Slight Tales # 23

Slight Tales # 23
Originally uploaded by ART NAHPRO

I cannot say enough good things about my flickr friend Art Nahpro, known IRL as the artist Paul Jackson. For a taste of his capabilities, watch this amazing video. He has a whole channel on youtube, I'll look for the link to that as well. Update July 23, 2008: here's the link to Paul's channel on youtube. I am still not sure why we're getting two versions of this embedded video in a single blog post, but I'll figure it out one of these years.



Enjoy.

Engaging graciously with one's audiences

World's most beautiful geraniums - one, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2008

Since social media and Web 2.0 are all about engagement and dialogue rather than top-down message delivery - which is, essentially, monloguing - I thought I would do a brief post about engaging graciously with one's audiences.

I came across Leo Bottary's blog when looking through the questions relating to public relations posed on LinkedIn - he had asked if there was a way to make PowerPoint presentations less deadly (my hyperbolic phrasing there), and I pertly answered that I believe Pecha Kucha is the answer - six slides, 20 seconds per slide, and you're out. Much to my surprise, I later found myself on the June honour roll on his blog - a lovely example of acknowledging one's readers. Leo and I were colleagues at the same firm, but he wasn't one with whom I'd worked directly or with whom I'd even corresponded during my stint at H&K. I'm not saying we're all wonderful, but it's certainly a huge talent pool of professionals who have benefited greatly from the resources, continuing education, and professional development opportunities made available to staff. I have to say I agree with him - basic social skills (including use of the 'magic words') are kinda key to this medium and should be a requirement for folks working in public relations.* And it's nice to see that Web 2.0 is more about standing up and being counted than the empowerment of anonymity we saw with Web 1.0.

Next up: my former boss Boyd Neil, whose blog can be found here, or through the links I've provided. A crisis communications and corporate reputation management expert at H&K, Boyd did something I think few people can, which was to build a department from an extremely motley crew of inherited staff with, shall we say, varying levels of ability. That's one tough gig. Coming across Boyd's original blog was actually what got me off (or onto) my ass to start blogging myself. The premise for his original blog was Proustian. Even though writing is a large part of what he does for a living, he had more to say on a variety of subjects, and his subject matter was not trivial. I was following his Air Canada complaint saga closely but with a rather hopeless feeling: having requested a gluten-free meal they sabotaged him on a flight to Europe and he was sick for days afterwards. As someone who's had a variety of food allergies throughout the course of her life and has been astonished to see food allergies given less respect and attention by servers than religious dietary restrictions, I would have been falling all over myself to grovel at the mistake I'd made if I were Air Canada. But no....

When I alerted him to the fact that a link he'd posted wasn't working, I got a very gracious acknowledgment from him. When we worked together I appreciated Boyd's professionalism so much and was frequently amused by the fanatical grammarian in him. I don't think I've convinced him that those who regulate the English language (I think it's the OED folks, but I'm a little hazy on this) have conceded on the split infinitive front (it had to have been all those Star Treks, no? After you've heard 'to boldly go' seven million times you have to accept that you're never going to be able to maintain an 'infinitives must not be split' stance - better to choose your battles wisely and just stick to refusing to permit sentences that end with prepositions, a battle we can win).

The third example, and the original motivation for this post, was this exchange I discovered on the CBC web site, in which Esther Enkin, the executive news editor, discusses why CBC chose not to air the latest Bernardo video in its entirety. It's an excellent example of how to deal with diversity of opinion without compromising the stance your organization has taken. And if you read it, you'll see that the tone of the questions actually maps to the gracious tone Esther displays throughout.

Happy reading, all.

* If only they were - I came as close to death as I ever have when I watched in horror as a junior colleague once - gasp - picked his nose in the middle of a major presentation to a major client we'd been trying to win for nearly a year. I have never prayed so fervently to Scottie to beam me up as at that moment.

Plus ca change, plus ca change

The Life of Riley, originally uploaded by The River Thief.

While this photo isn't timeless, with the clothing, the car, the chair (in Canada we call them Muskoka chairs, not Adirondack chairs) and even the architectural style of the cabins in the background firmly fixing it in the late 1950s, early 1960s, my aunt is doing precisely what I wish I were doing now - sitting outside, watching the chipmunks and listening to the sound of the wind in the trees.

