Online Public Relations Thoughts

I'm on the road for two days starting today, and I won't be able to blog. I'm going to a conference where distinguished speakers will discuss globalization of business and matters such as outsourcing and offshoring. It should be interesting, and I'll bet that they say, "Globalization is here. Get used to it."

Meanwhile here is a conundrum for the public relations specialist. It is a story about high-tech wine making. Wine has traditionally been positioned as a handcrafted specialty of winemakers who follow guidelines that are thousands of years old. Now we have GPS-linked tractors and wireless transmission of humidity, moisture and temperature from the vineyard. What's the world coming to?

I couldn't help but think of how the publicist might spin this. The wine your favorite robot drinks? Digital wine? Wine with a byte? It seems to me that it is a public relations challenge to keep romance in winemaking when it is more and more like a chemist's concoction. Still, it tastes good and that's all that counts.

So the President is holding a press conference at 8:30 pm EDT today. Interesting. It seems to me that Presidential press conferences are leftover devices from an age without a 24-hour news cycle. Bush has a good reason to go before the media tonight. He has much to explain, and he needs to project an image of someone in control of the situation. But, for the most part, Presidential press conferences are an exercise in posturing -- the media preening before cameras and the President showing how he can knock off tough questions with evasive or non-answers. The public wasn't getting much out of them.

Another media device that has lived beyond its usefulness is the party convention. Today, they are huge rallies of the faithful talking to the faithful but convincing few anywhere else. No wonder networks stopped covering them.

This blog has an interesting discussion of candidates who take one position then another. The comment was from April 8 so you will have to scroll down. The point is that accusing another of flip-flopping is a personal attack and not a commentary on a political point or its validity.

Flip-flopping is not appreciated in any context in society. Look what happens to a company that changes earnings estimates because projections are too high. Their stock is sold down quickly and investors jump ship. Look at CEOs who make promises then don't fulfill them. They are removed from office.

It seems to me the proper public relations counsel is the careful qualification to avoid flip-flopping and accusations. "IF this happens, then I support that, but we will have to wait and see." This provides one with an out and from being trapped by critics later. Companies qualify their earnings estimates heavily with long and turgid lawyer statements at the beginning of every financial presentation, but that is not enough. It is better to be hedge during the presentation itself and when things don't work as one planned, everyone was warned. Even range estimates should be qualified. "We expect to reach X to Y cents per share IF the economy and interest rates stay where they are over the next three months." Some companies do this, but not all.

A push for certainty is a shove in the wrong direction. Nothing in life is certain and the future is the least certain of all. It is better to be conservative and outperform than ambitious and embarrassed.

The White House is trying to handle a devastating communication that is sabotaging every effort to get the president re-elected. That is the body count of US troops the media are keeping. Each report of a death is an announcement of another block of votes taken from the President and deposited with the challenger.

From a public relations perspective, there is nothing one can do to counter this kind of communication. The country is not united on Iraq and reports of deaths move the populace against the desires of the President. What the President is trying to do in Iraq may be right. But, that doesn't make a difference. The President has the public relations task of convincing you and you and you and you that he is right and deserves your support. By appearances, he has not done that successfully, and every attempt is met with a withering barrage calling it spin and lies.

Frankly, if I were counseling in the White House now, I would be discouraged. The US has to stop the killing first and impose a peace. Iraq needs to fall out of headlines and into the second half of newscasts or in the depths of a newspaper's first section. It has to be overtaken on Web sites with other concerns. In the last two weeks, months of work have been blown away. And now generals are determining if they should commit more troops. The Democrats are calling it a quagmire and "another Vietnam." It has similarities even though they are slim.

What this tells me is there are problems for which there are no realistic PR answers. All the "spin" in the US cannot overcome the image of a Marine with a loaded bodybag slung over his shoulder.

I don't wish to be partisan. I am interested in communications. If the White House can dig itself out of this pit and regain the confidence of the American public, my hat will be off to them for pulling off a great feat.

