“Booby Mom” was Both Shocking and Awesome: Can Provocative Content Improve Print’s Prospects?

Did I have a problem with now-infamous boobsucking TIME cover? Not at all, but I was somewhat surprised by the brouhaha that surrounded the image of the "booby Mom" whose 3-year old was photographed standing on a chair suckling her boobies.  Does that sound so pornographic or rude? You'd think so based on the throngs of readers (and media outlets) who commented on the controversial cover, considering it pornographic. Really people? I was a lot more troubled by what was going inside TIME Magazine and the article about attachment parenting than the cover. Truly troubled.

But back to the image… “Booby Mom” has spawned an avalanche of coverage and launched much discussion, not just about “attachment parenting,” the actual subject of the TIME cover story, but about the ways in which magazines (like all print media), have taken massive hard-copy readership hits can use thoughtful, provocative content and social-media relationships with readers to boost revenues. A TIME spokeswoman told the New York Times that the cover helped that issue become the magazine’s best-seller so far this year and doubled the subscription rates for that week. Says a lot about the so-called disgust about a breastfeeding mom on the cover, right?

Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that since around 2003-2004 newspaper and magazine circulation numbers have plunged as a result of the internet revolution. This got me thinking, as someone who pitches stories to media outlets for a living, about how print media can use provocation and button-pushing to help bolster their other ongoing efforts to slow the slide. Of course, a lot of the time provocative content gets shelved on the recommendation of the bean-counters who are afraid of offending anyone who might possibly buy a copy of the paper, or better yet, a subscription.

Let’s Face it, Bare Skin Sells… Is That So Bad?

And yet it is the most controversial messages that generate the most visceral reaction. Let’s face it, they are the messages that lead to water-cooler talk, arguments and coveted mindshare of brands.  If you’re old enough you’ll probably remember Demi Moore’s naked and very pregnant Vanity Fair cover in 1991.  The “decency police” went berserk denouncing the cover as obscene and generally gross. But like TIME’s “Booby Mom” cover, the Demi Moore cover is one of Vanity Fair’s best-remembered  and most imitated ad nauseam by celebrity women with a bun in the oven.

And then there was the The New Yorker, whose editorial staff must have been sweating (and likely second-guessing themselves) on the eve of the publication’s 2008 cover lampooning Fox News’ take on Barack and Michelle Obama’s onstage “fist bump” as a “terrorist fist jab,” bracing for the storm of criticism that followed.  That happens in lots of industries:  fear of offense and of reduced revenue discouraging unconventional or “risky” views.

Fear is contagious and all too soon there is nobody left who is willing to voice an idea that could be seen as too “out there.”

I’ve seen this with numerous clients I’ve dealt with throughout my career. It’s understandable, especially in the tetchy economic climate we’ve been living in for the past several years. And, when necessary, it’s been my role to poke, prod and nudge a nervous client to take a risk that ends up paying off. As someone whose business is to improve clients’ business, I know it’s important to encourage “outside the box” ideas because that’s where innovation comes from. When we push ourselves beyond our comfort zones we often end up succeeding way beyond our own expectations.

So kudos to TIME Magazine. Kudos to the “booby Mom” Jamie Grumet. And kudos to the other half of TIME readers who could stomach a 3-year-old nursing from his mother’s breast.

Of course, if we didn’t have that brouhaha in the first place, maybe I wouldn’t have written this piece to begin with. And that’s exactly my point. 

Forget ‘Unfriended,’ Try ‘Unjobbed’ A Facebook and Twitter Posting Refresher. STOP OVERSHARING!

Every time I write a blog post like this I mutter to myself, “this will be the last time I’ll need to reinforce this message.” But each time I’m reminded of our collective short memories.

Whether it’s a cruise ship disaster off the Italian coast that generates a frigid corporate response, a “communications guru” for Groupon that tries to quell investor concerns by saying “Every three months, Groupon is a different company,” (wtf?) or the recent demotion of a Miami-Dade Fire Rescue captain for bigoted comments he posted on Facebook regarding the Trayvon Martin shooting, people in positions of power – or anyone for that matter – fail to remember some simple communications truths when it comes to expressing thoughts and ideas in a public space.

And it’s especially true when that public space is Facebook and Twitter.

