Recently read and in progress

Wrinkled pink poppy with raindrops, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2008. These gorgeous poppies are at the corner of Third and Fourth in New Westminster.

I've been on a book buying binge recently. It seems nowhere is safe - there are books everywhere (yay!). At London Drugs I encountered Laurie Viera Rigler's Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict and kicked myself for not buying it there, until I remembered I spend quite enough money at London Drugs as is and that I want to support the local Black Bond Books in the Royal City Centre (if only to ensure the mall retains a bookstore). It's already made me giggle several times and I'm only on page 30. The premise is basically the same as that of the Diana Gabaldon books: a modern young woman (this one hales from 21st Century LA) is transported back in time to the Regency period, having just ended her engagement. So far she's had to use the chamber pot, flirted with a footman and submitted to being bled. Good thing it's not the Victorian era or she'd be having her insides squished by a variety of corseting devices as well.

I reread Nancy Friday's My Mother, My Self over the course of two long and painful months. How a book I've alread read with only thirteen chapters being read theoretically at the rate of one chapter a day could have taken eight weeks and incurred almost $5 in library fines I'll never know. But can you and Dr. Freud say resistance? I had such mixed feelings when I finally got to the end of it. For one very interval shortly after my mother died last summer I felt I had been reborn. That faded so quickly. While there are numerous criticisms to make of Friday's book (including that her perspective is not really broad enough to be convincing - by focusing on only two generations of women, those who came to adulthood during World War II and their offspring, and by limiting herself pretty much to North America), there is such great sadness in the acknowledgement that we seem predestined to be so much more critical of our own sex than we are of the opposite sex, and that, no matter how highly skilled or highly trained we are, we can only rarely set aside our own emotional needs during the separation and individuation process.

Having read Elizabeth Hay's Late Nights on Air in and around the Nancy Friday, I was impressed by her description of Justice Tom Berger's extensive community and stakeholder consultation regarding the proposed construction of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline. Late Nights on Air is not the book A Student of Weather is, but it's a good read nonetheless. Wanting to learn more about Berger, I got a copy of A Long and Terrible Shadow from the library, Berger's thin discourse about five centuries (1492 to 1992) of European atrocities committed in the name of progress in the Americas. I only read about half of it - the numbers were too much for me, the stories of betrayal, slavery, the decimation of entire peoples and the sad realization that superior technology can be more seductive than either wealth or beauty.

I've plunged into Michael Redhill's Consolation, a novel set in dual time (late 1990s and mid-1850s). Hailed as 'the' book about Toronto (I've always thought of Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle and Life Before Man as being the definitive Toronto books, but I was curious), I'm loving it and am having to ration myself to one part per day. The segments alternate between the two time periods as a widow and her family attempt to prove her late husband's theory that some of the ships that sank in the Toronto Harbour have been covered by landfill and that one, in particular, contains an amazing photographic archive of Hogtown in its earliest days. Redhill has an uncanny gift for describing some very subtle familial interplay - the things we say and do that set each other off. He's worth reading for that alone.

I picked up a copy of Sherwin B. Nuland's The Art of Aging one day. One of my pet peeves is that we are forced to take health classes as part of our participation in the public education system, and yet those classes focus on puberty and our burgeoning sexuality. I know all I need to know about those things, thank you very much. It would have been nice to know that one starts to lose to muscle tone in one's 40s. I realize that's a mere statistic and that the odds can be beaten, but knowing what to look out for is helpful. (A simple truth such as, as you age, you will find you need to pace yourself and if you don't want damaged body parts to ache you really do need to get upwards of six hours' sleep a night would have been most useful, for instance.) It wasn't the Nuland book that made me buy the new collection of Nora Ephron essays, I Feel Bad About My Neck. It was my sentimental fondness for her witty titles and my remembrance of the brilliant how to fake an orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally that sold me. I have been vainly hunting for my copy of Wallflower at the Orgy to see if Ephron's humour was always so brittle and superficial, or if this collection marks a change in my attitude or in her writing. Sadly, it hasn't jumped off the bookshelf at me. Still, a quick and amusing read if you're in the waiting room at the dentist and not interested in last year's Maclean's or Time magazines.

Next up is this year's Canada Reads selection, Paul Quarrington's King Leary. Having read Civilization a couple of years ago, and having been a fan of Quarrington's comic novels for years, I'm swallowing my iconoclastic tendencies and am going to read it (my attitude is usually, fine, if everyone else in Canada is reading it, I don't have to, do I?).

After that there's the new Germaine Greer, Shakespeare's Wife. I admire her greatly, but I don't have a good track record of actually finishing her books - I think the one on menopause is the only one I've actually managed to consume. Still, I like to think I'm supporting her continuing endeavours by generating a royalty payment or two. I can only be grateful that she chose to write about Shakespeare's wife rather than the wife of the English author whose life I hope to turn into a novel some day. And I suppose if I really want to be able to say, 'but it was my idea first' I should be open about it here on the blog, but I'm not going to be.

While at Black Bond on Sunday picking up the Rigler novel, I was seduced by three other novels and slunk home with what felt like ill-gotten gains: another copy of Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, since I'm obviously never getting my own copy back; the mass market paperback edition of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and Carol Shield's Unless. I am not a huge fan of Shields' work - I wasn't blown away by either The Stone Diaries or Larry's Party. But The Republic of Love, recommended to me years ago by painter and former bookseller friend Barb Symons, was a very fine novel, and on the off chance this one is as good, and because it was selling at the ridiculous remaindered price of $7.99, I bought it. The spectacular cover didn't hurt either.

I am still looking for a copy of Thomas Wharton's Icefields, another of the contenders in the 2008 Canada Reads contest. Haven't been able to find it anywhere (although I confess I haven't looked with my usual diligence). In the meantime I read his next novel, Salamander, a strange but intriguing fantasy of a printer, a mad baron, and, ultimately, of two men and their daughters.

Now if only it would get warm so I can sit out in the sunshine and read to my heart's content....

A pleasure doing business with you

China cabinet - detail, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2008

It must sometimes seem as if the blog photos and text bear only a subliminal relationship to each other, and it's true, they do. For me they have connected meaning though, even if isn't explicit to you. I'll blog in greater detail about the store on Columbia Street in New West where I bought this lovely reclaimed teak china/curio cabinet with its gorgeous turquoise crackle stain. The service I received from the store's owner and the fact that I market my services, not a product, has got me thinking about measurement. It's called The Urban Gypsy and I've edited this post to give you the correct link - the dread 404 error message I got previously was user error, it seems.

Here's a Client Service Audit that Rosemary Teliatnik of ROC Management International gave us at the February New Westminster Networking Women (or NWxNW, as I like to think of it) lunch. I confess I've tweaked it a bit, rearranging the questions into what seemed (to me, anyway), like a more logical order. Value add, maybe.

Client Service Audit

How do you answer the phone?

• What does your voicemail message say?
• Are all members of your company aware of major projects?
• What do you do if you don’t have what a client - or a potential client - is looking for?
  

Do you meet deadlines?

• Do you regularly communicate with a client during a project?
• Do you let them know as soon as possible if a problem comes up?
• Do you ask for your client’s input?

Do invoices clearly outline work performed?

• Do you follow up with clients after you complete a project or on at least quarterly basis if they’re retainer clients?
• How do you deal with complaints?
• What do you do if the hours or hard costs vastly exceed the budget?
• Do you ask your clients for testimonials or referrals when you’ve completed a project?

Do you communicate with your clients when you aren’t working on a project for them?

• Do you keep your clients informed of new services?
• Do you keep your clients informed of changes in your company?
• Do you cross-sell your products/services to your clients?

And for me, the most important question:

How do you let your clients know you value their business, their testimonials, and their referrals?

Continuing education

Man cast, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2008.

I guess to some extent I liveblogged the Lorraine Murphy Blogging for Business seminar I attended yesterday at Tradeworks Training Society. Certainly I created my first proper WordPress blog and played with a lot of the features. I also got two very valuable tips. One was a piece of information I'd been searching for over the course of the last two years. I needed to be shown, in a very hands-on way, how to name links within the text of my posts themselves. I can't tell you how frustrating is the answer given in Blogger's Help FAQ. I may be permanently stuck in 'potential propellor head' mode but I'm not a complete idiot. Now that the problem's solved, I feel like a genius. The other amazing news was a method for promoting the blog that was so in tune with my sensibilities that I immediately vowed to adopt it. Soon, if not immediately.

I also really enjoyed the exchange with Lorraine. She's a feisty and opinionated woman, but this is the second event she's organized that I've attended, and she does it right from a human perspective. There are breaks. There's good food. There's coffee. There's an amazing amount of hands-on how-to instruction. She's informal without being unprofessional, she's smart and funny, and I'm glad she's successful. We were able to agree to disagree on several topics and agree to agree on several more, and it really felt like an exchange of ideas.

