Note from Doyle: I was copied on this email to Joe Fuentes from a friend and colleague, Cary Baird, who also worked with him at Coors. With her permission, I’m sharing this here. Thanks, Cary.
Dear Joe,
I just read a blog that Doyle Albee wrote about working with you, and I confess that I cannot do a better job of capturing the lessons you taught. Yet, I must try.
I’ll always remember the day you started at Coors, hired to be a manager in one of the most catty, political, clique-ridden departments in the company. By the time you joined the company, I had been with Coors about six or seven years, and had seen eight (8) bosses come and go – more than one a year. Some of those bosses didn’t know diddly-squat about journalism, PR or communications. Some knew about PR, but had no idea about writing or editing. Some knew the concept of a target audience or message objective, but had no idea how to communicate. In truth, most were not good bosses.
Then you came along and changed everything. You could write and edit. You knew how to communicate. And in your book, that included listening as well as sending a message. You came along at a time when I was flexing my muscles and striving to be better and to make an impact. In short, I wanted to go up the corporate ladder.
You were brilliant with me. Your nickname for me was “Slim,” a moniker that I secretly cherished. You refrained from micro-managing me and built up my confidence when I felt uncertain. You supported and coached me through the land mines of producing the Annual Report. And when the time came, you helped launch me to my next job as a manager in the department. I went into that job with a picture of myself in my mind as “Slim,” a strong, independent, Katherine Hepburn-like woman who could handle almost anything.
One of the things I regret is never playing golf with you. How you loved that game and took Coors’ corporate representation at all golf tournaments to a new level!
You shared many traits with another man we both loved: Swede Johnson. I can honestly say that you and Swede were like giant bookends of my career at that time. Great defining and guiding forces that made me always want to do well and improve. Joe, your guidance and the example of your own behavior helped me become a better person and employee. Thank you so much.
Spiritual faith soothes us at these difficult times. Keep practicing your golf swing, dear Joe, because you and I will be playing the Heavenly 18 one of these days. And give ole Swede a hug.
I just got word from our friend Marie Rotter at Xcel Energy that Joe Fuentes passed away last night. The Denver PR community—in fact, our community as a whole—lost a wonderful person.
Our thoughts are with his wife, Chris, and his entire family. As Jeremy Story said on the Denver PR Blog yesterday, “Life can be cruel, and that someone as good and caring as Joe has cancer is proof of that.” I’ll second that.
I often remark how social media is not a new set of behaviors, but just a new set of tools. We’ve always just wanted to talk to each other, and social media makes that easier than ever. As a professional communicator, social media has provided me with a myriad of new outlets—and challenges—but I believe the basics remain. In order to be an effective member of any social media community, your communications must be clear, honest and transparent.
There is no one that fits that description of communication better than my good friend and mentor Joe Fuentes. I learned today that Joe is fighting for his life against cancer, and it caused me to pause and reflect on the many lessons I learned from Joe while working for him at what was then Adolph Coors Company. The things Joe taught me honed not only traditional communication skills, but his constant example as a warm, caring and open person set the stage for understanding how to use social media 20+ years before any of us had so much as a Facebook page.
It was Joe that told me—again and again, until I got it through my head—that a great editor makes the writing better, not different. An ego is an editor’s worst enemy, he would say. You don’t change it because you can, you change it because your change makes it better.
I remember the first news release I wrote for Joe. I was in my early 20s and, of course, I knew everything. Back in those days, we typed our drafts and handed them off for editing. Joe walked the draft back to my office, literally covered in red ink. No sentence seemed beyond the reach of Joe’s pen. I must have had quite the look on my face, but Joe just smiled and said “oh, don’t mind that… this was pretty good, actually! Let me show you what I did.” And he sat and shared freely more than 20 years of experience as a writer and and editor at the Rocky Mountain News along with another 10 years or so of public relations experience with Public Service Company of Colorado. And consistent with his own advice, there was not a single mark on that page that didn’t make the piece better.
