Joe Boughner suggested / challenged / inspired a bunch of people to think about what they would do if they could write only one more post — if they had only their “last post” to write. And damn it all, here I am getting ready for a long-awaited trip to Italy and I’m thinking about mortality — and enjoying it. So here’s what Joe made me think, and write.

The last post. No, this isn’t it, as far as I know. But that’s as much as I can say, as much as any of us can say.

Let’s be honest — none of us think about our mortality much. We don’t want to think about that. What would that sort of thought at the FRONT of our consciousness do to our actions, our behaviour?

I first confronted the fact that I would die when I was 13, when my brother killed himself. I remember the macabre period of his 36 or so hours in hospital, wakes, funerals, etc. specifically in some ways, and vaguely in others. Like looking down from a rowboat at rocks in the water. The doctor who told us he was dead looked like a character on “Another World,” a soap opera that was HUGE in Cape Breton at the time. A girl I liked a lot kissed me on the cheek on the front steps of the funeral home. I don’t know what happened to her.

My brother left a note. I don’t quite know what it said. I know it still exists, but I haven’t seen it for years. I’m not sure I want to. It was 1979;
He listened to Supertramp as he prepared himself to drink rum and take pills. I still find it difficult to listen to some of their songs.

That act changed everything. Not the kiss. Although that changed things for me too. I can trace back more than 30 years and know that there were innumerable behaviours that changed, that happened, that didn’t happen, because of my brother’s act and its impact on me and on my family. As an adolescent, I know that there were things I pulled back from, things I didn’t do, things I didn’t try, because on a conscious and unconscious level I knew I could die. Because I’d seen it happen.

A few years ago, and many years after my brother died, my partner’s father passed away. He had a massive heart attack which kicked off a stroke. I was in the ICU room when he died, some of his brothers and sisters around the bed, his wife and children out of the room, unable to watch. I felt I needed to witness it on their behalf. It was powerful.

People in Cape Breton say a couple of things at wakes that are related. “Sorryferyertroubles, dear.” and “Sorryferyerloss.” I think those are interestingly appropriate things to say. Whether or not religion comes into it, death shouldn’t be a time of grief for the dead person — we grieve for those of us left behind. If you believe in things like Heaven, then surely the dead person is better off than he or she was here; if you believe things end at the end, then there’s nothing to be sorry for.

We who keep on going are the sad ones, because we have to keep going through life, muddling through as best we can, and because there’s one less person we cared about in the world.

But what does all of that mean for us? Should we NOT connect with others? If we develop bonds of care with others, aren’t we causing them more pain when we inevitably die, and ourselves more pain when those we care about die? Or is the cost-benefit analysis skewed so that what we reap from our relationships while alive outweighs the pain of loss, and colours that pain with sweetness?

For me, connecting is worth more than the pain of loss. And I try to give more pleasure while I’m here than whatever pain my eventual end will cause.

So what if this were my last post? Would it be a note of goodbye? A note of knowledge? A summing up of my successes, my failures, my failings? Words of wisdom? Because, in the end, how does a person identify what they know and what they’ve done that is worth sharing, worth passing on? I look back at four decades and know that I’ve done some good things, done some bad things. I’ve helped bring new things to the world. I’ve loved people and cared for people. And I’ve hurt people and been hurt. And if this were my last post, if I were to … stop … what would my legacy be? Only the good things I’ve done for others.

Here’s what I think I’d say: protect yourself, preserve your own happiness and your own belief in yourself. And once you’ve done that, do as much as you possibly can for others without hurting yourself — unless absolutely necessary.

I would love to say I live this philosophy every day to its fullest. But I don’t. Sometimes I’m selfish; sometimes, stupid; sometimes stupidly selfish. But I try. And I guess if I had to make a REAL last post, it might be this:

try.

Every so often you see a news story or two that make you do a double take. Case in point: this CBC story about the city of Toronto banning kite flying in a park. I saw the headline, and thought it was a crazy idea. The gist of the story? Apparently some people don’t just fly kites with plain old string. There are people who indulge in the hobby of “kite fighting,” in which two fliers try to cut the string of each other’s kites.

And there’s the problem: the string can apparently cause several problems — birds can get caught in the trees with it, ducks and geese can get the string wrapped around their legs in the pond and lose a limb, city workers find the string tangling their mowers or weed-whackers, and apparently the councillor has had reports of people being injured by the string.

So the city banned kite flying in the park where the kite fighters congregated.

