Corporate Engagement

Pell's poor PR performance

Crikey. (subscription)

Cardinal George Pell has made four errors in handling the current s-x abuse controversy. The first three are dumb, the fourth is potentially devastating.

More of my article....

links for 2008-07-08

• The Aussie who's changing the world of whistleblowers
  (tags: politics media whistleblowers leaks)

Pell's denial doesn't stack-up

Pell denies sex abuse cover-up - National - smh.com.au Pell's explanation is neither clear nor convincing. For a start, he seems to be drawing a distinction between rape and sexual assault which is hard to follow and just seems devious to me. Second, he hasn't answered at all the allegation that he over-ruled the church's own enquiry and he hasn't offered an explanation for doing so. Lastly, if he did make an honest mistake, as he claims, he still has a duty to do something about it but he seems cold about the damage his 'mistake' might have done to it's recipient.

Pell will have to do better than today's effort if he is to avoid the Pope's visit becoming mired in controversy. The Pope's visit to the US in April sparked a lot of revisiting of the Church's problems with sexual abuse and Pell needs to make it perfectly clear that he cares about this stuff, above and beyond what the law formally requires of him.

Warning Obama off the soft, swinging centre

In recent decades, as ideology and party partisanship have declined, major political parties in Australia, UK and the USA have tended to focus their attention on that growing group of notoriously fickle voters that are socially conservative, change resistant, uninterested in international news and ask only 'what can you do for me'?

These people have many descriptions: swinging voters, aspirationals, battlers, working families and more.

More grandly, we have had Clinton's 'triangulation' and Blair's 'third way' with their Australian equivalents like Howard's wedge on immigration and refugees and Rudd's New Leadership (which seems to be adding up to Howard lite with a few symbols and lower petrol and grocery prices).

Obama in the primaries seemed to hark back to a more idealistic time, i.e. the 1960s, the last time the world seemed 'fresh and bright', with his speeches which resonated with the echoes of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

Now that he has the nomination wrapped up, there is growing concern that he will seek the safe harbour of business campaigning as usual. Two articles particularly caught my attention from Arianna Huffington and Paul Krugman.

Huffington wrote on 2 July:

But, as we've seen, Barack Obama is not immune to the seductive call of the Conventional Wisdom sirens. And it's a call that's only going to get louder. He'll hear it from the chorus of pundits standing outside his window -- folks like The New Republic's Noam Scheiber, who today counseled Obama that being labeled a "typical politician" is a very good thing for him because it will assure wary voters that he won't do anything rash.

While a few days Krugman was warning about the re-emergence of some typical Republican tactics and urges Obama to hang tough against them:

The willingness of the McCain campaign to engage in these tactics, employing such tainted spokesmen, tells us that the campaign has decided to go negative — specifically, to apply the strategy Karl Rove used so effectively in 2002 and 2004 (but not so effectively in 2006), that of portraying Democrats as unpatriotic.

It would, of course, be absurd for Obama to abandon his real strengths (the capacity to inspire people in particular) and play some second rate game. What's more, he will win, as Krugman suggests, by focusing on two big issues. The republicans, including John McCain own an economy headed towards recession and a war that has been the biggest international relations disaster by the US since Vietnam. That's why even if McCain gets up, the republicans will still get wiped in the House and the Senate. In addition, I would say that Obama is on a real winner talking about universal health care, rising inequality and a middle-class that has been under consistent attack throughout the Bush years.

If Obama gets diverted by conventional political wisdom, or by the republicans' politics of diversion, he will sag in the polls. He needs to keep the momentum rolling, and believe in the change.

More Than 10,000 Laptops Go Missing At US Airports Each Week

The Huffington Post:

"According to the Ponemon Institute, more than 10,000 laptops are reported lost at the 36 largest airports in the US each week and, of those, 65 percent are not reclaimed. They also reported a further 2,000 laptops lost at medium-sized airports, with 69 percent of those not reclaimed. According to the institute, folks also aren't very confident that they'll ever see their laptop again once it goes missing, with 77 percent of the people surveyed saying they had 'no hope' of ever recovering a laptop lost at the airport, and 16 percent saying they wouldn't even do anything to attempt to recover it."

What an extraordinary statistic.

Bank PR ‘outed’ via Social Media interview

PR Disasters:

"National Australia Bank has distanced itself from a PR consultancy (p’raps Cox & Inall), which attempted to spam post commercial messages on several leading Aussie sports blogs. Local SEO practitioner Jim Stewart tele-interviewed NAB PR Felicity Glennie Holmes who asserted that ‘this activity was poorly executed by our PR agency’. Jim Stewart primarily challenged Felicity on corporate spamming & the ethics of placing covert NAB ads disguised as blog posts. Felicity kinda defended her employers decision. Interesting note to PR practitioners; be wary of responding to a blog query. As you would with a journo query, ask if they plan to broadcast your communication and if you’re uncomfortable with their response, decide if you wanna participate (or not). For eg: Jim Stewart conducts his interview with Felicity, filming himself for vodcast, and putting her on speakerphone - his body language, facial expressions and other non-verbal silently ’spin’ his take on her responses. Judging by Jim’s raised eyebrows in his vodcast of the telecon, he couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing from FGH. I’ve called Cox Inall to see if they were involved and if so, to hear their side of the story. Someone called ‘Killingly’ is supposed to contact me; after almost 18hrs, am still awaiting any call or email. Agency head Tim Powell left a voice mail for me around 9am and is happy to speak to me later today…stay tuned."

