In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I spent four childhood Christmases in Lesotho, the tiny mountain kingdom in southern Africa where my father worked for the country’s newly independent government. I have vivid memories of our very first Christmas there, which came scant weeks after we first landed in this strange new land. So I know first-hand that several things we take for granted at this time of year simply don’t happen in Lesotho, a country that struggled with poverty and chronic drought when we lived there and whose problems have been endlessly compounded since then by the ravages of HIV and AIDS.

The most obvious difference at Christmas time is that it is hot and sunny in Lesotho, not cold and snowy. Contrary to many people’s imagined vision of Africa, however, it does get extremely cold and snowy in Lesotho during its winter since the country lies at 5,000 feet above sea level and higher. Being in the southern hemisphere, Lesotho’s winter corresponds with our summer, and vice versa.

The next most obvious difference is that very few families in Lesotho will be tucking in to a feast of good food following a frenzied burst of present openings this, or any, Christmas morning. Many families will be led by the oldest child, or a surviving grandparent as AIDS has cut a swath through a generation of parents and wage-earners. And while most will take time to celebrate with joyous song and dance the religious aspects of Christmas in this deeply devout nation of church-goers, very few will be able to join in the secular aspects that, for most of us, now take precedence.

This childhood connection to Lesotho and an awareness that this tiny nation of incredibly resilient and warmhearted people was bearing a disproportionate share of the burden of HIV and AIDS led me a few years ago to look into a unique Canadian charity, Help Lesotho. We have supported Help Lesotho and its unstoppable dynamo of a founder and director, Peg Hebert, ever since. Through the year, we use our media relations skills and do what we can to help Peg spread her message of hope, and at Christmas we forego sending cards and gift baskets to our clients and colleagues in favour of giving the money to Help Lesotho. We will do so again this year.

But I also want to draw the attention of our Ottawa readers to a fundraising sale of Christmas gift items that Help Lesotho will be holding at its offices over the next couple of weeks. Here you can buy one-of-a-kind gifts that will not only delight their recipients but will also help Peg and her team continue their work. You can see a full catalogue of the items on offer here, and the sale itself will be held at Help Lesotho’s offices at the Keller Williams Building, 610 Bronson Avenue (just north of the Queensway) from 4 to 7 p.m. on Thursday, December 4; Friday, December 5 and Friday December 12; and from 10 a.m. to noon on Saturday, December 6.

For those of you not in Ottawa, the same gifts can be bought and the same contribution made to Help Lesotho by clicking on the link in the previous paragraph and shopping online.

Technorati Tags: Help Lesotho, Christmas gifts

In case you missed them, here’s a roundup of our posts from November.

Francis:
Nov. 5: Happy birthday to us
Nov. 5: Breathtakingly audacious
Nov. 18: Customer service so bad it wins an award
Nov. 26: Velocity students showcase projects

Danny:
Nov. 7: Sometimes you just never know…
Nov. 13: Getting covered by Tier 1 business media
Nov. 17: Top tech PR cliches
Nov. 28: The balance of power

Leo:
Nov. 3: When to speak up and when to keep your mouth shut
Nov. 10: Getting attention in the 500-channel universe
Nov. 21: Boldy going where we’ve gone before … sort of
Nov. 25: When the iron’s hot, strike!

BBC technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, posts an interesting piece on the dot.life blog about the slating of the new BlackBerry Storm by English comedian, Stephen Fry. No, this wasn’t part of a stand-up routine, but rather a series of messages on Twitter, where Fry apparently has a following of thousands.

I note Fry’s comment at the end of the post, essentially stating that he thought one of the results of the Net and social networking has been to make everyone more equal in their influence. But has this truly been the case?

Certainly in Fry’s case it is partially true, but while his newfound influence in the field of gadgets and consumer technology can be attributed in part to the social networking revolution, it is also true that he is a man who had a considerable public profile before the Internet was even considered a medium of any significance.

The web and its associated technologies have certainly given a voice to millions, but in terms of real influence, the masses still invariably turn to those who have commanded attention beyond the four walls of the internet.  Of course there are some exceptions to the rule, but the notion that we all have equal influence is generally only as true online as it is in the world at large.

