Online Public Relations Thoughts

A PR person working with Secretary of State Colin Powell showed how not take control of an interview Sunday. You must have read by now that the woman had the camera panned away from Powell and told the famously grouchy interviewer, Tim Russert, that the interview was over. Needless to say, Russert did not take intrusion into his interview kindly. It took the intervention of Powell himself to keep the interview going. Powell told the PR person to back off and the interview was concluded, but Russert got his revenge by making it known far and wide that it was "press management gone berserk."

In the press aide's defense, the interview had run over its allotted time and Powell's people had tried to get it wound up, but Russert wouldn't stop. Powell, a much smarter media relations person than his aide, knew Russert should be allowed to run on.

I can appreciate the quandary of a PR practitioner who tried too hard to take control. There are times when you need to get a person out of the room and on to the next appointment. You have to intrude in one way or another. That's your job. But, there are journalists who don't care a fig for your job. They are going to continue their interviews until they are done with whatever they have to ask. I have played the heavy in the past, but I'm not sure I would have the courage to do what Powell's press aide did, especially with such a hard core interviewer like Russert.

I'll bet she never does it again.

The crisis on which we have been working is cooling. There is no new information out that harms or helps the client. That doesn't mean stories have stopped coming. They haven't stopped, although there are not as many of them.

My "favorites" are conspiracy theorists who see subtle connections between the client and all sorts of nefarious things. These people come out of the woodwork in every crisis. The most annoying are self-styled experts who purport to know the events and what has transpired then proceed to make factual errors throughout their articles.

The client is apoplectic about the errors that continue to appear in print despite the company's best efforts to correct them. A prestigious newspaper made a whopping error the other day that even amazed me (I'm used to seeing this sort of thing.)

During the cooling off period we will try to correct most of the errors but we know that once in the media, errors tend to take a life of their own. "If X said it, then I can say it." The failure of the media to check basic facts is disturbing. There is a lot of shoddy journalism in the world. But, if there weren't, what need would there be for public relations practitioners?

A colleague related a story to me a while ago of a conversation he had with a movie studio PR person. It was one of those "I-don't-believe-I'm-hearing-this" discussions.

This PR person had a story -- not a compelling one -- that supports an upcoming movie. He was demanding that it be on the front page of the B section of The Wall Street Journal, or he would take the story to a contact at the Los Angeles Times. My colleague pointed out that the story was missing some facts to make it more interesting and anyway, there was a better chance for it elsewhere in the Journal. But no, that wasn't good enough for the PR person. He wanted the front of the B section of The Wall Street Journal or nothing.

I have been hearing more and more tales like this and have experienced a few myself. There is a loss of balance in the PR industry and a loss of understanding of the differences between advertising and editorial. To the discredit of some news media, they have brought this on themselves. But for the most part, PR practitioners have fallen under the spell of marketers who believe in control, control and more control over the message. These are marketers trained in advertising and promotion where they can dictate what is said. They do not want to understand the nature of First Amendment media, and they don't grasp its credibility either. For them, column inches are advertising equivalents -- nothing more or less.

It saddens me that PR practitioners have fallen for this cant. PR has gone back to the future. It started with payola at the beginning of the 20th century when publicity agencies paid newspapers to run columns on the wonders of the telephone. Payola was a part of the media through the scandals of the Nixon era when newspapers and other media started an overdue cleanup.

Some of the worst practitioners of control PR are in Hollywood where publicists bar access to celebrities and stars unless they get the cover of People Magazine or a guest shot on the Today Show or another quid pro quo. This cynical horse trading has spread through too much of the industry. It is the fault of bootlicking editors and publishers who are more concerned with numbers than honesty. It's past time to put a halt to it. There are honest editors, reporters and publishers who refuse to kowtow to the dicta of marketers and advertisers. I prefer working with them, even though they kick me or my clients once in awhile. They are honest and their readers know it.

I got the newspapers this morning and vowed to read about anything other than the crisis I am working on. Anything. The crisis is so consuming it is all I think about. That's a lousy way to keep perspective on a world, which is moving forward despite my concerns. It feels strange, however, reading about things that have the significance of feathers on the breeze.

I am tempted to say, "Don't these people have better things to do?" On the other hand, what they are doing is better than what I am doing -- using public relations to help protect a client under assault. Times like this remind one that frivolous things have a serious purpose. They help us forget worries and to speculate on the merits of the newest wines or funkiness of designer furniture.

