New on Friday, May 23, 2003 -- 

One of the extracurricular events planned is a show called Tony and Tina's Wedding. Earlier this week I met a man whose wife took him there for his anniversary, and he says it's well worth going to see.

In an e-mail announcement to IABC members, the association included links to some special deals offered by attractions and hotels in Toronto, and some of the hotel prices deeply undercut the rates offered at the Sheraton Centre hotel for conference delegates. 

The hotel business in Toronto is suffering badly, and IABC deserves congratulations for not panicing, as so many other organizations did, and canceling.  I spent most of yesterday with hotel staff and a retailer in one major hotel, and the news is even worse than I thought. The main floor restaurant in the Harbour Castle Hilton was open for about an hour this week, but otherwise left dark because there are no customers. The roof top dining room, with a great menu and an even better view, is apparently almost empty at both lunch and dinner.

Anyone looking for deals outside the Sheraton should know these are the closest top notch hotels, all with anywhere from a one minute (if the streetlight's green, The Hilton) to ten minutes walk.

Le Germaine -- brand new, I think this is my kind of hotel, in the entertainment district./
Hilton -- right across the street
Holiday Inn on King -- in the heart of the entertainment district
Metropolitan -- across Nathan Philips Square, which is directly in front of the Sheraton
Le Meridian King Edward -- 100 years old this year; a gem
Fairmont Royal York -- closest we have to a castle in Toronto
Eaton Center Marriott -- a couple of minutes walk, another very nice Marriott that I'd pick over the other hotels here only if I wanted Marriott points.

Le Germaine is brand new, and there was a big feature article in Toronto Life magazine about it, written by Katherine Ashenburg, who wrote a book in which hundreds of my photographs were published. Curious about the hotel, I went in last Sunday morning, only to be warmly welcomed by the staff, and before I knew it, I was on a tour. If you go to www.hotelboutique.com you can get to the site for the Toronto hotel. While its own  restaurant isn't open yet, there's a beautiful room where breakfast is served, and the hotel is surrounded by a dozen excellent restaurants. The same man (above) who was at Tony and Tina's wedding was a Le Germaine guest, and he raved about the hotel and its service. I think this will become the hotel in Toronto for creative-type people from ad agencies, design studios, television production companies, and so on, and will be a fashion industry favorite. Pro photographers will love it, too. Rates are $150 double, for a while. Ten minutes walk to the Sheraton.

I've been updating my travel section here, designed to give conference delegates lots of useful info on how to make the most of their stay in Toronto when they are not in the conference sessions.

COVERAGE OF THE IABC CONFERENCE: I'm trying to make arrangements with IABC to provide coverage of the conference. If it works out, and I'm pretty sure it will, I'll be writing here and in Jack O'Dwyer's web site, with updates each day of the conference.

New on Tuesday, April 29, 2003 -- 

World Health Organizations lifts its travel ban on Toronto
It should never have been issued in the first place.

My local radio station just reported the WHO has decided that, now that the damage has been done, it really is OK to visit Toronto. I'm betting the lifting of the ban will not make the front page of the New York Times, though. The issuing of the ban was there, of course. UPDATE: It's an hour later than when I wrote the preceding sentences,  and while tomorrow's New York Times newspaper is not yet published, at least the travel advisory lifting is near the top of the New York Times web site.

New on Monday, April 28, 2003 -- 

How important is winning an IABC Gold Quill award of excellence?
Manulife Financial, a giant Canadian-based insurance company, thinks it is important enough to include among the highlights of its operations listed in Manulife's first quarter earnings release.

Manulife Financial won the International Association of Business Communicators Gold Quill Award for excellence in management of the communications related to its Indonesian operations.

This sentence is one of the highlights listed in the Business Wire version of the financial news release, from April 24, 2003. I don't know how many editors published this sentence, but at least it was in the release. (I blew up the type and made it bold, just cuz I felt like it. In the release, it's just another paragraph, but what the heck!)

