Photo courtesy The Lilac Breasted Roller, via Flickr

According to a recent press release that came across my desk, a group of ocean activists recently gave Discovery Channel executives an earful about the channel’s annual “Shark Week” ratings blitz. The activists, concerned about dwindling populations of these animals, pressed the company to revisit how they depict sharks and specifically objected to vocabulary, such as “man-eaters, monsters, mindless killing machines and other like terms.”

As you might imagine, I think these activists are right on target asking the corporate suits to change their language. It matters what the company calls these animals. After all, far more citizens will experience sharks through “Shark Week” than in person while snorkeling or scuba diving.

But what really caught my eye was this: Who do you think these activists were who managed to secure four hours on the schedule of some mighty busy corporate suits to harangue them about the words they use? Was it Greenpeace? Oceana? Oceans Conservancy? The Pew Oceans Commission? Seafood Watch? Any of the other high-profile groups that stand up for sharks and other cuddly critters?

Nope. It was The Shark Group, who describe themselves as “an International Internet discussion forum, whose members live on all continents.” That’s code for a plain old Google group. Group members, who hail from around the globe, got themselves sufficiently organized to put themselves on Discovery’s radar, and secure the commitment from its execs to review the groups proposals for a different flavor of programming. An impressive accomplishment.

If you’re inspired by The Shark Group’s example and want to start your own Google Group to organize your fellow citizens, I say go for it! I have a few tips for you in this report I released last year: A Network of Networks.

Congratulations, Shark Group! Go get ‘em.

Out in Iowa’s Great Lakes country, somebody screwed up and now a bunch of fish are dying, slow, painful, needless deaths. PR pros call this a “teachable moment.” It’s a brief window of opportunity when the slow, incremental degradation of the natural world reveals itself to even casual observers. It’s some immediate, awful, tangible event that nobody wants to see happen again.

And “again” is the key word here. The thing to talk about at a teachable moment like this is the future. While the memory is fresh, your fellow citizens will be very receptive to your proposals if you point out how they will prevent this awful event from reoccurring. It’s a great time to use words like “planning ahead,” “balance,” “investment,” and of course, “future generations.”

But that memory won’t stay fresh for long, so think carefully about whether you want to use your teachable moment to push for a positive solution — or make sure someone gets what they’ve got coming to them.

Fish kills are one kind of teachable moment. Floods are another. Dam failures are another.

What else in our world could we consider a teachable moment?

Hat tip to Darryl Halling for taking this graphic shot and letting me use it. He’s a member of the Iowa Great Lakes Yahoo! group, a terrific group of clean water activists.

I dish out the critiques of others’ work pretty liberally on this here blog. But I’m ready to take it like a man, too. The Gulf Restoration Network is running a video contest, and I have prepared this little piece to submit. What do you think? How can I make it better?

The deadline for submissions is August 10, 2007. If you want to put something together yourself.

I’ve been saving this great picture for weeks, just waiting for the right moment to blog about it — but communications guru Andy Goodman beat me to it with a dead-on critique in his Free Range Thinking newsletter.

But I won’t begrudge Andy for scooping me. I’ve been reading his newsletter for years and I’m a big fan. In fact, I have modeled much of the approach for this blog — blending research, theory, and critiques of concrete examples — on Free Range Thinking. It’s an enduring and constructive approach to addressing the community’s PR needs, a welcome contrast to flash-in-the-pan blowhards like Lakoff, Shallenberger, Nordhaus, Mooney, and Nisbet who dispense criticism so freely and offer useful suggestions so rarely.

To see back issues of Free Range Thinking and subscribe yourself, click here. You’ll be glad you did.

To read Goodman’s insightful take on the photo above, click here.