Last April, we had the great fortune of landing Lisa Bernstein as a student intern. Fresh out of Red River College’s Creative Communications program, we were thrilled with the way Lisa took to the work - from writing newsletters to managing websites and blogs, and pitching media. She did things so well, that we just kept her busy after that internship ended… and we’re looking forward to working with her for a long time to come.

Lisa is a skilled writer and creative problem solver with an eye for detail and a flare for presentation. Before she came to us, she provided communications support for the Health Sciences Centre Foundation, Manitoba Custody and Youth Corrections, and the 8th Annual Graphic Design Art Auction and Festival. She also holds a BA (honours) in Film Studies from the University of Manitoba.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 11th, 2010 at 12:20 pm and is filed under Social media and blogging, writing, Media relations, Dooley Communications, News, blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

We’ve been very busy over the last few months at Dooley Communications. The year has been packed with new work for great new clients, including Direct Impact. We’ve been working with DI’s network of PR agencies across Canada since the spring helping Ford of Canada in Manitoba and Northwestern Ontario. Our efforts have yielded dozens of positive media stories across our region on TV, in print, online and on radio.

All in all, it’s been a great way to celebrate our third year in business. We’re growing, adding clients and staff, and looking forward to year four.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 11th, 2010 at 12:13 pm and is filed under Northwestern Ontario, Direct Impact, Media relations, Dooley Communications, Blogroll, Manitoba, blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

Mon dieu! Someone should have reminded the French national soccer team about the old maxim: don’t air your dirty laundry in public. The team is in complete disarray at the 2010 World Cup as players and coaches feud publicly over the poor performance and underachievement of one of the world’s most talented squads. Former players and current politicians have waded in, advertisers and sponsors have pulled out. Ooh la la.

It’s all a good reminder of what mother used to say: if you don’t have anything nice to day, zip it. (Or words to that effect.) It’s also a good example of how a lack of public relations skill can inflict terrible damage on individuals, a team with a noble tradition, and legions of fans around the world.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010 at 8:51 am and is filed under Media relations, branding, blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

Imagine that you’re the Winnipeg School Division and your current claim to fame is a couple of cell phone videos of two of your teachers simulating a lap dance and oral sex during a high school pep rally. The high school is pilloried by media around the world. The teachers in question are lambasted by students, parents, politicians and every human being who hears the story and shakes their head in dismay.

So what do you do if you are the Winnipeg School Division? Why, you pretend nothing has happened at all. That has been the approach of the WSD administration ever since the Churchill High School lap dance scandal broke.

Today’s Winnipeg Free Press reported that the division has even removed any media stories from the clippings it sends to its trustees. Those would be the same trustees that the citizens of Winnipeg elected to govern the administration.

Let’s repeat that: the trustees are supposed to govern the administration.But I digress.

This story continues to go from bad to worse. What started as a serious lapse of judgment for a couple of high school teachers has escalated to a potential crisis of confidence in the entire school division administration.

It’s hard to tell why the administration is burying its head in the sand on this. There have been a few comments saying that it’s a personnel matter and therefore is entirely private. That may be, but that doesn’t mean it’s not also a full-blown communications crisis for the school division and the school in question.

As it happens, I live in the catchment area for Churchill High School. I also have a son for whom my wife and I have to soon decide if he’ll attend Churchill or some other school that doesn’t have lap dancing during pep rallies. As a parent, I’m looking for some sign that the school and the division understand the depth of the mistrust this episode has bred. As a voter, I’m searching for some evidence that the school division is capable of handling itself competently. Sadly, I’m seeing the exact opposite on both counts.

The school division could have taken a much more pro-active approach to this situation while still respecting the privacy of the teachers. Its executive management team should have immediately responded both within the school community (before it hit the media). And once it hit the media, it needed to speak through the media and via its own publications to the general public (to reach would be parents like me). We need to be reassured of the culture and policies at work in our schools and in our school division.