Here's what it says about the award in the IABC web site:

EXCELLENCE
Indonesia: From Bankruptcy to Life Insurance Co. of the Year
Kim Griffiths
Manulife Financial
Causeway Bay, Hong Kong

Manulife, for folks who don't know the company, has been PR-friendly and well run for many, many years. The current CEO, Dominic D'Alessandro, won a Canadian Public Relations Society, Toronto chapter, CEO of the year award a couple of years ago. I went to the ceremony, and he made a good speech, actually talking about the importance of communications. I've had some dealings with Manulife's charitable activities over the years, and this is a company that understands its responsibilities to the community. I find the inclusion of the IABC award in the highlights smile-inducing. First, because I'm just plain pleased that the people approving the release are willing to recognize the importance of communications, and second, because it shows how the people responsible for communications can, when they do PR for their own PR department, get well-deserved recognition.

Manulife has the nicest grass of any Toronto company, and a few years ago Toronto was full of moose statues as a tourism promotion. Manulife bought a moose, dressed it up in Scottish-style golfing togs, put it on the beautiful front lawn that's cut like an Augusta national putting green, and proved an insurance company can have a sense of humor.

New on Friday, April 25, 2003 -- 

GREAT NEWS
IABC has not cancelled/moved conference
The International Association of Business Communicators today revamped its web site, posting a notice that says "Since WHO’s recommendation will be reassessed in three weeks and IABC’s International Conference is still six weeks away, current plans are to continue with IABC’s conference in Toronto as scheduled."

I've added the color.

Today's update, which certainly has not been highlighted on IABC's web site opening page, but that's another story, reports that about 650 people have already registered, two speakers have cancelled, 40 per of those registered are from Canada, ... You can read the whole notice by going to www.iabc.com, and then clicking on the top item under news in the upper right corner.

IABC has revised its cancellation policy, saying, 

Should IABC decide on 15 May to postpone or cancel the conference, we will issue a full refund to all who are registered as of that date. Right now, we are continuing our cancellation policy of a full refund, less a 20 percent administrative fee, if your written cancellation request is received by Friday, 16 May. (IABC’s full conference cancellation policy is online at:

http://www.iabc.com/events/conf2003/registration.html.)

In contrast to IABC's untempered promotion yesterday of the nonsensical World Health Organization notice slamming Toronto, IABC today mentions an advisory from the Centre for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, that says visitors to Toronto should stay away from health care facilities where people with SARS are being treated. Yeah, well, that makes sense to me, too.

Yesterday a backhoe cut a natural gas line and blew up a strip mall, killing at least four people, in the west end of Toronto. But no one's saying stay away from strip malls. 

It's early evening as I write this. I've spent the day out and about in Toronto, attending a press preview of Owning Mahowny, a movie based on a book by my friend Gary Ross, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Minnie Driver. I had a couple of business meetings, and lunch in a Japanese restaurant, and then I took a long, long walk through the Yorkville neighborhood, and down Yonge Street to the Eaton Center enclosed mall. I saw thousands and thousands of people, was within a few feet of hundreds, and I saw one lone medical face mask, sitting on top of a radio on the dashboard of a delivery van. 

The city is safe, and now that IABC's decided to keep the conference as planned, subject to another look-see later, IABC headquarters, IABC Toronto, and all the Canadian IABC chapters have the opportunity, and I believe the obligation, to promote the conference and the city and keep those registered still coming, and get more, too. Those 650 registered are a long way from the 1600 predicted. 

If you have any concerns about safety, feel free to call me, at 416 - 879 - 5771. I hope IABC puts lists of local members to call for reassurance into its web site, too. If "networking" is the key to the value of IABC, let the world's members network with Torontonians if you want reassurance. And I hope IABC proactively phones those already registered, and reassures them, too.

New on Wednesday, April 16, 2003 -- very early

Chris and Suzanne Salvo win IABC Gold Quill Merit award

This photo by Chris Salvo is one of the pictures submitted by the Houston-based husband and wife photo team in IABC's Gold quill awards.  You can see more of their work at www.salvophoto.com I'm always delighted when photography gets some recognition as a powerful communications too. This picture was taken in the Sahara Desert, for an oil services company that gets contracts from the government of the USA.

