Inside the world of Rob Mclean, Author

Finally, a PR agency that has jumped on the iPod / iPhone app craze. Paver Smith is a UK PR agency who I had never heard of until today. They came out with an application for the iPhone that gives you free PR tips / advice every day. I think it's a great brand building effort. Not only do I think the app is useful for PR professionals (there's always something we need to be reminded about), but I think it's a good app for folks to tell their CXO's to download. I think executives embrace PR much more when they understand how it works, and this app is great for slow-feeding executives little facts about PR. Thumbs way up to PaverSmith for being the first to market (that I'm aware of) with a PR, iPhone app. If they show this kind of passion and innovation about their own brand, then that's the kind of agency I'd want to work with, so they've already left a lasting brand impression in my mind! Not to mention I'll be reading their tips every da...

Read review here Yet another sign of how voice services are racing to zero cost. Google has made it so that using Gmail you can make phone calls at no cost within the US and Canada. Now, obviously the big issue is that you have no DID (direct inward dial) number assigned to you... hence people can't call you or see you are calling on their caller ID. The point however is that it won't be long before all that stuff is available just like it is on Skype (although in Canada you still can't get a DID for Skype - thank you CRTC, NOT!). Anyway, I can definitely see the day where Google offers a 360-degree digital / communications offering. Right now they have their finger in just about every pie... they've got Android, voice services, search engine, office apps that could replace microsoft office, the ability to become an online media provider (YouTube), and on and on and on... The only thing Google is missing, and it's a huge piece of the puzzle, is the OS......

This is more of a rant about the media (probably an unfair rant at that). Why is it every time a flu or cold outbreak occurs we never get any warning in the media?  Heck, we don't even get coverage of it while it's happening unless it's life threatening (H1N1 kind of thing). I really wish the media, or Health Canada, or someone, could notify the public when incidents of cold/flu are going around. Everyone is getting sick over the past week (including me) and yet I've got no clue what's going around (and no, I didn't go to the doctor to find out). Anyway, the weather network use to track rates of the flu across Canada (but I don't think they do anymore). It's very annoying that it's nearly impossible to know what is going around without going to your doctor because the media never cover it. Yes, once you start seeing colleagues get sick you know something is on the loose, but by then it's too late to take some immune boosting steps like e...

Story here So another analyst has slashed their rating on RIM. It's unfortunate to see the market turning on RIM, but as much as I hate to say it, it's probably justified. Their recent acquisition of Cellmania is a bad sign in the sense that it clearly tells you that they do not have the in-house capacity to keep pace with the competition... ergo they had to buy another company to try and keep up. While it may be a good thing down the road, right now it tells you they are clearly on their heels (at least in the consumer space). I recently got to use an android phone and I've got to say... I think it's better than RIM by a long shot and it even trumps the Apple iPhone. When competition is neck-and-neck, it's the small user-centric features that will often put you over the top. What I was impressed with when it came to the Android was how instead of static wallpaper, like RIM and Apple have on their interfaces, the Android has a motion backdrop. Something a...

Read story here Yet another story, this time in the New York Post, about dropping cable tv for the internet. Yet again, it's disappointing to see the story not mention any of the things you need to truly enjoy all the benefits of cable tv without cable tv (heck, you get more through the internet than you'd ever get with any cable package).  I was shocked to hear in the story of 20 somethings sitting around the dinner table watching tv on their laptop. On your laptop?!!! Guys, what the heck are you doing?  In the most basic of set ups at least hook your laptop up to the tv using an HDMI cable. Another disappointment...yet again Netgear gets no mention - argh, come on guys, get the PR machine going. Anyway, this article, as many others, references sites like Hulu and Netflix, which clearly tells you those two companies have their PR game-face on and are out there staying connected to reporters (because realistically neither Hulu or Netflix are the future of Internet-...

Story here Talk about insane. It's funny how we are in a recession with so many things needed in the world... roads, mobile devices, education products, cures for diseases, etc. You'd think there would be more work than we have people to do the work. And yet unemployment is still in the nine percent range.

So apparently everyone is in an uproar over Aniston using the word retard. Really? This whole thing is so absurd. As if Aniston holds any malicious feelings towards people with disabilities. I get that it offers various organizations who represent children with disabilities the opportunity to push the cause that they want to see the R-word gone from our modern day lexicon, but creating an uproar over Jennifer Aniston seems a bit harsh - especially given that she oozes decency and was clearly being self deprecating (see video below). It's funny how no one ever goes after Howard Stern who actually uses people with mental disabilities in pretty horrible ways (see video below - warning: offensive language contained within ). Yet another example of how people will pick on folks that they know they will get a response from. No one goes after Stern because controversy only makes him more popular not less. Instead they jump on someone like Aniston because they know doing so...

