30 Monday Jan 2012
Posted in MidcoSN
The last few months I worked on a story with Midco Sports Network profiling an incredible family from Fargo, ND with a passion for curling at the Fargo-Moorhead Curling Club. The Podoll family also gave me some lessons in curling and I don’t see any professional curling in my future, but you never know!
Originally aired on MidcoSportsNet.com
29 Sunday Jan 2012
To some, it’s just a job. But for Kendall Titiml, the man with the golden voice, it’s a golden opportunity.
Walk into the McDonald’s in Wayne, America (that’s in Nebraska, but look at the water tower and you’ll understand the nomenclature) and you may be greeted by a smile wider
and brighter than the arches outside. That “I’m Lovin’ It” personality belongs to Kendall, 22, a marketing student at Wayne State College. Kendall entered the Voice of McDonald’s IV, a contest to recognize McDonald’s employees for their singing talents. As he made it through the public voting to be one of the U.S. finalists, news organizations in Nebraska, Iowa and Palau (Kendall’s home and an island nation 500 miles east of the Philippines and 2,000 miles south of Tokyo with a population several thousand less than Aberdeen, SD) covered his journey.
But a lesson in PR (and life): don’t assume you know the whole story.
As we worked to share Kendall’s story (and help him get votes), we got a chance to interview him. He chatted about his philosophy in life, love of music and excitement that he would use his winnings to send his mom to his sister’s graduation and he may even make the trip home as well.
But then he mentioned something else.
At five-years-old, he became ill with Guillain-Barre syndrome and needed to be taken to a larger hospital hours away in Hawaii. While there, his family stayed at a Ronald McDonald House. Kendall told us how grateful he became back then for the chance to recover and he believed McDonald’s gave him two opportunities in his life.
While we thought we just wanted to share the story of a hard-working college kid with a great voice and passion to perform who loved to inspire people with his positive personality, we found another story. A young man grateful to share his talent and endlessly appreciative of people he never would know who gave his family a place to call home while he recovered.
Next up, Kendall heads to Orlando in April where he competes for international bragging rights singing with 16 competitors from around the globe, all hoping for their golden opportunity.
Originally posted on ADwërks.com.
18 Sunday Dec 2011
Posted in Mud Mile Media
Nate and I with Mud Mile Media (along with an awesome team, thanks Brad Dumke, Angelique Verver of Platinum Imagination and Dan Aspan!) helped Alex Jinkinson produce his first music. Alex, an amazing musician out of Sheldon, Iowa, made it a fun and enjoyable (despite the cold!) day shooting in downtown Sioux Falls with a baby grand on the middle of the sidewalk and along some random rural roads near Chancellor, SD!
17 Saturday Dec 2011
Posted in PR
The last few months I worked on an exciting project with the South Dakota Advertising Federation to announce the first class for the YWCA Women’s Leadership Program. The most recent SDAF AdLib talks about what we did and you can watch the progress of the program at the YWCA’s website.
17 Saturday Dec 2011
Posted in family
Three decades in the same grade. You read that right, that’s exactly what I wrote. A 60-year-old first grader. The thought of a sexagenarian trapses the halls of a school, when years ago they needed to finish high school, probably leaves you horrified, cringing and cursing our education system. It leaves you to wonder how someone with an AARP card who qualifies for senior coffee prices at McDonald’s sits in the lunch room with six-year-olds sipping on milk with missing front teeth as they wait another decade for a driver’s license.
But this first grader aces the alphabet, arithmetic and the toughest subject of all — parenting. My mom, the oldest and smartest first grader anyone could be lucky enough to know. This week she turned the big 6-0. The truest definition of a teacher, with zeal for learning and zest for self-improvement. If we walk into a WalMart sixty miles from her school, she recognizes (and gets recognized by) kids she taught when Alf graced televisions in primetime. She often admits that when she gets new shoes, it puts an extra pep in her step and all the small faces in her classroom get a kick for the rest of the day out of her new kicks. Of all the classroom lessons my mom tediously planned with a perfect combination of persistence, patience and passion for excellence, none can mean more than the life lessons.
