And for those of you who scoff at the ‘broadband as a necessity’ idea here are some sobering thoughts for you from a presentation I created. In it, you’re the rural electric company claiming that electricity is a luxury as well. You are on the losing side of history, by the way.

Finally, some excellent stories (I’m all for stories) about the rural and urban digital divides. I love the one about the hog farmer. It shows the impact that a lack of broadband has on businesses so well, and nips the false argument about broadband being some elite- liberal issue in the bud. Full disclosure, I worked at Free Press when these were created though I didn’t work on them specifically.

The power of the customer cannot be underestimated these days, no matter how frustratingly bad / false/ spiteful Yelp reviews can be.

One of my clients had been ignoring social media space, as well as customer service, and one of my roles has been to connect the two for this small business.

From the start, I’ve been monitoring reviews and managing the response to any review below 3 stars. This was a totally new concept for the client. The communication offers an apology and asks for the chance to right the wrong with a free overnight or meal, etc. It’s a genuine outreach with a clear and compelling offer.

Two things have struck me since launching this customer service effort.

First, not a lot of people actually respond to the mea culpa.

Second, the conversion from angry to delighted customer is more powerful than can be imagined. While the effort might result in only a 10% response to the apology, those who do come back for a “do over” have responded overwhelmingly. And they are now advocates, messengers and marketers on behalf of the business.

One such customer wrote a glowing email to the General Manger after being treated right. He really raved about his experience and his gratitude at having his original complaint addressed. He also promised to update his Yelp review.

But here’s the catch. Now-happy customer who promised to update his Yelp review hasn’t. And it’s still doing damage.

This is the crux of the issue for many businesses and organizations who are working to both address problems and prevent them. They can repair a customer relationship, which is extremely important and does serve as an important part of marketing and brand management. But they can’t repair the PR (‘public’ and ‘relations’, actually means something in this context).

To me, this is the real power of the consumer. It’s beyond marketing. It’s having the ability to be both a positive messenger while simultaneously helping to tarnish (or destroy) a business’ reputation.

I see businesses making great strides at being customer-focused, thanks to withering reviews (that are often fair and honest) and the now-public nature of reputations. I think this is great because I am emphatic about good customer service and want to see much more of it.

But I’m also hoping to see a shift in how newly powerful customers understand their responsibilities in the public sphere so that the public and private experience — and messages they send — are more aligned.

But communications are like cake batter: Lumpy, or sticky consistency results in bad cake. And bad cake is thoroughly disappointing.

A major nonprofit that I’ve liked since my early years in the foundation community is consistent, but not in a good way. Every plea is a crisis (lumpy). Every thank you is really a “give more” (sticky and irritating). Interactions with this nonprofit are transactions.

The giving doesn’t feel good anymore. I hope this isn’t because I’m part of a selfish generation that needs ever more from everyone and everything.  I simply want my occasional (and meager) sums of money to make an impact. I want my cake. I want to eat it too. And cake should be good, not lumpy or sticky. You get the point.

I’ve mentally written off this organization because I’ve experienced years of this consistently bad outreach and it has left me feeling unconnected to the nonprofit, as well as increasingly annoyed by its fundraising and communications tactics.

In 2011 I’ll be shifting from the mental write-off  to actually removing my name from as many “lumpy batter” lists as possible, and focusing solely on the good cake organizations.

I know others are doing the same. I’ve seen similar resolutions from people I follow on Twitter (@SnarkyJones) and hear increasing frustration from rank and file donors about the ways we get communicated to, and the way those messages make us feel.

So for those organizations who have created good batter I say ‘long live cake!’  For those with lumps I say ‘off with your head!’

To that end I majored in communications, with concentrations in art and intellectual history. My master’s degree is a Master of Liberal Arts (yes, that really exists).

My career has followed a similarly general path. I’ve been a Special Projects Manager (aka “trusted generalist”) in two different organizations. Project management is a major theme in my work, whether in the philanthropic community or on the nonprofit side.

But when I launched my own consulting gig I did so as a Marketing Consultant. I had been Marketing Director at my previous job and it felt more real than a plain old Consultant.

However, a number of new clients made me rethink the Marketing Consultant title I was using. The #MarketerMonday shouts outs on Twitter sometimes felt like my only connection to marketing, despite my constant and unwavering dedication to helping clients tell their stories well.  I will always be passionate about improving messaging and communications, whether in video or social media, board reports or funder briefings.

