Inside the world of Rob Mclean, Author

Apparently the occupy Wall Street protesters headed down to the NYPD headquarters. I've got to say, that's a pretty big crowd. After 13 days of protest now you'd think people would call it a day, but it doesn't look like these folks are going to go away. If the crowd size manages to double or triple in coming weeks it's hard to imagine how the NYPD will handle the crowd. At some point they will have to break it up if they want to maintain control over NYC streets.

Fascinating to watch all the headlines erupt over the Bank of America announcement that they will start charging five dollars a month for debit card usage. Debit card fees: Outrage triggers backlash against BofA (Los Angeles Times) Bank of America faces outrage over debit card charge (Washington Post) Bank Of America Is 'Sticking It' To Customers, Senator Says (NPR) Bank of America has declared war--on America (Catholic Online - ok, second tier, but great headline) Customers cry ‘holdup’ as Bank of America blames feds (Boston Herald) Bank of America Goes Through With Stupid Consumer-Hating Idea (Tucson Weekly) Bank of America: Please Don't Use Our Debit Card to Buy Stuff (CNBC) Bank of America debit card fee plan met with resistance and anger (The Guardian) Anyway, you get the drift. At this point Bank of America might as well go through with the charge because they've trashed their brand so bad even if they cancelled the charges they wou...

Milking your customers is a bad PR move.  It's ok to increase prices as long as you increase the value they are getting also. Simply increasing prices to increase profits is a sure fire way to kick your brand in the nuts (pardon the french). Bell Canada recently pissed me off (and I'm sure many others) raising their prices seven per cent for no apparent reason. Although I think it's due to the failure of usage based billing. Netflix jacked up the prices on their customers also not long ago. It was a move I disagreed with and wrote about in a post - Where Netflix messed up (what happens when you ignore PR) .  Since then their stock has crashed from $298 a share to $112 a share (that's around a 60 per cent hair cut in under three months!) And now Bank of America has announced that it is going to start charging customers $5/month for debit card usage. Perrrrrrrfect! This is just what you want to do. After the tax payers bail you out turn around and start chargin...

I don't follow Oracle news, but recently they sure pulled out a fairly atypical PR move, publicly revealing confidential information about another company (Autonomy) in the media. The story is a confusing one and I'm still not sure why Oracle did this. Basically though it appears that Autonomy approached Oracle about being acquired. Oracle declined. Autonomy was then acquired by HP and denied that it ever approached Oracle. In response to what Oracle says are lies, Oracle posted powerpoint presentations that Autonomy, via proxy of Frank Quattrone, presented to them. You can view the powerpoints here on Oracle's Web site.  Oracle also came out with a press release - Another Whopper from Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch . Usually this kind of thing is done behind the scenes via leaks to the media. Oracle could have easily just leaked the powerpoint presentation to a key reporter to change the narrative within the media. Why they went with such a formal PR process I couldn...

It's interesting to see the National Post using infographics, such as they recently did for a story on a young boy that committed suicide as the result of school bullying. The graphic isn't as fancy as it could be (basically it's a lot of circles all over the place) but it's still a great value add. With many graphic designers unemployed or under employed, now is a great time for the media (and corporations) to augment their communications with infographics that significantly increase the resonance of their messaging. People are visual by nature and presenting statistics in graphical form generates far more interest in the reader/viewer than simply embedding a litany of stats in table form or as text. The full sized image can be seen in pdf form here

I recently got an LED monitor and let me tell you it's night and day compared to my old LCD monitor. I spend a lot of time at my PC and with my old LCD monitor it takes a toll on your eyes. I suppose it's a function of the flicker, refresh and resolution rates. Either way, by the end of the day your eyes are worn out. Since using this LED monitor, I'm telling you, you can stare at the thing for hours on end and experience absolutely zero eye strain. If you are still using an LCD monitor, do yourself (and your eyes) a favor and go get an LED monitor - you won't be sorry. Every business should be using LED, PC productivity is so much higher when you aren't being fatigued by eye strain two hours in to your day.

Two years ago I signed on to Ontario's Health Care Connect, a service by the Ontario government that helps people who don't have a doctor find one. Two years later I'm still getting letters from them saying "Your Care Connector is still working to find an available family health care provider in your area and will contact you as soon as one becomes available." And government wonders why tax payers generally feel that government is nothing but a black hole filled with pointless programs that do nothing except spend money to accomplish nothing. I mean, if you can't find me a doctor after two years then what good is the program? Is anyone even really looking? Or is everyone who signs up to Health Care Connect basically just tossed in some database that is programmed to send out a "We're still working for you..." letter every six months? Now, I found a great doctor a year ago, but it's through a walk-in clinic, so it's not the same a...

