…all the Grey’s Anatomy. And food. Allll the food. Bless you Jamie Oliver and your 30 minute meals of deliciousness! Should you be in the market for mustard chicken with dauphinoise potatoes folks, this is the book for you.
Also, I fiiiinally finished my cushion! It’s a little rough in its finished state, mainly due to my binding off around 7pm on a bank holiday Monday and not being able to wait to buy a cushion pad, I – er – repurposed an old pillow that had had it’s day…so yes. It may be a little bit…oddly shaped. But it is my oddly shaped cushion. That I knitted. I’m still a little bit in shock that I actually finished it… jumper next?!
The weather, in all its grey glory, has finally infected me. I’m sore-headed and annoyed, and sure, it’s not entirely the weather, but let’s just blame it on that. Just for now.
I’ve been wallowing in Andrea Gibson poems (“…I’m ready to reset my bones/ready to swingset my rib cage/so that the next time someone pushes me away/I will swing right back to that chisel with my marble spine…”) and as much as her words are beautiful, this mood means I’m already starting to get on my own nerves.
Until a colleague of mine showed me…a slow loris with a tiny umbrella!
…how can you possibly entertain the black clouds when there is something as cute as this?!
1. J.P. Smythe: The Testimony
2. Anne Enright: The Forgotten Waltz
3. Esi Edugyan: Half Blood Blues
4. Somerset Maugham: Of Human Bondage
5. Scott F. Fitzgerald: Tender Is The Night
…after all, what’s better when it’s chucking it down outside?*
(*i. e. “I wish I’d been inside all weekend doing nothing but chowing down on scones and reading, but alas, life got in the way again. Making good inroads into the Enright though; really enjoying her style)
I haven’t actually seen Matilda the Musical yet (sigh), but I’m in love with this song. How brilliant are Tim Minchin’s lyrics? And the four Matildas? And the choreography? Any time you ever get even a little bit down, obviously the answer is to air-punch the mirror and sing along to this…
Because nobody else is gonna put it right for me
Nobody but me is gonna change my story
Sometimes you have to be a little bit naughty…
I’ve been fussing around with some photoshop things (very slowly) and wasn’t going to post birthday photos until then. But it’s already been a week since the date, so I figured I’d just bang a couple up…maybe after the Big Flat Move I’ll have more time to re-teach myself all the photoshop skillz I learned during my MA.
Ha! More time. There’s a joke.
Anyway, in other news, I did my first concert with that there choir I joined (Barts Choir, for those who don’t click links) and it was wunderbar…over far, far too quickly! Hope you all had a lovely Easter break…my eyes are now on the prize of two and half weeks of relaxing back in the US. I cannot *wait*.
Ah the dreaded ‘c’ word. No, not charities, though, seeing chuggers heading straight for you in the street with a determined grin is enough to send you scurrying into the nearest bolthole…rather: CRISIS.
Even saying the word CRISIS is enough to set a few hearts pounding, and these days there’s a socmed CRISIS around every corner…or so it feels like, anyway. Some are small storms, intense and nasty and the worst of people, but over in 24 hours. Some are much, much longer-lasting. Today, at CharityComms’ fine social media conference - which, by the way, is one of the best events I’ve been to in terms of offering inspiration, genuinely useful case studies and practical tips – I listened to Macmillan Cancer Care‘s version of last summer’s s**t storm. And I was particularly interested in hearing Hilary Cross, Director of External Affairs’ speech on this, as I distinctly remember watching this unfold.
I remember, as I had my headphones on at work – which, at the time, was in a cancer charity also – and I was watching PMQs, as I usually try to, given my political interest. For those who may not have had such a vested interest as I did at the time, here’s a recap: during PMQs last summer, Ed Miliband used Macmillan’s numbers to show that benefits reshuffles would leave around 7,000 cancer patients without the money they needed due to the definition of ‘terminally ill’.
Point: This was a story Macmillan had successfully sold into the press days before. These numbers were already out there in the media, indeed in the national press. This wasn’t ‘new’.
