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Helping us get it

  • Larry Kramer: C-Scape: Conquer the Forces Changing Business Today

    Larry Kramer: C-Scape: Conquer the Forces Changing Business Today
    Sigh. I've been collecting lists of 'c' words for about the last three years, trying to make sense of the changes that are happening in the way people connect to, use information and talk with one another en-masse. Larry Kramer has managed to condense all of my 'c' words into just four and write an whole book about them. I just about hug this book when I saw it on the shelves at the Whitcoulls at Wellington Airport yesterday, with the recent IABC World Conference fresh in my memory, and my brain working overtime to figure out where all its ideas fit. None of these ideas are new, they've been brewing since the dawn of online and gathering momentum as social media spreads from the fringes to the mainstream, but finally very clever people like Kramer are pulling them together in way that connects the dots and puts them in context. Curation, Consumers, Convergence and Content are the four words that Kramer has picked to describe the world we find ourselves in - "a world where consumers, not producers and marketers, make the choices, where content, not distribution is king, where curation becomes the prime currency of value, and where convergence continues to revolutionise every part of every business." A great read if you're looking to understand what's now, in some places, and what's next for the rest of us.

  • Ben Sherwood: The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life

    Ben Sherwood: The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life
    Not a business book, in the strictest sense of the term, but its lessons are equally applicable to work as life. If you've been through life in Christchurch in recent months, you'll be fascinated by what makes for a survivor, why some people thrive and others fold and, astonishingly, the amount of control that we never knew we had in unpredictable and dangerous situations.

  • Howard Schultz: Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul

    Howard Schultz: Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul
    I loved this book, and with the dust just settling on February 22nd, it came at just the right time for me. I found myself torn between scribbling down great ideas for clients and great ideas for GT as, like so many other local companies, we ponder how the future might look in this crazy 'new normal'. What made this book such a great read was not just Schultz's successes, but his failures, and his wide open and realistic accounting of the culture change process. Anybody who has embarked on a change programme will tell you there's no such thing as a straight line, and that you can expect many, many things to go wrong before you stumble across a happy right. Schultz's candid telling of the ups and downs of his Onward project should provide great comfort to leaders who have hit the 'WTF Have I Done' stage of the change cycle and are having trouble keeping the faith.

  • Atul Gawande: The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right

    Atul Gawande: The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right
    Boy, am I pleased I didn't read this one before I went under the knife. I'd have been intolerable... Not a marketing books, as such, but an informative and thought provoking read for just about anybody running a business. Gawande (a surgeon) looks to fields as diverse as the construction industry and aviation for lessons in keeping people safer through the use of very simple check-lists. Made me think of all the change management initiatives I've seen over the years launched with a whizz and a bang and that then fizzled out for the want of simple reminders and processes that gently nudge people towards compliance.

  • Walter Kirn (Author): Up in the Air (Movie Tie-in Edition) (Mass Market Paperback)

    Walter Kirn (Author): Up in the Air (Movie Tie-in Edition) (Mass Market Paperback)
    So as much as I'm hanging out for an iSlate (or whatever it ends up being called) I'm counting the sleeps til I can get to this movie. What's not to love about it? Just the product placement skills alone make this one a must-see, along with the exploration of how sophisticated loyalty programmes are at pushing the 'give me more' buttons of their corporate devotees. I devoured the book, which shares the big screen version's jaundiced - but oddly compassionate - view of all that is corporate life on the road today.

  • Patrick M. Lencioni: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Manga Edition: An Illustrated Leadership Fable

    Patrick M. Lencioni: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Manga Edition: An Illustrated Leadership Fable
    I started out reading this book on a plane, all hunched up against the window so nobody could see that that what I was absorbed in was, in fact, a manga book. I was so totally absorbed by the time we lifted off that I forgot to hide the pages for the rest of the trip. Cartoon or no cartoon, this is a book with a message that will resonate with anybody who works with teams of people (OK, so that’s pretty much anybody who has to go to work). Subtitled ‘An illustrated leadership fable’, the story follows the adventures of the SMT of a floundering tech company as it transitions from its founder/owner/manager CEO to an outsider brought in by the board to whip it into shape. The cartoon format, unique for a business book, adds, rather than detracts from the message. This is a great example of both the power of story telling in getting the message across and the increasing importance of graphics as a way to make those instant connections that go beyond words and cut through the clutter of our info overloaded world.

  • Martin Lindstrom: Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy

    Martin Lindstrom: Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy
    Now here's a guy at the cutting edge.

    Lindstrom's game is Neuromarketing, which is so new my spell-check doesn't even recognise it as a real thing.

    Lindstrom and his kind have gone as far as putting ordinary people in MRI machines to find out why we make the purchasing decisions we do, and what influences them.

    This is the guy who did the research that showed that the actual brand is as much of an influencer on the enjoyment of drinking a Coke as the taste of of the brown fizzy stuff itself: totally dissolving the line between product and packaging, and proving the worth and value of brand beyond anything we had really understood before.

    He also casts light on some of the strange and unusual things that happen when you move products out of focus groups and into the real world (think: New Coke); gives some great criteria for when product placement does and doesn't working (with American Idol as his case study) and gives a wonderfully elegant explanation as to why Pepsi tends to out-rate Coke in taste tests, but the tables are turned when measuring actual sales (turns out that people favour sweeter tastes when it is smaller amounts, but milder tastes when it's larger: taste testing involves tiny samples, the real world buckets full. Who would have thought?)