Got my Bell bill this week and it was seven per cent higher. Apparently they have increased prices because, as the rep told me, "everything goes up in price over time' and Bell is the "Mercedes of phone services". Are you kidding? Voice services (especially landline) should be going down in cost, not up, given competitive pressures in the market. What do I think the price increase is really about? I think Bell was banking on usage-based billing (UBB) increasing its profits dramatically. When UBB fell through they figured they'd make up the difference by simply raising the cost on existing services. You'd think that corporations would look at NetFlix and realize that consumers today won't put up with getting hosed. Raising prices during a recession will only drive consumers to seek out what competitors are offering. What really annoyed me (and this is more a PR function) is how Bell never notifies you that a price increase is coming. It simply appe...

If you haven't seen it, Alessio Rastani (an apparent stock trader) was inteviewed on the BBC and his interview has gone viral. I'm sorry but this is just journalism at it's very worst. First, I actually think it's a great interview and I agree (as do many others) with what Alessio said.  He went a little overboard in his description of Goldman Sachs, but all-in-all, he articulated a view that many economists are saying is very possible. Here's the problem though. No one - and I mean NO ONE - knows who this guy is. There's no account of him working at any significant brokerage firm (he says he did, but refuses to disclose who). He simply appears to be a casual trader with only a few years under his belt at that. How does someone with no significant credentials get on a national broadcast like the BBC? I'll tell you exactly what happened (without even knowing the situation - so I could be wrong, but I doubt it). The BBC probably had a guest booked...

A video recently came out of a group of suposedly rich people watching the Wall Street protestors from a balcony above while they enjoyed champagne and laughing at the protest (starts at 50 second mark). Now, I have no clue who those people actually were, for all we know they aren't rich at all but rather were simply at an after-work function or a wedding reception. Plenty of average folks dress up and can look 'rich' for special occasions. Heck, for all we know the guy in the video who was laughing had just finished telling his buddy "Those wall street fat cats are really going to get it now." In fact, most rich people wouldn't find the protest that interesting. The super wealthy tend not to be 'gawkers', they have more entertaining things to occupy their attention in life. Generally speaking it's middle-class folks that can't turn away from a spectacle.  This is one of the problems with video, it doesn't always tell the real st...

I usually follow my Twitter feeds from my mobile device, but I recently installed Seesmic on my desktop and I really like this app. Previous desktop twitter apps I found frustrating to use. Tweekdeck for instance I found very hard on the eyes. And for some reason a lot of these apps don't let you resize the text, which is beyond frustrating because looking at a sea of 10 point font gives you a headache. Seesmic however lets you change the background to white and increase text size so that it's a pleasure to use. You also get little 'bing' notifications every time a new tweet comes in (an option you can obviously turn off). It integrates LinkedIn if you want, as well as FaceBook and Foursquares.  Anyway, best socmed app I've come across and definitely worthwhile downloading.

Mayor Bloomberg warned of impending riots and the recent Occupy Wall Street protest may foreshadow such an event. The protest started off with only a couple hundred people last week (your usually assortment of hippie-esque protestors) and went unnoticed for the most part. However, after a week now, the number of protestors seems to be growing and YouTube is now starting to get a constant stream of videos regarding the event. I've talked about video becoming more and more important in marketing / communicating anything. Just as important is the video editing software which is allowing people to add music and audio tracks to their video, creating more compelling viewing experiences (see the video below at mark 3:00 for an example of this). The video below shows the police are starting to crack down on the occupy protest. While video of police managing a protest always looks 'dramatic' what's interesting here is that the 'occupation' has officially become a s...

According to Pew Research negative opinions about the press are at an all time high. Definitely check out the source article because they have a ton of infographics that are worth looking at. The main graph related to the research is the one below: As you can see, the public no longer views the media as unbiased or fully accurate. There are dozens of variables that play in to this phenomena, but I think the biggest one is that the public has traditionally viewed the media as doing the people's work. Which is to say, they are kind of like the FBI, but they work for the people not the government. They are suppose to root out what is going on and inform the people so that society can hold politicians and corporations accountable (note the reoccuring theme of accountability that I talk about often in this blog, because it's a causal variable behind much of the issues in the world today). Over the past 15 or so years, the press has lost it's credibility with the p...