One can go too far into crisis or into any job, for that matter. I think of the publicity types who are consumed with the presidential campaigns now. They are past exhaustion and pushing hard. They will push hard for months more then one individual will go to the White House and the other will go home. All those who worked for both candidates will learn how to live again. They might be surprised to find the world didn't care that much for their work. What was monumental to the publicists was incidental and hardly thought about by most.

We can never forget that.

The hardest damn thing to get in a crisis is a fact. One could dig a gold mine in less time than it takes to dig pertinent data from a file drawer. And yet, one is hampered fatally until facts are in hand and one can prove that an organization has not acted irresponsibly.

I have watched a client get bashed for a week and a half because the facts were missing for a critical situation, and the people who have them are never around, it seems, or they don't remember or something. Whatever the case is, we didn't until today have facts we need.

In a grueling exercise this afternoon, we collected essential facts about a process that has been the target of criticism. The client has done a fine job with the process but a person criticizing the client in public apparently doesn't know that. We need to get facts out there to media who are listening to the person and are unaware there might be another side to the story. But it has taken SO long to assemble the facts and even today, we couldn't get all of them straight. There was still a flurry of phone calls to find out if A was true and if B was false.

I don't know how one resolves situations like this but there ought to be machinery in place in all companies for sensitive parts of a business through which key facts are digested and stored in a central location for quick retrieval. I hope in time we can get that done. It would save everyone's nerves -- and temper.

When one is fighting back against floods of allegations, it is frustrating and frankly, miserable to be on the short end of facts. Whenever you think you have made progress to rebut an allegation without substance, something happens to shift the spotlight. There is a new crisis, a new focus, a diversionary tactic by someone somewhere that destroys the force of the point you want to make.

When everyone is pointing at everyone else, the case is worse. You don't know whom to trust. In fact, you dare not trust anyone. People are looking at the end of careers and maybe, jail time. They will do anything to avoid that -- and they do.

So we sit in teleconferences and debate what we can say. It's back and forth and forth and back. We think this point might be forceful. It will change the debate. It's great. There is a pause: The lawyer begs to differ. Not so quick, he says. We aren't done with the investigation, he cautions. "But haven't we made the point public already sotto voce? Let's shout it from the rooftops." Another pause. The lawyer says he hasn't really interviewed enough people yet nor tracked down nearly enough data to allow the point to stand on its own. So why did we mention this point at all? One can hear air rushing from the room. It's off to another point and another still. Finally, we give up for the evening. There is nothing to say that we haven't said and that isn't strong enough to rebut a witness on national television.

Another long day of crisis peters out and everyone goes home. We'll try again tomorrow.

One insidious enemy in a crisis is exhaustion. With 24-hour news cycles, it doesn't take long for individuals to grind down in 12-hour days, seven days a week.

There is constant news monitoring, the drip of new or repeated allegations in the media, an intense scramble for facts in unclear situations, hours of press release writing, more fact checking, word negotiation with lawyers and senior executives, publishing, followup, interviews and start all over again in the morning. The pace is relentless. Ride the horse or get off and watch the media, the public, competitors, government regulators, the world condemn you and your company for something you are not even sure you did.

For proud CEOs who built their companies the hard way and were enjoying success till the moment of the crisis, the shock of sudden allegations is almost more than one can bear. It is understandable a CEO will take a hardened view of fighting every step of the way in every way and never giving up. But, there is nothing one can do to stop news. It is an ocean smashing against the organization and drowning morale, deluging customers, smothering normal workflow. One almost forgets there is a business to run, but there IS a business to run. There are employees to buck up and customers to call. There are contracts to fulfill and new business to sell. All that work must be done in the hours left over from fighting the crisis. That too adds to exhaustion.

I have watched in a space of a week and a half normal people taking on a glassy-eyed appearance, staring into space, yawning uncontrollably and marching forward with less enthusiasm by the hour. They know they have to get the job done, and they will, but the stress will stay with them for a long time to come.

The hard fact of the situation is that they also know -- and the world too -- that they might not win the war of perception. The world will tar them with an ugly label for years to come. All of the company's good work will be framed by one ugly incident over which they had no control whatsoever.

