Click here to view the embedded video.

Yeah, I know that they only need a small percentage of responses to be happy. But the advertisers paying for direct mail advertising need to pay better attention to the lists that direct mail companies are using when they send stuff out.

Here’s exhibit A:

My mom lives in an assisted living retirement community. This direct mailpiece was delivered to her mailbox, and to the other 40 mailboxes in the complex.

No one who received this mailing has any interest in roofing, siding, or windows. The retirement facility handles all exterior maintenance.

Now, multiply the number of people who received this useless mailing in the one facility by the number of people in other similar facilities who also received it. And Cambridge Exteriors LLC paid plenty for the privilege of adding to the trash output at these nursing homes — and got no business from it at all, nor would they ever. Why didn’t their direct mail firm consider this when they generated the mailing?

The point is, throwing a ton of direct mail against a dubious mailing list is a waste of time and it is expensive too. I called Cambridge Exteriors to alert them to the wasted direct mail. They never called me back.

You are much better off creating targeted content in written, audio, video, and photographic form, and surrounding it with the right keywords and data, and getting up on the web in a search environment where people who have roofs, siding, and windows of their own will find you.

Direct mail companies, improperly supervised by clients, will waste your money dropping your direct mail pieces on people who have no interest whatsoever in your products. But you will get charged for it.

Some of the key points I make in the article:

1. Tell me a story. That’s the same advice that [executive producer] Don Hewitt used to give to 60 Minutes reporters when they first started preparing the program 60 Minutes.
2. Edit your podcast recording to remove superfluous or repetitive segments.
3. One person talking in the microphone can be incredibly dull. It is always more engaging to listen to a group of people.
4. Audio stories leave a lot to the imagination, so if you paint a picture with sound of the things you are talking about, it adds an interesting dimension to your podcast.
5. Focus on sound quality – learn about compression, equalization, and how to edit to avoid disturbing jumps in sound quality.

What tips do you have about producing better podcasts?

Lubetkin Global Communications camera setup at a recent seminar

I look at a lot of video created for other companies to see what’s going on in the world we inhabit on behalf of our clients. I am really disturbed by what I see.

Many companies apparently blanch at the cost of producing a real video with pictures of their workers, facilities, and interviews with their subject matter experts. So instead, they are persuaded to produce what I consider misguided videos.

Video producers can create animated word graphics fairly easily, and instead of finding a way to produce decent images for their clients, a lot of them seem to be taking the cheap way out — picking their client’s pockets in the process.

I just watched a video for a Florida PR agency that takes this “flash some words with urgent music”  approach. You see a lot of stock images of swirling globes and business-oriented graphics flying by. You see buzzwords and generic business headlines about the “changing environment,” flashing onto the screen. These words are supposed to tell the story of why I should use this firm in “a changing communications marketplace.”

But wait one minute, please. Let’s get real.

They are using video to flash words at you.

You can read the words more easily on a static page.

You don’t need the urgent pulsing music to tell you that the economy is tough and the media environment is changing.

What can someone know about the firm after viewing that video?

There are a few b-roll images of what I assume are their team members in the video, without any sound. The only thing I know about those people is that they seem to have a blue tinge to their skins. I didn’t learn anything about their capabilities and experience.

Words on screen is a cheap, ill-advised way to do web video. People don’t want to be sold on websites. They want to be educated and informed.

If you want a video, then take the time to tell your story — yourself, on camera.

That’s the kind of videos we make.

We interview you and your team talking about your philosophy, your approach, how you handle clients. Then we get a client or two to talk about what you’ve done for them. We make images of you and your team actually working the problem. It’s harder to do, it takes more planning, but it will get you better results.

Visitors to your site go away knowing something about you and your approach.

If a firm asks me to watch a video and it’s just a bunch of words flashing across the screen, it tells me two things:

1) they really wasted their money on the video budget, and

2) they are pompous asses if they think they made a cool video, because it’s just the same boilerplate bullshit they would put on their pitch slides, and I learned nothing about them from it.

I want to hear the agency head TELLING me how s/he feels about these trends and what they are doing about them for clients. That’s a video.

Which kind of video would you rather see?

William "Commodore" Vanderbilt, earliest practitioner of "Public Be Damned" approach to corporate PR

The underlying message of the Goldman Sachs imbroglio remains the same as the underlying message about all the reputation management foul-ups that have taken place over the past decade, most conspicuously in the financial services sector.