I don't lean to the left when it comes to the economy, but Elizabeth Warren , who served as assistant to the president, definitely knows how to make a compelling case.  Warren headed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and is now running for senate after Obama passed her over to actually run the Bureau as director. In this campaign speech she hits her points perfectly and comes across as very authentic in her beliefs. This is exactly what Obama should be doing, but for some reason he can't find his rhythm. This reinfoces a PR point I've said many times, which is you can't teach authenticity. While Obama is a great orator, he lacks authenticity, hence his reputation for being a teleprompter president. Even the way Warren frames a question and then answers it herself with a definitive 'NO' is great PR. That's exactly how you do it. You always answer the question with a definitive answer and then articulate your various nuances. So many spokesperso...

Obama spoke at the Congressional Black Caucus on Saturday. The key quote that came out of his speech was: "I expect all of you to march with me, and press on," Obama said. "... Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying. We are going to press on. We've got work to do." (at the 11:30 mark in the video below) I was kind of surprised that he'd take such a forceful tone with a black audience who have suffered the most under Obama (with unemployment near 20 per cent). My favorite quote of all time is by Gandhi (who Obama is apparently a huge fan of), who said: "Poverty is the worst form of cruelty." Although some say the quote is "Poverty is the worst form of violence." So if Obama truly is a Gandhi fan, I'm a bit taken aback that he's saying to those living in poverty to stop complaining and stop crying. On the surface it seems like a dumb thing to say. But from a PR perspective it's actually quite smart (yet als...

Great little story of a private company - Marvin Windows - that has refused to lay off any of its 4,300 employees. This doens't surprise me. From what I've seen of private-based companies, owners will sacrifice greatly to protect their employees (it's a myth that the 'rich' don't care about people, at least from what I've seen). It also goes to show, which I've spoken about before, that it's our stock market model that is at the root of the cuts we've seen (maximizing profits in the short-term to appease shareholders, even if it be at the cost of long-term growth). The president of Marvin Windows puts it perfectly... While Marvin’s story might seem quaint, even naïve, Ms. Marvin says the no-layoff policy is as much a business wager as an act of benevolence. She says she is confident that it will ultimately pay off. Already, she says, Marvin is gaining market share from weakened rivals.  Ms. Marvin acknowledges that her family’s privat...

You know, the other day I talked about 'superhero' campaigning . Right on queue Obama comes out today and says: If asking a billionaire to pay the same tax rate as a plumber or teacher makes me a warrior for the middle class, I'll wear that charge as a badge of honor. You can read the full story here. I'm sorry, but it's really laughable that three years in to his presidency he is now calling himself a 'warrior', when even his own base sees him as someone who sits on the fence more often than not and who tries to be seen as the 'compromiser in chief'.  If he was really this so called 'warrior of the middle class' where was he when he first took office when it came to the middle class?   More to the point, why keep pretending like taxing the wealthy is going to create jobs. As I've said before, I don't care if you increase taxes on the wealthy, but it's dishonest to act like doing so will have any significant impact on une...

OK, now this is just messed up. Apparently in China tobacco companies are sponsoring elementary schools . With strict regulations on tobacco in China - you can't smoke in public, you can't advertise on television or in print - the tobacco companies are reaching kids by sponsoring their schools. Over 100 schools now have names like Sichuan Tobacco Hope Elementary School.  This is about as immoral as you can get when it comes to marketing.

PR Daily News had a short article on five reasons a reporter will delete your news release . Let's forgo the irony that they used the digit 5 instead of using the word five in the article headline (a basic CP style rule), the five reasons a reporter will delete your news release were: Send it to their personal email Include the phrase ‘For Immediate Release.’ Fail to personalize it Include a ton of copy and don’t hyperlink. Include a typo      Keep in mind this article was written by a reporter. While you may think that advice from a reporter must be wholly accurate, I'd reconsider that assumption. I think PR people can tell you far better what will or won't cause you to lose traction with the media (because they've approached thousands of journalists... and not all journalists are the same!) For instance, I'd disagree with his second and fifth point. Yes, you should never have a typo, but a reporter is not going to pass on a news item simply because...