In this instance, it is easy even for the CEO to say, "what will be will be" and to give up. For those who don't give up, leadership is steadiness of purpose and confidence that communicates itself to the weary troops. For some leaders this comes naturally: For others, there is acting, a performance that must be convincing in every detail lest even the tiniest gesture betray the corrosive effects of the situation to everyone about you.

I have been watching this go one with a client for days now. It is amazing, and I cannot recall any crisis manual for public relations that has discussed the effects of exhaustion on reputation management. The manuals need to be rewritten.

I had a painful task today of turning down media interviews for a company. There were plenty of them too from the largest networks and from print media large and small. You must understand that for most of my career, I have worked on accounts where one had to work hard to get one media interview, and it was sometimes impossible to get two for products, services and companies that are boring or obscure.

All of a sudden, a client has a crisis and media flood to the client's doorstep from every part of the earth. It was astonishing to the client who couldn't keep up. She would answer one call, hang up, answer another, hang up, answer another. Her voice mail box overflowed. She had chits spread over her desk with scribbled names and phone numbers. Cameramen were in the lobby asking for the CEO. She and the CEO couldn't eat, couldn't relax, couldn't breathe. Finally, she made a wise decision. She wasn't going to get to all the interviews: Some had to be turned down. She asked me if I would do it while she tried to whittle the pile still before her.

So I dialed and tried to make nice while saying no. It is an odd feeling. This is, of course, what entertainment publicists do regularly because stars and starlets are often hot commodities. Publicists can demand covers on People Magazine and get it. They can negotiate with Vanity Fair. They can flip off networks that have annoyed them and go to the gleeful competition.

I have never done that and don't expect to do. About the nearest I got to power in public relations was many years ago when I handled the test drive fleet for Porsche Cars North America. People would beg me in order to borrow a 911 for the weekend. I often had to say no: It was easy because if a journalist could not show substantial circulation or audience, it was too expensive and risky to loan a high-powered sports car.

One might ask why the company with the crisis didn't hold a press conference. The answer to that lies with the crisis itself. For many reasons, it was undesirable to have a press conference, and it still isn't. So, we continue to turn 'em down. I might even get to like it someday. I hope not too much because the crisis can't continue forever.

In a crisis, paranoia is good. Anything bad that could happen will. In crises, things go wrong in ways one would never expect.

That is why it is good to think about what might go bad and how to maintain control if it does. The problem is so many things could go wrong that it is a useless to forecast everything. Risk managers find obvious dangers and develop ways to prevent them. PR managers don't have the luxury of spending days thinking about failure. We work on the fly.

That is why I was impressed with a client who is dealing with a problem. I was going to send her an options memo related to the crisis when she called, and I discussed it on the phone with her. She had thought of everything I was going to write plus a few more things I had not. I didn't send the memo. I figured the things I had not brought up she had thought of too. It is useless to give advice to someone who knows what to do.

Still, thinking of contingencies and controlling them are different animals. Some risks cannot be controlled. If they happen, one deals with them. For example, one knows employees could spill company secrets in public. We trust employees not to do that, but we know they can, and we know we cannot prevent them. The way to minimize that risk is not to have secrets that can embarrass a company to the point of extinction. Get rid of dirty laundry at once because it will show sooner or later. No one can keep secrets with the Internet.

I am now thinking of contingencies for this crisis for two months out. I'll bet my client is at three months out.

In a full-blown international crisis, it's damned hard to maintain perspective. I'm learning that anyway. The moment-to-moment changes in the story, deluges of news calls, myriads of articles appearing on Web sites and TV and radio reports overwhelm. One can no longer feel where the story is going and how it might turn out. It is enough to keep up with the news cycle. But losing perspective is dangerous, because it is then one gives bad advice to the client.

We had a case today, and I'm not sure who is right. (I think it wasn't me.) It was a question of what to do next in the media, if anything, about a huge crisis. My boss took a position I found alarming. I opposed him because I said it was too early to expose the CEO to questioning that my boss' position would open the CEO to. We went back and forth and for and back. It was then I noticed a colleague standing at the door who is good about judging things. I asked him listen to the argument. He did. There was a long pause, and he said he favored my boss' position. His reasoning -- the CEO needs to show visible leadership in this instance. I thought that response over and realized he had a point, but I still felt the risks are terrible if something should go wrong.

I argued for a delay and got it. We proposed an alternative to the client that the client liked and is doing. We will come back to the original proposal in a day or two, depending on the media climate.