All fired up as I am about social media these days, I decided I couldn't miss Jason Alba's webinar on using LinkedIn. Finally, a seminar that provides detailed how tos, whys, and what-not-to dos. Marketing Profs is, without a doubt, the best continuing education investment I've made this year, and I don't think I've even begun to scratch the surface of the archived resources available.

Back to Connecting the Dots though. I had only just discovered the Questions and Answers section on LinkedIn about a week ago, and the combination of seeing Lorraine work the WordPress forums and realizing what a powerful tool they were for building profile made the lightbulb go off for me re the same feature on LinkedIn. So in the course of examining the PR network Qs and As, I came across Bruce Pilgrim, whose answer to the question, "How do you become a better client servicing person?" is the quintessential 'bad cop' consultant answer. I don't disagree with him at all and I bet I'd like working with him. I can tell he takes his role as a consultant seriously and it's obvious he's not an order taker. He's not going to start with tactics and work his way back, if possible, to the strategy they support, and he's dead right on that front. Still, his answer to the question and his in-your-face style made me remember how very nice it was to work as part of team. When you do, you get to share the responsibility for managing client expectations, and that means you also sometimes get to share in the sheer joy of coming up with creative solutions that get your client known for all the right reasons.

Here's his response to the question, cut and pasted because you'd have to be a LinkedIn member to see it otherwise. But of course you are, aren't you?

"You need to understand that the customer is NOT always right.

Listen very carefully, ask a lot of questions, and try to determine exactly what they really need.

Frequently, an interaction begins with the customer saying: "We need a brochure." (Or a website, or a video, or a white paper, or an ad, etc.) Instead of immediately working on their request, I ask a lot of questions about what they are trying to accomplish.

Often, it turns out that they need something very different from what they think they want. It's your job to be consultative and carefully, respectfully, and diplomatically lead them to the best solution."

An unfortunate sound bite: taking Doris Lessing seriously (but not too seriously)

Warholized, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2008

Over the course of the weekend I read several reports of the interview with Doris Lessing that was going to air on BBC4’s Front Row today at 7:15 UK time (there’s some complicated abbreviation for the time zone, something like BST, but it sounded like a disease and does this mean they’re not doing daily savings time this year – should they not be doing it by now if they’re going to?).

From the headlines and the quotes, I thought the majority of the interview was going to focus on Lessing’s considered reaction to having won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year. All the sound bites quoted in The Guardian and in The Times online featured her saying, “It’s been a bloody disaster.” The implication in many of the articles was that winning the Nobel had ruined the remains of her writing career as it meant she was now having to spend all her time fending off requests for interviews. My initial response was, “how very churlish – you certainly asked for your 15 minutes of fame and now you’re upset because you can’t close the Pandora’s Box you’ve opened.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, she does say, in response to the interviewer’s question regarding how winning the Nobel has affected her life and writing career, “It’s been a bloody disaster.” The line is delivered with a chuckle, and it is prefaced by an ardently sincere warning from Lessing to other writers about failing energy levels, what it takes to write, and how little time there really is for that sort of labour-intensive work. Do it now, she’s saying, don’t put it off.

At 88 she doesn’t think she has another book in her. I would say that’s just fine. She’s already got more than 50 published books to her credit. She’s mastered at least four different genres: the short story, the essay, the contemporary novel, and, from all reviews, science fiction. I’m not a fan of anyone’s science fiction – when P.D. James and Margaret Atwood stray into this genre I became angry with them, as if they had suddenly displayed bad taste so extreme as to throw all their other accomplishments into question. That’s probably a bit of an over-reaction. But because so much of Lessing’s recent work has been sci fi, I haven’t been reading it. Even the fifth novel in her Children of Violence series (the first novel was Martha Quest) was a bit much for me, and had I not discovered her marvelous short stories and had to read The Golden Notebook at university, I might have lost interest in her. But I have always hung onto a copy of her book of essays, reviews and interviews published in 1975, A Small Personal Voice.

Most of the Front Row interview actually focuses on her latest book, Alfred and Emily, a fascinating mix of family biography and fiction, in which Lessing imagines her parents’ lives as they might have been and then recounts their actual lives, profoundly changed and their course forever altered by WWI. This is a Lessing I will read, for a variety of reasons.

In her interview with Front Row shortly after winning the Nobel Prize in 2007, Lessing said, “There’s something abrasive in me because I have often made people very cross.” I laughed when I read this. Being occasionally abrasive is part of the writer’s job description, isn’t it? The strident form of Communism she espoused in her youth, her writing a novel perceived as a feminist manifesto (The Golden Notebook) and then quarreling with descriptions of herself as a feminist, writing two novels under a pseudonym to prove how difficult it is to get work published, her public announcements for a good 20 years before she actually won the Nobel Prize that she would never win it – well – controversy and Doris Lessing are old pals. The prize committee acknowledged this, describing Lessing as, "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny."

So I’m going to read Alfred and Emily for a lot of reasons. One is that I think we are all sentimental about our ‘own’ wars, and almost every generation has one. For my parents it was World War II, and their enthusiastic participation in that war coloured their views on the war I consider my own, that nasty little exercise in empiricism known as the Vietnam War. More than 20 years after I ran around attending anti-war demonstrations in Ottawa (I finally had to stop going because I kept getting into shouting matches with the organizers, mostly Marxist-Leninists – I still remember the rather stunned look on the organizer’s face when I yelled, “Just because Nixon is wrong doesn’t mean Ho Chi Minh is right!”), my mother told me that she and my father had been wrong about the war in Vietnam. I don’t think this meant she was finally reconciled to my choosing an American draft dodger as my first lover, just that perhaps my father shouldn’t have taken Cassius Clay’s refusal to serve quite so personally. My dad loved that man until he refused the draft, and then it was as if he had never existed. We never called him Muhammad Ali and we never watched televised boxing again. But I can’t blame my parents for believing at the time – when they were in mid- and late teens – that the Second World War was the war to end all wars and one they were eager to participate in to keep the world safe for democracy. And I can’t condemn them for applying their life experiences inappropriately 20 years later. Neither the German nor the Japanese economies was seriously impacted by my father’s refusal to buy either a German or a Japanese car for 30 years after the end of WWII. Living with the courage of his convictions may have meant we spent a lot more on repairs than others did, but if it helped my father sleep well at night, it was worth it. Besides, we met lots of kind and interesting people in the course of those breakdowns in the countryside surrounding Ottawa.

But another reason I will read Alfred and Emily is that I am becoming increasingly conscious myself of the passage of time, of the external events that shape our personal realities, and of the multiple roles we are called upon to play during the course of our lives, regardless of whether we choose to have children or not. I have been contemplating a blog post about having always been a reluctant member of the – as one television commercial now states – generation that refuses to grow old. The idea isn’t a new one, although its being so baldly stated seems almost delusional, and I think any group of people that bases its life philosophy on advertising slogans (who did that commercial about never growing up, was it Mattel?) is in serious difficulty. Which just goes to prove how bad I've always been at being a baby boomer.

Much as I’m looking forward to reading this new book of Lessing’s, I wish she could, at 88, be content with what she has already accomplished and perhaps consider that retirement is not the worst thing that can happen to a person. When asked about the money that comes with the Nobel Prize, she said she’d been advised to give it all away for tax reasons. She then mentioned she was sleeping in her downstairs sitting room because she can’t manage the stairs in her North London home any more. Her back and her heart and her kidneys are playing up, and it is one of the most charming moments in the latest interview when she announces that during a recent stint in hospital she’s suddenly discovered that she actually has these organs. There’s even a little giggle. It’s not up to me to tell her how to spend her money. But I caught myself thinking one of those fancy little chair lifts that zoom up and down flights of stairs might not be a bad use of some of it. (I’ve only ever seen a couple of these but I love the way you ascend the stairs riding side saddle, as it were. There’s something so imperious about ascending a flight of stairs in that manner, clutching a cane – one of those deeply ambivalent items that is both support and weapon, depending on the way it’s held.) Or perhaps sell the house and buy a flat that’s all on one level?

I think I’m going to let her have the last word here. In her essay “Afterword to The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner,” Lessing defines the novel as ‘that hybrid, the mixture of journalism and the Zeitgeist and autobiography that comes out of a part of the human consciousness which is always trying to understand itself, to come into the light.’

P.S. You only have seven days after the date of broadcast to listen to BBC4 interviews, although you can download the podcasts and listen to them at a later date. Here’s the link to Front Row.

P.P.S. Alfred and Emily won’t be available in Canada from Harper Collins till July 23.

The battle lines are drawn: are you a Costco member or a Walmart shopper?

Blossom, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2008

I'll spare you my latest hilarious attempts (eventually successful, but it took me four tries) to find my local Costco. It's hidden away on Brighton Avenue just off Government Road in Burnaby and if you don't happen to be in the right lane when Cariboo unaccountably decides to veer to the right you can find yourself on the TransCanada heading for Hope. I found that even more unsettling than the two previous excursions when, much to my bewilderment, I ended up in Coquitlam. It was all worth it though, when I scored a delightful moss green linen jacket at the Coquitlam Value Village for the queenly sum of $8. So, sorry, I didn't actually spare you the story.