Rick Perry just came out with a political ad that looks like it's a trailer for a feature film. That's one thing I've noticed about campaign ads this year, they are the slickest they've ever been. Which makes sense given technology is enabling high-quality video production at less cost and less expertise required than ever before. Rich Perry's Trailer Ad Ron Paul's Trailer Ad Compare those videos to what was being produced in 2008 and it's night and day. Barack Obama's 2008 campaign Ad This transition to movie-trailer type ads, I think, is in response to Obama's success in 2008. While he didn't have ads as slick as this, what his campaign showed was that the masses vote emotionally. The success of "Yes We Can" showed other politicians that if you can manage to move people emotionally, you can generate far more support than by simply stating your policy differences. Old campaign ads always highlighted the difference b...

Non profit organizations are known for running on a tight budget, but that doesn't stop some of them from doing an amazing job in designing their Web sites. A recent article - 40 of the Best Websites of Non-Profit Organizations - is definitely worth checking out. Some of my favs are: Michael J Fox (Parkinsons) Take the Walk (HIV/AIDS) African Tour (Stop child labour) To Write Love on Her Arms (Depression, Addiction, Self Harm, Suicide)

Kudos to Bloomberg for sounding the alarm before the building is on fire. Today he predicted that if the job picture does not get better that there will be riots in New York and called on politicians to get their act together. This is the first instance of someone clearly identifying a near-term risk of civil unrest in the US. I suppose Bloomberg might be grand standing (who knows, maybe he'll run for President) but I don't see that as his style.  I actually did a press conference years ago which Bloomberg participated in and from what I could tell he seemed like a really nice guy. I don't see him doing this simply to garner headlines or as a PR strategy to apply pressure on the politicians. I think he's saying this because he believes it's a serious threat. The reality is that while we use the stock market,  GDP and unemployment to gauge whether we are technically in recession or not, that's not how every day Americans gauge a recession. They gauge it b...

Ron Paul One criticism I've had of Ron Paul is his failure to take complex ideas and boil them down to something that resonates with the American people in 30 seconds (which is what they are often given in these debates). It's not really his fault in the sense that it's a bit absurd to think a person can spend a lifetime studying economics, philosophy, politics and that what takes a lifetime to learn can be condensed down to 30 seconds of wisdom that reasonates with the masses. So I was happy to see his campaign using video to bridge this gap. In a recent video he's countered one of his most misunderstood stances - the anti-war stance. He's got a good tag line, Mutually Assured Respect. It's something that will resonate in 30 seconds and which the media will take an interest in and give him interviews to flush out what exactly he means by MAR. It's sort of mind boggling when you think about the fact that in the year 2011 there is only one candida...

Terry Matthews , founder of Mitel and many other tech companies, commented on the state of technology in Ottawa and Canada as a whole about a month ago (I just stumbled on the article recently). You can read his interview here . What he describes is a sad state of affairs. Anyone in tech in Canada knows that his comments are bang on the money. Canadian companies focus purely on R&D and neglect so many other areas of their business (in part due to lack of access to talent as well as funding). RIM is a great example of this. There is a must read article in Canadian Business - BlackBerry’s perceived brand value takes a dive - that came out today. It points out that Canada's top 10 brands combined have a brand value of $47B, in comparison, Google alone has a brand value of $48B. The basic truth is that companies do what they know how to do. Most of Canada's companies are run by engineers and so it's not surprising that they invest heavily in engineering. Primarily it ...

So American Apparel ran a competition for models (open to the public) for their XL sized clothing. The competition's name "The Next BIG Thing". Apparently one woman, Nancy Upton, submitted a variety of images designed to get a viceral response and ended up getting the most votes. Ameican Apparel disqualified Nancy in light of her submission pictures being inappropriate in relation to the spirit of the campaign / contest. They then wrote her a letter (you can read it here ) explaining that they did not appreciate her actions (and sent such letter to media outlets - I suppose in light of Nancy getting a lot of media attention for her entry). Anyway, so AA's The Next Big Thing campaign blew up in their face and turned in to a little bit of a PR nightmare. A couple of lessons that can be learned here: 1) If you are running online competitions, never ever let people simply upload submissions without them being approved by staff first. All you have to do is vi...

