My wife and I have decided that the holiday season, Christmas to New Year’s day, has become much too complicated, much too stressful. We have made a decision to simplify everything we do — less shopping, less presents, less driving, less cooking. Now we have a year to effectively communicate to our clearly identified, carefully segmented target audiences.

We have determined a clear and simple message: “The holiday season is, for us, a time to enjoy each other and our family, and reflect on an important religious event.”

We are committed to message discipline.

We are committed to delivering this message in a consistent fashion throughout the year.

We are committed to engaging third-party ambassadors who can reinforce and echo our message — relatives and close friends of similar mindset.

And we are committed to enacting our program, no matter who may suggest I am Scrooge.

Happy 2011 messaging.

The National Football League has some beautiful new commercials for it’s Play 60 campaign to motivate children to get out and play, to be active for at least 60 minutes a day.

But every time I see this spot on television, it saddens me. Our culture has slipped to the point where we need a high-priced public education campaign to try to get children to go out and play.

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My 16-year-old son has just accepted a scholarship to play college lacrosse. InsideLacrosse.com did a very cool report about it. But one kid posted a comment: “He’s really not good at all.” My son could care less. But it ticked me off. It’s weird to see your son so viciously attacked online (just kidding about the vicious part) — but it is weird, and it bothered me. Fortunately, other kids posted comments like, “He is very good,” and “He tears it up.”

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I yelled at my two teens this morning for being slow getting ready for school, holding me up from getting to a meeting. My dog got very upset. First, she walked over and stood behind my wife, her tail drooping, rubbing up against my wife’s legs for “safety.” Then, she walked over to me and got up on her hindquarters, her paws up in the air, until I leaned down and hugged her. My dog gets very stressed when one of her peeps is upset.

Last week, I shared a cab with a guy who works for a large foundation. He told me that they are very involved in the First Lady’s initiative to combat childhood obesity. We both agreed how sad it is that we need major public education campaigns to encourage children to get outside and play.

I commented that, in just one generation, we have changed the nature of American childhood and, as a result, children are suffering the health consequences. I suggested that one of the biggest problems is that we have scared parents into never letting their children out of their sight. Children today are not encouraged to “get out and play.” They are required to stay in and be watched. And that, I said, may be beyond repair.

Sensational media reports have convinced parents that it is too dangerous to let their children get out of view. But, in any given year, there are only about 100 stranger abductions of children in the U.S. Of course, it’s horrible. But it’s not the “kidnapper around every corner” that the media often presents.

As we continued to talk on our way to the airport, I suggested that one of the best things we can do to combat childhood obesity is to launch a campaign telling parents that they can let their children go out and play.

Or maybe it’s to permanently cancel “Dateline NBC: To Catch a Predator” and every show like it.

I do a good bit of media training. For one federal contract, I have visited and spent a better part of the day with community-based organizations. I help them develop a communications strategy and then conduct media training. If I had a nickel for each time I heard, at the end of the day, “We were dreading this, but this was fun, just terrific” (or something like that), I’d have a lot of nickels. I like to think I’m pretty good. But I’m wondering if it’s more that most consultants just plain stink.

Perhaps it’s because when I visit, I listen. I never show up with a projector and PowerPoint. I don’t pass around handouts. I don’t stand up and give a lecture. That would be easy. I do something much harder. I lead a discussion. I listen. For a consultant, that’s risky. It means I never know where the conversation will go. It means I am never sure that I will have something to offer the group I am working with, never sure I will have the answers. It means I’m nervous starting every session.

But I guess it means I don’t stink.

First, the cool stuff. The Blogenberg legion knows that I believe in making money and doing right. This may be the coolest project to help make this happen that I’m yet to come across. The Hitachi Foundation has just launched the Yoshiyama Young Entrepreneurs program. Young people (very young to me!) ages 18-29 who started their business to both generate revenue and help people in this country who are being economically left behind could be awarded up to $50,000 over two years. Plus they get other support, of the non-dollar kind, to help build the business. The first-round application deadline is March 22nd. (Disclosure: The Hitachi Foundation is a client.)
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The weird stuff. A good-looking young woman whom I don’t know asked to friend me on Facebook. Turns out all of her friends are guys whose first name starts with Jeff. (That’s my given name though I make my dog call me Blogenberg.) She’s collecting Jeffs. She’s got some sort of Jeff Fetish. I mean, I know that science has documented a direct link between the name Jeff and virility, but I turned down the friend request.
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Because of the snow that has turned Washington, DC into a ski vacation destination, my wife is still “stuck” in the Caribbean visiting her mother. And school has been shut down since last Friday, and will be through next Monday (a holiday). My house is being run by teenagers — my kids and their friends — and a dog who is trying to steal and eat every bagel or snack I bought for the longest snowstorm. Send help.
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At least I am eating healthy. Last night, my son, his friend and me cooked dinner. We put nacho chips in a platter. Grated cheese over it. Poured leftover chili (my wife makes the best chili in the world) over it. Grated more cheese on top of that. Microwaved it. Then more chili on top. Dinner!

