Online Public Relations Thoughts

I'm going to be on the road for the next week, so there will be little or no posting.

Lawyers have more fun than PR practitioners. They can write scathing letters even when they give up a fight. PR practitioners usually have to make nice.

This thought occurred to me because a while ago, we were helping a client publicize something. Suddenly from nowhere an individual popped up and claimed the client had stolen his ideas. Not only did this fellow make the charge, he sent faxes to the firm's clients and others stating the client was a thief. This, of course, upset the client who immediately called his lawyers. His lawyers researched the topic and concluded the fellow had no case. Moreover the fellow's insistence and faxes had damaged the client's reputation. My client's lawyers sent a stiff letter to the fellow, demanding a retraction and a list of everyone whom the client faxed.

So how did it turn out?

The fellow's lawyer sent a wonderfully written letter that claimed our client's letter was "replete with rhetorical flourishes, overstatement and unsubstantiated claims of damage." He then repeats the charges against my client. However, here's the funny part. The lawyer writes that the two parties could litigate or compete against each other, and it was the lawyer's advice that they compete. Huh, what?

Let's see. The lawyer sends a "Dear Sir, you cur" letter but in the end says let's forget the whole thing. Nifty. You get to have it both ways. I wish we could write like that once in awhile just for the fun of it.

But, we're too civilized.

A former colleague took a corporate PR job and has been sharing experiences that are interesting -- to me, at any rate. For one, the day he started was the day he learned his new boss was leaving. That's a touchy shift. One never knows what another new boss will want or expect. The chemistry and skills that got one the job in the first place might not be the chemistry and skills that helps one keep it under someone else. Fortunately, there isn't another boss in the offing for awhile. This will give him time to settle in without worrying about who comes next. He also has noted his duties were not precisely defined. I find that interesting because it seems to me corporations do better in packaging work than agencies.

Years ago, I flirted with the notion of going inside but never did. That was a mistake career-wise. One should have a feel for stresses inside a large organization. The problem was the PR job offered was so limited that it made no sense. At that time in major New York banks (It has since been merged out of existence.), jobs were defined so narrowly, there was little chance for growth.

Agency life is varied. One practices a range of skills and confronts problems calling for different solutions. But, at the end of the day one goes home and leaves a client's problems behind. In the corporate environment, those problems are there day after day. One has to learn the art of coalition building to get things done and to know where internal levers are. The hard work of an internal PR practitioner, it seems to me, is knowledge of the territory and connections one makes. It is through this invisible web that one effects change and creates good communications.

The former colleague is finding he is performing a range of duties that sound more like an agency than a typical corporate department. He writes that he learned a lot while he was in the agency business and that comes from the varied tasks of client service.

This story spotlights how crass lawyers can be. If you were the spokesperson for Accor hotels, what could you say? I know what I am tempted to write, but it isn't printable. It is highly unlikely that government will pay much to compensate victims for an "act of God," so guess where the money would come from?

There are huge telecom mergers in the US and the market is shrinking to a few large companies with millions of landlines each. What I don't understand is this. The young aren't using landlines anymore. Here's an exercise. You are the PR person for Verizon. Tell me why I should be thrilled that Verizon just acquired long-distance provider, MCI.

I would like to see a PR practitioner defend this idea in California, especially since lower income citizens live farther out to own cheaper housing. If there is an idea that is DOA, use-based driving is it.

There is a horrific story that everyone should read whose client or company has government business. It is here.

The government now admits that two missing computer disks at the Los Alamos research laboratories, run by the University of California, never existed. Yup, that's right. The witch hunt and $5.8 million fine levied against the University for poor security management was for items that were never created. University of California's reputation was dragged through the mud, and it nearly lost control of the labs. Actually, it did lose control of the labs but the government pays so little to manage them that the new manager backed out.

So, how does the government say, "I'm sorry" to an organization whose reputation it wrecked. It sends a threatening letter and fails to lift the fine.

We have worked with other government contractors who have been hauled before the government for lapses they didn't commit. The same pattern happens repeatedly. Bureaucrats rarely say they are sorry, and they rarely admit they have harmed anyone. They find flimsy excuses to support their positions even when excuses have nothing to do with the original charge.

The sanctimoniousness of government bureaucrats is disheartening. These people believe they are doing the people's business. Hence, anything they do and say must be right.

Be warned. If you work with the government, watch your flanks. Keep public affairs specialists at agencies and on the Hill. That is the only way to survive government witch hunts. Even then, it is difficult.

The Sunday, Feb. 13 New York Times has a lengthy feature story on the PR business (Subscription required). The story, "Spinning Frenzy: PR's Bad Press," is even-handed despite the headline. The writer, Timothy L. O'Brien, was careful to note all sides.

