Mutually Inclusive PR

PR Briefs - News Items Dec. 29, 2005

Colin McKay - Is Traditional Public Opinion Polling Dying a Slow Death?

Colin McKay - Abramoff, Op-eds, and the "Invisible" Hand of the Free Market
Business Week and others reveal payments for editorial mentions of a lobbyist's clients in op-ed pieces placed by think-tank analysts.

Scott Baradell - Media Orchard Presents: The 10 Worst Spins of 2005

David Weinberger - Microsoft Word: 20 Years and Still Wrong
David Weinberger marvels that he still can't perform some basic image placement functions in Word, despite 20 years of refinement of the standard word processing program. (With some help from his blog readers, he figured out how to solve the particular problem he was complaining about, but what happened to the good old days when WordPerfect let you view its commands and delete the ones that were causing problems?).

Another take on Word:

Uriel Wittenberg - A Tool for Thought Declines
A long-time Word user complains about the dumbing-down of certain capabilities.

Shel Israel - Edelman, the Missing Linker
The co-author of a new book on blogging takes the CEO of the world's largest PR firm to task for never linking to others in his influential blog. A much-discussed item in the PR blog world this week.

Recording Industry Vs. the People - Mom Fights Downloading Suit on her Own; (lawyers' blog explains RIAA process); 

P2PNet.net - How the RIAA Gets its Victims

Tom Friedman - The Other Side of Outsourcing, a look at job outsourcing to India, on YouTube by a New York Times correspondent (streaming video)

1983 Gimli Plane Crash that Almost Happened

Imagine the surprise of two pilots who, in July 1983, without fuel, successfully brought a Boeing 767 to an emergency landing on an abandoned air force air strip. They found, not an empty runway, but a car race taking place in what was now a raceway.

Imagine the surprise of the pit crews and crowd as the huge jet dropped from the sky and rolled its way toward them, slowed by a partially-deployed front wheel.

This was the event for which most people know Gimli, Manitoba. It's a town about an hour's drive north of Winnipeg, where I spent a lot of weekends and summers as a kid. The Gimli Glider, as the  Air Canada plane was called, made international news for an air emergency that didn't end in disaster.

One of the factors that caused the plane to run out of fuel between Ottawa and Edmonton was the introduction of a new plane to the fleet and new metric standards, without timely training and manuals. After a fuel tank gauge malfunctioned, the maintenance crews and pilots had plenty of time to sort out what amount of fuel the plane needed for the flight, but they ended up using the wrong ratio to make their calculations

Two factors that saved lives were the experience pilot Robert Pearson had as a glider pilot, and the familiarity co-pilot Maurice Quintal had with the Gimli air strip, where he had been stationed with the Royal Canadian Air Force. When both engines stopped running and hydraulics were severely limited, Pearson improvised to get the plane down. At one point he realized he was going to almost overshoot the runway, so he used a gliding maneuvre called a sideslip to get the plane low enough to land at the start of the runway.

As for Gimli, the economic disaster predicted when the air base closed down never materialized. It's a trading centre for some of the Interlake region of Manitoba, and a tourism destination. The New Iceland Heritage Museum opened in 2000, profiling the area's history as a settlement for Icelandic immigrants in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Check out the CBC archives for a sound clip after the plane landed safely. For a description of the emergency landing, see Wade Nelson's article. For more on the metric conversion error that caused the problem, see Peter Banks' article.

The photo above was taken by Wayne Glowacki of the Winnipeg Free Press.

Previous post:

Air Crash: Language and Expectations

Thanks to Keizo Gates for the link.

My Blog Christmas Card to You

Whatever tradition you observe, I hope you have a great holiday.

Don't sweat the stuff you can't do anything about.  Pay attention to the things that matter to you.  Do something special for someone you care about.

We had the pleasure to have a winter rainbow this week, so I thought I'd share it.

Don't Be Heavy-Handed with No-Photo Policy

  The Photo McDonalds Didn't Want You To See 
  Originally uploaded by WillPate.

Piaras Kelly and John Wagner warn that camera phones have expanded the likelihood your organization will be photographed or videoed by someone. So be prepared.

My take: Companies can try to ban the use of cameras and video cameras on their property, but they should provide some direction or training about how to enforce the rules.

I've seem many examples of employees getting aggressive and unpleasant when someone innocently (or otherwise) pulls out a camera to take a picture of something or somone.  It takes a lot of tact to enforce this kind of rule without offending the public or your customers. And when you've invited the public to an event like a fashion show or a product demonstration, you should relax the rules.

