A Rodney Day

by Roger Pynn

“Can we all just get along?” begged Rodney King, the L.A. man brutalized by police in 1991 when the officers who beat him were acquitted and it touched off riots.

His words rang in my ear this morning as I listened to radio reports of partisans jeering at each other during a town hall meeting on health care reform:

“People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we get along? Can we stop making it, making it horrible for the older people and the kids…It’s just not right. It’s not right. It’s not, it’s not going to change anything. We’ll, we’ll get our justice….Please, we can get along here. We all can get along. I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out. Let’s try to beat it. Let’s try to beat it. Let’s try to work it out.”

Two things all of us have that are guaranteed to be unique: fingerprints and opinions. But somehow we’ve become so partisan that we aren’t willing to shake hands … or listen to each other without villainizing the other for not agreeing with us.

I don’t like partisans. I like collaborators … people willing to work with those of differing positions long enough and hard enough to find common ground.

Our firm doesn’t “do politics” because you take the winners and the losers with you after a campaign (those you beat hate you and if you lose you’re to blame) but there’s a lesson here that applies to all communication.

Think of it in terms of your attempt to win market share. Before you can get a customer in the door, you have to let them know you respect them. They have to think you can get along.

You’d think the same thing would apply to politics and our civic life, but … then again … we’re all different.

Spam – Quarantine (1)

by Kerry Martin

Everyone gets spam—e-mails claiming that you won $3 million in the Netherlands lotto, messages from the crown prince of Nigeria wanting to give you his entire fortune before he dies of cancer, and of course, the ever-present marketing blasts offering to get your message out to 500,000 people in your targeted audience.

Normally I easily sort these and quickly delete them before taking up too much of my time, but today I noticed one piece of junk that got my attention.  It wasn’t its subject line (Get Your AD in Front of Millions), but what got me was a slap-in-the-face, bold-typed sentence in the start of the body: “I have successfully gotten this message in front of you.”

It made me laugh.  I had opened this e-mail and read it, hadn’t I? 

Now, I admit, my pet peeve is having an unread message in any of my inboxes that creates that bold (1) in my Outlook.  But by quickly opening it to get rid of that notice, what did I actually do for this person’s “Open – click through” statistics?  If this ‘marketer’ claims to get their messages to 5 million people, how many others out there like me are giving him great tracking rates just by opening it for one millisecond before deleting it?

One thing’s for certain, that statistic isn’t the end-all be-all for analyzing how well you get your message across; you need multiple metrics.  You need to cross-reference trends in all kinds of media: newly added Facebook fans, new subscribers to an eNewsletter, counts of signatures on a petition, requests for more information, registrations for an event and phone calls to voice their opinion.

At Curley & Pynn, we always refer back to those 4 questions, especially the last one:

What do you want them to do?

My guess is, “delete my email” isn’t your answer.