Originally posted on ReadWriteWeb

A while ago, I posted about one of the classic blunders in response to online criticism: deleting negative comments.

Let’s add another mistake to that list: silence.

I’m not sure there’s a force on earth that could have saved Susan G. Komen for the Cure from the social media firestorm that engulfed the organization this week. (Other than avoiding their original decision, which struck me as deeply misguided at best.) But lord knows their communications strategy didn’t do them a lot of favors – starting with their initial silence.

Whether the rationale is “Let’s hope it blows over” or “We can’t get internal consensus on a message, so let’s not say anything” or “Legal suggests we shut up”, silence does nothing to stop an online juggernaut from building. All it does is reinforce the impression of an organization’s critics that it’s out of touch with their concerns.

Back when the main communication vehicles were things like ads and news media, you could often take a good long time before pushing out a news release or sending a spokesperson out for a scrum. Not any more.

Two things can help if you find yourself in the Komen situation – especially if you need some time to gather the facts, reflect on your position and decide on your next move.

First, a crisis communication plan. Thinking about possible scenarios and developing a strategy for each one – including who responds, how and in what channel – means you don’t have to do that thinking when your fight-or-flight mechanism is competing with your higher reasoning functions for attention.

And second, an honest temporizing response. Replying to people that you understand how important the issue is to them, and promising them a more complete response within a few hours or days, and then delivering on that promise with a sincere and direct reply, can give you and your colleagues the time to move beyond a reactive, defensive response to a more effective one.

What won’t work is wishful thinking. Planning based on the assumption that nobody will notice what you’ve done – or that when they do, they’ll give you the benefit of the doubt – is some of the best fuel a firestorm could ask for.

Noise to Signal - a cartoon by Rob Cottingham

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Originally published on ReadWriteWeb

I’m somebody who can, uh, go on. At length. About nearly any subject. Ask anyone who’s taken one of my classes… or read one of my blog posts once I get on a roll.

So I can understand why I’ll get the odd “TL;DR” in response. And I try not to take it personally; instead, I look on it as a reminder to pare my text down, murder my darlings and generally indulge myself a little less.

That’s on a good day.

On a bad day, I mourn the rapid decline of human civilization, curse people’s can’t-be-bothered-to-read-anything-longer-than-a-tweet mentality, and generally grumble about “kids these days”. I imagine scenarios where the instructions for disarming a doomsday weapon are three paragraphs long, and nobody on the planet has the attention span required to get through them.

And I’m finding my bad days now outnumber my good days by about five to one, and rising.

In fact, there are times when I…

No! Wait! Don’t go – the post is almost over! You’re almost at the comment form!

Noise to Signal - a cartoon by Rob Cottingham

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Watching the State of the Union, I’m wondering what would happen if President Obama announced he was supplementing the Peace Corps by launching an SEO Corps.

Noise to Signal - a cartoon by Rob Cottingham

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See more cartoons about social media, business and the way we live and work online at Noise to Signal Cartoon

Noise to Signal - a cartoon by Rob Cottingham

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See more cartoons about social media, business and the way we live and work online at Noise to Signal Cartoon

Can we all acknowledge a debt to Rep. Anthony Weiner for providing the kind of crisis management case study that will make PR instructors’ lives easier for generations to come?

That’s it for our 2011 retrospective, except for two cartoons that never made it beyond the really rough draft stage. Here’s one about Kenneth Cole’s ill-fated Arab Spring tweet (the caption would have made it clear that this is any CEO speaking, because this guy doesn’t look a thing like Cole):

And this one was going to be about Facebook’s new Timeline feature:

Except that I realized it was actually just a take on this brilliant tweet from during Mark Zuckerberg’s demo back in September:

And that’s that, folks – now go do some funny stuff so I have things to draw this time next year.

Noise to Signal - a cartoon by Rob Cottingham

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I’m going to guess that for the student in question, this wasn’t the tweet she’d have chosen to see broadcast around the world. And maybe if we all applied that test each time we posted something, we’d have a lot less meaningless fluff in our activity streams… but what we lose in fluff, we gain in blandness.

Today is our big 2011 blowout sale – everything must go, and the price of each cartoon has been slashed in half, from the already-reasonable zero to the insanely ruinous zero. (How do we do it? Volume.)

Next up is the last post. Hope you like it.

