No jail time for 'bad' journalists

Tory MP retracts suggesting jailing bad journalists:

A backbench Conservative MP has retracted a statement he made earlier while blasting the media for its testy relationship with Prime Minister Stephen Harper: that reporters who write distorted articles should be jailed.

It's no surprise Colin Mayes retracted his statements, but the real question is who let this guy submit this column in the first place. Methinks Mayes needs to get some communications help - fast.

Technorati tags: journalism, dumb ideas, PR, communications

Don't make stuff up

Star Force is a anti-piracy software company that sells a copy protection program which many game companies use to protect their products. The problem is that Star Force installs itself on the users computer at the highest permission level - equal to the space reserved for the operating system - and will reboot a user's computer without notice if it detects any attempt to copy a disc, or use a copied disc. Nevermind the fact that users are permitted to make a backup of discs for their personal use. Needless to say, the discovery of how this software actually works has created a firestorm.

This would just be another tech story if the company that makes Star Force hadn't created a fake web site under the guise of a third-party to tell people the Star Force software was safe. A moderator posted this message on the Star Force message boards:

Just like to call your attention to article, which investigate StarForce drivers and compares it with another program's drivers.

- What is StarForce drivers?
- How StarForce drivers works?
- How to remove StarForce drivers?
- Does only StarForce Copy Protection uses drivers?
- Which else copy protection shemas use drivers?
- Which else programs use drivers?

You will fined answers on all above questions in the article by OnlineSecurity ON.

Sounds great, doesn't it? Getting third parties to tell your story is always an effective way to manage an issue, but faking a web site that proports to be a independent provider of computer security information is just plain wrong. It's also stupid, because it took all of 2 minutes to do a who-is on www.onlinesecurity-on.com to find out that the domain is registerd to Star Force.

So not only does this company have a product that is drawing fire from many quarters, it now has torpeoed it's own reputation. Any credibility it had with consumers is pretty much lost.

Goes to show you that making up stuff is never a good route to take. You will get found out and as the blogosphere has shown with repeated examples, it doesn't take long for that to happen.

Technorati tags: StarForce, fradulent web site, ethics, software, PR

Lyn Nofziger dies at 81

Lyn Nofziger aide and adviser to Ronald Reagan has died at age 81. I highly recommend that any communications person who handles issues related files should head on over to Amazon and dig up a copy of Nofziger's bio.

Nofziger was not only an outstanding political communications staffer, he knew the media and, most importantly, instinctively understood how people would react to an issue and could drive messages that resonated.

While he has many finest moments, perhaps the one he is best known for is being drawn in at the last minute to manage communications the day President Reagan was shot. Even though he wasn't working in the White House at that time, Nofziger offered his services and arrived amid the chaos at the hostpital. Grabbing some blank hospital forms, he had the terrific sense to jot down the quips the President was making with friends and staff before being taken into surgery.

Within the hour, Nofziger was the public face of the Reagan administration, briefing the media and country on what had happened to the President. Using the notes he'd taken he was able to reassure the country that the President was likely to be OK. Among the notes he'd taken:

- Reagan reassuring Nancy: "Honey, I forgot to duck."
- Reagan to his Chief of Staff: "Who's minding the store?"
- Reagan to doctors before surgery: "Please tell me you're Republicans."

While certainly rough around the edges, he was a skilled communicator. I had the fortune to exchange e-mail with him several years ago and found him to be everything that I imagined after reading his bio. With his characterisitic wit, I recall him ending a note to me expressing his sympathy that Canadians were living under a Liberal government.

Nofziger was also a blogger and I always enjoyed reading what he had to say. He will certainly be missed.

UPDATE: Washington Post obit link.

US FEC puts blogs on par with MSM

Enough acronyms in that title?

Big news: The US Federal Election Commission (FEC) just voted 6-0, putting political blogs on par with the mainstream media (MSM).

This was an important ruling because many had questioned whether the activity of third-party blogs should be considered as a form of campaign activity covered by campaign finance laws. The decision means that internet activity, including blogging, e-mail communications and online publications, are exempt from these laws.

As Wired Magazine described it: "Bloggers would be entitled to the same exemption from the campaign finance law that newspapers and other traditional forms of media receive."

