Online Public Relations Thoughts

I know I wrote that I wasn't going to post for a few days but this is hard to believe. A good 75% of Americans are still depending on slow dial-up connections for the internet, assuming that broadband gained a few percentage points in the last year. It is difficult to imagine life in the slow lane. We changed over to broadband about six years ago now, and in that time, we have forgotten the madness of modems that worked sometimes and not others.

I can understand the difficulty of rural broadband service because my father lives in a farm district where it is not available but I cannot believe that 75% of America lives in similar circumstances. There aren't that many people in the Red States.

I'm taking a few days off to celebrate Thanksgiving with the family. I'll post again by next Monday. Happy Thanksgiving.

I'm always impressed by what we don't know. Living on the edge of knowledge is more interesting than cramming facts. In the December Scientific American, an article asks a simple question, "Are Viruses Alive?" It turns out this question has no answer because one must first define living versus dead at a biological level then determine if the parasitical nature of a virus qualifies it as living or mechanical process. No one can agree on either fact set yet.

I thought this fascinating and mentioned it to an acquaintance who is an immunologist and an executive editor of a science publication. Her response? "Who cares?" Her view is that it isn't necessary to know whether a virus is living or dead to work with it. That same attitude arose when quantum mathematics were developed in the early 20th Century. Einstein fought against quantum concepts but scientists used them because they explained things.

Pragmatism also should be the view communicators take. We shouldn't care what medium we use as long as we achieve results we want. Dividing media into disciplines is interesting, but who cares other than those doing the dividing. CEOs want results. They don't care if communicators use media placement, advertising, direct, web or something else. That's why when we counsel clients we should be careful not to bias advice toward what we know best. We should know the attributes of media and recommend what is best for a client whether we do it or not. It is honest and builds credibility. How many of us actually do that?

PR practitioners should be worried about the Federal Communications Commission crackdown on foul language and sex and violence on the airwaves. There may well be a First Amendment issue. On the other hand, being a parent of a 9-year-old, I don't want her exposed to some of the language and visuals that pass for free speech on television. It seems to me there should be some middle-ground solution. We don't need censors crawling over the 500-channel universe. We also don't need to worry about what our children will see when they turn on the TV. Solutions have been proposed in the past like the V-chip. They haven't worked. It is an issue in which PR should be involved. Has anyone been saying anything?

There are communications issues for which there is no solution. This is one. Anybody who has paid the least bit of attention to nuclear power has been worried about waste more than meltdown. All the PR in the world is not going to get anyone to agree to a Yucca Mountain near them. Now, scientists are saying just let it sit in cooling pools around the nation. It's like letting the garbage build up in your home under the assumption that science will figure out a better way to pick it up some day.

This story is old, but it should be noted anyway. The CEO of Segway is leaving -- Segway, the marvel machine that was supposed to change the world. If there is a case study for hype and not true PR, Segway is it. The two-wheel, self-balancing machine is a solution looking for a problem. It is finding a few applications but none of the world-changing uses that were forecast.

Segway deserves the bad press it gets.

There are some actions that set one up, even if there are good reasons to take them. The House Republicans just did that by changing its rules and letting Tom DeLay, the House Majority Leader, keep his job although he is facing an indictment. The howls have begun. No matter what Republicans say to justify it, nothing can make it look better.

Similarly, John Kerry just landed in hot water because he reported he still had $15 million in the bank after his election campaign. His own party members are angry with him and said he should have spent the money or given it to candidates in tight races. That amount of money makes it seem that Kerry didn't give the race his all. There are good reasons for Kerry to have that much on hand, but nothing Kerry can say will calm angry Democrats.

Sometimes politicians' sensitivity to perceptions fail them.

Google has done innovative things, but what they just released -- Google Scholar -- is impressive. Try it at http://scholar.google.com/. Here is why I am amazed. I went in and typed "Public Relations" and got 27,500 hits led by books and articles on PR. Not bad at all. I then tried the name of one of my books, and it came back with hits and a box for my zip code. Upon entering my zip code, Google Scholar told me which libraries have my book near my house and the distance to each. Wow!