But before I dig deeper into the recent Wall Street Journal article that inspired this post, let’s set down a few definitions and lay the groundwork for some ideas. People tend to take a schizoid approach to their handling of social media. Many consider Facebook and Twitter one part public forum to voice concerns and express joy over life’s great events and its trivialities, and part personal-echo chamber-cum-sounding-board. In other words, they use it as their personal diary – either through lengthy posts or 140-characters.

Readers, the time has come to seriously reconsider that approach.

Last week, Gene Morphis, the Chief Financial Officer at Francesca’s Holdings Corp., a Houston-based women’s clothing company, was fired after a series of what were deemed offensive postings. While it’s unclear if the article’s pull quote from Morphis’ Twitter page was Francesca’s final straw, it read:

“Dinner w/Board tonite. Used to be fun. Now one must be on guard every second.”

When it came to his job security, he wasn’t kidding. Morphis should have been on guard – and kept his opinions a lot more guarded and certainly to himself.

A Generation of Oversharers

Of course, privacy settings can to some extent ensure that Facebook and Twitter remain private mediums, meant to be within narrow circles of approved friends. But regardless, they are not or should not be viewed strictly as digital diaries. Dictionary.com defines “diary” as the following: “a daily record, usually private, especially of the writer’s own experiences, observations, feeling, attitudes, etc.” When it comes to the web, the phrase “usually private” could afford to lose one term.

Morphis had been the company’s CFO since October 2010. And for two years he really raked in the dough, earning $1.2 million in 2010 and $565,720 in 2011, according to the article. Why the half million drop is another story.  But earnings figures like that suggest that paychecks – even large ones – are no guarantee that a person is irreplaceable. 

Social Media Ettitequte Lesson # 24: Don’t S@#! In Your Own Nest

The incident also serves as a reminder to PR professionals that as much as we help manage a company’s public message, it is not our responsibility to be everywhere and anywhere without a filter. Besides, policing people’s Facebook and Twitter accounts would be an invasion of privacy – even if social media has proven itself anything but private.

The lesson: People need the self-control and discipline to police themselves. So keep writing Facebook posts, keep Tweeting to your heart’s content, but be mindful of what you say. We may suffer from collectively truncated memories these days, but in the age of wireless information overload, news about sinking ships, racist commentary, and the musings of paranoid executives gets around pretty fast.

Speaking of short-term memory lapses, a quick check on Morphis’ Facebook page shows that as of Friday May 18, his employment status still reads: “Cfo · Oct 2010 to present · Houston, Texas.”

Didn’t he get the memo?

The rest of us sure did.

Your Brain on Facebook and Why Blogging is Going by the Wayside

Our ADD culture now shuns corporate blogging, favoring less time-consuming Facebook postings and that’s a shame. Paralysis by no analysis.

At 138 characters, the above opening to this piece would work as an effective tweet. It would also work as a brief Facebook shout out. Talk about the irony in blogging about how corporate blogging is going by the wayside.

Last month, USA Today reported that businesses who blog fell to 37% in 2011, down from 50% in 2010. The reason most commonly given for the blog blackout: blogging takes too much effort and (it does, I should know!), it’s not where customers are – they’re on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. 

So to answer my own question that frames this blog post – Facebook and Twitter aren’t killing bloggers.

Our need for instant gratification, insane levels of information overloaded, and our anywhere and everywhere mobile connected lifestyle is.

It’s incredulous to think of blogging as an antiquated medium already. But at the speed at which technology changes these days, it’s easy to see the blog as barely a step above traditional email. Just another thing to read, to add to the burdensome pile of daily to-dos…

Like I said, blogging does take effort. More than just aggregating other’s works or simply “curating,” successful blogging takes aggregation one step further, providing analysis and commentary – two functions that come right from the world of traditional print media. To a large extent, blogging takes the best of old school media and combines it with the zero production costs of web publishing and the ethic of instant and transparent content updating.

Does that mean every company should blog? No. It doesn’t. But for the ones that do, modern blogging should be viewed as an essential compliment to the faster and shorter paced world of Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. Consider these mediums as “headline grabbers,” or teasers – ways to hook and link your audience back to your company’s website.

Considering that ThinkInk is among the 37% of companies that maintains their blog as both commentary and reaction to the ever-changing world of communications, our bias is unavoidable. And I’ll readily concede that blogging, tweeting and Facebook posting can all exist as un-tethered mediums, serving their own benefits. In fact, with brevity as the backdrop to this blog post, the 138-character opener served as an effective way to condense, trim and consolidate my thoughts, making for clean, crisp writing.

