Goodbye Ghost Fly

Inevitably we would leave the Camino PR starter office.

Our basement office was once a stable for the work-horses that carted baked goods through Manhattan.   In the first weeks we hauled out debris and installed large bamboo mats and oversized desks to create a comfortable but frugal workspace.   We sanitized everything, but still I was so convinced that rats and roaches would make their appearance that my mother shipped us a diaper-genie type trash can that tightly  seals any evidence of food.  I was wrong to be afraid, only two living creatures emerged: a horse fly that periodically buzzed through the office like a Blue Angel air show, and a gigantic wasp that spontaneously reproduced and then flew away.  I don’t know why the wasp visited, but I believe our supersize fly held the spirit of horse flies past, reminding us to recognize those things upon which we build our future.

Our carriage house was the kind of office where you could sketch on the wall and spill paint on the floor.  One day Woody Allen and Larry David showed up and turned the carriage house into a temporary movie  set.  Many Tuesdays we ended the day with creative hour, when Tomas and Sean would practice guitar and Mary would bring in a bag of sweets from the Donut Pub.

But there were downsides too.  It’s the kind of office that makes you worried about getting your nice suit dusty from crumbling pillars.  The air was stale and smelled vaguely of horses, despite our abundance of aromatherapy and the constant whir of the air purifier.  The original window and door could not be sealed, and on frigid days the narrow stone stairwell created a wind tunnel that swept directly into our meeting area.   Cell phones sputtered as if we were in a bunker and every evening we wrapped our computers in colorful silk scarves to prevent them from taking in too much dust.

“We aren’t a typical corporate office” Loretta often says, words I soothe myself with when we are doing other-duties-as-assigned like pouring animal-friendly salt on the icy stone steps.   I have known many lovely typical corporate offices but we’ll always be a little quirky, like our carriage house roots.  We have moved just two  blocks.   We now work on the floors above a poster store that houses the largest collection of movie posters in the world.   Oversized double doors in our top floor open onto a large wooden deck that gives us a rooftop view of Chelsea.

After working hard underground we are taking in deep breaths of  fresh air.  I am grateful for our roots and for the friends who give us momentum.  Goodbye first Camino home.  Thank you and goodbye, ghost fly.

PR Exec Joins Camino!

Monica Contreras (and her two beautiful Daschunds) have joined the Camino PR family!  Monica is one of the nation’s leading communications executives in the areas of social marketing, research-based communications, emerging market development, and corporate/media/non profit promotional strategies.  She is widely recognized as a young emerging superstar in the global public relations profession.

Monica truly loves her dogs.  She successfully pitched Otto, the youngest one, to become the cover model of a lifestyle magazine (see below).   Monica has a huge heart, sharp communications insight, and a fierce determination to make the world a better place.   She is located in CPR’s New York office.  Camino PR is grateful and energized to have Monica’s talents.

The condom melee

Ah, the Pope and condoms.  I first publicly criticized the Pope’s views when I was a teenage columnist for a Gannett newspaper, but my editor censored the piece.  The Pope was on a U.S. tour and the paper was worried about reader backlash.  Not much has changed since, except now my daughter is the teenager.  The Pope has ratched up his attack on condoms (claiming they aren’t effective at preventing HIV), and lots of parents and the media are still treating condoms like a four-alarm scandal.

Last week about a dozen students at my daughter’s middle school were inadvertently given condoms during a celebration of “National Women and Girls HIV Awareness Day”.   A 48-hour morality melee ensued.  Some parents of the condom kids were shaken and angry, multiple apologies from school and public health officials were rushed out over two days, news media descended on the school, and teachers gave their students impromptu lessons in how to say “no comment” to aggressive reporters.

Exactly one year ago the CDC released startling findings: one in four adolescent girls has a sexually transmitted infection.  Another study found that by 9th grade, 32% of teens were sexually active.  This year school officials teamed up with public health advocates to conduct an HIV awareness poster contest and a health fair to help prevent these middle school kids from becoming part of this statistical nightmare.

The school didn’t intend to distribute the condoms – some health fair bags from a high school event got mixed up with the middle school bags – but the incident raises the uncomfortable question about what messages and information ought to be shared with this age group.  Statistically, a third of these eighth graders will be sexually active within a year.  When and how should they get access to condoms?