Noise to Signal - a cartoon by Rob Cottingham

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We’ll wrap up our look back at 2011 this week – and hey, only half a month after the end of 2011 Retrospective season – and start with a flashback to March, GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons, and those elephants. In case you, unlike an elephant, are capable of forgetting, here are the broad strokes:

In March, Parsons uploaded a video himself shooting and killing an elephant in Zimbabwe, and there was an immediate outcry. Parsons’ defence that the killing was an act of humanity, helping villagers protect their crops and providing a little badly-needed meat, was undermined by the video itself, which was flippant and self-promotional.

(The video has since been re-edited to replace the initial title labelling it a vacation video and to remove the shots of Parsons standing triumphantly over the elephant, and the AC/DC music that ran over the footage of villagers — wearing GoDaddy caps — stripping meat off the elephant’s carcass, as well as closeups of the villagers and company logos.)

By the way, this week’s cartoons are hot off my (virtual) notebook, rough edges and all. Hope you enjoy them!

Noise to Signal - a cartoon by Rob Cottingham

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Originally published on ReadWriteWeb

As you get older, you start to see the great cycles of life emerge. Hope and disillusionment and hope again; pride crushed by defeat and then rising again; and of course, the rising wave of speculation in advance of every Apple product launch.

No surprise, then, that Morgan Stanley analysts are getting buckets of news coverage this week for predictions of a March iPad 3 release and aJune iPhone 5. They join plenty of other pundits, and the predictions are more or less coalescing around quad-core chips, a higher resolution screen for the iPad and a slimmer profile for the iPhone.

Here is the part where I’m supposed to write that people who obsess over those product rumors (unless they’re investing in Apple or its competitors) are shallow fools destined to spend the next Apple keynote gnashing their teeth in fury that the latest new iDevice doesn’t come with the tachyon emitters that MacRumourLicious.com swore were coming.

Except that I get it. I understand the appeal. For a lot of us, speculating about the next iPhone’s processor or whether the iPad’s touch-screen will be pressure-sensitive (yes, fine, I’m the only one speculating about that) or what the next version of Android will offer is about more than just speed ratings or raw performance. It’s about what we can do with the new features or increased power of the device: what we’ll be able to create, how we’ll be able to collaborate, and how we can foster richer and more satisfying connections with each other.

OK, it’s also about whether the next version of Angry Birds will be able to have 3D-rendered shadows and photo-realistic explosions. But it’s also about that humanity-lofty stuff, too.

P.S. – MacRumourLicious.com is actually available. This is your chance to launch your Mac rumour empire.

Noise to Signal - a cartoon by Rob Cottingham

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Here’s a quick doodle about this week’s release of Apple’s Supplier Responsibility Report, listing the companies behind 97% of Apple’s material and services spending.

Apple’s committing to a new level of transparency as the first tech company to join the Fair Labor Organization - at a time when scrutiny of working conditions at Apple’s suppliers is at an all-time high, and the company is facing mounting criticism.

I’ve done some work with the sustainability and social justice certification community, and it warms my heart to see consumers increasingly concerned over the  ethical behaviour of the companies they deal with. Apple has probably attracted so much attention because toxic, abusive and exploitive working conditions clash so powerfully with its brand. Here’s hoping that once people get a taste for this kind of ethical accountability, they demand more of it – from Apple, but also from the thousands of other brands they choose from.

Noise to Signal - a cartoon by Rob Cottingham

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See more cartoons about social media, business and the way we live and work online at Noise to Signal Cartoon

There’s a special appeal that Myers-Briggs personality types hold for folks in the online space. Maybe it’s because of the appeal of a simple yet exhaustive taxonomy that can capture the whole spectrum of human variation. Maybe it’s because you can quantify it, plot it on a graph and measure it against other people’s – kind of like Klout for your soul.

Or maybe because people can drop it into a Twitter bio, and reveal their inner selves in just four characters, which helpfully leaves room for the words “passionate about B2B marketing for rotor arm assemblies” along with that that quote that Gandhi apparently never said.

Whatever the reason, it at least suggests that in a world so often dominated by metrics and conversions, we’re still up for a little introspection. Especially if it leads to an embeddable web badge. I take comfort from that.

Noise to Signal - a cartoon by Rob Cottingham

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See more cartoons about social media, business and the way we live and work online at Noise to Signal Cartoon