But sometimes, even in our mobile-enable, digital-frenzied world, people need to sit down, read a long newspaper article (in whatever medium) digest complicated, thought-provoking material and let the revelations that those works generate percolate and permeate their neurons.

Corporate blogging is hard work. So is going to the gym.

Brains, like our bodies, need constant workouts for them to remain in top shape and a steady diet of only social media probably isn’t the best for either.

Now was this 466-word article so damn hard to read? 

A Lesson for the Growing Virtual Campus: Stay Grounded and Keep Human

In November 2011 the Japanese announced that their supercomputer “K Computer,” – the world’s fastest – achieved 10 quadrillion calculations per second. Don’t laugh. In nerdy tech-geek speak, 10 quadrillion calculations is shorthand for a petaflop or floating-point operations per second (I had to look that up). Breaking the 10-petaflop barrier was a big deal, but already US competitors are working hard to build a supercomputer with twice that speed. Such a computing behemoth could be going live later this year.

That may be all well and good. But if an operator were to ask the K Computer what its emotions concerning love are or for it to express gratitude toward its creator for being built, I can guarantee you that 10 petaflops or 100 wouldn’t make much difference. K Computer simply wouldn’t compute.

Why?

Because even with the best and brightest human minds working on the problem, artificial intelligence still has a long way to go. Try as they might, something is lost in translation – reaction time is off, responses to questions feel forced, and even the worst public speaker on the planet is liable to excite a crowd better than the tinny voice of a computer, say, like Watson, the metallic brainiac that beat its human competitors on Jeopardy last February.

And that’s exactly the same technological limitations I fear when I read about the growing virtual campus movement as more and more universities consider adding virtual classrooms and e-learning opportunities for their students. David Brooks, in a recent article in The New York Times, rightly points out that online learning is particularly good at adjusting the learning pace to individual students as well as the usefulness of assisting remedial students. But the doubts Brooks raises over online learning’s abilities seem too large to surmount. He writes:

“Will online learning diminish the face-to-face community that is the heart of the college experience? Will it elevate functional courses in business and marginalize subjects that are harder to digest in an online format, like philosophy? Will fast online browsing replace deep reading?”

My short answer to all three questions is an unfortunate, yes – for now. Take videoconferencing technologies like Skype and Facetime. As a Miami-based public relations firm, I’ve joined the 31 million Skype users to communicate with clients as well as staff. While it’s clearly an improvement over standard phones and conveys more information, (though pixilated/frozen images can be even more annoying than a dropped call) if I had the option I’d still prefer to speak to these people in person – to make eye contact and gauge body language. With Skype and Facetime, users look at cameras. And it feels that way.

And it’s that lack of human connection which spills over into Brooks’ second question. Imagine the quintessential freshman college philosophy course without that genuine real-world student-teacher give and take? The truth is I wouldn’t want to. As for Brooks’ third concern, “fast online browsing,” is already becoming an epidemic thanks in part to rapid smartphone adoption and 150-character Twitter feeds. In other words, small screen sizes and information overload are already threatening “deep reading” and its requisite offshoot, deep analysis.

Virtual vs. Real

Of course, technology is always improving and the goal of virtual and simulation software is to ultimately drop the “virtual” in their names so that what they produce is indistinguishable from the real world experience. As we approach the November 2012 presidential election you can be absolutely sure that CNN will unveil some new virtual teleconferencing equipment. Back in 2008 those efforts produced a sort-of hologram that gave viewers the impression that correspondents were in the studio with Wolf Blitzer. While impressive, the image was more about TV special effects and less about true holography – 3-dimensional reporters never occupied the CNN broadcast space. The conclusion: the “hologram” was cool but it proved more of a distraction (and a way to boost ratings) than it was a way to effectively deliver information.

As colleges and universities sign on to offer online and virtual lessons, they should take this lesson to heart: stay grounded and keep some human element to your programs. Introduce students to all the magic videoconferencing, the mobile web and social media have to offer in an educational capacity, but let those technologies be explored in the real-world by a flesh and blood professor, augmenting their lectures, not supplanting them.

That is, at least until the K Computer – or its 1,000-petaflop relative – learns how to build the L, M, N, O and P computers without any help from us. 

Slow-Jamming Prez Is Height Of Cool

The following article by Vanessa Horwell, Chief Visibility Officer of ThinkInk, originally appeared on Marketing Daily on 05/03/2012.