There is no right or wrong in a case like this. There is more or less risk. One has to know the situation and personalities well enough to know the risk to take. I think late tonight that we should propose the boss' idea, but I want to see what is happening. However, there might not be a day or two to spare. The story is moving fast. I am left with a question, "Am I too conservative?"

When a bad story hits, there is much to do. A first step is to look at the reporting closely. Is the story accurate? Is there a gross error somewhere? An attribution that cannot be correct? An insinuation that crosses the line into outright error?

A reporter might be accurate but the person who gave the facts to the reporter might have been inaccurate or using the reporter. This is common in lawsuits. Litigators seek publicity to pressure the other side or sway the jury pool. To get it, they build a package of "facts" and statements that show how deeply their clients have been harmed. By time the reporter talks to the other side, the journalist already has half-written the story. The other side, meanwhile, might not feel free to fire back, especially if it will battle charges in court. Further, the facts might not be as sexy as the allegation. Many a piece on 60 Minutes over the years came directly from litigators who were seeking to put an opponent on the defensive.

The next step is to build a fact sheet or Q&A that asks the worst possible questions and provides facts that refute them or put them in context. There is no percentage for clients in distorting this process: It would haunt them in the media or in the courtroom. Facts without insinuations or aspersions should show how the charges cannot be true. Swinging back with countercharges is good for selling newspapers and boosting TV ratings, but it is lousy for preserving a client's reputation. On the other hand, if a plaintiff is working hard to smear one, it is critical to deliver facts cogently and simply to refute the plaintiff. The brilliant example of this in the last decade was the way General Motors nailed NBC-TV for rigging tests that made gas tanks explode in crash tests. However, it is rare that one can get the goods on a news medium or opposing attorney like that. The facts are seldom that clear.

When stories aren't in error and they look awful, then one should say what the organization will do about it. There is room and justification for radical change: The public wants such action. Are heads rolling? If not, why not? Are injured consumers being recompensed? If not, why not? The CEO has to be willing to say publicly and loudly that "we made a mistake and we are going to fix it."

Finally, one has to speak or at least distribute the facts to the media so they have the other side of the story. The worst case is to get a bad story and to let it sit there while rumor and pressure and new stories build. The client keeps hoping the story's impact will go away. When it doesn't, it is usually too late to do anything. There is no gain in waiting.

All crisis manuals tell you that to fight a crisis, you start with facts. If you don't have facts, don't speculate. Well, what if you can't get facts? The dirty secret of crises is that facts you need aren't readily available and while news is breaking all about, you are desperately short of real information to pass along. Hence, news outruns the organization, and the organization is placed in a perpetual catch-up mode -- a lousy place to be.

I have long thought that is what happened to Union Carbide at Bhopal. The cloud of poisonous gas escaped and enveloped the shantytown outside its gates and was gone before the company in Connecticut could react. Meanwhile news media rushed to the site and broadcast horrendous images of the dead sprawled on the streets -- men, women and children, old and young. The ghastliness of the incident and the surge of rumors left Union Carbide on the defensive from the instant it heard about the accident or sabotage, depending on your interpretation of what happened.

In other words, the company never had a chance to defend itself. Lest you think this was a special situation that rarely repeats, let me disabuse you of that notion. Any company with foreign operations in remote parts of the world faces the same situation. All the crisis preparation one can do will not make up for an inability to get facts from a remote site in time to handle a 24 hour news cycle.

Like it or not, international crisis work is battling ghosts.

Alice Marshall of Presto Vivace in Fairfax, VA had comments on my post about waiting for a bad story. Here is an edited version of what she had to say.

I think employees should be called in and briefed in person. I think the sales/marketing people especially should be briefed beforehand. I also think customers and suppliers should be sent an email. But remember, that email could be forwarded anywhere or wind up on a blog, so, that could be counter productive.

One more thing, if you can catch the news organization in an out-right fabrication (extremely rare, but does happen) you could put the report and the documents in question on your web site and persuade bloggers to link to them.

