Thanks – RA

One of my bosses always used to say that everything was analogous to dating. Another that the PR business, mostly about service, always comes down to waitressing — taking the order and organizing all the chairs in the room. (To this point, I always ask new professionals about their college jobs — not the internships, but the ones “off the resume.” I’ve found that students who get rehired by their hometown employers summer after summer often understand more about service than those who’ve spent four summers interning.)

One boss used to remind us that it was all about the lighting — you know, nobody ever looks good in flourescent lighting. Another taught me how important it was to control the things you can control — they are few and far between, and it keeps you prepared for those things you cannot control (most everything else!).

One boss shared the secret to staffing client events was to always keep busy; let the client staff enjoy the press event because we’re hired to staff it for them. (I still almost never eat at press events for fear the moment someone is going to need me is the moment I’m chewing on a bagel.)

I learned how to travel smartly, and to make every business trip special by finding a personal moment or site to see and remember. I haven’t yet tried one tip a boss shared: Wear your nearly-worn-out shirts on the trip and then just leave them behind, leaving suitcase room for gifts or, if New York, new shirts.

Oh yeah, I learned real stuff, too. About clipping and copying at first, but then pitching and writing, planning and programming, predicting and analyzing, being strategic and knowing when “being strategic” means keeping quiet. About connecting with others and about sharing what I’ve learned, starting the cycle anew. About business. About ethics, doing the right thing, all the time.

It’s the holiday season, and when I see the names on our family card list, I’m reminded of the many people with whom I’ve had the pleasure of working over the past two decades. And although 2010 isn’t “technically” the start of a new decade, it will be for me, as I officially embark on my third decade of my career. I don’t know what it’s going to bring, but I’m going to “control the things I can control,” and be optimistic about everything else. Something Great is about to happen, and I can’t wait!

Happy holidays, everyone!

The communications pros racing to comment on the Tiger Woods story is an example of this. “What I would tell Tiger is …”, “Tiger must do …”, “Tiger is getting bad counsel …” The talking heads who are certain they know better than Woods have one goal: Promote their individual brand as professional communicator.

I appreciate that the media are going to cover this story, and that, heck, if there’s going to be coverage why shouldn’t one promote their brand. But I ask this: Is this the type of news story — a scandal, filled with innuendo and, more important, having a negative impact on a person’s family and children — one that you want your personal brand to be a part of? Every opportunity to promote your brand should be weighed within the context of the story and how it will be viewed by your audiences.

Will the “crisis communications experts” who provided comments about Tiger Woods gain future clients? It’s possible. It’s more likely that by agreeing to comment now, these persons are establishing or furthering media relationships for later, when they need to help protect their clients. Quid pro quo.

When I look at the Woods story, I look beyond what his team has messaged. (Though isn’t it interesting that his only statements are public, posted on his Web site?)

Instead, I take a look at the brands that are advertising on some of these gossip and faux-news sites. These aren’t brands that Woods endorses, but other companies whose ads run prominently on TMZ and Page Six and the like that are directly benefiting from his personal plight. This story is likely generating millions of additional consumer impressions for those advertisers right during the middle of their important sales season.

For example, there’s a service provider whose musical ad is running on US Weekly. What a bonus for them to have their ad streamed right before one of Woods’ alleged voice mails!

Would I want my clients’ brands to be linked with this story? Probably not, but if the research says their target consumers index high for information on gossip and pop culture, maybe that’s the right place for them to be.

But still, I can’t help but wonder: World’s most famous athlete … peak sales season … stories suddenly reported … peak sales season … millions of online consumer impressions … peak sales season. Curious, isn’t it?

In our family, we recall with fondness such now-illegal activities as sleeping on the floor in the back of a family van, riding in the bed of our neighbor’s flatbed truck, and – especially memorable to me – sitting in the middle front seat of my grandmother’s Oldsmobile as we ran errands together.

Two events in the news call to mind the “When we were kids” days. The first, tied to the launch of the book Super Freakonomics, was the authors’ appearance on “Good Morning America” yesterday suggesting that car seats for toddlers are no safer than seat belts.

The second, also yesterday, was Orange County supervisor Chris Norby (R-Fullerton) raising the political equivalent of “When I was a kid” by questioning whether California’s mandatory bicycle helmet laws are contributing to childhood obesity. The story was reported in today’s Orange County Register, linked here.

Norby’s hypothesis was straight-forward: Children are riding their bicycles less than in previous generations because they are required to wear helmets. He backpedaled some in a follow-up statement, but I think his hypothesis is relevant.

