LB's Rambles

Equal Time

Having wished Atlas a Happy Birthday below, I have been reminded rather forcefully that we have two grandcats as well as a granddog. The grandcats belong to Other Daughter and Son-in-Law.

This is Osiris. Osiris is large, and has stripes as well as an identifying orange patch on her tail. You see her here in the process of playing with a ball on a string. Or, perhaps more accurately, in wondering why this person is dangling that irritating object in front of my face; I must now consider bashing it with my ferocious claws and showing it where it belongs.

The second cat is her sister, Isis, who has quite clearly (and properly) decided that the only appropriate way to handle these dangling articles is to lie flat on her back, so that she can more readily manipulate this irritating object with her paws.

The astute reader/observer will have noted that both these cats are, er, to be polite, inordinately large. That is correct. In fact, my daughter and son-in-law note that they have not seen their landlord in more than a year now; the cats' sudden weight gain may have taken place around the time the landlord disappeared. Isis and Osiris aren't saying, but they do look rather smug...

Second Birthday!

My wife and I will be going out to California in two weeks for a belated second birthday party for Atlas.

This is Atlas.   He's a good-natured Chocolate Lab, and he's practically big enough for my daughter to ride to work, if she wanted to. We're proud of our grand-dog, and we have a variety of birthday presents. That may not endear us to my daughter, but, hey, you can't please everyone.

Word for the Day

I learned a new word today.

Multure.

According to the Free Online Dictionary, it is the charge imposed by a mill for grinding grain, under Scottish law.

See, there's this Scottish folk song which has been going through my head (and you thought YOU had problems). It's called "The Maid Gaed to the Mill," it is distinctly single-entendre bawdy, and it speaks of the maid's determination to "hae her corn ground/mill and multure free." Use your imagination. The miller was happy to oblige.

Anyway, I went looking to find out what "multure" meant. Now I know. Can't wait to try to get that into a client's release somehow...

Wonder if there's a Technorati tag for "multure"?

This Is Truly Offensive

From our "Oh, grow up!" file, Ars Technica notes:

Blogs are known to be a free-for-all for "expressive" content, but according to a new report by ScanSafe, a vast majority of blogs host content that is considered "offensive" and potentially "unwanted." ScanSafe's Monthly "Global Threat Report" for March 2007 says that up to 80 percent of blogs host offensive content, ranging from "adult language" to pornographic images. The company suggests that businesses should be aggressive about preventing users from accessing some or all of this material. And of course, they'd hope that you'd use their products to do so.

And what makes blog content "offensive"? Apparently, the single use of a single profanity is sufficient to get the whole blog condemned as "offensive."

Now maybe it's offensive to your eight-year-old child. But I don't think your eight-year-old child is necessarily reading my blog. And cutting off access to blogs that someone finds "offensive" strikes me as a truly terrible idea.

Your thoughts would be welcome - that's why the comments are open... 

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit for pointing this one out.

Be There or...

Wow is THIS not a surprise: it appears that YouTube now gets more Internet traffic than the websites of the major networks combined. Sally Falkow has more about the story on her blog. And she points out the importance of a YouTube presence to almost any company trying to reach its customers.

But. It's not that easy, is it. Put the wrong kind of video up - something that looks too much like a regular TV commercial, for example - and you could wind up with a lot of negative attention. Trouble is, it's kind of hard to game the system when it comes to video popularity. If a video is perceived as cool, as in, as unforced, as funny, as outrageous - whatever - it's likely to take off. If not...well, there are a lot of videos on YouTube that don't get tens of thousands of viewers. Or, worse, that get negative attention...

It's All About Service

Two incidents today reminded me of the importance of customer service in just about any industry.

First, the good news. I stayed home today expecting two servicepeople from the same company - one to perform the annual check of my home heating system, the second to make sure my air conditioning was set for this year. I was told that both would arrive between 8 AM and Noon.

Right. 8:20 AM, the service person shows up at my door. First plus: he tells me that he is doing both jobs, so I won't have to wait around for a second person to show up. He then proceeds to check out both systems very thoroughly, perform tests, and generally clean and overhaul everything. Took him about two hours. Nothing to worry about, he told me, but if any problems DO pop up, here's a number to call, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. He left a happy customer behind.

Now the other story. I had ordered some software from a large mail-order company. When the software arrives, it turns out to be the wrong software (and, for that matter, a very old version of the software I DID want).