I agree with most of what Alice has to say. It is important to brief people beforehand to prevent panic. Sometimes, however, there is not much time to get this done. I am aware of a situation in which an investigative reporter suddenly called a company and claimed he possessed a document that stated one of its employees was guilty of a criminal act. The company did not have the document nor did it have evidence that the employee was even accused of such an act. What should a company do? You wouldn't brief anyone because the story is too hazy. Unfortunately, two days later at least three members of the news media had the same document, or one similar to it. Now what do you do? The company still could not get confirmation as to what the document was, nor could it track down who authored it. There wasn't much action the company could take. Apparently, an attorney somewhere had released the document as part of a defense of a client not related to the company. The company was caught in the backwash and its reputation imperiled.

I do like Alice's comment that one must be careful about sending e-mail because contents will find their way outside. One should never write anything in an e-mail that should not be seen elsewhere. This is true for e-mails in general.

As for posting the facts that rebut a bad story, this has been done in a few instances. Most organizations wait until the story has appeared. One or two organizations of which I am aware actually posted interviews with reporters on their Web site before the story appeared. They were concerned what the reporter might write. It takes courage to do that -- or fear.

My thanks to Alice for her comment.

Great public relations happens in odd places and in odd ways sometimes. This is a story about a baseball park, and it is not about the many promotions that baseball teams run throughout a season. It is about WiFi. The San Francisco Giants baseball team has outfitted its entire park with WiFi connections so businesspeople playing hooky at the game can do their e-mail on their laptop computers while watching the game. It's a fabulous idea: I wish I had thought of it myself. In addition, the Giants have provided fans with a Digital Dugout that feeds them scores and other information during the game.

It would be great to report that a PR person on the San Francisco Giants thought this up, but that isn't the case. The idea came from the Chief Information Officer who uses information strategically throughout the ballpark to benefit the players and increase interest for the fans. One feature he is installing now is neat. You can order food from your seat and have it delivered to you rather than getting up and missing half an inning while trying to buy three hotdogs and two beers.

Great PR is everywhere. It just takes creative thinking, and, as this example proves, anyone can build better relationships with the public.

I'm late in commenting on this story. It was reported last Friday that PR budgets and jobs are still down in the US. Here is the essence of the study:

While an advertising rebound may be under way, the public relations sector is seeing budgets and staff levels waning, according to a study released last week by the USC Annenberg Strategic Public Relations Center. According to the study, PR budgets last year among companies on Fortune's "Most Admired" list were down 5.5 percent from 2002. (In comparison, total ad budgets were up 6.1 percent in 2003, according to TNS Media Intelligence/CMR.) PR staffing in 2003 dropped by an average of 15 staffers within Fortune 500 companies, according to the study.

My wife has been reviewing resumes for a client who is hiring a PR manager. She was astonished by the high quality of responses she was reading for a mid-level job. There were people with qualifications that beggar mine and they were seeking work at a far lower level of income than they had been getting.

No, the job deficit is not over in PR: I am at a loss when it will end. I have written here before that we have gone back to the future. We are an industry that looks more and more in size like the early to middle 1990s before Internet madness set in. I'm not sure PR will ever return to its size during the Bubble. On the other hand, I'm not sure it won't either. It is possible through organic growth that the industry will return to its former size, but it won't be through the dramatic hiring of five years ago. It will be a slow and moderated return that will leave fine professionals on the street and searching for work outside of PR.

This speech should be mandatory listening for every marketer and public relations counselor in America. (Scroll down to the video link) The speaker, David Weinberger, is the former senior Internet adviser to the Dean campaign and a person widely acknowledged to be an expert in Internet marketing. His talk is about the lack of control that marketers have with the Internet. Marketers no longer control messages. They no longer exclude consumers from bodies of information.

I have ranted here about the change in control the Internet has brought to public relations and corporate communications. I'm glad my views are not solely my own. Yet marketers persist in the belief that they can control messages. That comes, unfortunately, from business school training where everything is about managing and control. Listen to the whole excerpt. It's worth your while.

There is a quiet period before a bad story appears. In that time, clients work to prevent the story from happening. (They can't). They ask an agency to tell them what to do. (The agency tries to prepare them for the worst.) Eventually the story comes and expectancy is rewarded by the force of an awful report. By then, however, the client and the agency will have feared the worst, and the story might not seem as bad as it is. But, it might be worse, and it is hard to tell until feedback comes from customers, employees and others.

I have been thinking about this because we are waiting for a bad story that will embarrass a client, and there is little the client can do. The client didn't create the problem, but the client will be hurt. That's harder to bear.