In my frustration to find Costco (my reasoning being not only that I was dying for some of the vegetable gyozas I can't find anywhere else, but there really was little point in paying even $50 for an annual membership if I was only going to use it once or twice a year), I actually contemplated heading for the Grandview Highway store because I was reasonably sure I could find it with a lot less difficulty than I was experiencing trying to find the Burnaby one. But I'm nothing if not persistent, and finally last Sunday I took all the right turns and thoroughly enjoyed my warehouse experience.

With my giant cart I mused about the fact that you can't always get what you want at Costco but that's part of what makes it fun to shop there. I'm not at the top of the pyramid when it comes to brand allegiances: if I went for coffee and the brand I usually buy isn't there, I'll still come home with coffee. That and the reminder of the sheer abundance we're privy to here in North America. While I can get exercised about how unfair it is that when you can afford to buy in bulk you can really see some extraordinary savings in not only money but time and effort, when I can afford to do it myself I'm delighted.

On the two occasions I ended up in Coquitlam, Lougheed Town Centre and its WalMart beckoned. I find it very easy to ignore the siren call of WalMart though.

It's not just because of the way they treated an American friend, who was used and abused in the grocery department for a couple of months before being transferred to the flower department. At six three and with size thirteen feet, I was thrilled that he was secure enough in his sexuality to gleefully announce, "I'm the new flower lady!" As an artist he was happy to work with flowers. And they were a lot lighter than the produce boxes he'd been heaving around 12 hours a day. Sadly, the glee didn't last long as his job sort of vanished. I thought it was only in government that when they wanted to get rid of you they put your desk out in the hallway or just took you off the posted schedule without in any other way communicating that your services were no longer required and you could sleep in if you wanted to. But apparently not. I'm not even going to go there in terms of what is wrong about this passive-aggressive method of communication. It's easy to imagine how it feels to be treated like a commodity no one wants to buy any more.

It's not the astroturfing or the greenwashing or the lack of benefits or the willingness to hire foreign (read: slave) labour at WalMart. It's not the fact that WalMart has acquired such an iron grip on the consumer imagination that not shopping there seems like heresy to middle- and lower-income earners. It's not the ugliness of the stores or the offensiveness of the very idea of the greeters.

It's all of those things. And so, while I applauded the WalMart victory in Squamish, and continue to support Squamish as a location for a factory outlet mall (what could be better, some of the country's most spectacular scenery on the way to one of the world's best ski resorts and incredible bargains on the way there and back), I won't be heading for the repurposed-Costco- which-will-soon-be-a-WalMart at the Grandview Highway location. WalMart can continue to get along without me. And I'll continue to spend my money on some of the brands Costco makes available to me even though they're probably never going to be household words. I'm sort of hoping I don't get addicted to Cafe Mbeya's coffee in case it was a one-time purchase. But I'm going to enjoy every last drop of the two-pound bag of beans I bought, knowing that it's not only organic but also fairly traded coffee. I'm not sure whether the Tanzanians who produce it are getting any more than the $1.36 per pound that's the minimum established for fair trade coffee the last time I researched it. I hope so.

For the CBC article on WalMart taking over the old Costco location:

www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2008/05/09/bc-wal-mart-vancouver.html

And for more info on Cafe Mbeya:

www.levelground.com

The murkiest of murky waters

I'm not sure why the Reverend Jeremiah Wright is doing a speaking tour right now or what occasioned his recent controversial remarks at Washington's National Press Club. From a media relations perspective though, it's fascinating to watch this scenario play out.

From the very little I've read and seen, Barack Obama is rapidly painting himself into the 'can't win' corner, not as a result of his association with Rev. Wright or his attendance at the United Church of Christ in Chicago, but because his communications advisors aren't giving him the advice he needs to hear. Either that or he's not listening to them (some clients are like that, which makes one wonder why they hire consultants in the first place), or they are actually giving him bad advice.

I can only speculate about why Obama doesn't seem to understand that while some crises occur without a great deal of warning (think the sinking of The Titanic), most start out as issues that are improperly managed. Their growth can be slow, steady, and trackable, or they can erupt like the fires in a peat bog, the ones that burn underground for days, weeks and months and burst out after all the firefighters have gone home. It may well be a facet of Obama's character that he speaks first and thinks second, or thinks only after someone has pointed out the consequences of his statements. Certainly his remarks regarding the working class at the fundraising dinner seem to have been a case of his desire to play to his particular audience and laugh at his own jokes overriding his better judgment.

It may also be the result of some peculiarity of political communications advisors, whose career aspirations are so closely linked to the candidate's. Perhaps it's more difficult for them to get out of order-taker mode and into consultant mode, so they can tell their 'client' (Obama) what he needs - but undoubtedly doesn't want - to hear.

But the fact remains, even if the Rev. Wright decides to take a sabbatical and visit another country for the next six months, or takes a vow of silence, or [substitute other potential event that could remove him from the media spotlight], the issue of Obama's association with Wright - which as a member of the congregation includes taking spiritual advice from a man who may well be misunderstood but does seem to be a pretty loose cannon and not what I'd call a 'media natural' - is never going to go away. That's the sad thing about issues in the age of the internet: they're always there waiting to resurface.

Media reports indicate that Obama's initial response to some of Rev. Wright's most recent controversial remarks on race and disease was somewhat jocular and dismissive, and only in his second round of media interviews on the subject did he actually censure the remarks Wright had made and attempt to distance himself from his pastor. Obama's excuse: he hadn't actually seen the coverage or heard the precise words when he spoke first.

The next day, after he had heard exactly what Wright did say, Obama's reaction was to angrily paint his spiritual leader as a 'divisive' individual and a negative factor in the presidential campaign overall.

Someone on Obama's communications staff needs to learn what a holding statement is and how to use it. And Obama himself needs to learn to curb his tendency to be dismissive and flippant, because it's not playing well in the international media or with voters. He seems to be playing to the media, his imagined buddies, rather than talking to his would-be constituents. And as a result he's alienating both. He also needs to learn that there's nothing wrong with saying, "I don't have all the information I need to answer that question but I'll do my best to answer it as soon as possible." All Obama needed to say in his first round of interviews was, "I haven't heard Rev. Wright's remarks myself and I'd like to review them before I respond to your questions. Let's talk about this tomorrow - my staff will be happy to set something up." And then move on - quite literally in this case.

Is that too simple? Perhaps it is, and perhaps that's why it hasn't occurred to Obama or his advisors that it's also the right response. Remember that expression, "Poor planning on your part doesn't constitute an emergency on mine"? Journalists have deadlines and as a media relations practitioner I like to respect those deadlines and work with them. But a scrum is very different from a press conference, and if you haven't scheduled a press conference, you don't have to get into it with reporters before you've had a chance to gather the information you need (not to mention your thoughts). Better to say something, yes - 'not available for comment' or 'didn't respond to our request for an interview' are lines that make me cringe whenever I hear, read, or see them. But by being open, honest, and transparent, by not even trying to be a 'media cowboy', you're not going to have that said about you. Because you did respond - you just didn't say much. And that's ok, particularly when you sense that you don't have all the relevant facts at your disposal.

And yes, of course, if Obama had used the wording I suggest, reporters would have started telling him what Wright had said. At which point Obama should have reiterated, "I'd like to review the reverend's remarks myself - let's talk about this tomorrow." The questions would have continued until he said the same thing three times. And then they would have stopped when reporters realized this was really all they were going to get right now, and that pushing it would only alienate Obama and they don't really want to do that. Because they're going to want to talk to him next week and the week after, and journalists can't afford to burn bridges with people they need to interview.

Think of it this way. If your kitchen sink suddenly springs a leak, you're probably going to need to call in a plumber. You can call in the middle of the night, pay emergency rates, stay up the rest of the night biting your nails while waiting for help, and watch the water damage your hardwood and your carpets. Alternatively, you can turn the water off, mop up the mess, put a thick towel down in the area near the leak, go back to sleep, and call a plumber in the morning. If you follow the second course of action, you won't have solved the problem immediately, but you've contained the mess, ensured no more damage is being done and that the mess isn't going to get any bigger.

One of the ways you can tell Hillary Clinton really is the more experienced candidate was her response to - well, now the phrase 'the Bosnia boo boo' has popped into my mind I can't think of any other way to describe it. Her explanation wasn't particularly convincing, but it was prompt, forthright, and conclusive. Less than 24 hours after she got busted about the circumstances of her arrival in Bosnia, she was out there owning up and acting like an adult. Much as I dislike the ambivalent phrase, 'I misspoke' (in fact I was so astonished to hear it that I had to look it up to make sure it was actually a word), it was the correct one to use in the circumstance, sitting on the fence as it does between 'being mistaken' and 'having lied.' It can't have been an easy statement to make, and she did sound a little defensive when she went on to say that she was actually human and made mistakes. But what Hillary did very right in that situation was to then take charge of the interview and say, in effect, 'Regardless of the mistakes I've made, that's not what we're here to talk about. We're here to talk about what we need to do to make America a country all its citizens can be proud of, not just the privileged few.' Because that's what an American presidential election really is about. And that was a paraphrase of the gist of her remarks, not an actual quote.