Technorati Tags: social media, Internet, BBC, Stephen Fry, BlackBerry Storm

An application that allows users to create their grocery-shopping lists online and then see which of their local stores has the lowest total or individual prices for the items on the list was the debut project to be presented at the first-ever exhibition Monday of projects developed by students at the unique VeloCity incubator-residence at the University of Waterloo. With an objective no less ambitious than to “organize the world’s food information,” Grocerus is a nifty app that, covering a limited array of foodstuffs and listing stores only in the immediate Waterloo area, still has a distance to travel before it meets that ambition.

Indeed, the same could be said for virtually all the projects exhibited, where ambition outstripped — sometimes vastly outstripped — their implementation to date. But considering that these are student project teams that have been working just scant weeks, the dozen and a half ideas on display were an impressive array of creativity, imagination and, for at least a handful of standouts, well-engineered product development.

Some, like Grocerus, were strictly local in their initial iteration. For example, Find It Off Campus, which matches available student housing with students looking for accommodations, and Class Album, which helps students coordinate their schedules, both focused exclusively on the University of Waterloo for starters, but their founders expressed every intention of broadening their horizons once proof of concept was established.

Some of the applications are trying to dig value out of social networking trends. Gruup aims to use Facebook and other sites to bring consumers together for group discounts on products while Emoshion wants to lever social networks to help people uncover rare or hard-to-find fashion items such as limited-edition sneakers. Giftah, whose site is not yet live, wants to capitalize on the 15 to 20 per cent of gift cards that never get used by making a convenient marketplace where they can be bought and sold.

One of the more polished presentations was InPulse, a so-called “smart watch” that will use Bluetooh connectivity to convey key information about incoming emails, SMS messages and calls from your mobile phone to your watch. “Send me an email directly to my watch,” founder Eric Migicovsky said in what had to be the most original line of the day.

The judges bestowed their blessing and $1,000 on Sparknav, which will allow users to download to their phones content about their surroundings, such as directions, tour information or even exhibit details at museums, art galleries or zoos.

Two other good reports on the day’s activities at GlobalNerdy and StartUpNorth provide excellent analyses of how the students’ shortcomings in terms of effective business models and presentation skills can be addressed by getting executives and technology professionals more involved in VeloCity, something to which inmedia is committed as a partner of this fascinating endeavour.

Technorati Tags: University of Waterloo, VeloCity, student entrepreneurship, Grocerus, Find It Off Campus, Class Album, Gruup, Emoshion, Giftah, InPulse, Sparknav

As a former journalist, nothing warranted a head shake more than PR folks who weren’t interested when opportunity came knocking.

Sure, there are always situations in which a journalist is a burr under the saddle, pricking away at tender spots that an organization would rather keep out of the public eye. But I’m talking about positive media opportunities or, in some cases, followups on pitches that have been made by the PR practitioners themselves. As a journalist, I personally experienced situations in which a PR person would make a pitch, then disappear or stonewall when we expressed an interest in pursuing the opportunity.

Michael Hammond, a reporter at the Kitchener-Waterloo Record and former colleague from the Ottawa Business Journal, pinged me today about three separate examples of apparent PR apathy towards the media this week that caused a great deal of teeth grinding and hair pulling in his shop. And again, these were positive story opportunities that were brushed off.

I invited Michael to appear on our blog with a guest piece about these incidents, but he was so incensed  he had already published his rant on the Record’s blog, which you can read at A necessary evil.

The moral of the story? Take all the good press you can get. Duh!

Technorati Tags: media relations, pitching, Kitchener-Waterloo Record

Say what you will about the mindset of Hollywood executives, they do like to reuse and recycle, even if the concept of “reduce” remains beyond their grasp.

We’ve seen the bigscreen reboots of such classics (I use that term loosely) as Charlie’s Angels, Starsky and Hutch, The Dukes of Hazard, Get Smart, The Fugitive, Bewitched and Shaft, with The A-Team on its way in 2009. It’s seen to be a safer bet to hang your hat on a franchise with some pedigree, than try to woo consumers with something entirely fresh and unique. Of course, there’s no shortage of examples where such caution has resulted in a bomb at the box office. Treading the line between attracting older consumers nostalgic for classic television and engaging younger consumers with something updated and current in the same package can be a risky proposition. As is always the case in product marketing, trying to be too many things to too many people can backfire.

All this to introduce the reboot of the mother of all franchises - Star Trek. Yes, I contend, it is bigger than Bond. All that’s left after this is the return of Gunsmoke.  