For those of you who follow the market, you'll know that things have been anything but bright over the past six months. A little glimmer of hope comes from Doug Kass. I love Doug Kass, who called the bottom of the recession a couple of years ago. He's basically calling another bottom now with a rebound on its way. This relates to an earlier post I had where I was saying that for a true rebound we needed two things. Obviously job growth and unemployment to start coming down. But more importantly... we needed some degree of confidence to return to the markets. I think it's a great sign when someone with a level head like Doug Kass is turning bullish for the second half of the year.

I have to say first and foremost that I love graphic and multimedia designers. I think a creative graphic designer is literally worth their weight in gold. A compelling visual can drastically shift people's perspectives on a given issue. Which brings me to the following video that was created to obviously drum up support for the legalization of marijuana. I don't really have a hard stance on the issue myself, although I lean towards legalization as a result of my libertarian mindset. Tax revenue and regulation is probably a better scenario than law enforcement expenditures and incarceration costs and the unregulated state of buying something on the street - not to mention the harms associated with labeling people criminals.  But I can also appreciate the slippery slope argument - if you legalize pot, then what's next, cocaine? Anyway, I think the whole thing would be a non issue if we lived in a society where people didn't feel the need to self medicate. But...

Interesting article in the Holmes Report , although it lacks the detail I'd have liked to have known. Basically the article says that the negative feelings towards corporation is at an all time high.... "Says reputation research veteran John Gilfeather, who has been working with Vision Critical on ReputationPlus: "In 40 years of studying corporate reputation, I have never seen this level of vitriol aimed at larger corporations. It is not just an erosion of positives, but also a rise in distinct negatives. If companies do not start communicating—and communicating better—about why they should be respected, this trend will continue." If you read the book "Good to Great" by Jim Collins, it's not really surprising. Many corporations today are driven by one thing, which is the bottom line and the share price. While the bottom line obviously matters, the irony is that focusing first and foremost on the bottom line seems to hurt the bottom line. What ap...

Skype filled for its IPO recently and the WSJ had a nice summary of the numbers associated with Skype. The issue with Skype obviously is how do you make big bucks on a low cost service. You have to do that by having a massive consumer base. In telecom we use to talk about the race to zero... that voice services will eventually become free through the commidifaction of sending voice as data packets and competitive market forces (which increase exponentially when voice is seen as a data transmission). Anyhoo... all the techno mumbo jumbo aside... the big problem for skype is that most people like to move about while they are on the phone and don't like being tethered to their computer. I think if Skype takes off, it will do so in the mobile world where users use skype on their smartphones to avoid cellular charges. The biggest barrier however is that at some point Skype is going to have to start publicizing itself as more than just a PC / Smartphone app for making phone ca...

Today must be a 'strange' day for me as everything I stumble on seems... well... strange. I'm a fan of Netgear and noticed they signed on Atomic PR as their AOR (agency of record). Not having heard of Atomic PR I went and checked out their Web site. I found the navigation presentation very strange. Everything on the screen gets faded when you move your mouse over another part of the screen. While I get the notion of highlighting the content the viewer is interested in, basically whiting out the rest of the site is very odd. I'm constantly surprised by how poor a lot of PR firms Web sites are. Your Web site is your face to the world... it should draw visitors in, not put them to sleep or give them a headache. The only explanation I can think of as to why this happens is that PR folks tend not to have a lot of experiencing developing Web sites. Check out Ogilvy and Mather's Web site . Super creative and eye catching... but my lord, navigating it gives you...

So I'm reading the National Post online and come across this very strange blog entry. "Drink hard"  It appears to be a blog about a new vodka brand and a promotional event that included Bruce Willis. But for the life of me I had to read the blog twice because the writing was all over the place. Which goes to show, you can know grammar and lots of words, but when you string them together in an off-the-wall kind of way you lose the reader.

Just finished reading Good To Great by Jim Collins . I've heard about this book for years and I'm ashamed to admit I never got around to reading it. Unlike Outliers, I was thoroughly impressed with this book. I'm always interested to see how themes and insights are continually recycled throughout history - the old continually presented as new - but as such, I'm usually let down by most books as they rarely present any new insights. But Good to Great holds enough novel anecdotes and comparative analysis to support the main thesis that it is a very enjoyable and insightful read. I still would argue that the philosophic works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca or Marcus Aurelius bear as much fruit if not more, although the tenants of stoicism seem to be beyond the grasp of our modern day culture and as such their macro applicability is questionable. What I did like about Good to Great though was how much it aligned with stoic thought and provided evidence to show how such ...