I'm posting the link (but not embedding the video) to a singularly horrific interview with Rev. Wright. I have to say, I feel sorry for everyone involved with this interview: the reporter, the preacher, and the guy who actually feebly tries to put the United Church of Christ's statements on its web site into some sort of context. I never thought I'd feel sorry for a Fox reporter, but everyone involved with this interview has lost the plot. I'm thinking of using the line, 'I used to be a seminarian' to replace 'I used to be a contenda' in my impromptu comedy routines. As for Wright - challenging an already hostile reporter? Refusing to actually answer the question and repeatedly posing one of his own, then trying to make it sound like the interviewer was being mean to him? If I'd been the interviewer I would have cut the sound on Wright's mic as punishment for not actually engaging in a conversation and for answering every one of his questions with not just a question, but a challenge. Which is, I guess, why I'm not a journalist.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNTGRL0OJWQ

Writing short

Blossom Dearie, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2008

In my personal life I have long realized that I am both loquacious and garrulous (one of those is worse than the other, although I can't remember which). Blame the one sixteenth Irish in me if you like, or the fact that I was an only child, and, worse, the child of two youngest children from large families who must have had to become compelling communicators and storytellers in order to get any attention at all. When I am not in seriously reticent, information gathering mode, I do like to talk. As much as I want.

Perhaps it's because I enjoy communication and can usually analyze what I'm saying and what the other person is saying while it's happening that I have what seems to be an inbred hostility to PowerPoint. All the pitches to potential clients demonstrating my former firm's expertise and global capabilities were done as PowerPoint presentations over which a team of us had slaved for a week, with tweaks and suggestions from executive management. But, I said, you're not learning anything about the client when you're lecturing them in the dark. The C-suite loves 'the deck', I was told. It was a case of adapt or leave, so I adapted.

I have come to appreciate PowerPoint's value a bit more, but there are still times when communicators' mastery of it as a tool seems minimal. Reading a PowerPoint when you haven't attended a presentation is a lot like reading the chapter titles of a book, and if you're lucky you get the first paragraph of each chapter as well. As for those who insist that I click to get each new line of text - the supporting points for the presenter's assertions - I am warning you, you are not Pavlov, I am not a dog, and your information nuggets do not qualify as 'treats'. If you want to communicate with me, do not make me dig for information - you will only alienate me. Similarly, if there is no compelling reason to provide a visual, chances are good I'm not going to be amused by irrelevant graphics.

So I am thrilled to hear of a trend in PowerPoint that originated in Japan but has now been widely exported to the Western world, Pecha Kucha. Maximum 20 slides. Maximum 20 seconds per slide. Do your presentation, make it effective, then sit down and let the reaction and interaction begin. I'm a little alarmed by the suggestion that content is less important than form. But as a rule of thumb I think PowerPoints globally will be substantially improved, even if it's only because those who adopt the Pecha Kucha concept will time themselves and will learn to be a little more realistic in terms of the sheer volume of information they're trying to convey. PowerPoint is all about the highlights - it's not an alternative to writing a white paper or a case study. It's not really an appropriate vehicle for a case study either.

One of the biggest challenges I have ever faced in my writing career was writing one-sentence synopses of films that still managed to convey some idea of what the movie was about. I was lucky this came early enough in my career that it gave me a certain sort of discipline, as well as a lot of practice in distilling the essence of complicated subject matter into very few words. This has been incredibly helpful when crafting key messages for media relations clients who are then required to provide sound bites for radio and television. Short sentences are wonderful. Long sentences can be even more wonderful, but tend to be far less memorable. Ditto short versus long questions - "Where's the beef?" is still one of the most memorable questions in advertising history.

A shout out to my friend Mhairi Petrovic of Out-Smarts (see link in the links section), in one of whose blog posts I discovered the Melcrum network (now if only there was one that focused on external communications rather than internal), where I first read about Pecha Kucha:

http://www.internalcommshub.com/open/news/pechakucha.shtml

And for Wired's take on this trend:

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/15-09/st_pechakucha#

Guilty pleasures

Limoges, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2008

We all have them, and I’d love to know what yours are – please leave a comment on my blog if you have something to confess in this department.

I’ve apparently launched a spring cleaning endeavour here at the home/home office. Part of it was necessitated by getting tax info together, a task that always takes three solid weeks of whining (sometimes more) and about three hours of actual work before I hand it off to my accountant. This year is the first time I’ve managed to get receipts for two years muddled up together, and the shame of this is what’s propelling the spring cleaning. No cupboard or drawer is safe.

Yesterday I found both the little notebook in which I list the books I’ve read and their authors, which hadn’t been updated since my move in November. As I began to add titles with the help of my library lists of books checked out (three more scraps of paper for the recycling bin, one tiny step for womankind and its sanity), I began to realize something: not only have I developed a fondness for historical fiction (that’s worthy of a post in and of itself), but I apparently have a bit of a fetish for what, in all honesty, can only be described as historical romance.

The evidence is overwhelming. The Friday before Christmas 2007, in anticipation of some serious and perhaps snowbound hibernation, I took 11 novels out from the New West library, and at least four of them were historical romances. I blame The Tudors for stirring up my love affair with all things Elizabethan. My heart starts to stir when I hear the theme music, my pulse quickens – I’m more excited than I was as a child waiting for the next installment of Glenda Jackson’s Elizabeth R. (Another post there about my heroines – will all these posts ever get written?)

The web site, which I anxiously check every couple of weeks to see when Season 2 is going to air (and because I’m mesmerized by the pearls, the gold, the garments – they’re definitely garments, to call them clothing is like calling diamonds hard coal), is sponsored by The Other Boleyn Girl, the movie recently made from Phillipa Gregory’s novel. http://www.cbc.ca/tudors/ After seeing the trailer for it when I finally saw Atonement, I had to read it. It was one of those long but good novels, and it was actually quite wonderful to learn more of Mary Boleyn's life and to see a quiet, early version of an almost-Ghandi-like feminism. Mary's passive resistance to being used as her father's, uncle's and brother's pawn was ultimately successful - she was the only one of the Boleyn siblings of her generation not to be executed by Henry VIII. Did she really bear him two children? It's the first I've heard of it, but I suppose it's possible.

Apparently I also had to read her other novel, The Virgin’s Lover. I disliked it, I’m afraid – the portrait of Elizabeth she painted was indeed that of a weak and fearful woman, one who had neither the heart nor the stomach of a man, was mistrustful of other women and overly dependent on her male advisors. I also had to read Carolly Erickson’s The Last Wife of Henry VIII (good, but I’m far less invested emotionally in Catharine Parr than in Elizabeth herself or in her mother, Anne Boleyn), as well as Sara George’s Journal of Mrs. Pepys (which was great although not terribly memorable, it seems).

From the safe distance of four centuries or more it’s fascinating to see creative minds bring alternate versions of history to life. The rivalry between the Howards and the Seymours, its desperate intensity and long duration, had somehow escaped me when I first started consuming Tudor history in my childhood. Since this is really the only era of English history other than the Victorian that’s really fascinated me, perhaps I can be forgiven for not knowing for sure whether the Seymour/Howard feud was also part of the whole Lancaster/York thing. That, of course, was the great thing about Henry VII (I’m not so convinced the Star Chamber was such a good idea). He was the compromise candidate, and his ascension of the throne marked the end, once and for all, of the Wars of the Roses, leaving subsequent monarchs to tackle other pressing issues, such as the separation of Church and State, the need to plunder those pesky monasteries to keep the monarch in cloth of gold, and, of course, the necessity to put an end for once and for all to the territorial and economic ambitions of both France and Spain.

One of my oldest friends is a mediaeval historian who has always sneered at Antonia Fraser as a popularizer of history. I still haven’t figured out what’s wrong with that, and frankly the fact that she married Harold Pinter makes her interesting aside from anything else she’s done (oh to be a fly on the wall of that marriage). But now reading Antonia Fraser is also, it seems, a guilty pleasure, and after seeing the Sofia Coppola film Marie Antoinette on American Thanksgiving (when my hostess asked me at least twice if we really had to watch the whole thing and I stubbornly insisted that yes, we did, although we did watch part of the middle section in fast forward), I had to read the Fraser book on which it was based, Marie Antoinette: The Journey. It confirmed what I suspected: the Coppola film version was a travesty and Marie Antoinette was renowned for her physical grace and her dancing. She did not, in fact, walk like a duck or talk like a Valley Girl. And she was not the originator of the phrase, ‘Let them eat cake.’ She probably never said, ‘Off with their heads!’ either. That may well have been the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland. Or the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass.