Working for Joe was an ongoing lesson. Long before Google wanted headlines to be less than 22 words, Joe asked what every word was doing there, what role it played, and challenged you to make sure it was the best possible word for the job. If there was to be a drop head, it had to play a part in telling the story. And leads (or ledes, as Joe, ever the newspaperman, would write) had better be strong and to the point. Show up in Joe’s office with a normal PR lead/lede filled with buzzwords and braggadocio regarding your company’s leadership in some area and you were sent back to start again. It was Joe that demonstrated that PR was better for everyone—from company to client to reporter to reader—when the tenets of journalism were followed. “Don’t write puff,” he’ll say, “it won’t get past anyone worth getting past.”
While Strunk and White might have written it first, it was Joe that drove it home for me: “Omit needless words,” he would say, often followed by “I’m pretty sure we don’t get paid by the word around here!”
I’ve had the opportunity to introduce several of my employees to Joe from time to time at different events, and they’d often say, “Oh, you’re the AP Style guy.” And Joe will always smile. “If you want to communicate with someone, you’ve got to speak their language, and AP Style is the journalists’ language,” he’d remind us. Even today, when news releases are more often than not read directly by the general public, it’s maybe more important than ever to have your writing look and sound as professional as any news outlet. It helps give the story credibility. I learned that from Joe.
I remember working on a news release one day, typing feverishly (yes, typing on a typewriter!) when Joe asked me what I was doing.
“Working on a news release,” I answered, a bit incredulously.
“I’m just impressed that you memorized the entire AP Stylebook, since I don’t see it on your desk while you’re writing,” he said. “Make sure it’s all correct when you send it to me.” Joe knows the Stylebook better than anyone I’ve ever known, but his was always within easy reach. Now, I never really put mine away. Like Joe’s, my AP Stylebook is within arm’s length at all times.
But even more important than the writing, Joe is always the professional’s professional. His standards are high and he expects your best work, but rather than yelling or chastising, Joe simply makes you want to do your best because you never want to disappoint him. I’d do anything to meet a deadline for Joe, not from fear, but from respect. Joe and I worked together in a large department that could be difficult at times with office politics and turf battles. Somehow, Joe stayed above the fray, did excellent work and set an example for his staff. Without exception.
I remember one day, Joe got very, very angry with another manager on the staff.
“Darn that guy, he really makes me mad sometimes,” he said in a pretty even voice—and that was pretty much the end of it. I honestly don’t know how Joe put up with my high-strung mannerisms all those years, but he did, and if it drove him half as nuts as I now fear it might have, he never let on. He just continued to show me through example that there was another way to get things done.
In many ways, Joe is a true old-time newspaperman, but at the same time, he has always been years ahead of his time. You see, Joe understands the importance of clear, honest and transparent communication as being the foundation upon which everything else is built. It doesn’t matter if you’re chatting with a friend, writing a news release, completing a column for a major daily or a launching your very first blog, it all begins with clear, honest and transparent communication.
Despite what you probably thought all too often, Joe, I was listening to every word. My very best to you today and every day, my friend.
Well, maybe not predicted, but I noticed some great parallels while having a good time watching Hackers, the 1995 film starring a young Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller, a couple of nights ago.
While it was far from the first time I’ve seen the movie (my wife will actually complain about how many times I’ve seen the movie!), I noticed something very different this time. More than just laughing at the out-of-date technology, the hacker culture portrayed in the film acts much like today’s social networking and mobile computing cultures.
So maybe Hackers predicted at least a part of the future. Fifteen years ago, you needed special equipment and a lot of special skill to pull much of this off. Not anymore.
A few examples:
Throughout the movie, the characters hacked in to networks from pay phones. While it was mostly to evade getting caught by using their own phone lines, it reminded me of the public WiFi community that’s sprung up with cheap (or free) and easy Internet access from anywhere and could even be a WiMax foreshadowing. Just as they used pay phones to hide, we can even make it difficult to be tracked from a Starbucks, for example, as the address will show up as a public access point.