Instead, the only public action it’s taken has been to threaten the students who took the videos and to see that they’re removed from YouTube. Seems to me they’re trying to move mountains to protect the reputations of two teachers that have deservedly lost them on their own. Meanwhile, the reputation of the WSD and of Churchill High School has been permanently smeared by their inaction.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 10:23 am and is filed under Media relations, Crisis communications, Issues Management, Winnipeg, blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

Adam Dooley, President of Dooley Communications, was recently interviewed by Uniter reporter Kristy Rydz on communications and corporate social responsibility. The question: can companies that pollute credibly call themselves environmentally sensitive?

The story examines the dilemma and wonders if some corporate efforts are only so much ‘greenwashing’.

What’s your view?

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 1:22 pm and is filed under Media relations, Dooley Communications, Credibility, Winnipeg, blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

I pity the communications people around Newfoundland and Labrador premier Danny Williams. He’s a blowhard at the best of times, but how do you handle his decision to have relatively simple heart surgery in the United States.

Choosing to pay for a U.S. hospital over a ‘free’ Canadian one is akin to poking a finger in an open wound.It says loudly that one of our country’s most prominent leaders has more faith in U.S. hospitals than our own. Simultaneously, it has dragged a taboo topic into the spotlight: those who can afford it, go to the U.S. for serious health issues. There’s no other way to put it.

His message is clear: Canada’s health care system is second rate and pity the poor suckers who have to stay at home to wait (and wait and wait) to use it.

It would have been a stroke of genius if he had intended to drive home those points in a very public manner, but Williams continues to strike the oft-repeated chord of Canadian politicians:

“I have the utmost confidence in our health-care system, I certainly do,” the 60-year-old said (in the Globe and Mail), perched on a leather chair in his condominium in Sarasota, Fla. “It’s a bum rap for someone to turn around and say, ‘Oh, Williams does not have confidence in his own health-care system because he has to leave the province.’ ”

A bum rap, eh? No, the only one who got the bum rap was the PR person who has to try to keep lipstick on this pig.

Williams’ “ass”-inine actions follow on the heels of popular mixed martial arts fighter Brock Lesnar’s condemnation of a Manitoba hospital last month. Lesnar went to a Brandon hospital in the middle of a diverticulitis attack. Unsatisfied with how he was being treated, his wife drove him to North Dakota for treatment instead.

Credibility is the most valuable commodity in public communications. These public dismissals of our hospitals only reinforce the general public’s too frequently miserable experiences with health care in Canada. Whether you’re in Brandon, Manitoba or St. John’s, Newfoundland… or Ottawa … it’s must now be a lot harder to pitch a positive story about our hospitals.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 10:11 am and is filed under Credibility, Issues Management, blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

Last week’s Tiger Woods apology-cum-public flagellation was nothing if not a great case study for students of communications. The golf great continues to get awful advice (perhaps he’s acting as his own PR counsel?) on how to rehabilitate his image following last fall’s sex scandal.

From the cheapskate podium and ‘community theatre’ backdrop to the phony delivery of his ‘lines’, Tiger’s apology just drew attention to just how far he’s fallen. And deservedly so. While critics of PR say it’s all about spin and lying, this is a perfect example of one PR maxim I follow: “never lie.” Lies are almost always found out, or at least sniffed at. They obliterate credibility. Yet, here was a guy who told whopper after whopper. Pretending to be a pillar of integrity, morals and discipline, he made tens of millions of dollars on his image and has justly lost millions as his image has been stripped bare… much like his skanky mistresses, I suppose.

An apology was necessary. It should have come last fall, but it didn’t. In this case, he would have been better off giving an exclusive interview to a friendly source. The Oprah show would have been perfect. It would have given him the opportunity to tell his side of the story more fully and it could have showed him to be more human.

But aside from Tiger’s image and marital rehab, there were also lessons on how organizations need to deal with episodes like this.

