Before writing word one – asking you to donate a measly five bucks – I have a confession to make that will hopefully convince you of the mental journey that I have been on that has brought me to a place in which I am hitting you up for money.

• I have social media donor fatigue.  I am probably (no, likely) a selfish jerk, but I have one or two people a week hitting me up on Facebook or Twitter asking me to help with this cause, that movement, or said anti-campaign.  I am more skeptic than philanthropist.  And I have donor fatigue.

With the preceding disclaimer, I hope to convince you that besides my overall jerk-edness, I am asking you to participate and give five bucks to the Blue Key Campaign.  Your donation gets you a blue key pin or pendant supporting the USA for UNHCR, which is a US-based 501c3 that supports UNHCR’s work.  So while you are supporting the UNHCR, you should know that they lead and co-ordinate international action to protect refugees and resolve refugee problems worldwide. Its primary purpose is to safeguard the rights and well-being of refugees.

Here’s why it’s important:

My friend, Shonali Burke brought this campaign to my attention last week, and using the words from the Blue Key Web site, you will learn that there are millions of refugees around the world without places to live, clean water, many of whom are even missing family members.  And they are assisted by UNHCR.

There are more than 6,000 UNHCR staffers on the ground, in more than 128 countries around the world. These are the people who help 26 million refugees cope with life after they’ve been through unimaginable trauma.

We’re asking Americans (since USA for UNHCR works to raise awareness of the UN Refugee Agency in the U.S.), to get their own Blue Key; for just $5, you’ll show the 6,000+ UNHCR staffers all around the world, that their work – which many of us never see – is appreciated.”)

How do I connect with this?

First, Shonali is a friend and others that I admire like Kami Watson-Huyse and Geoff Livingston are involved, that tells me a lot.  The second reason is more personal.

I have a lot of stress in my life and have dedicated myself to near-daily meditation.  One of the exercises I do is to envision sending kindness to people I like, to difficult people as well and especially to those in circumstances of poverty, war and distress.  So I hear these meditation words several times a week while I am sitting my nice recliner in an expensive house in a top 10 county in the United States.  I do this, while others wonder not even where their next meal is coming from, but if they can flee a region or country where people who want to kill them for who they are or what they are – this screams for attention.

This is a big, personal disconnect and is probably also pretty selfish.

Second, I do an annual fundraiser for a charity called St. Baldricks, one that raises millions for childhood cancer research ($24 million last year alone).  But really all I do is hit friends up for donations so I can show up at a pub in Washington, DC in March, get my head shaved and get drunk.  I raise money for a wonderful little girl named Lauren, but I feel a little guilty compared to what others do to raise money.

People like Doug Haslam, who has been raising money for the Pan Mass Challenge by going on a very, very long bike ride to raise money for pediatric cancer research for years, people who really put their bodies where their causes are.  And this year, it has to be more personal for Doug, who lost his dad to pancreatic cancer on May 14.  You can also help sponsor Doug’s ride here.

So I, the cynical, donor-fatigued UN skeptic am asking you to help by donating five dollars to the Blue Key campaign – show some love to the USA for UNHCR, which is a US-based 501c3 that supports UNHCR’s work.

Think – and donate.

Mark

Politics is a mean, nasty, filthy business.  Trust me, I know – I have been around it most of my working life.  Much of the process of getting elected is pushing your candidate’s positives while attempting to raise the negatives of your opponent.  But a Cardinal rule is don’t help the person opposing you by doing something stupid (read: don’t be Michael Dukakis riding in a tank).

As I have stated again and again in this space, the first rule of crisis communications is to avoid the crisis to begin with. Anticipate contingencies.  Plan for FUBARs.  Don’t step in it.

And above all, don’t leave yourself open to attack – and don’t shoot yourself in the foot.  And all of this is why Congressional candidate Jane Corwin’s social media person should be waterboarded.

Jane is running for Congress in New York’s 26th district special election.  Good for her.  She has a pretty nice looking Web site that, when you get past the usual campaign-speak is attractive and fairly informative.

Done, right?

Nope.

One of Jane opponents must have did a little background research of his own and discovered that the campaign’s social media person neglected to register all of the possible domains, leaving them exposed to a parody site.  And that’s exactly what happened.  The campaign staffer registered .com, not .org.

Hence, meet the parody site, www.janecorwin.org.  Consider that this URL is just a hair from being the URL of the campaign site – AND – many campaign sites have .org domains because they are not considered companies.

Both sites have a virtually identical look and feel and navigation, so if one is not paying attention, until you carefully read the copy, it’s hard to tell them apart.  Here are some comparisons:

On the campaign site:

• “Challenging the status quo and protecting your tax dollars.”

Parody site:

• “Protecting the status quo and taking your tax dollars.”

And it goes on and on.  You can read all about the real campaign site here, but the embarrassing and (to be honest) gut-bustingly funny items on the parody site include:

• The welcome pop-up screen:  “Together, we can make delicious soup from the bones of the poor. Sign up now to be served by Jane Corwin.”
• The lead campaign news item on the home page: “In response to her heroic support for Paul Ryan’s budget plan, which would end Medicare in favor of an innovative program called ‘widespread human suffering,’ Jane Corwin has been given an award by Pat Boone, spokesman for the 60-Plus association. Boone was a famous singer in the days before it was learned that music could convey human emotions.”
• Instead of “volunteer,” “donate now” and “contact” on the campaign site, the parody site lists “surrender,” “give us your money,” or “get brain implant.”

Finally, the real campaign site does, in fact, integrate Facebook.   As I write this, 809 “like” Jane.  On the parody site, instead of the “like” button, it is replaced by “coronate,” and those who like Jane include Kim Jong Il, Donald Trump and Muamar Gadaffi.