This is a useful tool.

I have been helping my 9-year-old with Spanish. It reminds me as we tangle with conjugating verbs - hablo, hablas, habla, hablamos, hablais, hablan -- that how one says something affects how one thinks about it.

Verb conjugation is not something English speakers know. It has been difficult to get her mind to expand to a concept of a verb ending that signifies an actor. I kept telling her that once it clicked, she would never have trouble with it again. It's a different way of thinking in Romance languages.

That's easy to say but not easy to understand. The notion of a familiar "you" versus a formal "you" doesn't exist in English. One has to put on the culture of the speaker to grasp the distinction. I warned her that when she starts Latin in a few years she will also have to know noun declensions as well as verb conjugations. This was too much to bear. But, in my long ago and exceedingly vague memories of translating Cicero, there was grace in the formation of a Latin sentence that English cannot equal. There also was emphasis that escapes English linearity. Only one great English writer I can think of matched Latin expression -- John Henry Cardinal Newman. It is said he rewrote his sentences up to 90 times before they achieved the finish he sought.

It is easy for us with simple journalistic sentences to think we are universal communicators. We aren't. We miss the subtleties that are second nature to native speakers.

I wish language instruction in the US were better than it is. We need cross-cultural training to be true citizens of the earth. Instead, we tend to assume everyone will learn English. So far, we've gotten away with that arrogance.

The failure of exit polls during the presidential election got me to thinking about trust. We trusted the polls because they are -- well -- polls and they are done right, of course, and they have been accurate in the past. But the exit polls were wrong for a variety of technical reasons, and we should not have trusted them. This incident led to a chain of reasoning about what we trust when we don't have the evidence for belief. This chain led through vast reaches of society. We operate all day long every day on secular faith, and we rarely test beliefs. We don't have time. This paper discusses the nature of trust and its deep impact on communications. As usual, I am happy to know what you think about it.

The new paper also marks a milestone of sorts. There are now 45 white papers and essays on online-pr.com. They are here, and they cover a broad range of interests. All of them are free for the taking. I only request that if you use any of them that you credit online-pr.com as the source.

For years now, I have witnessed curious economics at the Pennsylvania train station in New York. For those who have never visited the station, about 100,000 people a day pass through: They enter it from outdoors and from subways underground.

The economics has to do with popcorn pricing, and it says something about communications and people -- topics PR practitioners are concerned with. Here is the situation. Near the station's entrances, popcorn vendors sell their product for $1.50 per bag. They use the same bag and the same popcorn. There is no difference. Yet, just 50 steps into the station along the same corridor, there is a popcorn stand that sells its product for $1.00 -- again, using the same bag and the same popcorn. For some reason, vendors at doors sell for higher prices than the vendor in the middle of the station. It isn't a case of foot traffic. Tens of thousands of people pass the stands. Yet, $1.50 stands always seem more crowded than the dollar one.

I have never figured out the reason for such price disparity. All stands have clearly marked signs and use the same machinery. People know of two prices, but it doesn't make a difference. Moreover, when the dollar stand lifted its price to $1.50, it lasted but a day or two and the price fell back. It's not branding because all stands work the same way. It's illogical.

What does that tell me? Logical argument is a fraction of economics and communications. Preferences override rationality for no good reason. We have always known this to be the case, but to see it in action just 50 steps apart is eyeopening.

Before you ask, I buy popcorn at the dollar stand. That is how I stumbled on the disparity in the first place.

I have never been one to celebrate military service and trumpet that I am a veteran. I served in the Army and left with a wish that the Defense Department bury my records at the St. Louis, MO depot where such files are stored. (They may have too because years ago that depot had a major fire and a million or so records were lost.)

However, I am proud of my nephew serving in Iraq, in spite of my cynical attitude. He claims he isn't busy and he could be doing more, but he also notes that mortar rounds and rockets have been dropping about 200 meters from his position. That he doesn't seem too worried speaks of professionalism born of training. The Armed Services don't have to worry about their PR, as far as I am concerned. They got a black eye at Abu Ghraib earlier this year when untrained MPs tortured prisoners, but for the most part, troops are doing a difficult job well.