The old cliche about pictures equaling a thousand words is bedevilling the White House. Photos from Iraq are stronger communications than protestations of the President and his cabinet and millions spent on TV advertising. This photomontage from leftist Michael Moore has a sharper punch than the rabid speeches Moore has been delivering.

Classical rhetoric is largely silent about the power of pictures. It was focused on speech and the persuasive delivery of words. I have been reviewing ancient Greek rhetoric for an essay and the absence of visuals is noticeable. The Greeks created powerful imagery that is among the best ever in Western art. They set a high standard for sculpture and painting. Why didn't imagery get into their discussions of persuasion? It is hard for me to believe their orators never used visual aids to make a point. Both the Romans and Greeks used imagery for political and propaganda purposes, and they understood its power well.

It's a curious absence. What also is curious is that students rarely learn rhetoric anymore. It was once one of the three most important subjects a pupil learned. Today, we scarcely pay attention beyond courses at a college level. And yet, we are living in the greatest age of communications the world has known. As powerful as images are, we cannot communicate everything by pictures alone, though some try.

The principles of ancient rhetoric are still building blocks of everything we do in public relations to turn audiences to causes. But for the absence of argumentation by image, rhetoric is worth studying. Perhaps we need an Aristotle to develop principles of multimedia rhetoric to return this knowledge to its rightful place.

Sometimes one has to wonder if a person is serious. This story has my head spinning. I wonder if the writer has his tongue in cheek.

The writer advocates legalization of all steroids and performance-enhancing drugs. I wouldn't normally write about an issue like this in a PR blog, but I have been working on communicating the steroid issue for a client. I cannot see how even regulated steroids will do anything but harm individuals who take them. Our firm has developed public relations tactics on the issue, but the medical aspects are the most persuasive. One risks serious damage by taking them, as well as subverting the integrity of any game the individual plays.

The writer contends that almost everything else has improved in sports from shoes to uniforms to protection gear. Why not the human body? I almost bought that argument. Perhaps I could still, if there were a magical drug that did no harm to the body except amplify strength and quickness. No such drug exists.

While I respect the writer's right to an opinion, he has made the PR campaign more difficult. I wish he had kept silent. Some will believe his cant, and those are the ones who will harm themselves. Worse, they will be young and jeopardize their lifespans.

I'm sure you are familiar with one of the common methods of viral marketing. Someone makes an outrageous TV ad that is never shown on the air because it is offensive or explicit. The person places the ad on the Internet, so people will pass it around and thereby, create "buzz." There are sites like this one that track such things and bring them to you, so you don't have to wait for your 30 closest friends to pass it along.

A friend of mine, Pete Shinbach, sent along this viral ad today. It is hideous. One can never imagine a company allowing such an ad to be made, if Ford Motor actually did, and one could certainly say that Ford has a cause for action against those made the ad, if they did so without Ford's permission.

One thing the makers of this ad forgot is that all buzz is not the same. The old saw that one should never care what is said about him as long as someone says something is wrong. This ad fits into "bad buzz." It gains awareness, such as this blog entry, but the awareness is condemnation.

I have told desperate clients more than once that if all they want is publicity, I would give them a nickel-plated revolver. They can go to a street corner and start shooting. They are guaranteed to get publicity, but they might not like it.

Public relations works within norms of acceptability. Using the Internet, one can push norms but not too far. Of course, because many young creatives are sex-obsessed, many of these viral ads are porn in disguise. On occasion the ads are funny. Most of the time they are regrettable. The message is lost in copulation. As my father used to say, common sense is not common.

There is a hilarious story in The Los Angeles Times that discusses how the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) is trying to change the perception of those over 50 in its magazine. It's a public relations campaign for Baby Boomers feeling their joints and walking slower. According to AARP, it is suddenly OK to talk about "sex after sixty."

AARP even changed the name of its magazine from Modern Maturity to "AARP The Magazine." It has banned the term "Senior Citizen," and it has proudly announced that "Sixty is the New Thirty."