I often have said one of the great PR campaigns by an industry were the efforts to have a bicycle helmet law passed. Suddenly, a niche business that catered to offroad cycling enthusiasts became mandatory purchases for any parent interested in having their children become bicyclists.

“When I was a kid,” I biked everywhere. Whether to school and back, around the neighborhoods on my newspaper route, or a five-mile jaunt along the old state highway to the bowling alley, my bicycle gave me a freedom to move about the country(side). Wearing a helmet was reserved for skateboard activities, where the risk – yea, likelihood – of falling was great.

My 8-year-old daughter believes that helmets are a necessity of bicycling, and my 4-year-old immediately puts his on when he wants to go riding. But as a parent who successfully rode helmetless for my 18 years of adolescence, I’m far more concerned with my kids scraping a knee from a fall – it’s a realistic danger for them as sidewalk riders.

Now, as they get older and become a street cyclist, then a bicycle helmet is a common sense purchase. And that’s my point: Shouldn’t we be trusting parents to make common sense decisions?

When Supervisor Norby asks the question if children riding their bicycles less because of helmets, isn’t he really saying, Have we made it too difficult for our children to experience the world as we once did?

Is a sleeping toddler lying across the comfortable backseat of a car really in such danger that parents must strap them into plastic booster seats?

Are we encouraging parents to parent, or simply to not break laws?

• The Lost Symbol felt more like “National Treasure 3” than “The Da Vinci Code 2.” (And didn’t one of the “National Treasure” movies also tackle the subject of the Masons?) Despite all the buzz on Twitter and elsewhere, Dan Brown’s latest is not worth the hype and attention that it’s receiving … although I’m sure the publishing industry is hoping it will stimulate sales heading into the holidays.
• Angels and Demons is still the Dan Brown book I liked best, with The Da Vinci Code second.
• Youth soccer is in full swing in our house, with my 8- and 4-year-olds engaged every Saturday for the next 10 weeks. I’ve often considered including youth soccer organizations into marketing programs for clients, but based on our family’s experiences the past couple of years, I question the overall value of an integrated sponsorship: There aren’t enough touch points with the players and their families.
• But here’s how brands could make a youth soccer partnership work: Develop self-contained programs that reach coaches and team parents directly … and that means real-world, grass-roots efforts, and not just a Web link and ad in the family magazine.
• Great to see a campaign I worked on earlier this summer getting lots of attention: Butterfinger’s commitment to comedy featured in The New York Times (including their partnership with Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter), and their just-announced signing of Seth Green as brand “mouthpiece.”
• Undervalued Web real estate: The fantasy football waiver wire pages. Butterfinger and Subway are running ads on Yahoo! Fantasy Football currently, and Toyota has created a “make your team’s logo” site to promote their brand … smart.
• For 2010, would a below the title sponsorship, Yahoo! Fantasy Football Presented by Brand X, be an effective online billboard as part of an integrated in-store and mobile program? It would benefit both brands, Yahoo! and Brand X.
• A friend of mine pointed out that by not regularly breaking 100, I am worse than the average American golfer, as the average score is reported to be 100. I find that hard to believe … I argue that nobody will ever tell you that they “shoot in the low 100’s,” so any survey of golf scores is going to be abnormally skewed!
• My mom has more Facebook friends than your mom.

My wife has often referred to our 6,395-mile journey as our “technology road trip,” and I think that’s an accurate description given how we incorporated technology into every step of the process. From planning the trip and booking accommodations along the way, to keeping friends and family updated with a live blog, and, finally, creating a coffee-table photo book keepsake for our children, we relied on an abundance of free Web sites and tools – and some electronic gadgets we already use everyday – that helped to make our Great American Road Trip both memorable and enjoyable.

Here are some tips, tricks and tools from our 31-day road trip across the Western U.S. that can help you plan your next driving vacation with children, save you money, and make sharing your adventure with family and friends fun and easy.

1.  Plot the trip. Using Google Maps, we were able to plan out distances and driving times to determine what drives were achievable, and where we needed to plan overnights and book rooms. We set an initial guideline of four driving hours and/or 250 miles daily, and then planned our trip around sites we wanted to see and cities we wanted to visit.

2.  Book rooms. Start by reading the reviews and discussions at Yelp.com and TripAdvisor.com – consider the feedback of others in their communities before booking your trip, and remember to join and participate afterwards by authoring your own reviews.

