An Environmentally Friendly Cigarette? Are They Blowing Smoke Up Our….

Flipping through May’s issue of Toronto Life, I was rather surprised to be greeted with a full-page ad for du Maurier cigarettes.

But what held my attention was a marketing move so audacious that it was hard for a second to decide if it was demented genius or utter stupidity that inspired it.

The advertisement- which can be seen here via a piece in the Toronto Star - claimed that the brand had, in effect, gone green: “We have updated our packaging to reduce its impact on the environment,” the copy trumpets.

It then goes on to describe how the foil in the packaging had been replaced by paper “making it kinder to the environment.” Further, emphasis was placed on how the brand’s new cardboard packaging “meets standards supporting sustainable forest management.”

While that’s all well and good, didn’t any of the folks who signed off on this campaign see how ridiculous signing off on greenwashing a cigarette brand is?

I’m not against smoking or smokers – they have enough scorn to deal with, as well as an addiction that can be all-consuming – but I am really riled by the fact the company would consider the public so stupid that they would not see this as a blatant case of using a genuine concern about the environment in the name of making a few extra bucks.

I suppose it is admirable that the packaging is less harmful to the planet, it’s just a pity that the product itself still is.

Social Media And Its Role In The Panic-demic

As former member of the fourth estate, I feel quite elegiac about the sound of the presses slowing towards an inevitable stop. Ever since I saw His Girl Friday as a very small child, I wanted to be a reporter. [And who wouldn't - Roz Russell was gorgeous, bantered beautifully with even more beautiful Cary Grant and got to do good through the power of the word!]

Today, however, I find myself in the surprising  and uncomfortable position of being more than a little miffed at my paper- and broadcast-based journalistic brethren. Their eagerness to point the finger at social media as panic-mongers of DOOM as the Swine Flu crisis develops.

REACTIONARY REACTIONS?

An example of the digi-pointing can be found in a blog by Milo Yiannopolous of the UK’s Telegraph who notes:

Twitterers are saturating the Twitterverse with scaremongering and nonsense about swine flu via the #swineflu hashtag. Let us be clear: swine flu aint some hot internet meme. It’s not a lolcat or a great flash game. It is a serious disease.

The speed with which idle chatter about swine flu is propagating, at the hands of those (it seems almost wilfully) ignorant of the facts, is terrifying and may cost lives. It has now become impossible to separate hysteria from vital news. For perhaps the first time, Twitter has become a hindrance and not a help to newsgathering and to the public seeking information.

And closer to home, the usually level-headed and excellent news source NPR has also chimed in, with  Evgeny Morozov noting that

despite all the recent Twitter-enthusiasm about this platform’s unique power to alert millions of people in decentralized and previously unavailable ways, there are quite a few reasons to be concerned about Twitter’s role in facilitating an unnecessary global panic about swine flu.

You’ll forgive me if I state that this sounds a bit like sour grapes. True, one of the justifiable concerns about social media is that there is a dearth of fact-checking. And yes, there are idiots out there who will play the Web 2.0 version of the game of telephone, terror edition.  But has there never been a panic caused by a broadcast network or a newspaper? Truly? Rumours never have flown because of a hyperbolic headline or an over-emphatic piece on a 24 hour news network?

ANOTHER LOOK AT SOCIAL MEDIA IN RELATION TO SWINE FLU

No one is downplaying the fact that this is a potentially deadly illness and that people have been tested positive for it on several continents. The threat is real and frightening.

However, it is also true that almost nobody has looked at the positive ways social media has been used in the course of this porcine pandemic.

Just to offer a few examples:

The Centre for Disease Control has been offering updates on Twitter such as

“20 confirmed cases of swine flu in U.S. 1 hospitalized. All have fully recovered. http://bit.ly/uycgL #swineflu”

And over on FriendFeed, one of its users has created a Swine Flu room which aggregates “various real-time information streams on swine flu from across the web,” making it a reliable and timely source of information.

The CDC has also used YouTube to present a video by Dr. Joe Bresee of its Influenza Division dealing with the signs, symptoms, transmission and treatment of Swine Flu.

So, in fact, social media has been a means for calming the public and providing it with a stream of accurate and useful information – which is not a story you are likely to see in your local paper, if in fact you still have one.