Richard Branson was on the Kudlow Report the other day. He didn't give the best interview (he was clearly at a party of some sort and background noise was distracting him), but I have to say, doing PR for Branson would probably be the best PR gig you could ever have. The reason why it would be the best PR gig is because Branson embodies all the traits that make for great PR. He's light hearted, he's got an unbridled positive attitude, he speaks his mind, he takes risks and doesn't sweat failure, he views everything as a conversation, and he clearly makes everything he does 'fun'. Branson is 'infectious' (in a good way). One of the best accelerators of PR is having a client that intuitively views PR (and business for that matter) as fun. Once you have that greenlight to 'have fun' that's when you can really achieve remarkable things. 

[ correction:  please note: I got Apple's number wrong. Since their IPO their stock has actually gone up 10,000 per cent, not 1,000 per cent] RIM is getting pounded in after hours trading today (down 18 per cent and still falling) after announcing their second quarter results. Apparently they only sold 200,000 playbook tablets in the second quarter (Apple sells about 2.5 million iPad's a quarter). I guess the question is becoming, is RIM approaching its last breath? (My totally non-empircal, shot in the dark call of RIM stock hitting $15 bucks isn't looking so crazy right now though). Is the Grim Reaper calling? (now that's a good pun!) I don't necessarily think so, although as I've been saying for over a year, they do have a brand crisis on their hands. But first a couple reasons why the Grim Reaper may not be blackberry messaging RIM just yet: 1) If you look at RIM over a 10 year period (which is to say if you invested in the company in 2001) y...

For those that didn't see Tim Geithner , Secretary of the Treasury, was recently interviewed for 30 minutes by Jim Cramer of Mad Money . Jim essentially treats Tim like a prognostic God, taking everything Tim says with enthusiastic belief. It's clear Jim views Tim as the white knight that will save the global economy (this is the same guy that wanted to quit just two months ago and Obama talked him in to staying, it's also the same guy who said America would never lose its triple-A status just months before it did). Over at Business Insider though there was a gust-busting, pointed-stick-in-the-eye (and very short) article pointing out that Cramer a few years ago identified Tim as the worst possible candidate for Secretary of Treasury and how we were all doomed if he was selected for the job. He begged the administration not to hire Geithner. Yikes! Talk about egg on your face. Cramer has gone from seeing Geithner as the worst possible person to be Treasury S...

Interesting 30-minute cartoon that was created called the American Dream .You can watch it on YouTube. It's interesting to see this kind of content being created, plays right in to my thesis that a battle of ideas is brewing between corporations, the government and the people, which I talked about in my post Emerging Trends - Let's Get Ready to Rumble a few weeks ago. Infotainment is definitely an effective way to gain mindshare. A lot of tech companies copy the "X for Dummies' model years ago and that went over well. They would take their product, for instance if they made wireless networking gear, and make a "Wireless Networking for Dummies" book. Because people knew of the Dummies books it instantly resonated with people (as opposed to if it had been branded simply using the corporate logo, in which case people would react with dread over some 200-page corporate manual).  Number one rule of marketing, make your content easy for people to absorb...

Not often you see something like this... During the GOP debate on CNN tonight the Tea Party didn't just tank their brand, they nuked it. While they had a brand that was a mix of positives (liberty, no deficit spending and small government) and negatives (uncompromising and extremist) after tonight they solidified their brand as being outright nuts. Blitzer asked Ron Paul how would a private healthcare system treat someone who didn't buy health insurance and got sick and required six months of care. Who would pay for it? Would he just be left to die if he couldn't pay? At which point a number of people in the crowd cheered "YES". Part of me wondered why CNN would pair up with the Tea Party to hold a debate, it seemed a bit odd (CNN leans to the left and the Tea Party is far far right). But when I heard that question it made sense. While the question was fair, it's pretty obvious that it was also designed to get a reaction out of the extreme elements i...

Looks like Italy might have their bacon saved by China .  The two countries are in talks to sell Italian debt to China (sparking hope that we might avoid a Great Depression globally). One has to almost chuckle over China buying up all this debt. I mean, we're talking about a communist country that subjects its citizens to slave labor-like conditions and wages. So of the 20 dollars of revenue the worker produces in a day, the government keeps 18 dollars and the worker keeps 2 dollars (I don't know that those are the figures, but I'm assuming it's something along those ratio lines). Then the government takes the 18 dollars and uses it to buy up the debt of countries who are living high on the hog without paying as they go (in part to keep their export trade going, but also, I'm sure, to keep those countries from getting too vocal about Chinese activities they may not agree with). From what I can tell this essentially equates to developed nations being bailed out...