Amazing how so many politicians are becoming savvy communicatiors!

Here’s an interesting follow up to my article in IABC on politicians who blog.

Mohammad Ali Abtahi, the media savvy Vice President of Iran’s (for Parliamentary Legal Affairs), has an interesting blog.

Abtahi blogs about such things as marriage, the Shiite conflict I Iraq, democratizing Iranian society, and the need for a “mercifulness and coexistence between Christians and Moslems”

As a political blog, it’s truly worth watching!

In case you haven’t visited them, Australian Prime Minister John Howard blogs, as does British MP, Tom Watson.

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It’s TV Turn-off week. (April 19 to 25th).

How much of citizen action will it take for television to clean up its act? Boycotts have worked with mixed results, but there is more evidence now that advertisers are sensitive to being branded as unethical and family unfriendly. (Abercrombie and Fitch is just one example )

A new approach being taken by CleanTV is to document the ‘raunch’ that appears on local stations, and make it easy for people to fire off an email to the advertiser. Not the station, mind you, but to the advertiser.

It’s a neat idea if it can mobilize people. The logic being that profit-hungry networks will not simply listen to viewers, but will certainly pay attention when advertisers hold back their money. CleanTV sends a daily log of the unfavorable content to the local advertisers “so they are aware of what specifically they are supporting.”

However, the site takes itself a bit too seriously, and attempts to mix a bit of street activism with morality. Does a housewife with a toddler and a mortgage really have the time or the inclination to become a ‘digital commando’ as the site urges? My toddler/mortgage juggling ‘commando’ firmly believes that all you need is a remote, not a mouse, to make a statement –any week of the year.

CleanTV, it must be said, is the creation of Steven De Vore, who claims the project was started in response to the LDS church urging its members to ‘do something’ about television.

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Two days ago here I posed the question whether it was possible to rebuild trust with a branding push. Just noticed a news item that Firestone is going to put this to the test.

You will recall Firestone was forced to recall 14 million tires (and settle a $149 million class-action lawsuit) in 2000 because of the fatal rollovers.

It was the biggest example then, of wrestling with reputation management –before Enron, Tyco and Martha took that coveted spot– when your brand starts hurting your stakeholders.

Firestone’s brand building campaign will start in November. Even before that, Advertising Age reports that sales of passenger car tires are up this year. You can bet I will be watching this brand.

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There is no need to preach to the choir, I know. But on a personal note, my article on how politics has been the rocket fuel behind the ascent of blogs this year, is now on the IABC’s Communication Bulletin, (IABC’s Online Newsletter for Communication Management.) You need to be a registered IABC member to access it here.

My favorite analogy is how many of us never quite knew what to make of the Web back in the eighties:

Imagine for a moment that you’re the corporate communication officer of a company in 1995, and at a meeting one day, you call people’s attention to something called the World Wide Web. Eyes glaze over. The numbers guy who has heard the phrase on CNN asks you to give him a cost-benefit assessment. The CEO says it is “very interesting.” A few account managers snicker in a corner about the wisdom of putting the company on a worldwide stage when it can only market its products locally. Would anyone care, they ask, if the company added this “HTTP whatever” to a business card?

To many communicators this scenario is familiar. We all battled with this “to web or not to web” question at some time. Now replace the reference to the web with the word “blog,” and the arguments (and the reactions across the room) are oddly similar.

If you get a chance to read the article, send me your comments to this address.

There is a follow up to this article in the next issue of CW Bulletin.

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There are some places we just don’t want ads to get into. I can name a few off the top of my head: church pews, foreheads, (they have tried) police squad cars, (somewhere in the US, apparently) the few seconds before you hear the dial tone, and cows (attempted in Switzerland, believe me) for example.

I never wanted RSS news readers to become an ad medium, but someone just pointed out how cool it can look. I am not so sure that ‘pretty cool’ translates into ‘very useful’ for most of us who relish the few commercial-free environments left in the real and virtual worlds we operate in.

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This may sound like a plug for IABC, but I have a Brand-related question. It grew out a session called “Restoring trust in a reality-show world” that I plan to sign up for at the IABCs international conference in June. I have been researching this topic for a year, and have a dilemma whether creating trust is more difficult than restoring trust. I am not sure if trust can be restored at all. Can Enron start over? Can Janet Jackson ever… you know!

Here’s my real question: How much importance do you give to a brand name when you are dealing with a company –say for your 401K, a car dealership, your child’s day care, even the grocery store? We make allowances for different levels of trust, depending on whether we are picking up milk, or dropping off our toddler. But does the ‘brand’ really matter?

To turn this question around, who is really in charge of the brand at these organizations? I make brand-conscious decisions every day, not based on the brochures, ads or the press releases, but based on the way the ‘barista’ treated me at you know where, the way the bread rack was stocked in aisle 23, and how many loops of the “your call is important to us” crap I am subject to when I call my service provider. So why is it we put more faith in the ad agency or the PR company than we do our employees? Who really is in charge of the day-to-day branding? When they do mess up, must we turn to the old tools for brand restoration? I think we communicators know the answer to that, but I have not still heard of a place where this happens.

Which is why I am going to be all ears at the trust-fest, which falls into an unexciting sounding track called ’employee communications.’ (I wish we could call employees ‘Internal Brand Guardians’ or some such thing.)

AND NOW A BLATANT PLUG FOR THIS SESSION:

In a world rife with communication spin and slant, it’s no wonder that employee trust has fallen by the wayside. Does that matter? You bet your brand it does! Drawing on Randstad’s research into employee attitudes, Joanne and Don Reichardt offer insightful recommendations for developing an internal communication program that will improve employee trust, loyalty and productivity; strategically align employee communication to support the brand; and raise the perceived value of employee communication at the highest levels of the business.