Back when I was in the military -- so long ago that Santa Claus had black hair -- there was little discipline and less success. We had potheads lighting up in front of NCOs and no one said a word. The reputation of the service was at rock bottom, and it wasn't for another 10 years that people started to look up to the services again.

Reputation counts in military services as it does anywhere else. The pride my nephew shows, even with criticisms about the stupidity of some situations, comes through clearly. I don't know whether he will stay in the service, but if the rest of the men and women about him are as good as he is, this country doesn't have a problem.

Like others yesterday, I tried Microsoft's new search engine. I got a message, "temporarily unavailable." This story explains that the service crashed a few times the first day. In Microsoft's defense, the company released the engine as a beta, but on the other hand, it seemed like a repeat of an old Microsoft public relations failure. The firm has time and again allowed customers to shake down software for it. That is, Microsoft software, despite testing, is usually buggy and requires an update to fix what should have been repaired in the first place.

That a beta version of its search engine should go down immediately was symptomatic. I'm sure the folks at Google and Yahoo! didn't mind a bit.

In defense of Microsoft, their code is millions of lines and testing cannot cover every permutation of peripheral and software usage. However, Microsoft's code, critics say, is just too complicated. If the company simplified it, there would be less chance of failure. I am not a programmer nor software expert, so I cannot tell if that contention is true. I do know I have had my share of Microsoft glitches, some nearly fatal. Nor have I forgotten the Microsoft employee from years ago who said the company did not make errors and blamed me for a bug that was clearly theirs.

Microsoft often is accused of arrogance. That's why when it fails, competitors and long-suffering customers take satisfaction in seeing the company humbled. It might be better public relations if the company were less driven -- but then, it might not be Microsoft.

This paper on the Russian experience during the battles of Grozny in Chechnya has interesting PR advice. Although the paper is old, it is chilling when one considers the task of American soldiers in Iraq. Lesson number one is something every PR practitioner knows but maybe not every soldier.

You need to culturally orient your forces so that you don't end up being your own worst enemy simply out of cultural ignorance. Many times Russian soldiers made serious cultural errors in dealing with the Chechen civilians. Once insulted or mistreated, they became active fighters or supported the active fighters. Russians admit they underestimated the affect of religion and culture on the conflict.

Doesn't this read like what happened and continues to happen in Iraq where Sunnis and Shiites battle for supremacy? There were news stories today that Sunni mullahs might call for a national boycott of elections as a result of the invasion of Fallujah. This would weaken the new Iraqi government from the outset.

In fairness to the US military, there was understanding of the cultural divisions in Iraq before they entered the country. That didn't make the invasion and subsequent guerilla warfare any easier. There are situations in which cultural divisions are too deep. We saw that in Bosnia. We see it in Iraq.

Long-time hatreds don't go away in a year or even 10 years. Communicators must learn to step gingerly about them and avoid setting off one group or another.

I'm blogging today over at http://www.iaocblog.com along with Sally Falkow, Steve Rubel, Kevin O'Keefe and B.L. Ochman. Stop by for an interesting discussion.

Flexibility is not a criterion of the young. I have learned this bitter truth while teaching a 9-year-old to sing and play the flute. The young memorize and spit back what they think they hear. They read melody from memory and memories play tricks. The worst part is that once the young learn something wrong, it is almost impossible to correct it. Their brains read out the same mistake over and over and over. An instructor has to play tricks with their minds to get them to hear a mistake and present melody accurately.

What has any of this to do with PR? It should be a lesson to look at a target audience closely and to understand limitations before sending a message. With the young, one should choose familiar patterns their conservative minds can grasp easily. Asking them to stretch too far is asking the impossible. A few might do it: Most cannot.

I suppose that is why most of us should not write for the young. We are past the point of understanding the barriers, and we cannot grasp why children have difficulty with obvious ideas. But then adult populations have trouble as well. Perhaps then, if we can communicate to the young effectively, we should be able to communicate to adults powerfully too. An interesting idea.

PR practitioners are not in the job of dictating values, but they should be sensitive to them. Values are an essential element to communications.