We next began cashing in our available travel and hotel chain points – we earned the points, so we used them for four-star rooms in the biggest cities on our trip, cities where we wanted to stay downtown for proximity to sites.

For the rest of the trip, we used Hotwire as a tool to hone in on price ranges for various cities and neighborhoods – knowing the discounted rates helped us budget whether posted room rates were in line with what we should expect to pay. Where location was important or specific arrival dates certain, we booked rooms through hotel chain’s sites directly – cross-checking on Expedia to make certain the prices were consistent – and always checking for AAA discounts.

Otherwise, we used both Hotwire and Priceline to book next-day and sometimes same-day rooms in cities along our route. Although these sites don’t provide you with the hotel names until after purchase, forums like BetterBidding.com helped us identify the hotels, so we always knew what we were “buying.”

3.  Make a technology checklist. You’ve spent hundreds of dollars on music players, video recorders and other portable devices – now’s the time to make use of them. We went through our drawers, cabinets and kids’ rooms and came up with the following items that we took on our road trip:

• Blackberry.
• Laptop computer.
• iPod.
• Digital camera.
• Video recorder.
• GPS unit. We have a Magellan Maestro 4350, with the AAA Tourbook information built into it.
• XM Skyfi radio. We long ago chose the portable unit over a permanent in-car subscription so we can move it between cars and use it in the home. We listened to a lot of talk, sports and entertainment radio all along the trip.
• Portable DVD player. Perhaps the best road trip invention EVER, the children passed some of the time watching movies and keeping themselves entertained. Part of our four-hour driving limit factored in time for one movie per leg, our children alternating choices throughout the trip.
• Small lantern. Useful for the kids during our night stretches.
• Our children do not have a portable gaming device; in our family, video gaming is a social activity. Our kids do have Leapsters, and our 4-year-old brought his on the trip for car “alone” time only.

4.  Rent a van. We rented a Toyota Sienna minivan, and removed the middle row seats – the children sat comfortably in the third row. Not only did this give our children some room to stretch out on the floor (uh, when stopped, that is), but it put a few extra feet between the parents and offspring, something our sedan didn’t offer. I used my AAA membership and landed a great deal directly on Hertz’s Web site … however, I continued to check prices on Priceline, Hotwire and other sites, and phoned my “local,” off-airport rental car branches right up until the night of our trip, just to make sure we were getting the best deal.

Also, I’m going to suggest something I wouldn’t ordinarily suggest: Strongly consider paying for the rental company’s “walk away” insurance coverage. I know, I know … it’s a rip-off. And for business or short trips, I don’t even consider this option. But for your looong family road trip, consider this to be “peace of mind” coverage that can eradicate your worries about road damage, scratches, spilled coffee … those small things that can add up.

5.  Set up a road trip blog. Here’s where you make use of that camera phone … Although I use WordPress here, I created a road trip blog on Blogger.com (using my Google account), because I found it easier to send and post quick pictures and short texts via e-mail using my Blackberry. (Google explains the process here.) For us, writing brief updates about our day and sharing quick snapshots was a fun way to help memorialize the trip for the future, and receiving comments back from our family and friends was a treat for the kids – they loved hearing from Grandma, their school friends and cousins all along the road.

Give your blog a fun, memorable URL and share the link with your friends in the 2-3 weeks before you leave. Cross-posting your blog on your Facebook page also can be a good idea, depending on your privacy settings and concerns.

6.  Outfit the car. Invest in enough 12V adapters, splitters and extension cords for the car to power your DVD player, satellite radio, and other devices. We found a 20-foot extension cord on eBay that enabled us to run power to the DVD player to the rear outlet of the minivan, freeing up the front outlets for other items. My wife made special backpacks for each of the kids, filled with books, car activities, and other surprises. Each kid packed a second backpack with toys and other items from home, and they carried their pillows from car to hotel room every night.

We packed an array of snacks, stopping for grocery runs every few days to get a new variety. We used an ice chest keep items cold and a clear file box to store the snacks.

Another tip: Be prudent about driving at night. I prefer to drive at night, but for our children, we tried to keep them on a regular schedule as best we could – which meant being checked into hotel rooms by dinner time. In 24 days of driving, we night-drove only three times, using the cover of darkness to chew up time along stretches of highway with little scenery or few possible stops.

