I’m watching Michael Phelps win another gold medal on CBC and notice that the 2008 Olympics are in Bei-JING (as in jingle all the way). I watch diving on NBC and the Olympics are in Bei-zhing ( “j” like the French pronounce it in words such as “jupe” or “jolie”).
So…is there a right way to pronounce this city’s name or is this a case of “I say tomato, you say tomato?”
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The Barenaked Ladies’ PR problem
Barenaked Ladies frontman Steven Page was charged with possession of a controlled substance after New York state police found him with cocaine and marijuana, as reported extensively in the Canadian media yesterday. Apparently, he had just finished snorting the stuff with a Canadian dollar bill when police entered his apartment. Why media reported that he was using a Canadian dollar bill is a little weird to me…like at least he was showing his Canadian pride while he was committing a felony offense. Good for you.
If this had happened to another rock musician, Keith Richards let’s say, it might have come across as an incurable bad boy up to his old tricks. However, Page’s image is clean-cut and quirky. Not only that, the Barenaked Ladies have just released a children’s album no less and are scheduled to appear at a benefit concert hosted by Disney and Playskool on behalf of four children’s charities next month. Disney, Playskool and cocaine use…which of these three does not belong with the others?
Needless to say, this is an image crisis for the Barenaked Ladies. Page admitted to police that he was indeed taking cocaine, however, on the band’s website, it issued a statement saying that “the validity of the charges against Steven will be strongly contested.” These two messages are contradictory and it will be interesting to see how the band and Page manage their reputation going forward.
They might want to follow the example of another celebrity whose image was hurt by his drug use: New York Yankee pitcher Andy Pettitte. His name was among the many baseball players mentioned in the Mitchell Report for using illegal substances, in Pettitte’s case human growth hormone. Unlike others such as Mark McGwire and Roger Clemens, Pettite was very upfront about the whole issue. He admitted that he had taken HGH and testified to this as part of a hearing before the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Oversight and Governmental Reform.
This past spring training, he apologized to baseball fans for his drug use and spent nearly an hour in front of media explaining the whole mess. Over and over again after giving answers, he asked reporters “Did I answer your question?”.
Since then, very little has been reported on Andy Pettitte and his drug use. Life has moved on and a quick search on Google News has Pettitte in more news stories involving sports than his past drug use. Even those stories are more about a possible court appearance involving his past trainer Brian McNamee and his (former?) friend Roger Clemens.
It might just be best for the Barenaked Ladies and Page that they own up for what happened and apologize. There might be some short term costs but in the long haul, it will serve their interests.
What do you think Page and the Barenaked Ladies should do? Is apologizing for the mistake the best option available?
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Saying you’re sorry
I’m continually interested in how principles of good communication between individuals can easily be applied to organizations. Prime Minister Harper’s apology yesterday to aboriginal Canadians is a case in point. In his statement, Harper apologized completely and took responsibility for the terrible way that aboriginal children were taken away from their parents and forced into residential schools throughout most of the 20th century. It was unequivocal in its tone, and he appeared sincere and humble as he spoke. Especially interesting is the gracious manner in which the aboriginals accepted the apology, and the apparent goodwill that was generated. While the hurt and suffering was not completely undone, there were even moments of humour as they responded to the apology in the House of Commons. It was clearly a step in the right direction to heal divisions between First Nations and the rest of Canada.
Apologizing for hurting others is an idea that even young children understand. For individuals, it is clear, albeit very difficult sometimes, to apologize for a wrong-doing. You say what you did wrong, you understand how it affected that person and say you’re sorry. For larger organizations, taking this sort of action can be muddled by legal considerations and how the organization will be held liable. From a public relations and a moral point of view, apologizing quickly while taking responsibility is the right thing to do.
It’s amazing how gracious and willing people are to forgive when they are apologized to as shown by the aboriginals’ response. Conversely, people get very annoyed when a wrongdoing has been committed but there is no apology or no responsibility taken. The anger expressed and suffering prior to Harper’s apology was indicative of this. With this whole and complete apology, relations between First Nations and the rest of Canada can begin to move forward. It will be interesting to see how this relationship continues from here on out.
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Tags: aboriginals, apologize
Facebook: a military threat?