These companies have made conscious decisions over the past decade to deliberately avoid building reputations with the journalists who cover them. Whether through arrogance, egotism, or simply not caring about the public perception of their activities (Commodore Vanderbilt’s famous, “The public? The public be damned!” quote comes to mind), these companies have failed to enlist public support that could have been a bank of goodwill when critics attacked them.

These firms systematically liquidated highly skilled and seasoned communications professionals who they believed cost them too much and replaced them with interns and junior people content to get a fancy title on a business card in return for merely reading scripts back to reporters, blocking access to executives, and even just not returning journalist phone calls, ever.

Goldman has always been one of the chief offenders in this vein. For decades they never talked to the press at all. You cannot operate in a vacuum like that any more.

Companies continue to think they can control what is said about them by not speaking to the media. This is a vain, egotistical, false, and ultimately unsuccessful approach to public relations. You cannot expect to extract money from the public and have so much disdain for them that you do not engage in an ongoing relationship with the media who are your best hope for explaining your actions to that public.

Nancy Brinker of the Susan G. Komen Foundation for the Cure - Original photo by Jason Pier, posted to Flickr.com under Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0) license permitting "remixing," which is what Mother Jones apparently did to the photo.

One of the biggest lessons coming out of the Komen Foundation’s recent high profile policy and communications failures is the importance to corporations and organizations of having some voices of dissent in their circle of advisers.

A major problem of our technologically flat world is that we have the ability to tune out voices that we don’t agree with more easily than ever before.

If we are conservative, we can watch Fox News and not worry about hearing a liberal point of view.

If we are liberal, we might read The New York Times and never look at The Washington Times.

This is a mistake. You need to be listening to voices that don’t agree with you.

For example, boards across the country should be reading and discussing every article in  Mother Jones magazine about their industry.

This well-known publication happens to do some of the best investigative reporting around today, and offers insights into the social and political issues that your organization WILL need to deal with in the coming months and years, whether you like it or not.

Unfortunately, most business people would recoil from the thought of even looking at Mother Jones, because of  its rich political history as a publication of the far left liberal wing of American politics — but you’d better look at the MoJo article, “What Would It Take to Trust Komen Again?”

The article, by MoJo co-editor Clara Jeffery, does a brilliant job of dissecting the Komen Foundation’s insular and single-minded board of directors.

She does a careful job of distinguishing between the many Komen advisory and volunteer boards around the country. She is talking about the wealthy, conservative core of close friends and family members that Nancy Brinker has surrounded herself with. They think alike, they send their children to the same elite private schools, they raise money for the same conservative GOP candidates.

They are, to put it bluntly, a lot like corporate boards — and other nonprofits — all around the country. People like to be friends with people like themselves, and they like to have those people around as advisers.

Boards like the Komen board, which are elitist and insular in their thinking, almost never take good advice from their communications counselors. Let’s be honest. We can blame the PR department for a screw-up here, and maybe they had something to do with it.

But I will bet you that the PR department tried to tell the Komen board what the possible outcomes were from their policy change, and that information was suppressed.In a big corporation — and that’s what Komen is, after all — there are many simple ways to keep information from getting to the board.

Either they made the presentation to someone in management below the board level who decided it wasn’t “important enough” to bother the board with, or they did bring it to the board, which just all clucked their tongues and just patted the PR people on the head, thinking, “we are so much higher than you, we know so much better how things work, now go back to your office and send out more press releases about our pink merchandise.”

The problem is, such an incestuous board becomes an “amen corner” for what they think. They don’t get real outside opinions. They usually either demote, fire or push aside anyone who gives them contrary advice, or heaven forefend, bad news. Ask anyone who took bad news about Bank of America to Ken Lewis what happened to them. It doesn’t take long for the troops to get the message that the best way to survive is to keep your mouth shut and don’t tell the boss.

On 60 Minutes, Leslie Stahl did a profile of Admiral Mike Mullen, the recently retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He recalled that when he got his first star as a Rear Admiral, he received a note of congratulations from one of his Annapolis classmates that read, “Congratulations, from this day on, you will always eat well and never be told the truth again.”

Boards will always eat well, but they need to create an environment in which they can be told the truth — and the messengers will not be muzzled or fired or telling the truth.

And of course it made me remember this joke, which is way too long to tell in the 140 character limit of Twitter.

(Overheard CB radio conversation)

CB Operator: Breaker 1-9 for a 10-36?
Translation: can someone on channel 19 please tell me what time it is?

