Over the last few months I’ve had a lot of fun pitching gift ideas to daily news media on behalf of our friends at Help Lesotho. Now that Ottawa is covered in a blanket of fresh snow, I can’t help but feel festive. In the spirit of the fast-approaching holiday season, I’ve decided to pull together a gift guide to help anyone who has a public relations professional to buy for this holiday season.

Students studying PR, young PR professionals and veterans alike should always have a style guide on hand. Some of our favourites include The Canadian Press Caps and Spelling, Eats Shoots and Leaves and Globe and Mail Style Book. If the PR professional in your life doesn’t have one of these or similar titles, you should be able to cross them off your list by visiting a well-stocked local bookstore. Books about grammar fundamentals may not be very exciting but they certainly are useful. Dictionaries are also great to have on hand. For the terminology-saturated person working in technology PR, try Chambers Dictionary of Science and Technology. If you think flipping pages is too low-tech, a subscription to the online edition of the Chicago Manual of Style may do the trick.

For PR pros who frequently travel, there are a wealth of gadgets you can buy to help them stay plugged in. While an iPhone or iTouch may be a bit pricey, consider springing for a country-specific SIM card or a gift certificate to a phone-unlocking specialist like Warlox Wireless. After reading about the positive experience Francis had with his unlocked GSM smart phone loaded with a pay-as-you-go SIM, I don’t think you can go wrong. Skype credits aren’t a bad idea either. For the earth-conscious gadget lover on your list, Amazon Kindle, a souped-up e-book reader that allows for wireless e-book downloads, would make a great gift.

For social media-savvy PR folks, a bottle of Stormhoek’s Blue Monster is guaranteed to win smiles. Thanks to Hugh Mcleod, this wine is well known amongst those who frequent geek dinners. Other great gift ideas include flickr pro accounts, tickets to popular conferences like SXSW or cool t-shirts from the likes of Threadless. Grammar gurus are bound to appreciate the They’re, Their, There shirt.

That’s our list. Feel free to share your ideas in the comment section. You can also check out Chris’s gift guide for marketers, which Seth’s Blog pointed me to.

Technorati Tags: holiday gift guide, PR, public relations, marketing, communications

Ah robots, what an endless fascination we seem to have with the silver machines of the future. True to form, the Guardian reports today on the massive growth of the robot industry in the land of the rising sun.

“In Japan, robots can already be found working as home helps, office receptionists and security guards, as well as on the factory floor,” reports Justin McCurry. “Human endeavour is being supplemented - and even replaced - by mechanical efficiency in almost every area, from hands-free vacuum cleaners and golf-bag carriers to a robotic baby who teaches childcare skills to expectant couples, right down to freeing trapped wind and changing nappies.”

There are good reasons for the rapid adoption of robots in Japan (see population decline, strict immigration laws) but how long before we start seeing more mechanical friends in the Western world?

Technorati Tags: robots, Japan

Today’s Marketing daily headlines feature included this piece that caught my eye: “Trees rejoice as Astral creates paperless annual report.” This initiative not only does the right thing by the environment, but also reduces clutter and provides a competitive differentiator for the company that’s doing it. It will be interesting to see if this trend catches on.

Technorati Tags: annual report, Astral

The Register reports today that Google’s philanthropic arm will invest tens of millions of dollars in renewable energy.

“Cheap renewable energy is not only critical for the environment but also vital for economic development in many places where there is limited affordable energy of any kind,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said.

In true tongue-in-cheek Register fashion, the reporter notes, “Google’s founders believe the firm’s experience in data centres and bot-vs-bot advertising mean this relatively small investment will nonetheless overturn the established energy economy in short order.”

Technorati Tags: Google, cleantech, renewable energy.

If you think your business requires tough decisions, you would agree that they are trivial compared to the late President John Kennedy’s during the 13 days of the Cuban missile crises. The world teetered on the balance of massive nuclear explosions and a wrong decision would have killed millions of people in Canada, the USSR and the United States. Nor was this the only time. On at least two occasions, military officers faced the apparent prospect of incoming missiles. For them the decision to retaliate or not had to be made in minutes. In one case, the officer wondered why there were only five US missiles on his radar screen. The answer was that he was looking at five birds!

Recently Ted Sorenson, a key advisor to Kennedy during the missile crises, set out his view on how a leader makes tough decisions in the face of conflicting advice. Speaking in Ottawa and Toronto a week or so ago, Sorensen advised executives to picture their options creatively. For example, Kennedy didn’t call it a “blockade,” which would have meant that any ship sailing towards Cuba would have been turned back. He labelled it a “weapons embargo,” thus allowing key non-military supplies to reach Cuba and make it clear to the world that Cuba was not the enemy. A nice byproduct was avoiding the alienation of people elsewhere in the Caribbean whose lives would have been disrupted by a blockade’s automatic triggering of wartime marine insurance rates. Reach out for support, Sorenson advises. Kennedy sought cooperation from all nations. And communicate directly with your opponent rather than through agents.

Above all, Kennedy was a realist. When the crisis had passed, an aide urged him to use his status to intervene in the Sino-Indian War. “But you are 10 feet tall,” the aide said. “Oh, that will last a couple of weeks,” Kennedy replied.

Technology executives may face just as much uncertainty as Kennedy did, and need to apply the same creativity to their problem solving.

Peter Kemball is CEO and founder at Acorn Partners, an innovative firm that helps B2B SMEs finance their success.

What used to be a safe haven from the reach of internet advertisers has finally crumbled under the pressure. The BBC reports Adobe has signed a deal with Yahoo! that will see dynamic adverts being displayed in online PDF documents.