On the afternoon that ABC camped out at the middle school for at least four hours, the principal asked those of us who worked or lived nearby to help shield the students from the cameras as they left school.   Many of the parents and security staff  were furious that ABC news was filming kids.  The sensationalist media had turned the  lesson about disease prevention into a real life display of the taboo nature of dealing with emerging sexuality.   Any middle schooler who thought  they could safely engage the subject of sex with adults at Thursday’s health fair learned by Friday that the subject was wildly explosive.

When the cameraman began filming the students exiting school, a number of adults were on hand to help the kids move down the sidewalk without being filmed. I began taking pictures of the ABC crew.  The ABC reporter screamed at me from across the street, punching his finger in the air, “this borders on harassment!”.  That’s when I got mad.  I couldn’t film him while he filmed my kid?

I calmed down and respectfully called the ABC producer in charge of the story, who apologized for the reporter’s behavior.   I explained that I had been positioned across the street with my palm sized digital camera and he said it wouldn’t have mattered if I were inches away, anyone has the right to film the activities of his crew.

Then the producer and I had a good discussion about the impact of sensationalizing condoms. What lesson, if you were thirteen, would you walk away with as you watched the media treat the mistaken condom handout as a major scandal?  Through the eyes of a middle schooler it’s not so different from the Pope’s rigid position: condoms are risqué and most definitely off limits.  His focus had been on whether ABC was adhering to journalistic standards; he hadn’t been focused on the impact of the coverage on area teens.

I didn’t expect the editor to kill the story – four hours of a stakeout by ABC, complete with dozens of interviews in half a dozen locations, was too much of an investment to throw away.  But the end result was a very, very brief story and modest footage.  I’m convinced that the editor paid attention to the community impact of ABC’s news decisions, as well as to the anger of the community that had been targeted.

Making your voice heard in the media can help soften the sensationalist treatment of adolescent sexual health.  But you don’t have to wait for a media moment to be influential.  If  you’ve got kids in your life and you’d like to be proactive in promoting sexual health, here are some resources you might offer them:
Sexetc.org (for teens)
Teenwire.org (for teens)
A reference book titled “It’s Perfectly Normal” (for kids and young teens)
A reference book titled “It’s So Amazing” (for kids and young teens)

Protesting Corporate Excess

On Thursday people who are fed up with the corporate climate are attending protests in cities nationwide.  There’s a lot I’m supposed to do on Thursday but nothing seems more urgent than sending a loud message to those who continue to contribute to a broken economy and corrupt corporate culture.  I’ll be heading to Wall Street to protest.  Please make your voice heard on Thursday — you can get more information about actions in your city at http://takebacktheeconomy.org/

Check out their video below:

Equal Treatment

Yesterday’s AOL headline about celebrity chef Cat Cora and wife Jennifer Cora expecting babies is yet another display of the media mainstreaming of gay relationships. AOL news treated their relationship in the exact same way it treats heterosexual couples, reporting “Iron Chef and her wife are pregnant”.  Fox used the term “lesbian partner” in its headline and used a sensational tone in its coverage, but they did lead the article with “The Iron Chef and her wife….”

Homophobia still has a firm grip in our culture but I like these small pebbles of progress.  Editing out bias in media coverage is a good barometer that change, at whatever pace, is underway.  Over the years I’ve tended to seek out deliberately gay-friendly refuges, like an Olivia cruise or a week in Provincetown.  Several years ago I was looking for a place to take Winnie to dinner, and on a whim typed “best lesbian chef” into Google.  It’s not the best way to figure out if the food is good, but I was looking for a friendly environment.  To my surprise I found a list of “best lesbian chefs”.   I chose the only chef on the list located in Manhattan, and that’s how we came to fall in love with Anita Lo’s restaurant, Annisa.  Anita Lo has my vote as the best chef in New York and Annisa has become our celebration restaurant.

Winnie and I stopped by Annisa for a drink and appetizer a few weeks ago.  We are never organized enough to get reservations, but sitting at the bar meant that we could chat with Anita when she emerged occasionally from the kitchen.  She was glad to hear we had come from a fundraiser for the Audre Lorde project, and when we told her that Gloria Steinem had hosted the event at her apartment she immediately asked, “what did she serve?”  Winnie told her we’d eaten quiche and Anita started laughing.  “That’s really funny!” she said, shaking her head as she retreated to the kitchen.    Winnie laughed with Anita but I know, deep down, neither of us really knows why that’s funny.

Here’s the AOL headline:

Congratulations go out to Jennifer and Cat Cora on their baby announcement!

Marketing Values (not!)

