Airfoil Public Relations

Helping others with environmental awareness

In honor of Earth Day, here’s a fascinating story about a Michigan couple who not only go green at home but find opportunities for their local school, too.

Kathy scours Web sites looking for state, federal and foundation grants. Her grant-writing abilities have brought Laker schools a composter; wind turbines; a science lab where kids learn how to make their own wind turbines; grants for a turbine; solar panels that track the sun's movement; a new biomass boiler for the superintendent's home; processors to make biodiesel and seed oil, and a program to use 20% biodiesel on buses and retrofit old buses with equipment to clean up their diesel emissions.

-- Tonja Deegan

Monopoly’s meant to teach money and math, not plastic

This morning I saw a Monopoly game commercial which by itself isn’t so different. Although I suspect Monopoly hasn’t bought traditional advertising in a very long time. When is the last time you saw a commercial for Monopoly?

Then I listened a little closer and saw that this edition was actual the ‘electronic banking’ version of the game where players use a credit card style machine to track and count the money for them.

Why is this an upgrade to this game? Are we teaching our children early to use credit cards? Part of the reason my husband and I play monopoly with our children is for the experience of winning and losing money but most importantly -- counting money. Although I’m sure Monopoly’s newest version was well-intended (and just in time for the holidays), I don’t intend on buying it for my family!

Jean Chatzky, financial editor at NBC’s Today show, just wrote about this as well:

“We pay our bills online — often from work. Kids have no idea where our money comes from or how it moves. These new games just exaggerate those differences. When kids count Monopoly money, they not only get a lesson in math, they get the pit in their stomach when they are out of big bills and down to only $5’s and $10’s.”

Also spend a minute to click over to the site and see the tips she has for credit cards and kids.

-- Janet Tyler

Living on the sun

Anyone who doubts the validity or impact of global warming might be swayed by spending a couple weeks of any August in South Carolina.  This August, for instance, cooked up a record 14 straight days of temps between 100 and 108.  This is your brain; this is your brain on sweet tea.  I swear the mockingbirds were spontaneously combusting and whole fields of Bermuda grass transmogrified to shredded wheat.

What you may learn by spending a fortnight feeling as if you were living on the sun rather than in it is akin to Mark Twain’s observation that “a person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was getting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever going to grow dim or doubtful.”   Heat and light narrow the eyes but burst open the mind to new possibilities that we can carry home with us; not, however, without singeing some sacred certainties.  Humidity breeds humility.

For what they’re worth, I submit the following observations to other unsuspecting backyard baskers and  barbeque-ers who aspire to slather their brains in solar sauce during a beautiful torrid spell:

1.      Burgers will cook equally fast on the grill whether you turn on the burners or not.  Skip the propane and save your money.

2.      No temperature is sufficient to seal off primary-season politicians who are attracted to voters in heated climes like pigeons to grass seed.

3.      Air conditioning is simply a way to condition people to keel over when they hit the air on the way to their car from the Marble Slab.

4.      You can work up a sweat trying to communicate with consumers when they are in extremis from the heat.  TV is full of re-reruns.  No one’s sitting on the porch reading today’s newspaper, or on the patio tuning the radio.

5.      Even in hellish weather, however, people still take pains to stay connected.  At the pool, they have their cell phone.  In their cars, they have their cell phones.  At the mall, they have their cell phones.  In the chilled movie house, they have their cell phones—turned on all too often.  At their desks, they have their laptops—hey, eventually calls get dropped.

So it turns out that South Carolina in August, or late summer for any of the dozen or so other states that claim a place in—and on—the sun,  can be a hotbed for mobile marketing and online contact.  Knowing where your customers are cooling their heels and how they stay in touch with the world is crucial for every marketer.  Getting them to volunteer their texting info or online shopping preferences can ignite a marketing effort quicker than a petunia shrivels at 3 o’clock in a Carolina window box. 

When the going gets perspiratory, the really cool marketers go mobile, go online and go fishing for prospects.

-- Steve Friedman

Leads2007 - My First “Unconference”

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending Leads2007 on behalf of Kaleidico, an Airfoil client operating in the mortgage lead space.  This gathering of lead aggregators, generators and providers was an “unconference.”   What’s that you ask? Well, it’s a traditional gathering of industry leaders and competitors in a given space who come together to learn and share and they set the agenda beforehand.  There are no product pitches or long PowerPoints, just honest opinions that are all on the record (and readily available for anyone to read since various folks were blogging at the event).

Just about everyone in the room was somehow involved in generating mortgage leads, and while I came in with an understanding of the process having worked at Quicken Loans, I learned a lot about the science behind everything from creation of a Web form to loan conversion and application ratios.