And why is it this is such a guilty pleasure? Well, you know, I'm not only an English major, I was a hyper-responsible English major. Eleven of the 15 courses for my degree were English courses, and with the exception of Old English, I took every course I would need to get into the strictest of Canadian graduate schools, even though I certainly didn't have to at the liberal arts college I attended and even though I never did end up doing an MA or wanting to, really. I took Chaucer of my own volition. I even made it through Restoration and 18th Century literature, although it almost killed me (if it hadn't been for the dramas I would never have survived Pamela. Or Clarissa. Or Tom Jones, to be brutally honest. And for some strange reason we never got as far chronologically as Jane Austen, and in retrospect I'd like to know why.)

So to read a book that fits in a rack is - well - the intellectual equivalent of junk food and something I used to reserve for times of sickness or utter exhaustion (one Anne Rice per cold and I am confident you will be able to read the entire oeuvre in your lifetime). Mea culpa.

Now make me feel a little less guilty by confessing some of your guilty pleasures. Keep it clean though folks. And the golf web site is thattaway. ----->

Plan B

Chinese Lanterns, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2005

Many years ago, when I worked in the policy development division of one of the Ontario ministries, I asked the policy analyst for whom I worked how government policy was actually made: did it filter down from the top or did it percolate up from the bottom? He said from what he could tell, it was a little bit of both.

The day after I took my friend for her horrendous trip to the hospital I read a response to an article about a proposed power project here in BC. The guy who commented said, basically, 'we have enough fossil fuel resources to support 2 to 3 billion people, and our population is currently 7 billion.' In talking to my friend I said to her, 'These pants don't fit any more, and there's only so much more room we can buy for ourselves by undoing the button, opening the zipper and wearing a long tunic top to cover the bulge.'

I am confused by what's going on with our health care system and saddened that we seem not to have managed to get things right. I'm sure there are some people who abuse the system and run off to the doctor when they'd be better off just taking an aspirin and getting a good night's sleep. But I think there are a lot of us whose response to universal medical care is quite the opposite: as responsible citizens who believe in the principle of universality, know the system is overburdened, and probably delay going to the doctor until our conditions are serious.

Certainly we observed, while waiting for assessment, that people who came in by ambulance were being triaged first. Now you have to pay for ambulance service, and I'm sure it's expensive. But when you consider the loss of earnings experienced by spending nine hours waiting for an X-ray, you start to wonder if you wouldn't have been better off calling an ambulance. Not to mention the trauma of the waiting itself (I mean, I wasn't even sick and I was getting stressed out by the woman in the lobby wondering if she was having a heart attack - she was), worrying about whether the door handle you've touched has SuperBug germs on it, wondering why that group of people are wearing masks and trying desperately not to go to the SARS place.

In the same way that I have never understood how someone who is mentally ill is expected to get better in an environment where all the other patients have their own versions of reality, how are you supposed to get better when you're being exposed to a bunch of people with communicable diseases?

Surely there's another solution though. Why couldn't my friend have paid for an X-ray at a clinic near her home so she could have quickly determined whether she was going to need emergency surgery, and then, perhaps, worked for half a day? Why is it that those who need knee replacements are able to pay for treatment at their convenience, but those who need other kinds of surgery can't? Is it not a win-win situation if wait times for surgery are reduced? And wouldn't they be reduced if those who could afford to pay and who wanted to pay for treatment at their convenience did so?

For those of us who are self-employed, universal health care doesn't come free or at nominal cost because we don't have benefits - when we're sick we're not earning money and not marketing our services. If your surgery is scheduled at your busiest time of year, the economic loss may not be a one-time thing - you may lose the client because you had to refer them to someone else.

My periodontist once joked that I would soon be performing my own procedures, such an avid interest did I take in what he was doing to my mouth. I'm sure I'm a pain in the ass and I'm also sure he knew I wasn't going to start wielding a scalpel myself. In the last two years though it's been determined that I have a Vitamin B12 deficiency. I had to go for shots weekly, then every two weeks, and then once a month. I rebel against this not because I don't believe the doctor that my body is now unable to process the B12 I ingest. I've upped my intake of foods that contain B12 (meat, dairy and eggs) and I've also taken B12 orally. I have had to conclude that the doctor is right: I'm not processing it - I need the shots. What I don't need, however, is to have those shots administered by a doctor - or even a nurse. I also don't need to be exposed to a waiting room full of sick people once a month. Most important for me, though, is that I cannot justify in my own mind consuming medical services once a month. I'm not sick! I have a vitamin deficiency, for crying out loud.

Luckily I have been able to persuade the doctor that my objection is a valid one and got her to prescribe syringes and teach me how to give myself the intramuscular shots. I'm amazed at how many people say, 'Oh, you're brave.' I'm not, I don't think. I probably wouldn't attempt it if I had to inject into a vein. (Although I keep thinking, surely I'm no more or less smart than the average heroin addict.) But for me, this is part of being the change I want to see happen. I'm trying to reduce my demand on a system that's groaning under the strain of too many people, too few doctors and nurses, and far too little money. And I guess my question is, what's your Plan B? And how can you persuade your doctor and your elected representatives to let you implement it?

Monkey see, monkey do?

Monkey totem, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2008. www.wk-photoart.com/Georganna/Maypole.htm

There's a long blog post in the works that will focus on how to become the change we all want to see. Let me just say briefly that I spent a couple of hours in the emergency ward with a friend on Thursday. I then had to rush home, leaving her on her own and in pain, equipped only with the paperbacks I'd shoved into a bag and a few pieces of nicotine gum. We got there at 10AM, and when I called at 7PM to find out whether she had been admitted, subjected to emergency surgery, or released, I was told they still hadn't decided what they were going to do with her. By 10PM when I called again, I was angry enough about the situation that if they had told me they still hadn't decided what they were doing with her, I was going to the make the decision for them and go and get her. I am still quite shaken by her description of what she went through during a nine-hour wait for an x-ray.

I wanted to blog a bit about the presentation at Northern Voice 08 that has stayed with me. More than a month later, I think about Dave Olson's presentation, 'F*ck Stats, Make Art.' See his synopsis here, or better yet, download the podcast. It's a shame it wasn't filmed, really, because I do think you had to be there to see how truly engaging he was:

http://wiki.northernvoice.ca/F*ck+Stats,+Make+Art+Dossier

I'm currently taking a speechwriting course, which so far involves watching and commenting on presentations from a diverse group of speakers. I am struggling a bit with some of the material, because to be perfectly honest, it is presented for the most part completely out of context. I am trying to be a good girl and a good student, but I have been so disconcerted by the second speech (from former Saturday Night Live cast member Julia Sweeney) that I've just sort of come to a standstill. I don't really want to post what I'm truly thinking, which is 'who is this Julia Sweeney and why should I care whether she believes in Santa Claus or not?' Setting a cat amongst the pigeons was fun when I was in my 20s but I have to be feeling truly energetic to deal with the fallout from this pastime now.

In describing my quandry to the friend I took to the hospital though, I talked about the difference between Sweeney's presentation and Dave Olson's. Wacky though he (or his persona) may be, he had a point and he moved unerringly towards it from the moment he started speaking. Yes there were asides and yes, a very old copy (not sure if it was a first edition or not) of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass was brandished during the course of the presentation. Here's my synopsis of his presentation: think of all the Web 2.0 creative content (blogs, vlogs, podcasts, digital photos and collage, et al.) generated by just ordinary folks as a huge pyramid. The bottom layer of the pyramid will be a fairly thin but broad slice of just sheer dreck. The bulk of the pyramid will be content that is relatively ordinary but gets a fair bit of attention, or as Olson describes it, 'goofy, nonsensical, or cheesy slices of contemporary pop culture [that have] either contrived or wrangled their way to the top of the viral avenues.' But that very top slice of the pyramid is going to yield some real gold in artistic terms. And creating that gold is far more important than getting to the top of the pyramid.

Flickr has recently added a new feature, the ability to check one's stats. Every once in a while I take a look to see how many of my photos have been viewed in a day and which ones they were. I am constantly surprised and usually gratified to see that some of the more offbeat things I photograph are viewed, often years after they've been taken. Yes, the photos of my breasts are my two most often viewed. That was a tagging science experiment though. Just wait till I start tagging all my photos 'breasts' or 'nipples.'

As the news turns

Hydrangeas against rail, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2008

I do wonder why a study would be released on a Sunday and whether the implication is that we can all read it today and get a jumpstart on next week's work - that does seem a little cruel.

But it looks like there's some interesting stuff in the Project for Excellence in Journalism's annual State of the News Media report as synopsized by Wired's online news site:
http://news.wired.com/dynamic/stories/S/STATE_OF_JOURNALISM?SITE=WIRE&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2008-03-16-16-32-59

The full report is available here:

http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.org/2008/

I confess I haven't read it in its entirety yet. That will require a cup of coffee, as I wrap my head around the fact that without the war in Iraq and the election, there would be 25 per cent less news in the U.S. (ok I realize that's not what the report says, that's my somewhat cynical tweak on it). I do hope the report gives us a ranking of Britney stories because I'm pretty sure that even though I've assiduously tried to avoid them, I probably read more news items about Britney Spears in 2007 than I did about the US election and the war in Iraq combined.