But I think FEC Chairman Michael Toner summarizes this decision best, saying: "There will be no second class citizens among members of the media."

I think this is a tremendously important point. There are two key trends that relate to blogging and the MSM. Blogs and the traditional media are becoming more and more intertwined, and also, more and more people are getting and sharing news through blogs. Both point toward the growing importance of blogs and their interconnectivity between people and the media.

Had the FEC voted to include third-party blogs in with political advertising, it would have cast a pall over the web. Sure glad that didn't happen. We here in Canada can take some measure of comfort that this decision might someday help protect blogs in this country.

Why Big PR can be dangerous to your business health

Gene Weingarten from the Washington Post writes an article based on a PR pitch the Post received from the flak from the US National Funeral Directors Association. The pitch was trying to get interest in doing a story about how the funeral industry would respond in the case of a catyclismic terror attack or a pandemic.

Here's an excerpt from Weingarten's phone call back to the funeral industry flak:

"Me: I am in receipt of a pitch you sent to a reporter at The Washington Post on behalf of a client. I am summarizing here, but basically you begin by noting that The Post has recently been covering the controversy over the sale of port management contracts to an Arab Muslim country. Then, employing a non sequitur of breathtaking proportions, or possibly one of the most tasteless transitions in the history of written communication, you say that, in a related development, you represent the National Funeral Directors Association.

Heather: This is making me nervous, as a PR professional.

Me: So, I kept reading. And, basically -- correct me if I am wrong here -- in an effort to garner good publicity for your clients, you are proposing a positive story on how funeral directors will be helping us bury our dead in the event of a terrorist holocaust that will annihilate thousands of people.

Heather: Well, you are incorrect. That is not in context.

Me: Okay, here's the context: 'To follow-up on the articles being written in the Post about Bush's port deals, John Fitch, VP of Advocacy for the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA), can discuss how America is planning to handle the potential mass fatalities from a terrorism standpoint -- and perhaps more importantly to you, how small business owners (funeral directors) will play an important role. Most funeral homes are owned by the same family for an average of four generations.'

Heather: Well, yes. The roles they will play in mass fatalities."

Complete lunacy.

This is exactly the kind of stuff that happens because the client has a bad idea and the PR agency doesn't have the brains or guts to tell them it is bad. And these things make it into the open because many agencies are more interested in billing time on a project - no matter what it is - than they are in giving sound advice.

During my agency time, I ran across my share of these kinds of nuclear ideas. Should the idea be put into motion, it is sure to leave everyone involved radioactive for some time to come. But hey, the agency makes their numbers.

UPDATE: Apparently Small PR can be bad for your business health too. I was following up on this story and apparently the PR newbie responsible for this pitch works for a small PR agency in Maryland. By bad. But I still stand by my opinion that large PR firms are often on the dispensing end of bad ideas and have lived through plenty of them. I guess the lesson here is bad judgement has no bounds.

Don't drive angry

So an American family sends a letter to every Canadian Senator complaining about the seal hunt, and Senator Celine Hervieux-Payette responds with an angry letter of her own. CTV describes her letter:

"Senator Celine Hervieux-Payette penned a terse response to the McLellans, suggesting they should be more concerned about their own government's treatment of Iraqis.

She didn't limit her comments to the war, however, pointing out that the true crimes being committed in the world are 'the daily massacre of innocent people in Iraq, the execution of prisoners -- mainly blacks -- in American prisons, the massive sale of handguns to Americans, the destabilization of the entire world by the American government's aggressive foreign policy, etc."

Senator Hervieux-Payette may strongly hold all the beliefs she writes about, but is an angry letter to a mom and her kids really a smart way to respond to this issue? I think not. Maybe Senator HP should sleep on it next time before she decides to pick up a pen.

I've seen this happen lots of times in communications situations in government and the private sector. It's always when emotions run high and people are rushing to respond without really thinking. This is exactly when e-mail can be your worst enemy.

Seal Spin, Part 2

I'm not trying to be an anti-sealer, even though the little things are cute as buttons, but the public relations fight over the 2006 sealing season is one Canada is just not going to win. With quotes like this from Canadian spokespeople appearing in foreign newspapers:

"The Canadian High Commission in London is aware that the damage done by pictures of the mammals being hacked to death. A spokeswoman said: 'The annual seal hunt is tightly-regulated, humane, economically viable and based on sound conservation principles. At 5.8 million harp seals, the herd is three times the size it was in the 1970s."