Instead, however, I'm blogging away, and the escape to the cabin in the woods will be delayed a few weeks. I came across this article about Bill Gates stepping down and wanted to link to it and discuss it because it details some of the controversy surrounding the battle for market dominance of Microsoft Word over WordPerfect.

It may be silly to be nostalgic over software (of all things!), but it's interesting to me that it is universally acknowledged that Betamax was better technology than VCRs and yet VCR technology still managed to triumph (for a while). I don't know the details of how that happened, or I've forgotten them. I do know though that WordPerfect had actually achieved market dominance at one point, and that it was lovely software to use. New releases were relatively rare, but when they happened, the richness of functionality, the ease of use of the new features, and their incredible usefulness made learning an intensely rewarding experience. No one has ever made the mail merge as simple as WordPerfect did, although it was a bit of a jolt, after having memorized hundreds of commands for the F keys, to just be able to use your mouse to click on an icon with version 5.1.

I remember coming back from a client user conference in California and trying to tell some of my 20-something colleagues what one of the product managers I'd met at the conference said to me. In retrospect I'm beginning to think anyone who worked in high tech PR during the dotcom boom deserves a medal merely for having been able to find a journalist under a rock who was willing to cover our clients - there was that much going on it sometimes seemed like we were asking them to be four places at once. Anyway, I remember telling them that the product manager had told me a story about his mother being a very early adopter of technology and that while she knew other software was available, she was still using Multimate. Even I had only encountered one or two computers in the 80s that used Multimate software. So I told them the story, adding that the software product manager had also said, 'Most people already have more software than they will ever need - or learn how to use.' I was met with blank stares. Usually my anecdotes get a better reception than this. Finally, one of the 20-somethings asked, 'Multimate?' I explained that it had been the word processing standard before WordPerfect. The stares were no less blank. And so I gave up. Twenty years can be a very long time, it seems. And my point - which was the bewildering profusion of options and the stress engendered by constantly having to learn new things to make one's job easier merely because new things were being developed and marketed, not because they were really necessary - had just sailed right over their heads.

But I was also thinking last week about the world before Starbucks. During one of my mother's last trips to visit me in Toronto in the mid-1990s, Starbucks hadn't really penetrated my consciousness. There was a Second Cup in my neighbourhood (Kensington Market), but Starbucks hadn't really arrived, and I caught myself wondering what she would have made of both the coffee and of the Starbucks experience. In her later years she was a huge Tim Horton's fan, and I wonder if she would have hated Starbucks' coffee, or if she would just have objected to its price.

The battle lines are very clearly drawn between Tim Horton's and Starbucks, and while it makes perfect sense that these two firms have positioned themselves at opposite ends of the marketing spectrum and deliberately set out to create completely different customer experiences, they've behaved like rival hockey teams. Except for the fact that they seem to have forgotten that you can't have a hockey game without two teams, and that hockey (and coffee) fans have something in common: they love hockey. Erm, coffee. I'm mystified by the loyal following Tim Horton's has (although I do snicker when folks cross the street with their Tim Horton's coffee to sit on the Starbucks patio directly across the street). The coffee is weak and bitter, the lighting makes me pray to be beamed up (or back in time to an era where fluorescent lighting had yet to be invented), and the whole orange and red thing - it doesn't just make me want to consume quickly and get out of there, it makes it pretty much impossible for me to set foot in the place.

But I find it sad to see Starbucks making the kind of mistakes that lead to the closure of 600 stores in a single year. When I lived in a town of 6000 in Ontario, the only good coffee I got was the coffee I made myself. I used to joke with my former colleagues that they could always leave Toronto and open a Starbucks in Kincardine, because the town needed one source of commercially available decent coffee (there were three Tim Horton's in town, I believe. Okay, two. That was two too many, IMNHO). Silly and frustrating though the whole Starbucks language is, as a corporate entity they've done an amazing job of training young staff and of creating a consistent experience. What seems almost like the mock-Italian of their creation labelling masks some very good things at the heart of this corporate empire. For staff, provision of benefits for even part-timers, a wage above the minimum, and a commitment to training are the things we as customers benefit from but don't necessarily see. Exquisite service, comfortable seating and lighting, and consistency of product quality are things we should celebrate, no matter our vintage.