Back in the 1970s, I tried to convince media buyers that people over 50 hadn't died yet and deserved attention. I was looked upon as a lunatic. Since then, I have watched sporadic efforts to remind marketers that people live past 35. Marketers still refuse to believe it unless they sell denture cream or Metamucil. Now, AARP tells me I'm sexy.

There is a chance with the growing number of aging people that getting old won't be as much of a penalty as it used to be, but I have yet to see that. Marketers saturate America with images of youth, vigor and sex, and we want to believe their pandering. Now, AARP is trying to do the same with those of us entering "geezerdom." We want to believe AARP too, but will anyone else in the business world accept it?

It would be interesting to see a communications campaign that tells the truth about aging, but I suspect it would fall flat. In our minds, we see ourselves 20 years younger than we are. We can't accept age and we forget quickly the annual, dreaded day when we turn another year, so we can regain our self-delusion. AARP is playing to that psychology.

Today is a day when I'm going to have at least three clients all wanting action NOW. I'm nervous about it. It looks like this morning is going to be the worst period and this afternoon I might be able to work with less interruption. I don't mind this kind of pressure. I mind terribly letting clients down. I'll start work earlier and see if I can let off some of the pressure before the clients get to work. Some PR jobs are unremitting pressure like this, and I don't know how practitioners stand it. But that too makes a difference between skilled practitioners and wannabes.

There are companies, products and services that are so dull one is hard pressed to say anything about them.

There is the component maker who builds a commodity product that is buried in another product and is never seen or understood. There is the company that provides a service buried in another larger entity and never isolated or talked about separately. Early in my career, there was a company that provided an obscure insurance product to a niche of American business in which no one, even the company that sold the insurance, seemed to have much interest. I never could figure out what to say, and I was a failure in promoting it. From these humiliating experiences I concluded there are some products and services that should not be publicized. They just are. If you want to advertise them, fine, but don't try to get the media interested in what is a dull topic.

On the other hand, when these companies need awareness and cannot afford large advertising budgets, what is one to do? The first and best way is to dig deeper. Try to understand why this product and service exists and what would happen if it didn't. Sometimes that is enough to find an angle one can pursue. If that doesn't help, use trade shows, seminars, direct mailers -- something, anything -- to gain attention.

On the other hand, some products and services have such a small market their customer list can be counted on one hand. For example some auto component makers have at most 50 customers. Why do they need to tell the world about what they do? They are fine with unmarked plants in small towns away from media attention. In fact, some like it that way. All they need is to keep 50 customers happy.

I have had my share of dull topics. I've concluded that dull topics prove one's skill, not topics that sell themselves. I admire more the PR person who can make life insurance seem exciting than the PR person who promotes a hot sports car. The PR person with the sports car beats reporters away. The person with the insurance product creates many avenues to find one that half-works.

Let the PR person with the flashy product or service reap personal headlines. Good practitioners know the difference.

When a client is dysfunctional, an agency can be left in a curious position. We had such a happening. A client asked me to write a speech and to interview a fellow with good insight into the audience to be addressed. My client contact said the speech was to be 15 to 20 minutes. When this fellow heard that, he asked me earnestly and often to condense the speech to no more than 10 minutes, seven if possible. He warned me that I would lose the audience if the speech was any longer. I reported this to my client contact and went about writing a shorter speech.

I worked at it between assignments and finished a 10-minute text that I sent to my colleagues for comment. They liked it and told me to send it to the client. I did so, and my contact liked it too. She sent it to her boss.

A little later, I got a one-line message from her boss. He wrote that he had not read the speech, but it had to be 15 minutes in length. Oops. No one said that it HAD to be 15 minutes in length. I was told that it should be 15 to 20 minutes then told to keep it to 10 minutes or less.

I have difficulty expanding something that has been written and edited. This speech was honed to a good length -- the wrong length. Now I have to develop five minutes of material I don't have while keeping the flow of the original. I felt like a naive apprentice sent to get a board stretcher when a timber is short.