The other option is to encourage customers and others to document your organization's activities, and maybe provide free publicity. But as Wagner notes, that approach could be risky if your employees and your workplaces aren't up to the task of being documented.

See the group photo pool in Flickr, You Can't Take Pictures Here!

Previous Post:

Unauthorized Photo of a Sound Event

Albrycht Challenges Readers to Change the World

If something you did in 2006 could make the world a better place, would you do it?

That's the question Elizabeth Albrycht is asking New Communications Blogzine readers. The European blogger points readers to challenges from the 2005 State of the Future report, issued by an American NGO. Each year the American Council for the United Nations University produces its report.

This year, the challenges include four that Albrycht thinks are most relevant to communicators:

- How can genuine democracy emerge from authoritarian regimes?

- How can the global convergence of information and communications technologies work for everyone?

- How can the capacity to decide be improved as the nature of work and institutions change?

- How can ethical considerations become more routinely incorporated into global decisions?

Albrycht's challenge:

"Pick one challenge and devote some of your time in 2006 to working to solve it. Report on your progress throughout the year via your blog. Tag your related posts with the Technorati tag Global Challenge (Global Challenge) and let’s regroup at the end of the year and see what we’ve accomplished. Actions don’t need to be big ones! Even small steps count."

For more, read Albrycht's post on News Communications Blogzine, and check out a previous post on her CorporatePR blog (and my post about it).

IABC Blog Battle Royale

Ragan Communications' David Murray critiques IABC Cafe blogger (and board chair) Warren Bickford for writing bland posts, and not doing it often enough, in the December 19 Ragan Report.

Reminds me of the complaint about restaurant food: "The food here is terrible! And such small portions!"

Last winter, there was a sustained attack by bloggers on then-chair David Kistle for starting a blog, but not seeming to have the energy or inclination to maintain it. This year, despite a lengthy absence from the blog, Bickford hasn't faced the same criticisms.

This could have something to do with Bickford's active engagement on the blog over a period of months, the fact he asked several guest bloggers to step in during times when he might not be able to carry the conversation (only Tom Keefe has risen to the occasion), and how open he has been to suggestions, comments and criticism. That kind of behaviour earns you some slack when you need it.

Murray's conclusion "A lesson, perhaps: Transparency requires more than a good attitude, but time and energy, too."

Mark Ragan steps into the debate, saying that Murray was calling the blog bland, not Bickford. He then goes on to suggest Bickford could be more "exciting" by writing like Steve Crescenzo does. Crescenzo is indeed a lively writer who often takes a provocative stance to get a reaction. Which works for him, but it's not necessarily Bickford's style.

Bickford is doing just fine, writing about things that interest him or affect the organization. He has a wry wit that doesn't need to be more exciting, thank you.

While Murray was taking a jab at the IABC Cafe, he also took a potshot at "Canadian PR man and IABC gadfly Brian Kilgore (who) responds, often multiple times and typically truculently, to virtually every entry. We do not fault bloggers for ignoring such people. We might not even fault them for removing their posts."

Nothing like poking at a hornet's nest to stir up interest.

(Disclosure:  I know and respect Bickford. I haven't met any of the others involved in this epic struggle.)

A List of 2006 Lists

Prescience from the pundits:

Shel Israel - Blogging Predictions, including "After a few major metropolitan newspapers die, dailies will begin to understand that blogs are part of their solution, and will start incorporating neighborhood bloggers into their system." Not Too Geeky responds.

Seth Godin - Internet marketing in 2006 - 1) Inventory of adsense begins to catch up with demand ; 2) Thumbnail photos show up in adwords; 3) Web pages get DRAMATICALLY better at teaching and interacting ; 4) Several large marketers cease to do TV; 5) The Supreme Court bans email attachments. (Thanks to B.L. Ochman for the link.)

Trevor Cook - Looking forward to 2006, including "RSS will become ubiquitous" and "The record companies will fight back."

Robin Good - New Media Predictions 2006, including enormous growth in "news mastering," blog advertising and podcasting. Mark Hamilton adds his comments.

Red Herring - Microsoft's Challenges in 2006, including executing product transitions, pushing Vista to business users, getting the XBox 360 buzz back, overhauling security and refreshing its online strategy.

