Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest, with Billy Pilgrim on backup.
Often hilarious and occasionally either brilliant or impenetrable, Vonnegut’s novels were and are talismans for my generation. His best work? Slaugherhouse-Five. His weirdest and most hopeful? God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.
His website currently shows just a line drawing of a birdcage, with the door open and the bird flown.
Something tells me that he left clear instructions about that…
Long ago and far away, or maybe it was just 30 years ago, Johnny Paycheck recorded David Allan Coe’s “Take This Job And Shove It”, which became an anthem for the workin’ man. And woman.
Recent events have me wondering if the word “job” is on the verge of becoming, if not obsolete, at least vestigal in American English.
Detroit’s auto manufacturing plants are on the ropes. Circuit City is laying off 3,400 sales employees. Most days it feels like the entire workforce is teetering on the edge of redundancy – in both the Brit and Yank versions of English.
Back when Johnny recorded his big crossover hit, the idea of joining a company out of college and working your way up the ladder over the next 20-30 years was considered the norm.
The bad news is that the American workforce, like the military, is fighting the “last war” – in the workforce model, the belief that employment with one company for an entire career is still possible, or even desirable.
Go to school, get good grades, get a job.
How about pay attention in school, study business, identify a need, and fill it. You don’t have to be on the MBA track, this is a framework to follow even if you’re a stellar mechanic or plumber.
This isn’t new stuff – Robert Kiyosaki has made a fortune saying essentially the same thing. The education system in the US, and across the globe, needs to wake up to the fact that they’re still teaching to a 19th century societal model.
Just one woman’s opinion…
Working my way through the NY Times today, I was brought up short by a headline alleging systematic Long Term Care (LTC) denial-of-claim problems, particularly with Conseco.
For those of you not familiar with LTC, this is a policy that one purchases long before (ideally) one approaches the age of infirmity, paying regular premiums that, in theory at least, guarantee that one’s time in assisted living or a nursing home won’t bankrupt oneself or one’s family. This worked for my family – my father, bless his heart, paid over $300 a month to insure my mother’s care should she need it. She did. He didn’t buy a policy for himself, since he’d already been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease – he got mom one, though, and it made the last several months of her life a little easier financially. Particularly in the month between dad’s death and hers, since his death ended his large pension payment.
Lest you think that John Grisham’s “The Rainmaker” was an amped-up-for-fiction view of insurance malfeasance, read this – the only LTC insurer that ends up looking good is Genworth Financial.
Caveat emptor, baby.
I’ve seen several pieces in print and on various TV news outlets recently about “the new spring break” – college kids heading off for a week to drink ’til they puke, hook up indiscriminately, flash their…oh, wait, that’s the OLD spring break.
The new spring break involves volunteering, doing something like building a Habitat for Humanity house or other community support work.
Reading between the lines here – and I admit to wearing glasses – I seem to intuit a move away from the endless navel-gazing of “self-esteem” and, at long last, into the higher awareness of “self-respect”. Hard to develop self-respect if one repeatedly wakes up hung over and naked – particularly hung over, naked and in bed with someone whose name you don’t know. Which is, I’m afraid, a common remembrance for any of us who participated in an old-school spring break. Back inna day.
Aggrandized self-esteem allows one to excuse just about any sort of behavior. Attempts to say anything to the boy behaving badly or girl gone wild fall on deaf ears, since they see no error in any choice they make.
Give that kid some self-respect, though, and they’re likely to avoid the drunken hook-up before it even becomes possible…perhaps there’s hope for humanity after all.
Your company is about to launch a new product or service that will raise the achievement bar in your industry. You want to make sure that every customer for your innovative offering hears the buzz, and acts on it by buying it – in droves.
You write a press release announcing your exciting news, and fire it off to Business Wire, PR Web, several industry magazines, your local paper’s business editor, and the newsrooms of local broadcasters.
You post it, with a big headline, on your company’s website. You sit back, and wait for the world to beat a path to your door.
Some time later, you notice that your door is still on its hinges. Your hoped-for media response was underwhelming. In fact, it was non-existent. You saw the headline on the Business Wire page. You know it was near the top for several hours on PR Web.
But no industry writers called, and your press release wasn’t even run in your local paper’s business pages. Why not? Where did you go wrong?
In your business, you’ve no doubt discovered that relationships are what make customers out of prospects. The same principle is in play with media relations – it’s not what you know (or how well you write your press release), it’s who you know. And how they feel about you and your company.
When you were developing your business plan, you put an advertising budget in under marketing, didn’t you? Here’s another question: What’s the best advertising in the world?
Answer: free publicity.
I can hear you – you’re saying…”OK, Casey, but how do I get free publicity?”