I'm not going to tell the fellow who asked me to keep the speech short. I'll just let him fight it out with the boss who told me it has to be 15 minutes. Meanwhile, that speech stretcher must be around here somewhere.

The events in Iraq today were meant to embarrass the White House, create a credibility crisis and get Americans to leave the country. Who knows? It might work. Mutilating bodies, dragging them through the streets and hanging them all or in part from a bridge and wires is as savage as one can expect to see from anyone.

That is the message some Iraqis want to send to the world. Not only are we not civilized, we will perform atrocities with abandon to get our way. It's a powerful message and one used by warriors through history. The sheer recklessness through which life is destroyed is designed to shock all who see it. No wonder mobs can be cowed by a few powerful and unscrupulous individuals.

But having seen that kind of savagery, what is the right response? To leave the scene as we did in Somalia, or to stay the course as the White House has vowed to do? This is what Presidents are elected to decide. We know some answers are not workable. The US could respond with equal savagery but all that will do is further rile the people and the protesters will win. The US could cave and leave and the elements of hate will win again. The US can stay the course and watch more soldiers and civilians die. That is not desirable at home and the protesters will win still again. I'm happy I do not have to communicate administration policy now. It is a deadly box from which there is no easy exit.

Old soldiers from the Vietnam conflict can say, "I told you so." But, it isn't the same. There is no world power feeding arms into the country: The weapons used are what have been there for quite some time. However, the hatred is the same, and hatred will find a way to wound even with shovels and hoes.

Make believe you are working in the White House and trying to provide public relations counsel to the President and his advisers. What would you say?

Who among us hasn't used change tracking in Microsoft Word? Who hasn't then placed the final document on the Internet in the form of a press release or something else? This is a cautionary tale for all of us. You might not have erased all of those changes stored in a file appended to the original document. That's what this fellow found when he looked at Microsoft's Web site and found changes in several places -- some funny and some not.

It's hard to remember after making final changes to get rid of stored data. One should run a specific software tool to do so. It's here.

Just for fun, see if you can find hidden data on your Web site. It might not be funny when you do.

Why is it clients call with bombshell news late in the afternoon? Why is the news sticky or worse, and there is almost nothing one can do because of a pending lawsuit or charge? These thoughts occurred to me during a recent incident.

I find bombshells interesting as public relations challenges, but often one can only listen. In the early hours of a bombshell, facts are missing, and one should never expose a client or oneself to speculation. It is especially difficult when there are multiple parties, all of whom have different interpretations of events. A client will state a case only to be corrected by another. Suddenly, all advice is moot.

I had an incident in which a client said someone was a former employee. Later, another person at the client said the individual was still employed. That one fact changed the course of our counsel. I had been giving erroneous advice on the assumption the individual had no role in the company. The person who told me the individual was no longer an employee should have known, but he didn't.

Finding facts under pressure isn't easy, especially when media are calling and on deadline. One needs time, and there isn't any. This is as much the reason for a "no comment" as anything else. About all one can do is to correct obvious errors. For example, a reporter might think an entity is a subsidiary, when it isn't, and a person a CEO, when he or she has no management role. One can address that but then, must stop. It is tempting to keep talking -- a fatal lure.

No matter how experienced one gets in handling bombshells, there are embarrassing outcomes lurking even in innocent words one exchanges with a reporter. Bombshells call for high-risk communications. That's what makes them fun.

The BBC is trying something that, if it works, can change the way TV operates -- from a mass medium to an interactive one. It is a creative idea PR practitioners should watch to see if there are applications. Here is how the news story describes it:

An interactive quiz that allows viewers to take on studio contestants from their homes is to be staged on BBC One (and)... will begin on the evening of Saturday 3 April.

Viewers will be able challenge for a prize of £30,000 or more via interactive TV, the internet or a Java enabled mobile phone.

The programme will be split into two parts - with the first 50 minutes dedicated to whittling down studio teams from four to one and finding a winning team from among the interactive contestants.

