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“Yes, it’s important to change the light bulbs and windows, but it’s even more important to change the laws and the policies,”
Al Gore, in Phoenix, keynoting the GreenBuild conference
“When put together, we have the tools and technologies to solve three or four climate crises … But the missing element is political will.”
Al Gore in Cambridge Mass, at a book signing of Our Choice.
“Who wouldn’t buy a pair of socks for the Mount Olympus of commercial exposure?
Mitch Albom, on American Eagle’s promotion that lets a customer enjoy the his or her 15 seconds of fame on a billboard in Times Square, — the ‘famous airspace that once featured a giant winking penguin…’
“And the fun won’t end Nov. 27 …”
Story in the Associated Press about how shoppers would the checking social media sites for Black Friday specials
“Facebook is for brands – the careful ones”
Headline of a great post by Neville Hobson, commenting on research about using Facebook, about the need to not act like marketers!
“It’s a hole in your heart, just like 9/11.”
Spc. Chris Monge, on the tribute to 13 soldiers killed at Fort Hood, Texas
There are so many mashups around us that we have begun to take them for granted. We tend to see more of the video and music variety -like Everyblock and those that are Obama-based. Google has a tool called ‘maplets’ to use the API of their maps.
How about a mashup of a mug and your Twitter followers? Check this out.
So I was glad to hear that there’s a British competition open for mashups, on three themes: Crime, Environment and Health. The winner gets £10,000!
Watching last evening’s live webcast by Bill and Melinda Gates, I liked how Bill zipped past Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, and the Windows logo, to note that these ‘pictures’ don’t compare to something completely different –a chart showing decreasing infant mortality rates.
I love it when presentations don’t use graphics as a crutch. (Love it when the first slide is not the darn company logo, as if to remind the brain dead in the audience as to who is presenting! Full disclosure: I have committed this crime myself, and know it sucks!)
Love it when someone stops a canned PowerPoint preso and uses the flip chart instead to draw some crude Venn diagram or stick figure to explain the point. (If you’ve not read The Back of a Napkin, I highly recommend it, as I have done before like a broken record.)
In somewhat ironic news, this month, Gates (who owns Corbis) supposedly ‘expanded his stock photo empire’ with a small stake in Eastman Kodak.
Just as the aphorism goes that “there are lies, damn lies and advertising,” I wonder if it’s time for someone to come up with one about stunts –especially the PR variety.
Let me be clear. I don’t condemn stunts. In fact it might be construed as another word for ‘tactic’ or creative attempt to make a point.
So I was about to classify this latest ‘underwater cabinet meeting‘ by the President of Maldives as a stunt, but I thought I’d put the question to my readers to check the pulse first. I won’t go into the details here, suffice to say that it takes a bit of effort to get your cabinet to strip down to scuba diving suits –and anchor desks to the coral– to pull off something like this.
But back to the definition of a PR stunt. Here are some past examples that might fall into this category.
- Pole dancing in the streets of Manhattan
- Admitting to a PR stunt -charging for use of bathrooms on planes
- Boy lost in runaway balloon –a stunt that looks like an accident
I know, there are more. But for our purposes, let’s ask if promoting a cause or a brand validates the approach. Governments are quick to blame each other when an international or bilateral crisis arises, calling it a stunt, even though there had been no specific public facing activity. Headline writers find it a useful 5-letter word to spice up a story. (As in this one, that was clearly a misplaced use of money, rather than a stunt).
I would think a PR stunt is anything that
- Involves an event or a sustained activity that is staged, primarily for gaining media attention
- Is unusual or controversial
- Is connected with an extended campaign that does not involve PR or advertising. Behavior modification, for example
The first --gaming the media –can be dangerous, if done to fool the media. If the balloon incident being debated this week proves to be an act of self-promotion by wasting time and money of a sheriff’s department, that’s a dumb stunt, indeed.
The second –is often creative and harmless. The guy who dons a pizza delivery attire and ‘delivers’ his resume (attached to the box) to a marketing director, is clearly breaking out of the old method (email or mail) to get his application to the top of the pile.
The third –wins my approval, hands down. This is what all good (insert the word ‘marketing,’ ’cause promotion,’ ‘advertising’ as a prefix here) campaigns ought to be.
President Nasheed’s course of action seems more like the third category. He has a point to make, and what better way than for a leader of a country surrounded by –and threatened by– water to do this?
“In the surround-sound media environment of today, there is no shortage of places you can go to see an expert’s view of business and where it is headed. What I took from the first day of the World Business Forum, however, was just how important passion is as a common thread in the people (and their organizations) who are accomplishing something.”
Rohit Bhargava, on the World Business Forum
“While 60% of employees use word processing daily, only 42% actually create documents.”
Forrester Research report on technology adoption in the workplace.
“In a real-time, social media world, marketing has to react immediately to the successes and shortcomings of operations, product development, legal, finance, customer support, and the idiosyncrasies of company personnel.”
Jason Baer, on how social media gives everything a marketing focus.
“A turtle travels only when it sticks its neck out.”
Tweet by @lspearmanii
“Hi! This is your aspirin bottle calling. I haven’t seen you in a while…”
Peter Svensson, of the Associated Press, on the technology that connects the pill bottle cap to an AT&T network.
