For the past two weeks, infamous Hollywood playboy Charlie Sheen has been dominating headlines with his, how can I put this discreetly . . . “questionable” behavior. Given the recent developments in his personal life, his professional career hangs in the balance.
Rather than make a gesture of goodwill, Sheen has taken to the airwaves first in a radio interview on the Alex Jones show, followed by a television interview with ABC’s 20/20 and an appearance on Piers Morgan’s show on CNN, pleading his case to the public.
Out of these interviews have come some incredible sound bites. In fact, an entire website (www.livethesheendream.com) was created on which you click on Charlie Sheen’s head and a new sound bite appears beneath his face with every click.
How else can a person capitalize on great sound bites? Gee, how about via a wildly popular, real-time social media platform designed for mini updates, say in . . . 140 characters?
That’s right folks, after extreme public demand, Charlie Sheen has joined Twitter to broadcast his pearls of wisdom to the entire world wide web. You can follow him @CharlieSheen. You can also join in the Sheen-related conversation by using popular related hashtags, such as #winning, #winner or #chooseyourvice.
Last night Elizabeth Holmes, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, tweeted:
As I write this post, his follower tally is currently at 760,746.
Thought Sheen has lost his role on “Two and a Half Men” and his publicist, he sure knows how to take lemons and make lemonade. In fact, he’s set up his stand on the best block in the neighborhood: Twitter.
Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter Discussing the McChrystal Mess on MSNBC
Somewhat lost in the full blown media storm around Rolling Stone’s“Runaway General” profile of General McChrystal that ended up costing him his job yesterday, and could be a turning point in President Obama’s attempt to fix the situation on the ground in Afghanistan, was how this all played out behind the scenes. How could someone as bright as McChrystal open the door to this controversy with seemingly no regard for what he was saying to an embedded, freelance reporter with a tape recorder in hand? What was his staff thinking? Was he trying to get fired?
Michael Hastings, the freelance reporter for Rolling Stone who compiled the profile (who is still in Afghanistan BTW), discussed some of those details in an interview with his former news weekly yesterday. And, surprisingly, it only took one email to get access to Gen McChrystal:
“I was Baghdad correspondent for NEWSWEEK for two years, and I left the magazine after covering the elections. I wrote a piece for GQ before Obama took office that raised some serious questions about the direction we were taking in Afghanistan. So it was something I wanted to be writing about. I saw General McChrystal and his new strategy as a way to look at our Afghan policy to see if it’s working or if it’s a totally insane enterprise. I met with editors at Rolling Stone, they seemed into the idea, so I e-mailed McChrystal’s people. I didn’t think I was going to get any access at all. It’s one of those strange journalistic twists. They said yes, come on over to Paris to spend a couple days with us.”
Why McChrystal’s aides and most likely Duncan Boothby, a senior media aide (who has since resigned as well), gave access so easily is puzzling. Surely, McChrystal also weighed-in on the final decision, but why wasn’t there more consideration of the potential risks in opening the door to an outsider who had previously questioned the strategy in Afghanistan? Perhaps, McChrystal, who has never shied away from the spotlight, saw an opportunity to illustrate once and for all that the President’s strategy / lack of support wasn’t working in Afghanistan? McChrystal stunned the White House back in September of 2009 by making his 66-page recommendation for more troops public – noting that the United States could loose the war there if they didn’t get more troops. At the time, he went on 60 Minutes to get his point across.
“McChrystal, an expert on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, has long been thought to be uniquely qualified to lead in Afghanistan. But he is not known for being media savvy. Hastings, who has covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for two years, according to the magazine, is not well-known within the Defense Department. And as a freelance reporter, Hastings would be considered a bigger risk to be given unfettered access, compared with a beat reporter, who would not risk burning bridges by publishing many of McChrystal’s remarks.”
The stanza or graph, truly gives you an inside look at what goes on behind the lines and the balance a beat reporter must take in building relationships and balancing what they put out in print with the effect it will have on their future access, and how it doesn’t really apply when working with a freelance writer (or columnist for that matter). In fact, it was such an inside-baseball look that Politico pulled the graph later in the day, likely because they were scared of the scorn they’d take from fellow reporters on the White House beat.
Whether Hastings was far riskier than a typical beat reporter or not, the biggest mistake made by McChrystal and his staff was not having a cohesive objective going in. Or at least not appearing to. What was their objective for the profile? Why did they let Hastings tag around for a bar crawl in Paris and spend even more down-time with them as Volcanic ash grounded in them in Paris? If you’re going to agree to any interview, and especially to a profile of this magnitude, you better have a cohesive game plan going in that sets clear ground rules for you, your staff and the reporter. Perhaps a commander of General McChrystal’s ilk couldn’t bring himself to fear something as harmless as an embedded, freelance reporter. Unfortunately, in this case, the reporter was more dangerous than the enemy he was battling on the ground in Afghanistan on a daily basis.
