moran
By Francis Moran Many, many years ago, I worked at the then-decidedly down-market tabloid Halifax Daily News. (See my post on the closing of the News earlier this year by Transcontinental.) It was not unusual for our newsroom to receive odd missives, their senders clearly counting that our bent sense of humour, appreciation for the […]
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Where are all those eyes coming from?
August 07, 2008 by Leo Valiquette
By Leo Valiquette Francis posted a good piece today over at Dangletech on the misperception that marketing and public relations activities are a wasted effort during the summer months when sandy beaches and boat docks beckon. Linda blogged quite handily herself on the issue a little while back. There are, without doubt, fewer pairs of eyes available […]
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Laying claim to social media
August 05, 2008 by Leo Valiquette
By Leo Valiquette In business circles, defining what is social media is immediately followed by the question of how can it can be turned into an effective marketing and communications tool. But who owns this function in an organization? Is that even a valid question? Over at A Shel of My Former Life, Shel Holtz gives […]
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July Roundup: Good tips, bad slips and farewell to Linda
August 05, 2008 by inmedia
By inmedia In case you missed these posts the first time around, here’s a recap of everything we published in July. Linda: July 3: Blogging about blogging July 9: A post for the word nerds July 11: iPhone frenzy! July 18: How times have changed July 21: Marketing to different age groups July 25: Home […]
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Over and out
July 31, 2008 by Linda Forrest
By Linda Forrest Today is my last day of work prior to going on maternity leave. In Canada, we’re incredibly blessed that we have the option of taking one year off to be with our new arrivals, so I’m taking advantage and plan to be off until mid-August 2009 doing work of a different sort. […]
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Oh, the sweet serenity of white space
July 31, 2008 by Leo Valiquette
By Leo Valiquette Over at Glass House, Frank Shaw takes a moment to talk about, taking a moment. The power of silence, the impact of that empty space between words, whether written or spoken. Not that there’s much chance to enjoy the comfort of one’s own silence, or anyone else’s, for that matter, in this age […]
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