If you need more information on the sessions, jump off here.

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I am writing an article for IABC, on how political campaigns have been adopting forms of electronic communication. There seems to be a huge divide between a few blog-savvy politicians, and those still spending millions on TV ads. But consider these baby steps that tell me we will see a flurry of activity by the end of the year:

Sonia Gandhi sent a text message to a cricket-obsessed electorate with the words “You are India’s pride. Team India.” India, of course, is a country where SMS has grown by 200%. Mobile phone operators have agreed to use SMS to urge people to go out and vote in the elections this week.

The Prime Minister’s Office, Australia. Australian Prime Minister, John Howard has his own blog, as does Bush and Kerry.

Oh, yeah! Canada. Canadian mobile phone users have been given a 4 digit number to reach their country’s political parties via Text Message.

Mangalore, India –a city in Tamil NAdu, South India. Mobile phones of the media were targeted with an SMS message, IN ALL CAPS, about withholding a vote for two people.

Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan elections that just concluded may be considered a new model for campaigning. The Marxist party of a former rebel group, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, contested and won parliamentary seats after using SMS, and other grass-roots forms of campaigning. So did a new party comprising Buddhist monks, called the Jathika Hela Urumaya. One report, even outlines how SMS was used in a form of negative campaigning. Outgoing cabinet minister, Milinda Moragoda, also uses SMS, but was voted off the island, so to speak, when his party, the United National Front lost the general election.
See the story here.

If you have any recent examples, please email me.

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Advertisers have mixed reactions to what’s called ‘interruption marketing,’ but rub their hands in glee when it is referred to in the same sentence as ‘guerilla marketing.’

Ever heard of the bizarre ‘subservient chicken’ Web site? The following example involves the words ‘viral,’ ‘chicken’ and ‘fast food’ but it has nothing to do with indigestion.

Subservient Chicken is an intriguing Web site for Burger King. The advertising hot shop that created the idea, Crispin, Porter + Bogusky is known for unconventional tactics in brand communication. The site features a man dressed in a chicken costume pacing around red couch. A white bar below it prompts you to “get chicken just the way you like it. Type in your command here.” You can type in commands such as jump, dance, sit etc, and the very odd bird/man character obeys. (Don’t try anything rude, the poor chap crashes to the ground. OK, go ahead, do it!)

What’s going in here? The fast food chain says it is part of a campaign to reinforce BK’s “core equity.” This is code for saying they have brought back the old “have it your way” tagline that the previous ad agency made them run. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the site had received some 15 to 20 million hits, even though only 20 people had been officially told of the site. In other words, the story had spread in true viral fashion, for absolutely no cost, and in a matter of weeks! I think the exercise is futile, and may have no effect on what really matters: selling more burgers. But you have to admit that 20:20,000,000 is not a bad formula!

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It’s hard to predict where RFID is headed, in the context of an ‘always on’ culture that has to also get used to being always alert.

RFID is a fascinating area to watch, because it brings up issues of privacy and commerce –specifically whether the clothes we wear or what we buy at a grocery store could be monitored, and the implications of embedding the technology in currency notes and passports. But here’s a different angle:

Dan Gilmore writes about the University of Tokyo’s Ubiquitous Networking Laboratory where researchers see a future where RFID tags work with everything around us:

“Someone eyes a radish in a supermarket, and by scanning the vegetable with a handheld device — perhaps one of tomorrow’s smart phones — the customer can learn whether the radish was grown organically and how long ago it was picked.”

He then cites a Microsoft researcher, working on a project named ‘Aura’ that turns a hand-held computer into a scanner –it scans bar codes off a product, wirelessly connects to the Net and then scans databases, including search engines, to provide information about the product.

“The results can be illuminating. For example, Smith shows a supermarket scan of a box of cereal. The top item in Google reveals that the maker had at one point recalled the product because a significant ingredient wasn’t on the label.”

These will be the next generation of communicators and readers. Wireless and ubiquitous, and so small that it would be hard to not carry one.

I am not sure I could handle so much information on a daily basis, but it might change everything from packaging information, how a company markets a product, to checkout counters.

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After my post yesterday, I was pleasantly surprised to hear an NPR story (“Search Engine Wars”) this morning about the cat and mouse game of search engine optimization. As NPR put it, it’s also known as ‘gaming Google.’

I recently wrote an article about ‘Google Intelligence’ for LMD magazine that put forward the idea that people pay too much importance to search engines, confusing the ability to find ‘any subject on earth’ with in-depth research. One reader wrote asking asked if I was making fun of the ‘knowledge’ she could now find online. After all, she said, we could never have found out so much so easily before the Internet gave us so much access.

She missed an important point. I had prefaced it by saying that:

“..this is not about knocking Google and Yahoo!, or showing up the inadequacies of search engines. This is about how the Internet keeps us happy with superficial knowledge gleaned off home pages. It makes us very lazy when it comes to digging deep for information –information that is increasingly managed, massaged, and ends up on a search engine.

And my point is? A search engine can be very smart, but we have to remember that we are only looking at a very limited world view. Just because something is or isn’t listed on Google or Yahoo does not prove or disprove its relevance. Sometimes we need to probe deeper than the bowels of a server.

Yesterday’s cool trick using Google, which I like a lot, proves my point. Google rankings mean nothing, sometimes, even if they tell you how ‘important’ something is at that moment in time.

Having said that, I have to put in a word for a brand new search engine called A9. It’s a division of Amazon, and has some very useful features. What I like most: the ability to keep ‘notes’ on a page reference you find! Check it out!

Blog Search Engine -Search Engine
and Directory of blogs. Looking for blogs? Find them on BlogSearchEngine.com

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