Issues management: Louis Vuitton and Nadia Plesner

Nadia Plesner, a Danish artist, started a campaign in October last year to “raise awareness of the ongoing genocide in Darfur”. Her now-famous illustration of an impoverished Darfur child holding a chihuahua and a Louis Vuitton (LV) bag lookalike was meant to highlight the disparate treatment by the media towards a certain hotel heiress and the situation in Darfur.

The luxury goods giant asked Plesner to cease sales of her designs immediately. She resisted and LV, obviously none too happy about it, brought a lawsuit against Plesner, claiming an incredulously amount of over $20,000 for each day of her Simple Living campaign.

I thought this was a classic David and Goliath story. And indeed, it is. Google for the story and you are likely to find media and blog articles on the issue. Even Jeremiah Owyang (one of my favourite bloggers on the social media scene) devoted an entry on the ongoing suit.

Without going much into the nitty stuff (you can read that yourself), I am wondering what in the world does LV intend to achieve by suing the socks off of a struggling artist, who in her best of intentions, simply took the monogrammed LV bag as an inspiration. LV would have been better off fighting intellectual piracy of its famous bags from the likes of the notorious Ladies Market in HongKong, choc-a-bloc full of LV imitations.

I have no doubt that Plesner will garner much support (she probably already has an army of supporters). There is even a FaceBook group in support of Plesner and her campaign. If LV treads wrongly and insists on going down the libel road, it may find itself in more of a fix than it bargained for.

Will this fiasco hurt LV in the long run? Maybe not. With annual sales of billions, and growing, LV’s main target audience are the mostly the well-heeled with cash to burn. It’s not a mass-market brand. Still, would this hurt LV’s brand reputation and how it is perceived? We can only wait and see how will LV react to the current situation. Their PR agency has their work cut out for them, and in this age of social media, they better have a good online strategy in their pockets too.

New beginnings

Gosh! It has been 3 months since I’ve updated my blog. The main excuse being my course… I’m learning that juggling work and studies is so tiring! Now that the term is over, I can kick back and have a little break. Well one interesting thing is that inspite of not updating this blog, I discovered that I am still getting traffic, sometimes from the most faraway places, oddly enough. I hope to regain my momentum and blog more regularly, especially on PR and social media.

And of course, this month I start my new job at Sony Asia Pacific, where I’m part of the regional webcomms team. This is the first week so far, and already the learning curve is steep.

On a more personal note, I joined the big Three O club this month. I thought I was suppose to be like either very scary or exhilarating, depending on how you look at it. But I was like, hmm, okay. There’s other changes that I’m making in my life and here’s to a brand new start to brand new beginnings.

p/s Keep coming to my blog!

The eight things meme

I first saw this meme on Jeremiah’s blog, and then on Connie’s blog. It’s amazing how fast information spreads in social media. Well to keep the meme going, here are eight things you didn’t know about me:

1. I’m a natural right-hander but I text/sms with my left. If I try to text with my right hand, I end up as slow as a retard.

2. I started out playing the percussion in the school band. It was so boring until I insisted and got started playing the trumpet. Then I got seduced by the french horn and ended up as a section leader. It has been 8 years since I last touched any of those instruments.

3. In secondary school, the teacher who marked my composition script for the GCE ‘O’ levels preliminaries came and told me in front of the entire class ”I read your composition and I nearly fell off my chair. Keep up the good work and you will go far.”

4. I have seven hamsters (!) at home. It was just two originally and one day we noticed the male one humping the female one, and a few months later, out popped five babies.

5. For my first job, I worked in the Government service in a statutory board doing web communications stuff and loved it. I still have fond memories of the place and my ex-colleagues.

6. My favourite country at the moment has gotta be Japan. I was there a few months ago and how can one not be amazed at the culture, the politeness, the scenic beauty and… the food! Oeshii ne.

7. I have fairly high myopia (over 800 degrees each eye). I’m afraid to go for LASIK because I’m convinced that when the laser is zapping my eyes, my eyeballs will move and I’ll go blind.

8. I’m a tech freak and have an insatiable urge to change my mobilephone every six months. Next up, the iPhone.

Merry Christmas & Happy new year!

May our light shine brighter
May our love grow stronger
May we grow in grace and go in peace
May we have courage to walk the road less travelled
May we have strength to overcome all obstacles
And may the new year bring renewed hope for all things good

Here’s wishing everyone, and you my dear blog readers - a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Photoblogging

Some of my favourite pics from my recent trip to Japan.

