By Stephen Rhodes
It’s hard to imagine a more complete cock-up than the rollout of the H1N1 vaccine.
First, there was year-long campaign The Pandemic is Coming. Chicken Little, in scrubs, paraded on national television, warning about the dire consequencies of a pandemic.
And not much happened.
Over the summer it started all over again, withThe Pandemic is Really Coming, honest, and you need to be vaccinated.
Canadians were largely ambivalent until Evan Frustaglio, a 13-year-old hockey player from Toronto, died on the eve of the H1N1 vaccine becoming available. Demand for the vaccine jumped overnight, catching health officials by surprise. I guess they didn’t believe their own clippings.
Suddenly there was a shortage of vaccine and only high risk candidates could be vaccinated.
About 4,000 people die in Canada every year from seasonal flu.
“By the time all the dust has settled on H1N1, somewhere between 200 and 300 people will have died in this country,” says Dr. Richard Schabas, chief medical officer of health for Hastings and Prince Edward Counties in eastern Ontario. who was interviewed on CBC News The National last week. He says public health officials and journalists have overstated the importance of the swine flu.
Either way, the challenge for health officials will be to convince a growing number of skeptics about the importance of the H1N1 flu shot.
If the public-relations effort to this point is an indication of what’s to come, we are in for a long winter. Worse, health officials have lost public confidence and their seemingly ad hoc approach to communications, and mixed messages, aren’t helping.
Panic is driving the bus because there is not enough information, and I don’t mean daily media reports about the latest screwup, to make an informed decision.
Communications strategy? Apparently not.
What do you think?












By Jeff Bowman
Who has seen you naked?
I have noticed the same thing and it’s not just teenagers. People walking along the street, in movie theatres, restaurants, board rooms… all with an almost insatiable need to stay connected. The other day I was standing on the main street of a small town in Ontario and I accessed 











By Jeff Bowman
The last three weeks sitting housebound with my leg plastered and elevated, has led to some interesting discoveries. I guess it took this period of imposed inactivity to make me realize that there are alternative ways to make a business work, and despite the mountain of things I can’t do, there are many things I can.











Godin’s point is that the Internet has eliminated the barriers of geography, cost, and time. Blogs and social networking tools are building new communities of common interest where thousands, even millions of people, join forces around ideas, causes, sports team and product lines. In Facebook alone, 250 million people are interacting.











As a country our investment in innovation creates a competitive advantage. Canada has no shortage of good ideas; but we fall short with the support needed to transform our inventions into innovations. We have a long list of innovations in agriculture, mining, forestry and fisheries. And there is acrylics, basketball, the Canadarm, the electron microscope, five-pin bowling, goalie mask, insulin, jolly jumper, kerosene, pablum, paint roller, rollerskate, snowblower, telephone and th zipper. Oh, we also invented Superman.
By Jeff Bowman
Today’s salespeople need to be experts in all areas of their product offering; they need to build a strong relationship with the buyer; they should be able to accurately profile their own company, the competition and their customer and be able to probe to uncover opportunities and needs so they can offer a clear benefit for every feature of their product or service. Keep in mind, a product feature without a stated benefit to the buyer means little in terms of needs satisfaction.











I talked about better understanding internal and external factors and suggested each conduct a simple 