“The urge for good design is the same as the urge to go on living”
- window display for Design Within Reach

A high end furniture design store in Manhattan’s Flatiron district stenciled this quote from a famous designer on their display window (see pic below).  I passed by it late on a Saturday evening.  A homeless person was huddled below the sign, creating a mini encampment in the freezing midnight air.  Visible from the sidewalk were bed frames on sale for just over $2,000.

Next to this design store is Fish’s Eddy, a housewares store that was displaying a stenciled plate of a floorplan, complete with “servants quarters”.  The store was papered over to look like it was the victim of the recession, when in fact the faux bankruptcy look was being used to simply promote a sale (see pic below).  This is an establishment that looks at recession and oppression and sees marketing opportunities.  Earlier that same day my daughter and I stumbled upon a favorite restaurant with a tax seizure sign posted on its windows.  The restaurant looked as if it had been abandoned just as the waiters were setting the tables for dinner.  “It’s like everyone was vaporized, like in the movies”, she said, sounding incredulous like the rest of her uneasy recession generation.

The novelist John Galsworthy wrote, “Idealism increases in direct proportion to one’s distance from the problem.”  I wonder if the marketing folks at Design Within Reach thought at all about the homeless and the millions of panicked households worried about “survival” when they stenciled the windows.  It must not have occurred to Fish’s Eddy that using the trauma of foreclosure and bankruptcy as a marketing gimmick might be, well, mean.  And the nostalgia plates with the floorplans that include “servants quarters”, especially in our Obama era of “hope and change”, must be targeted at those whose lives and legacies are not marred by class oppression.

Even before Bono’s (Red) campaign, everyone in the field of “buzz” was buzzing about the importance of values marketing.  The problem is, you’ve got to have a handle on some values worth celebrating if you are going to try and use values for your own marketing gain.  Bono’s got his eyes squarely on the elimination of AIDS in Africa.  The Design Within Reach exec’s must be looking inward at their own profit margin.  CEO Ray Brunner brings in about $1.2 million each year in compensation.  Among his directors is branding consultant Hilary Billings, co-founder of Red Envelope. The magazine Fast Company described Billings as someone who “mastered the art of creating “lifestyle brands” – products and services that forge an emotional connection with customers.”  Billings points to three factors that define a “lifestyle brand”: it makes life easier, it makes your world more stylish, and it is an orchestrated strategy that is fully formed at a brand’s launch.

The problem may be that marketing the luxury lifestyle needs to be redefined.  Or perhaps, thinking more radically, does the luxury lifestyle itself need to be reconsidered?  The idea of a $2,000 bed frame being “within reach” may be more symbolic of pre-recession excess than a reflection of smart brand management.

DWR’s stock price has plummeted from $4.50 last May to about $0.66 today.  The company is considering options like merger or sale.   So it may be that the company is thinking of its own death when it compares survival to furniture design.

CPR’s new arts project!

Camino PR has a new pro bono client!  We are thrilled to be helping Washington DC-based Schubert, Schubert & Schubert, a non-profit effort to make classical music more accessible.   Concerts are held later this month (March 20, 21, 22) at Georgetown University.

CPR is an active fan of the arts and arts education.  We hosted our first office concert last week when middle school student Tomas and his teacher Sean performed a guitar recital.  We commit the end of the workday every Tuesday to creative endeavors.  In the audience at the recital was CPR’s digital artist Mary Guidera, who many in New York have seen as one of the Caulfield Sisters, a popular independent band.  Mary hasn’t yet agreed to perform at Camino PR, but we still hold out hope.

Schubert, Schubert & Schubert has a long tradition of providing an opportunity for students to perform with the “stars” of chamber music.  An education connected to artistic endeavor is core to developing critical thinking and the kind of imagination that can improve our society.  Camino PR has been fortunate to gain insight from some of the nation’s leading thinkers on arts education, including Cyrus Driver from the Ford Foundation who was quoted last year in EducationNews.org:

“Learning in the arts infuses communities with a unique richness. The arts, music, dance, photography and the like, help bridge the divides of language and culture and promote community understanding.  They can expand our capacity for empathy by drawing people into the experiences of other people and cultures - vastly different from their own. There is a wonderful opportunity to create social bonds and social capital when communities share in both the creation and appreciation of works of art.  I guess you’ve gathered that this old economist, who once in middle school feared the arts, and who, like many in education saw the arts as marginal to a quality education, is now an acolyte of their transformative power in schools.”

If you have friends in Washington DC please spread the word about the Schubert concert series!

