Archive for the ‘Public relations’ Category

I guess I’m not finished writing about information security after my post about University of Oklahoma researchers losing years of cancer research data on a stolen laptop.

I got pointed back to the topic when I learned that there was another stolen laptop incident in New Orleans, at Tulane University. The details are these. While the university closed for the Christmas holiday, a staffer in the human resources shop thought he would get some work done on the W-2 forms necessary to produce for each of the more than 10,000 people employed by Tulane. Fine. He brought home the records on a laptop. The records were unencrypted. Uh-oh. The employee left the laptop in his car and went out of town. Uhhhhh-oh. The laptop was stolen. Now records including Social Security numbers, salaries, and other information that is classified as confidential by the university are in the hands of the thief.

There are obvious lessons to be learned, and obvious mistakes here. I’m not going to go into those. They should be self-evident.

But here’s where I am going: as organizations, you need to ensure that your employees are (a) aware, and (b) trained to act on, the sensitivity of your data.

I’ve worked at two post-secondary institutions, and there was very little talk of IT security. One opportunity to refresh my education was when Canada introduced the Personal Information and Protection of Electronic Documents Act (known to normal humans as PIPEDA). That required some extensive training for anyone with access to the database program our fundraisers used (which I had, subject to limits). But overall, I’d wager that this is how things are at most organizations:

So if I’m right, why aren’t employees more sensitive to these issues? Because there’s plenty of information out there suggesting that this is a BIG problem. One 2009 report for Dell by Ponemon showed that three-quarters of IT directors surveyed knew of a case in which their organization’s data had been put at risk because of a lost laptop (not even COUNTING all the other IT threats). Another Ponemon survey showed that nearly 4 in 10 data breaches occur because of lost or stolen laptops or mobile devices. That same study pegs the cost per record of stolen data at over $200US. (If that math works for Tulane, that’s a cost of two million bucks.)

So what’s to be done?

I’d bet that most organizations have IT security policies in place. Tulane has one. I’ve read it. All 14,000 words of it.

I’ve found countless other ones like it for universities, colleges, and other institutions and organizations.

It it reasonable to think that a 14,000 word policy is going to be regularly read — even by the IT staff or the HR staff? I don’t think so. I’d suggest that organizations of all shapes and sizes need to bring some resources to bear to make their employees far more cognizant of the risks to the organization and to themselves of sloppy data security.

If communicators are going to be counsel to their organizations, they should be scanning the horizons for threats. This su

re as hell is one. And I think that we communicators ought to lead it, rather than wait for the IT or HR staff to come to us.

As Maximus might say: Who’s with me?

Tony Cement demos a new Twitter app

While politics isn’t a huge part of my business life (unlike my compatriot Mark Blevis, for example), I am an armchair political quarterback of the first water. So this post by Maclean’s magazine parliamentary correspondent and blogger Aaron Wherry really caught my eye.

Minister of Industry Tony Clement is possibly the most passionate user of Twitter within Canada’s federal cabinet (although there are others.) And he should be given credit for not cutting and running despite being in charge of some controversial files, including changes to Canada’s census, an attempted takeover of Potash Corporation by Australian firm BHP Billiton, and most recently the government’s awarding of $300 million to Pratt & Whitney Canada to assist the company in carrying out research & development on new aircraft engines.

The announcement of this funding led to some stiff media criticism, and last night, as Wherry illustrates, Minister Clement took to his Twitter account to joust with several people, including journalist Andrew Coyne and economist Stephen Gordon (who had been intensely critical of Clement’s decision to discontinue the mandatory long-form census).

Clement puts on the gloves Twitter-style

The exchange lasted about two hours and ended at about midnight. I think it’s remarkable (in a good way) that Clement is doing this. But it makes me wonder about a couple of things. The Stephen Harper government has been painted as exceedingly locked-down in terms of communication, and there has been a long history of clashes between journalists and the government. But here’s a senior cabinet minister slugging it out with a journalist and others in the public twitterverse.

