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Associated Press reports that a congressional candidate from Ohio has been criticized by a leader of his party for donning a Nazi uniform during historical reenactments.
Baby Boomers may remember Sergeant Schultz, a character in the inane 1960s television comedy Hogan's Heroes.
To dodge conflict of any sort, Schultz would constantly grimace and exclaim, "I know nothing!"
When asked by AP's reporter whether it might be a tad offensive to go around wearing a Nazi uniform in the middle of Ohio, our hapless congressional candidate replied, "I don't see anything wrong about educating the public about events that happened."
By remaining clueless and unapologetic, the candidate is guilty of what I'll call "doing a Schultz."
PR 101 teaches that the crucial first step in "handling" a public relations crisis is the swift public apology. (And not only must that apology come forth immediately; it must be offered with a reasonable facsimile of remorse as well.)
To understand the power of the swift public apology, recall the recent cases of David Letterman and Tiger Woods.
Letterman apologized for his sexual indiscretions on his show before they were publicized. A month later, no one cared. A few media critics actually praised Letterman for his honesty.
In contrast, Woods shunned public attention after news of his sexual escapades broke. When his apology finally came three months later, it was too late. The damage to Woods' reputation was severe.
You can find more good advice about responding to a PR crisis in Chapter 9 of Michael Maslansky's The Language of Trust.
Maslansky emphasizes the importance of establishing context before offering apologies or explanations. Without context, audiences will always interpret your statements negatively.
Today John Lennon would have been 70.
Fans can only imagine what he'd have to say about life, love and the state of our world today. Or how marvelous his musical output might have been during the three decades that have passed since his murder.
This week, serendipitously, I rediscovered a 40 year-old solo album Paul McCartney made entitled, simply enough, McCartney. It contains Sir Paul's all-time favorite composition, "Maybe I'm Amazed," plus a dozen other songs he penned, all quite wonderful.
Listening to the album and remembering just some of the nearly 200 songs McCartney wrote and performed with Lennon, as well as all the fabulous music each Beatle produced after the band's 1969 breakup, leaves me in awe of their talent.
If only I had a shred of it, I'd be a happy camper.
Marketing guru David Meerman Scott has recently championed "business casual video" for its quick turnaround and low price tag.
This week, he writes on his blog about a new home-grown video and pushback from a video pro.
The project Scott describes is a video recording of a Radioheads concert created entirely by fans.
"Last week," he writes, "I spoke about this project to a professional cameraman. He was hostile the idea. He said the video would be shaky. That amateurs can’t do it right. He told me without a proper setup with booms and cranes it won’t look good. Last I checked, Radiohead was doing just fine thank you. And this project cost them nothing and gained more exposure for the band."
I'm a communicator who loves the strategic use of video. As such, I'm sympathetic to the hostile cameraman's viewpoint.
Please let me explain why.
By pointing to the few—and very few—examples of successful business casual video and pronouncing the idea a winner, Scott's unleashing a Frankenstein.
No question: business casual video is cheap and easy to produce.
The problem? It's cheap and easy to produce.
As a result, most business casual video is garbage. It isn't authentic. It's only sleep-inducing. Which leads me to ask...
Is It Real or is It Sominex?
I'm old enough to recall great TV ads that asked, "Is It Real or is It Memorex?" I'm also old enough to recall great TV ads for the sleep-aid Sominex. (Hell, I'm old enough to recall when Eisenhower was President. By the way, Ike was a Muslim.)
The vast majority of business casual videos fall on the opposite end of the advertising spectrum. They're cheesy TV.
That's because technology—in the hands of amateurs—cannot compensate for amatuerism.
Cheap technology, moreover, only encourages amateurism to spread, like a plague.
I'm afraid the marketing world is in for another five-year Dark Age similar to the second half of the 1980s (another era I'm old enough to recall).
That's when "desktop publishing" first appeared.
Desktop publishing placed a thousand typefaces into the hands of unschooled hordes and set back graphic design and visual communication 200 years.
Overnight, professional graphic designers were deemed "slow" and "expensive" and we found ourselves inundated by home-grown print ads, flyers, banners and brochures that looked like wanted posters from 1800.
In the long term, desktop publishing was a boon. But it took five years for graphic designers to seize the reins again and for corporate executives to say, "Enough of this crap!"
In the short term, desktop publishing was a beast unloosed upon the land.
Business casual video, I'm afraid, will repeat that history.
Want a window into some of the week's best blog posts?
Through her blog, "Mad Man" Marjorie Clayman provides a terrific new service called #30 Thursday.
Boomers will remember when their parents subscribed to Reader's Digest, the paperback book-size magazine that synopsized dozens of feature articles from other magazines and newspapers. People loved Reader's Digest because they trusted the taste of the editors who decided what to include every month. (The magazine is still subscribed to by 17 million people every month.)
With #30 Thursday, Marjorie is crafting the cyber version of Reader's Digest. Check it out.
Today I participated in a panel discussion about promoting tradeshow attendance at Association Marketing Day, a one-day conference sponsored by the Direct Marketing Association of Washington.
I was joined by three accomplished association marketers: Craig Blake, Nexus Direct; Margaret Core, Biotechnology Industry Organization; and Christine Maple, Packaging Machinery Manufacturers Institute. All are responsible for driving tradeshow attendance, which has declined in most cases since the economic meltdown in 2008.
When the mic was handed to me, I used the opportunity to remind conferees how essential branding remains to any effort to expand the audiences for tradeshows.
It might seem nuts to proclaim to a gathering of marketers that "branding matters."
But, from what I observe, few tradeshows have a skillfully wrought identity.
That's because most tradeshow executives rise to their positions via the ranks of show operations, which makes them exceptional logisticians, but often lousy marketers.
Most, as a consequence, close their eyes to branding and merely shower prospects with uninspired announcements of dates, locations and the "hundreds of companies" and "thousands of new products" to be found on the floor.
But branding—knowing your audience’s catch factor and letting them know you know—is crucial to increasing tradeshow attendance in today's Web-centric business environment.
You must brand to expand. There's no way around it.