The BBC will then whisk a satellite camera to their location, enabling a live head-to-head battle to take part in the second show.

Whoever has the highest score from 20 questions will win the cash prize and be invited to the studio the following week to see if they can continue their winning streak.

If this comes off, it could change TV in wonderful ways. I wish I were living in the UK right about now to see how this experiment unfolds.

There is a wonderful blog devoted to editors that PR practitioners should know. It is here. What I like about the blog is that it takes on issues of language and expression. The latest "grump" concerns whether one should write "gay marriage" or "same-sex marriage" and why. These are not issues I spend time thinking about, so I am glad someone does whom I can consult.

The essay on communications control that I mentioned a couple of days ago is here. Let me know what you think.

Jupiter Research, one of the first of the Internet consulting firms, has all of its analysts write blogs. It's a great idea because one can follow the thinking of the researchers as they examine their fields. I spotted the following entry for March 26 and was amused. The analyst is saying what I have written for some time -- that marketers are prisoners of habits and cannot break from TV, even though it is no longer a good buy. Here is what Niki Scevak wrote:

A post by fellow Jup blogger David Card got me thinking more about advertising's supposed axiom: the dollars follow the consumer. The reality, as we know, is they don't. Measurement has a little bit to do with it (it doesn't matter if the Internet has a great measurement system if TV et al don't have similarly great systems). But ultimately the responsibility rests with the marketers and the agencies they employ. With history as a guide, they have done an increasingly terrible job. IT managers never get fired for buying IBM, and ad agencies never get fired for recommending TV. People shrug their shoulders and say it will be different in 20 years, but I am not so sure.

This is what I have criticized in PR since the advent of the personal computer in the 1980s. Our field has lagged time and again. We failed miserably with the Web and gave that medium away to others because we like what we do and the way we do it.

Yes, we are networked now and we do things differently than when I entered the field. But we found the future after it was past. I'm not saying PR should chase every new thing offered in media and technology, but we should examine technologies and media like blogs systematically. We should experiment with them to see how they can serve us and our clients.

Sadly, except for a few early adopters, I have never found that to be the case.

John Udell, a long-time tech journalist, has written an interesting discussion of how blogging helps him as a reporter.

His uses his blog to announce and validate an idea for an article and to help him find resources to report it. When it comes to finding experts, here is what he has to say about PR people. It isn't flattering:

When a story appears on the editorial calendar, I'm swamped with phone calls and emails from PR folk who want to supply me with analysts, executives, domain experts, and customers. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. I sometimes accept these opportunities, and in some cases, I learn from them. It's dangerous, though, to be led down the path of least resistance. So I rely on the blog to find other people who have important things to tell me. As you can imagine, this makes PR folk really nervous. It's their job to try to control my story. It's my job to route around that control, and the blog is a tremendously powerful tool for doing that.

He also uses his blog to talk with vendors whom he requests to correct his views before he commits them to paper. And, he is smart enough to know that when he involves readers, his blog entries promote the story that will eventually appear. After the article is published, he uses the blog for analysis, feedback and enhancement of the original story.

In other words, Udell's blog is an integrated part of his reporting and publishing. It's a great way to work and one PR practitioners could imitate -- especially in internal communications.

One last note. His thoughts about PR and story control interest me because I have just finished an essay on that topic. I shall post it in a day or two for your comment.

Here is a disturbing story that PR practitioners should note. It has to do with an accountant who was somehow associated in Google with information that was erroneous and injurious. Worse, he could not get it off the search engine. So, he had to sue for a correction against not only Google but also Yahoo! and America Online to get them to correct their records too.

Search engines can make mistakes, apparently, and when they do, reputations can be injured. While this was an error, there have been deliberate moves to "Google Bomb" lately, especially against the president of the United States. This is done by placing links in several places that refer back to a web page or phrase when certain names are put into the search engine. There is nothing to prevent disgruntled employees from doing the same to a company. For example, a union having a dispute with a company "Google bombs" it with links that take one to a Web page where grievances against the company are listed.