Thus, it is interesting to read of the conflict about values -- the contention that the Democratic party doesn't understand the values of Red states. I'm no expert, nor do I want to be, but it seems there has been a divergence from a value system built around Judaeo-Christian ethics -- the 10 commandments, if you please. Certainly, the original Constitution was written by men who held the values of the Decalogue. That value system ruled for the better part of 200 years in the US with bitter differences, such as the right to own another human as property.

As the 20th Century progressed and diversity in the national population increased, it appears the values system for many became what the Supreme Court decides more than what 10 commandments stipulate. Hence in the 21st Century, we seem to have one-half of the country with a sharply different values system than the other half. I have no idea whether this interpretation is correct but it is useful -- for me anyway.

As a PR practitioner, I know I should not enter Kansas with the mindset of a liberal New Yorker. No one would understand the message I bring. We use the same words but have fundamentally different meanings. To me, a civil union rather than marriage for gays might be acceptable. To someone else, that is an unforgivable breach of a line that should be hard and fast in the history of Western ethics.

We are sensitive to differences in value systems the world over, and it is ironic that we seem to have overlooked our own country. This election is a reminder that we need to monitor differences and make sure they don't get in the way of client objectives.

But what about our own value systems? Should we make them known? For the most part, I don't think so. However, if a client is doing something that contradicts our beliefs, we have a decision to make as PR practitioners -- whether to bend principles or to leave. This is the challenge all whistleblowers have. It's never simple and never easy.

This article should be obligatory reading for every blogger who thinks he or she can say whatever comes to mind. You can't -- not yet, at least. International libel law is unclear when it comes to the internet and several court cases have only spotlighted how confused it is.

What this tells me is that the vaunted right of free expression in the blogging universe is fiction. If someone takes offense, whether in the US or Russia or outer Mongolia, that person can come after you -- if not the person, the company or the government. That should send a chill down any blogger's spine. The cases cited in the article are old but the effects of the cases are not.

Read the article carefully. You'll be glad that you did.

The wild talk the day after the election hints at the lack of trust many Americans have for the President. Since trust is at the root of communications, there is no way the President can reach these individuals with an effective message. He will have haters for the next four years.

This will be a public relations problem for the president. He needs to seek reasonable individuals in Congress who are willing to negotiate, or he will have to try to force bills through, if he can. It would be better for him and for the country if there were a center.

It is hard to be in opposition and trust, but it can be done. One can dislike another and everything the other stands for but work with that person for the betterment of all. It is a matter of both parties taming their egos and moving forward. Regrettably, this has been forgotten by many, and it makes relationships difficult, if not impossible.

Like it or not, we pursue public relations in an era when relationships are not a primary goal of many citizens' groups. They want power: They won't compromise. Fortunately, our Democracy was set up with divided power, so the strong could not overcome the weak. That was Madison's insight, and weak government has been America's salvation for more than 200 years. It forces relationships to get anything done. But it also means government can remain static and nothing happen -- a real possibility in a divided country. Perhaps we need Rodney King again. "Can't we all just get along?"

Whenever a new media tool like blogging appears, it is a matter of time before ham-handed marketers try to exploit it. Inevitably, they don't know what they are doing, and they mess it up. Thus, this story that I found on Marketing Vox. The ad agency probably sold the client on the idea of starting a blog, then didn't know what to do with it. "I know," someone said. "We'll stick ads on it." I can just see a creative director saying that was a great idea without the least understanding of what the agency was getting into.

There will be a lot more of this foolishness before there is a better understanding of how one should blog for marketing. The advertising agency involved should have known better. That it didn't is in itself a story. I expect PR people to be behind the media curve. I don't expect advertising types to be so backward.

Now, PR bloggers don't send me nastygrams. You aren't behind the curve. It is those hundreds of folks on either side of you who ask what a blog is when you mention that you are writing one.

I have been working with new technology in PR since the early 1980s, and it has always been the case that PR practitioners are slow to adapt anything new. I had thought marketers were better. I guess not.

