Archive for the “working” Category

Last week, I posted a bit of my side of Tangyslice’s story of Firstgiving’s selection of a new PR firm, and promised to talk about the thing we did that caused the most trauma to the folks pitching us. It’s hardly unique to PR that the people who pitch you and sell you and win your business are not always the ones who actually deliver the service.

We had already had a preliminary meeting with each candidate agency, generally meeting a principal and a lead member of our team to be. So my idea was to ask each PR agency to send us the full actual team that would be working on our account, and to leave the principal behind. Tangy talked me out of the last bit at least in part because he thought the firms would just tell us to get lost. He might well have been right, but what happened instead was actually more revealing than meeting the team alone would have been.

We told each agency that we wanted to meet the full team and wanted the principal to keep her mouth shut as much as possible. After all, we had already heard the big pitch from the head honchos. We know that we won’t get that much time from the top dog and most of the daily work will be done by the mid-level and junior folks. We wanted to meet those people and hear what they have to say.

As it turns out, what we got to see was to what extent the principal really trusted the team in front of a client, or even more frighteningly, a prospective client. We threw out questions to individuals and to the group and watched when principals interrupted or corrected the junior people and when they let them speak. One principal spent much of the meeting talking about how she would be doing lots and lots of work for us and by implication calling her team amateurs. Not cool.

I suppose it might have been more traumatic for the junior people to get put on the spot by a client in front of the boss than for the boss to let them talk, but some of those junior people are going to run their own agencies some day, why not give them a shot now? Maybe someday I’ll be able to say that I believed in them back when they were just associates.

The sun came through the office windows in an interesting way this afternoon.

Perhaps you’ve been following Tangyslice’s series on Selecting a Web 2.0 PR Agency. Part one is here. [update: part III just published!] Upon return from a recent trip to London, Tangy brought me a gag gift, a 147-page, glossy, perfect bound guide to Facebook. The absurdity of a paper book printed to teach you about Facebook* reminded me of something that happened during the Web 2.0 PR search.

The ultimate success of PR firms in our search was inversely proportional to the amount of paper they brought to the pitch. Those with plastic comb-bound presentations were at an immediate disadvantage. I felt bad waiting until they left the office to zip out the plastic combs and recycle the presentations. I wonder if the plastic covers are recyclable too?

Similarly, I mocked Tangy for putting on dress slacks for the pitch meetings while I made sure I was wearing jeans and a black shirt, and shined up my web 2.0 haircut**. None of the candidate agencies matched my ‘do, but one did match my outfit. It’s easy (and fun) to make fun of these things, but when your RFP says more or less, “we want to rule the world via social media” you are looking for a certain measure of out-of-the-boxiness, aren’t you?

Thirdly, and at least for now, finally, I have to point out that given the opportunity, only a couple of our pitching firms seized the marker and went to the whiteboard to illustrate their ideas. Visual thinking, especially on the fly, is a definite turn-on to firms seeking innovative PR.

Tune in next time when I reveal at least one thing that really annoys PR firms when you invite them in to pitch.

Oh, and in case you’re out there googling yourselves, the consideration set was:

• PerkettPR
• KEL and Partners
• Topaz
• Version 2 Communications
• Waggener Edstrom

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* I don’t mean to say, by the way, that Facebook is so dead simple that it needs no documentation. I mean that if you aren’t ready to jump in and learn from the online help and by experimenting, you’re not going to do well with Facebook. That said, the book does at least attempt to answer some important questions about Facebook, notably, “Why Facebook?” (page 6) and “Why did the UK fall in love with Facebook?” (page 11, by “internet psychologist Graham Jones.”)

** I hereby claim to be the originator of the term, “web 2.0 haircut” to mean a shaved head and a goatee or vandyke (soul patch does not qualify), usually in company of heavy-framed glasses. In the event that it should catch on, you read it here first. If not, somebody else thought of it.