PR and reputation management

While in the process of completing an assignment, I came across a recent article by washingtonpost.com highlighting how Google is being used to manage our online reputation. Because of the simple fact that Google indexes millions of pages a day, information previously only accessible via hardcopy records are now freely available over the internet. If there is an online identity, there is online reputation vis a vis social networks, blogs and community oriented sites like YouTube.

The article mentioned a new company called Reputation Defender. I visited their website and found that, unsurprisingly, most of the founders and management team are actually non-communications professionals with prior expertise in areas like technology, law, software application and business development. The magic behind online reputation management is actually search-engine optimization (SEO) techniques. Theoretically, anyone who knows their way around the internet and who are tech-savvy can employ SEO techniques in the same way Reputation Defender does.

I feel that the problem with such “reputation specialists”, is that without the benefit of  formal training in public relations, how would they see the bigger picture because the truth is you cannot separate online reputation from the ‘offline’ reputation because one affects the other. These should be managed synergistically. Reputation management therefore is best left to PR professionals. In the same vein, PR and communication agencies must learn to harness this technology because reputation management, whether online or offline, will be an important element in the communication mix of the wired generation. As PR continues to evolve, online reputation management will become an important aspect in the overall communication strategy.

MDA’s rap video makes it to TechCrunch

The infamous MDA rap video has made it to TechCrunch, and not for the right reasons. Great. Now besides being known for banning chewing gum, caning, archaic laws that criminalise homosexuality, we’re going to be known for bad rapping. Well done!

Kevin from theory.isthereason has a really funny post on the entire monkey business.

IBM report: The Advertising Armageddon?

I read with interest the recent report “The End of Advertising as We Know It” issued by IBM which forecasts “greater disruption for the advertising industry in the next five years than occurred in the previous 50.”. The report can be view here.

Whoa. Very doomsday-like with IBM predicting drastic upheavals in the advertising industry. I wouldn’t exactly call it the end of advertising. This is the beginning of a critical shift that will cause traditional advertising to evolve, NOT go kaput. We are beginning to glimpse the changes that are to come: Google’s OpenSocial and Facebook’s SocialAds, which delivers personalised advertising content based on users’ interests.

Remember the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report? There were scenes that showed him running through a metro train and a shopping mall in the midst of his escapade from the baddies. Very tiny machines scanned his retina and flashed personalised ad contents based on his purchasing history, interests etc.

When I saw that, it was all very wow and futuristic. In probably 10-15 years time, we may not be too far off from that future.

iDrool… iLike… iWant… the iPhone

Finally I managed to get my hands on an iPhone. Before anyone get all excited, no it’s not mine. And since it’s not an authorised handset, I shan’t reveal the source.

The first thing that hit me was how incredibly slim the iPhone is. Anorexic even. It feels very solid and not at all plasticky like how I’d imagine it to be. It just makes you wanna caress it, damnit.

The SMS function is simpler and easier than I thought. Even though the keyboard looked rather small, I managed to punch the correct keys most of the time. Maybe it’s because I have slim figure fingers. Still, I much prefer a tactile feedback especially since I SMS alot. The keyboard and spelling dictionary (not T9) takes some getting use to though.

The pinching actions when viewing photos or surfing the web is quite a novelty, IMO. Most of the other functions are a breeze and most users shouldn’t have a problem.

Having touched one, it just makes you wanna go out and buy one immediately. Should I get the iPod Touch as originally intended or just hold out for the iPhone’s Asia release? Decisions, decisions!

Updated 1 Nov 07:
P/S On hindsight, it will be better to wait. The second generation iPhone to be released in Asia will probably be 3G-enabled (and will hopefully contain none of the alleged hazardous chemicals).

Blog action day: iPhone an environment killer?

Ok ok, so I forgot I was suppose to blog about environment related issues on the 15th October… but it’s still 15th over at the US… so technically it still counts.

I just read an article at TechCrunch where “According to Greenpeace, the iPhone contains toxic brominated compounds (indicating the prescence of brominated flame retardants (BFRs)) and hazardous PVCs.”

Does this spell the death of the iPhone? I doubt so. Most electronic products are made up of non-biodegradable materials so they just sit in landfills when chucked away. But at least it’s creating awareness about electronic waste that most people aren’t aware about.

Another environment-related entry I posted earlier can be found here.

I’ll also be waiting to see how Apple will respond to this. Will Jobs be ready with another PR spiel?