PeppercomBlog

Tiger Had Us By the Tail

Posted by Matt Purdue

When I first read my colleague Ed Moed’s take on Tiger Woods, I admit I was a bit miffed. At the time he wrote it, Woods had been in a one-car motor vehicle accident…and that’s pretty much all we knew for sure. Rumors were swirling about his alleged affairs.

My thinking at the time was simple: Leave the man alone for a while. He crashed into a fire hydrant and a tree, and was knocked unconscious. Doesn’t any human being deserve a time to heal up after an auto accident before every so-called journalist and blogger goes crawling through his personal life?

But now, it seems, the worm has turned. Tiger is all but blatantly admitting infidelity, confessing to “transgressions” and being “far short of perfect.” But at the same time, Tiger continues to plead for us to ignore him, declaring that he has a human right to a “measure of privacy.” Funny, but I don’t remember the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights including the freedom to cheat on your wife without getting busted.

What do ice-cream sundaes and correlation have in common?

Posted by Milos Sugovic

Nothing really, unless you’re in PR. 

Take a look for yourself: slide six of a VMS presentation titled “Measuring the Power of News on Advertising and Business Outcomes.” Is that really correlation? Last time I checked, correlation is a statistical relationship between two (or more) variables. So why would VMS, the leader in providing news and ad monitoring solutions, dumb down a statistical concept so much that they themselves look dumb?

Well, there are three explanations I can think of: First, and least likely, they don’t know better. Judging from the rest of the presentation and the credentials of the researchers, they know what they’re talking about. So let’s scrap that one. Second, and more likely, they talk to it when presenting. Fair enough, but why a graphic with one variable? Unless they’re talking about autocorrelation (self-correlation over time), which I highly doubt, it’s not a good illustration, period.

Which brings me to the third and most likely explanation: the obsession with “dumbing it down.” Statistics has traditionally struggled with making inroads into the public relations profession, and understandably so. On one end you have practitioners that rely on right-brain functions (nothing wrong with that), while on the other there’s a whole myriad of challenges one faces when dealing with qualitative data. But that doesn’t mean we should reduce powerful statistical techniques to the cravings in the hypothalamus!

When News Becomes Voyeurism, and Vice Versa

Posted by Matt Purdue

Call them Ponytailgate and Joggergate. 

Two bubbling controversies present important lessons for PR folks: Whatever your clients do or say in public can come back to haunt them.

First, Ponytailgate. University of New Mexico soccer player Elizabeth Lambert was caught on video apparently roughing up some BYU opponents in a recent match. The real trouble involves a clip of Lambert yanking an opponent down by her ponytail. Somehow, someway the video spread around the interwebs like wildfire, giving Lambert an anti-Warholian taste of what it’s like to be infamous for 15 minutes.

Lambert had no business going rogue on her opponent (despite that fact that video evidence shows Lambert getting elbowed in the stomach at one point). But does our culture really have any business blowing this completely out of proportion? This was a women’s college soccer match, not the Super Bowl. 

Hand of a Frog

Posted by Milos Sugovic

Soccer (or football) is by nature a dirty sport; but that doesn’t mean cheating is acceptable. Unless, of course, you make the rules. 

It took the setting up of an easy play-off draw, two tough matches against soccer giants Ireland, an undetected offside, and a handball by captain and top scorer Thierry Henry for the French to barely qualify to the World Cup 2010. Great news for French fans but a shameful embarrassment for FIFA - Fédération Internationale de Football Association - a French acronym for the international football governing body.

In the aftermath of a match-fixing crackdown on 40 European games, last night’s referee blunder comes as a bitter pill for football fans to swallow. After Thierry Henry’s handball followed an obvious offside and a furious reaction by half-dozen Irish players, it’s curious how Swedish referee and chief culprit Martin Hansson and his assistants missed the blatant cheating. Or did they?

Rooting for Baseball, Inc.

Posted by Matt Purdue

Huge company takes gigantic risks in an infamously volatile market. Huge company gets enormous help from the government in the form of tax breaks and other favors. In the face of all this, huge company is now making piles upon piles of cash.

Are you rooting for this company, which has obviously figured out how to work the capitalist system to full advantage, to succeed or fail?