Also surprising is the assertion that blogs and citizen journalism sites aren't as welcoming of commentary as traditional news media sites. You mean the experts got something right? ;)

What's encouraging though - or what I take to be encouraging from the synopsis - is the notion that print is following broadcast media's lead - by accepting that stories are fluid and require frequent updates, regardless of printing deadlines. What's also encouraging is that a newspaper article is now being seen as an investigative starting point rather than the last word. This can only mean good things for notions like objective and balanced reporting or a clear statement of bias.

Letters to the editor

Never light just a single candle, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2005

I continue to ruminate about the hold Facebook and Twitter have on our collective attention spans, and about social media in general, its importance and its relevance. With some time to explore newer aspects of Web 2.0, I'm thinking a lot about the value of social media.

After writing yesterday's post I went back to my email inbox and glanced at the daily CBC news aggregate I have sent to me and got lost for the better part of the day in the bizarre tale of a break-up between two people announced in a weird kind of way as an entry in the currently brand dominant online encyclopedia. (If you wonder why I'm being so cagey here, it's because I'm not going to dignify the woman involved - of whom I had never heard till yesterday - or her actions - which include the posting of instant messages and emails and the announcement that she is selling her ex-lover's leave-behinds on E-Bay - by mentioning her name or including tags that reference her, her former lover, or the online encyclopedia in question. If you want to know who and what I'm referring to, here's a Globe and Mail article on the subject: www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080304.wlbreakup04/BNStory/lifeMain/home).

Thinking about this fiasco and also thinking about advising potential clients who are usually too busy running their businesses to focus on these things, in my stubbornly analytical way I wanted to find a definition of social media I could use with clients to stress the value of adding a social media marketing and communications component to their public relations and communications plans.

No more than six years ago I disagreed with a colleague who told me she had a friend with a local catering business and wanted a web site. The colleague said her friend's business was growing, she had a Yellow Pages listing, and that she saw no point in her friend going to the trouble and expense of creating a web site. I disagreed for two reasons. First, in the days before the internet, I had had to arrange catering in remote locations throughout Northern Ontario, without the benefit of even phone books for the communities involved. The long distance operators became my best allies in this endeavour. I'd dial 1-area code-555-1212 and ask them to look up caterers in the Yellow Pages, get three names and numbers, and then get on the phone to the caterers, explain what I wanted, find out if they were available on the date required, discuss the menu, and take it from there. It worked beautifully. I organized at least a dozen parties by remote control and had only one frantic call back from a caterer when the number of guests suddenly quadrupled and she needed my authorization to bring in more food (and to exceed the original quote for the catering). In the relatively early days of the internet (still in the 20th Century), I also hired a Vancouver photographer (from Toronto) to photograph an event - based on a web search and a couple of emails. In retrospect I should perhaps have emailed someone in our Vancouver office and asked for a recommendation, but it turned out just fine - the guy I found was, and still is, one of Vancouver's top photographers and he did a far more than adequate job.

Having a web site now - unless you are lucky enough to have lived and worked in the same community for a long time and your business comes to you - i.e. you really have no need whatsoever to market your services and are being offered contracts by people who already know both you and the quality of your work - is a credibility issue. Without one, you're like someone without a business card. As part of your marketing collateral, a web site is the second most important tool in your arsenal, right after that business card. (I should take my own advice, huh? Don't bother me, I'm busy blogging here.)

Conversely, I was dismayed last summer to have a client tell me she had just signed yet another contract for a quarter-page Yellow Pages ad that was going to cost her $18,000 over the course of the year and represented the bulk of her marketing communications budget when she had no real marketing collateral and an iffy web site that needed a lot of work. The only time I use the actual Yellow Pages these days is during power outages. And the target demographic for her business is probably a lot like me.

So in trying to find an acceptable and useful definition of social media, I came across this post and its ensuing discussion: http://scobleizer.com/2007/02/16/what-is-social-media/. And I don't disagree with any of it, although I'd like to refine the definition a little at some point.

I do, however, want to quibble with the importance of social media in terms of its usefulness and the resources devoted to it. In the same way that no media interview should consist merely of a recitation of key messages (with the notable exception of crisis communications, when those key messages should pretty much comprise the entire interview because dealing with the crisis is what really matters), no communications or public relations or marketing plan should consist solely of social media communications endeavours.

During the question period following Rob Cottingham's presentation at Northern Voice 08, Blogger 911: Crisis communications and the social web, an audience member suggested that, in a crisis, stakeholders should all be directed to a single web site that is being regularly updated. This is just so wrong. What makes a crisis so very challenging is the need to communicate with all stakeholders in the way they want to be communicated with. In the same way some people like to pay cash and actually count out the bills when making a transaction, others prefer to use their debit cards or pay online, while others still get an almost visceral thrill from writing a cheque, putting the stamp on the envelope, and then walking to the mailbox with it. You have to communicate with people in the way that is meaningful and appropriate to them.

If I picked up the phone and called a company during a crisis that involved me or someone I cared deeply about, I might appreciate being told that there was detailed information available on the company's web site or blog. But in the same way that corporate and social etiquette has generally contended that in most cases, the appropriate response to an email is an email and to a phone call is a phone call, if I am calling for information, I expect to be given information over the phone. I don't mind being referred to a web site that will provide me with a more detailed response, but I do expect my efforts at communication to be reciprocated politely and I don't want to feel that I'm being brushed off or that the person providing customer service is impatient with me. If I take the time to write a letter and send it by snail mail, ditto. Even though my email signature includes my phone number, I don't really expect - or want - someone to call me in response to my email. Unless my email says, 'call me.'

During a focus group on internal communications several years ago I had a forceful demonstration of exactly this point. We had two men who were demographically identical in the group: same age, same sex, same level in the organization, same earnings, same ethnic backgrounds. One of them loathed and despised email and announced that he'd returned his modem and cancelled his home internet service - he was having enough trouble keeping up with the barrage of emails he received at work. The other said that, frustrated with trying to reach his daughter on a shared phone in her university residence, he had been communicating her with mostly via MSN Messenger and email.

For once there is an actual connection between the photo that illustrates this post and its subject matter. The photo, as originally posted on flickr, is titled, 'Never light just a single candle.' One of the examples of good crisis communications utlizing social media cited by Rob Cottingham (who is the president of Social Signal (www.socialsignal.com) was the video JetBlue Airways' founder and CEO David Neeleman posted on youtube after nearly half JetBlue's New York flights were delayed or cancelled on Valentine's Day 2007. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r_PIg7EAUw

I'm not going to debate the merits of the messaging or its delivery right now. I would point out though, that the series of press releases posted on the JetBlue web site, beginning with the one linked below and posted on an almost-daily basis until the day after the video was posted (February 19, 2007), contain information not conveyed in the video, such as the refunds customers were being offered (unless I missed it in three viewings, but I'm pretty sure I didn't), and refer to 'our promise to you' rather than to the 'customer's bill of rights' that was the company's official response to the crisis. http://investor.jetblue.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=131045&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=963450&highlight=

My point is that the video is great, the press releases are great, letters and phone calls to customers are great, setting up a toll-free line so people can get an explanation of what happened and why and what you're doing to ensure it doesn't happen again is great, letters, emails and phone calls to customers are great, newspaper ads are great, radio, TV and print interviews are great. And you can't neglect a single one of those things, because if you do, you will be perceived as having not having made the attempt to communicate, which is the first step in making it right.

I have no idea who JetBlue's primary demographic is, but I'm willing to bet the first-born child I don't have that not all its customers would be mollified by any one of the available communications vehicles mentioned above.

Before the internet existed, it was generally accepted that for every one letter to the editor received by a newspaper, there were a thousand people who felt the same way but weren't sufficiently exercised about the subject to actually pick up a pen or roll a piece of paper into the typewriter or pick up their dictaphone and have their secretaries type a letter for them. Because of the perceived volume of opinion behind a single letter to the editor, they were taken seriously - very seriously.

I am not so sure the same can be said of an often anonymous posting on a blog or bulletin board. From the blogs I've read and the debates that sometimes ensue in the comment streams, there are a lot of opinions out there, and few people share precisely the same one. And I seriously doubt that a single blog comment represents the kind of groundswell of opinion implied by one letter to the editor.

And so, while it's safe to assume that it is possible to communicate with all your stakeholders when it's really necessary to do so, it is never safe to assume that one form of communication will reach - or please - everyone. Consistency of messaging is of paramount importance. Diversity in the manner in which you communicate an entirely consistent message is equally important - and ever changing.

If your friends are bothering you

Pomegranates, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2007

I just got a hilarious email from someone via Facebook. Well, I'm not sure why I got it - at first I thought someone had replied to all on an email that sent us a link to photos posted on Facebook. I haven't checked out Facebook's email features closely enough to know whether the 'reply to all' feature was activated within Facebook or the responder's own email client.