Lois and Allan, 1946

Lois and Allan, 1946, originally uploaded by The River Thief.

A year ago today my life as a daughter officially ended with my mother's death. My father and good friend died on Valentine's Day in 1991. On this first anniversary I have just concluded my final duty to my parents, arranging the grave marker for their cremation plot at the North Vancouver cemetery. It was installed yesterday and I have just come back from mailing the cheque to Gerry Brewer, who made this final and amazingly painful duty so much easier. Perhaps it's sad that we have never actually met, but I appreciated not having to make an appointment, being able to select a grave marker online and work with emailed proofs, especially since the interment process was a little fraught for me. I also mailed copies of my parents' wedding film to the three cousins to whom I'm closest. One is featured in the film, as she was my mother's junior bridesmaid, her father shot the film (but still manages to be in it, so I'm not quite sure who else was involved in the filming, perhaps her mother as well), and - well - so many of our relatives are in it that I thought they should have copies.

Over the last few days I've been going through photos, editing, scanning, cropping, adjusting, and posting on flickr in a family photos set I've created.

This morning I found a photo I must have seen several times before but had never really looked at. There are several similar photos of my father during his army years, horsing around with one or another of his sisters, flirting with a local waitress before he 'shipped out' to WWII, striding into his future with a grin on his devilishly handsome face. I hadn't even realized it was my mother in this photo until I looked at it closely this morning. But on the back is written, in my mother's hand: "Aug. 16/46. Lois & Allan. AND THE HAT."

In looking at the photo and reading the date, I suddenly realized this was the first photo ever taken of my parents together, and that it was taken very shortly - probably no more than two weeks - after they had met.

It definitively answers the question that some of my cousins have had the courage to ask, 'What did he see in her?'

My father is not only movie-star handsome in this photo, he is in his prime. Snappily turned out in his newly acquired civvie finery, recently demobbed, he looks proud and determined here. There is no doubt in my mind that he was thinking, as he glanced at the photographer, 'this is the one.' Probably, since it was 1946, it was phrased, 'This is the woman I'm going to marry.'

But it is the look on my mother's face that amazes. The softness, the glow, the yielding tenderness. It's obvious she's captivated.

I wish I had known that woman a little better, the one who, for a brief while anyway, believed that life was full of infinite possibilities and the world was her oyster.

It's not its job to teach you how to spell

The miracle of pine trees, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2008

At the risk of sounding terribly peevish and perhaps to position myself too far on the anal side of the oral/anal dichotomy, I have been noticing a lot of typos recently on web sites and blogs I encounter.

Far and away the single most common misspelling - and really, it's almost a word misusage rather than a spelling error - is the confusion that seems to exist between the contraction, 'it's' - short for it is - and the singular possessive of the personal pronoun it (as in he, she, it) - which is spelled 'its'.

Many years ago, I concluded there were two types of bad spellers in this world. The first is the person who just doesn't really relate to language all that well - or at least, not to its written form. Keenly aware that their intelligence is, to some extent, being judged by the quality of the written work they produce and that they are not what you could call 'linguistic naturals,' these folks always ask someone else to proof their work, keep a dictionary at hand, and actually do something to compensate for what they perceive as a handicap.

Then there are what I have always thought of as the arrogant misspellers, and I think this is what I'm encountering in a lot of web copy these days. These are the folks who do have an affinity for written language and they are probably also readers. They don't have an actual learning disability and they aren't intimidated by the written word. In my experience, these are the folks to watch out for. An early facility with language has made them horribly arrogant. They never spell check anything. They don't own a dictionary, and they think you're kinda stodgy for consulting one from time to time. With the advent of spell check, they've rested their case. The fact that spell check isn't going to tell you that you've typed 'change' instead of 'chance' doesn't bother them a bit. I don't blame anyone for not using grammar check when copy writing - it has an almost mediaeval approach to sentence fragments that would drive anyone who can actually type - or write - nuts.