But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was this: according to Guido Fawkes, ”3 minutes after the PM sat down”, Mike Hobday, spokesperson for Macmillan and one-time Labour candidate for Welwyn Hatfield was on the Daily Politics, “defending Miliband’s use of their figures” or, in other words, supposedly using his a-political charity for political means. That was how it started. And because it started with Guido Fawkes: boom. the powder keg of twitter exploded and accusations of party-political shilling rained down on Mr. Hobday’s head.
I’m paraphrasing a little, but here’s the way Hilary Cross explained that they handled it in house:
1. Pulled Mike Hobday as their spokesperson (so that, as Hilary Cross said, he wouldn’t have to deal with unnecessary attacks on his professionalism etc)
2. Gathered together the requisite people from departments that could help react (press, policy etc)
3. Drafted a statement to use reactively 4. Responded to email (not twitter) complaints
5. Tweeted about other issues/campaigns they were currently in the middle of
6. Used the drafted statement to respond to Guido Fawkes’ blog post in the comments
7. Used existing close relationships with journalists to place a piece in the Guardian Voluntary Sector Network blog.
This is fascinating to me, as an outsider who watched this unfold, this is the reaction I had/what it looked like to me:
1. Pulling Mike Hobday as a spokesperson: This really looked like Macmillan hanging their head in some form of shame, and genuinely looked as though they were punishing Mike Hobday for doing something wrong. Personally, in something such as this, I think a masterful spokesperson will hit the issue head on (“yes I was a Labour candidate, yes Macmillan as an organisation were aware, but that was my personal business and Macmillan is entirely separate to that. The numbers have been in the public for days, the newspapers are still talking about it, the real issue here is…”) etc, and will turn the story back to the real problem. It wouldn’t be comfortable, it wouldn’t be easy, but watching Mike Hobday get benched genuinely made me wonder if there wasn’t a point to the furore.
2. Didn’t acknowledge the issue, tweeted about other stuff: There’s an easy way to fix to small problems on Facebook and Twitter: talk about something new, push the post down the page, get the community talking about something different. That works for one troll, but for something like this not posting about the issue made Macmillan look…slow. Slow and ostrich-like, and if-we-just-put-our-head-under-the-sand-here-everyone-will-go-away. I don’t think they had to say anything specific, they didn’t have to apologise, they didn’t have to explain or enter into any discussion, they just had to acknowledge it. I genuinely at the time couldn’t understand why they hadn’t, especially when Mike Hobday wrote one tweet acknowledging it on his personal account with a ‘and there’s an end to it’ attitude. That’s what they needed from their own account and even after today, I don’t fully know why they didn’t except for, I guess, they didn’t think it a comprehensive enough platform on which to turn the issue back to the real figures.
Which brings me to:
3. Responded to the accusations in the comments section of Guido Fawkes blog: Now, I get the logic here: here is a place where you can get some length, some parity, here you can explain a little better, use more words, not have them potentially as twisted against you as a 140 character tweet. But who actually reads the comments of Guido Fawkes’ blog? It’s full of flamers and trolls and people that just seem downright lunatic. I read them…once. Didn’t make that mistake again in a hurry. Therefore, I definitely didn’t see Macmillan’s response, they still looked silent and unreactive to me.
which finally brings me to:
4. A full statement is essentially ”released” to the public via the Guardian VSN blog the next day.This is where I think an organisation’s own platform is utterly vital. Your own platform – a blog, a news page, whatever you have – is a place where you can put a rebuttal, or press release or post like this and it is coming from you, free of associations, and you can do it any time of day. Macmillan could have released this statement (remember, they had it the day this all kicked off) the day before, tweeted the statement and had a ‘we’ve said our bit, as far as we’re concerned let’s focus on the real issue’ attitude. Instead it’s published the next day. Not only that, but it’s published on a very left-leaning newspaper’s site. Given that their spokesperson had just been accused of being in Labour’s pocket, this doesn’t personally seem to me like the best place to put this.