The first American president to appear on television was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Speaking at the opening of the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City, he declared the event “open to all mankind.” But for all Roosevelt’s TV-friendly oratory, it wasn’t until 1960 with the election of John F. Kennedy, historians argue, that television fully matured. Used with expert precision, Kennedy became our first “TV president.”

The same technological evolution can be seen with former president Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Clinton may have been the first president to send an email, but it is Barack Obama, with his social media-savvy Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts, that have allowed him to take top honors as the nation’s first “multimedia president.”

Too Cool for School? Not This Prez

It’s that media/tech-savvy distinction that allows Obama to connect with young voters –- better than even the saxophone-playing-Clinton once did. Obama’s presidential “cool” allows him license to use Kennedy’s favorite communications medium in new ways too. On April 24, Obama was the guest-in-chief on "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" -- where he joined the host in a bit called “Slow-Jam the News,” where current events are put to a relaxed R&B beat.

But humor was only part of Obama’s continuing call to cool. His presence was a superb lesson in public relations.

Obama took the opportunity to connect with Fallon’s college-aged and 20-something viewers to address an issue that is central to their futures -– student loans and mounting debt. The five-minute opener (with nearly 5 million YouTube views when I wrote this post) featured a smiling and hand-waving president who morphed into mocking seriousness. With a bluesy backbeat, the chief jammer began: 

“On July 1st of this year the interest rates on Stafford student loans -- the same loans that many of you use to help pay for college -- are set to double,” he said. …“What we said [to congress] is simple. Now is not the time to make school more expensive for our young people.”

The camera returned to a smile-suppressing Fallon, where he delivered the follow-up line in a raspy, deep voice. “Ooooh yeah. You should listen to the president." 

Public Relations 101: Stay On Message

With performances like that, who needs costly political ads or even stump speeches? Obama chose the student loan topic deliberately. Hours before the live taping, Republican presidential challenger Mitt Romney began backpedaling when it came to his opinions on the “student loan crisis,” first tacitly endorsing the July 1 deadline and then breaking with Republican colleagues to support the president’s call to keep student loan interest rates in check.

Perhaps the Romney campaign would like to blame it on the leap year.

On February 29, at a campaign stop in Ohio, Romney answered a question from a law student that illuminated his position regarding student loans and the need for market forces -- not public handouts -- to determine the fair cost of financial aid.

“The right course for America is for businesses and universities and colleges to compete, and for us to make sure that we provide loans to the extent we possibly can at an interest rate that doesn’t have the taxpayers having to subsidize people who want to go to school,” he said.

That’s an opinion that speaks to the Republican base. But throw in his campaign advisor Eric Fehrnstrom’s Etch a Sketch comment about being able to rewrite political narratives once the general election gets underway and you’re left with a politician edging toward a John Kerry-style flip-flopper.

We still have a long horse race ahead in the game of presidential politics. But Obama’s smooth, humorous and televised quasi-Romney dig will continue to serve him well. Not only does the president rely on a host of media outlets to disseminate his message, he’s skilled at shifting his tone throughout events.

Obama understands that shifting tone is different than shifting message. We’ll have to wait and see if Romney has been properly schooled and if Obama can remember his own lessons come fall.

But for now, I’ll still agree with the Roots rapper Black Thought, who at the end of President Obama’s slow jam session called him the “POTUS (President of the United States) with the mostest.”

Indeed.

The following article by Vanessa Horwell, Chief Visibility Officer of ThinkInk, originally appeared on Marketing Daily on 05/03/2012.

Daily Deal Dilemma: Does Groupon Need a Refund, a Reboot, a Stern Reprimand or Just a Little Maturing?

The answer depends on whom you ask. If you ask Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, 31, he’s likely to say the latter.

But before we get to Mason, let’s recap.

Back in February 2012, I wrote about how Groupon, the daily deals “Mecca” was launching a PR blitz to help rewrite its then recently soiled reputation after a slew of communication missteps:  a fumbled Super Bowl ad and a case of fuzzy earnings math just prior to its November 2011 IPO.  It revamped its website and added the public relations might of Paul Taaffe, the former chairman and CEO of Hill & Knowlton. (For history buffs, that’s the 85-year-old Manhattan-headquartered PR agency once known for its support of Big Tobacco and its infamous “A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers,” 1954 newspaper ad, that claimed the “statistics purporting to link cigarette smoking with [lung cancer] could apply with equal force to any one of many other aspects of modern life.”  Gotta love this industry!)