What I do know is that at the bottom of the email there's a Facebook-generated line that says, "Are your friends bothering you? You can opt out of emails from friends on Facebook."

I'm not going to bore you with the ins and outs of why this doesn't make a lot of sense to me because the email address to which the original link to the Facebook photo albums was sent isn't the one I use for Facebook. Who cares, really?

I am tired of hearing about the Facebook phenomenon and of being told that I have to have a Facebook account (the implication being that I won't understand social media if I'm not compulsively writing on people's walls and Twittering like a mad fool).

I have been using social media devices for more than a decade now. To some extent, I've got a lot of it out of my system. The giddy days of chat are over, although I still think that the real business potential of virtual meeting spaces was never really harnessed by corporations so people could cost-effectively brainstorm from locations across the world.

But I also think there's something just plain wrong about the notion that Facebook and Twitter represent some sort of great technological leap in human interaction. Am I missing something here? They act as centralized bulletin boards, do they not? There is absolutely nothing new about this idea. The only thing that's new is the branding and widespread adoption of two bulletin board services that incorporate some rather natural technological advancements, such as the ability to upload photo files to static sites. Frankly, that's not as impressive as the file sharing features of MSN and Yahoo! messenger systems, where you can share any kind of file you like within an instant message. These messaging systems have always incorporated an archiving option. So I think I'm pretty safe in saying that neither Facebook nor Twitter are the neatest things since sliced bread.

During at least two presentations I attended at Northern Voice 08, presenters who were online while speaking were interrupted by 'notifications' that appeared on the screen, updating them regarding new Facebook wall posts or Twits telling them what an acquaintance was doing. The first time it happened it was funny in the way someone farting might have been. The second time there was a stir in the audience and a feeling of unease, and I overheard a couple of conversations afterwards about - well, frankly, the inappropriateness of the whole thing.

Having once (and once only) been reproached by a friend for taking a cell phone call from another friend when we were having lunch, I've been doing a lot of thinking about the pros and cons of multi-tasking for the last couple of years. I've always known that while I had two ears, I'm really not capable of talking and listening at the same time, or of having two completely separate conversations at once in person. I used to be able to manage four different chat windows at a time, but I type more quickly than most and the quality of my conversations wasn't adversely affected by the fact that I wasn't uni-tasking. On the contrary, had I been talking to only one slow typist, I would have been less engaged in the conversations due to delays in waiting for responses.

I've been a member of flickr for several years now and have actively participated in a few groups. I've met dozens of flickrites and have been really thrilled when something I've said or a photo I've taken has resonated with someone an ocean away. The best example of this is the email I received from a guy in the UK who noticed a photo I'd posted of a tombstone at Vancouver's Mountain View Cemetery (and must have tagged with the deceased's name). He said they have been trying to track this long-lost ancestor for years and hadn't been able to figure out where he had ended up. My posting the photo of his grave let his relatives know he'd ended up in Vancouver. I was pleased to receive this email and happy to have helped someone with their genealogy even though that wasn't my intent.

The appeal of Facebook and Twitter is just totally passing me by here, folks. I'm not seeing any pros, only the cons (including more of life spent tethered to an electronic device, even if that tether is a wireless one). Is there something I'm missing here?

Political spoilers

More pods in the Park, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2008

I am going to revisit my post about our Canadian federal leadership at some point, but I'm also going to break yet another of my silly rules and talk briefly about the American leadership race and the upcoming November election.

Ralph Nader has 'declared' again and really, this is all this race needs, a second spoiler candidate to split the left-of-centre vote. If John McCain ends up president of the United States, the first two people I'm going to blame will be Ralph Nader and Barack Obama.

I realize politics is a blood sport, and that the complications of the US political system (which we studied in school but as Canadians used to a multi-party system I think most of us dismissed as - well - far too complicated for its own good or for our understanding) mean there may be some sort of subtleties I'm missing. Let me also state that I'm not Hillary Clinton's biggest fan. It's more a case of wanting to like her than of my actually finding anything she says or does inspiring.

Here's the thing though: Ms Clinton has been nothing but transparent about her intention to run for president ever since she first entered the political arena in her own right. Correct me if I'm wrong, but she was the first candidate to declare that she was going to seek the Democratic nomination in 2008. I'm not going to call Barack Obama names or say he's a Johnny Come Lately. I will call Ralph Nader The Spoiler, and his comment about the fact that the Democratic Party can't get it together and his cynical addendum that if it hasn't managed to get itself together in the eight years of Bush rule it should just implode because it's irrelevant was highly self serving. Nader doesn't play well with the other children and I'm sorry, but I think his refusal to either change the political process in the US so a multi-party system is adopted or play by the rules and actually seek the nomination of one of the two parties that are mandated to represent its citizens is just churlish. In fact, I think it's childish.

But I also think it is extremely unfortunate that Barack Obama has chosen to run in this particular election. I don't think American Democrats should be facing a choice between electing the first female president in their nation's history or their first black president. The primaries to date indicate that voters are almost equally split between these two candidates. In the Canadian system this wouldn't be so much of a problem, because at a national convention with multiple ballots, the leader would have been selected a long time ago. Obama, Clinton and Edwards would all have made good showings on the first ballot, and by the third or fourth ballot they would have been the only three candidates left, with Edwards functioning as King- or Queen-maker, throwing his support to either Obama or Clinton or setting his delegates free to choose one or the other. And then everyone in the party would have started to focus on what really matters: getting a Democrat elected this time around. Because that is what matters. And if another Republican president is elected this time around, I may change my mind and agree with Ralph Nader. Because this is just getting stupid: a country heading into recession because it's spending billions waging war halfway around the world while its own citizens have 'democracy' but not health care. A country that doesn't take its leaders to task when those leaders lie to the citizens they represent doesn't deserve to be a superpower. It sure doesn't have any claim to be a model of democracy for any other country (how about those weapons of mass destruction, has anyone found one yet? the search has been on for a while now).

So once again I find myself agreeing with Gloria Steinem. Hillary may not have quite as cute a smile as Barack Obama. Warmth may be something she struggles to convey via electronic media (something John Edwards can emanate without even lifting a finger, it seems). But she deserves the support of her fellow Democrats, and I hope she gets it before it's too late. She's done her time in the trenches, she's got not only the desire but also the experience to lead, and somehow I don't think she'll run again if she doesn't get the nomination this time. I'm not sure whether Obama will seek the nomination a second time if he doesn't get it this year. But I think the fact that Hillary's campaign for the Democratic nomination has been going on for so long means this is it: go 2008 or go home.

Here's a not-so-recent Op Ed Gloria Steinem wrote on the subject for The New York Times:

www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/opinion/08steinem.html?_r=1&ex=1357534800&en=737e0fe8e3afc0f0&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin

Recently read

Story House, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2008.

Since they're all due back at the library this week, it's time to do that blog post I've been intending for a couple of weeks now. Since the new year began I've been rather effortlessly reading more non-fiction than usual. I'm not quite sure what this is all about - perhaps I'm choosing better non-fiction, or perhaps it's better written these days?

The books on this shelf are actually the 'to read' pile but that's ok.

The Golden Spruce by John Vaillant
The book's subtitled 'A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed' and ultimately I think I would have liked it to focus on just one of those things. It would probably be over-ambitious to expect it to really illuminate all three. I ended up wanting to know more about the Golden Spruce itself and its role in Haida myth, more about Grant Hadwin's madness (some commentary from his wife would have been nice, although I can understand refusing to discuss one's estranged, presumed dead husband with a writer), and more about the greed that's characterized the forestry industry globally.

Last Lovers by William Wharton
William Wharton's the guy who said something I thought was totally profound about love: 'What is love? It is passion, admiration and respect. If you have two, you have enough. If you have all three, you don't have to die to go to heaven.' I was hoping reading this novel would help me track down exactly where he said it, but no such luck.

This is an odd novel merely by virtue of the way it's told, with alternating first-person narratives by the only two characters. One is a middle-aged American painter who is living illegally in a garret, having turned his back on corporate success, his wife and his children, at least temporarily. The other is a 70-something Parisienne who has suffered from hysterical blindness since she discovered her mother dead in the bath, having slit her wrists, when she was 14. The bizarre love affair that evolves between the two is just the teensiest bit too creepy to be heartwarming. Apparently Birdy is the one to read, so I'm not saying no to the notion of reading another of his novels.

Big Women by Fay Weldon
Fay is nothing if not reliable. Her cynical narratives of (mostly) English second-wave feminists are always witty treats, and this one is no exception. Stephanie, Nancy, Layla, Zoe, Daffy, Alice, and later, Zoe's daughter Saffron, live, love, strive, and survive in London, feuding, stealing each other's husbands and lovers, creating a publishing empire. Naturally the empire implodes, but most of the women survive and, well, carry on, older and wiser but no less witty.