How should the client react? One thing a client shouldn't do is to hunker and hope. It should tell customers, employees and others what it expects and how to interpret what the story is likely to be. This requires care because one doesn't want to tip off a reporter or others to facts that can create further embarrassment. The client shouldn't tell the tale but say there will be bad news and the client is dealing with the situation.

This won't prevent rumors. In fact, it will spark them, but it is better than handling surprised customers and employees who are easily swayed in vulnerable periods. One shows leadership in advance of the trouble and keeps it when trouble comes rather than hiding and hoping to maintain control.

Last week, the Pentagon learned about the limits of control it has over the Internet and imagery. I wrote then that PR should be more concerned now about responding to charges than attempting to control them before they are released. A day later I stumbled onto the following story that shows how little control there is. When a state cannot bar prisoners from the Internet, even if the prisoners are abusing it, then one has no control at all.

The story is disturbing. For every 100 prisoners that use the Internet responsibly, it takes one taunting families of murder victims to put society on guard. But, it appears there are few ways for states to stop inmates from publishing on the Internet, especially when web sites will post prisoners' surface mail.

So, if states cannot control their prison populations, what control do companies have against former employees that air dirty laundry about them? Hence, it is smarter now for PR counselors to prepare defensive responses than try to hide unseemly business.

I am familiar with a case in which a falling out between two managers resulted in a public law suit and the attorney filing the suit merchandised salacious aspects of the suit to the media. Of course, the media bit, and it showed on the Internet immediately as well. The targeted party in the suit had no time to defend himself before charges against him were available worldwide to anyone who knew which URL to use. Fortunately, in his case, few did, but enough learned about it that national media called and inquired. The only mistake the attorney made was not pursuing a more proactive Internet strategy. Had he done so, the situation would have been deeply embarrassing for the company. But, it won't take long for most attorneys to learn to do this. That means PR counselors must be ready to respond in kind. "No comment" won't work, if charges are serious and the person well known.

Say three times to yourself, "There is no message control in a crisis."

The Pentagon is learning the hard way the limits of control in the Internet era. It has tried to prevent photos being taken of coffins bringing dead soldiers home to the US. But a contractor took some anyway and released them on the Internet where they are being passed about quickly. The Pentagon fired the contractor but that makes little difference.

It is all useless attempts at control. The Web has torn down restrictions on imagery and the barriers will never rise again. The Pentagon is learning that lesson now.

But what does that tell the public relations counselor? Don't try to stop photos from being passed about. It will happen, even with grisly and emotionally devastating pictures. What one does is to prepare for the outcome of such images showing up on the Internet. There are several responses. One is to publicly deplore the use of the photos (and risk alerting everyone to their existence.) Another is to remain silent and hope they go away without much comment. A third is to sue and to demand they be removed from Web sites (which makes a high-interest case out of the photos.) A fourth is to attempt to punish the person(s) who took the photos or those who released them (a futile effort because others will pass the photos on.)

No option works well, especially if imagery is of high public interest. It is easy to get images into the ether with few or no fingerprints that identify who placed them there. The contractor was not intelligent about this and could have avoided repercussions.

PR still thinks about controlling messages. It should be thinking more about defending against them.

The governor of California (and if you don't know who he is, where have you been?) dedicated the first-ever hydrogen gas station for refueling autos yesterday. The story is here. I had to laugh as I read the story because it is hardly clear that hydrogen will ever become the fuel of the future. That is also the conclusion of a story in the May 2004 Scientific American that cast doubt on the concept.

Of course, that is not the worry of the governor. I suspect the governor cares not at all whether hydrogen goes anywhere. What the governor wants to show is PROGRESS. We're doing something about the air and fuel crisis. Hydrogen is a symbol and not a reality. In fact, the betting is that unless there is some massive technical breakthrough, hydrogen fuel cells will never be a reality.

Where is our more efficient engine going to come from? Why the same internal combustion engine that we have been using since the late 1800s or its cousin, the diesel. But that isn't sexy. It is much better to talk about fuel cells and the pie-in-sky promises of them. It's better PR.

I've seen a lot of pork barrel PR in my time, and this is one more example. California is not going to pay the tens of millions needed to make hydrogen fuel cells a reality. California doesn't have the money. Everyone will go to Washington with hat in hand and a romantic story about the future. That's the way this is done, and it is as fraudulent now as it was when it was first tried on George Washington. (Back then, it was canals that were going to change the transportation landscape of the country. George himself invested in one.)