The comments on the news story are entirely unsurprising. “Moronic government”, loss of freedom, “why not take on some real problems”…

But this story got me thinking about two things. Number one was how you balance sensitivities.

To me — a white Canadian guy who grew up in Cape Breton — kite flying was something did once in a while on a windy day. If your parents made you, you’d make a kite like the one in the picture, and fly that. Otherwise, you’d go down to Woolworth’s, blow a buck or two on a plastic one, and fly that.

But to others, this is a big deal. Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Korea, Japan, and the Caribbean all have long traditions of kite fighting.

Here’s a story from AlJazeera about how it’s done in Afghanistan (or at least was done before the Taliban and is now done, after the Taliban:

So while some are upset by the effects of the kite fighters on the park, for others this is their sport — their ultimate, their running, their dogwalking. Does this turn kite-flying into a culture clash? I hope not. But if I use a park for dogwalking and someone else uses it for kiteflying, whose interests are more important, more valid?

Second, one commenter made a really interesting point: “So a few birds are hurt by string, but tens of thousands of song birds in Toronto are killed each year by cats. Cities should ban outdoor cats.” I’m not arguing for such a ban. But I think the commenter underlines an interesting point. That point: nothing is risk-free; no solution perfect.

And surprisingly enough, it made me think of the Chalk River NRU nuclear reactor, which began to make medical isotopes again this week. When the NRU was shut down a couple of years ago, it became a cause celebre, leading to emergency sittings of Parliament and the passage of a bill to keep it open. Then it shut down again, and that time it didn’t seem to create any great public concern.

At the time, Dr. William Leiss wrote a short essay for me about risk and the decisions being made. It occurred to me then that the situation was one in which shutting the reactor was a decision with a high probability of negative effects on the patients who needed its medical isotopes, while keeping the reactor open had a low probability of a catastrophic negative effect. It reminded me that almost nothing is ever clean-cut.

Same thing with the kite-flying (on a different scale, of course):

• Allow kite-flying:  adds a likely source of harm to birds, a possible source of harm to people
• Disallow kite-flying: removes one source of harm to birds and people; removes fulfilling activity for some.

One more example: I’m on the board of the Ottawa Folk Festival, and we had an absolute downpour last  Sunday. Suddenly, a million decisions had to be made. What got cancelled? What got moved? Was the site safe? Which stages could be used? Do we discount tickets? Do we refund tickets? And on and on… Every decision (with the exception of site safety) was not black and white. Each one had to be hashed through (in this case with extreme time constraints). And no decision pleased everyone. You never do. At least our festival director found an opportunity to get a great photo taken.

I recently had a conversation with a friend who’s working in a role more focused on outreach than he’s used to. He called me to ask about webinars. “Are they social media?” I started to think about that and delivered a fairly equivocal answer — yeah, webinars can be, but they aren’t necessarily, depends on the interaction, blah de blah de blah.

But then I had a little epiphany. Something — a tactic — isn’t “social media.” The STRATEGY is social media. The tactic is just the action of the strategy.

It’s not the webinar that is or isn’t social. It’s the thinking behind it. If the thinking is: “we will deliver information to you and you will listen,” the tactics aren’t social. If the thinking is, “we want to tell you what we’re doing, and then we want you to tell us what you think, then we’ll react…” the tactics are social.

Of course, where does this insight end? It ends at the listener. Because if the RECIPIENT of this messaging wants to take it and run with it, he or she will, and your strategy be damned.

Look at what just happened with Air Canada and the wheelchair incident. Air Canada likely believed that its dealings with the family of Tanner Bawn were private. If you’re not aware, just Google “Tanner Bawn” and “wheelchair.” But their belief was not shared by the family, who were well-versed in the social media world and already had followers and friends online. And Air Canada appear to have been totally insulated from the firestorm of criticism that was growing online.

So what did I learn from my friend’s question? I learned to extend one of my favorite sayings from Terry Fallis — “a tactic is not a strategy” to “it’s not the tactic that’s social — it’s the strategy.”

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

My partner Cathy and I love spending time in our garden. And we spend lots of time out there when things get green and lovely.

And when we travel, we like to find beautiful things to take pictures of.

So I thought I’d share some of them with you. If you’re looking for an iPad wallpaper, feel free to take one or all of these, and I hope you enjoy looking at them as much as we did finding the images.

I’ve been thinking lately about how businesses hang on to their old ways of communicating and advertising recently. I’m going to tell you what I think first, and then I’ll tell you why.

