Brad Marley's Blog

The BCS should have spent its public relations budget on something other than public relations.

College football fans in the United States who think a playoff system to determine a true national championship is a bad idea are few and far between.

So the gents who run the Bowl Championship Series(BCS) brought in outside publicists to try and sway all of those naysayers with some old fashioned PR.

What did the publicists do?

They opened a Twitter account, naturally.

At first glance, one might think it's satirical in nature.  Sadly, it's not.

Contained within the tweets is a wealth of examples of how not to run a PR campaign.

Let's review.

Rule: Do not make up terms.

 
It's never a good idea to pretend your words have always been a part of the popular lexicon.

Rule: Do not fuel the fire.

 
This snarky answer was made in response to a snarky question. Obviously, the Snark Meter is now broken. Would you coach your executives to respond like this to a reporter?

Rule: Do not act dumb.  

 
There are a number of logical alternatives to the current BCS system that involve a playoff. (Like this one.) Pretending they don't exist is just ignorant.

Rule: Do not defeat your own purpose by being unintentionally hilarious.

 

For their second-ever tweet, the fine folks behind the Twitter feed used a quote by University of Florida football coach, Urban Meyer, to convey a sense that the system is better than the alternative, I guess. Easy for him to say when his team is consistently nationally ranked in the top ten and, thus, afforded an inside track to the national championship game. Now, if the quote came from Boise State head football coach, Chris Peterson, that might have opened some eyes.

***

Naturally, I believe public relations is something all companies should consider if they don't already have a plan in place.

But there are exceptions to every rule and, in this case, the BCS is one.

Due to an already overwhelming negative public perception, they lost the battle before the first shot was fired. Their attempt at swaying the deeply rooted opinion of a passionate public was ill-advised. Somebody should have killed this idea before the check was written.

But now the damage is done, and no amount of PR will fix it.

How ironic.

This just in: nothing too important.

Some of my friends don't trust the media. Until last week, I didn't understand why.

I grew up in a household where the newspaper hit our front porch every morning and I devoured it -- along with my oatmeal -- every day before school. News gathering was as common a daily task to me as food gathering was for Cro-Magnon man.

How could anybody go about their daily lives ignoring the news?

Then, one morning last week, I turned on my computer and saw the catastrophic news: a shortage of Eggo waffles.

While I tried to imagine a future where breakfast tables sat waffle-less, I was blindsided by another piece of news that will surely dampen the holiday spirit: canned pumpkin pie filling is in short supply.

I didn't have to scrounge to find the news, either.  It was front and center on Yahoo - a site that averages four million visits per day.

Suddenly, I had an inkling as to why my friends are so anti-news: most of it is non-news.

As the hard copy newspaper goes the way of the woolly mammoth, we are forced to sift through the noise on the Web to find the hard news.

If it's any indication of where our priorities lie, historians might look back on 2009 as the year the One Piece of Pumpkin Pie Rule was signed into law, and real news became extinct.

Books I Love: Thunderstruck

What do Guglielmo Marconi, the Italian inventor who discovered wireless telegraphy, and Hawley Harvey Crippen, the diminutive American doctor accused of killing his wife in cold blood, have in common?

They were key players, albeit indirectly, in the first made-for-tv car chase, which contained neither tv's nor cars, but instead, wireless communication and transatlantic ocean liners.

In the summer of 1895, Marconi, who was trying to perfect the idea of wireless communication, moved his experiments outside his lab/attic and discovered he could transmit messages long distances using electromagnetic waves. From that success, he was able to seek out assistance from the British post office to fund further experiments.

In the year 1910, Dr. Crippen poisoned his wife in their London home and claimed she moved to California to cover up her disappearance. To escape the authorities that were closing in on what really happened, Crippen and his lover, Ethel Le Neve, altered their appearances and tried to escape to America via Canada on the SS Montrose.

Thanks to Marconi's wireless device, which was now installed on most ocean liners of the day, the captain of the Montrose was able to send messages, while en route on the open sea, that he suspected Dr. Crippen was a passenger on his ship.  While he wined and dined the doctor into a false sense of security, people all over the world followed the chase through newspaper coverage fueled by regular updates sent via these magical wireless devices.

(Think of it as a slowly evolving OJ Simpson chase, only with a different verdict.)

When the Scotland Yard investigator chasing the doctor stepped on board to arrest him as the ship approached Canada, Crippen's fate was sealed. And with the arrest, and subsequent analysis of the crucial role Marconi's device played in the apprehension, the importance of instant communication was was forever set in stone.

Our world would never be the same.

Death to the buddy mail!

In an era when Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter are forcing us to become more intimately connected with our reporters, we still rely on a cold, distant tactic known in public relations circles as a "buddy mail."