Bud Inc. by Ian Mulgrew
Highly entertaining although quite astonishing in its bias. Funny that, with its focus on the medical marijuana market, two studies should come to my attention within a week of reading this book about the dangers of marijuana: one a New Zealand study focusing on higher incidences of lung cancer and another on damage to teeth and gums from heavy marijuana smoking (defined as one joint a day). Still, I am grateful to finally have read an explanation of the difference between indica and sativa.

Recently read will hopefully become a regular feature of this blog.

Finding one's (northern) (southern) (eastern) (western) voice - another reason I blog

Copyright Ruth Seeley 2007.

I made reference, a couple of blog posts ago, to the fact that I'll be attending Northern Voice, the Vancouver blogging conference, later this month. It runs from Thursday, February 21 to Saturday, February 23. http://2008.northernvoice.ca/

The kick-off dinner is being held this year in the Polynesian Room at Vancouver's Waldorf Hotel http://www.critiki.com/cgi-bin/location.cgi?loc_id=196, and I am really looking forward to it. (Last year's was held in the gorgeous Volunteer Vancouver building on Main Street, I believe - should have gone, I heard rumours of fountains of chocolate or chocolate swans or something equally extravagant.)

I also made a comment, in my previous blog post, that I was going to attend for the second year, despite having had a really miserable time at last year's conference. Some of it was my fault, some of it was a case of 'I should just have stayed in bed today' and some of it rests squarely on the conference organizers, or at least those tasked with event planning.

Northern Voice (the conference itself), is held at UBC's Forestry Building. For those of you who've never visited the UBC campus - it's huge. It's freaking huge. The UBC population is almost 10 times bigger than Kincardine, the small southwestern Ontario town in which I lived for a year before moving to BC in 2002. And I managed to get lost there for months. The estimates I've seen are that UBC has a student, staff and faculty population of 50,000. It is a vast expanse of land. What can I say - they didn't call it the Wild West for nothing. The only place I can really find with ease at UBC is its marvellous bookstore, and that's only when the roads aren't completely torn up and I don't have to take six detours.

It was pissing rain on the Saturday of Northern Voice 2007. Yes it's Vancouver, and I am actually one of the few people I know who don't mind the rain here and don't complain about it much, even though I've always thought snow was the smarter form of precipitation. Snow doesn't get you wet and it's - well - it's usually much more scenic than rain. Still, it was Toni Onley's dreamy coastal landscapes I had in mind when I moved here. This was unusual rain for Vancouver though - hard rain - big drops that really got you wet. I think of this as Eastern rain rather than Western rain. Mean rain. Purposeful rain. Its purpose being to mess you up in a quest to replenish the water table as quickly as possible.

For some inexplicable reason, the bus driver I had was not familiar with UBC campus and couldn't help me find the Forestry Building. This is the point at which I step up to the plate and acknowledge that I could have done my 'how to get there' research instead of just glancing at the map and assuming the bus driver would know his or her route. And that I could have left the house earlier.

As it happened though, I ended up wandering in the aforementioned pissing rain, waiting for another bus that would actually take me to the Forestry Building, getting myself into a completely foul temper, and arriving an hour late for the conference.

So - off to a bit of a rough start. I ran into a few people I knew and attended two sessions, both of which were interesting. Then it was lunch time. I quailed at the prospect of heading back out into that mess, so armed myself with the map listing all the area lunch venues. Most of them were at least a quarter-mile's hike from the Forestry Building. Many of them were much, much further away. I had already noticed that the Tim Horton's in the building itself wasn't open weekends, and thought it odd that they hadn't made an exception for a weekend when a conference was going on. Surely it would have been worth their while to open up on a Saturday just this once? While I'm not a fan of Tim's, some hot soup and a sandwich would have been really nice. I might even have been able to forget my wet socks in the convivial atmosphere of Tim's.

But no. Muttering to myself about it being one of those days I was going to get soaked four times (to and from the conference, to and from lunch), I headed for the next-nearest provision-providing venue, Starbucks. A latte and a pumpkin scone would have been just fine. On the way to the Starbucks I noticed an independent corner store and thought, oh, I don't care what their sandwiches are like, this is a better idea than Starbucks. Apparently not. The store had been robbed earlier in the day and the police were still conducting their investigation. Even though I had cash, the store owners had been forbidden to conduct business until the police wrapped up their investigation. Starbucks it was, then.

Obviously I wasn't the only person who had taken public transit to the conference, and great minds do think alike (fools seldom differ). I've never seen a Starbucks slammed the way that one was. And no one looked happy, which is most unusual. Didn't take long to figure out why. There was no food. I mean, there may have been one of those cinnamon straws. But other than that, the glass display case was pretty much empty. The Northern Voice organizers had failed to notify Starbucks that there was a conference going on. The staff were bewildered and embarrassed. Run off their feet too, since they'd been unexpectedly slammed.

So I had a latte, which I think I consumed perched on a cement planter in a courtyard that provided some shelter from the rain, and thought about going back to the conference. And I decided not to. The wet socks were starting to get to me, and I was beginning to feel murderous thoughts.

This year's going to be different. A lot different. For one thing, I'll be driving or being driven. For another, I know where the Forestry Building is. I'm also going to give the Starbucks a call myself and make sure they know there's a conference going on. I might even call the Tim Horton's and suggest they open up on Saturday. I've already done the feedback thing* for Northern Voice 2007 and mentioned these issues, so perhaps my phone calls will be reminders only, if the organizers took my advice. If they didn't, I'm not taking any chances.

Which brings me to the third reason why I blog. In my post 'Columnists I Like' I talked about the joy of writing freedom. That freedom doesn't matter much until and unless you have truly found your voice as a writer. When I first worked in public relations I was amazed at how difficult it was to master the right tone and style of PR writing. I'd written poetry, short stories, book reviews, magazine articles, ad copy, research and non-research essays, part of a screenplay...this writing thing wasn't really a problem for me. I've kept a copy of my first case study, which went through about 45 drafts before it was finalized, as one of my writing samples. I had significant editing help from at least two of my colleagues. A red pen was used, until my always expressive face assumed a rather stricken look. A black pen was substituted for the red. That didn't really help my ego much. And then, finally, something clicked for me and I was able to rewrite the case study myself and get it approved. Everything became a lot easier after that.

Looking back, this is how I'd describe it. Have you ever worn cowboy boots? I've only owned one pair, and I'm not sure what happened to them, but I'm quite sure I cried when I got rid of them. I loved them. I loved them when I first saw them in the store and I loved wearing them. There was a two-week period when I first started wearing them though, when I actually contemplated cutting off my feet. I've never had blisters on the tops of my feet before. I've never had blisters on my heels that bled. I've never stacked bandaids one on top of each other to try to prevent further damage and a little cushioning just so I could get through the breaking in process.

Mastering another form of writing - and a difficult one - was like breaking in those cowboy boots. Ultimately it was worth the struggle. Much to my surprise, writing is a skill that continues to develop the more of it you do. I'd add, 'as long as you continue to read good writing,' as my one caveat. A couple of years after my first case study, the receptionist at work got a call from someone asking to be put through to the company's best writer. My boss wasn't in, so she directed the call to me. Turns out it was a headhunter, and while the lovely Diana was outraged at being tricked this way, it was pretty hard for me not to giggle with sheer joy at the compliment she'd paid me.

I remember a client objecting strenuously to a press release and demanding to know why we'd chosen to use each and every phrase and structured it the way press releases are properly structured. I'm not sure what possessed me, but I do know we'd sweated over this release (our 'best teams' approach wasn't quite working in this instance, I'm afraid). I couldn't help myself. Even though I was the most junior person there, I had to be the one to justify our approach. And I did, mounting an extremely convincing case for why the release needed to be left alone if the client's goals were to be met. That release and the subsequent media relations we did with it led to the longest feature coverage I've ever helped generate.

And that was the point at which I realized I had found my voice as a writer. While I may not understand it on a conscious level when I begin to write, whatever method I have, whether it's research or an outline or that weird form of subconscious analysis that happens when you absorb a new form of writing by osmosis from reading, reading, reading...I now know there's no form of writing I can't master. One of the best things I learned at my former agency was to stop being neurotic about my writing. The collective writing approach used in a PR agency means you can't be too proprietary about your work. If you were to have a hissy fit every time something you wrote got changed, you wouldn't make it through the probationary period. There's no room for that sort of journalistic ego in PR writing, and there's also no time for it. The sort of jockeying for position (front page, please, and if not that, I'll settle for a section front page) that goes on at newspapers won't cut it. The learning process may be painful. Hair may be pulled. Tears may be shed. Paper may well be crumpled and flung. (Gee, I manage to make a pretty much silent activity seem quite melodramatic, don't I?)

Then, of course, once you have found your voice, you must use it. Or lose it. And so, I blog....

* As you can see from the first link I've posted, the organizers have listened and are including lunch! Oh, it's so nice to be listened to. Heeded. To have one's views taken into account. I'm still calling Starbucks to give 'em a heads up though.