A sample from one of my keynote speeches

If the Internet is like a swarm, then sometimes good buzz can quickly turn into bad buzz and you can get stung. Tod will introduce your delegates to both the swarm culture and both the danger and opportunities in blogs and podcasts. Features everything you need to master Tod’s S-W-A-R-M system to respond to negative buzz online.

Click the Play button at the centre to view. | Watch Video

From a keynote presentation to the International Convention of the IABC. More information about this presentation at http://www.todmaffin.com/speaking/pr.php.

Posted August 19, 2006 Comments

Be very careful when doing an interview with The Globe and Mail

An interesting thing happened recently that got me thinking about the permanence of electronic databases and how old-school media still can’t quite walk the walk when it comes to dialogue in today’s two-way communication environment.

A reporter from the Globe and Mail interviewed me a couple of weeks ago for a piece which ran earlier this week.
His article was overall excellent, but contained an inaccuracy (he said the CBC “endorsed” an existing blog of mine when, in fact, that’s not true). It was an innocent and, to be fair, minor error. Still, it’s an important distinction that leads people to believe that the CBC somehow bought me out.
The reporter, Guy Dixon, agreed with me that the article needed correction and said so in the blog-comments on the Globe’s site. He also tried to get the paper to make a correction to its electronic version.
But here’s the problem.
The Globe and Mail refused to correct the article.
It was an error in fact that both the subject and the newspaper’s own journalist agreed needs correction, but the newspaper refused. I wasn’t asking for a print retraction — only for them to fix the inaccuracy in its electronic edition. A dozen keystrokes.

Why is this important? Here’s why.
In today’s age, electronic versions of these articles are sent to news databases like Canadian Newsstand, CBCA, and so on, and stay there for eternity. The blog comments don’t. This mean the Globe is choosing to deliberately let an inaccuracy stand in the public record. They could, very simply, make a quite note to the article or a correction, but won’t. I’m still unclear why. All the journalist could tell me was that his editors didn’t think it was “aggregious enough.”
If this were a print correction, fair enough. It was a small inaccuracy. Were it print, I’d agree that the newspaper probably wouldn’t want to cede important column-inch space for a small correction. But this is the Internet, folks. There’s no lack of space.
In this way, most bloggers I know are actually more ethically sound in their correction policy! Most will not only make a correction right away, they’ll even indicate with strikethrough what they deleted.

Rather than deal with this again situation, I’ll probably just avoid Globe and Mail interviews in the future.
Use your own caution.

P.S. I’d have posted this directly on the Globe’s comment page of the article, but they’ve closed the comments on the piece. Nice touch.

Posted August 17, 2006 Comments