Response: Hey, guy, I’m not going to give you a 10-36 because if I give you a 10-36 then you’re going to ask me for my (10-)20 [my current location] and if I tell you my 20 you’re going to ask me for my home 20, and if I give you my home 20 you’re going to ask to have a coffee break at my home 20, and if you come to my home 20 for a coffee break you’re going to meet my sister, and if you meet my sister you’re going to want to date my sister, and I won’t have any son of a bitch date my sister who can’t afford to buy a wristwatch!

BA-dum ching!

Steve "@PodcastSteve" Lubetkin; Judy "@MorahToMorah" Lubetkin, and Shel "@ShelIsrael" Israel together at the Dancing Camel Pub, Ha'Tasiya Street, Tel Aviv, during the Tel Aviv Beer Tweetup November 28, 2011

Here’s another story about why it is essential for you and your business to be involved in the use of social media tools like Facebook and Twitter.

We are travelling on assignment in Israel last week and this week. When I checked my news feed on Facebook this past Sunday, I learned that one of my colleagues from the Society for New Communications Research, best-selling author Shel Israel, was in Tel Aviv the same time that we are, making a speech to an Israeli marketing conference. I also learned that there was going to be a “TweetUp,” a meeting organized by using Twitter and Twitter tools, at which Shel would be one of the guests of honor.

We had no problem adjusting our evening plans so that we could meet some inspiring young Israeli high tech startup entrepreneurs, see our old friend Shel, and visit the Dancing Camel Pub, a funky brew pub (run by an expatriate from New Jersey!) in a part of Tel Aviv we might not otherwise have gone to.

Without Facebook and Twitter, we never would have known Shel was in the vicinity, nor would we have known about the TweetUp.

This is how social media can connect the dots — even six thousand miles from home!

May I please just say, “Ugh!”?

If you are going to record podcast interviews at all, you ought to at least learn one rule for production. Get the interview subject’s bio ahead of the interview, and either turn it into an intro script so YOU tell your audience who you are speaking with, or do the research yourself. don’t make the guest also be the host.

Listen to NPR or CBC, Terry Gross or Brian Williams, it doesn’t matter. The pros do not open an interview by asking the guest those basic questions. If you want people to think you know what you are doing, act like you do know.

Prepare for your interview, and introduce your guest properly to your audience.

Kevin Cummings, president and CEO, Investors Bank

A few days ago, a story in one of the major business publications here in New Jersey caught my eye. It was about how Short Hills-based Investors Savings Bank has rebranded itself as Investors Bank. It’s a subtle but important separation from its heritage as a savings bank into a new and more dynamic form as a local bank aiming to attract small business and consumer customers dissatisfied with the service they get from the giant superregional and national banks that have devoured most of the banking market in New Jersey.

As you can see elsewhere on this site, it also happens that we just produced a video podcast for the New Jersey Bank Marketing Association, in which the president and CEO of Investors, Kevin Cummings, described the rebranding of the bank in extensive detail for an audience of bank marketers and business leaders.

Partly as a promotional effort, but mainly because it was content relevant to the business publication’s story, I added a comment to the story (by the way, I pay for my subscription to this publication) pointing out that readers of the story might be interested in hearing more about the bank’s rebranding by viewing the video. The comment included a link to the podcast.

I received a terse email from the publication’s editor that informed me that “comments like this will not be approved on our site.” I wrote back that it was a shame the publication was so worried about posting links to outside content that it would deprive its readers of any opportunity to get more information on a story in the publication.

I haven’t received any answer to my response. I suspect I won’t, either.

Ironically, this publication has gratefully accepted –  for no compensation — my digital images of various executives appearing on  regional economic panels in the past, and once, even paid me to license photos of a state official for use in the publication. And in fairness, I have tried on several occasions to forge a formal partnership with them that would enable their readers to benefit from the audio and video content we produce.

One of the challenges for mainstream, traditional publishers, is going to be deciding how to deal with independent content producers like me. We produce what we think is pretty good content for our clients. A lot of it is straight reporting, no commentary, just a recording of a seminar, what people said and what questions were asked. Why wouldn’t a publication want to amplify its own reporting by linking to content like this?

So what if it sort of promotes the content producer a little bit? Isn’t that why they invented bylines, anyway?

What do you think? Should mainstream media be willing to let independent content producers link content that relates to their stories or not?