It’s not Citi or Goldman Sachs. It’s Yankees Global Enterprises, or YGE. This holding company owns both the New York Yankees and the YES cable television network. And when the World Series ended last night, with millions of people screaming until purple in the face, did they know or care that everything in the lead paragraph is true about their beloved conglomerate?

Leveraging My Cutting-edge Digital Platform

By Matt Purdue

They’re called clichés: words and phrases that have been overused to the point that they have become almost meaningless. Businessspeak is rife with them, and it’s time to end them. Look, I’m sure at some point a phrase like “leverage best practices” was new, may even clever. But now it—and its clichéd cousins—is just nauseating. 

I propose that we immediately retire:

Platform—Unless you work on an oil rig, you don’t have to worry about platforms. It’s not a communications platform; it’s a plan or, if you want to get fancy, a strategy.

Dig deep—Stop trying to pretend you work a blue-collar job. Besides, this should go without saying because clients pay us to conduct in-depth research. When is the last time a client asked you for a bit of shallow, perfunctory research.

Drill down—See above. What is it with the PR sector and references to oil, gas and mining industries?

Leverage—When did this become a verb? Leverage “use” instead.

It’s 9/11. Does corporate America care?

Posted by Matt Purdue

Walking to work this morning on Manhattan’s East Side, I passed the fire house on East 29th St. I’ve passed this firehouse dozens of times, not thinking much about it unless one of the firefighters was out testing the heavy-duty circular saw they use for rescues. This tool sounds not unlike a chainsaw, and whenever I hear it I would wonder what the neighbors must think waking up to this racket.

But today was different. The crew of this firehouse, home to Engine 16 and Ladder 7, was standing at attention in the mouth of the firehouse door, in their dress blues, silent. I figured today was inspection day or something. But then, halfway down the block, it hit me. Today. 9/11. The emotion literally stopped me in my tracks. Although I don’t know any of the men and women of Engine 16/Ladder 7, I know they suffered deeply on 9/11/01.  Ladder 7 lost, yes, seven firefighters that day.

Is Social Media a Function of Social Media?

Posted by Milos Sugovic

Peppercom recently conducted a social media audit to uncover the “white space” areas of opportunity for a client. In the process, we collected data on over 1,200 mentions or social media “hits” for industry competitors, measuring their share of voice vis-à-vis various messaging categories and sentiments. After examining data on Twitter and blogs primarily, as well as Facebook, YouTube, Ning, LinkedIn, Delicious, and MySpace, we decided to do a quick experiment and answer the following question: For each competitor, does a strong presence in one social media channel translate, correlate, or spill-over into a strong presence in another social media channel? The answer was “yes.” 

To answer the question we looked at blog and Twitter activity for three competitors. We graphed the number of Twitter and blog “hits” over the timeframe analyzed, and generated the following three graphs. Do you see any relationships? 

Where did the inputs go?

Posted by Milos Sugovic 

How many times have you heard this question: “Should we measure outputs or outcomes?” The discussion of measurement in PR is flooded with a debate over which is a “better” metric: outputs or outcomes. Can you guess what the conclusion is always? You got it right - it’s “both.”  

So why the debate? Well, in essence, it’s a discussion around opportunity cost of doing each, be it in terms of financial resources or time, and usually doing the former over the latter is considered to be “cheaper.” But as technology and software develop and data becomes more readily available, the discussion will lose steam. Untill then, it’s a valid debate only if you consider outputs and outcomes to be perfect substitutes.  

Don't Rub It In.

Posted by Matt Purdue

In today’s L.A. Times, James Rainey’s column is a must-read for PR professionals. Rainey pithily summarizes the latest chapter of the Alessandra Staney saga at the New York Times (sorry, I refuse to capitalize the self-aggrandizing “the” in the paper’s title). A bit of background: Stanley, the NYT’s leading TV critic, has been chastised almost without mercy for the shoddy job she did on Walter Cronkite’s obituary in the July 17 edition. It’s become widely known that the obit included at least eight factual errors.

Everyone from Gawker to Katie Couric have ripped Stanley (and, to a lesser extent, her editors) for, once again, playing fast and loose with veracity. In one of the most scathing rebukes I’ve ever seen a journalist fire at a colleague, the NYT’s public editor placed blame with a reporter “with a history of errors [who] wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work, and editors who should have been vigilant were not.”