But that passion, and the skills needed to communicate well, don’t come from only a marketing background. Or branding expertise. Or even being a maven or guru in social media.

You need a good generalist to cover all those things — someone who understands the nuances and oddities of the philanthropic community as well as the endlessly changing rules of social engagement, along with the pitfalls of nonprofit-speak.

With that in mind I am delighted to reclaim my generalist sensibilities under the very general title, Consultant.

Of course my client is not alone in this haphazard approach.

Plenty of companies with enormous marketing budgets create a confused product and confused brand because of a whole lot of mixed messages. You can’t be an octogenarian’s dream car and a hip hop status symbol while also turning women on as they drive.

No business would sanely claim to be a bridal boutique, a hipster handbag store, an outdoor gear outfitter and a flower shop all at once. You’d look like this (pretty crazy) to potential customers. But many others try a similar, though less obvious, form of being everything to everyone.

Being everything to everybody dilutes the core of what makes an organization or business special and it makes customers unclear about your offerings. If I want Thai food I won’t go to a place that offers Thai and pizza in a trendy martini bar with a late night greasy diner menu.

Embracing who you are and what you do — and sticking to that story — is essential.

Too bad it was a hoax.

Not that I don’t love humor or when someone points out the obsessive lack of fact-checking that our mainstream media system does before blaring stories across the Series of Tubes.

But the story of Jenny and her awful Farmville-addicted boss is so much more powerful because we can all relate to it, and we were all rooting for the underdog. We all feel like the underdog, especially when it comes to our bosses.

Everyone (except those asshole bosses) shared in one small, albeit very public, victory. We were collectively laughing at bad bosses.

I suspect we’re not collectively laughing at anything now, not even the media’s need to regurgitate or create fake news. “The Media” is a less meaningful villain than bosses.

Nonprofit communicators can learn from this. Get a good villain (there are plenty out there) and take them out with humor.

I’d love to hear what you’re thinking right now. What do you take away from the news recently? What are you excited about? What do you want from MoveOn?

If you have any thoughts you’d be willing to share, please reply to this message or drop us an email.

I thanked Justin (or in reality, the volunteers who will read the responses) for asking. That alone is so refreshing. And I rattled off a little missive about my thoughts on power, the influence of money in politics, etc.

But my real response was this:

As a communications professional I always look to tell stories to connect with my audiences… and I think it’s imperative for nonprofits to do that. The progressive movement has stopped telling stories as a whole.  MoveOn does a good job on a campaign level, but progressivism as a movement doesn’t.  I’d like the story of what we stand for and what’s at stake to be told better and more in all kinds of mediums. Remember the Arthur DeMoss Foundation anti-abortion ads in the early 90s (see one here)? They told a story and were so powerful that I remember them today. I can’t say the same of pro-choice ads.

MoveOn should hold more video competitions and also devote more money to storytelling, whether via viral videos and more traditional means. When our story becomes popular and compelling, we have a much better chance of keeping independents and keeping elected officials on our side. They’ll go whichever way the political wind blows them for the sake of their jobs. It’s our job to make them think of us as the power and energetic base.

The recent Super Bowl ad for Focus on the Family, using the compelling story of Tim Tebow and his mother’s decision to maintain her pregnancy despite a sickness that threatened her fetus exemplify my point. The brouhaha was justified, given CBS’ failure to air ads with competing messages. (I’m for airing ALL sides of stories, not just one. Seems more honestly American to me.) But the story was and is a great story.

It is personal — bringing us into the lives and struggles of real people, and played out with charm and sweetness. The story told is one of hope, of motherhood, of love. It’s about potential more than anything.

Frances Kissling and Kate Michelman from Catholics for Choice wrote in response to that Super Bowl commercial about the need for the pro-choice side to better tell their story in a thoughtful opinion piece in the Washington Post. I agree with their reasoning.

While I’ve jumped into the most controversial and emotional battleground simply by bringing up abortion, I think my point about storytelling is essential for a broad spectrum of issues — from factory farming and energy issues to financial regulations and consumer product safety concerns.

I’ll be looking out for stories that I think do a good job of promoting progressive ideals and hope to find some to share so that ten years from now I can recall the power of a specific story and the movement that it supported.