Yesterday, CBC reported on the Canadian Defence Department advising its soldiers to not post personal photos or information on social networking sites such as Facebook due to security concerns. It highlighted how these sites are popular with soldiers to stay in touch with their families back home.
I can definitely see why terrorist organizations, such as Al-Qaeda, would want to check out soldier Facebook profiles. A soldier post of a battalion moving in a certain direction could have deadly consequences. At the same time, I can also see this as a very convenient reason for the military to exercise censorship over its personnel, something the CBC segment also highlighted.
Military culture is completely different social media culture. In military culture, command and control is the rule of the day whereas in social media, control is very decentralized. There is certainly no censorship, at least imposed from an external source. The social media issue the military faces is the result of a clash of cultures whose values are fundamentally different.
Social media poses a very real problem for the military. The wrong people obtain secret information and soldiers die unnecessarily, simple as that. Simultaneously, social media is increasingly ubiquitous and I can understand why a soldier in Afghanistan would want to use Facebook to connect with his wife and kids in Canada.
The military could impose penalties but I’m not if that would really work. How would soldiers be monitored? Would the military spend time roaming Facebook to see who is posting information? There is a limit to how much it can impose its will on its staff in this area in my mind. Training soldiers how to use social media responsibly should definitely be a part of basic training but to ban the use of these sites is probably unrealistic and likely ineffective.
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Tags: Facebook, military
Trying out Radian6
After a couple of people on Twitter wrote about Radian6, a tool for tracking issues in social media, I thought I would call them up for a demo. After that, I decided to try it out for a free 7 day trial.
It took about an hour of training by salesman Tim Tozer for me to really get it but afterwards, I was pretty much ready to go. After entering key words in much the same way as you would in Google, the software allows you to keep count of blogs that contains those terms. You can search back up to 30 days although I’m told that you can go back 90 days in the next month or so. From this list of blogs, you can see a description of the first few words and how many comments have been left. You can also delve deeper into this search set to see which terms come up the most often. For example, if I did a search for the terms “Obama,” “Clinton,” “McCain,” and “Romney, I would get a list of blogs that pretty much all relate to the 2008 US presidential campaign. From that list of blogs, I could then look to see how often the terms “economy,” ” immigration,” and “healthcare” come up. By seeing which words are most popular can start to give me a sense about what bloggers are discussing the most. There is much more I could talk about here but this gives you an idea of what Radian6 does.
Overall, I was pretty impressed with the software. It’s pretty easy to use and I found myself looking up more and more stuff as I became more comfortable with it. I could see which blogs are the most influential in any search and see spikes when certain topics became more hotly discussed over time. It’s a tool that would be very helpful to scan which issues were percolating under the surface before they caught the attention of the greater public. By catching issues as they develop in their initial stages, it would allow more time to handle issues proactively rather than playing catch-up once an issue caught on fire. This is definitely a tool worth checking out and worthy of attention from PR professionals.
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Tags: blog monitoring, Radian6
I’ve been reading David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Marketing & PR upon the suggestion of Joseph Thornley and his social media bookshelf. It’s very readable with some good info.The chapter that has me nodding my head repeatedly is his section on good writing…or the lack thereof…in business communications. He advises against using jargon-laden phrases. This sort of thing tends to happen in the technology business and he refers to this language as goobledygook. Having done some work in business-to-business PR, I knew exactly what he was talking about. These words and phrases include groundbreaking, industry-standard, cutting-edge and let’s not forget the ever-popular next generation.
In a study he conducted of North American news releases over a nine month period, there were 388,000 news releases distributed and over 74,000 mentioned at least one gobbledygook phrase. The winner was next generation with 9,895 uses and there were over 5,000 uses of the following terms: flexible, robust, world class, scalable and easy to use. Other phrases of note were cutting edge, mission critical (never saw that one before), market leading, industry standard, turnkey and groundbreaking.
I have to admit that in the past I have used a few of these phrases. They are extremely tempting to use. I had my face slapped (figuratively, of course) by a senior consultant who reviewed a news release I wrote caught one of these words and quizzed me on what I meant. The reality was I didn’t really know.