After six television series (including the animated one) and 10 theatrical releases, the entire franchise is being rebooted with a new movie and new actors in the roles immortalized by the old series, anchored around the characters of Captain James T. Kirk, Dr. Leonard McCoy and Mr. Spock. They have dared to recast these pop culture icons with fresh faces who portray them a few years prior to the time period encompassed by the original TV series. The first trailers have just hit the Internet. This isn’t your daddy’s Star Trek. It’s fast, slick and the starship interior looks like it was designed by Apple engineers. There’s even a clip in the trailer where it looks like Spock loses his temper with Kirk and takes a swing at him. (Where’s the logic in that?)

The studio is obviously hoping to engage a younger audience, after a somewhat feeble response to the last television series and theatrical movie. It remains to be seen if they are beating a dead horse with an offering that will only serve to alienate the core fanbase that has stood by the franchise all these years. With the release date still far off in May 2009, the studio has lots of time to kick the marketing and promotion into high gear (no doubt with the affiliated merchandising to pad any softness in box office revenue).

Whatever the outcome and the general audience reaction to this franchise reboot, I think there will be interesting lessons learned about marketing and managing audience expectations when meddling with such an iconic brand, much like Coca-Cola’s experience with New Coke.

Technorati Tags: marketing, promotion, Hollywood, branding, Star Trek,  Coca-Cola 

I don’t know if it’s because we have a client whose software helps companies vastly improve their customer service, or whether we, like most others on this planet, rage against lousy customer service when we are victims of it, but it simply defies comprehension that companies would willingly lose business because they can’t seem to get their heads around the fact that effective customer service is the most potent — indeed, maybe the only — sustainable competitive differentiation in an environment where price advantage will evaporate thanks to offshoring and technological advantage will be leaped over by another’s innovation.

Just this past week, I had a couple of truly outstanding examples of mind-numbingly poor customer service. The first was the Chapters cashier who blithely dismissed my bringing to her attention a major flaw in the company’s online search engine. One of my sons needed a replacement copy of a book he was studying for school and had lost. I went online to make sure the book would be available at the store before I actually went. Chapters’ computer system told me there were no copies anywhere in the city. When I mentioned this to my son, he said the computer had told him the same thing when he had looked for the book a week or so earlier, only to find at least a dozen copies on the shelves. So I ignored the computer system, went to the store and found many, many copies were, indeed, available.

When I mentioned this to the cashier and suggested she might like to bring it to someone’s attention, she brushed me off, saying the shipment of books probably just came in and that it took their computers a few days to catch up. When I said my son had experienced the same thing a good week or more earlier, suggesting it was a more persistent issue than her first glib response would suggest, it was as though she wasn’t even listening; she simply repeated the same pat answer.

Now, I wasn’t complaining. I wasn’t bitching. I was helpfully bringing to the store’s attention the fact that there might be a serious problem with their online system that, had my son not let me know differently, would have cost them this sale as I went elsewhere to get the book. And she simply couldn’t care less. Either through deliberate training or a complete lack of interest, she had a stock answer that allowed her to avoid any meaningful attempt at genuine customer engagement.

For what it’s worth, five days later, the book is still showing completely out of stock all over the city. The kicker is, it’s Orwell’s 1984; at least the concept of doublespeak is alive and well and living at Chapters!

The second unbelievable episode happened yesterday when our phone system went down. We couldn’t get an outside dial tone. Our landline provider is Rogers, so we called them. It took fully 45 minutes — yup, you read that right! — for them to find our account, even though we gave them the phone number in question, the account number at the top of their invoices, every phone number on the account, the name of the company and the name of the key contact on the account! Turns out, Rogers has yet to integrate into their main system the operations of Group Telecom they acquired several years ago when they bought up Sprint Canada. So although everything about our phone service is striped Rogers, we actually had to call a completely separate customer service number, where we told there was a system-wide failure.

But neither of these meets the standard for wretched customer service set by the first-ever winner of the Air Canada-Harold McGowan Memorial Award for Truly Egregious Customer Service. The award is named for Air Canada’s baggage-handling chief at San Francisco Airport who said to me, when I started telling him why my bag had failed to arrive with me on a flight from Calgary, “Keep talking sir, it’s going in one ear and out the other.”

Now, Air Canada is truly a leader in finding new ways to treat its customers like crap. But even by the high standards for low service set every day by the legions of couldn’t-care-less agents of this near-monopoly carrier, Harold’s performance was a jaw-dropping standout. With my journalist’s training, I immediately wrote his statement down on the back of my boarding pass, along with his name. I carry it around with me to show people who, like everyone at the baggage counter who heard Harold that night, simply can’t believe anyone in a customer-facing position would ever say such a thing.