Deep Down, Are We Pretty Shallow? Lessons Learned from the Susan Boyle phenomenon — or not…

BACKGROUND

Susan Boyle might put me out of a job – and I couldn’t be more delighted.

In case you were in a coma, Susan Boyle is an unprepossessing Scottish woman with a voice so beautiful it will literally make you weep — and she’s become the biggest thing since sliced bread via YouTube over the past five days. Her glorious performance of  the tremendously challenging ballad “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miserables on an episode of  Britain’s Got Talent has amassed nearly 13 million hits.

Back the 21st Century P.T. (that’s Pre-Twitter), it would have been the job of a professional communicator, likely of the publicist variety, to hype this woman — to remake her as a more suitable brand by spiffing up her image and promoting her to any and all media outlets.

Instead, one of the things remarkably talented woman has demonstrated — again– the power of social media and how effective the public itself can be in terms of calling attention to something or someone in whom they are interested. Instead via YouTube as well as discussion on Facebook, Twittter and FriendFeed, the woman has – via viral marketing that she herself did not set into motion – become a superstar.

Heck, she’s even generating press for Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher because they tweeted about HER performance.

WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?

What it is about her that appeals is that she is (or at least seems) genuine. In this era of people who are Photoshopped and Botoxed to the point of near waxworkdom, this woman looks like an honest-to-goodness 47 -year-old lady. So strong is the expectation that our female talents now must be young, size two lovelies that one wonders if Janis Joplin– an off-kilter beauty with a killer voice — would be able to have a career today.

WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

Perhaps the scariest thing of all is that she has revealed the ugliness in our society’s current attitudes about beauty and talent. Screen goddess Ava Gardner once joked “Deep down, I’m pretty shallow” – what a pity that this may have been revealed as the current dominant mindset for humanity.

Watching the audience’s initial mocking reaction to her demonstrates that. And it makes her victory all the more powerful in this era of narcissistic twit(terer)s.

And it makes me particularly worried about the world my daughter will inherit -  if the response of MTV’s bloggers can be taken as typical- that they could react to her talent in the following callow manner:

It wasn’t until this morning that I got wind of the Susan Boyle craze. Along with the rest of you cynics out there, I have to admit that I was too quick to judge and giggle before she opened her mouth. Not to follow the crowd, but she seriously gave me goose bumps and watery eyes. (I discovered that closing your eyes to her bushy brows and just allowing yourself to hear her voice is the trick.)Her talent is undeniable, regardless of her cat collection and homely frock.

Perhaps there is a future in public relations: Teaching narrow-minded narcissists how to relate as people. Perhaps?

Only Connect…Or Only Collect? The Whole Follower Question

“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect…”

E.M. Forster

INTRODUCTION

While it is probably unwise to begin a blog post by quoting superior writer, it’s a mistake I’m going to repeat twice, because it was the brilliant Corvida Raven, whose thoughtful musings served to kick start my little grey cells and nimble typing fingers. She asked the following question in terms of social media networks:

Everything is about connecting to others, but have you considered the type of connection you’d like to have with people?

FIRST A DISCLAIMER:

I’m not going to tip-toe through the minefield and muck of “suggested Twitter users” – dangerous territory already well covered elsewhere- like here for a start.

MOTIVE IS A MAJOR CONSIDERATION

Hopefully the most common answer to Corvida’s question is ” a meaningful one.”

But from where I sit, the type of connection a person has with someone on a social media network such as Twitter can depend on their motive for engaging with and being engaged by that network in the first place. Are they trying to connect – connect to ideas and increase your knowledge? Connect to people with whom they can discuss shared passions or debate differing outlooks? Or are they looking for something else entirely?

I SHALL LEAD YOU ?

Are they looking to boost their ego? More and more there seems to be a sharp increase in people simply looking to amass numbers – be elected electronic prom queen so-to-speak – rather than actually connect. A sort of  “Mine’s bigger than yours” mentality- only this time having to do with numbers of Twitter followers.

It’s a mindset that’s been encouraged by tools like twittergrader.com – something that was meant to be helpful in measuring marketing reach (itself a dubious prospect in terms of what these networks were designed for) that has instead somehow been twisted into a popularity meter for many a person.

You know you’ve seen those tweets – “I’m ranked number __ in the city of Oz.” And frankly it’s disheartening.

