Mutually Inclusive PR

Giving Thanks

Why are the forces of political correctness in this world so often strident and humourless bores who act like they never get laid?

I would argue many politically correct folks are witty and quite willing to acknowledge other points of view.  But the ones who lecture the rest of us on what we should be doing, how we should be speaking, and - most importantly - what we shouldn't be doing and saying, tend to be strident, humourless bores.

When the Barenaked Ladies make a point about world peace or environmentalism, we don't boo them off the stage.  They do it with humour, self awareness and respect for your right to disagree.

 

John Wagner, one of my favourite bloggers, likes to act as a bit of a contrarian.  He calls out the political correctness bullies who use outrage and spin to try to force their views on the rest of society.

This week, he's asking whether the grumbling about the origins of American Thanksgiving justify a reshaping of the holiday to reflect the exploitation of aboriginal people.  His point is that the symbolism of the pilgrims depending on the generosity of the local Indian tribe for survival has long since given way to a holiday that's all about getting together with family.

Of the politicization of Thanksgiving, he asks:

"So aside from political gain or media visibility, what's the point of turning something like Thanksgiving into a finger-pointing exercise?

"Is the third-grade teacher in the AP story above -- who walks into his classroom and steals things from his students to educate them about the European settlers -- really doing any good? Or is he simply creating another cariacture?"

I left a long, boring comment on his blog.  The short version is that I think it's quite possible to have a discussion about aboriginal rights, European colonialism and past injustices without giving up our right to celebrate the good things in life.

Europeans did some pretty horrific things on this soil in the name of God, progress and civilization.  I don't think it's too much for us to look back on the atrocities of the past and acknowledge them.  Even today, being born in a First Nations reserve in Canada automatically knocks years off your life expectancy.  I'm happy to talk about that with my kids on a day like Thanksgiving or Canada Day.  It doesn't make me any less thankful, or any less proud to be Canadian.

Image courtesy of RedKid.net

Common Sense PR Blog Part of b5 Media

A while back I announced that I'd be making some blog changes.  The day has arrived.

Drop by Common Sense PR and let me know what you think.

At the time I decided to launch a new blog, Jeremy Wright announced that blogging network b5 Media was looking for writers for a planned business channel.  I sent b5's Douglas Hanna a proposal.  The next thing I knew I was writing posts for the blog-to-be.

I'll be writing primarily for business managers and communicators.  I've found that quite often managers don't know how to get the most out of public relations, and communicators don't know how to get buy-in to communications plans.

Yes, there will be ads.  Yes, they will sometimes get in the way of the paragraph you are trying to read and they may do annoying things to attract your attention.  I'll try to keep the writing and visuals exciting enough to get you past the distractions.  Thanks to ad revenue, I may be able to get to some more conferences and events in the future.

For people who subscribe to feeds, the blog will have a full text feed available, so you don't have to leave the comfort of your feed reader.

Please drop by, subscribe, and let me know what you like and don't like.  Check out some of the other business blogs on b5.  I'm pretty excited about the possibilities for creating an information nexus for the business reader.

Thanks to my editor Douglas, the designer Scott, CEO Jeremy, and all the bloggers at b5 who have made me welcome.  It's been hard keeping this under wraps until launch day (everyone I told about this -- don't tell Jeremy I was a bad boy).

Update:  I realized I didn't mention anything about Mutually Inclusive PR.  This blog will continue, with a bit less emphasis on public relations/communications. I'll be migrating the content to a new server soon at www.ericeggertson.com, but will keep posts active on this Typad server for a while, to keep the links from breaking.

Tags:  b5media, blogs, eggertson

Josh Gets the Money Shot for Signage Fetishists

Confesion: I have a thing for signage.  I rave about good signage, and contantly harp about the perils of bad signage.

When I see a new stop sign - without warning signs about the change - all I see is a lawsuit.  When I can barely navigate a parking garage because the signs are hard to read, hard to understand and poorly placed, I vow not to return to that mall (well, for a few months, anyway).

When I speed up after the super speed bumps, only to find out someone mistakenly placed the 50 km/h sign before the last speed bump, instead of after it, I start to fantacize about painful procedures mistakenly performed on city engineers.  (Try going over one of those extra large speed bumps at 50 K when your spouse is recovering from whiplash.  Now go look up pain and suffering in the dictionary.)

So, I'm a signage fetishist.  I'm not ashamed.

I was particularly pleased to come across Josh Hallett's photos from an Ikea.  The signage - like the rest of the store and product design - is simple, elegant and extremely functional.

The spotlight trained on the arrow on the floor is a particularly nice touch.  Thanks for sharing, Josh. His Flickr photos. Check his blog, too.