Remember the scene where they all watched the show with Razor and Blade called “Hack the Planet”? Again, you needed serious skills (and maybe even a little fiction help from the script) to show your program by breaking into a broadcast feed. Now, that’s nothing more than a video blog, which can be—and often is—produced by just about anyone. You can check out shows like AmateurLogic.TV anytime—no special skill or equipment needed.
Hacker handles: names like Acid Burn, Crash Override or Phantom Phreak populate the movie. There’s even a scene where one character, Joey, says “I don’t have an identity until I have a handle.” Not really so different from Twitter handles, is it? A shout out to my friends @geekmommy, @smileyvegas, @technosailor and @queenofspain. So, which one of you wants to be Lord Nikon?
And in the end, they needed to meet (meetup?) to take down the systems and save themselves from certain prison sentences. They sent messages online (today’s Facebook event, meetup or Tweetup) and used pagers (perhaps SMS or Foursquare?) to get people together all over the world and support their cause. Look what we’re doing now: through SMS alone, more than $20 million was raised to support relief efforts in Haiti in just a few days.
Perfect parallels? No, but it reinforces something we’ve been talking about lately at Metzger: social media is not new behavior, it’s just new tools that allow us to talk, interact and get together—which is what we’ve always wanted to do.
Put Hackers in your Netflix queue… it’s still a fun ride (I wonder what Dave Taylor thinks of the film. Dave… would you like a “retro-review?” Call me!).
The New York Times recently covered Coca Cola’s inclusion of social media in their Super Bowl ads. Some said “Huh?”
I disagree. Though it has been slowly emerging recently, this is yet another brilliant way that socmed can and should be used. Reading this article got me thinking about how socmed will impact this famed sport event and what means for the future of sports and media.
For most, the first thing that comes to mind when they think about the Super Bowl (besides the game) is the commercials. Although Coca Cola still holds two commercial spots for tomorrow’s main event, they are, for the first year, putting their eggs in the socmed basket. So what effect does this rush of socmed into the Super Bowl spotlight have? And why hasn’t this come to the forefront sooner? There has been the slow introduction of communication technologies incorporated into these scenarios over the past few years, but nothing compared to what is possible.
My question: why isn’t there a stronger push being made towards using socmed for this purpose? When used right, socmed can be of such great value… Who cares if it’s not traditional, it’s what’s happening now and will be what’s happening tomorrow. And not only does this mean something for once-a-year sports events, but can have a profound impact on how sports news and updates are communicated daily. The relationship between the two will change sports media forever, because today so many of us enjoy these play-by-play updates on our Facebook page and Twitter feeds instead of the annoying “too much information” one-liners.
A little chuckle to brighten your day: How even a squishy, soft and sweet Muppet can get blasted on YouTube with a barrage of nasty commentary. Obviously a goof (and a hilarious one!), but just imagine what’s it’s life for the truly deserving. Check it out.
There are many companies who seem to have the attitude that customer review sites are just a bunch of noise, populated by complainers and ignored by the vast majority. That might be true today, but over time, I think it’ll become of critical importance for companies to be paying attention to this data.
To demonstrate how the future might well look, let me show how a quick Google search for a restaurant’s address caused me to change my lunch plans…
A colleague had sent me email saying “let’s have lunch, you pick the place” and I remembered that a new Mexican place had opened up here in Boulder called Agave. The signage was good and I thought it’d be a nice chance to try somewhere new and hopefully add a venue to my favorites.
To confirm the address, I searched for the restaurant in Google (“agave boulder co”) and when it showed me the location, it also showed me the following tip:
As you can imagine, that little snippet was enough to make me want to learn more. Who wants to have a meal at a place where the service is “horrible”? I clicked on the “A” button and got a bit more info:
Seven reviews for a brand new restaurant? That’s worth checking out, so I clicked on “7 Reviews” and found that while there was one good review, there were plenty more from people who had experienced bad service and – worse – bad food there too:
Suffice to say I was turned off and decided then and there that Agave wasn’t going to be the restaurant for us to use as our meeting spot.
Here’s where it gets interesting, though, because immediately underneath the bad reviews was the following:
I looked at the nearby places and thought “Larkburger!” and that’s where we went.