She showed me you should love life as much as you love your family and your work. Your job should never center around a paycheck or clocking out at 40 hours, but on what in life cannot be given a number, like giving people opportunities to find the best in themselves. She taught me that being a good teacher will always be harder than being the best student in the class because you will be the student that never gets it all right the first time. She reminds me to give hugs and high fives every day, no matter the size of an accomplishment because each achievement in life that moves us forward should be celebrated. When the pencil breaks, it’s not a big deal. Grab the sharpener along the wall and start again. She never told me any of these things, she modeled every one of them with the same precision and dedication that she used to draw out her perfect penmanship as she taught me to write. When winter comes, recess outside may mean freezing your fanny off, but the silver lining to the clouds of snow comes when you plop a carrot in a snowman’s face.
I didn’t always appreciate, and still do not, all the wisdom my mom gave me about learning and life, but every day there seems to be one more thing I shake my head at and think, “She was right about that.”
To the oldest first grader I know, happy birthday, Mom, and here’s to another year of your life lessons.
16 Friday Dec 2011
Posted in DooGooders, Dooing Business, PR
Being a business owner comes with a lot of crap. In our company, literal crap that comes by the gallon. So when you do what we doo, cleaning up dog doo, inevitably you get some prank calls from kids (I can’t blame them) or voicemail from people wondering just how you pick up the poo. But then you get the questions that even in a million years of a jazillion buckets of poop pick-up, you never could expect. And sometimes someone drops a load of,“Huh?!!?!?” bigger than what a Great Dane can pile up. That’s a house pooper.
One of those calls came from an elderly woman. Voice of an 80-year-old angel: “I need some waste removed.” Easy enough. “I let my dog poop in the house. Can you clean it up?” That knocked us over about as fast as the day we realized one of our five-poodle-families needed Pepto stat. A house pooper. Because let’s wake up and smell the feces: if they let the dog poop in the house, what other mess will they leave behind for you to stick your foot in? House poopers come in all shapes, sizes and smells. In every business, you meet them. They tempt you. Your bank account stinks at the time and the project smells like easy money. Maybe it’s the customer you cut your rate for in hopes of a bigger fish. Or the quick job that shouldn’t take too much time. But eventually, you find yourself working so many hours on the project, you make pennies. Or cutting your charges so much that it sets an expectation you will keep dooing that.
Knowing when to say no can be just as important as knowing when to let go. Sometimes the crap you get from a client ends up being more than it’s worth. Just like when you bring a puppy into your home, Fido needs to be the right fit, and so doo the people you work with. You may not feel like you can fire a client, but step back and think of how much more productive you could be for someone you work well with. Bottom line, no matter how much crap you handle in your business, house poopers will always show up. You just need to know how to show them the door.
Originally posted on SDAF.org and published in South Dakota Advertising Federation AdLib.
13 Tuesday Dec 2011
Courtesy: Spec-ta-cles
Liver by any other name, well, just call it liver. Dress it up with gravy, corn or peas, but liver will never be a juicy cut of steak slathered with A.1.® Sauce, a mouth-watering filet mignon or a burger beefed up with cheese and bacon. It can never be the other white meat, it will always be beef. And whatever name you use, it still tastes like liver and I will not, cannot and could not think of eating it. But not that my mom did not try.
Growing up on a farm, when you butcher your own cattle, you get left with a lot of leftovers which includes a freezer full of tongue, Rocky Mountain oysters and liver, when all the rest found its way to a plate. My mom knew this, and she would call liver any other name but liver in hopes I would eat it. Sometimes it would almost work. I’d take a nibble or two and then question the cut. Sometimes simply the look would throw me into a toddler-like tantrum.
When it comes to PR, you get plenty of liver. Good stories, full of iron. They beef up a company, but rarely do they suit everyone’s palate – the specialized, niched and super-quirky pitches. As business owners, we want to pitch everyone everywhere every story, because we want to believe everyone everywhere loves to know everything we do. But you would not serve a plate of liver, steak or stew meat at a meeting of the American Vegan Society (yes, it exists - http://www.americanvegan.org).