This is one complex business.  On the one hand you have the lead generators who work to provide mortgage bankers and brokers with good, actionable leads that come from online advertisements.  It’s not easy to generate good leads, and folks like TARGUSInfo help ensure that the data collected is verifiable (yes, there are lots of folks who fill out forms with fake information).  On the other hand, you have mortgage bankers and brokers who pay for these leads, but they want to ensure they only pay for valid leads.  There’s a lot of back and forth and whether a lead is “good” can be subjective and/or depend on the honesty of a particular mortgage banker or broker.

It’s not uncommon for bankers to call a lead only to find out that the phone number is incorrect, or worse yet, the person didn’t fill out a form to begin with. Likewise, lead providers often have leads returned with a refund requested but find out that all of the information they provided was valid.

Doublepositive talked about “hot transfer” leads.  This is where a company actually has someone on the phone before handing off the lead to a loan officer.  That’s a big deal because it saves loan officers a heck of a lot of time trying to run down a person via phone.

There was a lot to learn at Leads2007.  It’s likely we’ll see a new industry association develop with some recommendations to make sure that people who fill out forms for mortgages online receive a qualified person responding to their query while disreputable lead aggregators and lead generators are left in the dust.  It’s only going to increase in importance as the housing and mortgage industries face an unstable climate.

-- Todd Krieger

The Green Bandwagon: Avoiding the eco-electro-flouro-bio-hydro-organically sustainable potholes

So many companies are jumping on the green bandwagon that its hybrid-driven axles are sagging. Businesses large, small and conceptual are crowding into the green marketplace, seeking ways to add more green to their bottom lines. Among the latest: If you enroll in its paperless statements program, Citibank will donate a tree on your behalf to the National Arbor Day Foundation (and, coincidentally, significantly reduce its administrative costs). In the process of careening toward green, however, a number of initiatives have taken on a drab shade when seen in the light of day.

The U.K. supermarket chain Tesco, for example, hit a pothole after announcing a "green plan" by which it promised to shrink its carbon footprint. Among other steps, it's allowing customers to recycle paper-based food cartons in its stores and is displaying the carbon footprints of its products on labels. British media discovered, however, that Tesco has been shipping CDs and DVDs to Switzerland and then reshipping them back home as a scheme for avoiding a value-added tax. To save its customers a pound or two, it was generating many more pounds of emissions from transporting the disks.

Lexus also has hit some bumps in the road by producing the LS 600h L hybrid luxury vehicle as a muscle car that reportedly gets only 20 miles per gallon.

These paradoxical kinds of actions on the part of corporations increasingly are viewed as "greenwashing" by influential bloggers and journalists. Companies that rush to proclaim a green scheme must be committed to maintaining that program over time and need to think through all the ramifications of their processes to ensure that they truly are reducing pollution and/or energy use.

The blogging community is many things to many people, but few would contest that they routinely serve very effectively as a kennel of watchdogs identifying malfeasance, real or contrived, with remarkable alacrity. Just as conventional journalism emerged from the perceived need to keep a close eye on government and its officials, bloggers are gaining their reputation by focusing very sharply on the true actions of corporations, holding them to a high consumer standard with no tolerance for questionable green claims.

To ensure that your claims, green or otherwise, avoid the wrath of consumer-generated sites and the media, keep in mind:

1. Earn consumer buy-in early. Provide previews and exclusive information to the online community and seek their input. The questions raised in response to your own blog posts and on the sites of influential watchdogs are your best sources of research. Address these questions in a serious and diligent manner to reassure consumers and the media. Likewise, ask for consumer input on the next steps they would like to see you take to advance your green program so that you gain allies even before you expand your efforts.
2. Be as open as possible. In online conversations, don't try to "spin" the benefits of your product or service. Be straightforward in declaring exactly what you believe your offering will do, how it will do it and how you will measure the results.
3. Invite consumer groups and/or influential bloggers to your announcement event. Make them a part of your solution to reduce the chances of their later becoming part of the problem.
4. Continue communicating after the initial announcement of your green plans. Report back to the media on the positive impact your program is having, on the growth of sales in your green arena and on comments you've received from customers.
5. As your program rolls out, stake a claim. Become a part of the green infrastructure by promoting your program among your industry peers, at consumer events and in consumer publications. No one company or organization "owns" the green movement at this point. Take advantage of the opportunity to become a thought leader based on your own commitment and results.
6. Always tell the truth. Exaggerated green plans or claims wither quickly under the heat of consumer and media scrutiny. Become a positive force against which the actions of other companies are measured.