So I tip my hat to Minister Clement. I think it’s great that he’s doing this. And now, some tips that I think his tweeting can teach us all:

1. Use the tool that you are comfortable with. It could be argued that a blog might be a better tool for Clement. But for whatever reason or reasons, Clement likes Twitter. So he’s using Twitter. You can’t force a minister to do stuff. But I don’t think anyone’s twisting Clement’s arm to do this. He’s engaged. So work with that.
2. Don’t cut and run when things get tough. Clement has gone through some bruiser battles on Twitter. But he’s still there, and while he may end a given exchange, he doesn’t go to ground when critics appear. You have to brace yourself for the critics and be ready to respond.
3. Remember that you control your message, no matter the medium. In the exchange from last night, Andrew Coyne presses hard for Clement to disclose departmental research. Note that Clement doesn’t say “no.” He ignores the request. He could provide it at a later time, or he might not. Or Coyne could do an Access to Information request to obtain the research.
4. Choose a medium you can communicate in. Clement appears to be a tech savvy guy; he also appears to like cut and thrust. That makes Twitter useful for him. Furthermore, he uses the shorthand and conventions of the medium to his own advantage. He shortens words, uses hashtags, etc.
5. Choose a medium that matches your urgency and frequency needs. I mentioned in tip 1 that a blog might be better for Clement in terms of putting out fleshed-out arguments. But the conversationality wouldn’t be there, and the need to polish the writing would be higher. A podcast would require some sort of equipment (even Audioboo would require a mobile device), and it doesn’t have the immediacy of a tweet.

I hope these tips are useful. If you have any more to add, please leave them in the comments.

... or IS it?

I get lots of invitations to events related to public relations, usually from local chapters of professional associations like CPRS or IABC or business groups like the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce, or from companies like Ragan Communications. Quite often, the pricing structure for an event – a breakfast, a webinar, a professional development session, whatever – goes like this:

• Members $40
• Non-members $55
• Students $20

For example, Ragan says on its site

“Ragan Select members always get the lowest prices & access to all ragan.com content.” (emphasis theirs)

This is a sensible structure in some ways. Members pay a membership fee, so this is pitched as one of the benefits of membership — reduced admission costs to events. Makes sense. Also makes sense to give students a break on attendance. I didn’t have much money when I was a student.

But I was thinking about this as a way of recruiting new members. Associations cost money. Unless you’re a student, joining CPRS will run you nearly $400; IABC is a bit cheaper. And unlike the old days, there are a ton of PD events out there that don’t require a membership: Social Media Breakfast, TEDx, Case Study Jam, Third Tuesday, Ottawa Brain Drain, Podcasters Across Borders…

So if you’re an association, and you want to bring in new members, is the best way to recruit to charge people more? Might you not be better served by holding special “non-member events”, where you gave the noobs a discount? Or an event without a charge at all? And for that matter, given the negligible amount of revenue that student attendance at these events likely brings in, might it be worth it to not charge them at all?

If you don’t change your pricing structure, do you risk losing people who want to pay “à la carte” for their professional activities? Is it the membership fees that pay for things like the massive research library that IABC offers (to members and non-members, at different prices)? Without those fees, what happens to the research? Or to the associations themselves?

It feels like a truism to say that the pace of change in public relations and communications is break-neck. The advent of social media has accelerated that pace crazily. Many people in the industry are having difficulty with the way the practice and principles of public relations are being challenged by new media tactics and by the move to make “symmetrical two-way communications,” to quote the Grunigs, approach reality.

The local chapters of associations are led by dedicated volunteers looking to make connections, and in some cases names for themselves. Is the “way forward” now to volunteer for associations, or to do “personal branding?” Is the way forward going to make PR professional associations irrelevant?

I don’t know the answers. But I find the questions interesting.

I had a quick chat with Robert Janelle yesterday, who was writing an article for the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce‘s member newsletter about social media for business.

One of the things I talked about was learning from others, and building on their ideas. In folk music, that’s “the folk tradition.” But given that you can’t copyright an idea or a concept, there’s no reason that businesses embarking on a social media initiative — or any sort of communications, for that matter — shouldn’t learn from others.