New on Wednesday, April 9, 2003 --

Will you come to the IABC international conference? Will anyone?

I'm getting worried about the IABC conference in Toronto in June. (click here for my special conference page) Late last month a giant cancer research conference was cancelled in Toronto because the delegates were scared of SARS. Air travel around the world continues to be down, partly because people are too chicken to fly, partly because flying is such a pain that people won't subject themselves to the punishment.

I'm sure some IABC members are wondering if they want to be in the middle of perhaps 1000 Americans assembled in one place in a foreign country; is this a good terrorism target? 

Some Americans might not want to come to Canada because the Canadian government said it does not believe in unprovoked unilateral invasions of countries that Bush does not like. And there are probably lots of IABC members around the world who look at IABC as an American organization, and might show their mistrust, dislike, or general distaste by declining to come to the conference.

Over at the IABC site I can't see any revitalized, renewed, signs of efforts being made to generate attendance, and deal with the potential financial disaster. 

Financial disaster? Am I over-reacting? A few years ago, the Canadian Public Relations Society and the International Public Affairs Association held a joint conference in Toronto, and the president of CPRS asked me to keep an eye on the financial progress of the conference. My questions sure annoyed the organizers, but I could see time after time when poor planning, poor promotion, foolish decision making, or even the failure to make any decision, harmed CPRS financially. At least asking the questions caused some positive actions to be taken, and the financial problems were reduced.

Without access to the inner working of IABC's planning, I can't offer as detailed an assessment for its June Conference, but I simply ask you, have you been reminded lately to register? And can you read the conference program, or were you, too, so disgusted/annoyed/fuzzled by the design of the promotion piece that you could not / would not / did not read it?

We shall see what we shall see....

New on Tuesday, February 4, 2003 -- 

To my story sources: thanks to all of you who are sending me story ideas. I really do appreciate the leads, and please keep them coming. I believe I'll get more time soon to devote to BAK's Report, and will be following up on your ideas.

IABC gets some newspaper coverage in Saskatchewan
Regular readers know I want the associations of communicators to actually engage in decent pr programs for themselves and, by extension, our profession. Down below, (click here)  I note that Annette Martell, the International Association of Business Communicators elected chairwoman went to two chapters in western Canada and, to the best of my knowledge, did not bother with any media relations. She's sent me an e-mail, confirming, sort of, that. She wrote

Brian:

 

When I was in Saskatchewan we didn't secure any media coverage that I'm aware of.

 

Thanks for asking -- Annette

I'm getting cynical; when I read the response I couldn't tell whether IABC tried and failed to get coverage, or did not even bother trying at all. And I wasn't sure whether the reply was deliberately confusing, or intentionally confusing. Anyway ...

Which is not to say that the Regina Leader Post, the leading (only) daily paper in Saskatchewan's capital is not interested in IABC's activities and the overall topic of business communications. In that same story I mentioned New Zealand IABC dynamo Jillian de Beer was going to speak in Regina. Although I wrote to the president of the IABC Regina chapter and to the woman responsible for pr for the chapter and got no response (maybe they are in Florida to keep warm) I did go to the Regina Leader-Post web site, where there was a nice picture of Jillian by photographer Charles Melnick and a good story by Angela Hall about how Jillian rebranded part of Auckland. I did a web search on her name and found she's also pitching business in Delray Beach, Florida. She  make s the "International" in IABC mean something.

Here's just a bit of the story:

"It got quite desperate," said Jillian de Beer, managing director of de Beer Marketing & Communications, recalling when small stores and markets closed and the area became "quite a red-light district. The street died. In 1993 it got quite desperate."

"There were lots of empty shops for quite some time. I was asked to work with the street community," said de Beer, in Regina this week to conduct a workshop organized by the local chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC).