The story quotes leaders in the field, all of whom have interesting things to say about the future of PR. Disappointingly, the one firm missing from the article is Ketchum, the company most associated with the hidden payment problem, other than Armstrong Williams. There is a passage at the end of the article, which throws Ketchum's reputation into a harsh light.

"We would assume that the commentator-pundit would disclose," said Lorraine Thelian, Omnicom's head of North American operations in a January interview with PRWeek, a trade publication. "That's an assumption that you make."

"It's not like we were pitching him to other media as a spokesperson," Ms Thelian added, "Whatever he did once that contract was put together, he did on his own."

Since Omnicom made this statement, it and Ketchum have remained silent, a risky tactic given that public relations wisdom traditionally holds that staying quiet during a crisis only prolongs media scrutiny and creates an appearance of culpability.

"They should have come clean right away and not tried to pin all of this on Williams," said Paul A. Argenti, a professor of corporate communications at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. "It's an example of the same kind of bad advice they give their client everyday."

Ouch.

Update: Alice Marie Marshall of Presto Vivace, Inc. found a free copy of the article here. Thanks, Alice.

Call me slow, but I just stumbled on an internet business theory called the Long Tail. It is something Google talks about, but somehow I wasn't listening. What is fascinating about this theory is how it changes economics.

For the one or two of you who still might not know what the "Long Tail" refers to, here is an explanation. With the cost of storing data online nearing zero, it doesn't matter whether you place 10 or 10 million songs online for sale to the public, or every book that is in, or even out of, print (as Amazon does.) What happened as companies did this is that they found as much as 50% of their revenue came from sales of works ranked 100,000 or more down the Long Tail of inventory. These were songs and books that would never be carried in music or book store. But the internet reaches the world, and little-known music and books can find niche audiences.

How does this affect Public Relations. It seems we have to take a longer and larger look at what we do when working with clients. Take, for example, a consumer electronics company. It might make a product that doesn't sell well, and it markets it to just a few countries. As we discovered when we worked for a consumer electronics company, users band together worldwide into their own constituency. A company cannot discontinue a product as easily as it has done in the past when it reached the Long Tail and was no longer that profitable.

Already there have been instances where unknown bands and forgotten books have risen from obscurity to best sellers because an audience found them in the Long Tail and talked them up.

The Long Tail is an economics concept, but it has as much meaning for communications work as it does for business. It's an issue that merits closer study.

The cost of a bad reputation.

One of the great PR battles of recent years was between Walter Hewlett and Carly Fiorina, now former CEO of Hewlett Packard. Carly followed a scorched earth campaign to sell the merger with Compaq, as did Walter to prevent it. One has to ask if Walter was right all along. Carly was the visionary marketer, and no one doubted her capacity and grit to sell her message. Most felt she could make the Compaq merger work, except dissidents led by Walter. But in the end, the merger didn't work, and HP wallowed in mediocre performance too long. The board finally acted.
Carly and Walter's PR battle is a business classic that should be analyzed for years and should be a regular part of PR courses. It shows how different views of a company can clash in public and divide target audiences. In the end, it wasn't a matter of whether Carly was a woman CEO or a visionary. It was a matter of whether her plan for HP worked. The board felt it didn't, and in an era of activist boards, that's a death knell for a CEO.

Interestingly, Michael Dell of Dell Computer was clear-eyed about the merger when it occurred. He confidently predicted the merger would fail and that Dell would clean up. That is what happened. It will be awhile before anyone bets against Dell again.

Now the board says it is looking for an experienced operator who can get HP moving. Apparently, they have had enough of vision.

This story shows what can happen to your reputation on the Web. Maybe these landlords deserved the bashing they got from anonymous critics. Maybe they didn't. Who is going to know as long as the critics hide from sight?

The fact is that this stealth approach is reputation theft, pure and simple. If someone has a legitimate gripe, the person should be honest enough to identify himself. But, people aren't honest.

We worked recently with a similar situation having to do with an author. Another author was aggrieved that our author had written about the same topic as the other scribbler. Our author had not read the other fellow's book, however, so there was no chance for plagiarism. There were some similarities in concepts but not in language. No one, least of all the lawyers who compared the two books, could find any semblance of copying from one to the other. The aggrieved author, however, was having none of that. He put up one of his friends to write a bad review on our author's book on Amazon.com. There is no way to get rid of that review. It's there like a sore thumb, and I'm sure it has cost some sales.