So as PR professionals, we cannot serve every story to everyone. We need to know the menu, our audience, and what they like and want to eat. Blame it (or credit it to) technology, but journalism evolved in the last decade into the Mall of America, filled with amusement parks, Subways, Hooters and lots of stores, each catering to a unique audience. If we want to create effective (and efficient from an opportunity cost perspective) pitches, we need to know what our audience wants and to not waste their time with what we think, or hope they will like. As advertisers, we research what works and what doesn’t, and PR must follow the same philosophy. It may seem like I’m serving up some strained peas, easy and obviously little chewing required, but so often (as I remember from being a journalist receiving emails every day from the launch of a Bosnian eat-on-a-dime cookbook to pitches about throwing the perfect children’s party with a budget of $20,000 when I reported on courts, cops and crime). When we pitch to the masses, they pitch our idea in the trash. Instead, we need to know the reporters, the blogs and the beats that care most about what idea we want to sell them. We must find the unique angles, and then serve our stories up on a silver platter. I admit, I am as guilty as my mom at trying, wanting and hoping someone will eat what I dish up. I pitched faux-Facebook websites like a pop-up-shop on a random street corner pushing the latest Louis Vuitton bag, and I would pitch to anyone and everyone because my client wanted a story on the front page of the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. That’s when a slice of humble pie helps for all involved. Communicating to clients also becomes critical so they know why and how you want to reach the people you believe will be most interested in them.
Now I’m kind of hungry with all this talk of food. I think I’ll grab a delivery menu for pizza tonight.
Originally posted on ADwërks.com.
01 Thursday Dec 2011
Posted in City Link
I’m a few days late on this, and technically a month when I realize it’s December today, but here’s the latest episode of City Scene on CityLink Channel 16 (Midco). We talk a lot about winter, snow and cold, with a side of rabies.
09 Wednesday Nov 2011
Posted in MidcoSN
Originally posted on MidcoSportsNet.com
I first met Jim Denevan in a tiny, cramped doctor’s exam room that smelled like latex and Lysol. That day he needed to get his arteries checked out with his cardiology team. Jim volunteered to let a television news crew follow him for some video and I accompanied as part of the hospital’s PR team. Funny, charismatic and a cross between your best friend and the coolest grandpa you knew would describe him. As he left, he made a mention of going on a trip and something about fixing his bike. In his early 70s at the time, it struck me that someone his age would be bicycling around the country. After he left, I asked his son how often he rode. He just smiled. Then I learned, he didn’t bicycle, he motocrossed.
Then I caught up with Jim again a few months ago, same grin and zest for life I remember from a few years back (along with plenty of wise cracks mixed with wisdom) and we followed up for Midco Sports Magazine. We met up several times to watch Jim ride, chat about his love of the sport and even more so, his love of life. During our first time at the track (he rides at Sioux Valley Cycle Club near Renner, SD), the fog lay so thick, we could barely make out a track in front of our feet. Mother Nature, not wanting to help us out that day, made it difficult to start the bike. Producers Nate Burdine and Dan Aspan tried to help Jim get it started. And as they pushed, pulled and prodded that bike, something hit me again. Jim, determined to ride, never gave up. I could see the frustration building, just like the fog, on Nate and Dan’s faces. And at about a third of Jim’s age, fatigue soon joined the frustration for them. But Jim, while he slowed down slightly on the outside (moving more like a 50-year-old than 75-year-old), on the inside, he stayed revved up and ready to figure out how to get that bike going. And he did. Once it started, he rode. He crashed a few times, but he always got back on the bike. And that day, and several others, as the snowbird flew, I saw an athlete for the ages.
Because Jim’s story reinforces that it’s not the medal around our necks, but the metal of our spirit that makes us true athletes. That age does not determine a champion, but determination. In this age of athletes glorified on t-shirts, pumped up on primetime TV and internationally recognized, true competitors compete with the man on the inside.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
10 Monday Oct 2011
Posted in City Link
Ok, so I’m a little behind in posting this! Here’s the current City Scene on CityLink Channel 16 (Midco). There’s some awesome video of the Sioux Falls Police Department’s SWAT training exercise and you’ve probably seen the billboards, but check out the photo shoot for Sioux Falls Fire Rescue seeing pink.