Tangential linking:  For a different take on design, check out Ross Howard's post about ambient signifiers, and how the use of sound on the Tokyo rail system suggests ways to subtly help website visitors find their way (and no, Ross isn't suggesting musical websites).

Tags:  signage, kea, retail, signs, joshhallett, functionality

Interactive Sites Can Work, if the Concept Is Right

Here's a Flash site that makes the most of low-res graphics and the public's expectation that milk will be marketed in a wholesome way.

Instead of testimonials about health and bone density levels, mechantchoco.com (warning: site launches with sound) uses a horror film motif to reveal the sad fate of kidnapped chocolate bunnies, ducks and bears that are ground up and turned into chocolate milk.

The choppy, cheap horror-film look of the graphics works well.  Selecting different options, you can see how the chocolate critters were bashed, ground and micro-waved into pieces before being transformed into chocolate milk.

The campaign earned BBDO Montreal a Cassie grand prix.  For six weeks in 2005 Quebec was peppered  with posters for various "missing" chocolate animals, prompting teens to visit the site.  Sales went up 17%, says the Globe and Mail.

Tags:  ads, flash, promotion, dairy, youth,marketing

MedicAlert to Partner with Schools on Free Kids' Bracelets

It's one of those "Why haven't we done this before?" decisions. Canadian MedicAlert Foundation is launching a program toay to provide free warning bracelets or necklaces to kids from four to 14 years old with medical conditions that could be life threatening.

From a public service point of view, this is a no-brainer.  Kids shouldn't be penalized if their parents don't think they can afford the fees, or don't feel motivated to sign up their kids.  This program will go through the schools to reach kids and their parents.

From a marketing point of view, it's a good idea too.  As more schools get involved in the program, more kids will get used to having a MedicAlert tag. And kids grow up into paying participants in the program, which includes a national database and 24-hour toll-free number.

Not that MedicAlert is a for-profit company.  But if their goal is to prevent deaths among Canadians with life threatening allergies or medical conditions, this is a smart way to get corporate backing for a major push to reach the estimated 200,000 Canadian kids who are at risk.

The No Child Without program starts in 60 schools, and will expand to up to 10,000 elementary and junior high schools across the country.

See also: How to donate; Globe and Mail story.

Flickr's Open Approach Continues to Pay Off

Every time I try out another third-party tool to view my Flickr photos, the creative options out there reinforces the cool factor in the Flickr brand.

But it's not just my photos I can play around with. All public photos on Flickr are available for anyone to view and sort.

Kevin Dugan pointed me to a site that lets you browse visually by tag, but there are dozens of other ways to play.  Check out some more toys.

People Still Use Payphones? Yeah, for Ads

The breathless news release from OutdoorPartner Media describes a nameless client that is spending $1 million on an outdoor campaign using "payphone kiosks," which I assume is a synonm for phone booths.

That's not news.  Nor is the fact that "OutdoorPartner is particularly well-positioned to capitalize on the migration of media dollars to out-of-home media properties due to a combination of the Company's: vast network of advertising displays; micro-targeting capabilities; and ability to deliver branded, multimedia content to consumers using Prime Point's Bluetooth product."

Here's the real news item:  There are hundreds of thousands of phone booths still in use in North America!  I don't know if anyone make phone calls in them, but they're certainly useful as "alternative out-of-home media solutions for advertisers."

Disclosure:  God, now I have to write disclaimers about advertisers.  The timing of this piece is awkward, since it's based on a news release handled by CNW Group, who just started advertising on this blog yesterday. But I don't believe in penalizing advertisers any more than I believe in fawning all over them, so instead of spiking this item, I'll just note the potential conflict of interest and run it anyway.  I've been subscribed to CNW's news release distribution service on and off for three years.

Marketers, Welcome to My Readers

In the right margin of this blog, you'll find an ad aimed at Canadian public relations folks.

I haven't run ads here before, not from a misguided sense of the purity of my ideas, but because I didn't have the time and energy to pursue it.

Well, CNW Group sought out several Canadian public relations bloggers for a promotion of a media monitoring tool, so you could say opportunity came knocking.

The result, for those who click through to CNW, is an online game that has a PR flack trying to protect the client from whatever objects coming falling from the sky. Full credit to them for recognizing that advertising has to have some intrinsic value (in this case, a bit of entertainment) for the audience, especially an audience that is as jaded toward traditional marketing as your average PR person is.

Not wanting to host anything on the blog I wouldn't try myself, I checked out the game, and it's both safe for work and sort of fun.  The game animation is okay, but I liked best the descriptions of crises that are dropped on the poor PR person in the game. 

David Jones has a comment recognizing CNW for trying something different.  Much thanks to Michael O'Connor Clarke for being the go-between for several months while the idea took shape. Colin McKay is also selling his soul, as is Chris Clarke.