Be A Man

“Manhood” is back in.

Yesterday on the McLaughlin Group, journalist Monica Crowley summed up the Republican opposition to Obama’s stimulus package this way: “The Republicans rediscovered their manhood”.  This follows weeks of Illinoic Gov Blagojevich-induced rage about taking his lumps like a man, as expressed by Illinois State Senator Dan Cronin,

“It’s somewhat cowardly that he won’t take questions.  If he had something to say, he should have come down here like a man and faced the music.” The “manhood” sentiment is littered across the media world.  Today columnist Susan Antilla of Bloomberg gives advice to fallen financial giants, “So suck it up, be a man…”

This branding of “man” only begs the question, in opposition to what?  Be a man, not a squirrel?  Of course the opposite of acting like a man (a good thing - brave) would be acting like a woman (the wrong thing - cowardly).  And that can’t be good news for feminism.  California Governor Schwarzenegger doesn’t mask his insult to women – he has repeatedly used the term “girlie men” as a way to define the right kind of male behavior, as in “…if they don’t have the guts, I call them girlie men”.

The glut of “manhood” references have started resurging with new vigor.  But the backdoor insult to women remains largely unchallenged. Crowley’s generation hands the language down to younger generations of hopeful pundits.  A psychology student at UC Santa Barbara writes today in the school newspaper, “Steve Pappas, could you please grow a pair, be a man and accept that you lost the election?”

If women get gender branding advice, it’s usually about being a “lady”.  Entertainer Steve Harvey has jumped into the “lady” versus “man” advice with his new book, “Act Like A Lady, Think Like A Man”.  Harvey postulates that men are most comfortable being recognized in the role of provider and protector.

I have a favorite picture of my son at the beach (see below) standing at the water’s edge.  I wonder what he is imagining for himself.  It would be helpful if, when I turn on CNN in our living room, he wasn’t hearing sexist stereotypes about what it means for him to be a  man.

Recession PR

Loretta has cut back on trips to the hairdresser due to our 2009 recession spending plan.  Check out her Facebook page (or the pic at the bottom of this post) to see if her new style looks like Barry Gibb of the 70’s Bee Gee’s fame.  Oddly, I recall being at a disco in Honduras in 1980 and the crowd going wild when the DJ spinned a Bee Gee’s song.  Sorry, that’s the kind of useless tangent that gives blogging a bad reputation.

We might be in a recession, though who knows what the economists will say months from now.  I am routinely hearing of layoffs among friends and acquaintances.  And yet anxious customers are still lining up before Best Buy opens its doors in the hopes of snagging a sold-out wii gaming system.  Is it a depression?  An implosion?  A head game?

In the midst of downsizing, Recession PR is in full swing.  That means fewer marketing dollars and more “earned media”. It’s a critical time to re-do a communications strategy.  One good way to deal with reduced budgets and increased expectations among communications staff is to max out technology.  I just finished refresher training with a database subscription service that tracks all of Camino’s media, our media relationships, and the market value of our results.  I have automated systems that tell me when an issue is emerging, what’s happening with opponents of my issue, and what scheduled events the media is planning to cover related to my clients.  All this technology means that staff can focus on proactive and creative work.

I’m about to interview candidates for a staff position that includes “research” so that all this technology can be meaningful.  Way back when the Bee Gee’s were sexy, research meant mastering things like the Dewey Decimal System.  Now research is all about using Boolean logic. Melvin Dewey was barely a teenager when George Boole died, but his work predated Boole’s impact on information searching.  Dewey created the organization system over 100 years ago for a university library and this basic system became, and remains, the theoretical framework for library organization.  Anti-Semitism and sexism mar Dewey’s place in history, and his legacy is threatened by the fact that an alarming number of public schools can’t afford books anymore.

I’ve rarely sent a researcher to the library; today the Internet rules, and for that I need to hire people who get the logic of Boolean.  I need mathematically inclined research staff more than I need organization-inclined staff.  Instead of a hierarchical system,  Boolean  uses a mathematical approach to narrow the search.  Words like AND, OR, NOT, NEAR are the soul of Boolean logic.  For example, my daily apartment search looks something like: apartment AND Manhattan AND 2 bedrooms NOT walkup.

History remembers Boole kindly as a brilliant mathematician, and a modest man inspired by literature and philosophy.  Words and logic together were his poetry.  He said:

“No matter how correct a mathematical theorem may appear to be, one ought never be satisfied that there was not something imperfect about it until it also gives the impression of being beautiful.”

