For some bands, an arrest for cocaine possession is just another week of media attention.

But for any entertainers trying to market themselves to children, drug arrests, unwholesome sex acts or disrespect for religion can be career stoppers.

The initial response from The Barenaked Ladies website said Steven Page had pleaded not guilty and “the validity of the charges against Steven will be strongly contested.”

While there’s a lot of societal tolerance for booze, “soft drugs”, and addictions to bad haircuts, the murmurs of understanding seem to die out when cocaine, meth, heroin or any of the harder drugs are involved.

While the cheerful, energetic lead singer’s legal case is being built, he and the band will have a lot of work to do on the reputation restoration side.

Not so much from their adult audience, who may be disappointed with a celebrity’s poor choice of mind-altering substances, but from parents who don’t want to expose their children to “bad influences.”

The behavior of children’s entertainers has always been held to a higher standard than us regular folks.

The Ladies have always been able to handle the media and their fans well. Here’s hoping they find the right combination to work through this situation.

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The interconnectedness of public relations and marketing is evident when you see a company effectively differentiating itself from its competitors. But even the most coordinated efforts have to amplify something true about your company.

Revolutionary advertising teamed up with bland media relations won’t get you where you want to be.

Setting yourself apart in the public’s mind will fail miserably if the customer experience doesn’t live up to the billing.

If employees and business partners don’t buy into the idea that you really are a different company, they’ll pass on their skepticism  to customers.

Southwest Airlines and Canada’s WestJet have been very effective creating a corporate culture that reinforces their image as friendlier, more customer-focused travel companies.

The photo (left) of CEO Gary Kelly doing his best Gene Simmons imitation reinforces Southwest’s willingness to behave differently. And that image is reinforced daily by employees’ behavior.

Basically, if you can’t enthusiastically answer the question “Why should you do business with us?“, your company doesn’t have a workable differentiation strategy.  Which means whatever you’re spending on marketing and PR can’t achieve the results it should.

And if your answers don’t ring true, your attempts to make your company stand out from the crowd will succeed in the wrong way.

So, can you explain why people should do business with you?

Photo courtesy Southwest Airlines Photo Gallery.

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This tip works for executives, employees and just regular folks.

If you can see yourself years from now talking about what a waste of time and energy your job (or relationship, or business venture) was, stop complaining and start getting out of your current situation.

In some cases, I’ve been able to renegotiate my role. Other times, the smartest thing to do was bail quickly and not look back.

I’m not advocating infidelity or corporate backstabbing. But there are some situations where you just can’t win, so stop trying.

Other Quick Tips.

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Journalists and bloggers are often willing to put up with a fair amount of inconvenience in the pursuit of a story, but when the inconvenience is the news conference you’re holding, you know there’s a problem.

Here’s the unimpressed commentary by hosts of the Evil Avatar Radio show/podcast, after the early morning Nintendo press conference they attended at the E3 video game industry conference.

Scott:  (no one seems to use last names on Evil Avatar Radio) They got us up so early, we thought, Are they going to feed us? “Yeah, they’re going to have food for you, coffee … We’re going to take care of you.” Got on the charter — the bus that they had there and drove out to Hollywood — which is a dump, by the way. Got there and had to wait and wait and wait. All they had was coffee, which is nice, but some people don’t drink coffee. … and no food, so we’re hungry.

Scott:  Then the show started, and we thought, maybe we’ll get some news here and it will take your mind off how hungry you are. Nope!

Nick:  The whole press conference can be summed up in this phrase: “Our numbers — let me show you them…. Let us tell you about how many we’ve sold, how many we’re going to sell of our systems.”

Scott:  Anyway, Nintendo killed our day, basically.

Here’s the attitude our intrepid journalists brought to the next news conference, and their coverage of Nintendo:

Scott:  Luckily, Sony had buses waiting for us when we got done. We got on a bus, and they shipped us to the Shrine Auditorium. . . . Sony f**kin’ blew Nintendo out of the water as far as coffee and food. (laughs) You’ve got to understand, I know we’re praising f**kin’ fruit smoothies, but we were thirsty and hungry…. Starving.

Moral of story:  Try not to piss off the people you’re trying to impress.

Photos via Flickr, with permission from bapenguin (his blog).

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Not all of us absorb information from text equally.

Some of us can read a passage, but without a visual cue, the information slips away quickly.

And others retain text just fine, but get bored staring at big blocks of text.

Unless you’ve decided you only want to appeal to a cross-section of your potential audience, you should use some design tricks to attract and retain readers, and to give your ideas more impact.

I touched on this topic in the fifth post on Common Sense PR: Tip - Don’t Always Rely on Text, and it bears repeating.

Don’t take my word for it. Lani Anglin-Rosales (aka laniAR on Twitter) takes Darren Rowse’s (problogger on Twitter) 9 Signs of an Effective Blog Post, and treats them visually: The Makeup of a Super Effective Blog Post

Graphic designer Charlie Pabst offers some suggestions for breaking up text with subheads and visuals: How to Make your Writing More Visually Appealing (link via Kelly Phillips Erb, aka taxgirl).

There are good examples of info-graphics and visual representations of complex ideas all around us. Just watch five minutes of CNN’s The Situation Room, and you get the idea.

Image by Eric Eggertson. Available for use under a Creative Commons license.                    

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