I think that while we social media enthusiasts think everybody “gets it”, there are incredible numbers of businesses that don’t. They don’t understand social media and new communication tools; they don’t think they’re “serious”; they think they’re not part of a legitimate business. And I don’t think it’s an Ottawa problem; Chicago-based Gini Dietrich talked about hearing the same things in her town on a recent Inside PR episode.

So, two examples, and then a couple of conclusions.

First: The city of Ottawa has been trying to shop around an “integrated street furniture program” for the last several months. The city wanted to bring a private company to the table and do a deal that would see the company provide things like benches, newspaper racks, etc. etc.

The program site says:

The program will be guided by the following six principles:

• Provide a service: There must be an existing service or an identified and demonstrated need for street furniture. Advertising is secondary to the purpose of the structure.
• Offset capital and operating cost: Costs associated with the initial acquisition, ongoing maintenance, and periodic renewal of street furniture is transferred from the City to the service provider.
• Generate revenue: Portions of the advertising proceeds generated from the street furniture are returned to the City as a revenue stream in order to reflect the value to the service provider derived from the use of the City’s right of way.
• Improve the Streetscape and Preserve Identity: The City’s streetscape can be improved if street furniture has a common look and feel. Additionally, there is a high potential for increased visual clutter if services are expanded without a comprehensive policy. Although the program is seeking a common look and feel, it is not intended to provide a “one size fits all” approach, and will therefore need to be flexible enough so that street furniture can be tailored to specific areas where the street has developed a defined cultural identity. In addition, streetscape elements that were designed through public consultation as part of a street renewal project will be recognized and preserved.
• Enhance Service: There is a need for additional services in various parts of the City. The provision of these services will be appropriate for the potential users and for the streetscape context.
• Improve Coordination: Advertising on various types of street furniture may compete for the same audience and changes in individual agreements can significantly undermine revenue potential of other agreements.

Media reports today are saying that the City received just one response to a request for proposals. That proposal was non-compliant.

Second: I’ve been noticing bus shelter ads recently like this, with a number of businesses listed, and a pointer to the Findusfast.com site. This ad features a carpet and flooring store, a jeweler, an online flower service, and a self-storage company. I keep thinking about them each time I walk past. What’s the appeal here?

I suppose the businesses might be thinking they can’t afford shelter advertising on their own, so if they do this, they get that kind of exposure at a cost they can afford. Here in Ottawa, an ad like that would cost a minimum of $430 (for more than 100 shelters) for a four-week placement, and as much as $765 (if you’re doing under 10 shelters).

They may also think it’s useful to get the listing in the Findusfast directory. Their online pitch to advertisers gives eight reasons:

“1.  Priority listing in your category
2. Three rotating banners ads
3. Branding icon – top of page
4. Link to website
5. Link to offer, flyer, menu…
6. Map to your location
7. Mission statement line
+ a cost of $0.67 cents per day.”

So why would you go into a web directory like this, when you already have your own site? What’s the ROI? What’s it gain you compared to, say, doing a Facebook or a Google ad campaign, or buying your own bus shelter advertising from Clear Channel?

I asked a friend in the real estate business why he uses a bus-bench advertisement for himself. He doesn’t have numbers on response. But he has had anecdotal evidence from other realtors that when they change their advertisement or if they change locations, they get calls from clients saying “What happened to your ad?”And, he notes, the bus-bench market in Ottawa is strongly dominated by realtors.

So. Conclusions.

It’s pretty frustrating to think that ad campaigns with only grossly estimated eyeball counts and little ability to prove results are adopted  by businesses while effective and measurable campaigns done using PR or advertising tactics online are ignored.

The street furniture example is making me wonder whether the companies are beginning to realize that the return just isn’t there for outdoor-type advertising anymore in the broad sense. What’s the call to action? What’s the measurability? Is outdoor just a cacophony of sound and image that makes it impossible for you to stand out?

It seems to me that businesses are unwilling to let go of the things they understand, that they’re comfortable with. Even when it doesn’t work. There’s nothing new about the quote “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the problem is I do not know which half” — Lord Leverhulme said it nearly a century ago. The difference between now and then is the absolute explosion in places and ways to waste that advertising budget.

But we early adopters — and we’re STILL early adopters — have to be patient and let others catch up to us. Or is that lasso them and drag them forward? The good news? That means there are STILL a lot of new clients for folks like you and me.