You develop relationships with reporters who cover your industry, that’s how.
Look at your local daily newspaper, and local TV news. Pick up the last copy of your industry’s trade magazine.
What stories have they run in the last year about people, companies or events in your business sector? Who reported the story?
Print media needs to fill the news holes in their pages – the news hole is the part of the page that isn’t paid advertising – and television news needs to have something to report between commercials. Reporters will welcome a heads-up about news on their beats that they don’t have to go out and dig up on their own.
The approach here should NOT be to call or email the reporter and tell them all about your company. You want to be a source, not a source of annoyance. The best way to open a dialog with a reporter is to offer yourself as an expert on your business sector – for example, if the reporter’s beat is real estate and development, and you’re a Realtor with a lot of experience in commercial development, you’d be a great
source for that reporter.
Make contact with the reporter after you’ve read or watched some of her or his recent pieces. Start a conversation – email is ideal here – with some of your observations about the piece, and about where your industry is headed. Keep it short, not a dissertation.
If there’s an industry event coming up in town, ask the reporter if they’re planning on attending. If they are, make a point of seeking that reporter out and introducing yourself. Start a relationship, just as you would with a prospective customer. A caveat – be aware that journalists have ethical standards dictated by their industry and their employers. Gifts, even a free lunch, have to be reported, and in most cases refused. What you need to offer is information, good information, not bribery.
Once you’ve established a relationship with a reporter, value it. Offer them stories, not self-serving fluff – the relationship will only pay off if it’s win/win, just like every other business relationship. Is what you have newsworthy? Is a new branch office for your company news: is it offering employment in an
economically disadvantaged area, or is it just another suite of offices in an upscale office park?
There has to be a news “hook”, something that makes your story more than just your story.
Harking back to the scenario I drew at the top of this post, if you have an fresh solution or product that you believe will have the world beating a path to your door, the way to tell the world certainly involves writing a great press release. You’ll get a lot more mileage out of that release if you send it to reporters who know you, who regard you as an expert, and who will tell your story to their readers – your market – who will then beat a path to your door.
Becoming an expert is what you did on the path to starting your business. Being recognized as an expert by the media will give you visibility worth thousands, even millions, of advertising dollars that you don’t have to spend.
Does this give you a new view of reading the morning paper, watching local news, reading a trade journal?
Are you itching to make a list of reporters who cover your industry?
Great – go do it!
Wow. Who knew that Anna Nicole had so much to offer a tired, cold, mid-winter media scrum?
What a terrific window into the glories of Western Civ, that citadel of freedom of thought, the free exchange of ideas, the elevating power of art. Whyever would anyone think we were corrupt? The Great Satan?
As the flock of dodos, um, media professionals descended on South Florida over the last several weeks to pick over the slowly rotting, not-so-corpulent-thanks-to-TrimSpa corpse of the late and over-lamented Ms. Smith, the following occured:
When I started in the TV news business back at the dawn of time – or maybe it was 1980 – the world was a bigger place. It was harder to get a signal out of the back of beyond, the internet didn’t exist, and the word info-tainment had yet to be coined. We have, it seems, become a global village – a collection of gossipy grandmas clucking over the latest version of Hollywood Confidential.
That noise you hear in the background? That’s Ed Murrow banging on the inside of his casket in frustration…
OK, I’m slow, I admit it.
I completely missed the whole Jessica Cutler/Washingtonienne blog scandale back in 2004 when it was actually going on. I must have been doing something else right then, like…oh, working for a living outside DC?
Now that I’ve emerged from my Cutler coma, I’m shocked, shocked, to discover that a good looking, if directionless, twenty-something broad was having sex with multiple partners in our nation’s capital. And maybe even the Capitol. Da noive! Why, that little hussy!
Not really.
I’m not at all shocked. I’m appalled – but not by Ms. Cutler’s actions, her blog, or the román-a-clef novel, “The Washingtonienne” (cleverly eponymous with her original blog) she published in 2005.
I’m appalled that, thirty years since I was wandering the corridors of power (not DC, but NY), so little seems to have changed about how a young woman who uses her sex appeal will go from zero to whore in fifteen-minutes-of-fame flat.
I’m amused at the fact that simultaneous-partner guys are still viewed as role models by their peers – go ON, you dog! – but let a woman try that and she’s a slut.
We almost have media convergence on the web these days – can we finally admit that we’re out of the cave? That it’s not even the 20th century any more?
Sex is how we all get here. But procreation – organized religion’s opinion be damned – is not the only purpose for human sexuality. If, as the aforementioned organized religion opines, the human race has dominion over the natural world, why don’t we have dominion over our bodies…and what we choose to do with them as consenting adults?