As a blogger, it is only fair to let you know about the accuracy of my powers of observation. I made two predictions about the election that is still going on at this hour -- both apparently wrong. I had also made a prediction about the World Series -- also wrong. All this goes to prove that in some areas I should give prognostication a rest. Fortunately, I did not burden you with either prediction, but I did tell my friends and family who will mock me as they should.

There were two predictions I made that turn out right, but they are small consolation for a seemingly major error. (It's still not decided yet.) Since I made all predictions in ignorance, I am not so unhappy about the outcome -- 50%. But then, as my friends' said, so did eveyone else.

This election was pure noise in which facts and accuracy did not survive. How the electorate could make a decision through that noise should be a matter of deep study in PR. There are times when truth cannot survive allegations and spin. I say this referring to both sides, because both were indulging in invective that was distressing to witness.

Regrettably, PR is not a useful tool for every occasion. When opponents spend hundreds of millions of dollars to scream at one another, the volume alone does not allow one to think or to make a considered decision. Campaigners have known this for millenia, however, so why am I surprised? I'm not. I'm sad that appealing to base instincts continues to be so effective.

This blog will remain silent on the election. Too much has been said already. Go vote.

Reputation systems are used all through the internet, especially on ecommerce sites, such as eBay where anonymous buyers and sellers exchange goods and services. But they are also used to evaluate products, teachers, movies and a host of other things. They work through user-submitted ratings accumulated to scores.

PR practitioners need to be sensitive to them because maintaining and enhancing the reputations of individuals and organizations is a fundamental part of their mission. That is why a new essay describing these systems, their benefits and shortcomings is now on online-pr.com.

I wish I could report that the systems have significantly enhanced reputation management, but they haven't. They are an aid to users but they are not a panacea. There is still plenty of hard work for PR practitioners to do in monitoring the internet and remediating slanders or other comments about clients.

Take a few minutes to read the essay, and let me know what you think. It summarizes extant information about these systems and shows where they work and where they go wrong.

Scare stories are always good around Halloween but this story is frightening. It is one more reason why companies must guard their reputations online. The idea that one would blackmail a company by sending out child pornography under the company's e-mail address is more than heinous.

What the company did in response to such extortion is the best one can do -- expose it publicly. Tell the world someone is trying to blackmail you and how they are trying to do it. So, if the criminals do send the e-mails, the public will know it didn't come from the company.

Inevitably, there will be upset and outraged customers. To them, the company must apologize and say it is doing everything it can to capture the crooks. The company also needs authorities to acknowledge publicly this is what is happening to offset the damage.

It is chilling to think that criminals will try anything to bring down a company's reputation online. Be warned.

I've tried not to say too much about the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) in this blog. Why attack an organization that is nominally doing good for the practice of PR? But, if the numbers I read in the Oct. 27 Jack O'Dwyer's Newsletter are accurate, the society is on the edge of irrelevance. O'Dwyer claims that of the 12 biggest PR agencies with 17,400 employees in 2001, there were just 617 members of the PRSA that year and that has dropped to 316 members in the 2004 PRSA Bluebook. That's slightly less than 2% of the employees in the top 12 agencies. You can bet that most of the 2% are juniors and not middle managers or senior executives. If this is true, PRSA has about as much importance to PR as the Democratic Party to the Bush/Cheney reelection bid.

So what is PRSA good for? I was not able to answer that question years ago when I left PRSA and gave up the APR I once possessed. The society had no importance to work I was doing, but I figured it was me. Apparently, it wasn't.

I am fully prepared to talk to anyone from the PRSA who can prove the society is relevant to the PR business, as long as that person can produce facts and figures to back the case. I suspect, as Jack O'Dwyer contends, PRSA serves small agencies and academics who value the APR. The rest of the PR world has gone in a different direction, and PRSA apparently made no effort to keep up or lead.

If true, it is sad. There is room for an effective association of and for PR practitioners. I'm not sure PRSA is that association.

It has been written here that there is less work in PR. This story from the AP is an example of what happened. The graduates of 1999 are still struggling to find a place in society five years later. They knew they were wanted until suddenly, they weren't, and there was nowhere to go. The individual in the article was in PR when she lost her job. After years of struggle, she's back in PR, but she needs years to dig herself out of debt.