On the other hand, I am also aware of authors who write anonymous reviews of their own books on Amazon.com -- a similarly suspect activity.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I asked a friend of mine to review my last book on Amazon.com, but I charged him to write an honest review. If he didn't like the book, he was to say so. He slapped me about some things before giving me a passing grade. (I deserved the slap.) Still, it would be better overall if no one was allowed to be an anonymous critic of any kind. It encourages dishonesty, and people need no encouragement.

As a PR practitioner, you may have already encountered these practices. There is little you can do about them, but they can damage your reputation. Watch out.

There are no better PR pros than generals and admirals when they want to save a weapons program. They'll do just about anything to keep a line item in the budget. That's why the Air Force is now flacking its new stealth fighter, the F/A-22, which is in big trouble. The service did a Super Bowl flyover this week and last month, the Air Force chief of staff flew it over Florida at Mach 2 to show it off to the press and, of course, to Congress.

For decades now, military contractors and the services have mastered the art of spin to save hardware programs. Most of the time they have been successful. They know what turns the head of a Senator and Congressman. They also have learned how to spread the jobs for any piece of hardware to several Congressional districts so they can count on a block of votes.

We can learn a thing or two by watching them work. Still, I would like to see some of these programs cancelled.

There is a cry of woe among journalists in the US over censorship imposed on TV and radio since the Super Bowl half-time incident last year. There are stories on every side of the issue such as this. What I haven't seen is a discussion of whether sexual innuendo has just gone too far in popular culture. That is apparently one contention of Tom Wolfe's new book, which focuses on college experience that according to other articles, Wolfe caught well.

This is not a call for censorship but for common sense. Sex is just one of many things people do. They breathe, eat, sleep, work, marry, bear children, raise families, get sick, die. I guess none of those are as interesting as "tits and ass."

Sexual innuendo is not a factor in corporate PR work. No one would ever counsel a female CEO to dress provocatively for Wall Street analysts. It would not only be a distraction but a profound disservice to the woman. When then do we push sex in beer and auto ads? Or, if we allow such flagrance for women, why not have men parading semi-nude in public as well?

There is hypocrisy here among young, predominantly male creatives for whom sex sells. I would like to think it a phase that will moderate in time. It has been a long time, however.

Marketing PR is not above using pretty women and handsome young men to make points. Corporate PR and brand positioning are a more cerebral. Both, however, should be concentrating on product benefits more than "sex sells," since we are largely in the business of unpaid persuasion.

Am I an old fogey, or is this an issue on which PR should be taking a stand? No one should advocate censorship. There is a First Amendment and the Victorian era showed it doesn't work anyway. But is moderation too much to ask?

The worst situation for any company and PR practitioner is the situation in which you can't win. Usually companies don't get into this bind as often as politicians, but it's uncomfortable no matter to whom it happens. This is a classic case of "damned if you do and damned if you don't."

The mayor of New York will lose votes no matter where he comes down. Usually politicians kick such issues upstairs. They appoint commissions to study them, and they get the hell away from the complication as fast as they can. The "fig leaf" commission is told to take its time and the hope is the next election will be over before the issue comes to the fore again. Of course, the commission report is filed away in a drawer and never looked at, but it serves the purpose of getting the politician out of a jam. Companies don't always have the luxury of such an out. I have seen corporations appoint investigators to "get to the bottom of the situation," but the investigators never report to the public. More often than not, a company has to take a beating from one side or the other. You can't please everyone. Affirming some relationships means breaking some others.

I'm not going to criticize this article for being obvious, but anyone who has worked with new technologies knows consumer adoption is slow.

Today, we have bloggers yammering about community journalism, and PR practitioners hammering the uses of blogging in corporate communications. But, there is little progress. There are many blogs, but they are a fraction of total internet users. In the end, there is no need for all those journals. And, use of blogs in PR lags where it should be.

In the decades that I have worked with technologies, there has rarely been a time when people flocked to an invention. Even PCs had a slow gearup.

It takes a long time to overcome a consumer's fundamental question, "What's in it for me?" I have scars from trying to introduce technology to co-workers who didn't see how it would benefit them. Months later, they grasped the concept, but by then I had all but given up.

Actually, I did give up. I don't teach technology much anymore. Today, I use technologies that make sense for me, and let others catch up as they will. It might seem selfish, but it works better for everyone.

If this is true, it's dumb. You don't make an offer and not live up to it, especially when it deals with soldiers. You might as well stiff firefighters, doctors and nurses too.

Earlier this week I wrote about a journalist and his suggestions for integrating citizens with a newspaper through blogging. I asked that anyone who had an experience of using a blog in a corporation to contact me. Well, someone did, and he had this to offer.