The Canadian message is a pretty good one, but in the face of cuddly little seals being clubbed and shot, their message is trumped. I think what this situation illustrates best is the PR adage that no matter how correct your position, there are some public relations fights you're just not going to win. I think the seal hunt falls into that category for Canada.

Messaging Afghanistan

We've been seeing stories for several weeks now about how Canadians are divided on our mission to help rebuild Afghanistan. Part of this is due to the failure of the government to communicate to Canadians about why we have been there for several years and why we are now leading the NATO mission in that country.

In a news conference today, Afghan President Hamid Karzai had this to say:

"Please convey to your people, to the people of Canada, the immense gratitude of the Afghan people for what your country, your people have done for us,” he told Mr. Harper after an hour-long meeting.

“For giving the lives of your sons, for contributing in money, for contributing in soldiers and for being one of the biggest helpers in Afghanistan.”

I liked his statement because of the humanness behind it. It is clear and helps people understand that the sacrifice that is being made is understood and appreciated.

The new Canadian government is doing a better job at helping people understand why we're there, but there's still a long way to go to move public sentiment to more fully support the mission. As with any initiative, government or corporate, if the initiative is lost when communicating, public positions will be set and they won't always be in the place you want them to be. Fixing the situation after the fact is much harder than if things were proactively communicated in the first place.

Dubai Ports World: A communications failure

If there ever was an example of a communications failure that led to a massive issue, this is it. If we set aside the politics of an election year for a moment, the DP World ports deal died because of an utter failure to educate in advance of the deal being signed and made public.

Opponents of the deal were free to make all sorts of claims in the vacuum of information the government created. That's in part why the initial stories about this issue noted that the US intended to 'sell' these ports to DP World. Clearly this wasn't the case and the failure to communicate exactly what was happening led to the confusion and ground swell of opposition.

I'm not saying that the deal would have gone through if they'd actually done some hard work explaining it, but their complete breakdown in communications in advance and then immediately afterward assured the deal's collapse.

The whole episode reinforces the need to get out in front of issues - especially the tough ones. Failure to do so hands your opponents the advantage.

The Yale Taliban

Last week it emerged that one of the former Taliban foreign ministers has been enrolled at Yale University for the past eight months. I'd say this is something of an issue management file for Yale. And how did their spokesperson respond? This quote appeared in the OpinionJournal:

"Almost no one will now defend Mr. Rahmatullah's presence as a special student, even though a week ago many had no such inhibitions in a splashy New York Times magazine piece, which broke the news that he had been at Yale for eight months. In that piece, Richard Shaw, Yale's dean of undergraduate admissions before he took the same post at Stanford, explained that Yale had missed out on another foreign student of the same caliber as Mr. Rahmatullah but that 'we lost him to Harvard,' and 'I didn't want that to happen again."

Knowing how controversial accepting such a student would be, you'd think Yale would better prepare a spokesperson to deal with the issue. Perhaps they do see this person as a prized catch, but to frame his acceptance as merely part of the Yale-Harvard rivalry shows a lack of appreciation or compassion for the people who suffered under the Taliban. He would have been better off acknowledging the controversy, but then giving people some of the rationale why Mr. Rahmatullah was accepted. Framing the message to help people understand your motivation in taking this action would go a long way to defuse the controversy. Unless of course their decision was just as Mr. Shaw suggests - part of the Harvard rivalry.

As an aside, doesn't the picture of Yale accepting a former member of the Taliban government as a student make you think that Thurston Howell III wasn't far off?

Telling your story

Outstanding video from Seth Godin speaking to Google. Godin speaks about the need for companies to tell their stories in a compelling way that matters to people. I think it's a must see. Lots of people and companies write words - lots of words - but the successful ones know how to tell their stories.

In the communications business you run into this all the time. People will ask about investor relations, internal communications, issue management - but when you boil it all down, it's about knowing how to tell that story. And knowing that, as Godin says, you're not as important as you think you are.