Over time, we should see more of this kind of action rather than less. Keep an eye on it.

I spotted an interesting discussion of statistics on a business blog called Synergy Fest. The site pointed out inconsistencies in logical thinking, especially with probabilities. The entry focuses on Bayesian statistics and raises two cases you are likely to get wrong.

The cases did not impress me so much as the reminder that we should not flaunt numbers without understanding assumptions and facts behind them. That is the problem with factoids. They sound good, but frequently they mislead or are wrong. Few challenge them, however, and they become part of assumptions. No wonder we get off on the wrong track so often.

It is hard work to look at how someone arrived at numbers being used -- hard but necessary work. The quickest way to vet statistics, however, is to look at sample size, whether the sample was random and the percentage of error. That should be standard in PR. We can save the world meaningless junk surveys or stupid interpretations that fall well within a margin of error. Along this line, it is disgraceful how journalists are writing that Kerry is ahead of President Bush by three points or Bush ahead of Kerry when three points mean nothing given the variability of the survey. It's meaningless handicapping.

There is enough bad data in the world to confuse everyone. There is no need to add to it.

This is a tidbit picked up last week from Marketingwonk. It's just one more example that nothing much is new in our business. Techniques are applied from medium to medium, sometimes with interesting outcomes. Here's the story:

Taking Lives ( A new movie - ed)...is trying something innovative online, with Warner Bros. releasing the first eight minutes of its upcoming "Taking Lives" onto the Internet. The teasing effect harkens back - in more than one way - to the 1920s, when magazines would publish the first chapters of (generally bad) novels.

Never discount anything because it is old.

We went hiking in the 2000-acre reservation that borders the town in which we live. There were early signs of Spring. Last week's snow was melting rapidly, and mud was everywhere. The waterfall down the hill was running full tilt. Our dog, normally a house animal, was pulling wildly in every direction and getting filthier by the second. He got a bath when he got home.

It has been a long winter. It started with deep snow followed by bitter cold then temperate weather when daffodils began to grow, then two snow storms to let everyone know nature controls events. It is interesting that we invest billions in weather forecasting, but there is little we can do to control weather. All we really do is track weather's vicissitudes.

In many ways, I think business is the same way. I have listened to too many CEOs complain about their companies' stock prices after all the work the CEOs have put in to raise them. In some seasons there is mud, and one can little about it. A CEO I respect once said that he wasn't going to pay that much attention to stock price. He was going to continue to execute. Sooner or later, the stock price would catch up. That is the best attitude to take.

Other than correcting error, there is little one can do to turn around journalists or analysts who don't like a company. It is a matter of performance and time. If company continues to perform and one keeps journalists and analysts apprised of success, sooner or later someone sees light. Forcing the issue as some companies do can backfire or push the companies into unhealthy decisions that harm performance eventually. That is what happened during the Bubble era.

To every season there is a time.

The current issue of Forbes Magazine has an article on McDonald's restaurants (3.29.04, McDonald's: The Sizzle is Back.) that is an example of modern management failure.

The previous CEO of the company, Jack M. Greenberg, was let go after a performance that saw the chain plummet in nearly all categories. The current CEO of the company, James R. Cantalupo, is apparently putting things back together.

What struck me about the article is a story that shows how CEOs get derailed. Greenberg was in love with a proposed $1 billion network that would send real-time sales data from 31,000 restaurants to headquarters. His head of US operations tried to tell Greenberg this wasn't sufficient for getting customer feedback. One needed to visit stores and look at their conditions -- the pace of service, the appearance of facilities and food and the attitude of the employees. Greenberg persisted with his system until he was let go: Cantalupo cancelled the project. Cantalupo went to store vistitations with mystery shoppers who check on service, food and attitude. The turnaround, according to the story, was quickly apparent.