Here’s a revolutionary suggestion – how about we adopt the philosophy of Stella Campbell (formally known as Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and the first actress to play Eliza Doolittle in Shaw’s Pygmalion), who said of sex, “It doesn’t matter what you do in the bedroom as long as you don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.”
Stella Campbell certainly knew the price paid for being a woman who colored outside the lines – as an actress in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, she learned first-hand that “actress” translated to “slut” in most people’s minds.
Thirty years – since my dewy ingenue days; or 100 years – since Stella Campbell made epigrams, and headlines…we’re still fighting for real sexual equality.
Jessica, I salute you for your 15 minutes – which is all you’re gonna get unless you come up with something other than “last night I got drunk and I think I got laid” – but you did strike a blow for equality…or maybe just equal time.
As the tragedy at the Sago mine in West Virginia unfolded on our televisions and front pages in January of 2006, I’m certain we all wondered how the story could have become such a terrific example of corporate media-relations bungling.
Perhaps I was in the minority thinking the bungling was terrific, but I’m in the media relations business – this mess was going to be a terrific teaching tool to illustrate how not to behave in a crisis.
How did such utterly wrong “facts” get released? And why did International Coal Group, the company that owns the Sago mine, let the wrong story spread for three hours before admitting to the real facts – twelve miners were dead. There was only one survivor. Not twelve, as had been joyfully reported by broadcasters and newspapers around the world.
There is one primary rule in media relations – never let the story get away from you. International Coal Group violated that rule, and wound up the poster child for corporate blundering. ICG will have “Sago mine disaster” inserted in every story about their company for years to come. The coal industry isn’t known for its safety record – now ICG has the dubious distinction of joining the “worst mining disasters” list.
Most business owners, large or small, will never face a media disaster of these epic proportions. They can, however, learn some valuable lessons by being aware of what can happen if you violate that one primary media relations rule – never let the story get away from you. Every company should have a media relations crisis plan – even if you will only end up talking to a community newspaper.
Plans for any company should follow these guidelines:
1. Be prepared
2. Tell the truth
3. Establish one point of contact
4. Tell the truth
5. Maintain your message – know what to say, and say only that
6. Tell the truth
7. Know what is, and isn’t, newsworthy
8. Tell the truth
9. Be aware of deadlines
You’ve likely noticed that one rule is so important, it’s in there four times – no matter what you have to say, if it isn’t true, you’ll be found out. It might be within three hours, like it was for ICG. It might be three weeks, three months – but you will be found out, and you’ll have an accelerating disaster on your hands that your business may not survive.
Here are two more real-world examples that show how important the truth is when your company faces a crisis:
In Sept. 1982, a series of deaths in the Midwest were found to be caused by cyanide-tainted Tylenol. In the nation-wide panic that followed, Johnson & Johnson, Tylenol’s manufacturer, responded by recalling all Tylenol products and investigating their manufacturing plants – and keeping the public updated on what they were doing, and what they discovered.
They stated that they recognized this as a public health crisis first, and a company crisis second. Working with the FBI, the FDA and the Chicago Police Department, the company was praised for its honesty with the public during the Tylenol crisis. In 2006 – 24 years later – Tylenol has 35% of the painkiller market in the US.
On Dec. 3, 1984, a Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal, India accidentally released a cloud of pesticide – methyl isocyanate – that covered the city.
Over 1,500 people died within 24 hours.
Even though the company deployed a medical team immediately, the company’s statements – via the medical teams on the ground and corporate press appearances – downplayed the effects of the accident. Months later, Union Carbide was still denying that mortality rates were as high as they were being reported in the press.
The company never fully recovered, and was bought out by Dow Chemical ten years later.
Like I said before – tell the truth. It won’t just set you free, it’ll keep you in business.
You should have a media plan in place before you speak to a community calendar newsletter, your local paper’s business editor, a local radio or television reporter, or launch a product or service at a trade show.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking to a suburban community paper or the New York Times, having a plan in place gives you the confidence to speak your message, stay on track, and stay in control of your company’s news, and its future.
In the fast-moving, 24-hour spin cycle that is today’s news business, you don’t want to wind up circling the drain, getting caught off guard if your company suddenly becomes newsworthy.
If you’re lucky enough to come up with that fresh take on the mousetrap that has the world, and the media, beating a path to your door, you don’t want to answer the door in your underwear.
By being prepared with a media plan, developed using the guidelines I’ve given you, you’ll answer your door looking (and sounding) sharp, successful and newsworthy.
And you’ll enjoy your ride on the media train, instead of finding yourself ground under its wheels.