BUSINESSES TOO

And that’s just regarding individuals, that says nothing about the unfortunate new inroads spammers and unscrupulous marketers are trying to take.

It’s getting worse too. If you don’t believe me, take a look at more expert opinions – such as the one tweeted by PurpleCar (who writes quite a bit about online behaviour and does it very well)  yesterday when speaking of www.tweepme.com, an “opt-in group” to help rapidly build a base of followers.   “this is a total travesty” she tweeted, followed by “what’s the point of tweepme after a while? Mainstreamers will realize you can rig the system and not use twitter. Follow rates lost value”

EFFECT OF COLLECTORS

It seems to me that trend of collecting has had a tremendously negative impact, having lead to all kinds of dubious services and narcissistic behaviour. Collectors will pander, flirt and provoke shamelessly just to raise their numbers. This kind of tactic is very seductive but ultimately cheapens whatever “connection” there might be. How meaningful is your connection if you are one of thousands?

The truth of this is hammered home if you take into consideration a recent, beautifully crafted commentary on Posterous concerning Dunbar’s number.

In it Melanie McBride sagely noted:

“there are only so many people we can treat reasonably and thoughtfully given the fixed capacity of the human OS and available relationship RAM.“

IN THE END

If you are in fact considering the type of connection that you want to have online, if you want to have meaning, doesn’t it seem better to focus on quality than quantity?

Ironically, given his massive legion of followers, Robert Scoble may have best summed up why it is best not to be a collector and not to focus so much on the size of your following:

If you define yourself by who is following you you’ll always feel inadequate. After all, you can’t control your followers and any idiot can follow people. But, define yourself by who you are following and you can really build something of high value.

In other words, isn’t it best for the tenor of these social networks and your experience on them that people try — really try — to connect and not just to collect?

As Shakespeare suggested: “Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.”

My husband’s younger brother died this weekend.

He was barely into his thirties, a large guy with a fondness for tattoos and clothes  that feature skulls and flames   If you went by appearances alone, you might think him a bit of hellion. But that would be because you never saw him allow his 4 year old niece to clamber all over him,  jabbering non-stop and you never heard him rumbling out a deep, booming laugh when she  drew “marks” on her arms to try to match his. (Laughter that only increased when
he realized the ink that she’d used was definitely not washable.) Nor did you see his sentimental streak- how he teared up when  my husband asked him to be the best man at our wedding.

My daughter is baffled by what  happened to her uncle.  She has had a hard time coming to terms with the concept of death ever since she first came across the idea last year when a classmate’s pet goldfish perished.  The very idea was almost too  scary for her to consider. She came home and announced that “Things get old and they die. Grammy is very old but she is never going to die.” And then burst into tears.

[Mind you, my mother is not that old but I too hope she is immortal.]

However, now that someone she knew and liked is gone, death has become that much more tangible and that much more frightening.  Last night she kept asking if I was going to die and if her father was going to die and asking why her uncle had died. [I tried to make things easier by bringing in the idea of reincarnation but that didn’t exactly take because she kept asking how her uncle would know how to find his stuff and whether she would be able to keep all her toys if she died andcame back. So that was a “mom fail” right there.]

An aspect of parenting that is hard is having to teach your children fundamental truths about the world- stranger danger,  the existence of death and so on .
Little kids are so innocent and happy and you wish you could protect them from these things forever.  As someone who is a professional communicator,  it is sometimes part of my job to find a way to make unpalatable truths easier to accept.  But even with those skills, trying to teach my daughter not to fear death while not courting it either is one of the hardest things I have  ever had to face as a parent.

Mind you, it is nothing compared to what my in-laws are going through right now.

It is not the natural order of things for a child to predecease a parent.  It is something no parent should ever have to endure.  My in-laws are bearing up under this tragedy with grace and strength. They struggle but they endure admirably. They are heroic, as is my husband, whose grief , though
barely verbally expressed, is clearly vast and deep.

I share this with you in part as a means of processing the experience-because I too am still in shock and somehow writing about it makes it slightly more comprehensible.

How uncertain and short life sometimes is. If there is someone you love or even like and you have not spoken with them in a while- pick up the phone or get  on Skype or text them and arrange to see them face to face.  Because you do not know whether their last moment– or yours – is just around the next bend.