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Word reaches your humble correspondent’s ear that Lee Potts, who is an integral part of the fabulous Visual Being group blog, has started yet another project.

Obviously with far too much time on his hands {grin}, Lee is running solo this time with Breaking Murphy’s Law, a blog about all of the things that can go wrong when you are a presenter or when your are supporting someone else’s presentation efforts.

Here’s a couple of excerpts of recent posts to the blog:

• PittWatch:Video Clip of Brad Pitt on Idol Gives Back — Skip to about 0:50 to catch the stage manager’s amazing grace under pressure as she deals with Brad’s microphone malfunction.
• joeyhagedorn.com: Home-built Blu-Ray Laser Pointer – “In a completely dark room it is even possible to see the beam in air…” You definitely don’t want to give one of these to one of the Jedi Knights I wrote about last week.
• Blinded by the Light - Despite what the title leads you to believe, this isn’t part two of last week’s “letting loose with the laser pointer” post. This week I’m going to talk about how a room’s lighting scheme can render your visuals invisible.

Here’s a snippet of Lee’s prose style to encourage you that a) Lee has ‘lived’ and intimately knows this stuff, and b) the old boy has a great sense of humour!

I don’t want to overdramatize the way it went that morning. None of the things that went wrong were that big of a deal. It’s just that I was running a little behind. Everything had been going well. Then one of the laptops failed. There’s nothing quite like getting the much dreaded blue screen of death in this situation. Okay, no problem, we had backups. Switch the bad machine out with a good one. Boots up. We’re good, just a small, unwelcome adrenaline jolt. Who needs coffee?

Not so fast. Now the remote control isn’t working. Jiggle connections, check the dip switches, reboot the laptops, change batteries. Okay, one of those things fixed it. Anyway, the speakers have been prepared to deal with a remote failure during their presentation so we’re good. Everything’s working on the back end. Now it’s time to take care of the rest. In other words, the projector and the actual image I’m projecting.

Whoops, when did that happen? At some point, while I was busy putting out those other fires, someone came in and changed the room lighting. We had spent more than a few minutes earlier that morning making adjustments so the room would be be dark enough for the slides to show well, but also bright enough so the audience could take notes and not fall asleep after the lunch break.

Unfortunately, The-One-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed (the client team’s head honcho) thought that the room was now too dark and had ordered that some be adjustments made. Problem is, one of the recessed lights that went around the parameter of the ballroom was now shining directly onto the screen, almost completely drowning out and making unreadable anything being projected. It looked a lot like the screen in the picture up there to the right.

But wait, there’s more…

But it’s not just Lee’s new blog that I wanted to highlight here. It’s also the way that Lee has gone about informing the blogosphere about it.

Here’s Lee’s initial email to me:

Hi Lee,

How have you been? I believe we corresponded when you commented on and linked to Visual Being, my last major online project.

I just wanted to let you know that I’ve started yet another (I think this is the fourth) new blog and it might be of interest to you. It’s called Breaking Murphy’s Law (http://www.breakingmurphyslaw.com). Unlike Visual Being, it’s not a group blog and I’m remaining focused on a very narrow range of subject matter. It’s about all of the things that can go wrong when you are a presenter or when your are supporting someone else’s presentation efforts.

I hope you find it interesting and useful.

Regards,

Lee Potts

As I replied back to Lee,

G’day Lee

I will DEFINITELY blog about this!

Cheers and with bon homie from one Lee to another :-),

As soon as I had sent that reply, I realised I had more to say (regular readers will be shocked by this revelation… not! {grin})

P.S.GREAT blogger outreach, my friend!

I *may* have to comment on that too, since there is sooooo much shite flying around at the mo about clueless pr; it obviously shows that bloggers know how to liaise with each other (even if you might have done it via a personalised mass mailing, it absolutely shows that you understand your audience).

To which Lee replied

Wow, thanks again. I just try my best to follow the Golden Rule with this sort of thing. It might not be very fast or efficient but it’s better for keeping things human.

It’s that last sentence that gets me in the heart:

“It might not be very fast or efficient but it’s better for keeping things human.”

Please note that, corporate marketers and PR practitioners — it may take you longer to put together a blogger relations/outreach programme, but it will be worth it in the long run! If your clients kick up about the billing time, send them over to this post for an explanation!

Stumble it!

Filed under: PR, blogging, customer service, ethics, marketing, public speaking, tools

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