However, the grammar check would help those who seriously do not know the difference between the contraction it's and the possessive of the personal pronoun it. Which is its. There is no apostrophe. And it is so easy to check this on your own. Just ask yourself, could I substitute 'it is' here? If the answer is no, remove the apostrophe immediately. If not sooner. And step away from the writing instrument. At least for a little while.

I will not name names. I know that the blogging platform in particular doesn't lend itself to mid-post course correction - it's very frustrating to write a post in Word and then have to reformat everything, adding the italics for the book and movie titles all over again, perhaps a little bit of bold here and there for emphasis, formatting the links. None of these things is particularly creative or inspiring, and perhaps they're antithetical to the creative process. But when I see 'it's' used incorrectly 14 times on the same page, please don't expect me to believe that you know better and just didn't grammar check your copy. You obviously don't know any better. But if you're reading this post, you no longer have any excuse. And if you'd learned this rule back in grade three when it was first taught, you wouldn't be having a problem with it now. Would ja?

For a list of the 100 words most often spelled incorrectly in the English language, click here.

Releasing the balloons: social media as opportunity

I'm sorry you were so unhappy., originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2008.

While following up on a comment I'd made the other day on Kris Krug's blog, I noticed some of the resources he's made available on his site. For those of you who haven't heard of Kris, check out his blog and his photos on flickr. He's an extremely gracious young man (having finally achieved 'older woman' status I'm allowed to refer to him as such). I thought it was hilarious that the very first person I met at the kickoff dinner for NV08 was one of its chief instigators and organizers, but in my new, far more relaxed approach to networking (i.e. I have no expectations other than the trading of information about myself and receipt of same in kind), I am often pleasantly surprised by the people I meet without even really trying.

Today's find was SmashLAB's White Paper: A Primer in Social Media, which can be downloaded as a PDF.

What a pleasure it was to read. It's recent (March 2008), and while it's not encyclopaedic in its scope, it has reinforced something that occurred to me earlier in the week: social media presents opportunities that were always available to companies and individuals, but which few, if any, chose to employ. There were, however, some exceptions and workarounds. Here are three:

Very early in my career, I worked for Maclean Hunter in the old Maclean Hunter building at the southeast corner of University and Dundas in Toronto. This was the heart of Chinatown, close to funky little Baldwin Street, as well as to the Art Gallery of Ontario. There were tons of restaurants in the area. But on rainy days, people tended not to go out to lunch, and made their way to the cafeteria instead (Torontonians don't have that same ability to cheerfully endure rain as Vancouverites. They don't do well with snow either. In fact, the only thing they do seem to be able to endure weather wise is extreme heat and humidity, which finally drove me out of town).

Let's face it, it was cafeteria food - a step up from the slop served in high school, university and hospital cafeterias, but not exactly cutting-edge cuisine. Still, it was cheap and not totally nauseating. One of the things I noticed on the occasions I had lunch there was the the vice president of the consumer magazine division and publisher at the time of Maclean's magazine, Lloyd Hodgkinson, was always there whenever I was. In fact, he sometimes sat at my table. Other times I saw him sitting with other employees from a variety of different magazines. What I never saw was Lloyd sitting with a cabal of other executives at or near his level in the corporation.

I was once sent to talk to him about something, and while waiting to see if he had a moment to talk, he came out of his office and answered his (absent) secretary's ringing phone. I waited till he was finished the call and then teased him about - well - basically about the tail wagging the dog. And in the nicest possible way, he immediately set me straight. Basically he said, it's my job to ensure Maclean's subscribers are happy. And if they're not, I want to know about it. But, I said, doesn't the circulation department look after all that? Yes, he said, but if someone has taken the trouble to call me, I want to hear what they have to say, and make it right if I can. (I am, of course, paraphrasing here, since the conversation took place sometime between 1981 and 1983, and while I do have almost perfect short-term recall of conversations that really and truly interest me, it has been a while, hasn't it?)