The story was not about measurement but data blindness. It is an issue PR deals with constantly. Executives fall in love with numbers but fail to look under them to reality below. One of the finest CEOs I have met spends a large part of his time visiting locales and talking to employees. He understands the limitations of numbers. Unfortunately, other CEOs don't: They get hung up with measurements such as stock price (It must go up.) to the exclusion of operations. Or they build information cockpits in lieu of plant and store visitation.

Long ago it was understood that only the human brain with its multiple sensory capabilities is sufficient to capture the totality of an experience. It is an old lesson easily forgotten in a data-driven age.

PR practitioners, because they deal with relationships, should never be fooled by numbers. Regrettably, they are.

Nielsen//NetRatings reported that three out of four Americans Have access to the Internet and the online population has passed 200 million in the US for the first time. The service said the number was 204.3 million Americans. That was a nine percent increase from a year ago. Here is the money quote.

"In just a handful of years, online access has managed to gain the type of traction that took other mediums decades to achieve," said Kenneth Cassar, director of strategic analysis, Nielsen//NetRatings.

If you are still not thinking of the Internet in your PR strategies, shame on you.

Don't laugh. I still meet PR practitioners who put together media and promotion plans and fail to remember the Internet. I witness this time and again. Their excuse is that it is another department -- or something along that line. My reaction is amazement. How can we still talk like that in PR?

Some other news from the announcement: Women represent a higher proportion of Web surfers, with eighty-two percent or 34.6 million women between the ages of 35-54 accessing the Internet at home. Men in this age group posted an 80 percent access penetration rate, accounting for nearly 32.4 million surfers.

Remember just a few years ago when it was a medium for young techno-nerds?

Microsoft is seeing its reputation under assault from all sides. It is a powerful company, but even its vast sums of money don't seem to be enough to prevent constant criticism of its two-fisted competitiveness. This is a challenge even the finest PR counselors have trouble handling.

Bad news is everywhere. The EU is about to tell the company to unbundle its operating system. The state of Minnesota is suing the company for monopolistic practices and releasing damaging e-mails that showed how Microsoft has operated since the 1980s.

Hewlett-Packard has decided to sell PCs with the Linux operating system in China --an operating system Microsoft detests. Opensource.org has released an e-mail that purports to show how much Microsoft is contributing to the SCO patent claim against Linux. The story is here. Major vendors have now pledged themselves openly to Linux in defiance of SCO and Microsoft, and magazines like CIO are writing appreciative articles about Linux.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has been embarrassed again and again by lack of security in its software.

Would you take this company for a client? Yes, you would because Microsoft pays well and has millions of supporters. The problem, however, lies with leadership. Microsoft always intended to dominate PC software. It has done so, but at what cost? Maybe if the company were less cutthroat it would be liked more. But weakness doesn't appear to be either in Bill Gates' or Steve Ballmer's genes.

That just makes the PR problem all the tougher.

There is nothing one can do when a client is unhappy with a news article. We are experiencing such a situation. A well-known publication did a story on an executive that the executive is steamed about. Really steamed. The trouble is that objective outside observers think the article is balanced and positive.

We're mystified. We know what the executive is unhappy about: We think he is overreacting. However, try and tell that to a client. About all we can do is to focus on a way to avoid the situation in the future. The executive will give interviews, but there are things he doesn't want to talk about. So, we will show the executive how to avoid the topics. They aren't important anyway. Meanwhile, we will try to lift ourselves from the mud and get back into the executive's good graces.

Who ever said this business is easy?

Journalism.org has released a lengthy report on the state of the media. It is here. The report isolated eight trends that are important to note because they affect how we do our business in PR. Here are the eight:

1. A growing number of news outlets are chasing relatively static or shrinking audiences for news. PR needs to target audiences better through multiple media.

2. Much of the new investment in journalism - much of the information revolution generally - is in disseminating the news, not in collecting it. This helps PR when we help the media do their work.

3. In many parts of the news media, we are increasingly getting the raw elements of news as the end product. This puts a premium on accuracy. PR, more than ever, needs to keep journalists out of trouble.