-- Eric Kushner

The Next Tourism Boom: Space

Thinking of buying a ticket to somewhere for vacation this Winter like Florida or California? How about somewhere a little more unspoiled, somewhere not found on any Google Map, like ummm…space

Cathy Booth Thomas, reporter with Time Magazine, wrote a fascinating feature this week titled “Space Cowboys” profiling the main players in the bourgeoning space tourism industry.

The article sheds light on the future prospects of consumers being able to purchase tickets on flights that take passengers on an intense suborbital journey, filed with several minutes of weightlessness and views of the curved shape of Earth.

Thomas centers her article on Richard Branson’s commitment to space tourism with the launch of Virgin Galactic in 2004. However, Thomas also mentions several other notable names that are doggedly pursuing the endless possibilities of space tourism such as Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, Elon Musk, founder of PayPal, and John Carmack, co-creator of the Doom and Quake video game series. These space services in development range from space clothing outfitters to a space postal service. Even budget hotelier, Robert Bigelow founder of Budget Suites, is cashing in on the possibilities of space travel with the development of an inflatable, space station hotel.

Most of these companies are planning to launch passengers into space by the end of this decade with the cost of a space flight upwards of $200,000.

Me? I think I am going to keep buying those Wild Time scratch cards from the Michigan Lottery and think of those crazy views of Earth from the outer fringes of the atmosphere.

-- Allen Arnold

The Scope of Communications

Astronomers and space buffs, artists and writers, explorers and geologists, ministers and teachers all likely were gratified to hear that NASA has reversed its initial decision and will send a refurbishing crew to the Hubble Space Telescope in 2008, rather than letting humankind’s most inspiring Earth-orbiting science experiment plunge into a forsaken tract of South Pacific seas. 

Hubble has provided us with invaluable and often unexpected insights into the history of our universe, the way stars and planets are formed and the origins of life.  Perhaps equally important, it has transmitted images with a beauty simply unattainable anywhere on our little Earth.  Massive intergalactic clouds rearing up like horseheads, galaxies colliding in silent disaster, black holes gobbling stars by the millions, new stars flickering to life like distant sparks on a limitless horizon.  Suddenly, other solar systems have become not only imaginable, but image-able.  Acceptance of the possibility of life elsewhere now seems far more likely than during our pre-Hubble geocentric era.

What would happen, I wonder, if we could train an imaginary Hubble-like telescope on Earth’s most tumultuous locations?  How would we respond if we could suddenly understand the true history and makeup of other populations and cultures?  Would we be more open to the possibility of other lives being as deserving as our own?  Would we see the beauty of those lives amid the fiery collisions that ignite so many lands?

I’d like to think that we, as communicators, could be the lens for that Earth-watching scope.  We can and should focus public opinion on the real origins of people, places, issues and innovations.  We can spark brilliant solutions by shedding light on our differences, build dazzling futures by painting images of where we have been and where we are headed.  We can encourage people to accept the possibility of a better life by stimulating exceptional interchange of ideas about the challenges to future improvement.

In a largely unintended manner, Hubble has become the Great Communicator.  Its photos have showered us with a universe of possibility and potential.  Here on Earth, we should do all we can to reflect that mission, even if on a mere global scale.  We can do much to reshape our world by being great communicators—and, like Hubble, perhaps we can help bring some beauty out of chaos on a less cosmic but no less crucial plane.

--Steve Friedman

Contemporaries

One of the least-recognized but, to me, most fascinating tweaks in broadcast news formatting has been the development of the In Memoriam segment on ABC’s This Week program each Sunday morning. While the segment is quietly emotional in its simplicity and its consistency in showing equal worth and contributions from individuals in all walks of life, what really stirs me most is the concept of "contemporaries"—diverse individuals who occupied a common stretch of the world’s timeline and impacted us in bursts of energy or wisdom.

Sometimes the strange juxtaposition of contemporary figures erupts in nodes of creativity, like the Algonquin roundtable of the 1920s that at various points brought together such literary sharpshooters as Dorothy Parker, Edna Ferber, Alexander Wollcott, Robert Benchley, Noel Coward and George S. Kaufman with such unlikely figures as Harpo Marx and Tallulah Bankhead.

Then there’s the amazing literary coincidence of contemporaries Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Jules Verne, Leo Tolstoy, Louisa May Alcott, Lewis Carroll and a seemingly interminable list of others who created the classics of the 1850s to the 1870s and who, under the right geographic circumstances, might have formed their own roundtable.

The once-in-a-generation galaxy of the Rat Pack represented a coalescence of entertainment contemporaries that has never been duplicated since the demise of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop.

Odder—and therefore even more intriguing—are contemporaries from seemingly totally different planets, like Elvis Presley, Richard Nixon, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Mickey Mantle and Jack Kerouac.