I also think a lot about my stint with Coles Bookstores at the time of its most frantic expansion by opening new stores (as opposed to its later engulf and devour strategy, when it consumed first the Classic and later the W.H. Smith book chain). This expansion (I think the number of stores was supposed to double in less than three years and penetrate the entire US market in that time) was putting horrific strain on the existing stores. Making projection was well nigh impossible, given that we were operating with shrinking salary budgets and trying to cope with no less than three increases in the minimum wage within a year and a half. It was a challenge, let me tell you, and we had to get very creative indeed to keep the store adequately staffed and try to control shoplifting (our security device at the time being a single larger mirror). I heard stories of managers becoming so frustrated that they quit without giving notice and mailed their store keys back to head office. It was hard to get a district manager to visit your store (they were supposed to do a circuit of all their stores every six weeks) so you could raise issues and get some support for improvements; they were all being conscripted to help with the expansion too. Head Office seemed pretty busy too, and while there was a newsletter of sorts, it didn't really contain the kind of news that was important to us. Much to my surprise, our best sources of information were the publishers' sales reps, who did visit us faithfully (even though we did everything but our mass market ordering through head office).

I once took a creative job search techniques seminar. During this day-long event, the instructor gave us tips on how to get to the person who had the power to hire us. He suggested that if we were having trouble getting past the person's secretary or the receptionist that we lurk in the area and wait till said support staffer left her desk, then basically rush the office of the person we wanted to see. I came as close as I ever had to having an apoplectic fit at hearing this suggestion. I had done temp work as both a receptionist and an admin assistant. I had done so when the organization I was working for was hiring. Trust me on this one, not a single person who gave me attitude when I was trying to set up an interview with them (or who was following up on their application), was *ever* hired by any of the close to 30 organizations for which I temped. Because, of course, when reporting back on interviews arranged or passing on messages regarding who had called, I transmitted not only the bare bones of who, when, and how to reach, but also the substance and tone of the interchange.

The smashLAB white paper quotes Yahoo Senior VP Jeff Weiner, referring to blogs, forums, and social media in general, as saying that there has never been a tool like this in the history of market research. "We can now tap into timely responses from the public, at very little cost."

I beg to differ just slightly here. There has always been a way to tap into timely responses. The information has always been available to those who wanted it, without going to the expense of costly market research. But in order to tap into that information, corporations would have had to actually engage with their staff and suppliers and to listen to what those who were dealing with the complaints and getting feedback on products at the sales level were actually saying. They would have had to open their ears and listen, and instead of going through the motions of staff days where cake and hotdogs were consumed and paintball pellets were shot in a teambuilding fiasco, they would have had to actually get down and dirty and make a two-way flow of information not only possible but probable. They would also have to have understood how destructive the creation of silos within organizations was, and that if personal-empire building within companies was permitted, the company's death knell had probably already been rung.

The smashLAB authors say, towards the end of the paper, that the communities created by and flourishing within the social media context 'tend to respond best to authentic, honest and respectable dialogue and conduct....Effective social media efforts build relationships between companies and consumers.'

Indeed they do. But the true value of social media is that these relationships can be built and maintained quickly, easily, and cost-effectively, and that the Zeitgeist is finally such that we, as consumers, now have the ability to access, act, react, and interact with those who are trying to market to us, and that we are now perceived as having critical mass. We always did have critical mass. We just didn't used to be quite so organized about exercising it. Nor has it ever been so easy for us to communicate with corporations. And they have the ability to benefit from our collective wisdom as end users.

One final point re the white paper: another lightbulb went off for me in the discussion of the 'WalMarting Across America' blog fiasco. What WalMart did wrong was not so much not being transparent about the fact that the trip was corporate sponsored or that the idea had originated with its PR firm, Edelman. What was really wrong was that they presented only the stories of happy WalMart employees. Had they been transparent even to the point of showing the good, the bad, and the rather homely, it's unlikely they would have been 'outed' as they were.

For decades now (well okay for almost exactly two decades), I have been saying (you might say ranting but that glass is both half empty and half full - that's the definition of half ;)) that the reason women were better at sales than men was because women understood - on an almost instinctive level - that selling was as much about listening as it was about telling. More and more I think Helen Fisher is right in her book The First Sex: the early days of the 21st Century are indeed the first time in the developed world's history that there is a critical mass of educated women freed of the responsibilities of child rearing and capable of effecting change on a meaningful level. And if you don't believe me, read Kris Krug's charming redress of gender imbalance regarding tech folks to watch in 2008.

