Blog
How Open Data Can Help Fix Youth Unemployment
How Open Data Can Help Fix Youth Unemployment In April of this year, CBC’s chief correspondent Peter Mansbridge hosted a segment on The National entitled, Class of 2014: Generation Screwed? Over the course of the fifteen-minute feature, Mansbridge interviewed...
Rob Ford is a Great Teacher. Here’s Why.
Rob Ford is a Great Teacher. Here’s Why. Let’s begin with a question: would Rob Ford have a better public image if he had accepted the substance abuse allegations in 2013? One could easily argue that the public perception of Ford would be negative either way. During...
Should the Government Outsource its Media Monitoring?
Should the Government Outsource its Media Monitoring? Media monitoring costs are always an issue, especially when taxpayer dollars are involved. Back in 2012, the Harper government came under harsh criticism for spending close to a million dollars to monitor a wide...
What do PR Disasters and Marvel’s S.H.I.E.L.D. Have in Common?
What do PR Disasters and Marvel’s S.H.I.E.L.D. Have in Common? WARNING: This short story contains spoilers if you haven’t seen Captain America: The Winter Soldier or Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. past episode 16 (and, to some extent, Iron Man 3). That being said, even if...
3 Branding Lessons Learned from the World Cup
3 Branding Lessons Learned from the World Cup Have you wondered why World Cup fever manages to inflict millions of people all around the world every four years? Soccer, or perhaps the politically correct term ‘football’, is one of the sports I view the least when...
Warning! Early Success Reality-Distortion Minefields Will Destroy Your Startup – Part 2
Warning! Early Success Reality-Distortion Minefields Will Destroy Your Startup – Part 2 According to the Startup Genome Project, 74% of high-growth Internet startups, with serious star potential, fail. Many of these tragedies are the consequences of the leadership...
Warning! Early Success Reality-Distortion Minefields Will Destroy Your Startup
Warning! Early Success Reality-Distortion Minefields Will Destroy Your Startup “We need to figure out how to scale this system to support a million users simultaneously” –– CEO of an education software technology company (2008) during a private discussion. I was...
How to Protect Your Online Reputation – Part 2
How to Protect Your Online Reputation – Part 2 Now that you’ve learned to address some of the underlying issues that may hurt your online reputation from part 1, your next step is to create an online defensive shield, one that will protect you from future negative...
How to Protect Your Online Reputation – Part 1
How to Protect Your Online Reputation – Part 1 Everybody acknowledges the importance of on-line reputation. After you put your heart and soul into building your professional or corporate brand and encountering a negative article or review, it causes anxiety. It would...
How to Find Context in Media Monitoring?
How to Find Context in Media Monitoring? As I mentioned in an earlier post about media monitoring, context is king. The real power is to find context in media monitoring, the ability to provide additional context directly related to the media mentions. The more...
The Best Way to Evaluate Media Monitoring Tools
The Best Way to Evaluate Media Monitoring Tools One of the best ways to evaluate media monitoring tools is to determine how much context is given when one examines a media mention. Context gives perspective and perspective gives insight. In turn, insight makes for...
Drop the Vision: Your Startup Needs to be Customer-driven
Drop the Vision: Your Startup Needs to be Customer-driven A lot of management theory focuses around the power of vision, however for many startups, this is a false promise. It could end up costing you the success you’d been working towards. I’ll concede upfront that...