I've persuaded my company to adopt the blog. Oddly enough, it has not been an uphill battle. I joined a testing division of a top semiconductor manufacturing firm, where the new manager was faced with the task of making broad-sweeping changes to move the group from lowest in class to highest performing in a single quarter. Effective communications was a key player in creating a group morale that could sustain those goals; and I think that I've learned some things about corporate communications from being in the trenches here.

My manager sought opportunities to present factual messages, but with only a quarterly opportunity to hold court amongst all shifts, it made more sense to seek greener pastures. So I dusted off the abandoned news portal. This quickly dispensed with a constant daily barrage of e-mail bulletins that merely got deleted when information overload levels got breached. The blog from the manager, on top of that, was not a hard sell when he took into account how the same population could be reached at any given time.

We're still in a nascent stage with the project, but the results have been tremendous, namely, the gratitude from the staff for having clear communications channels, and access to the boss once again.

This is an interesting story, and I would much like to correspond with the individual who contributed it to thank him as well as to find out more about the communications challenge he is addressing.

If there are more stories out there, let's hear them. I am particularly interested in your tactical suggestions for how to make blogging work well in difficult environments.

It's worth remembering on the evening of the State of the Union speech that no nation stands alone. This is not a criticism of the current occupant of the White House but a reflection on the sad state of Europe and the effect it has on the US and the rest of the world and vice-versa.

Unemployment news from Germany is serious. It is the highest since 1933. The European Union has admitted its efforts to grow have been derailed by unemployment, and it is now trying to stimulate job growth. Europeans themselves are down about the cross-border economy built painstakingly over decades of effort.

The worrisome part of sluggishness is that it fosters radicalism, and we don't need more of that. It also fosters attacks on free speech, an essential element in public relations just as it is in journalism. To that point, it is discouraging to read that the young in the US don't understand the necessity of the First Amendment. If anything, free speech is more important in times of turmoil than in times of peace. (That said, free speech is often abridged during war, and one could make a case that the US is at war.)

Public relations doesn't move independently from the economies in which it is embedded. As long as Europe is sluggish, it will impact the industry there as it has impacted other EU markets. And, it doesn't appear this time that the US can be the engine that lifts the EU from its torpor.

I have felt for several years that after the Bubble burst, the US would be in for a prolonged period of flat growth. We've done better than that, but no one is ebullient. That, as much as anything else, is holding the country back. It might well be the same for the EU.

It is essential to remember as PR practitioners that evil is in the world and sometimes people are not amenable to any relationship other than your destruction. Not that we should be paranoid in our business, but only fools forget there are people whose intents are not for the greater good. They are haters.

That's why I am eager to see this movie, which just won the major documentary honor at the Sundance Film Festival. It tells the story of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 through the eyes of a Canadian general who headed the UN Peacekeeper force and witnessed the killing. According to what I have read so far, the monstrousness of the slaughter -- 800,000 people in 100 days -- destroyed him emotionally because he was not authorized to use his troops to stop it nor could he get the world to pay attention. As we know now, Rwanda belongs alongside the Holocaust for the evil let loose upon the earth.

It is unlikely any one of us will see such hate and horror in our careers, but we must remember that the ability and willingness to commit wickedness hides in the hearts of humans. Its expression in a "civilized" world might be backstabbing and duplicity, but it is evil and lives are injured, sometimes permanently.

At no point in our careers as PR practitioners should we appease one who is destructive. It doesn't matter if this person is a boss or CEO or client. There is a limit that we should never dare to cross in maintaining relationships. In the case of the ex-general, the limit was destroyed by blood lust rarely seen in our day.

It happened just 10 years ago and will happen again.

Having been to business school, I have witnessed opposition between the way businesspeople think and PR practitioners speak. The two groups aren't from the same world, or at least, from the same assumptions. MBAs think revenues and earnings. Their motive and success is profit. Reputation, relationships and ethics are added complications to an otherwise simple formula. You are measured by money you make.

Recently, an article in the Financial Times addressed this issue in relation to business school teaching. A business school professor was unhappy that so few of his students understood or cared about ethics. But it made sense that they wouldn't. Their finance, accounting and marketing courses are about profit, about return without relationship to the larger context of business. Their spreadsheets do not have factors for relationships, reputation or ethics. These are off-book items that may be important but don't get one a top grade in a finance course.

Hence, this article, which examines the profit motive against PR principles. PR doesn't come off well. PR practitioners are outsiders who often shout to the deaf. And, regrettably, that is the way it will be. Business exists without ethics other than completion of a transaction. Ethics are imposed on the transaction by buyer and seller and by regulators. Economic transactors can be legitimate businesspersons or crooks. It makes no difference. Even PR principles can be subverted for use in illegal businesses.