I attended the 2nd edition of the bill conference in Richmond VA today (for the record, that’s Saturday, April 6, 2013), and wound up kicking off the talks with what’s become my core topic: #howmuchisthat, healthcare edition. That link goes to the hashtag’s home on Symplur, the healthcare hashtag registry that’s also a veritable time-sink of terrific healthcare thought leadership. Including healthcare data visualization. You’re welcome.
Why is this a topic I care so much, and know so much, about? I believe that in all the hot air that’s been expended in the discussion about healthcare and healthcare reform in the US – and boy, howdy, is that some hot air! – very little shrift is given to how consumers (commonly called “patients”) can effect grassroots change themselves. The firehose below takes a wander through the history of US healthcare, particularly from the cost angle, and resources that the average human can use to start figuring out, ahead of time, how to assess the value (medical and fiscal) of their healthcare options.
Here’s the firehose.
Steve Brill’s epic TIME piece, Bitter Pill pack a lunch, it’s the longest article TIME has ever published
My take on where Brill missed the mark on his “fix this mess” recommendations
A Feb. 12 post that raises Brill’s issue in what I think of as a great-minds-thinking-alike synergy
My health econ guru Uwe Reinhardt’s Chaos Behind a Veil of Secrecy article in January 2006 edition of Health Affairs
A post that includes intel on the RUC and the LA Times piece – both of which I mentioned in my verbal firehose
A NY Times story on the unintentionally hilarious 2013 report in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Assn.) on the wide disparity in pricing for hip replacements in the US – the RUC is an AMA committee!
Society for Participatory Medicine $30/year, very passionate and engaged membership which is driving real change
ClearHealthCosts.com, NY startup that’s crowdsourcing healthcare costs
Costs of Care, a 501(c)3 dedicated to helping patients drive down healthcare costs
Leapfrog Group’s Hospital Safety Score database
AHRQ (Agency for Health Research and Quality), part of the US Dept. of Health & Human Services
My 1st Disruptive Women in Health Care post, wherein I make some recommendations about break/fixing the health insurance model in the US (and yes, its headline is totally a shout-out to Jonathan Swift)
A year-later post from the Mighty Mouth blog with some additional suggestions on that break/fix, and why not doing it could be the hidden killer of the US job market
My life at times feels like one long experiment in whatever the reverse of “aversion therapy” is in regard to bugs. Particularly spiders. I can tolerate spiders up to 3/4″ in span, but once they get bigger than that I start to hyperventilate. Which makes orb weaver season here in Virginia a challenge. One of the little dears will invariably, overnight, make a web across the back door. When I open the back door, I’ll almost get spider-face.
My favorite, if one can call it that, bug story started when I was eleven, and had its big finish when I was twenty. At eleven, I was living in Coronado CA, in a house that’s still my favorite-I-ever-lived-in. A stucco and tile hacienda-style deal, with a central courtyard that had an olive tree and an entire wall of morning glory vines.
One night, I was in my bed reading, when I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. On the other of the twin beds, a bug built like a combination between ant and grasshopper – three-segmented body, long articulated back legs – and the size of a woman’s size five shoe was making its way along the side of the spread.
Like the good eleven year old Girl Scout I was, I screamed my head off and bulleted out the door to the courtyard. My parents didn’t see the bug and chalked up my screaming fit to imagination.
I slept on the couch in the living room for two weeks.
Nine years later, I was living on Mt. Davidson in San Francisco, in a basement apartment with two other girls. I awoke one night to banshee screaming – my roommate was dancing around her room, waving her (extremely long) hair around like one possessed. Once she was coherent, which took a while, she stuttered out that “it..it..was on my foot, and..and..then it ran up to my neck and it was in my hair!” “It” was an insect.
I didn’t see “it”.
A week later, I was standing in the door to the screaming, long-haired roommate’s room. She was sitting on her bed. She stopped talking and her eyes bugged out looking at something near my feet. I looked down. It was the bug from my room in Coronado. Or at least its cousin. In a fit of sangfroid, I grabbed a large plastic bowl that just happened to be handy and put it down over Bugzilla.
About twenty minutes later, a male friend arrived for beer and skittles (or at least tacos) – we three maidens did the “oh, we need a big strong man to kill the bug” dance. He puffed up his chest, smirked a bit at our girlish fright, grabbed an old magazine, and proceeded to the bowl.
He up-ended it, screamed like a Girl (Scout), and then the sound of furious smacking ensued. For at least three minutes.
When he finally reduced the magazine to pulpy shreds, he was pale and sweaty. His only comment was “f*ck, that thing was HUGE!”
I later found out said bug is called a Jerusalem cricket, or a potato bug. Here’s a picture. I still have trouble looking at it…
© 2024 Mighty Casey Media.