7.  Self-publish a keepsake book. The digital camera never left our side on our road trip, as we snapped more than 1,200 pictures in 31 days. We will edit and print out a few family photos from the trip to adorn our home. But using BookSmart software from Blurb.com, I quickly and easily organized a photo book of 400+ snaps from the Antonette U.S. Tour 2009, dropping and dragging files into a variety of page layouts. Additionally, I used BookSmart to import our road trip blog, creating a second photo book of camera phone photos and diary logs. The whole project took me about 4 hours; the 120-page photo book cost less to produce than printing the same number of photos, and has been easy to share with friends and family.

I’ve been following Canseco’s media soundbites since college: When I was at USC, we used to dial up his old “Jose Canseco 976-number” as a college radio bit. They were actual, daily updates recorded by Jose himself. We may have been the only callers to his hotline, but it made for interesting discussions in the studio afterwards.

Those old updates were unscripted, and, as I recall, not terribly interesting. But at least I was pretty sure that he created the content himself.

His Twitter updates @JoseCanseco … well, I’m not so sure about those. They seem too well-spaced, well-punctuated, and well-versed to be written off the cuff. It’s likely these tweets reflect his true feelings, but I’m guessing someone vets and inputs them for him.

Because when I hear Jose Canseco on the radio talking about steroids and the Baseball Hall of Fame — as he did yesterday on a Philly radio station – I hear someone who has several key messages, but is struggling to make them clear over the feigned “shock” of the sports radio host interviewing him. If I were media training Jose Canseco, based on what I’ve heard him say in recent interviews, I would tell him to stick to these key points:

• I don’t know whose names are on “the list” any more than you do.
• I’m concerned when I hear baseball writers say that they are not going to elect certain players into the baseball Hall of Fame because of this issue.
• The facts are that only 17 players have admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs. (Source: Tom Verducci column). But we know that hundreds of players took them.
• I assure you that some players receiving Hall of Fame votes – past, present, or future – used PEDs. I’m not going to name names – but they are out there.
• Baseball is going to have a big problem on its hands when some star players who nobody suspected of taking PEDs is elected to the Hall of Fame … and then the public later finds out these players did use enhancements.
• Call me anytime.

“Call me anytime” … Because just as in 1988, Jose Canseco makes for interesting discussions.

It’s incredible how “real” children communicate as they aren’t fearful of being judged. At age 4, my youngest moves from love to fear to wonderment and back to love in the course of a few minutes and sentences … I don’t know whether companies and brands can be as open as that, but it’s interesting to think that in our new world where talking “with” customers is at long last embraced, that messages needn’t be overly scrubbed and polished and every word agonized over.

Knowing who you are and what you believe in is important, above all. How you communicate that could be as simple a 4-year-old: direct, honest and timely.

- Free breakfasts at hotels – 8
- Breakfasts at Waffle House – 1
- Fast-food stops for breakfast – 4 (McDonald’s 4)

- Fast-food stops for lunch – 8 (Subway 5, Wendy’s 2, McDonald’s 1)
- Fast-food stops for ice cream – 6 (DQ 5, Sonic 1)

- “Roadfood” reviewed stops hit – 6 (Voodoo Doughnuts, Frank’s Diner, Lisa’s, M&M Bar & Café, Oklahoma Joe’s, Tastee Inn & Out)
- “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” featured stops hit – 1 (Pine State Biscuits)
- “Man v. Food” featured stops hit – 1 (Voodoo Doughnuts)
- Home-cooked dinners – 4

- Snowglobes purchased for K.’s collection – 7, but only 5 survived the trip
- Golf balls purchased for P.’s collection – 5
- Souvenir pennies made for the kids’ collection – 12 each
- Number of casino premium items my grandfather gave to us this time – 5

- Number of Major League Baseball games attended – 3 (Arizona @ Seattle, Minnesota @ Kansas City, Washington @ Colorado)
- Number of Minor League Baseball shirts I picked up – 4 (Spokane Indians, Missoula Osprey, Sioux City Exlporers, Tulsa Drillers)

- Stops at Peet’s Coffee – 5
- Stops at McDonald’s for coffee – 1
- Stops at Starbucks for coffee – 10
- Local and regional brews sampled – 6, plus the ones in Golden, Colo.
- Regional wines sampled – 0

- Fireworks purchased – $57 worth
- Fingers slightly burned– 2

- Relatives’ homes visited– 4
- High school and college friends met – 4
- Long Beach neighbor families met – 2
- New friends met – 2

The cleaning out of the Sienna rental took a couple of hours; unpacking may take a couple of days. I’ve lots of additional thoughts, reviews to write and post to Yelp and TripAdvisor, photos to sort and share, and e-mail and bills to read and return.

But it’s nice to be home.