Inside the world of Rob Mclean, Author

A while ago Warren Buffett bought a whack load of local newspapers .  A lot of folks didn't understand the decision, but I always did. Local newspapers give you news you will not get from national outlets. National news you can get anywhere, most of it online for free. But local news you can only get from local news papers (with limited access online). If you want to know what is going on with a company, never ever turn to the national papers, always turn to the local papers. The local papers generally have real face-to-face relationships with the companies (and even some of their employees), whereas the national papers have generally only interacted with said companies over the phone or perhaps once or twice face-to-face. Those local relationships often result in news coverage that digs beneath the surface as to what is really going on. In light of this, the Ottawa Citizen proves my point with RIM. They had an interesting story today that states that RIM is limiting summer va...

Well I bought some shares in RIM today. I bought some at $7.54 a share on the TSX. While I'm a strong proponent of staying OUT of the stock market for the next year (perhaps even longer) given what I believe to be the possibility of a serious crash, I've made an exception in buying some RIM. If I've misjudged the bottom (a risky thing to try and do any time) I'll quickly get out should the share price fall another five per cent. Having said that, my reasons for getting in at this point are pretty simple (and mostly PR related): The 'bad news' cycle is now over. The stock has been slaughtered and basically all the dirty laundry is now wide out in the open. It's hard to imagine any negative news events over the next month or so that would receive any attention. With Q1 behind it, the discussion over financials will disappear for the next three months. Even Q2 and Q3 have had such revised expectations placed upon them, that RIM's stock price wi...

In my past post about social media and the kids who abused a 68-year old bus monitor, the last update I gave saw folks having raised $318K for the bus monitor over at Indiegogo . Well, a week later that number seems to have peaked at $655k!!!  It hasn't moved much in a few days, so I think this crowd funding effort has now run its course. Just utterly mind boggling though. This poor lady gets verbally abused by a bunch of brats, people around the world feel bad for her, and she ultimately is walking away with $655k! I think it's fantastic and it shows how social media has the power to radically change people's lives.

Anyone who was praying for a miracle on RIM can now officially stop. RIM announced its quarterly earnings today and the news was bad. Revenues for the quarter fell from 4.9B in the previous quarter to 2.8B this quarter. The company reported a $518M loss for the quarter. In addition, RIM announced it is cutting 5,000 jobs and that BB10 will be delayed until 2013. The stock is currently down 16 per cent in after hours. You can read more here . While RIM has 2.1B of cash reserves, one has to wonder how long that will last with losses running at 500M a quarter? That's less than a year of operating capital considering this quarter's losses. I'm actually going to be a bit of a contrarian here and say that this might actually be a moment to buy some RIM stock. If not tomorrow then perhaps the day after. The simple reason being that this quarter is going to wash out a lot of investors and we might be seeing a bottom in the stock price. With all the bad news behind ...

For those that watch MSNBC or who use to watch CNBC you'll know Dylan Ratigan , who use to host Fast Money and now hosts his own show on MSNBC. Today was his last day at MSNBC and he had an interesting farewell message. Visit msnbc.com for breaking news , world news , and news about the economy I found his words at the 6:03 mark quiet refreshing. "...the apparent culture and system is one of destructive extraction, predatory, dualistic lying scumbags and we have all these other people who are completely the opposite of that [who] are [on] this mission centric heroic culture of collective collaboration and right now the power model at the top of our civilian society, top of our media, banks, politicians, models this sort of putrid dominance seeking culture and ultimately that's what we need to repair..." Here's my take on Dylan. I like the guy, have since he was on Fast Money. He's a straight shooter. That said, he's off on some non-prof...

Bloomberg has a great story outlining Obama's media strategy in which they show that Obama has a clear preference towards controlled one-on-one interviews versus Q&A's at press conferences. Statistics from the story that are interesting are: Obama had held only 17 solo news conferences as of February, fewer at that point in his presidency than  Bill Clinton (31),  George H.W. Bush  (56) or  Ronald Reagan  (21), though more than George W. Bush (11). The data are even starker if you consider “impromptu” encounters with reporters. On that measure, Obama took questions 94 times, fewer than Bush Jr. (307), Clinton (493), Bush Sr. (263) or Reagan (120). The one measure on which Obama leads his predecessors is in actual interviews. At the time of Kumar’s count, Obama had given 408. That’s about three times as many as  George W. Bush  (136) had given at a similar point in his presidency, and about two- and-a-half times as many as Reagan (164) or ...