Yes, this is funnier than hell, but it’s serious too.  When someone sent me this article, I got curious to see how much coverage this has gotten beyond Jane’s district.  Jane:  ouch.

No less than the online version of Time magazine wrote about the parody site on May 6, calling it “ruthless,” but nonetheless, quoting some of the funnier lines.    The Atlantic wrote about it, calling it “…in fact, a parody site that rips the state assemblywoman as a corporate shill and hilariously mocks the stock photography and conventional political imagery on her campaign’s actual website, JaneCorwin.com.”

Double ouch.  And the irony is no lost on me that this special election is taking place to replace Rep. Chris Lee (R), who resigned from Congress in February after half-naked photos of him surfaced on Craigslist.

Going back to my original point, the best way to carry out crisis communciations is to avoid the crisis to begin with.  I mean, it’s what, like $39 bucks a year to register a domain?  When I was in the agency world, we once spent about $2,000 registering all possible domains (and I mean ALL) for the company, it’s senior executives, and even those that could represent acronyms.  Any time that a client balked, I would ask if they have business insurance.  The answer was inevitably “yes,” and I would tell them that while they cannot stop web sites that attack them, they can make it harder for people to quickly and easily find the negative information.  That’s your online reputation management insurance.

So dear social media person at Jane Corwin’s campaign:  your mistake to spend maybe an extra $150 bucks got your candidate lampooned online and created an echo chamber in Time magazine, the Atlantic, as well as others.

As for punishment, here’s my idea: there have to be some out-of-work waterboarders just hanging around the faucets at Guantanamo – and – information to whack Osama may have come from one of the enhanced interrogation techniques, so why not waterboard the idiot whose neglect caused this flap?  Negative aqua-reinforcement.  Or have “.com, .org, .net., .info. and .tv” tatooed on his/her forehead.

Just think: we could video it and make it into a parody site.

Mark

I’ll keep this post short and sweet, but two days ago, the world lost a powerful and courageous person who bared his soul to the world via his blog and other online outlets – describing his battle with cancer – and his eventual death.  He was only 41 years old.

His final entry, “The Last Post” was stark, compelling, honest and painfully sad.  Derek wrote this in advance of his own death from Stage 4 colorectal cancer and asked that it be published upon his death.  And his wishes were honored.  As I tried to share his story with friends, yesterday his blog site went down and the links that I am publishing are from a cache:  a tribute to the amount of people who followed his journey.

I started following his oddessy only a month ago, but found myself gripped by his outlook on his impending and inevitable demise.  He wrote honestly and eloquently.

A small sampling of his last post:

Here it is. I’m dead, and this is my last post to my blog. In advance, I asked that once my body finally shut down from the punishments of my cancer, then my family and friends publish this prepared message I wrote—the first part of the process of turning this from an active website to an archive.

He describes what he is going to miss, not in the sense of the fear of dying, but wonder at what the world will behold had he lived to the age of his grandmother – 91.

And many things will now happen without me. As I wrote this, I hardly knew what most of them could even be. What will the world be like as soon as 2021, or as late as 2060, when I would have been 91, the age my Oma reached? What new will we know? How will countries and people have changed? How will we communicate and move around? Whom will we admire, or despise?

Finally, in a heartbreaking, final paragraph, Derek says goodbye to his two daughters, age 11 and 13, as well as his wife:

What is true is that I loved them. Lauren and Marina, as you mature and become yourselves over the years, know that I loved you and did my best to be a good father.

Airdrie, you were my best friend and my closest connection. I don’t know what we’d have been like without each other, but I think the world would be a poorer place. I loved you deeply, I loved you, I loved you, I loved you.

When I read this yesterday, I found myself haunted by his pain, honesty, worry and self-awareness.  And tearful.

I did not know you Derek, but I wish I had.

Mark

I have written in this very space – harshly – what I think about Osama bin Laden and his heinous attacks on innocent civilians.   I also, although not lately, have written much more about social media.  And despite the name of this blog, for me, there is no intersection. Nor should there be.

Enough, already.  Stop going for the cheap headline.

It’s nauseating to read the accounts of many who attempted to find a social media angle to Osama’s killing.  It was  tragedy that the man lived to carry out his attacks on innocent people.  Not a history lesson. This is not a story about social media, it’s a story about the most evil man of this generation being, as so many have said “brought to justice.”  Here are some of the headlines that bothered me yesterday:

• Osama bin Laden dead: Twitter records broken during Obama address
• Twitter user unknowingly reported bin Laden attack
• Bin Laden is Dead; Twitter Buzzes

And the one that I found most nauseating:

• Social Media Lessons from Bin Laden Death Coverage

I could go on and on, but here’s my point.

First, one of history’s most evil figures has been killed – and that is newsworthy, to an extent. But it does not need to turn into a social studies lesson on Twitter and the dissemination of news.

Second, not everything has a social media angle. Sure, it exploded on Twitter.  So did the Mumbai attacks and so did the last election.  So did the Japanese earthquake.  But this is different.

As one of my Facebook friends detailed yesterday, Bin Laden and his organization have killed people in African embassies in 1998, the London tube bombings, the Madrid train bombings, the Bali bombings,  thousands of people killed in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and other places where al Qaeda slaughtered Muslims in the name of their jihad.

Let’s not turn this into, as one of my Facebook friends lampooned, yesterday “What The Killing of Osama Bin Laden Can Teach Us About B2B Marketing.”

Leave it alone, social media colleagues.  Leave it alone.  It’s too raw and not suitable for a classroom lesson.

Mark

P.S. – After note:  When I finished typing this post, I went upstairs in my house to get ready for work.  The TV was on.  The headline on Fox Business was “What Bin Laden’s Death Means for Business.”  See what I mean?