It was different when I started. There wasn't much work in journalism, where I wanted to be, and pay was terrible. There was work in PR, and pay was enough to live on. I was out of work when I got my first PR job and thankful for what I was given. I lived alone and in a lower middle class neighborhood at a rent I could afford. It was years before I saw a paycheck that allowed me to think about something else -- like better housing. But I didn't have expectations.

It was a pity society misled so many into thinking they were going to do well from the beginning and rise to riches. What happened in California was a Gold Rush and like the original Gold Rush of 1849, it lasted five years until most went bust. I suspect the class of 1999 has a hard-earned conservatism about money and lifestyle. It was and is much needed and not so bad. How many SUVs do we need on the road anyway?

Academic freedom is fiercely held on most university campuses, but not always. There are occasions, as Duke University has learned, that free speech can be a public relations nightmare.

That is what happened when the campus allowed the Palestinian Solidarity Movement to hold a conference (Registration required) on the property. The worldwide Jewish community erupted in rage. Their anger was exacerbated when a Benjamin N. Duke Scholar and senior at the university wrote an editorial in the campus newspaper, The Chronicle, that told the Jewish community to stop complaining among other things. That ignited threats and hate mail that poured down on the young man. The Jewish community then displayed an Israeli bus on campus that had been bombed as part of its protest.

All this happened with a brand new president who had just stepped into Duke's top job a few weeks before. So, now, Mr. President, what do you do to calm alumni and keep contributions from drying up?

This is the kind of PR nightmare no one wants, but the president has to deal with it. It will be full employment for him for awhile. A question that remains is whether he would dare invite the Palestinian group to the campus again. If he wouldn't, then he has another PR problem -- one of academic free speech.

With some issues, one cannot win.

Only in California where love of cars equals love of bean sprouts and environmentalism would you find a story like this. It's hilarious to think the governor could show off an eco-friendly Hummer -- the brutish war machine converted to monster road vehicle. The irony of it seemed to be lost on the AP writer until the last paragraph when he writes these delicious sentences.

Though Schwarzenegger arrived at the event in a low-pollution vehicle, he left in a gasoline-powered SUV that typically gets about 15 mpg. Officials said the hydrogen Hummer needs to refuel every 50 miles and there are only about a dozen fueling stations across the state.

The sentences send up the PR event and show it for what it was -- a hokey tip of the hat to clean air that was as unreal as caps on Beverly Hills teeth.

There are some PR stunts that aren't worth doing because no one will believe them. This was one. Anyone who knows about hydrogen fuel-cell cars knows they are at least 20 years off, and there is little liklihood they will ever achieve commercial feasibility. If the governor was going to show a Hummer converted to a real fuel-saving vehicle he should have shown a hybrid-power vehicle that uses batteries and an engine like the Toyota Prius.

Instead, the PR stunt left one laughing at the impracticality of it all.

A well-known political pollster used to say campaigns are a one-day sale. Everything one works for comes down to less than 24 hours in which people enter a booth and make a choice.

The length and bitterness of the presidential campaign is a cause for wonder in that regard. There is no doubt where I live, for example, that many people dislike the president and support challenger John Kerry. How do I know this? From signs on lawns and stickers on cars. These outnumber the Bush-Cheney signs by a huge amount. In fact, I have yet to enter a community in my New Jersey travels where the reverse is true.

Lawn signs are a public relations tactic with extra force. One has to commit to allow a sign to be posted on a lawn and to keep it there. The voter has made up his or her mind and wants others to go along with the choice. Nieghbors know these people and their word of mouth is public for all to witrness. That, it seems to me, has more force than a billboard or an ad on TV that has been bought and paid for.

In a close election like this one, lawn signs have a force they might not have at other times. A voter can see his or her neighbors' selection and are tempted to go along. I don't pay attention to lawn signs most of the time, but this year is different. They have become clues to which way this deeply divided election will go. My guess is New Jersey will be solidly Kerry. I won't place a bet.