4. Journalistic standards now vary even inside a single news organization. Companies are trying to reassemble and deliver to advertisers a mass audience for news not in one place, but across different programs, products and platforms. PR should package its news for multiple media as a matter of practice.

5. Without investing in building new audiences, the long-term outlook for many traditional news outlets seems problematic. If there ever was a reason for PR practitioners to learn Web skills, this is it.

6. Convergence seems more inevitable and potentially less threatening to journalists than it may have seemed a few years ago. Convergence is a fact. PR practitioners must accept that as a fundamental part of working with news media.

7. The biggest question may not be technological but economic. How do publishers make the Web pay? It is not a new question but one that is becoming urgent. We should expect to be paying more for online media as time progresses.

8. Those who would manipulate the press and public appear to be gaining leverage over the journalists who cover them. This is good and bad. While we supply more information and get it published, we also risk our reputations as PR practitioners if we are sloppy, overtly biased or too sales oriented. Good PR requires subtlety unless one is a Barnum and Bailey style publicist. Then, anything goes, but one is typecast quickly.

Read the whole summary. It is worth your time.

I'm reading a history of Mozart's last year of life, called "Mozart's Last Year: 1791." The author, H.C. Robbins Landon, went back to archival evidence, original correspondence, newspaper reports and other documentary material to reconstruct Mozart's final days. It's interesting because the man that emerges is vastly different than that of the stage play and movie called Amadeus by Peter Shaffer.

What people think about Mozart today is in no way accurate. He wasn't a wastrel touched by genius, as Shaffer would have it. He wasn't murdered by Salieri. Certainly, Salieri didn't like Mozart but Salieri programmed and conducted Mozart's music in 1791. Mozart was a middle-class householder and composer scrambling to make a living at a time when composers did not have copyright protection on their works. The man was a devoted husband and a shrewd, pragmatic operator. He wrote for instruments he had on hand and voices under contract. His genius emerged in mudane circumstances.

The public would rather believe the myth.

There was a time -- for some PR practitioners, there still is a time -- when accuracy was not essential. It was more important to titillate than stick to facts. In fairness to publicists, accuracy wasn't that important to newspapers either. The great sportswriters of the 1920s and 1930s often made up their copy. It was creative writing with an emphasis on legend.

It is easy to create popular misperception but hard to correct it. That's something to remember in everyday PR work. Getting the story right the first time helps one avoid many hours of repositioning later.

This weekend I felt like an agency that develops a campaign and then tries to find someone to sell it to.

I was asked to write a 20-minute speech for a CEO, but there are a couple of unknowns. I have never written for this CEO before. I don't know his speaking style. I don't know the topics he wants to talk about. I don't know much about the audience he is addressing. Other than that, I'm in control.

Unfortunately, this is not uncommon in PR. We often write on spec. We make something up and hope it is 60% to 75% of what a client might be looking for. We assume there will be changes -- lots of them --, so we qualify everything lest the client accuse us of being dumb.

I've never had a conversation with this CEO. I've heard him speak, but I've never seen him give a formal address. I would have preferred to read four or five of his speeches and review them on tape to determine phrases he uses, what he stresses and avoids, his manner of speech -- blunt or nuanced --, his ability to speak from text or from notes.

I was given one of his speeches from a year ago to a different audience and a pile of facts about a topic. So it goes.

I told the client I would write a detailed outline of a speech and get that approved before writing the speech itself. I wrote the detailed outline then changed my mind. The client has never seen one of my speeches and might not understand from an outline what my style is like. So, I turned the outline into a finished speech and sent both the outline and speech to the client.

This speech will not survive in its present format, but I hope it gives the client a sense of direction so the client can say definitively, "We want this but not that." If that happens, I can have the speech done quickly this week. If not, I am faced with the one thing writers fear most -- a client who can't make up his mind -- the "I'll-know-it-when-I-see-it-client." More time and angst are wasted on indecisive clients than just about anything else in PR.

So far, this client has been relatively easy to work with. I don't expect continuous revisions as happens with annual reports, but one never knows.

Wish me luck.