Part of the 70% or part of the 30%? I just don't know

Birkenhead Lake, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2004

As mentioned in my last post, I decided to read Paul Quarrington's King Leary even though it had been selected as this year's Canada Reads book. I'm a Quarrington fan from way back, and this is the third of his novels I've read. Home Game, as I recall, was hilarious, although it led me to confuse Pemberton and Penticton for quite a while (have I said, 'Don't bother me with details,' recently?). Residents of both communities would be understandably enraged* though - I get it now, having lived here for six years (although I've still never been to Penticton and Birkenhead Lake, pictured above, is the closest I've come to spending any time in Pemberton - we may have stopped for gas there). I read Civilization a couple of years ago and loved it.

I've been following the Hockey Night in Canada (HNiC) theme song controversy as CBC blew the negotiations to keep the song, and I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. There is nothing quite as Canadian as hockey (I'm not sure how the Russians feel about it, but it's hard to imagine a European of any nationality being quite so passionate about any single sport). In my research, I (somewhere) came across the statistic that 70% of all Canadians consider themselves hockey fans. I know my Taiwanese ESL students were hard pressed to figure out what was going on during the playoffs the year before last. They were much more interested in basketball, and the Canuck flag waving and the horns honking and just the getting in the cars and driving about to celebrate a sports team's victory were puzzling customs and ones I was hard-pressed to explain to them. For the best coverage I've encountered regarding the breakdown of negotiations for the HNiC theme song, here's the story from The Tyee re what went wrong and why. (I'd like to know how I'm supposed to know when to leave the room though if I don't hear the familiar 'doo do doo' doo doo' of the old song.)

Since yesterday was Father's Day, it seemed like the perfect time to delve into King Leary. My dad was the first hockey fan I met, and we had a little ritual for the Saturday night games when I was growing up. Dad and I would go to the corner store and pick up a package of Callard & Bowser toffee and we'd eat it with Mom while watching The Saint, which immediately preceded HNiC (that's almost pronounceable; more so if you have any Ukrainian friends and have been trained in the subtleties of pronouncing names that begin 'Hr' or 'Hn'). Given how highly censored my television watching was, I'm amazed I was allowed to watch The Saint. Roger Moore was totally irresistible in his youth though, and it was television in the 60s, so I suppose it was pretty tame (would love to see it in reruns just to see what I missed in terms of innuendo the first time around).

For a reason I never really understood, my father was a Boston Bruins fan. We lived in Ottawa, and of course Ottawa didn't have a team between 1934 and 1992 (although why I should take the word of some guy who lives in HAWAII on hockey history I'm not sure). He liked them because they were the underdogs, and for many years he viewed it as his personal mission to help them win the Stanley Cup through the sheer force of his devoted fandom.

HNiC, in those days before telephone ringers could be turned off or phones could be unplugged, was a 'no-call zone' for my father. It wasn't really okay to call between periods or during the post show either, as the selection of the three stars was almost as important as the game itself. Getting the recognition right was almost as important as skating, passing, foiling shots on goal, and playing like a gentleman. (Although it was kinda scary the way he'd get all worked up when the gloves came off. 'Fight!' he'd yell, really loudly. 'Fight! Fight! Fight!')

One of my uncles decided to be a pest one Saturday night and called repeatedly while the game was on. Dad answered the phone the first two times it rang and explained that the hockey game was on. The third time my uncle called Dad didn't bother to pick up the receiver - he just picked up the whole phone and threw it across the room. For a few days after that talking on the phone was an interesting experience - you had to lie on the floor in the dining room and gently hold the wires together as they fed into whatever the pre-cursors to jacks were called. Eventually he fixed the phone. In another twist on improved technology, you always used to be able, in the days before helmets and mouthguards, to spot a hockey player by his front teeth. They'd usually be capped by the time he was 16, and the thin blue line of the old tooth capping procedure was visible if you looked for it.