And case studies can be a powerful way of doing just that. Conveniently enough, there are good people who are compiling lists of case studies online. Some of these lists are in wiki form, so you can easily add your own; others are more conventional sites. Either way, use them. Why not save yourself making the same mistakes others made, and find brand new mistakes to make! As Samuel Beckett so famously put it: No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Here are some places to find useful case studies in social media:

Penn Olson’s 30 social media case studies

Web 2.0 examples in Canada wiki

Peter Kim’s list of over 1000 social media “examples” (the inspiration for Web 2.0 examples in Canada)

Tod Maffin‘s Case Studies Online site

UPDATE: If you prefer your case studies in the live and in person format, and you’re in Ottawa, you should check out Case Study Jam, a little meetup that I’ve been helping to organize with a cast of ones, including Joe Boughner, Amy Boughner, Melanie Bechard, Della Siemens, and Nick Charney. You can get a sense of what a CSJ is like from Robin Browne’s handy-dandy audio playlist!

And one more thing to think about: If you have an example of how your company or a client did something interesting, why not write something up about it and submit it to one of these lists? Sharing is caring.

Photo credit: The Cake Engineer on Flickr, licenced via Creative Commons

The Ottawa Fringe Festival, one of the seemingly dozens of annual events that make life in Ottawa in the summer fun (and sometimes exhausting) has been holding a series of lunchtime events that have ranged from bloody debates on the future of theatre to… an Ignite event.

With the help of theatre and communications guy Ryan Anderson, the Fringe folk put together a roster of artists (not including me) and business types (yeah, that was me) to do Ignite presentations with the loose topic of the intersection of art and business.

For those of you not familiar with Ignite, it’s a movement where people put together 20-slide presentations that are the visuals for a five-minute talk. The slides advance mercilessly, every 15  seconds, so it’s like “The Pit and the Pendulum” for speakers.

The good news is that  all the presentations were great.

The presenters were, in order of appearance:

Tyler Cope, co-founder of Overlay.TV, a local tech startup and general good corporate citizen in Ottawa
Nancy Kenny, a peripatetic young actor, writer, and marketing guru
Sterling Lynch, another hyphenate (actor-writer-only-guy-wearing-a-tie).
Ram Kanda, creative director at Fuel Industries, a seriously big advertainment and online company here in Ottawa
Me
and Barry Smith, a Colorado newspaper columnist here with a show called “Every Job I’ve Ever Had”

Anyway, I thought that since I’m in the business of shameless self promotion, I should record my audio and match it up with the slides for you.

The presentation, which I called “If your art falls in a forest was it really art?” is only about five minutes long, so at the very worst you won’t have wasted much time.

I’ve put up the audio from the presentation, as well as a PDF of the slides. I tried to marry the slides with the audio, but sad to say, couldn’t get the timing to work the way I wanted it to.

UPDATE: Or… you could just wait a little bit for the enterprising folks at Ottawa Tonite to put up the video (which I thought was just being streamed). I’m really not that smart.

I got a tweet today pointing me to the release of The Results Map. This is the brainchild of Caroline Kealey, CEO of Ottawa-based Ingenium Communications. I’ve known Caroline casually for a number of years, and she’s always struck me as a really smart communicator.(If you needed proof: when she teaches, she enforces the smartphones-off rule.)

And the Results Map, from what I see, doesn’t disappoint. The video tour they’re offering on the site is a good introduction. And she’s been smart enough to sponsor the “Strategy & Counsel” programming track at this weekend’s IABC World Conference in Toronto. If getting a solid product in front of a few thousand communicators doesn’t make for a good first few days, I don’t know what would.

Kealey’s been working on this idea for years, and the final product (if anything in this business is ever really final) uses the metaphor of the subway map to guide communicators through the process of developing, implementing, and evaluating communications programs.

I suspect this thing is going to take off in larger organizations. The one fly in the ointment? It is not cheap: $2800 CAD to get in, plus a $100/month sub for the online resources they’re offering along with it. A lot of smaller organizations will likely gasp at that cost.

Caroline has been gracious enough to give me a quick peek under the hood, so I’m hoping to post again in a week or two with a full review of just what this tool is and whether it’s as good as I’m guessing it will be.