Ernie Els complained that staging the apology in the middle of one of the World Golf Championship tournaments was  selfish. He was right, and PGA Tour commissioner Tom Finchem apologized to Els and other players saying: “You can never communicate too much in this business, and when you don’t, you usually pay a price. And that was a good example.”

I don’t have a lot of sympathy for Tiger. As my mother used to say, he’s made his bed and now he has to lie in it. That bed might not be as uncomfortable if he had been following good communications advice from the start. The same goes for the PGA Tour, which needs to make an extra effort now to adjust its marketing and branding. It can’t be considered Tiger’s tour any longer. If it is, then the tour will risk battering its image just as badly as Tiger has hurt already his.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 22nd, 2010 at 11:30 am and is filed under Media relations, Credibility, blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

This time of year is always very exciting for me personally as we get closer and closer to the Manitoba Communicator of the Year celebration. This year, CPRS Manitoba will present the third annual award on March 24 at the Hotel Fort Garry.

I remember when we first started talking about creating the award some four or five years ago. Nearly everyone, especially the CPRS Manitoba board, was enthusiastic. That’s not surprising as we’d been looking for some time for new ways to bring value to our members and to promote both CPRS and our profession in Manitoba. The award has done a great job of that so far and I’m very proud to have played a part in developing it and organizing the celebrations for the past three years.

I want to thank Marketwire for its generous sponsorship of the award since its inception.
The nomination deadline has been extended to Feb. 26. So get your nomination in soon.

And as a special lead-in to the award, CPRS Manitoba is also hosting a half day conference on social media this year sponsored by CNW Group. It features Keith Bilous, President of ICUC Moderation Services as keynote speaker. ICUC has quietly grown to be one of the largest online content moderation companies in the world right here in our own backyard.

The conference also has a host of other homegrown talent on two panels dealing with the changing face of news media and how to leverage social networks. Come out and see, hear and meet: Bruce Owen of the Free Press, Glenn Tinley of Studio Publications, Curtis Brown of Endless Spin Cycle, Shel Zolkewich of ShinyPackages, Corey Quintaine of Kildonan Place, Rebecca McCormack of Cake Clothing, Jason Hasselmann of New Media Now, and Colin Whitney of Mars Hill Group.

It’ll be a great conference with plenty of fresh case studies on how to make social media work for you.

Buy tickets at www.cprs.mb.ca. Early bird rates end March 5!

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 18th, 2010 at 12:40 pm and is filed under Social media and blogging, CPRS, Dooley Communications, Winnipeg, Blogroll, blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

Whoever came up with the idea for all the women in my life to spontaneously tell me the colour of their bras deserves an award. Like most men on Facebook, it took a little while for me to figure out exactly what was going on… all these one word status updates. Just a colour mentioned: black, white, beige, violet, periwinkle, leopard… ooh la la!

I’ve since found out it is a breast cancer awareness campaign and I think it’s extremely clever. I’ve read it started with a viral email that women were asked to pass along to women only giving them a sneaky secret society kind of feeling: a way to do good while pulling a prank and teasing the men in their lives.

And it was the mysterious tease that makes this so effective. It makes the men take notice and ask questions. If it doesn’t start an actual discussion about breast cancer, it certainly gets us all (men and women) thinking about it.

It’s a well done, simple and very intelligent campaign. Bravo!

This entry was posted on Friday, January 8th, 2010 at 12:49 pm and is filed under Social media and blogging, blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

Fact: a close friend of mine recently recounted a news story about a tragic traffic fatality to me. She told me via chat, sending me a link to her Facebook page, which linked to the original news article as well as to a condolences page for the victim.This friend doesn’t subscribe to any daily paper. She doesn’t read them. She barely ever watches TV news and rarely clicks on talk radio. She relies on her network within Facebook, chat and email to keep her informed.That’s just one more reason to include social networks in your company’s public relations and corporate communications efforts. Whether you’re trying to reach an audience in Winnipeg, Manitoba or any where else in the world, people are talking to one another in new and dynamic ways.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 at 10:54 am and is filed under Social media and blogging, blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.