12/13

It is clever to endow a popular toy with personality and an online diary, and I wish a marketing PR person had thought of it.  (Actually, a PR person might have.  I don't know who writes the "airhead" commentary.)  But, here is a sample of the latest Barbie entries:

12/6/2002  Reservation for 3
Like how awesome is Madison’s dad? He got us a reservation at that hot new restaurant/club, 11C! It usually takes months to get a rezzy there! We’re going Sat. night. Mad’s dad rocks.

12/4/2002  Have You Heard???
You know I’m all about the latest in the wireless world. So imagine my shock when I heard someone’s cell phone barking like a dog. I am totally not making this up. It’s the newest thing. Musical rings are so yesterday. Well, I made a B-line to the cell phone store and guess what? My new cell meows! Fab or what?

You might wonder why I am bringing up a weird topic like this, but there is a reason.  I recently wrote a white paper on blogs and how they might be used in PR.  I must admit I did not think of creating a blog for a mythical character.  But, some creative soul out there did. 

So, here is another reason for considering blogs in PR -- as trendy marketing tools.  I suppose the Barbie blog will generate imitators like the Kermit Blog in which a frog relates his mishaps with an amorous pig. 

I was interviewed two days ago by a PR reporter on the subject of blogs.  I am not sure I told her about the Barbie blog.  That was an oversight.
 

12/12

The greater worry is that blocking is becoming more frequent on the Internet and because of political and court decisions, may become common.  This is a pity for Internet users and online PR. 

As you may have read, one study estimates that the Chinese government has blocked about 20,000 web sites from entering the country, anything that would imperil the government's hold on the people.  You also may have read that Dow Jones is being sued in Australia for defamation because Australian readers could reach its Barron's Web site where a story made an allegation about an Australian businessman.  Australia's high court ruled that the man could sue Dow Jones in Australia, even though Dow Jones' servers are in New Jersey.  What this means, of course, is that publishers may have to block their sites from countries in which Free Speech rights are not as strong as they are in the U.S. 

Should  this happen, the Web could turn into a localized medium based on political rules.  It would be a horrible blow to a universal medium.

I must confess I did not see this coming.  I knew the Chinese government was trying to control the medium, but China is a communist country.  It did not occur to me that Australia, a democratic country, would do the same because of legal rulings. 

Earlier this week, I wrote about the need to fight for Free Speech.  Free Speech is threatened around the world.  PR depends on providing information accurately and truthfully.  If we cannot do that, we are propagandists.  It's our choice to make.

12/11

As commentators said, the step was unprecedented and confirmation that Law has lost the respect of subordinates and laity.  The priests wrote the letter after a judge forced the archdiocese to release personnel files detailing transgressions by priests over the years. 

The public relations debacle is complete.  There is nothing Law can do to recover and if the pope orders him to stay on, he will serve a penance of humiliation. 

Is there anything Law might have done to prevent such a downfall?  From a communications point of view, I doubt there was much he could do.  The mistake was managerial when he allowed bad priests to stay in their jobs.  Why he did that is a mystery, but I think it came from protecting his own much like the police protect their own.  Instead of the "blue wall of silence" the archdiocese had a "roman collar" of self-protection.  It was arrogance that all organizations suffer, especially organizations that believe they are in the right.

The sad part is that Jesus warned against such behavior in the Gospels.  But, throughout the history of the Roman Catholic Church, its leaders have not always understood or cared about the ethics they were to uphold. 

The Roman Catholic Church has a long way to go in America to rebuild trust.  And, if the laity are smart, they will no longer place clergy above themselves.  But then, they never should have done that in the first place.
 

 12/10

Gillmor's reasoning is that passersby can deliver images of an event well before journalists get there.  They click and deliver photos through their wireless phones.  Gillmor wrote that in Japan millions of camera-enabled phones have been sold and apparently that is what people are doing there.

What he says makes sense, especially for breaking news.  Can you imagine how Sept. 11 would have been covered had camera-equipped phones been generally available in the U.S.?

Camera phones will be an assist to journalism and a nightmare to PR practitioners.  If you think you have no time now to respond to media events, wait until you find yourself staring at a picture of a dead employee at your plant site on the 10 o'clock news -- and you haven't notified the employee's husband yet.

Camera phones will be Democracy's Big Brother.  Rather than a central, Orwellian authority keeping an eye on you, there will be millions of independent eyes watching.  Nightmare scenarios are endless -- e.g., an employee photographs a rat near a supermarket's sign and sends the shot to the local paper, a barfly photographs your CEO in his cups and sends the picture to National Enquirer,  a jealous husband captures your EVP in flagrante delicto with the husband's wife and sends the evidence to the CEO and TV station.

This won't happen right away, but it is coming.  I am not looking forward to the day when it arrives.
 

12/09

I was reminded of that over the weekend while flying for hours on airplanes.  I read a wonderfully written life of Galileo in which the temporal power of the Catholic Church was turned against a man who was a faithful Catholic.

Galileo's story is well known but bears repeating.  His Dialogues that discussed the Copernican theory of the earth and planets revolving around the sun were challenged by the Inquisition as a heresy.  The Bible scriptures, of course, supported the earth as the center of the universe. 

It wasn't that the entire Church was against his point of view.  It wasn't .  Many of the Church's hierarchy supported Galileo even through his troubles.  It was that the pope of the time, who was fighting the Thirty Years War, felt Galileo had questioned the pope's authority.  So the pope turned on his longtime friend.  The Jesuits,  scholars and astronomers then and today, were in the lead helping to condemn Galileo's views.

It took 200 years for the Dialogues to be removed from the Catholic Church's list of banned books!  This was long after the Church admitted that it was wrong.  It took until the modern day before a pope declared formally that the Church owed Galileo an apology.  No wonder the framers of the U.S. Constitution understood the need to protect speech as well as to separate Church and State. 

But, the instructive part of the biography was this.  In times of stress, such as now,  free speech is threatened by a state that seeks its preservation first. 

PR practitioners must ever be on the alert for any government initiatives that threaten to limit the discussion of a full range of ideas.  We can't do our jobs properly if we are barred from communicating.