KDPaine's PR Measurement Blog

My New Year's Resolutions

Bulldog asked me to write up some New Year's resolutions, in case you were wondering what they might be.. read all about it here.

The virtual holiday card

I'm an old fashioned kind of gal when it comes to holiday cards, and I hate it when people send me virtual cards which I then have to download.  But I know there are lots of people who read this who's mailing addresses we don't have, and I didn't want anyone to feel like we weren't wishing them a very happy New Year -- so for all of who have been part of this conversation over the past year, thank you and may all your results in 2007 be spectacular-- by any measure of success.

Virgil encouraged us to “Look with favor upon a bold beginning,” and it’s an appropriate exhortation for the New Year. This is a time of change for all of us on the planet, and especially for KDPaine & Partners. Our latest bold beginning is the recent opening of a new office in Berlin, New Hampshire. We were rapidly outgrowing our Shankhassick Farm cabin by the river, and so decided to “outsource in-state” by moving the production end of the business to New Hampshire’s Great North Woods, a land of staggering beauty yet stagnating economy. There we found a beautiful old building and some beautiful new talent. Our new office opened in
September and is already home to a cracker jack team of six that we expect to double in size over the next year. Their efficiency is only matched by their enthusiasm, and by our enthusiasm for the town of Berlin and its environs. We encourage all of you to come for a visit and enjoy the views of Mt. Washington, the tallest peak in New England and home of the worst weather on earth, plus miles and miles of hiking and ski trails, gorgeous naviagable waterways, rapids for the kayakers and beautiful deserted back roads for the bicyclists. We’re proud to be part of Berlin, new home of the best team of public relations researchers on earth.
We hope the New Year brings you bold beginnings and great successes, by any measure.

A slightly different perspective on Portsmouth, NH

For anyone who wants a little perspective on life in Portsmouth, check out my op ed in The Mirror.

He nails it!

Sorry, I haven't had much sleep, and therefore couldn't resist the pun, but Jim Nail at Cymfony has come up with a few prognostications for 2007. I can't argue with any of them! Talk about having the Christmas Spirit.

Now here's an interesting key message....

Me thinks Ford doth protest too much. This  story could either be the boost they need to get over their stodgy, mired- in- financial- woes -image, or the ultimate sponsorship nightmare.

Five things you don't know

This is waaay too much fun. From Susan Getgood's blog I caught the "Five things you don't know about me" meme.  Here are mine:

1. I flunked kindergarten.  I refused to play house with Ginger Diana -- I can't beleive I can still remember her name. Of course the fact that I was 3 when my parents deposited me in kindergarten might have something to do with my anti-social behavior.

2. The book I'm really working on is a steamy romance called "Steamed Clams and Steamy Nights,"  based on true stories of things that happened in the Barn --- my house that burned down.

3. My favorite thing to do on the planet is dance. Sex, gardening, running, and listening to music all follow.

4. Twang -- I'm a huge country music and bluegrass fan - the lonesomer the better.

5. I love to fish.

All I want for Christmas, Santa

Is to get PR people to stop doing stupid stuff.  After being ridiculed for days, Sony finally took down its fake playstation blog. But why does it take irate bloggers to get PR people to do the right thing? Bill Sledzik made a great point in his comment.  If these PR people had any ethics, they'd just say no when clients ask them to do this stuff. Why is it so hard for them to do the right thing and walk away when a client asks them to lie?  Are we all such people pleasers that we forget our ethical principles when a big client waves an account in our face.
My hero of the day is GSD&M President Roy Spence who walked away from the  Walmart business -- at least someone has learned something from all this nonsense!

Here's what researchers do on their days off

Saturday was the annual Christmas Tree cutting ritual here in Durham. This year, my able assistant (otherwise known as the Victim) was none other than Peter Kowalski,  a USC grad that we hired in September who actually understands things like the difference between latent content and manifest content and chi-squares and ANOVA.  He's  someone who has spent most of his life with pavement under his feet and a Christmas tree was something you brought out of the basement and dusted off.   So the concept of going into a muddy field and chopping one down was what is known as "a character building experience"  We get in my very decrepit pick-up truck and head for my favorite Christmas tree farm in Stratham, NH.  We have a chain saw which doesn't work, and a hand saw which works if you have a couple of strong arms to use it. Thank god Peter is very very strong.
The cute little perfect trees that I've been finding here for years have turned into very large trees indeed. So I settled on a nice little number, standing all by itself.  The fact that it was about 40 feet tall didn't deter us in the least.  We attempted to get the chain saw working and couldn't, so we took turns with the hand saw and after about 20 minutes of hard labor this giant thing came crashing down. We then had to cut it down to a more reasonable 15 feet for it to fit in my living room. This is what was left AFTER we cut off the 15 feet!. And, by the way, Peter is well over six feet tall.