I'm looking forward to Powell's account.

Largest lobbyists linked to Labor

The Australian:

"TWO companies with strong links to the Rudd Government have emerged as the biggest lobbyists on the federal political scene, dwarfing most other players in terms of staff numbers and client lists. Labor campaign adviser Hawker Britton and government-linked Government Relations Australia are the big two in thelobbying world, each representing companies with billions of dollars in turnover in the corridors of power. The level of their interests has been revealed for the first time in the Register of Lobbyists, created by Kevin Rudd to increase transparency in the political process. It reveals the previously shadowy world of lobbying includes 132 companies employing 370 individuals who make their living attempting to influence government decisions. They work on behalf of 983 clients ranging from small industry associations to multinational mining giants.

"

The long tail debate

Marginal Revolution: Has "The Long Tail" been refuted?

ABC Digital Futures - The identity crisis for media workers

ABC Digital Futures » Blog Archive » The identity crisis for media workers

The ABC should be congratulated for examining these issues, and examining them, and examining...it's like you're in some krudd process... but not much in the way of blurring of consumer and producer around the ABC where the empire remains in firm control

H&R Block (Kansas) on using social media (video)

• Focused on building brand.
• Social media spend is about 0.5% of overall brand promotion spending.
• ROI is largely about learning
• Made stuff relevant to each community rather than creating it over and over
• Be careful about pushing outer limits of technology
• Blogged on tax legislation as it went through
• Created forums for people to ask questions (about tax changes) and then respond one-to-many
• Keep looking for ways to drive engagement deeper (the more engaged, the more loyal the customer)
• Offered free tax advice on facebook - scaling up is a problem. Answering 20,000 questions is a lot bigger problem than 2,000
• Used a brand evangelist on Youtube
• Backlash against brands on Youtube - has to be funny and purposeful
• Brand evangelist also used on myspace
• Second Life a 'wonderful corporate challenge' - offer tax advice in avatar form using a dance scene - really good for customer engagement
• Used twitter, interaction with Robert Scoble. Twitter experiences have been great
• The biggest measurement is changing perceptions of brand - takes time

Who should blog for your company?

a shel of my former self: "A lot of choices have to be made when a company decides to launch an official blog. Among these choices: Who will represent the company on the blog?"

A nice discussion of the issues involved: - existing company person or hire an experienced blogger? - single or group blogs?

Some social media fakester tactics

Are SEO Ethics Different than Social Media Ethics?:

"...'Vanity Baiting'.  This tactic, used by SEO's, made me stop and question everything that was said to me in the past by SEO's who now seem to be 'overly gracious' with their comments.  Have I been 'baited' for months with this vanity baiting tactic?  How can I trust anyone who uses this tactic, that they are being truthful with their compliments going forward? Was any of that real, or was that to get me to stumble, read, sphinn, and link to them?  If it was, it worked in the past because I have done all of that, now though I will have to think twice, because the trust that was there, is now gone. What about gaming Twitter for backlinks?  Seems harmless?  Think again.  If you get found out as a spammer on Twitter (and now Plurk), the community bands together and not only reports you to the respective services, but the community shuns you.  Sure you may have your other spammer friends to follow you, but will anyone else?  Likely not, then what good is gaming Twitter? What about multiple accounts on social media news and bookmarking services?  Think it's all about the 'avatar'?  Think again.  It's about the human, and again, if you are found out to be building fake accounts - i.e. claiming to be a 43 year old mom of 3 who loves cooking, scrapbooking and knitting, when you are really a 30 something man, who's spamming the scrapbooking folks with your fake profile/avatar, all hell's going to break loose when those people you befriended through the bot you created, figure out your spamming them.  But hey! What's a few profiles to burn down, right?  Trouble is all that time spent 'faking it' could have been spent being real and making real connections that gain you much more than links."

It's amazing how many people spend so much time and energy looking for ways to create artificial success online - must be good money in it?

Social media: Some lessons from America

I spent most of April in the USA and apart from going to baseball games I caught up with some great bloggers. Here's some key points from those discussions:

• Although many bloggers are very successful esp in this presidential year there still isn't a sustainable business model. Many high profile bloggers are still operating in start-up mode which means working round the clock and burning people out
• At the same time, it is much harder for new bloggers to carve out a niche than it was a few years ago
• Big media has adapted very quickly to the new environment over the past year or two and organisations like Forbes have some big plans for building communities and marketing in that environment
• Most companies basically have a GMOOT (get me one of those) approach to social media; they don't really 'get it', they just want to do something cool.
• Many early adoptors are blogging less because of micro-blogging (twitter, facebook).
• Second Life has not been a winner for corporates and 'we were all guilty of rushing into it without thinking it through'.

Don't write Rudd off just yet

Unleashed.

A first term in government is never easy, writes Trevor Cook.

"Commentators are not only suggesting that the Kevin Rudd honeymoon over but that his government might have already started down a path to ruination. A quick look at history, especially John Howard's first term, might give them reason to be a little more circumspect.

More...

links for 2008-06-30

• Microsoft's Canberra PR jaunt
  (tags: politics internet Microsoft,)