Inside the world of Rob Mclean, Author

If you are a Canadian and you use the Internet you need to visit this site www.openmedia.ca I strongly suggest you also sign the petition on the site www.openmedia.ca/meter Basically the days of reasonable internet prices (if they were ever reasonable to start with) are coming to an end as the big ISPs start to charge customers on a per gig usage model. Rogers started doing so a while ago, but now even the Bell ISP resellers are going to be forced to do so also (so cable customers can't even switch to ADSL, no matter where you go this is how you will be billed now). I blogged about how we were heading down this path way back in September .  As I predicted in my blog PR folks working for ISPs are facing one heck of a bumpy ride ahead of them. Beyond the PR though, Canadians need to react to what is happening. The internet is the lifeblood of our economy and the essential medium through which information is shared.  If Canadians accept that the billing model moving forwa...

Wow. I was thoroughly disappointed by Obama's State of the Union speech tonight . He basically took the worst of all courses of actions. He didn't really focus too much on his successes, he didn't admit to any shortcomings, and he really didn't articulate what was in progress (ie. what was going to get done by the end of his term). It was a lot of fluff and center-of-the-road messaging. What he did do a lot of though was articulate the issues. But at this stage of the game, halfway through his presidency, to still be addressing issues from a professorial angle is simply boring. Great, you know what's wrong, but two years in no one wants to hear about what's wrong, they want to know what you've been doing over the past two years to fix the things that are broken. The primary highlights of his speech on the 'to do' front were to have 80 per cent of Americans using high-speed rail within the next 25 years and to have 80 per cent of America's...

Should be interesting to see Obama's address tonight. He seems to have simplified his messaging down to jobs and deficit reduction - I guess it's never too late to get it right. Why it took two years to steer the ship in this direction we'll never know, but at least it seems to have turned. I think tonight's speech will set the tone for his presidential re-election campaign in two years time. He's got a tough road to haul as the question at election time is always the same "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" While the answer for most Americans would be yes (since two years ago the world was falling in to a proverbial abyss), Obama got elected on 'Change you can believe in' and so how he is evaluated will be slightly different than most presidents. People won't just be asking whether they are better off, but also whether he delivered on what he promised - bipartisanship, ending the wars, closing Guantanamo Bay, controlling...

I thought I'd take a moment to talk about social media. Social media has had a few years under its belt now and I've got to say, while it has value, such value is nowhere near as high as its perceived value. Take Twitter for instance. Yes, twitter is great but what impact is it really having in the real world? The easiest way to assess this, in my opinion, is to look at Twitter activity. It's quite a shocking thing to do.  Let's look at the one statistic that matters, people following tweets... @ nikestore has 43,343 followers  @ blackberry has 204,174 followers  (Research in Motion) @ McDonalds has 80,152 followers @ EA has 433,227 followers  (Electronic Arts) @ Cisco has 46,474 followers @ CNN has 1.5 million followers @ WSJ has 600,218 followers (Wall Street Journal) @ britney spears has 6.6 million followers @ barackobama has 6.3 million followers @ sarahpalinusa has 384,953 followers @ pmharper has 79,797 followers (Canada's Prime Minister) ...

So for anyone who has a blog you know that you have three options for the look and feel. You can use a blogger standard template, download fancier templates or create your own. In the initial creation of my blog I chose a combo of the last two options. I downloaded a template I liked and then slightly modified it a bit. Long story short, apparently in the template one of the images linked to Photobucket (I'm not even going to link to Photobucket I'm so ticked at those guys right now). Something must have happened to that image because suddenly my blog was hijacked by Photobucket. I've switched to a basic blogger template until I get the time to custom design my own template (so please bare with me while I use this somewhat mundane template for my blog). An image of what photobucket did to my blog is below.   I mean, what the heck? So I'm sure anyone using the template I was using is experiencing the same problems. Lesson learned... if you are doing anythin...

Hey Folks! [warning - as I occasionally do, this particular post is not about PR] It's been a while since I've blogged (I'll get in to that later), but I came across an interesting article - Productivity great worry for Carney - in the Gazette, although I'm sure it's appeared in all the papers.  The article got under my skin. Basically Carney, Bank of Canada governor, has said that Canada's productivity (how much a person at work outputs in a day) is lacklustre. A whole bunch of factors combine to create this, including a high Canadian dollar and businesses not purchasing new equipment that increases productivity.  But when you put it all together, basically, Canadians aren't outputting like they should be. What frustrated me was how little the article talked about the real reasons behind lower productivity (hey, who would want to talk about them, because they aren't pretty). From what I've experienced first hand, and from what you'...

Well it looks like cigarette packages will be getting a face-lift in the next year or so. One of the images will be of Barb Tarbox who died of lung cancer (label below). This is a fascinating PR case study. At first the government was focused on contraband cigarettes and reducing that trade. Then there was outcry from the medical community and the government was seen as being in bed with the tobacco industry. Then the government announced that new labels would be created. From a PR perspective there are a number of fascinating elements associated with this development. First, this was clearly the result of a PR war - one that never developed, but the threat of which moderated the governments actions. Second, what I find thoroughly fascinating, are two elements of this story which the media seems to be completely ignoring. The first is that in all the stories I've read (and admittedly I've only read a half dozen of the hundreds of stories) there is never a quote...