The important takeaway from this – particularly so if you are the owners of Agave – is that customer reviews really do play a part in your business success and while it might only affect a small percentage of potential customers today, I promise that as we move more and more into a mobile always-on world, this sort of experience will make or break a retail outlet, whether you’re a cafe, tire shop or restaurant.
And as for us? I’m sure we’ll have a great burger and fries at Larkburger.
NateWarren
“Now that the “Wow, golly!” phase of social media is over for the all but the Johnny-come-nevers, I think of socmed sites more and more as socially-based news aggregators. With that comes a dwindling patience for “Making sandwiches NOM NOM NOM” and “I’m the new mayor of Walgreen’s” updates. It seems some folks have a compulsion to fill in the update form with whatever, whenever (The Oatmeal said it best).
When talking about this post, we were reminded of this little piece of Facebook badinage
I try to think of every update as a performance: I’m going for laughs or I’m sharing a resource, or both. My proposition to all my socmed friends is: render a trenchant viewpoint, make me laugh, give me something I can use, or shut the hell up until you actually have something to say. If socmed is a news desk, I often find the reportage lacking. But then again, I’m a notorious crank on the issue.
What’s your tolerance for chatter? And by what criteria would you filter it out? We solicited a multi-generational take from around the Metzger Associates table; first a serve from our president and CEO, then a return from two junior members of our team…
John Metzger
Back in my days as a cynical tech trade editor, 99% of the stuff thrown at me was garbage. I had to sift through it to find the hottest news — who was firstest with the mostest, what company had something to say that was going to impact their industry and affect the greatest number of my readers.
It felt, at times, very unproductive. Technology was, and still is, about creating productivity gains, and the traditional way to achieve this in the Information Age was to reduce interruptions, keystrokes and any other break in the stream of consciousness. Word processing was the classic example. As a magazine editor, I watched my writers improve dramatically, maintaining their concentration while making big copy edits with a few keystrokes instead of literally cutting and pasting with scissors, tape, white-out and other distractions.
Today’s social media technology has increased productivity in water cooler communications to that rare situation where the gains have taken us beyond the tipping point of delivering actual productivity. Sifting through 99% of the noise on today’s social media reminds me of being a journalist, sifting through the haystack to find the needle. I strongly support the notion of re-defining socmed as a news aggregator. When hundreds of people stop what they’re doing to read about one person watching a nice sunset, I don’t think too many people are gaining much of anything, be it productivity or even warm fuzzies. When those same hundreds of people read something that’s relevant, delivers insight — or that at least makes us laugh — that’s another story.
Doyle Albee
First, I agree with both of you that “I’m eating yogurt” just isn’t the kind of thing that makes me want to jump on a site and engage. That being said, let’s think about many of our own conversations.
When I walk in the office on a Monday morning, my typical salutation is not “Good morning. What are your thoughts on the political upheaval in Burkina Faso?” It’s more likely to be “How was your weekend?” As a species, much of our conversation is just small talk. That’s OK. I think the key is to fit in with your group.
During our conversation on this topic, we also talked about how much many of us hated games like Farmville on Facebook. Count me among them. However, more than 30 million people disagree with me. Who’s right? We both are. It’s just like real life, if you think about it. I have friends that love romantic comedies, but they don’t invite me to tag along because they know I’m not a big fan. I love college football, but I have many friends who would rather go to the dentist for a significant procedure than spend a day in a bar watching game after game with me. That’s OK, we’re still friends, but we don’t share everything in common.
That’s where social media is going and needs to continue to go. This really hit home for me when I reviewed the top Twitter trends of 2009. I hadn’t discussed one of them with my more than 2,000-strong peer set. I realized that, despite being a regular Twitter user, my group on the network is talking about different things. Again, that’s OK.