It pays to be a cynic as a PR counselor. The old beat reporter who has seen it all is better fit to be in PR than the starry-eyed promoter who believes his own tales. But then, no one wants to hear the truth. The truth hurts: It doesn't make you free.

Environmentalists have damned the Bush administration. The Bush administration defends itself lamely against accusations that it has dirtied the air and made the environment worse.

It's interesting rhetoric to watch because it is couched in belief sets that could not be more opposed. That is why I was interested to hear a CEO deeply involved in the energy industry say last week that the US will depend on oil-, gas- and coal-fired plants for at least the next 20 to 25 years and maybe longer. With the price of oil and gas rising, that will mean more coal-fired plants than either of the other two fuels. The US has thousands of years of coal in the ground and a diminishing supply of oil and gas. What this tells me is that the rhetoric of both sides needs modification. The environmentalists need to stop fighting the inevitable, and the Bush administration needs to look again at how to make coal and oil-fired plants more environmentally acceptable.

But I think I can say this won't happen soon. The two sides have no desire to accommodate, and all the public relations gestures in the world won't heal the breach. Simply put, they detest one another -- or at least, it seems that way. Many public issues result in standoffs, and they appear to be insoluble challenges to public relations counselors. The only way one can make progress is to get off the stage and to talk quietly in the background where neither side feels compelled to posture.

I knew a woman who did this years ago when the first environmental clashes arose in the 1970s. Feelings were so high that meetings were kept secret from both environmentalists and industry leaders, other than those in the room.

Not all public relations should be done in the open. There is space for backroom work, and counselors shouldn't be afraid to move silently if they can get an issue off dead center.

Public relations does not have to be public.

The San Francisco Chronicle is giving a lesson in how to explain a complex story through following the production of a single bottle of wine. A story about the series is here.

It interests me because too often in my career I have been asked to explain complex topics that resist white paper treatment or a press release. Sometimes, one needs to trace something and show its impacts in every direction, which is what the writer of the wine story is doing.

Take, for example, a topic that is almost impossible to make interesting -- network management. There are many companies that do this vital work, but what is network management? More often than not, it is the nuts and bolts of keeping a system operating like plant operators at a utility. You never question how an electric plant stays on line until lights go out. So too with network management. So, how does one make network management interesting, or least readable, and compelling from a public relations point of view? You do as the writer about the wine bottle has done. You go to the trenches and document what it means to manage a network just as the writer is documenting what it takes to make a bottle of wine.

This requires digging and both the client and the practitioner must take the time to do that. What happens often is that a client becomes impatient and wants "ink" without building the story. The result is no story -- or as a colleague puts it, a MEGO story. (My Eyes Glaze Over.)

Few stories in business are so compelling that they sell themselves. It takes work, sometimes hard work, to build public relations positioning that is credible and effective.

I finished the opinion piece on Saturday afternoon and shipped it off to my colleagues for comment. Thirty pages of handwritten notes from the business conference boiled to 1320 words. It has a dour warning about the next 20 years. We are entering a period of scarce commodities and overcapacity worldwide. There won't be enough jobs for any country.

But all isn't lost. The US and Europe have faced similar circumstances before and will again. The challenge is what they do about it. The CEOs who spoke at this conference were frank about what they are doing. They are going to the lowest cost source for manufacturing and intellectual capital as long as these sources meet quality standards. And guess what? They do. Millions around the world are striving for a lifestyle that approximates what Americans, Canadians and Europeans have. They are willing to work for less if they see a way to advance for themselves and their children. As one CEO put it, how can one discriminate against people like that by keeping jobs in North America or Europe? The answer is that one shouldn't, and the CEOs won't.

What this means is that both Europe and America have a challenge to produce goods of sufficient complexity and value that other parts of the world can't readily produce them. That's not easy to do and it might require fewer people than factories of yore. So what do the unemployed do? There is no answer yet. The CEOs didn't know, and I sure don't.

Several sounded a note of caution to Americans. The US educational system is broken. The US must have more scientists and engineers to invent the future. Right now, however, it is hard to get kids out of highschool who pass standardized testing. Meanwhile, several states are rebelling against the idea that they should have to pay for such testing. It doesn't sound like the political realm is ready yet to meet the challenge.