Somehow we got it into the truck and into the living room. It then took five people, a mile of rope and wire, and some very careful engineering on the part of Arnie Taylor to get it to STAY up. But last I checked it was still standing!. 
I'm not sure what Craig Carroll and Jim Grunig would have to say about what we do with star researchers here in New Hampshire..

Other Columbian observations

So on the list of the world's scariest places, in most people's minds, Columbia is probably right up there with Pakistan but slightly below Iraq. I have to tell you, the trip down on American Airlines was scarier, but that had more to do with the fact that my "business class ticket" that American had promised as part of their sponsorship of this conference  was anything but so I had to sit in the middle of many many screaming children in totally packed airplanes, and the plane was a relic of some distant past (I know I'm spoiled by Emirates and Jet Blue, but even the bathroom made me nervous it was so decrepit) but I digress.

This is what Columbia is really like. The absolutely most frightening thing is trying to get out of the country. It takes about an hour to get thru immigration and another hour to get your bags. Then they check to make sure you have the RIGHT bag, then they check to make sure you're not importing anything illegal (right, like I'm going to smuggle drugs INTO Columbia???) THEN you have to go thru a security screening to get OUT of the airport. When you do get out of the airport, you are met by hundreds of shouting Colombians anxious to hook up with their friends and loved ones. Oh and by the way there's also a very loud band playing. Normally I love Latin American music, but when your plane landed at 9:30 pm and it is now nearly midnight and you've been traveling since 3 am, this is not the most welcoming of scenarios.

However, I was greeted by two charming ambassadors from my  hosts Tactica & Estrategia
who must have the patience of Job to wait for me for all this time. They took me thru Bogota which has without a doubt the most gorgeous, sophisticated, wonderful Christmas tree lights on the planet. My hotel looks like something out of a movie set. The only indication that security here might be a bit different is that they were checking IDs of everyone entering the hotel.
My suite is just amazing, and before I even had a chance to explore it, a glass of wine a perfectly done steak and a fresh salad were brought to my doorstep, courtesy of my hosts.
Further exploration of this room discovered a jacuzzi, a fire extinguisher on the toilet (what EXACTLY were they expecting?) and a lovely kitchen area without a coffee maker -- Juan Valdez were ARE you???  So far the biggest surprise was that the coffee in the hotel was mediocre and hard to find. Don't they understand that sleepless American workaholics need coffee when they wake up at 3 am??
I met my hosts and discovered them to be savvier and more on top of what communications is all about than most of the Agency folks I've talked to in America.  Not only are they making measurement a major component of their offering, but they start with measuring attitudes and awareness and preference - NOT media. What agency in America is doing that?
The conference was well attended and full of great questions from high level savvy people. I was then whisked away to a local mall that looked surprisingly like every other mall I've been in from Singapore to Istanbul to Toronto to Montevideo to Liverpool... except that they have the most exquisite emeralds and pre-Columbian jewelry.
The ultimate sign that this place isn't all that different from any other is that I fell asleep last night watching Animal Planet.
I could have been watching Fox, but that was waaay too scary.  But then again, I used to think that having breast cancer was the scariest thing on the planet.  Now I know that there are alot scarier things that can happen. But Columbia just isn't one of them.

Blogging from Bogota

So once again, the lesson is, we all have more in common than less. This morning when I went out to go for my morning run in Bogota, the front desk staff at the very lovely Windsor House here in Bogota looked at me like I was nuts. "Not safe" they explained. So I went to their gym, which was much better than most of the ones I've seen in US hotels. At the very same time, my assistant Diane was at HER gym back in New Hampshire, on the same machine, doing exactly the same thing --- so what's so different about Columbia? The questions from the audience today were not much different from the ones I heard in Doha, Qatar and Singapore and Milwaukee and Wichita. And see, the audience doesn't look that difference from Austin or Milwaukee or anywhere back home:

Okay, so Milwaukee and Wichita were a bit more clued in about blogs, but all in all, this country that sounded so scary before I got here, is just wonderful. My hotel room is probably larger in square feet than all of KDPaine & Partners headquarters.  My speaker gift is a spectacular necklace -- a replica of a pre-Columbian gold figure.  And the people hosting me at Tactica & Estrategia are smart, savvy about measurement and trying to change the discussion just like I am. They use different words to describe Outputs, Outtakes and Outcomes, but they mean the same things.  AN D best of all they're totally anti AVEs -- my new Mavens of the Month.