Sporadically, it appears, we share our lives with history’s most captivating personalities, many of whom have forever changed our definitions of classics, culture and the cosmos. I contemplate today’s contemporaries and wonder what they will communicate to future generations. How will the contemporary legacies of Kenneth Lay, Aaron Spelling, Billy Preston, A.M. Rosenthal, Floyd Patterson, John Kenneth Galbraith, Casper Weinberger, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin and Oleg Cassini—all subjects of This Week In Memoriam tributes over the past few months—influence American culture?

All of us in the arena of communications should be more cognizant of the interconnected world of personalities in which we move. Are we forming roundtables that ignite thought leadership and analytical approaches, or are we isolating ourselves from the valuable input of contemporaries who could help reshape our futures more positively? What would happen if powerful contemporaries crafted better paths of communication among themselves, rather than silos of isolation?

In a world where odd-couple contemporaries like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett can unite to make a global impact, what other contemporary opportunities are out there, waiting for the right spark and the right moment?

--Steve Friedman

Insults to the Deep South

Maybe James Dickey is to blame for penning the book and screenplay for Deliverance with its “less than favorable” portrayal of a select group of people in the deep South.  (If you haven’t seen it, brace yourself first and then rent it. You probably should view it if for no other reason than to understand the punch lines of so many of today’s comics.) 

That seminal film seems to me to be where the whole stereotype of hillbillies in the deep South crystallized. I don’t know if attorneys took to the imagery, or the reality of the attorneys’ success with juries from that region contributed to the stereotype, but this week’s news really struck me as symptomatic of fundamental issues in our courts today:  The proclivity of plaintiff’s attorneys to take Big Business to court in venues far off the beaten paths from those that Big Business calls home. 

Yesterday, Reuters ran a piece on the Google settlement in an Arkansas court over a click-fraud class action suit originated by Lane’s Gifts & Collectibles out of Texarkana, Arkansas.  In this case, the geography matches, but the fact is that the “deal aims to resolve all outstanding claims against Google for so-called ‘click fraud’ dating back to 2002.” 

Also this week, a Michigan company won a patent infringement case against a West Coast technology company in an East-Texas courtroom.  Why was it tried there? I can only presume that the plaintiff’s attorneys felt, rightly so it seems, that they’d have a better shot at a favorable outcome in that setting. 

The same story is told by Al Pacino in The Insider and in newspapers and pop culture on a recurring basis. Color me an idealist, but whatever happened to a case being judged on its own merits by a jury of peers?  When did that get swapped out for a case being judged by the most advantageous group that can be assembled by the plaintiff’s attorney with the implicit objective of leveraging the precedent for every similar case that follows? 

More important, if the phenomenon is so widespread as to be an element of popular culture, and with tort reform such a popular topic on The Hill, I can’t help but ask why this state of affairs persists.  It’s a rhetorical question, obviously, but one for which I think we’d all be better off with a resolution.

-- Eric Kushner

Privacy policies have far-reaching impact

So there’s a pretty big battle brewing in San Jose that looks like it has the potential to drive major change. Google’s battle with the government over privacy laws is something to pay attention to for a number of reasons.  Last week alone, over $20 billion in shareholder value evaporated with a 14% decline of their stock price as the market mulled the possible fallout from Google's rebuff of a Justice Department subpoena seeking a list of its users' search requests for a one-week period, according to this article in the  Associated Press The government is looking for the information to support its efforts to revive the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, which the Supreme Court blocked from taking effect two years ago.   U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales seems intent on getting his hands on this information and other major corporations, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft included (fair disclosure: I do PR for Microsoft but that’s besides the point for the sake of this discussion) have accommodated the request. 

How hard of a line is Google going to hold if the federal government really presses the issue?  How far might that stand depress the value of their high flying stock and how much will that decline impact the ambitions associated with this Wall Street wunderkind.  In August when this Fast Company story was written exploring what might be on the horizon for Google, the stock was trading at $300, already 3 times it’s opening price.  It hit over $475 earlier this month.  I don’t know the answers nor am I prepared to hazard a guess, but the fact that a principle, even one as fundamental to the success of the Internet as the privacy of user information, may be the undoing of Google is certainly intriguing. In an era where identity theft runs rampant, spam fills your inbox (though that is getting better) and spyware was literally interrupting a presentation that an associate and I were making to a group of Microsoft partners last week (yes, I recognize the irony in that particular set of events), it is rather fascinating that a corporation with the reach and promise of Google may well bet its business on a principle.

If everything were to proceed down an absolute worst case scenario, it could have a huge impact in technology circles and the economy at large.  It could also be resolved by next week and a total non-issue altogether.  I hope that this doesn’t become an issue between the Attorney General’s office and Google that literally, topples a giant as I, and many observers, am eager to see what they’re going to do next.

--Eric Kushner