Back in October 2008, I wrote a post about charitable organizations embracing donations via text message to help meet their end of year fundraising goals. This week the island nation of Haiti suffered a devastating earthquake and two high profile charities, the Red Cross and Yele (founded by Haitian musician Wyclef Jean), urged those wishing to send aid to make a donation not via check, email, or even online donations, instead they asked for one simple item – a text message.
By text messaging a special code to the Red Cross or Yele you could make a donation to relief efforts in Haiti with the push of just a few keys on your phone. Last week I wrote about some of the exciting mobile technologies unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and its clear that the mobile trend is not just for tech, it has spread to non-profit.
The Red Cross text message donations are being managed by a company called mGive. mGive’s chief executive, Tony Aiello, told Jenna Wortham of the New York Times, “Catastrophic fund-raising is different from the everyday fund-raising that we help facilitate. This is a huge tragedy, and we simply hope to help provide relief. . . Mobile giving is currently outpacing the early days of online giving.”
How popular is the donation method exactly?
In an interview with MSNBC’s Suzanne Choney, Jeffrey Nelson, a spokesman for Verizon Wireless said, “All mobile texters in the United States have contributed $4 million to the Red Cross Haiti earthquake relief effort, the largest outpouring of charitable support by texting in history — by far.”
Nelson went on to say, “Previous donating-via-text message efforts raised $400,000 after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and $200,000 after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami by all wireless customers in the U.S.”
And it doesn’t end there. To get out the word about donating via text, concerned individuals posted the text message codes on a plethora of social networks, making the plea viral.
Jennifer Van Grove of Mashable wrote a post today praising the Red Cross’ decision to use mobile and social media to raise awareness and more importantly, to raise funds. Van Grove said, “The Red Cross’s involvement in the relief effort is to be commended. Not only did it immediately set up the simplest donation method possible, but its social media presence and outreach, when combined with the State Department’s involvement, has turned this into a viral funding initiative, topping Twitter trends and inspiring action.”
This week it has become clear the most effective method of raising funds is to reach people where they are: on their phones and on social networks. When launching a fundraising campaign, in the wake of a crisis or otherwise, fundraisers should consider that their staring point is in fact mobile.
Pizza Hut isn’t a Stranger to Creating Publicity Stunts out of New “Positions” (2007′s VP of Pizza Campaign)
Seemingly undaunted, and hopefully encouraged, by the the recent fallout surrounding Domino’s aptly named “booger-gate,” Pizza Hut (YUM) officially announced its search for the “Twintern” today, after Stephanie Clifford noted the open casting call in the New York Times a few days ago. As Bob Kraut, vice president for marketing communications at the company noted to the Times:
“They’ll be our social media journalist, chronicling in 140 characters or less what’s going on at Pizza Hut.”
With so many companies trying to figure out a social media strategy along with best practices for using tools like Twitter, the idea of a Twintern seems like a win-win. As long as Pizza Hut understands that it’s just the first step in getting their feet wet within the Twitter and blogo-spheres, and they’re not a “journalist” just because they’re creating content, or micro-content in this case.
Pizza Hut, isn’t disclosing what they’ll be paying the Twintern to manage their new Twitter handle (Already 1,000 plus followers), but they’ll likely find a very talented and capable individual (Read: Their IT people are about to get inundated with applications) for a bargain-basement price. More importantly, they’re creatively using the “casting call” as a social media publicity stunt to heighten their mind-share in the space.
While content creation will be a big aspect of the new Pizza Hut gig, Clifford rightly notes that social media monitoring may be the more important job responsibility:
“The Twintern must also play social-media defense, monitoring Twitter for any mentions of the brand and alerting superiors whenever anything negative about the Hut is being said. (Applicants should study last week’s YouTube gross-out video posted by Domino’s employees, which was quickly passed around Twitter, to understand why.)”
The Domino’s case study is yet the latest example in a line of recent PR fire drills which have bubbled up from social media platforms as companies failed to respond in a timely matter (Motrin, Amazon).
While Domino’s has done a lot of things right after missing the YouTube video for the first 24-48 hours (pictured above – as it has been taken down), the delay in reaction put them in very a deep hole. A hole that wouldn’t have been nearly as big if they had quickly identified the video through Radian6 or a similar service and responded quickly within the YouTube community and through Twitter.
Since then, they have done a good job of following the crisis communications’ handbook by creating their own YouTube video response (below) with CEO Patrick Doyle and fostering conversations with their new Twitter handle (100+ more followers than Pizza Hut).
However, while the fallout from “booger-gate” has created an “opportunity” to grow Domino’s social media presence, Pizza Hut finds themselves in the more enviable position: cautiously observing and moving slowly into the social media space rather than falling in backwards in reaction to a crisis situation.