I really hope that a PR guy did NOT put this in his boss’s talking points: “It’s like the new Coke. This is a rebranding effort,” said Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform. “The feng shui people believe you need to take the roof off buildings to allow bad chi to escape. Let’s hope this helps.”

He was referring to the decision to remove a little red schoolhouse that had adorned the entrance to the U.S. Department of Education building in Washington, DC.

Wow.

Did swine flu finally kill media credibility? It’s an exaggeration, yes, but not too much of a stretch to say that the credibility of many working in traditional media was wiped out by the horrific swine flu pandemic that tore across the world at lightening speed last week. Oh, that’s right, there was no horrific swine flu pandemic last week. I forgot.

But for most of last week, the media did all they could to terrify us. My gosh, even our Amtrak-riding Vice President was afraid to get on the subway. The problem for many journalists is not that they became fear mongers. It’s that many (most?) Americans learned that they got better information from talking to their friends or neighbors, than watching TV, listening to radio, or reading a newspaper. That’s because to get an accurate take on what was going on, you had to either read paragraph 34 of the newspaper reports or be lucky enough to hear the lonely rational expert interviewed on TV. And those regular folks — the ones who dug beyond the media scare and uncovered some accurate information — became invaluable and trusted sources of information for countless others.

Maybe the best way to put it is this: word of mouth was the best and only vaccine for swine flu media terror.

Everything I preach to clients about messaging, presentation, and interviews boils down to this: keep the audience focused on your message. Don’t chase their brains away from what you want them to hear and understand. Somebody needed to tell Lawyers.com this.

Lawyers.com has a perfectly reasonable television commercial airing right now. But at one point, the camera zooms in on a computer screen, illustrating a feature that allows visitors to search for a lawyer by issue and location. The fields are populated by “Immigration, Los Angeles CA.”

Why do that? Why chase my brain away to thinking about illegal immigration and border crossings?

Don’t spend lots of money on a TV spot and then make one little mistake that chases my brain away.

Clients and regular readers of Blogenberg have often heard me say that the point of communication is to get the audience to understand your meaning — nothing more. I just came across the best example of this I’ve ever read or heard in Ted Sorensen’s memoirs Counselor. Sorensen was John F. Kennedy’s closest aide and speechwriter.

In 1963, 5 months before his death, JFK stood on the steps of the West Berlin City Hall. It was shortly after the Soviet Union had erected the Berlin wall. JFK famously ended the speech by telling the huge audience before him that, “I am a Berliner.” He stated it in German.

“Ich bin Berliner” means “I am a Berliner.” But, according to Sorensen, he accidentally wrote, and JFK stated, “Ich bin ein Berliner.” In his memoirs, Sorensen notes that, in common parlance, at least at the time, what JFK said actually meant, “I am a jelly doughnut.”

JFK received a 15-minute ovation. The huge crowd was not applauding because they liked jelly doughnuts. They understood what JFK meant.

The New York Times, aided by, you know, numerous websites and bloggers, has, if you haven’t noticed, declared war on Caroline Kennedy. They make fun that, you know, she says “you know” a lot. To the New York Times I say, you know, shut up.

I do a lot of, you know, media training. I tell folks that if you have a verbal tic, don’t worry about it when you are, you know, speaking in public. I tell them, you know, that I’m much more interested in them focusing on their messaging than wasting intellectual energy on thinking, you know, don’t say, “you know.” I tell them that the place and time to worry about a verbal tic, you know, is at home — never during an interview, panel presentation, etc.

So let me, you know, ask you? Did you get that the message of this post is that the New York Times, you know, should shut up, and that, you know, worrying over a verbal tic, in the moment, doesn’t make anybody a better communicator? Because, you know, you may have found this a bit irritating to read but you got the message. (Plus, were I talking and not writing, it would be less, you know, irritating.)

So just chill, you know.