Bloggers and PR

From Instapundit this past weekend is a link to a story about Bloggers and PR. Apparently a NYT article ran about how Wal-Mart has been actively engaging friendly bloggers with its messages in an ongoing attempt to deflect the criticism that special interest groups have been lumping on that company.

Not surprisingly, this is an effort that stems out of a communications war room the retailing company set up last year in an effort to respond more quickly and effectively to the claims being made. It's a tool that has been adopted by the PR industry, but political campaigns have been using for years. And its often the campaigns that have the best run communications war rooms that suceed. This is because they can more quickly catch and respond to media stories or special interest group activities - often within the same news cycle. The quicker and more effective you are in this game will have a direct bearing on how you're viewed in the media and by your stakeholders.

But on the issue of using PR to engage bloggers, I don't really see the controversy that the NYT seems to find. If you've got a message that has to get out, traditionally you arm your spokesperson with them and work to get them through the media filter and into the news. Arming third parties to speak on your behalf is nothing new and bloggers, as an emerging category of media, can fill that role.

More and more people, especially younger people, get their news and information from non-traditional sources. Blogs are sqarely in this area, but they must be engaged in an appropriate way. I think this point is particularly important as the old-school methods of PR don't mix well necessarily with the blogging community.

I don't think anyone believes that blogs will overtake the mainstream media as the largest source for news, but they certainly are surpassing many media outlets in terms of viewership. And we're seeing many journalists migrate to the blogosphere - blurring the lines between the two camps.

Bottom line though - if you are being talked about in the media or on the internet, you've got to know what's being said and be ready to respond fast. Engaging blogs in an appropriate and proactive way is not only smart, it can be very effective and help protect your organization's reputation. Wal-Mart is taking the right course and should be an example to other companies big and small.

Spinning the seal hunters

Newsweek: "Despite mounting pressure to cancel the yearly seal hunt, in which hundreds of thousands of baby harp seals are killed simply for their pelts, the Canadian government is allowing the bloodbath to continue."

With that as the backdrop, I watched Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams debate Heather and Paul McCartney on the seal hunt. I expected it could be a great case study for issue managing special interest groups. It could have been, that is.

First off, someone should tell Williams that smiling once in a while might be a good idea.

I think Williams did the right thing by taking advantage of the CNN forum to get his message out, but did a lousy job doing it. Rather than make the case for the hunt (which incidentally, I am quite skeptical of), he spent most his time on the Larry King show in a reactive mode.

Like most fights that play out on TV, there's only two sides to this. The McCartney's have the benefit of being on the side that has great visuals. Williams has a bunch of guys with guns and clubs killing seals - not the easiest thing to message around.

I think he could have done a much better job laying out an economic and ecological case for the hunt, but he resorted to a fragmented approach of calling the McCartney's ill informed and peppering the discussion with factoids which lacked an overall messaging theme.

From an internatinal perspective, Williams lost. Last count Google news had 400 international stories related to this issue. Williams had a chance to at least have some compelling messages on the record, but just didn't get any across tonight.

UPDATE: This gem of a quote from CTV's coverage - "First of all, the information that hasn't been given is that 90 per cent of these seals are killed by bullets, they are not all clubbed," Williams said in a debate that aired on CNN's Larry King Live."

Makes you all warm and fuzzy inside, doesn't it? Assuming Williams was trying to comment on the humaneness of the way seals are killed, he could have positioned this somewhat better.

Feeling blogged down?

Understanding how blogs can affect your business or organization is a growing issue most Canadians haven't fully grasped. More and more individuals and special interest groups are using the social networking power of blogs to get their messages out to the masses.

Room 40 contributed to this Marketing Magazine article Feeling blogged down? and discusses the challenges and opportunities of blogs in issue & crisis management. Find it in the January 30, 2006 issue.

Digg it

Imagine a news outlet where the readers chose what stories were most important. Imagine no longer.

Digg is a fast rising web site where readers do just that. Focusing on technology news, this site's model may become more common as its success spreads. Certainly it's a break from the exising editor-centric model we're all familiar with. I think it's got great appeal and the fact it also engages a level of social bookmarking means that people are engaged in a two-way dialoge about the news and market forces decide what gets front page billing.