In essence, I can see why Macmillan reacted the way they did, and the logic behind each step. Personally it’s not how I would react, or advise an organisation to react, but this is obviously the backseat driving of crisis comms: telling people what you would have done differently with the advantage of hindsight. That, I completely acknowledge.
I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts: leave a comment if you have a minute, especially if you’ve ever had to guide people through such a PR emergency.
is currently perplexing me something chronic. Not to mention, making me pretty glad that I live in the UK. I usually put these sort of mini-rambling-sometimes-ranty thoughts on my Tumblr, but what the heck. Today it can go here.
I don’t know what’s worse: Rush Limbaugh calling Sandra Fluke a prostitute, claiming that Fluke’s testimony to Congress on the subject of making insurance companies (in religiously affiliated institutions) cover the cost of contraception equated to her ”wanting to be paid to have sex”…or the particular women of America who are more than happy to let him say what they are thinking. Because couch it in whatever religious language you like, but they’re ignoring all the issues surrounding contraception and medical insurance – such as the fact that it’s used to medicate illnesses from acne to polycystic ovary syndrome as Sandra Fluke pointed out in her eloquent testimony to Congress – and simply making it about sex outside of marriage and the sin they feel it conveys. Let’s be honest: in their eyes, if you’re having sex outside marriage, then the implication is that you’re – as Rush Limbaugh actually said – a slut. Not only that but if you get pregnant and you have an abortion (because God forbid you can’t afford to give that potential child any sort of quality of life, or pregnancy presents a legitimate threat to both yours and the fetuses life) then you’re a murderer.
So much judgement, from such religious people. And this, additionally, in a country where the separation of Church and State is codified into the law of the land, is the first amendment, no less! And yet, in the UK, where Church and State were intertwined for years, where the Parliamentary Order of Business in the House of Commons still includes prayers, we do not discuss whether a woman has the right to free contraception. Or whether she has the right to an abortion (which, by the way, is why Theresa May makes my blood run cold). We don’t say, “I am C of E/Catholic/Muslim/Buddhist/Hindu, and that first and foremost is the morality with which you must make a law”, not here, not in this day and age and my word, am I glad for it. I’m not saying people haven’t tried, and I’m not saying that wasn’t the way it once was…but in 2012, the UK’s doing pretty good on this particular topic in comparison to that there country over the ocean.
It makes you wonder, doesn’t it, how so many people in a country so ‘advanced’ can continue to be so fire-and-brimstone about legislation? Limbaugh might as well have tried to slap a giant red A on Fluke’s clothes, for all certain parts of America’s society has moved on.
“This is no mere travelling show of oddities, a simple freak show of human weirdness, but a true spoken museum; carefully curated stories to be archived with our ears into exhibits that last only as long as the story itself…”
I know it’s LFW and all, but has anyone else been dreaming muchly about summer, given the transition-season clothing in stores and the small, hopeful bouts of blue sky we’ve been having lately?!
Just me?
Watching things like Jamie Cooks Summer doesn’t really help, either, given now all I want to do is sit in the back garden and bash holes in a bucket to smoke the bejeez out of a ton of shrimp and fish fillets…still, I whipped up some of my favourite easy salsa recipe this morning to brighten things up a little. I definitely needed it after an appalling run this morning. 5k planned, only made it 4 because, well, I stupidly hadn’t eaten breakfast. And it was ridiculously windy. And I’m weak. Still, that’s 3 for 3! Finally managing to stick to my ‘at least three runs a week’ rule. YESS.
Also made in the kitchen today: falafel, some berry oatcup muffin-style thingies for the mornings so I don’t have to faff around with porridge and the mother of all delicious slow-cooker buffalo chickens. Honestly, if you like hot food, try this – it’s amazing.
It’s been a thoroughly lovely and lazy weekend; late starts, knitting, pottering around, cups of tea, food shopping, film watching…all the good things. And on that note, I’m headed back into the kitchen to start a good old Sunday roast…