And then, after nursing the Bruins to their Stanley Cup victory in 1970, the creation of the WHA in 1972, and NHL expansion, Dad seemed to lose interest in hockey. We must have watched a few WHA games, because I know we snickered at Bobby Hull's hair plugs. Dad was tolerant of my crush on Derek Sanderson (was he really the first professional hockey player with facial hair? If so, why isn't this considered worthy of mention? Ah, because there was a player in the 40s named Garth Boesch who had a mustache - never heard it referred to as 'lip dressing' before though). He preferred the Mahovolich brothers and Phil Esposito, although he always had a lot of respect for Gordie Howe, Eddie Shack, and Maurice Richard.

To say that hockey is our national obsession is not an overstatement. The commentary on the loss of the rights to the theme song has apparently inspired 500+ comments on some news articles detailing the fiasco. And it has been a bit of a fiasco. CBC should have bought it outright after about the second season. I'd rather focus on the things the CBC does right than on what it does wrong though, which is actually a planned post for some time in the fairly near future.

Before he lost his passion for hockey, Dad would go to the occasional game in either Montreal or Toronto. I'm not sure how he got tickets for the Montreal games, but when he wanted to see a game in Toronto, he would pick up the phone and call King Clancy's office and arrange his tickets that way. It's going to be just one of those unsolved mysteries why he did this - to the best of my knowledge, my father didn't know the King and there was no reason to believe he'd get better seats doing it his way. Nevertheless, that's how it worked for him.

And having just finished King Leary, it couldn't have been a better choice for Father's Day reading. It is, in so many ways, a tender novel, and an accomplished one. It has many of Quarrington's comedic moments, particularly when Leary free associates between his glory days and the present. His final execution of his 'patented' St. Louis Whirligig on Carlton Street in Toronto is just so easy to imagine, as is the young pup's (whom Leary anoints as the new 'King') calm statement that he has six 'airborne manoeuvres.' I'm not entirely sure why Quarrington's changed all the names while so thinly disguising the very real characters. If King Leary isn't King Clancy I'm a - well - something I'm not.

Under all the hilarity though, there are some pretty tender messages about life and love and forgiveness. Before he croaks (because, at his advanced age, it could be any day), Leary is able to actually learn some of the lessons his elders have been trying to teach him for seven decades or so, and apply them. Unable to do anything for the son who killed himself, and not wise enough to help his best friend from his hockey days get sober, Leary is able to finally put it all together and reach out to his surviving son, granting him the grace of a reconciliation before his father dies.

So for me, Quarrington's King Leary was a huge voyage down memory lane. It was also a reminder of a couple of things. First, that one of the reasons hockey is so important in our culture is that it represented a way out for the poorest of the poor from the smallest of small towns (or not even towns, as the King says). The Manny Oz portion of the story, which deals with an aboriginal player whose NHL salary probably supports all of his siblings and both his parents, is heart rending, every bit as much so as the current aspirations of African Americans seeking to end generations of crushing poverty with basketball scholarships.

We once visited a childhood friend of my father's who had made the NHL draft. Not sure if he was from my father's own hamlet in New Brunswick or not, but he only lasted a year and it must have been on one of the farm teams as I can't find him listed as an NHL player. He was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and, by the time I met him, when my father was in his late 30s, he could barely walk with the help of two canes. Second, it reminded me of the poetry in motion that is men skating well - men who can't thread a needle and look odd holding tea cups in their big hands, men who can't dance to save their souls and aren't at ease socially, but whose souls shine through when they cover the ice so apparently effortlessly. And finally, its message of redemptive love - for a sport played superlatively, for a friend, for a child - well, it made me cry a bit.

* For those of you not familiar with British Columbia: Pemberton is located about half an hour north of Whistler by car and was a sleepy farming community until it became Whistler's bedroom community. Penticton, in the Okanagan Valley, lies in what I will not so politely describe as 'wacky religious cult' territory. Not, of course, that everyone who lives in Penticton is a member of a wacky cult. Oh never mind, I'm going to give offense no matter what I say now. I'll make a point of visiting Penticton soon so I have a more informed opinion. :)

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. ----->