Below is Loretta’s recession PR hairstyle, compared to the coifed Barry Gibbs at the height of his career.  You be the judge — look alike?

The Rubric Resume

Here is the best quote from the nearly 600 résumé’s I’ve received for a part-time position at Camino PR: “I have never been particularly interested in working with a PR firm…”

I posted the job on Craig’slist late Friday, and by Saturday my inbox was bursting. We already had a few candidates who responded to our website listing, like a Doula whose positive ch’i leaps off her resume like perfumed stationary. I plan to invite the Doula to interview. There was also a wonderful activist who had taught capoera to homeless children in Africa. But we thought we ought to create a broader candidate pool, particularly of communications professionals. I toyed with the idea of paying for a listing in PR Week, but decided instead to use recession recruitment tools: Craigslist, and the NYU job board.

A small firm simply can’t look at 600 résumé’s. On Saturday afternoon, after I quoted aloud from the first 80 emails while browsing résumé’s at the kitchen counter, Winnie threatened to come in and do the job herself. I’m not sure if she meant that she would sift through applicants or if she would actually be our project assistant. She would be fantastic at organizing our office. She is the kind of chef (and I mean chef, not just cook) who simultaneously finishes preparing an organic and healthy dinner and has all of the dishes clean before I’ve even set the table. In my defense, it is often difficult to find the matches so I can light the candles. I have never once seen her not make the bed the second she leaves it, and more than once she has even made the bed while I am still lounging in it (“So when you get up its already done,” she says). I am a thousand percent certain that we would never have lost the plug to the monitor or knocked the fax machine off its wobbly shelf if Winnie were in charge.

One thing I am quite certain of is that my occasional office junk food junkets would end the minute Winnie joined our staff, so I kept pouring through applicant emails. Soon I found myself looking for tedious reasons to like or dislike an applicant. If their email address name sounded silly, I worried. If they seemed to have a long commute, I wondered if they would last long. I loved the applicants who had checked out my website, I got angry at those who obviously did not.

My son interrupted my résumé surfing with a homework question related to the “rubric” for his book report assignment. It occurred to me then that the rubric résumé approach was the best way to engage the issue, both from the perspective of the job seeker and the employer. For those of you who have been out of middle school a long time, a “rubric” is a chart that details the requirements of the project and grades each category of the rubric. I took a look at the job advertisement, and chose four things that were critical, ranked in priority. Then I made four piles: one, people with no match; two, people matching the top criteria, three, people matching the second criteria, etc. I also created a wildcard pile for people like the Doula – someone that I had a gut reaction to even if their skill set didn’t match up perfectly.

I still had the time consuming task, however, of actually opening each email and glancing at the résumé. Here’s what I learned, from a job seeker perspective:

Number one (and this is huge): Make the subject line count. Almost every subject line was the same, “Project Assistant Position”. Email number 455 wrote “Amazing Project Assistant Position”. I looked at his application out of order. He turns out to be a communications pro, and someone I will definitely call about an interview.

Number two: Tell me what you will do for me based on what I’ve asked for. Don’t lead with what I will do for you.

Number three: Write well. Use full sentences and old-fashioned good grammar.

Number four: Sell me on your candidacy in the first paragraph of your cover letter AND in the first paragraph of your email. Simply writing “Attached is my resume” is a huge wasted opportunity to stand out. If I don’t believe in you by the fourth sentence, I’m not reading further.

Number five: Both attach your resume and copy it in the email. That saves me time.

Number six: Do some research – at minimum, check out the employer’s website.

Here’s what I learned, from an employer perspective:

I should have paid the money for a targeted ad – perhaps a combination of PR Week and Non Profit Times. The price tag seemed high for a small firm, but my time is billable by the hour, and Craigslist turned out to be a very pricey way for me to get the job done. I assume that using PR Week would have limited the candidate pool to those who are serious enough about communications work that they are engaging trade magazines. I might have eliminated the hundreds of people recently laid off from the financial sector.

It is tough to get a job in this marketplace. I have Ivy League graduates, distinguished authors, and seasoned researchers interested in this entry-level position. The hard truth is that everyone needs to figure out how to market him or herself. Public relations isn’t just for celebrities or snack food vendors. Just ask applicant number 455, whose head bobbed above the hundreds of hopeful emails. These days interactive or other forms of advanced resumes, clever outreach, and storytelling are vital for highly successful job searches and school applications.

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