Straight Talk PR

Our Office is Moving to Fresh Pond, Cambridge

Our office is moving.

We will no longer be in Cambridge's Kendall Square, which is one of America's most active centers of business innovation and activity. Instead, we'll be at the other end of Cambridge, in the Fresh Pond area near the Alewife "T" station.

Our new office is located be in a more convenient location where we can easily bike or walk to work, in addition to be reachable via a short drive. It's a place where we can contentrate on helping clients more fully.

Here's our new business card.

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And here's a map showing our new office at 185 Alewife Brook Parkway in Cambridge.

View Straight Talk Public Relations in a larger map

Noting Sorrow of New England, in Newtown and Boston

I was honored to have my letter to the editor of The Boston Globe published in Saturday's issue of the newspaper.

The Globe chose to illustrate the letter with a photo by the European Press Photo Agency of President Obama and Vice President Biden listening to remarks by Mark Barden of Newtown, whose son lost his life on December 14, 2012. The photo was taken at the White House on April 17, after the Senate rejected the sensible gun safety measures favored by nine out of ten Americans.

Here's the letter with the photo selected by The Globe.

Path of pain: a drive through Sandy Hook, a stop at Boylston Street

TWO DAYS after the Boston Marathon bombings, I was in Fairfield County in Connecticut on business. I had plans to drive next to visit friends in the Hudson Valley. I was surprised to find my route would go right through Newtown and the village of Sandy Hook.

It was the afternoon that the Senate rejected sensible screenings of purchasers of guns. I was listening on the radio. I followed a bright yellow school bus in Newtown. Another bus passed going the other way on Connecticut Route 25. They were probably buses taking students home from after-school activities.

I had an urge to reach out and hug every student on those buses and tell them that we in New England will look out for them, more than ever before. But our Congress failed us that very day.

Twenty-four hours later, I was back in Boston heading to a professional meeting in the Back Bay, just outside the crime scene. I stopped at the memorial at the fence on Boylston Street at Hereford Street. At the time, the bombing suspects were still at large.

My heart was heavy with the sorrow New England has endured in a small town and in its largest city.

I want justice for the Boston Marathon victims in the courts. I want action for the Newtown victims in Congress. Without fail.

Douglass Taft Davidoff
Arlington

How I'm Using Twitter to End eMail Overload

For about three months, I've been working to end my problem with email overload.

My email was out of control. My name is Doug. I'm an infoholic.

For longer than I care to admit, I've been stymied by receiving a hundred or several hundred messagesdaily. I had signed onto news feeds from media in every state I ever lived in -- and that's eight states, almost one-sixth of the union. I seemed to have signed onto the email list for every expert in public relations, the world of Apple products, politics of all kind, content managment, social media, marketing, sales, national media, and operating a solo business of any kind.

My attention to real messages, messages written by people I cared about and who cared about receiving a response from me, was diverted by the overwhelming pile of messages from people who I thought were interesting. I couldn't see the trees in my email forest. Or the flowers.

So here's what I did beginning around Thanksgiving last fall, when I decided that living with four, five, or six thousand messages in my in-box was just killing my ability to be present in the here and now. I went on a campaign to stop the emails and decide how to handle the incoming messages I did want.

The solution I settled on was to turn the junky emails, which run into hundreds of words each, into tweets on Twitter, limited to 140 characters. 

This is the process so far:

1. First, I threw out a lot of email. I sorted my email by sender. For a lot of senders, I simply defined a hundred or two hundred missed messages at a  time and trashed them. For senders I had a hunch I might care about, I threw out everything but the most recent one or two messages. On some days, in the time of just an hour or two, I could get rid of a thousand emails or more. (Don't forget, I was in a Sissyphusian race in which delay on my part resulted in those thousand messages being replaced, one for one, within a few days.) 
2. Second, I made better use of the best email sorting tool out there, which is SaneBox. It works on a subscription basis and is amazingly helpful, once you get the hang of it. They have responsive personal tech support, too. SaneBox will work with just about any email account.
3. Third, I started unsubscribing from email lists.
4. Fourth, when I unsubscribed from an email list I kind of cared about or I thought might matter to me in the future, I added a subscription to the sender's Twitter feed.
5. Around this time, my email in-box started receiving just a couple of dozen emails daily. I could handle that if I paid attention. Better yet, the emails became more relevant to the here and now of my life.
6. My process is at this writing is that I'm sensing an unintended consequence: My Twitter accounts are swelling with feeds. The goal now is to use the muting and list features on Twitter, and even the occasional outright "unfollow," to pare down the input from people who might be useful at some point but seem like so much noise today.
7. The last part of the process is important, because it leads into the next process, which is how I sort through all my information inputs. When I find something interesting, I generally don't stop to read it. I add it to the items in my Pocket. I'll discuss Pocket in detail some other time. I'm using Pocket to help me decide what to read, what to write, and what to refer.

So, end result, I've gone from hudreds of emails daily -- each one of which nominally required an action and a click -- to hundreds of Twitter tweets I can scroll through easily on Tweetbot using my thumb on my iPhone or a couple of finger swipes on my iPad or on my MacBook.

I feel happier and more responsive. I even feel like I have more control over my day.

For me, the bigger issue is to be ruthless during the next few months about limiting via listing, muting, or unfollowing, just about every email list for which I'm a recipient. It's time to set priorities and worry about something other than my inbox.

This process has taken weeks and months to develop and follow. I'm still wrestling my informational inputs into my control. But for now, I'm finally ahead in that game.

Let me know if this process gives you any inspiration, or if you have your own email procedure.

 

PR Battles Shaping Up as NIMBYs Oppose Climate Change Public Works

On our companion NIMBYmonitor.com blog, I suggest that supersized NIMBY battles are shaping up for the community relations discipline within public relations. The cause: major public works that will have to be designed, engineered, and sited -- often with little choice on that last one, as hydrology dictates location in many cases at least along the coast.

Many professions will have to work at their peak to address climate change, which means designing and implementing actions and global behavioral changes that repair the damage to the planet, prepare for the impacts of climate change, or aovid the impacts. Scientists. Engineers. Lawyers. Architects. Builders. Politicians. Bankers. Theologians. And public relations professionals.

More at NIMBY Monitor here.

Color Tool Discussed at Content Wordshop Blog

New post on The Content Wordshop, about color choices and the ColourLovers pallette tool.