Two major environmental groups have done research and produced pretty damaging reports. The first, California’s Environmental Law Foundation, has discovered levels of lead in fruit juices and canned fruits that surpass California’s Prop 65 limit of .5 micrograms of lead daily from brands like Earth’s Best, Del Monte, Welch’s and Whole Foods. This is scary for so many reasons. We now know there is no safe level of lead but even I won’t assume any of these companies are knowingly adding lead. So are organic foods just contaminated across the board at this point?

What’s especially interesting (and concerning) is the fact that the lead levels aren’t limited to bargain brands at all. The pricey organics and major store brands that have been selling the story of health and wholesomeness now have to figure out how to explain / spin / ignore the lead in their products.

The second batch of bad news is in the sunscreen world. The Environmental Working Group’s 2010 Sunscreen Guide shows the ineffectiveness of most major sunscreens along with the toxic load they carry.

From the EWG report:

EWG researchers recommend only 39 – 8 percent – of 500 beach and sport sunscreens for this season. The reason? A surge in exaggerated SPF claims above 50 and new disclosures about potentially hazardous ingredients, in particular recently developed government data linking vitamin A to accelerated growth of skin tumors and lesions.

So, the healthy things we’ve been told to do — eat organics and slather with sunscreen — are actually poisoning us.

I’m curious, in an admittedly morbid kind of way, to see how these brands address such critical trust, quality and health issues. For sunscreen makers, it’s an easier fix because they can choose to augment their ingredients. But for organic food and beverage suppliers who just have to deal with lead in the food supply it’s a totally different story.

Perhaps advertising campaigns for major fruit juice manufacturers will soon include health statements like, “half the lead plus 50% more vitamin C compared to other leading brands”.

Strolling through stores yesterday and unscientifically analyzing advertising over the past few weeks I realized that the fatherhood brand is not doing too well. I’m sure my bright friends at FastCompany have an infographic for this, but the images and products associated with fathers are all over the map. The brand has been diluted.

What represents Dad these days?

Ties of course, but also golf bags, slippers, after shave, tech gadgets, grills (BBQ, not bling), music, tattoos to celebrate the birth of kids (seen a lot of these lately), bikes, tools, spa certificates, clothes and brunch, to name a few.

The brand seems as confused as the men who live it. Are they bread winners? Or do they sacrifice the partner track for seeing their kids? Are they fix-it men, or point and pay types? Do they shave or wear collogne or are they more prone to motorcycles and tattoos?

The mold of what it means to be a father has shifted so seismically in the past generation that marketers are scrambling to redefine masculinity and fatherhood and, as far as I can tell, no one has nailed the image or brand.

To me that’s a good thing.

In my mind modern fatherhood is best summed up in the classic movie Parenthood (and charmingly parodied by the Toyota Sienna SwaggerWagon series).  It so plainly conveys the incredible complexity of fathers’ roles and everything they are expected to handle — financial pressures in a two-income kind of world, grappling to be a good role model even if they didn’t have one, trying to remain youthful and cool while exhausted and overworked, trying to fix things, cut lawns and take care of cars while also making time for tea parties, pretend games of fairies and watching a baseball game now and then. Don’t forget volunteering for little league, and possibly even spending some quality time with spouses and partners.

There’s no ad or thing that can sum up these competing and complex realities. There’s no one product or brand identity that can successfully cover the breadth of what it means to be a dad.

So Dads, today as you get your ties and dirt bikes, iPads and after shave, celebrate your liberation from a confining brand identity as you celebrate the kids in your lives that make you the complicated, un-brandable people you are.

Happy Father’s Day.

Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest I want to post some thoughts on speaking to your audience in a way that connects with them. Essential yet often ignored.

Take today’s trip through an elementary school assembly. One stone-faced teacher stood out, as she lectured young kids and used phrases like “boys and girls, thank you for listening” and “you really showed yourselves to be wonderful young ladies and gentlemen”.

Seriously.

If I curtsied to this woman and said “good morning m’lady” in the hallway, she’d think I was deranged. Yet she speaks to my kids like she’s deranged and completely out of touch with the second half of the 20th century AND early 21st century.

That’s a lot of out of touch.

It reminded me of some of my favorite recent ads that I’ve highlighted in earlier posts, like Close Shave Barbasol, the shockingly classic 80′s ad from 2009. It spoke to America and men and truckers like we/they have collective amnesia and forgot about the past 25 years.

Short story — if you want to reach the people you’re talking to or selling to or educating, communicate as if you live in the current decade. No need to be too cool, drop f-bombs or use slang. But address us in ways that don’t make us think you’re irrelevant.