And in his memory, I inaugurated the Air Canada-Harold McGowan Memorial Award for Truly Egregious Customer Service. The key criterion that must be met goes beyond mere incompetence or indifference; to win the award, an individual or company must essentially invite me to take my business elsewhere.

And so the first ever Air Canada-Harold McGowan Memorial Award for Truly Egregious Customer Service goes to — drum roll, please! — Petra, of Zip.ca Member Services, who last week explicitly invited me to cancel my subscription to this online DVDs-by-mail since she and Zip had no intention of ever addressing the increasingly poor customer service I had been experiencing for some time. Without going into extensive detail, what had started as a marvelous experience, degraded over the past year to the point where Zip was unable for more than a week to ship me even one of the 15 titles I had on my list. And all Petra and others at Zip could say was that I should add more titles, and maybe pick less desirable movies or settle for standard-format versions instead of the Blu-Ray titles I was seeking. In short, please don’t ask us to improve our service so it meets what we advertise; restrict your use of us so it falls within our limited ability to meet the promises we made you.

Congratulations, Petra, you’ve won the award and lost my business.

Technorati Tags: Customer service, Air Canada, Harold McGowan, Chapters, Rogers, Zip.ca

Over on the BBC web site, readers have submitted their personal choices for the most-hated cliches in current circulation. Reading through the article was a painful exercise, and I’m sure most of you will also recognize many of the expressions as appearing frequently in your own day-to-day vocabulary.

The technology sector is rife with such cliches, and I’ve summarized a few of these into a Top 10 list, some of which I must admit I still use “on an ongoing basis”, so to speak.

1: Going forward
2: Leading (as in “a leading provider of…”)
3: At the end of the day
4: Touch base
5: Mission-critical
6: Value-add
7: Downsizing
8: Out-of-the-box
9: Best practices
10: 110%

Got your own “favourites” or, better yet, can you truthfully say you’ve never used any of the above? Let me know.

Technorati Tags: writing tips, cliches, BBC

So, you want to see your story make the pages of the major business media? Well, if it truly merits that level of attention, then applying the right mix of patience, persistence and PR savvy should pay off… or perhaps you could try a somewhat less orthodox method to guarantee front page attention.

Yesterday’s spoofing of the New York Times by the mysterious Yes Men presents companies with an interesting alternative to traditional PR tactics: if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Just think - Company X unveils version 3.8 of Software Application Y - the cover story on BusinessWeek. Although printing a million fake newspapers in support of every news release is probably going to eat into that marketing budget rather quickly.

Ho hum, back to the drawing board.

Technorati Tags: media relations, New York Times, PR stunts

A new study commissioned by Microsoft finds that Britons spend about one quarter of their daily television habit flipping channels. But it’s hardly an attention-deficit trend limited to the U.K., or to television for that matter.

Bombarded as we all are by the sheer volume and variety of media each day, it’s a struggle to keep our attention span focused for too long on any one thing. Back in the ’80s and ’90s, there was talk of the 500-channel universe, and while the number hasn’t yet crept quite that high, the Microsoft study confirms that a near-infinite channel selection isn’t necessarily a good thing. As this study found, Brits spend an average of a week of their lives each year trying to make up their mind about what to watch, in the process often missing something they wanted to watch.

What do people do when faced with overwhelming choice? They often limit the options to what they know. The study found that more than 40 per cent stick with a handful of familiar channels, while one in three watched only the five main U.K. networks.

In the media business, channels are replaced by pitches, news releases and breaking news from the big names that demand attention. All the news that’s fit to print (or broadcast, or blog about) is too much to fit. With shrinking budgets and fewer hands on deck, media today are overwhelmed by choice, so much so that good material can get lost in the shuffle and never get fair consideration.

At inmedia, we focus on connecting with the media that matter for our clients to tell each client’s story, regardless of who those media are and if we have ever spoken to them before. We engage in a dialogue that brings our client to the attention of these specific media and educates both the journalist and ourselves on where there is a fit between what the media outlet needs and what our client does. It’s a personalized approach that can be tedious and frustrating, but crucial to rising above the noise. It’s far more effective than hoping for the best with mass e-mail blasts, or relying on ”existing relationships.”

This focused approach is the only way to take a client from being just another channel lost in a universe of hundreds, to being recognized as a useful source of information, news and perspective.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, media relations, pitching, channel surfing