Two things probably go through the minds of reporters when they receive this e-mail.

One, I'm not your buddy.

Two, good to see your mail merge feature is functioning. (And that's if the mail doesn't go directly into their junk folder.)

A buddy mail is, basically, information about an initiative masquerading as a personalized e-mail to any number of reporters that were identified in the time-honored PR tradition of media list building. A draft usually comes to us from on high, complete with an opening salutation -- usually 'Dear, XX' -- and a closing salutation.  (My favorite? Warm Regards.) We are allowed to personalize as we see fit, but it doesn't leave a lot of room for creativity. It's straightforward and to the point.

The announcement we tout is not important enough to the client's bottom line to have us spend too much time and money on, so we send the e-mail and follow up only if a reporter expresses interest.

It's the PR equivalent of playing the lottery.  Somebody always wins, which leads others to believe it's a good idea.

But, really, we're just wasting our money.

Death to the buddy mail!

In an era when Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter are forcing us to become more intimately connected with our reporters, we still rely on a cold, distant tactic known in public relations circles as a "buddy mail."

Two things probably go through the minds of reporters when they receive this e-mail.

One, I'm not your buddy.

Two, good to see your mail merge feature is functioning. (And that's if the mail doesn't go directly into their junk folder.)

A buddy mail is, basically, information about an initiative masquerading as a personalized e-mail to any number of reporters that were identified in the time-honored PR tradition of media list building. A draft usually comes to us from on high, complete with an opening salutation -- usually 'Dear, XX' -- and a closing salutation.  (My favorite? Warm Regards.) We are allowed to personalize as we see fit, but it doesn't leave a lot of room for creativity. It's straightforward and to the point.

The announcement we tout is not important enough to the client's bottom line to have us spend too much time and money on, so we send the e-mail and follow up only if a reporter expresses interest.

It's the PR equivalent of playing the lottery.  Somebody always wins, which leads others to believe it's a good idea.

But, really, we're just wasting our money.

No weekly grab bag of links this week.

Just when I'm getting back into swing of posting weekly links for all five of my readers, my wife goes and has a baby.

Some nerve.

Thus, due to a terrific lack of sleep and lax monitoring, there will be no links to get you through your Friday.

Check back next week when the links resume.

Uh, probably.

The Intruder

My daughter is obsessed with babies.

If we are at the store and she sees a stroller, she has to go look at the baby. I have approached numerous strangers with a request to allow my daughter to look at their baby.

After two minutes, she gets her fill, and we move on.

But she doesn't know what to think about the new addition to the family.

I imagine it's a bit of a shock to her that the baby in my wife's belly is very real and very loud, and will be sharing her house with us for the foreseeable future.

She met her for the first time this morning, and the only way I can describe the meeting was that it was one of indifference.

Yeah, that's my sister, now can I have some more goldfish?

Who wants to tell her she's not going anywhere?

 

Weekly Grab Bag of Links - November 6, 2009

This week, on "Weekly Grab Bag of Links," Brad gives you an extra-special helping of the blog entries and articles that struck his fancy.

Here they are, in particular order:

• Finding Your Life's Passion: Conduct Experiments (Abundance Blog) - I stumbled across this blog last week, and every entry I read has provoked my thoughts.  This one, especially.

• Exclusive: How I Unmasked @FakeAPStylebook (An Only-On-Twitter Story) (Wired.com) - Okay, first of all, if you are not following @FakeAPStylebook on Twitter, go follow. When you're done, go read how Callie Kimball uncovered their identity. It was probably one of the best-kept secrets that nobody had an urge to be in on. Still a good read, though.

• The Way I Work: Jason Fried of 37Signals (Inc.com) - I just discovered that Inc. com runs a semi-regular features on the way people work. While Fried's workday sounds delightful, I'm not sure how he fits in two hours of nonfiction reading every afternoon. Still, fascinating.  All of them.

• How To Stop Being Invisible (Copyblogger) - I'm still trying to strengthen my blogging voice, and Copyblogger consistently puts out content that helps. I'm still nowhere near where I want to be, so I'll keep reading and writing. I read this blog daily.

• Denver to Singapore (and back) in 5 minutes (Kottke.org) - I came across this video of a guy who took a still image of his trip to Singapore, then turned it into a stop motion film. Pretty radical.

Tune in next week when I do it all over again.

Sometimes words stop me in my tracks

So I was reading the book titled "Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity" when I came across the following passage:

You may never reach your summit; for that you will be forgiven. But if you don't make at least one serious attempt to get above the snow line, years later you find yourself lying on your deathbed, and all you will feel is emptiness.

I don't know.

I think that's pretty profound.