    Lindstrom covers some new territory, as well as age-old marketing challenges, looking in some depth at the new consumer and how to get cut through in an overbranded, overhyped, visually overwhelming world. Watch out for sound and smell as the next two killer brand values.

    To both get a taste of 'what's next' in the world of marketing, and answers to some of the oldest and most vexing questions we marketers ask ourselves every day of the week, pick up a copy. It's an enlightening and thought provoking read.

  • Lee Cockerell: Creating Magic: 10 Common Sense Leadership Strategies from a Life at Disney

    Lee Cockerell: Creating Magic: 10 Common Sense Leadership Strategies from a Life at Disney
    As New Consumerism makes itself felt across every sector, Not For Profits and NGOs are struggling with straddling that charity/commercial divide.

    More and more of the work I do seems to be about helping these organisations across a range of sectors, but primarily health, education, disabilities and social services - to connect with this new consumer environment, and importantly, bring their staff along for the ride.

    Not being a great believer in management gurus (I'll make an exception for Seth), I'm usually pretty skeptical of how-to books, but this one from Lee Cockerell has some great points to make about how to help staff connect, and stay connected, with what your organisation stands for.

    Cockerell was one of the founders of the Disney Institute, which runs half day, 3 day and 5 day courses on Campus at Disney sites (not that I'm thinking about doing one or anything...but the combination of Space Mountain and picking up some Disney learning is a lot to resist...) for business people, covering a variety of topics.

    Can't get to the Mountain? Then bring Disney to you! One of the DI team will come and speak at your next event for US$12,000, plus per diem expenses, plus business class airfare.

    Perhaps not quite the thing for that next NFP conference. Still, the book's a good read. And he uses some great real-life case studies to illustrate his points.

  • Seth Godin: Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing out of Sync?

    Seth Godin: Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing out of Sync?
    Seth Godin does it again! This one's a great overview of old/new marketing, and why there's no point in trying to mesh the two together.

    Key out-takes - don't even try to bring old-media tactics online, and, the doozy: realise that we are living in a world where changing the marketing model has the potential to actually change the entire business - just think about how the entire travel industry has been turned on its head operationally, thanks to online marketing technology.

    In classic Godin style, the chapters are bite-sized (perfect for a plane ride to Hokitika - you'll get through at least 5 chapters), and there's a handly 14-point list to help you see all the concepts in context.

    The 14 points continue the themes of his earlier works, building just that little bit higher to give a true birds-eye view of the ever-evolving new economy and what its latest turns mean to businesses everywhere.


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August 2009

Inviting Reporters to Dinner and Refusing to Feed Them

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I've been waiting for a decent length of time to pass to tell this story, lest the parties involved be too readily identifiable.

The names in this story have been changed to protect the not-so-smart -  and it goes something like this:

It's late on a Saturday afternoon and my cellphone rings. On the other end is a desperate and frustrated TV news reporter. 

The reporter (let's call him Bob, because I can't think of a Bob young enough that a network would let him on the air) had received, as had pretty much every other reporter in town,  a media release from a large organisation (let's call them NoCo).

This was clearly an issue the large organisation wanted some media coverage for. Why else would you bother to scribe and lovingly craft a media release and go to all the trouble of sending it out into the ether?

So NoCo distributes the media release, and Bob starts hunting around for all of the things he needs to make it work: talking heads to interview, a location to shoot in, and enough visual variation to make it interesting. He's going to need cover shots and cut aways and all of those things that a TV story can't happen without. Most of all he's going to need access to NoCo's premises - more than once, and for a decent length of time, because not only has Auckland decided they'll cover the story, they've tagged it for a lead at 6, with a live stand-up to introduce it.

So what does Bob do? If you answered "he calls NoCo to get access to the people and locations he needs to make the story work", you'd be wrong.

Bob didn't even bother to call NoCo, because NoCo doesn't talk with reporters. It doesn't even talk to reporters. It hardly even talks at reporters. Not even when it has issued a media release practically begging them to cover the story. 

All that NoCo's media department does is write stiffly worded media releases, hit the 'send' button on their media release distribution software, then run in the other direction to hide really fast.

If the media does manage to catch up with the NoCo comms team, they tersely refuse access to all of their sites. And all of their people.

There's no logical or easy explanation for this peculiar behaviour. NoCo must know as well as the rest of us do, that reporters can't make a story out of a tightly spaced A4 page. It's what I call inviting reporters to dinner and then refusing to feed them, and there's a surprising amount of it around.

NoCo's good news story happened despite itself. The story won - but NoCo lost. Big time.

Instead of getting its name emblazened (in a good way) across a six o'clock lead, NoCo was reduced to an off-the-cuff mention.

It was my client, YesCo, who got the plug,with its facility, branding and people featuring in the story. 

Yes, it was disruptive, it was time consuming and it was potentially hairy in places. But for YesCo it was the sort of advertising and credibility no amount of money can buy.

The moral of the story?

Don't issue a dinner invitation to reporters if you're going to refuse to feed them. It's confusing. It's conflicted. It's exasperating, and more than all that, it's just downright rude. 

 

Posted at 11:04 AM in Media relations | | Comments (0)