They say that the only thing worse than finding a worm in an apple is finding half a worm. I had such a moment at work last week. We had sent a list of target companies to a data mining firm in India with instructions to find the web and email addresses and contact names of people at these companies. A fairly standard practice these days. Data miners charge as little as a few cents per record for this kind of work.

I received a batch of such data and was giving it a once-over before having it imported into our database. You can’t really quality check thousands of names and addresses in any meaningful way, so you just leaf through and look for anything really odd. And completely by random, I found something really odd.

Company: Hebrew Academy of [redacted]
Contact: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President

It was truly a half a worm moment. We had already marketed to tens of thousands of records mined by this company. I checked the Hebrew Academy web site, and there was no evidence that Mr. “wipe Israel off the map” was in charge of a mid-western yeshiva. I checked all the other Jewish orgainizations in the list a a bunch of others for good measure but found nothing else odd. Several troubling thoughts came to mind:

• Since there’s no way this was a random error, somebody over there is making stuff up, and probably thinks this is funny.
• Imagine how awful it would have been if we had sent a letter addressed to Mr. Ahmadinejad at the Hebrew Academy.
• I happened to catch this one. How many others are lurking in the data?

As a marketer, I figured that there are lots of other data mining fish in the sea, and the cost of redoing all this work was still small compared to the potential cost of not just erroneous but offensive material lurking in there. Trying not to be too political about the specifics of the problem, I sent a note to the vendor simply saying that we could no longer trust the quality of the data for marketing purposes, and would have to cancel the project.

There was some back and forth, and then I found the other half of the worm. My data miner sent me a link to a press release posted on the Hebrew Academy’s site titled, “Israeli leader calls for tougher sanctions against Iran,” and including the line, “In Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad pledged to push ahead with his country’s nuclear program and said his people would not bow to Western intimidation.” The miners had searched the site for the word “president” and grabbed the name next to it without paying much attention. Had they searched for “prime minister” they would have put Ehud Olmert in charge.

Sure, this suggested less than stellar QA practice, appalling lack of awareness of current events, and maybe even laziness, but at least it didn’t mean that there was a bigot on the loose out to embarrass us. Much more in line with my expectations of cents-per-record data mining.

So what makes this a Purim story? Not much other than coincidence. Tonight is Purim, a holiday that marks the escape of the Jewish people from genocide at the hands of the Persians. Weird how these things sometimes fold back on themselves.

Enjoy the holiday and don’t forget to double check your mailing lists.

Settling in after a week off, I found that the yoga ball had been relegated to a conference room and a new employee had appropriated my door.  Good thing I had brought in my favorite office chair, the Levenger Sprezzatura, and was able to scavenge a nearby IKEA Galant.  Interesting that when viewed in actual natural light, the chair is in fact red, not as many would suppose, orange.

I fell in love with the simplicity and small footprint of the Sprezzatura chair at the Levenger store a couple of years ago.  Lots of people look at it and ask how I can sit in a chair without arms all day, but I’ve never missed them in an office or work chair.  I now have two, a black one at home and a red one at work.  When I went back to research the chair for this post, I found that they seem to have been discontinued.  Or at least replaced with the very similar but not quite as interesting Morgan Desk Chair.  I can’t help but feel that the seam is in exactly the wrong place.

Sprezzatura, by the way, is an excellent Italian word that’s fun to say.  It means - according to the dictionary applet on my Mac - “studied carelessness, esp. as a characteristic quality or style of art or literature.”  A more detailed and art-historical elucidation of the term is over at the wikipedia, but I use a definition more along the lines of “making hard stuff look not just easy, but also stylish.”

Other citations for this wonderful chair come from the also wonderful Book of Joe, which notes that the Sprezzatura is “intended for small home offices where space is really tight.”  That’s part of the appeal, definitely.  Apartment Therapy posed the question, what’s a good compact desk chair that doesn’t look officey, and at least one of their alert readers nominated the Sprezz, although several others mentioned are now on my list to check out.