Touched By a RAK

The year was 1998 – I was touched by a RAK. I even wrote about it in Kaleidoscope magazine. It was in the early days of the Internet when we didn’t have to worry about Spam or phishing. Not many people were on the Internet back then. Since I had an AOL account, the only people I connected with were on AOL.

One day on April 9th I received an email from a stranger. Which was quite rare in those days. It simply said, “You don’t know me. I want to wish you a Happy Birthday. You’ve been hit by a RAK… “Random Act of Kindness.”

The email threw me. Since he was also on AOL, it wasn’t hard to figure out how he got my email address. I emailed him back to thank him. He said that’s what he does…thinks of various ways to perform random acts of kindness.

Continue reading Touched By a RAK

Why the Tiger Should Have Roared

The first rule in public relations 101 is When In Doubt, Say Something!

When Tiger Woods’ Cadillac Escalade hit a fire hydrant and a tree in the wee hours on Black Friday, the 33-year old golf phenom decided  to take the vague route when asked, “What happened?” He didn’t even bother to answer the police.

A note to all of you who want fame and fortune: If the media comes after you and asks questions you don’t want to answer, answer them anyway…or at least tell them when and what time you will talk to them.

When you say nothing, the public and the media begins to speculate. You don’t want that to happen. You want to stay in control and when you don’t talk, the media has the upper hand.

Tiger posted information on his Web site. But that may have been too little too late. The media has already gotten into the public’s minds. The rumors started to fly through the air before Tiger could swat them with his nine iron.

“His wife caught him cheating and ran after him with a club,” “She knocked his window out trying to knock his head off,” “Tiger was raised by a black man who always told him never to hit a woman, so he fled instead.”

These are all speculations.   We won’t know the real answer to what happened that day. Unfortunately the rumors will continue to fly.

Until the Tiger decides to roar.

Just for Your Safty

That’s just what I saw in an ad in big, bold letters, sprawled across my computer. “Just for Your Safty…” I could not read beyond the word “safty.”   My first thought was, “Hmmm, that typo is huge! How did it get past the editors?”

Most bloggers, Facebook enthusiasts, marketers and people who love to write, don’t have editors. Editors check your words before you put it out there. They make sure that your audience will understand what you say and that your message  makes sense. They are the ones that, if you’re writing about our nation’s safty, what the audience reads is information about their safety.

No one is perfect. That’s a given. But when you’re putting your stuff out there for all the world to see, make sure that it’s tight and it’s right. Have someone look it over. Ask them to proofread it for errors – typos, sentence structure, dotted i’s and crossed t’s. After that person reads it, give it to someone else.

I once worked at a major newspaper. In our department we wrote classified ads. The nature of our job was to type as fast as we could what the person on the other line dictated. One of our biggest fears was to leave the “l” out of the word “public.”  Guess what? Our fears were often realized.

One way to proofread spelling is to read the words from right to left instead of left to right. Most people miss words because they know what they wrote, so they skim over the words without truly reading them. But when someone else reads it, they see, “all there money was lost,”  and “the dogs were baking all at once.”  Spellcheck can’t check this.

The best of the best make mistakes. The challenge is to make sure that you at least do all that you can to not make them. If you do, at least you can say that you covered all the bases. It’s for your own writing safety.

Why Men Kill The Ones They Love…Personal and Professional Reflections

In his latest blog, Jewel Woods writes:

My mother is a wiry-thin black woman who – soaking weight, with rollers in her hair and wearing a pair of roller skates – only weighs about 110 pounds. My father, on the other hand, was around 6 feet 2, 220 pounds, a former Golden Gloves champion, and a ex-Marine. Therefore, as a child, I simply could not picture what it was like for a man, particularly this man who appeared to be a giant to me, to hit a woman, let alone my mother. But he did.

What makes a 34-year-old man, walk into his estranged wife’s job, douse her with gasoline, and then set her on fire? What makes a 28-year- old man go on a shooting spree, killing 10 people including his mother?

Read More… http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jewel-woods/why-men-kill-the-ones-the_b_174545.html

Are you a reporter?

I recently attended a PRSA Cleveland luncheon seminar with Peter Shankman. He’s the founder of HARO “Help a Reporter Out.” http://www.helpareporter.com/. If you are a reporter you can sign up for his free email list where pitches are sent. As a public relations professional, I can read the pitches and provide the reporters with sources for their articles. Nice concept. He has over 50,000 subscribers.

One of the tips he gave to “be more visible” is to use Facebook’s birthday tool and send a “Happy Birthday” to your friends. He has over 5000 friends so it works for him. It can work for you too. Try it.