“Dynamic adverts can be changed for particular audiences or rotated to make sure that a particular user never sees the same advertisement twice.”

Thankfully, “The advertisements will not appear if the PDF document is printed.”

Technorati Tags: online advertising, PDF advertisements, Adobe

Bloomberg, a provider of business and financial news, is a regular target for us for our clients who are looking to communicate their business stories and successes. Wondering what is it really like at the head office of this media giant in New York? The company lampoons itself and the popular TV show “The Office” in this clip created for the Financial Writers Association’s “Financial Follies,” presented earlier this month.

Technorati Tags: Bloomberg

During the five-year period in my life when I made my home on the Western side of the Atlantic, I was always interested to note the subtle differences in the way that the general population responded to marketing when compared to my native Britain.

The UK is a generally more sceptical country and, in my experience, its inhabitants tend to expect a bit more effort from the companies that are trying to sell to them.

One memory leaps to the fore: Coca Cola’s miserable attempt to sell its Dasani water product in the UK. After quickly becoming the second-biggest selling bottled water product in the US, Dasani hit the shelves in the UK in 2004, only to be pilloried for being nothing more than purified tap water. It lasted only months before being pulled from the shelves, along with planned launches in France and Germany.

A study by GfK NOP released today puts me in mind of those days. Apparently the i-Phone isn’t doing as well in the UK as Apple might have hoped. Only 2% of those surveyed were thinking of putting the uber-gadget on their Christmas list this year. While the main reason for this is almost certainly the hefty price tag, I can’t help but feel that there are other factors at play too.

Richard Jameson of GfK NOP sums it up nicely:

“This is a highly competitive market and the mobile phone manufacturers have very strong brand loyalty. Apple needs more than cutting–edge design to penetrate this market and will have to work much harder in the UK than it did in the US to make iPhone a mass-market proposition.”

I wholeheartedly agree with Jameson’s perspective and would recommend his words be considered by any North American company that intends to target the UK market. Common language aside, the similarities end there.

Technorati Tags: marketing, UK, US, Apple iPhone,

We heard this one again last week.

Generating effective coverage of a client’s story is not all about the relationship I have with reporters; it’s all about the value of the story I have to tell.

This has long been the top-ranked of Francis’s Favourite Fictions, and for two good reasons. First, it’s incredibly widely held, believed in by clients and actively promoted by agencies. Second, it is so demonstrably untrue that after 30 years practice as both a journalist and PR guy, I remain utterly gobsmacked that it retains such unassailable currency.

Having worked the trenches of daily, weekly and monthly journalism, for both print and broadcast outlets, on both a local and national level and for both general news media and trade publications, some of my strongest and truest professional and personal relationships are with journalists. And I couldn’t lean on the best of those relationships to get a client of mine even a column inch of coverage that the client’s story didn’t merit. More to the point, I wouldn’t risk my own credibility by even trying.

But if my client’s story deserves to be in the New York Times, or on the BBC, or in EE Times, or on National Public Radio, or on the Richard and Judy Show, or in the most narrowly focused of trade media outlets, it matters not a whit whether I have any kind of existing relationship with the reporter, editor or producer who needs to be successfully pitched in order to get that coverage. It matters only that I have a deserving story to pitch and the ability to pitch it well.

And if the story doesn’t deserve to be there, all the relationships in the world ain’t gonna make it happen.

Here at inmedia, we demolish this fiction practically every time we take on a new client since we invariably are required to add new media outlets, new contacts — indeed, entire new industry sectors — to our outreach efforts. And even where we have an established record of success with any individual journalist or outlet, we don’t lever the relationship; we lever our ability to engage that journalist on the only issue of any interest to her or him: the story.

So why does this fiction persist? I blame the PR industry. Truth is, you sell what you’ve got. And if you don’t have the necessary grasp of how newsrooms operate to effectively pitch into them, if you don’t have the deep understanding of your client’s story that allows you to get past the initial objections reporters throw in your way, if you don’t have the strategic understanding of why you’re trying to generate coverage for your client in the outlet you’re targeting, then the only thing you can rely on is your so-called relationships. So you tell the prospect that relationships with the target media are a prerequisite to getting coverage and you hope the prospect is an unsophisticated buyer who will fall for that.

(more…)

Canada’s national broadcaster, the CBC, is airing a special series on its national radio news programs called, “How may I help you?” I caught the first in-depth piece yesterday evening and I so badly wanted to call in immediately and share my endless stack of customer service horror stories. Many fellow listeners obviously felt the same way; as of late this morning, fully 279 (!) individual stories of lament had been posted to CBC’s web site.

The issue put me in mind of an article, authored by Graham Technology’s Frank Kirwan, that we secured in Customer Management magazine earlier this year.

As I was listening to the radio piece last evening and reading some of the horror stories posted online this morning, the key point that kept coming back to me from Kirwan’s article “Dissatisfaction is a greater driver of (customer) defection than satisfaction is of retention,” he said. And judging from the number of CBC listeners who wrote that they would never again do business with that bank, telephone company, travel agency or whatever, clearly it takes just a single outrageous example of lousy customer service to trigger that defection.It really doesn’t have to be that way.

Because we have been working with Graham Technology for about a year and a half now, and with other companies like PIKA Technologies and Vocantas whose products and services can help companies sharpen their customer service, we know that the effective deployment of the appropriate technology solution can dramatically improve what seems to be a near-universally dismal record. The irony is that technology implementations are often cited by customers as the most egregious part of the problem. (Bell Canada’s voice avatar Emily surely would be hung in effigy from city to city across Canada if she was anything more corporeal than the ultimate in service-preventing disembodied interactive voice response (IVR) systems!)

(more…)