Airbag Industries - 2006, including "A design blogger will jump the gun and make 2007 predictions in October 2006. It always starts earlier than the year before."

Gartner Group - IT themes via Science Library Pad, "Choose 2006 tactics towards a 2008 strategy," " Insist on agility - in the heart of the organisation," and "Push beyond 2005 comfort zones - in value focus and technology."

Lee Lefever - The social networking consulting takes a year off to travel the world and write about it, so he lists the topics he would cover if he were covering the online beat in 2006.

And looking back at 2005:

Jeremy Wright, Fineman PR's Top 10 Pr Blunders here (no link on their home page - now that's weird). 

Debate Coverage: Live Blog Chat

Media blogger Antonia Zerbisias kept a running commentary going on the English language televised debate of party leaders Friday. Her postings resulted in a fragmented conversation, though, as comments to a previous posting would get missed by people reading the latest item.

As the debate wrapped up, she set up a single post for all visitors to comment to. The format worked much better, as her readers could hold a better virtual conversation about the debate.

Kudos to the Zerb for tweaking Typepad on the run to keep readers involved.

Making Blog Information Easier to Access

Most people would agree that it would be great if information people plug into their weblogs was easily searched, retrieved and categorized for the kind of information it is. For example, getting a search bot to go out and find all the conferences on a certain topic scheduled for your region for the coming fiscal year might help you plan professional development. It's one thing to find only information that's been posted in events databases. But think of the possibilities of finding every mention in every blog as well.

What people can't agree on is a standard method.

I missed this debate back in October, but it's worth going back to look at. Stowe Boyd of Corante describes the debate between advocates of microformats and structured blogging.

Stowe Boyd

I won't drag you into a technical debate. Suffice to say that microformats is one method of cataloguing information (such as a movie review, or an event notification). It calls for the use of web page style sheets to insert information about what category of information is being published (ie. event date, event location, event time). Another method, structured blogging, would employ plug-ins to help bloggers categorize their information.

Boyd leans toward the microformat method (style sheet approach) over the structured blogging method, mostly because it requires less up-front agreement among players in different companies.

It's not for the technically challenged, but the debate extends across several months and many authors:

• Structured Blogging Wiki
• Ken Thompson - Structured Blogging Standard Launched
• Phillip Pearson - Structured Blogging
• Pete Cashmore - Riffs, Noodly and Microformats
• Joshua Porter - Structured Blogging: Who Is Benefitting and How?
• Gregory Narain - The Structured Blogging/Microformats Debate - Different Sides of the Same Coin

The discussion extends way beyond this small group, but these were the ones I could easily pull from a BlogPulse search of Boyd's blog. As I get more comfortable with tools like BlogPulse, it's changing the way I pursue a topic. Instead of being stuck with one or two perspectives, I can open my field of vision to see a broader discussion taking place across continents, interest groups and time frames.

Update:

• Shel Holtz has an excellent overview of structured blogging
• Bob Wyman of PubSub (which has sponsored two plug-ins to help bloggers) gives some examples of structured blogging in use
• Google Blog Search on Structured Blogging and Microformats (a lot of overlapping results)
• Technorati on Structured Blogging and Microformats
• Stowe Boyd continues to naysay
• Arnaud Leene argues that even if structured blogging takes specialized skills and effort, a devoted core of people will make it work

PR Crisis: Rogers Profits from Terror Crimes?

One of Canada's major cell phone services is owned by the Rogers conglomerate. Now there's a front page story in The Globe and Mail, describing Rogers' refusal to eat the cost of fraudulent use of customers' cell phone costs by possible terrorist groups and others.

The kicker: the company's security person lets slip that several top Rogers executives had their cell accounts "cloned" by possible terrorists. Does this mean Rogers will admit their error, tighten their fraud detection measures, and let the customer off the hook?

My bet is it will take a couple of days of media and consumer outrage before they make the inevitable decision.  Reminds me of the telephone companies trying to force Internet dial-up customers to cough up thousands of dollars in spyware-related charges to their online account.

These companies have ways to detect and shut down the illegal activity. Why do they leave themselves open to accusations that they are profiting from the crimes of others?

Update:  According to media accounts, the customer got a personal phone call from Rogers boss Ted Rogers, who apologized and offered to waive the fraudulent charges to the customer's account. She (a lawyer) and her husband agreed, provided Rogers drops by for tea some time, so they can describe their customer service ordeal in person.

Not a bad recovery from an indefensible corporate position.