So I called the customer service number this morning. I'll make the long story quite short: after an hour, three calls, and three different "customer service" people, none of whom appeared to know what they were talking about (or to understand what I was talking about), they wound up disconnecting me. Great. I send off an email to a customer service line, giving full details. Back comes an email telling me I need to call their customer service number. I send back another email suggesting they read the email I sent them about what happened when I called their number. No comprehension.

So. The heating company has a loyal customer. The software seller is about to lose a customer - one, I might add, who has spent thousands with them over the years. Why? Service.

Folks, no matter what we do, we are all in the service business. We can't always make the customer happy, but we can at least try to give the impression that we want to help and are really trying. The obviously-outsourced customer service for the software reseller all too obviously doesn't care. That's going to hurt them. It's an object lesson for all of us.

Sensitivity

Interesting post on Steve Rubel's blog this week that raises a question that sooner or later comes back to bite every one of us who work/play/write/post on the web.

Steve, who is one of the smartest guys out there when it comes to technology and PR, got burned recently by something he wrote on Twitter. He found himself in hot water with an influential editor, and he had to write a clarification, which he (naturally) added to his blog.

I'm not sure he really had that much to apologize for. But then we all seem to be operating with our sensibilities tuned to a really feverish level. We are quick to take offense - and we find that we can give offense very easily, whether we mean to do so or not. You don't have to be Don Imus to offend people enough to make them call for your scalp.

I think that's a problem. I tend to be an absolutist on the first amendment; I believe that the best antidote to offensive speech is to counter it with more speech. That doesn't mean we need to tolerate profanity or ranting in online comments, by the way - but I do think we ought to be trying to have conversations, even with those with whom we may disagree strongly, rather than rushing to take offense.

Take a look at what Steve had to say. I think he's pretty much on target. I also think that if more of us met to talk things out over a beer or two (OK, OK, make it an iced tea if you like), we'd be a lot better off...

Buy This Book

It has been said of my friend Peter Shankman that he "wrote the book" on event-driven PR.

Now, that's literally true. He has written the book. It's called Can We Do That?! Outrageous PR Stunts That Work - and Why Your Company Needs Them.

Full disclosure here: as I said, Peter is an old and valued friend and longtime colleague, and he gave me a copy of the book. Doesn't matter - I would have bought the book quite happily (see link above) and feel that I got my money's worth.

With a great deal of humor and insight, Peter lays out his philosophy of PR and tells a lot of stories about his successes and failures. He ranges from some pretty solid commentary on the nature of PR itself to specifics of how he was able to pull off such stunts as convincing a horde of journalists and others to go jump out of a plane.

It's also a pretty valuable practical guide to best practices for PR - there are takeaways and lessons in every chapter. It's an easy and enjoyable read. So go do it.

Of Course It's About Multimedia!

The Bulldog Reporter's "Journalists Speak Out on PR" discovers multimedia. "Make Multimedia Part of Pitches for Digital Ink," they say.

Well d'oh, as a wise observer of the passing scene might put it.

And yet, there's a significant percentage of PR practitioners who still really, honestly don't seem to get it. They don't seem to understand that the best way to keep their message from being buried by the literally thousands of news releases being sent over the wires each day (to say nothing of email and fax and regular mail) is the use of a photo, a graphic, an audio, a video, or some engaging combination thereof.

Laura Goldberg, the Business Editor of the Houston Chronicle, makes the point quite well in that Daily Dog article:

We don't just run a still photo anymore. We're working with video and audio and podcasts when we pull packages together. For example, we just did a story recently where a reporter and photographer went out to Shell's 'Mars' oil platform in the Gulf. There was so much rich media that we ran an audio slide show of it.

Good point. Good idea. The press release alone isn't going to cut it any more. Whether you believe, with Marshall McLuhan (remember him?) that "the medium is the message," the message most certainly needs the medium - or perhaps the media - to stand out and be heard.

All Those Eyeballs

So who's really watching all those videos on YouTube and elsewhere? Anybody that you should care about?

Well...yes. That is, assuming you have a message you want to get out.

MediaPost's Research Brief newsletter cites a new study from Ipsos Insight which found 100 million Americans aged 12 or over, and having Internet access, have watched some form of video content on line. That's an awful lot of eyeballs watching Diet Coke and Mentos. And other stuff; I just found a video of Patrick Stewart singing a version of the alphabet song on the Star Trek set, while doing a soft shoe.

But that's a digression. Ipsos says the number means that 44% of the American public over the age of twelve has downloaded or streamed a video. What kind of amazes me is that nobody's figured out exactly how to make money from this yet. But they will. They will.