So the key for me is: know your audience. If you have a group of friends on Facebook that never ever respond to your Farmville or Mafia Wars overtures — get the freakin’ hint. My weekday tweets interact with an entirely different group than my Saturday-during-college-football-season tweets, and both work. The key is not to be the guy that insists on screaming “Freeeeeebiiiirrrrd” at the opera or butting into an intense political discussion with “How ’bout them Broncos?” It doesn’t work in real life and it doesn’t work online. Start, join and add to conversations and stay out of of the ones that don’t interest you.
Cortney Harvey
Constant updates on who’s brushing their teeth or going to the gym is overwhelmingly annoying and isn’t my idea of a news update worth reading. But regardless of whether or not I care to share a play-by-play of my daily activities with thousands of people, it’s still there and can’t be ignored. I’m not part of the generation that saw socmed change from corporate America forwarding each other jokes via email to a techie-blogging black hole. I entered the socmed scene when it was socially acceptable for a 40-year old soccer mom to have a Facebook profile. In my opinion, growing up with and not growing into (like many of you old hands have) socmed forums makes a big difference in what I look for in conversation.
Although there may not be much “value” in reading about someone’s hygiene, the point isn’t to gain much of anything. CNN can certainly help you accomplish that task. And who is to decide whether that information is or isn’t of value? Like Doyle said, I think that has everything to do with your audience. Not every conversation is appropriate in every forum. When I engage in a conversation, I know who’s gonna give a hoot about what and thus don’t waste my time trying to talk about why a Mac is better than PC with my grandma.
It’s all about knowing what topic of conversation is appropriate in which arena. All it takes is one person reading about or taking interest in something to turn “blather” into the next hot topic. Socmed has changed, but have the people who claim they are participants of it done so? So what if people don’t wanna hear about this or that! That’s the point of socmed. It’s there for people to do what they want with, and make their own.
Gabe Lee
Like those before me, I agree that situation dictates, but for the sake of keeping everyone’s attention, I’m going to explain my reasoning behind those tweets and updates that don’t really seem to grasp the conversation in any way. I rarely tweet or give an update that isn’t relevant, but that’s my opinion. I remember tweeting about being in a meeting with Doyle Albee, John Metzger and Dave Taylor, something about me feeling like I was “surrounded by greatness” (do I smell a raise?).
Seriously though, these three are influential in my world, and many others’, as well. That tweet was relevant to me and perhaps 11,000+ of their followers. But not everyone knows who they are, let alone care if I am in a meeting with them. Why should they? But my tweet was effective for me because my message netted me a few followers and some comment. For others, it was garbage.
Maybe our yogurt tweeter is lactose intolerant and for the first time in three years they are finally able to enjoy their favorite childhood treat. Means nothing to me, but their followers follow them for a reason. It might be because they share the same affinity for that gooey, semi-curdled milk byproduct or because they normally tweet about “relevant” issues. I think that there is a lot of time-wasting tweets and updates, but some of them are from people who are new to socmed, or perhaps we’re just not close enough to their circle for it to matter.
Someone said to me the other day that customer references aren’t important any more. “After all,” they said, “your customers are all talking about you online, so potential customers will just look there. No sense in compiling a bunch of references.”
Not so fast.
While it’s true that there’s lots of conversation online about lots of different things, you can’t sit back and hope some of it is about your company—you’ve got to help drive it. Additionally, if a bad review pops up someplace, it’s best to have some references in hand rather than trying to close the door once the cow is out of the barn. This is true whether your company sells directly to consumers (B2C) or to other businesses (B2B).
Click below to see a white paper I recently completed that addresses this subject. Feel free to download and share and, as always, join the conversation on this important topic.
Metzger’s Creative Director, Carolyn McHale, was recently one of the Top 3 finishers in a national competition to design skier Lindsay Vonn’s helmet for the Olympics. In fact, Carolyn’s design received more votes than any other. You can see the contest and designs here.
In addition, Carolyn got lots of attention from both local and national media—check her out in the NY Times, the Boulder Daily Camera and on KUSA-TV, Denver’s NBC-TV affiliate. It was a fun day in the Metzger office when KUSA showed up to talk to Carolyn, so we shot a little video (and made everyone dress nice, even though we didn’t make it on camera!).
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