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 was pretty gobsmacked yesterday when I heard Richard Fadden, the head of CSIS (Canada’s intelligence agency), tell CBC’s flagship newscast The National that his agency knew of cabinet ministers in provincial governments and members of municipal governments who were “under the influence” of “foreign governments.”

Fadden didn’t point to a specific country, but dropped a serious hint by mentioning that about half of CSIS’s budget is devoted to China. He also said that his agency had informed the federal government at its highest levels of their concerns — the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and Privy Council Office (PCO).

The reverberations haven’t stopped yet — and yesterday’s 5.0 earthquake that was centred near Ottawa was just a physical manifestation of those ripples.

I’ve not worked for CSIS, either as an employee or a consultant, and I’ve never played in the sandbox of federal politics . So I’m looking at this from the outside, as a PR guy.

At some time in the past several weeks, our chief spook does an interview with one of CBC’s most respected journalists (winner of multiple awards, and some say the inspiration for Live Aid) in which he subtly points at China as an influencer of Canada’s political class.

The day before China’s president arrives in Canada for an official visit, CBC airs the interview as part of a package looking at Canada’s intelligence operations. This is also just before the G8 and G20 meetings are held in Ontario, bringing multiple heads of state to Canada for discussions at the highest of levels.

Fadden then retracts some of his comments in a statement:

“Recent comments I made in the context of a special report by the CBC on CSIS have given rise to some concerns about foreign interference in Canada.  The following statement is meant to place those comments in context.

All of the activities of the Service take place within the law and the CSIS Act in particular.  The CSIS Act requires the Service to investigate threats to the security of Canada – including foreign interference.  The Service has been investigating and reporting on such threats for many years.  Foreign interference is a common occurrence in many countries around the world and has been for decades.

I have not apprised the Privy Council Office of the cases I mentioned in the interview on CBC.

At this point, CSIS has not deemed the cases to be of sufficient concern to bring them to the attention of provincial authorities.

There will be no further comments on these operational matters.”

It didn’t take long for a frenzy of reaction to start. Premiers, mayors, intelligence analysts — all were weighing in on what Fadden had said, and then on the retraction.

Calls for Fadden’s resignation began to surface, while others (such as former senior public servant and current columnist Norman Spector and right-wing blogger Adrian McNair) called for heads to roll at CBC for their journalistic practice.

So from a PR perspective, what can we draw from this?

1. It’s pretty rare for CSIS to open itself up to media scrutiny as it did for The National. So I find it hard to believe that this was done without a great deal of forethought. And even if it was given little prep time, given the time lag between the taping of the interview, some negotiation should or could have been undertaken to mitigate the damage of Fadden’s remarks. At the very least, I hope they brought in some outside interview prep; if they didn’t, then that explains a lot in terms of the miscues.
2. Is CBC at fault here? Should they have broadcast the interview at an earlier time? It’s hard for me to agree with that. What’s CBC’s job? To deliver news and to get ratings. They maximized their exposure with this story. Brian Stewart and Peter Mansbridge didn’t make Fadden say what he said. They ran with it. As they should have.
3. If we agree that this was deliberate, then the most important question to my mind is: what does CSIS gain by having this information come out publicly? If we believe it was a mistake, then the question becomes: how could CSIS get this SO WRONG? Is it a case of an agency and a person unused to dealing with media fouling up? Or is Fadden just loose-lipped (NOT a characteristic he’s known for, apparently, or one that’s desirable in a spymaster).

It’s been interesting contrasting this with the McChrystal affair in the United States. In one case, a general known for his outspoken, maverick image stops too far over the line and resigns; in the other, a senior bureaucrat barely known in the media at all speaks frankly, backtracks, and appears to be waiting out the storm.

(Photo credit: Charlotte Morrall, CC licenced on Flickr)

Almost exactly eighty-five years ago as I write this, a man named William Davis was shot and killed by police paid by the British Empire Steel and Coal Company (BESCO), as he marched in a union demonstration in New Waterford, Cape Breton.

The miners of that day were striking. BESCO cut off water and electricity to their houses. And their police fired over 300 shots in that skirmish.

Even now, despite the fact that no mines work in Cape Breton, Davis Day is celebrated in the mining communities of Cape Breton. I grew up in one of those communities. And I salute the courage of those long-ago miners who fought against tyrannical and brutal companies for the basic rights of a worker and a human being.

William Davis left a wife and nine children.

516
The Men of the Deeps: “Coal by the Sea”

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.