So we finally thought we were through all the hoopla regarding the Internet in Canada right? Usage Based Billing got shot down and the carriers were held back from jacking Internet prices up. No sooner can you sigh a breath of relief than the Internet comes under attack yet again. This time it's in conjunction with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Huffington Post has a story on how the TPP has Internet regulations that all participating countries would have to abide by. Which would mean that Canadians would become subject to the Internet laws determined primarily by the United States (although technically by the TPP as a whole). Open Media , the folks who helped stopped the Usage Based Billing efforts of Canadian carriers, has launched a campaign called Stop The Trap . Folks can sign the petition, just like what was done to oppose Usage Based Billing, and government leaders will get a message saying you oppose non-Canadian powers regulating Canadian Internet usage. ...

Totally not PR related, but I just tried VIM to clean the bathroom. Wow, this stuff is amazing. Ten times better than anything I've ever used before. It's rare that I blog about a product, since after all I tend to focus on PR, but I was so blown away by this VIM stuff that I figured it worth a mention. I only stumbled on it because they had samples-sizes on sale at Canadian Tire. For those of you who do your own cleaning, buy this stuff, you won't regret it.

This is like winning the lottery!  Wow, she must be beyond happy.

An update on the story about folks raising funds for a lady who is a bus monitor. In the post I stated $130k has been raised so far. Just came across more up-to-date stats and apparently they've raised $215k. Absolutely mind boggling!   

Wonder what is (really) happening over in Europe, Nigel Farage always gives it to you straight. Although you probably won't hear him on any of the mainstream media outlets (although BBC and Fox are starting to give him air time once in a blue moon).

CNN's ratings continue to crash and crash hard. The network now draws under 400,000 viewers during primetime, it's lowest ratings in over 20 years. It's not that complicated to figure out why... young people are not getting their news from the major news outlets any more. In addition, it doesn't help that many feel CNN has been co-opted by various corporate and political interests and curtails its news coverage so as to not offend said sponsors. When was the last time CNN broke a story? They still have reach when it comes to foreign stories (who surprisingly, wink wink, don't really contribute to CNN's fiscal growth), but I can't for the life of me remember any story over the past five years that originated or was exclusive to CNN. That said, many feel that Fox News is just as co-opted as CNN and it still brings in over 1.6 million viewers during primetime. I attribute this to the fact that Fox is really the only right-wing mainstream media outlet ...

Very tragic yet very cool story broke today that shows the real power of social media. Karen Klein is a bus monitor in New York. She appears to be in her sixties and earns $15,000 a year at her job. She seems to have had a tough life with her son having committed suicide at some point in the past. So you get the picture... an average, upstanding citizen trying to get by in the world. Anyway, the story  (read more at the link provided) here is that a group of kids on the bus decided it would be fun to verbally abuse her. Obviously these kids have EQs and IQs that scrape the bottom of the barrel, not just for what they did, but for video taping it as well. Enter social media. The video went viral on Reddit and then someone decided to raise money to send Karen on a vacation via crowdsource funding over at Indiegogo  (site is currently not loading for me, probably due to massive traffic generated by this story). The original intent was to raise $5k, but so fa...

For those that were following the GOP primaries you'll know that Ron Paul, aka Dr. No, was leading a revolution. Millions of Americans were donating and campaigning for Ron Paul and saw him as the only viable option to co-opted and corrupted politicians in both the Republican and Democratic parties. About a month or so ago Mitt Romney sealed the GOP nomination and many of Paul's followers asked what's next? Paul after all ran on a platform that was almost entirely in opposition to Romney's. Paul made it very clear that voting for Democrats (Obama) or Republicans (Romney) made no difference as they were both beholden to the banks and military industrial complex. While not winning the GOP primary, Paul amassed a good number of delegates, enough to be a thorn in the side of Romney at the GOP convention. Most of Paul's followers assumed Paul would use his base of followers to negotiate concessions from Romney in the GOP platform in exchange for an endorsement....