In that earlier post I puffed on about the tough job that Taaffe had ahead of him, referring to the journey as a “rocky road” while going on to say that, “taming the daily deal beast just doesn’t seem like a job anyone should embrace,” and that “public relations leaders can only craft a message so far. Too much spin and a message – and a company – can spin out of control. Let’s see what happens next.”

And (nearly) spin out of control it has.

Earlier this month it was reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission had begun a preliminary investigation into Groupon’s questionable financial accounting practices after the company announced that it was revising its 2011Q4 earnings, cutting it by $14.3 million to $492.2 million from $506.5 million. The announcement left many Groupon naysayers crying, “I told you so,” while investors are jumping ship in search of…. better deals.

Fast forward a few weeks since the troubling news and Groupon’s stock slide continues. On Thursday April 26, 2012, Groupon’s stock price was nearing bargain-basement levels, trading at $12.06 a share, after its $20 a share opening in November and its 52-week high of $31.44. The reason for the downward revision? Groupon hadn’t set enough money aside for customer refunds.

So in light of all this communications turmoil, one would expect that Paul Taaffe and his team would be out in full force defense and crisis mitigation mode.  To date, however, Taaffe’s strongest defense was when he told reporters: “Every three months Groupon is a different company.”

Somehow I don’t think that’s what investors wanted to hear.

But to give credit where it’s due, Groupon CEO Andrew Mason at an informal town hall meeting on Wednesday admitted his company no longer has “any margin for error,” adding that Groupon is “still this toddler in a grown man’s body in many ways.” In helping the company grow up, the company has announced plans to bring on board additional senior management, and according to a recent Wall Street Journal article, at least two new board members – all designed to show that the company can mature, mature quickly and rebuild investor confidence.

As a public relations professional, one of the most important pieces of advice I can give is telling clients to be up front about their actions and intentions and if there’s no substance behind a marketing campaign, then there’s no point selling the message.

Frank town hall meetings that get section-front coverage in the Wall Street Journal (check out Marketplace in the print edition) is probably not enough to quell all investor fears. But as Groupon closes out another challenging month and is only two and a half weeks away from its next quarterly earnings report, it’s nice to see a maturing response.

Perhaps then – and in an ironic way - Paul Taaffe was on to something after all. Just maybe, Groupon is beginning to change. And just maybe this change is here to stay and the company will not be something different three months from now.

We’ll have to wait and see.

Checking Their Guns (And Their Brains) At The Door: The Secret Services

Talk about public relations disasters in degrees. When Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney criticizes a Pittsburgh cookie it’s one thing.  But when half a dozen secret service agents and 11 military personnel lose their jobs after seeking the “secret services” of women who could have gone by the street name “Cookie” it’s an entirely different matter and enough to make me lose my dessert. 

In short: this is not good at all.

If anything, the unfolding Secret Service and military personnel prostitute scandal is a glaring example that sometimes no matter how much spin is added to the curve ball of professional news speak and public relations, you can still strike out. The exploits of these men are indefensible which has left the political punditsphere returning to humor. One of my favorites comes from Steven Cody, the Managing Partner and Co-Founder of Peppercorn, a public relations firm. His idea, expressed in his most recent post: “Let’s re-brand it the not-so Secret Service.”

And while crass humor may serve as a temporary public antidote for the serious standards and security breach that was uncovered in Colombia, it will do nothing in the longer term court of public opinion.

To a large extent, Lawrence Berger, the lawyer for two Secret Service supervisors who lost their jobs was right. The actions of these individuals did not compromise the security of the President. But if that’s the best defense that can be mustered, I think one would be hard pressed to call that a stunning PR reversal.

The President may not have been harmed physically, but his image certainly was, giving political red meat to the likes of Sarah Palin who commented on Fox news recently, "It's like, who's minding the store around here?" 

The Secret Service, founded in 1865, and charged with presidential protection since 1901, has a long and largely successful history. While there’s no denying this public relations disaster is a big one, it’s also likely that an agency that presumably takes its mission and duty so seriously will work exceedingly hard at doing their jobs that much better so that time really will smooth out this unfortunate – kink. (Yes, pun intended)

“Waiting it out” is usually a PR professional’s least favorite advice to a client. But in this case it may be the only way the embattled agency can regain its stripes. “I’m sorrys” have been made. Jobs have been lost.

It’s quite possible the less they say going forward might be the most prudent course of action.  Until, of course, one of them releases a kiss and tell all tome, which will be only a matter of time.