New on Thursday, January 23, 2003 -- 

Late breaking news: here's a reply from Saskatoon, regarding the story below. See if you think there's any leadership being shown.:

Hello Brian.

 

We did not engage in obtaining media coverage for Martell's visit in our market.  Our primary focus and concern was membership awareness along with board development. 

 

In my view, the international visits to our markets speak to the highly active local members and IABC's capacity to offer such benefits to members.

 

Carm Michalenko

Carm Michalenko is the president of the chapter. And I've also heard from the woman responsible for the chapter's external communications, who said:

Hi Brian!

Sorry... I don't have any info for you. Good luck with your project!
Cora

Major US, some international PR groups finally decide image of business matters.

After years when the communications societies have spent almost all their effort trying to sell courses and run conferences, a group has finally caught on that business and other organizations need to pay attention to communicators, and take actions that lead to respect for themselves.

Over the past few years, our profession has been downgraded and marginalized, with only a relatively few exceptions. PR vice-presidents leave, replaced by directors; directors are replaced by managers. Internal specialists are hived off to the personnel department, and others in our profession become juniors in the marketing departments.

Finally, the big shots in the associations have noticed that the voice of PR has not been heard in the executive suites, and, like a bolt of lightening, caught on that maybe communicators should be closer to CEOs.

I've been arguing for years that IABC, CPRS and PRSA need to get their messages out to executive management that PR belongs at the right hand of the CEO, but you can search long and hard before you find even the slightest effort by IABC, PRSA and CPRS specifically, and other communications associations generally, to make their case to the top dogs in the organizations that employ us. Even simple media relations programs explaining what we stand for are beyond the capabilities of the communications organizations.

In December, IABC's elected queen, Arlette Martell,  visited two small Canadian cities; she's in charge of the world's most extensive group of people responsible for helping organizations establish image and reputation, and IABC tells me it has no sign of even basic clips from the local papers in the cities she visited. The IABC Regina and Saskatoon chapter web sites have no transcript of her remarks; no evidence whatsoever that she was even in town.

I've worked in Saskatchewan; one phone call would have got her on television, would have got her interviewed by the business editors, would have got her story on the wire services,  if she had anything interesting and important to say. I've written to the two chapters asking if there was something I missed, and I've written to Martell, too. We'll see, but I don't think there was any coverage.

BUT, THER's STILL BIG NEWS IN REGINA -- New Zealand's Jillian De Beers is coming to IABC Regina next week to talk. Getting a guest lecturer from that far away, and one with a reputation within IABC of being knowledgeable and informative, provides another opportunity for educating outsiders. We'll see if IABC can rise to the challenge of the most basic media relations. You can read about her topics -- branding a red light district, among others, on the IABC Regina web site. This should get you there. IABC/Regina

Here's the news release from the coalition of pr organizations that's at least starting to try to become important. All the extra spaces between sentences, sure sign of amateurs, is from the original release.

For Immediate Release
Contact: James E. Murphy
917-452-4598
Paul Basista
212-387-4238

PUBLIC RELATIONS LEADERS ENCOURAGE CORPORATE AMERICA

TO ADOPT NEW ACTIONS TO RESTORE CORPORATE TRUST

19 Professional Organizations Develop Strategies Designed to Address the U.S.’s Crisis of Trust

Madison, NJ, January 15, 2003 – The leaders of public relations and related professions have challenged Corporate America to take more formal and highly structured approaches to regenerate trust on the part of their key constituencies. They called on corporate leaders of the United States to:

• Articulate a set of ethical principles that are closely connected to their core business processes and supported with deep management commitment and enterprise-wide discipline. These principles should balance the interests of all stakeholders, ensure investors receive full and timely information about the company, and compensate all employees in accord with their contributions to the company's success.
• Create a process for transparency and disclosure that is appropriate for their company and industry in both current and future operations. It should include a senior oversight committee, "culture" audits and consistent messaging.
• Make trust and ethics a Board-level corporate governance issue and establish a formal system of measuring trust that touches all parts of their organizations.