I’m really excited to announce that the new podcast PR and Other Deadly Sins is LIVE.

Mark Blevis is someone that I have a tremendous amount of respect for, as well as someone I like a lot. So it’s a kick to think that we’ll be doing this as often as we can. How often that is, we’ll figure out as we go. But for now, it’s just a thrill to get the first one out there.

Grab it at the new site PR and Other Deadly Sins. As always, thanks to Tom Hofstatter for holding my galumphing WordPress hands throughout the process.

There are certain stories that you can guarantee will get covered each year. Each February in Canada, RSP season brings stories about the lack of preparedness for retirement we Canadians are demonstrating. Each Canada Day, the Dominion Institute releases a poll that shows we Canadians don’t know our own history very well.

Every time Apple releases a new product you’ll see stories about the lineups and pictures of Steve Jobs in his turtleneck and jeans.

And at the end of March, Ontario media cover the Sunshine List. Not to be confused with the Sunshine GIRL (an exercise in a different sort of transparency), the Sunshine list was the result of a law passed in the mid-1990s by the provincial government . Pretty simple as laws go: anyone on the public payroll in the province — provincial public servants, employees of universities, colleges, towns, cities, hospitals — who makes over $100,000 gets put on the list and the employers are responsible for making the  list public by the end of March.

Back then, the Mike Harris government was in power in Ontario, and they loved the idea of populism, being in solidarity with the “little guy”, Joe Sixpack. So this sort of vague public shaming — providing a list of people who you could tsk tsk or wag a finger at — worked for them, quite nicely.

So every year, talk-radio hosts fulminate, columnists critique (Christina Blizzard: “There are 63,761 people on the provincial list this year. That’s up 10,000 over last year…April Fool’s? I guess the joke’s on us.”) and journalists write about how the ranks of the $100K earners area swelling. This Brantford Expositor editorial notes:

Five years ago, The Expositor published a local “Sunshine List” with 78 names. The list published in Saturday’s Expositor has grown to 349 names.

Here’s what I say. The Sunshine list has some serious flaws. First, $100K in 1995 is not the same as $100K today. In fact, just on inflation, it’s more like $133K. Assuming pay raises followed Canada’s inflation rate, someone making $77K in 1995 would be above $100K today just from cost-of-living. And freaking out because the list grows every year makes as much sense as freaking out because prices go up every year; that is to say, none.

Second, it doesn’t expose “fat cats” – there are all sorts of people who are normal working people who end up on this list. Police officers, firemen, bus drivers, nurses — they’re all there, mostly because they’ve worked enough overtime to hit the magic number.

Third, it doesn’t measure VALUE. The top public servant on the list is the head of Ontario Power Generation, who makes $2.5 million, apparently. What does that number tell us? Damned if I know. It’s a lot of money. Is it well spent? Does he make more than others in similar jobs? Does he outperform his compatriots?

Fourth, it reinforces our sometimes-perverse attitudes toward public-sector compensation. We pay our Prime Minister about $300,000 to run a G8 country. We pay the president of the Bruyere Continuing Care Centre $30,000 more than the PM to run an organization with 753 beds and 1,000 employees. The minimum salary for an NHL player is $450K. Formula 1 Driver Kimi Raikonnen made $45,000,000 last year (US!). Nortel‘s CEO made more than seven times as much as the PM last year.

So until we compensate people more in line with the VALUE they add to society, I humbly suggest that we kill the Sunshine list. As an exercise in effective communication about  compensation and the contribution to society, it is an utter failure.

Photo credit: Dru! on Flickr, creative-commons licensed.

Sometimes your breath can simply be taken away by the stupidity of a business’s actions.

This was the case for me when I first read that a subsidiary company of Loblaws had filed a statement of claim against the owner of a van which collided with one of its trucks — and against the driver of that van.