(Update: Donna Papacosta chimes in.) 

Knowing how much we bloggers like to talk about ourselves and our blogs, I suspect this campaign will get as much traction from the posts written about it as from the ads themselves.

This is an intermediate step for me.  Pretty soon I'll be delving much deeper into the world of advertising-supported blogging, and I'm really looking forward to it.  More on that next week...

Tags:  ads, socialmedia, promotion, blogs, cnwgroup

Flack May Have Ghostwritten a Celebrity Interview - News at 11

An L.A. publicist denies making up quotes by Ryan Phillippe and supplying them to a magazine as an exclusive about the breakup of his marriage to Reese Witherspoon.

How to file that item?  Dog Bites Man?  PR Secrets?  Celebrity Myth Revealed?

Celebrity magazines are an art form. They triangulate the star power or level of ridicule appropriate for their subjects, wrangle quotes, photo sessions and gossip from publicists, "friends", enemies and passers-by, and seek out details and images that will either feed or undercut the myths constructed for the celebrities who are in or out of favour.

The exclusive comments and revealing admissions about the stars are often pasted together by, or negotiated with, the publicists.

When a magazine posts an item revealing that Charlie Sheen has copies of The Iliad (in the original Greek) and War and Peace on his bedside table, what is more shocking -- that Charlie Sheen has a bedside table, or that it's possible he reads less esoteric literature?

If a celebrity has clout (and a lot of them do), the magazine is in the position of either currying favour or losing access.  A lot of favour is curried, and when access is cut off or reduced, the editor rarely lets it be known.  The gushing nature of most celebrity coverage overlooks or underplays the fact that much of the coverage is heavily controlled and managed by publicists, or is originated by publicists to affect how their celeb is perceived.

So, getting back to Ryan Phillippe, we find that the New York Post assigned three reporters to chase down a rumour that a publicist subcontracted to help him position himself during his marriage breakup was quickly unsubcontracted because quotes attributed to the star may have been fabricated.  Or maybe because an exclusive already arranged for one publication got handed to another publication.  Or maybe the firm that's been handling Phillippe's media relations for years decided they'd rather live with the conflict of interest while juggling with the interests of the star couple that is now uncoupled.

Liz, a public relations student, writes in her Crazed PR blog that  this is an example of bad PR, because the publicist fabricated quotes.

I highly doubt this is the first instance of quotes being attributed to a celebrity that weren't spoken out loud by the celebrity and faithfully transcribed by the publicist. And, other than a single unnamed source, my quick search didn't turn up any corroboration of the claim that this is something other than a freelance publicist losing a gig.

I suspect all celebrity publicists would prefer that their clients be available at all times to agree on a PR plan, provide quotes, approve edits, confirm facts and sign off on agreements negotiated with various media outlets.

In instances when that doesn't happen, I'll reserve judgement on whose fault it is.

Second Life Backlash Continues

The virtual natives are restless.  I'm waiting to see if this is an uprising of citizens for better corporate behaviour, or an effort to squash expression of opinions that don't please some Second Life pioneers.

Residents of a portion of Second Life have voted to ban companies and agencies from their portion of the virtual world who make unwarranted claims of accomplishments.

"The resolution: Some PR agencies and RL companies have abused SL and made claims in RL media of being first to do things many SL residents have done long before them ('1st radio station in SL', '1st fashion brand', '1st tabloid').

"SHOULD WE BAN THEM FROM DREAMLAND?
Group Dreamland Citizens  Proposal PASSED!"

Complaining that companies jumping on the Second Life bandwagon are unethically claiming credit for the work pioneered by others, "real" estate developer Anshe Chung issued a statement that the ban (see below) can take place if a company or avatar is judged to have falsely claimed credit for a Second Life innovation and hasn't apologized for the offence. (whatever that means) will take place.  Some form of quasi-judicial review will also take place online. Screenshot of Anshe Chung courtesy Second Life Herald.

According to the Second Life Herald, the gesture seems to be a call for repentance by anyone who is claiming to be "first" at things that have been done before in Second Life.

The Herald, meanwhile, takes offence at comments about Second Life by Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson on their podcast.

Update:  I missed this part of Chung's news release that explains the terms of the ban:

"Organisations and their avatars will be warned after a violation has been determined by a jury of residents. A ban will be issued if no adequate retraction and public apology is made by the offending party. In case of repeat offenses or especially severe violations a ban may be issued without prior warning."

Update II: With BL Ochman commenting that "IBM CEO Samuel Palmisano's avatar will become the first Fortune 10 CEO to appear in SL" next week, does that mean Palmisano will get spanked by a Second Life jury if it turns out not to be true? Has IBM called each of the other Fortune 10 CEOs to verify that they don't already have a Second Life avatar?

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