These were the conclusions from the Public Relation Coalition’s two-day summit meeting, "Trust: Models for Action." The Public Relations Coalition is composed of 19 foremost organizations for professionals in corporate public relations, investor relations, public affairs and related communications. The purpose of the summit was to collect the views of the participants and turn them into action models for restoring trust in business.

"These are three high-level concepts that the Coalition believes could have material impact on the challenge of restoring trust in the corporate leadership of the United States," stated James E. Murphy, Global Managing Director of Marketing and Communications for Accenture and chairman of the Coalition and the summit meeting. "The core of the recommendation is to ask corporate leaders to create or reinforce an ‘environment of accountability’ in their organizations. Without a visible, concrete and measurable commitment, society will continue to mistrust our corporate leadership.

"It is important to take these initiatives and disseminate them to corporate leaders throughout America within our respective U.S. members, to our clients and ultimately, to the American public at large," he said. "As significant as today’s discussions were, it won’t mean much unless this dialogue continues in boardrooms across America. Corporate leaders are receiving a lot of advice today from many sources. This thinking is coming from (more)

PUBLIC RELATIONS COMMUNICATIONS LEADERS ENCOURAGE CORPORATE AMERICA

TO ADOPT NEW ACTIONS TO RESTORE CORPORATE TRUST/page 2

the most senior professionals in our country and those from around the globe who are working at the core of these issues. I am confident these recommendations have the power to have significant impact."

The summit meeting on the campus of Fairleigh Dickinson University drew more than 50 senior professionals who are officers from each participating organization. They collectively represented more than 50,000 practitioners in the fields of public relations, corporate and organizational communications, investor relations and public affairs. Several participating organizations brought their global perspectives to bear on these discussions which focused on the current U.S. corporate environment.

"Members of the participating organizations are dealing with these issues on a daily basis, providing strategic counsel to managements and boards," Murphy added. "We believe that the action steps created today can help businesses deal with the distrust among key stakeholders."

The Public Relations Coalition will also publish a position paper that will expand on the collective views expressed today. The Coalition is an informal group composed of leaders of public relations and related organizations who meet periodically to discuss common interests. It has been active since early 1999. Today’s meeting was the first with extensive representation and a single focus.

Coalition member organizations participating in the summit included:

Arthur W. Page Society

Center for Corporate Citizenship at Boston College

Corporate Communication Institute at Fairleigh Dickinson University

Council of Communication Management

Council of Public Relations Firms

Global Public Affairs Institute

Institute for Public Relations

IPR’s Commission on Measurement & Evaluation

International Association of Business Communicators

IABC Research Foundation

International Public Relations Association

National Investor Relations Institute

National School Public Relations Association

Public Affairs Council

Public Relations Society of America

PRSA Counselors Academy

PRSA Foundation

Women Executives in Public Relations

Foundation of WEPR

###

New on Friday, December 20, 2002 -- 

IABC is coming to Toronto
Next year's giant International Association of Business Communicators international conference is being held in Toronto June 8-11. there's lots of info already on the IABC web site, at www.iabc.com, and this time, in a departure from its usually opaque web site opening page, it is easy to find out about the conference.

As the conference gets closer, I'll add some information into BAK's Report about where to go and what to see outside of the conference itself when you visit Toronto. Toronto's a great city to visit. Plan to come to one or the other or both conferences!

THE STORY BELOW WAS NOT WRITTEN WITH IABC IN MIND, BUT WE'LL SEE HOW IABC HANDLES TV AT THE CONFERENCE:

New on Thursday, November 14, 2002 -- 

Are you making your media events tv-friendly?
Most PR people are not, of course, doing this

Here's something I wrote for a photography forum in the internet, where a person had remarked on how hard it is to take good video pictures. PR LESSON? The television crews need interesting things to happen in 30 second chunks, and you need to tell them when those 30 chunks will arrive.

I spend a fair bit of time with television news video photographers because I'm mostly in the PR business. 