Here are some of the details and back story, thanks to sources including Wikipedia’s “Boys in Red” article:

• January 12, 2008: an extended passenger van carrying the Bathurst high school boys’ basketball team was driving back to Bathurst, New Brunswick after playing a game in Moncton. Just after midnight on the 12th, the driver, coach Wayne Lord, lost control of the vehicle in freezing rain and snow and veered into the path of a tractor-trailer owned by Atlantic Wholesalers, a subsidiary of Loblaws. Loblaws is a $30-billion company with nearly 140,000 employees.
• Seven members of the team were killed, as well as Lord’s wife, who also taught at Bathurst High School.
• The accident (collision, says Tom of What the Lemur) made national news, and people around Atlantic Canada were especially moved by the tragedy. For example, one memorial group established on Facebook attracted nearly 9,000 members
• Following the collision, 15-passenger vans were taken out of service in Nova Scotia, and there were multiple investigations into the accident by the RCMP, Transport Canada (pdf of report) and by the province of New Brunswick.
• The investigations didn’t find a single overwhelming cause for the accident; however, the van had worn brakes and tires, while the driver was tired and weather conditions were poor. The RCMP did not lay criminal charges.
• Some of the parents of those killed in the accident have continued to work for changes in policies and processes to make children safer, most prominently through the Van Angels web site.
• On December 22, 2009, Atlantic Wholesalers and Loblaws filed a statement of claim against Lord and the company which owned the van. They were pursuing about $41,000 in damages to their truck, environmental remediation, as well as costs and legal fees.
• The pending lawsuit was picked up by the media, starting with a radio report on Friday, January 9 — the second anniversary of the collision accident.
• The outrage in media response was immediate, and I would wager that the response to Loblaws itself was equally loud and negative.
• After a brief period of not responding to calls for comment, Loblaws withdrew the suit the same day the media attention hit, and issued a statement from the company’s president:

“We thoroughly apologize for the alarm and concern caused by the statement of claim. While it is normal legal practice to look for reimbursement from the parties deemed to be at fault , this decision was clearly made without consideration of the specifics of this accident. We would also like to thank all our customers that voiced their concern regarding our decision, allowing us to reconsider our actions.”

• Now, according to CBC online, Loblaws is engaged in some damage control in New Brunswick, calling the mayor of Bathurst and seeking advice on what action the company could take to demonstrate its contrition.

796 mostly anti-Loblaw comments on this CBC story

I don’t think Loblaws is an inherently evil company. And I don’t doubt that seeking reimbursement for damages is normal legal practice, as the company’s statement says. But there were serious miscalculations here. First, whoever made the decision to file the statement of claim likely thought more about process than about the human aspects of the tragedy. He or she or they forgot the human impact of this accident, which should have outweighed the damages.

The timing was beyond unfortunate. To do this so close to the anniversary of the accident was asking for trouble. But if you weren’t thinking of this as a human tragedy, you wouldn’t think of that.

The most serious miscalculation, was the inclusion of the van driver as an individual in the suit. I’d wager that a claim only against the company might have gone with far less, if any criticism. But when you file suit against a man who lost his wife and seven members of his basketball team in an accident, you can’t help but look like an insensitive bull, even if you’re ‘really’ filing suit against his insurance company.

It’s hard to think about the human factors when you’re part of a huge organization. But as Loblaws has learned, you ignore them at your peril.

Fail image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisgriffith/ / CC BY 2.0

A little while ago I did an interview with with Katfish Hunter and David Schellenberg, hosts of the Morning Startup on LIVE 88.5.

Essentially on personal branding, we touched on Mayor Larry O’Brien’s blog (I don’t like it); the case of www.lowellgreen.ca being purchased by someone who doesn’t think much of local CFRA talk-radio host Lowell Green and Lowell’s outrage (I argue he shoulda bought his own dot-ca), and some issues around branding for indie musicians. Part of the reason we talked about the musicians is that LIVE sponsors the Big Money Shot, a competition for local musicians at their own Live Lounge in the Byward Market.

I’m doing a little thinking about a presentation for indie and roots musicians with the title: “You are your brand / You are not your brand.” If there are people out there with thoughts they’d like to share on this, I’d be happy to hear and respond.

Here’s the file, a 9-meg MP3. Thanks to Archive.org for hosting it: Bob LeDrew on Live 88.5 FM.