It can be very difficult to describe how a technology works but what’s even more important is describing why the technology is important in the first place. What difference does it make and to whom? Why should I care? Why should the person on the street care? This can be one of the challenges when working with engineers and others who are deep into the inner working of devices. It’s a question of being to close to see the forest through the trees. It’s the job of PR practitioners to take a step back and really think what this means for the given audience and write in language that is easily understood.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted so it’s good to get back on the keyboard. My wife recently had surgery to have her thyroid removed and I took some time off to be with her. The surgery went well although she’s still recovering and can’t pick up our 3 month old son. All I can say is…Thank goodness for grandmas!
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Tags: business-to-business, cliches, David Meerman Scott, grammar, jargon, technology
Roger Clemens’s PR strategy
Last night, I watched 60 Minutes’ Mike Wallace interview Roger Clemens about his alleged steroid use.
It wasn’t exactly the most thrilling interview I had ever seen and Clemens isn’t exactly eloquent. In response to Wallace’s question about former trainer Brian McNamee injecting him with human growth hormone or steroids, Clemens answered, “My body never changed. If he’s putting that stuff up in my body, if what he’s saying which is totally false, if he’s doing that to me, I should have a third ear coming out of my forehead. I should be pulling tractors with my teeth.” Not exactly the key message I would have written for him.
Nonetheless, Clemens is doing something that no other Major League Baseball player alleged of taking steroids has done: execute a PR strategy. He posted a video denouncing the claims made in the Mitchell Report on steroids and mentioned that he would be interviewed on 60 Minutes in the near future. He did the interview with Wallace who asked him questions like he was lobbing softballs to a 7 year-old. It wasn’t hard for Clemens to hit them out of the park (I had to use a baseball analogy somewhere. Sorry!).
This is in stark contrast to Barry Bonds’s approach to allegations of his own drug use. As you might be aware, Bonds broke baseball’s all-time home run record this past season while under a huge cloud doubt. The rumours about his steroid use had been circling for several months and he was recently indicted on perjury and obstruction of justice charges for his testimony in the BALCO case. For the most part, Bonds treated reporters with about as much respect as for a garbage can. His relationship with the media was combative even in the best of times. The disdain he has for reporters is palpable in every media interaction I’ve ever seen.
Both of these players will have issues to deal with when their candidacy for baseball’s Hall of Fame comes up. With Clemens’s PR strategy, he will have a much better chance of entering than Bonds or at least an easier time of it. Who knows if Clemens is guilty of taking steroids or not. All I can say is that he cares what baseball fans think and he was pro-active in getting his message out to them.
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Tags: Brian McNamee, Mitchell report, reputation, Roger Clemens, steroids
8 things you don’t know about me
As challenged by David Jones at PR Works, here are 8 facts you probably didn’t know about me.
1. I lived in Kathmandu, Nepal when I was 15 years old which really opened my eyes to how the other half of the planet (or other 85% of it I should say) lives.
2. I was born in Toronto but moved to Ottawa as a baby and stayed there until I graduated from high school.
3. I went to high school with Alanis Morissette and majorly helped her twin brother, Wade, with grade 10 math.
4. I have competed in volleyball, baseball, swimming, basketball and track.
5. I lifeguarded for a couple of summers at Lac Phillippe, just north of Ottawa, in Gatineau Park.
6. I had an screenwriter agent represent me in L.A. as I tried to make it as a sitcom writer. I’m not entirely clear anyone at all saw my scripts though.
7. I did some radio reporting for CFMU when I went to McMaster for my undergrad in Sociology.
8. My favourite TV show is Mad Men on AMC. If you haven’t seen it, check it out!
There you have it…
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Not that I’m going to do this too often but it had to happen eventually. Here’s a pic of me and my son Ittai who is just over 2 months old. We put him on his stomach every once and a while to help with his physical development.
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joshturner[at]rogers.com
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Recent Entries
- Where are the 2008 Olympics taking place?
- The Barenaked Ladies’ PR problem
- Saying you’re sorry
- The “monster” off the record comment about Hillary
- Facebook: a military threat?
- Trying out Radian6
- My groundbreaking, market leading, cutting edge posting on gobbledygook
- Roger Clemens’s PR strategy
- 8 things you don’t know about me
- The baby picture had to come up eventually
- Hey Facebook…can you give me some privacy?
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