It's amazing how most PR people do not take the needs of video photographers into consideration when setting up news conferences and publicity stunts.
While a still photographer needs on, say, 1/125 of a second of interesting action, the video guys need 30 seconds at a time, repeated several times.

If your CEO is making a speech, get a copy beforehand, mark the paragraphs that you'd most like to see on the TV news that night, and give it to the tv crews. You'll find they are just as interested in getting the good stuff as you are, and chances are pretty good they'll turn the camera on if you tell them when the best parts are.

Failure to provide tv-friendly events results, as you can see by watching television news, all those tv news shots panning across the gathered reporters and other photographers, just in order to have something going on to put on the screen for the time the announcer needs to tell the overall story.

Here are some more tools, techniques, tips and philosophies that most PR people arranging media events seem to forget.

1/ Television requires props. Have real products, or blown up photos of real products, or samples of raw materials, or charts and graphs that are big and bold enough to be seen on television.

2/ Television does not require dull-looking un-named drones standing behind the person being featured. There's no need to surround t he person being interviewed with silent unknowns, and it distracts from your message.

3/ More people will see the tv coverage of your event than will see the event in person, if you do your job right, so make it easy for the tv people to get their shots. I remember working at a conference organized by twinkies who put the television crews at the back of the room, so they would not get in the way of the people in the audience. Just plain stupid, and stubborn as only a twinkie can be. the only way we got the tv people to the front, where they needed to be, was when I told the twinkies that there would be no luncheon speaker and that instead we'd hold a news conference outside the banquet room. 

4/ Lighting matters. If you can illuminate the podium, and illuminate the displays with the products or the posters or the graphs, the tv crews will happily use your lights, instead of turning on the camera lights and blinding your speakers. And they won't be disturbing everyone by installing and removing their light stands when the event is underway. The still photographers will appreciate your efforts, too.

5/ Help with the cutaways. Television video requires pictures to show in between the chunks of a speech that are being broadcast. Producers just can't cut from one part of the speech to another, because the picture of the speaker jumps. So cutaways are used. These are chunks of film -- often the panning shot of the audience -- that are in between the pictures of the speaker. Before the event starts, take the tv crews aside and show them samples, graphs, posters, raw materials, etc., set up under good lighting. They'll shoot these, and be able to insert them into the news clip when they need a "bridge' from one shot to another.

There are lots more ways to pay special attention to television crews. Use your imagination, and you'll improve your coverage dramatically.

New on Thursday, October 31, 2002 -- 

Sprint provides 8 of 19 board members at IABC in Kansas City
I haven't looked at who employees whom at other communication association chapters, but I note with fascination the dominance of Sprint at IABC in Kansas City, where eight of the 19 directors are either employed by or under serious contract to the cell phone company. Included are the past president, the president, the vice-president finance and administration, the secretary, the treasurer, the vice-president communications (the only man in the Sprint group), the vice president membership services, and the director, educational relations.

There are nice pictures of most of the board members, but the one board member who is a professional photographer does not have a picture. That's just the way it is. Lots of us in the photo business (see more general information about my photography here ) don't seem to have pictures of ourselves. A couple of other people are pictureless, including Stancia Jenkins.

The board's woman to man ratio is 13:5, not counting Stancia, whose name doesn't ring a male or female bell with me, so I did not count this member in the ratio.

Did you know, "the only source of truly sustainable competitive advantage today is brand relationships that are built with integrated marketing communications."? Neither did I, but you can learn more by going to KC/IABC 's next lunch, with Anders Gronstedt, Ph.D., international consultant and author of the best-selling management book, The Customer Century: Lessons from world-class companies in integrated communications. It's November 14th.

MORE ABOUT "I go nuts..."
There's a great part to the KC/IABC web site, but once again (see the story immediately below) the brain trust in KC has hidden it. If you look hard enough, at tiny almost unreadable type, you'll discover a freelance directory. Now, you might think that a freelance directory would be valuable for people coming to the site, and there would be a flag for it, and a link on the opening page of the site. No.