“Does our Cicero even glance at his speeches before reading them in public?”
George Will, conservative columnist for the washington Post, on Obama’s overuse of words and concepts in his speech at Copenhagen.
“Nice headlamps”
Headline of a billboard ad for a Northern Ireland used-car web site, that got the advertisement banned in the UK. The accompanying visual was not about cars…
It borders on being insensitive to be talking about, and blogging about the anticipation for Google Wave, in the days following the tsunami in Samoa.
As someone tweeted about this, the coincidence was very odd. (Not that it is too far fetched for Google to be associated with a tsunami –check this story!)
But as we wait for Google Wave to come our way, we are reminded of how outdated our predominant communication tool is. “If you look at a picture of the first computer that sent an email, it looks sort of like a cockpit in an old airplane,” observed Lars Rasmussen, Google’s chief engineer. He was commenting on email, a 40-year old technology.
I meet many people who are so annoyed with email. One CEO said he didn’t mind if a meeting started late because “it gives me a chance to catch up with my email.” He said that not looking up from his Blackberry, at lunch.
Reminded me of that limerick:
I’m out of the office right now.
Do I hate answ’ring email? And how!
Missed your missive? I’m glad,
So I won’t say I’m sad.
Pester some other worker-bee. Ciao!
Last week Dipnote, the blog by the State Department, turned two.
So much has happened in two years. It was the year that the iPhone debuted, and Microsoft bought a stake in Facebook. A few months before that TIME named all those people creating content and connecting through social media as the ‘Person of the Year’ – the famous “YOU” issue.
Luke Forgerson, Managing Editor of Dipnote
Dipnote took to this new way of communicating with amazing flair. If there is one example of I’ve been using repeatedly to illustrate how any organization could stop firing press releases and start a conversation, it’s been them.
Think about it. Foreign policy to many is as sexy as watching paint dry. But given the right angles –heck, the right to loosen up– and the interest in listening as much as speaking, it turns out to be a different animal.
I have talked to many organizations who are terrified at the thought of saying something that could come back to bite them. Blogs, and videos, and photos pulled from a diverse group of individuals seem like total anarchy to them. It might damage the brand, they fear. The question I get asked a lot is ‘What if someone says something nasty?” –followed by “should we publish that too?”
I won’t go into the responses I give, but you’d think a group of people who represent the brand image of a country must have thought about this a lot. There must be bookshelves of white papers and journals on this subject in their offices. There must be legal advisers shaking their heads in disbelief.
And yet…
If you look at the social media initiatives the State Dept has rolled out over the past few years, these ‘government employees’ seem to take to new media in a way you’d expect of a marketing organization. Maybe they understand that good marketing is all about good communication. It’s more than the ingredients of ‘technology and talent‘ that Sec. Clinton spoke about.
It’s about using social media as an antenna not a bullhorn.
I want to apologize to any of you who follow me on Twitter if you received a direct message from me saying “hey, I made $384 yesterday. this website showed me how.” Apparently my account was hacked because I may have clicked a link in a similar message from others in my network.
I had contacted two senders from whom I received the suspicious DMs with the shortened URL, and thought I was immune. A reader to my post at ValleyPRBlog confirmed that I too had taken the bait.)
So why are we so vulnerable to the garbage that gets passed around the Twittersphere faster than you could say Phish? One word: Trust.
- We screen less: We are so inherently trusting of those in our network, we don’t always take time to check if the email jokes, the ‘Must Read This’ links, or the PPT attachments are safe.
- We click more. I tend to click more on a shortened URL because I see so much of them. The link economy teaches us to prefer clicking on links rather than typing a URL out.
I have made the point elsewhere that there will soon arise Trusted Friends, or Network Curators, and these may not even be major brands; they could be individuals with great credentials. People we value, and… trust like crazy!
Speaking of which, I am about to purchase a book on the subject called Trust Agents –co-authored by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. It comes highly recommended. Brogan’s original thesis for the book was that it was about: “people who use the web in a very human way to build influence, reputation, awareness, and who can translate that into some kind of business value.”
Those of you who’ve been following this blog know that I make the point that while blogs do not solve every communication challenge (good ole face-to-face still works great) it’s become the center of gravity for a lot of what goes on in PR, marketing and media.
So I was glad to see Dave Winer, the father of blogs, invite Robert Scoble to get back to basics … and blogging.
In case you missed it, Scoble, who co-authored one of the earliest books on blogging (and wrote an early blog with a huge following) famously spoke out in favor of FriendFeed. It was all about Lifestreaming, with some concerns. But now that Friend Feed was swallowed up by Facebook, Winer suggests that it’s time to return to using the Internet for what it was designed for -to share and to store knowledge, to connect and to engage.
Doc Searls‘ comment to this is worth thinking about: In this new Eden, blogging and microbloging are native. Corporate walled gardens are just short-lived substitutes.
There’s a lesson here about the tendency to obsess with tools. For all the hype you hear about the new tools, and the ‘pay attention to Facebook’ talk, it’s what we do to connect and communicate, and yes, to ’store knowledge’ that matters.
That’s why blogs, which some have thought to be soooo passe, are worth discovering all over again.
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