You have to go to "career center," where you would go if you were trying to get employed rather than hire a company to serve you, and then you'd have to notice, set off to the side, again in tiny type "Find a Freelancer." There's no mention of the Find a Freelancer feature in the main body copy on the page, either.

But anyway, click on Find a Freelancer and you get a great 23 page Acrobat brochure with one page per freelancer, each page semi-uniform so it looks professional but also designed by the individual, with lots of info, full contact information. (IABC's international bosses seem to think contact info is a sin, or at least a crime, but that's a story for another day)

Keith Philpott, the photographer-board member with no picture, has a page in the directory, again with no pictures. But if you go to www.keithphilpott.com you'll find him in a couple of shots, plus lots of really good photographs. If you need a photographer in KC, well, he's got a good technical knowledge, and equally important, he seems to have a very good eye. He's the second IABC board member-photographer I know of. The other is Suzanne Salvo in Houston. PR LESSONS? 1/ Good photos are the cheapest, best, most efficient way to increase your media coverage. Call those two, or call me. I'll take a good picture for you, too, if you need shots in Canada. 2/ Go see the KC web site (it is at http://www.kciabc.com/kciabc ) and root around for ten minutes trying to find the photos of the board members, and once you get there, note how good the pictures are, and lament how tiny and hard to see they are. The page loads quickly enough, but, 3/ it would load just about as fast if the shots were thumbnails that could be clicked on and enlarged. Regardless,  think how much better your employers or clients web sites would be with good photos like these, or, if you have good photos like these, congratulate yourself for a job well done.

New on Friday, September 27, 2002 -- 

FREEMAN IN MALAYSIA
Several of the conundrums facing PR people were raised in Julie Freeman's talk about ethics to the delegates at an International Association of Business Communicators conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, earlier in September. One of the great questions, to which she provided two sets of possible answers, is this one.

Should a communicator assume the role of conscience of the organization?  

Why the answer could be YES

Their position  

Communicators listen to a variety of stake holders, both inside and outside the organizations
Communicators are out front of an organizations; they’re visible
Described as "boundary spanners" – listen constantly, read widely

Their expertise  
Communicators know what is going on.
They understand that good public relations/customer relations/employee relations should be grounded in actions, not words alone
They understand the impact of unethical actions

Their values
New NYSE regulations are based on three values –
Transparency, ethics and accountability
Communicators should know better than anyone the value of transparency; cover-ups never work

Why the answer could be NO

Every manager, every employer must act ethically
If one person is the corporate conscience, it lets others off the hook
Ethics must start at the top
Zero tolerance for unethical behavior
Create a culture of candor

There was more in the presentation, including a summary of the IABC code of ethics, and the accurate observation that ethics is a grey area.

Those interested in learning more about her speech can, of course, go to the IABC web site at www.iabc.com, and try to find it.

New on Saturday, April 13, 2002

Most presentations stink, or at least are poor, so ...

I've been at a convention, and I attended several luncheon speeches, a dinner speech that was a sensation (that's the part I was involved with) and half a dozen of those "expert presentations" that convention planners love.

Five quick tips so I don't write about your client's lousy presentation ...

-- If you don't need slides to help your audience understand you message, skip the slides.
-- If you do use slides, make them readable. It's 2002, and idiots still show slides the audience can't read. 
-- Make the speech useful to and understandable to the audience in the room. I listened to one speech that made the papers all right, and put the pressure on the government, which is what the speaker wanted, but it took real work by the reporters to dig the good part out of a dull, barely comprehensible text that was not written for the ear. And the content meant nothing to almost everyone in the room. They were just being used by the speaker.
-- Props help. The best speakers had things to show the audience. 
-- Pick examples that relate to the audience. One fool talked about sports equipment and candy bars, branded products bought by consumers, while speaking to an audience that makes components installed inside automobiles. Do you care who made the set brackets in your car? The door hinges? The dashboard? The horn? Geeeezzzzz