The article is bleak but it does not toss reputation, relationships or ethics. It makes the practitioner aware that hewing to these principles means a lifelong fight to be recognized and frequent defeat. But then, you knew that anyway.

This memo is from early in January, but it is so good that I am citing it here. It is a report and recommendation from a blogger-journalist to his managing editor on how to integrate blogging with a newspaper -- the Greensboro, NC News-Record. Look particularly at his suggestions at the end.

The memo reprises the difficulties newspapers face with declining readership, the success of bloggers in traditional journalism and the rise of community journalism. It's a digest of everything bloggers have discussed during the last year and an argument for incorporating blogging into the paper's editorial process. His suggestions are compelling and a way to get readers involved while keeping the newspaper's editorial integrity intact.

It struck me that much of what he recommends could be used in any multi-location company that is trying to keep a useful flow of news going to employees. For example, there is no reason why there shouldn't be a blogger assigned for groups of stores in a retail chain -- say, one blogger for every 10 stores -- whose job is to track what is happening in the stores and to log news for employees in them. This could be done on the company's intranet and made available to the company population as a whole. The editors of general employee publications can draw on these blogs for stories that go into greater depth. This approach would take away any headquarters bias of employee publications and bring the point of customer contact closer to the entire company. The same can be done for plant sites, for distribution points and for sales offices. In other words, the same community journalism envisioned for newspapers can also be done for in-house communications.

I'm sure there are practitioners doing this already. If so, I would like to hear from you.

This tool is begging for a publicity person to adapt it and use it. It would make a great promotional device. I've tried it and it's eerily precise.

Although some examples are suspect, this story from USA Today is a useful reminder to bloggers that similar media have been used before in history. But was Tom Paine really a blogger?

It's good to keep a perspective about what we are doing.

This story from Wired magazine is an example of new media that PR practitioners will have soon enough. Use of digital projection is well known. (I've seen it twice in two different science museums.), but the use of high-speed data transmission and WiMax to deliver the movie to a remote theater at 24 Mbps is a test bed.

The news is not that it was done but the implications of doing it. As the story points out, one can show a movie at the same time in thousands of theaters throughout the world and reach a larger audience than at any time in movie history. Further, one can use the technology for little movies and documentaries filmed with inexpensive digital cameras. Need an instant documentary? We have one for you.

This should be a great PR tool when developed, but if my bet is accurate, it won't be. Marketers will use it first, or politicians in campaigns, and then, it will filter its way to PR people. I hope I'm wrong, but I haven't been yet when I've predicted that PR will lag.

AOL has announced that it won't provide access to newsgroups anymore. Few are using them, so now one will go through Google, which seems to be the last organization that tracks them.

Most PR practitioners know little about newsgroups. They are an artifact of the early Internet before the Web dominated. There was a time that if one wanted to talk to other PR practitioners, the newsgroup was the way to do it -- and there wasn't much else except CompuServe, another name lost to the past.

The Web is a second generation technology to sweep the Internet and blogs are a third. We tend to forget the Internet is in its 35th year of existence and the Web but 13 or so. Blogs date from the early 1990s but they didn't come into their own until after 1995, and they didn't explode until two years ago.

Old timers remember when we checked newsgroups to find out what people were saying about products, services and clients. I haven't done that in a long time. In fact, when we monitored the web for a major electronics company over a two-year period recently, we rarely looked at or took anything from newsgroups. They were dated and shrinking in usage.

Nothing about the Internet is new, but some things about the Web are. It's good to know where the medium has come from and where it is going.

How does a respectable corporate executive slip into fraud and ruin his reputation and the reputation of his company? Oddly enough, a book on Accounting Irregularities and Financial Fraud, (Aspen Law & Business, 2002) paints a convincing picture of what happens.

It's important to understand how irregularities occur because every one of us can be tarred by major failure. The editor of the book, an attorney by the name of Michael R. Young, draws a picture that limns the Internet Bubble.

It starts with a company that is a hot stock and a CEO who is overly concerned with Wall Street's opinion. The CEO sees business starting to slow before Wall Street senses it. Usually a slowdown is cyclical because no business grows at a fast pace forever. The CEO refuses to accept that the company must cut earnings, and he damn well doesn't want to see his stock price fall. To prevent that, the CEO holds his executives to high earnings targets and will not bend. His subordinates MUST find a way to meet sales and earnings goals -- often called "stretch goals."

A division president knows there is no way he is going to make the target based on the business, so he looks at gray areas of accounting and starts to cut corners legally. He'll ship as much inventory at the end of a quarter as he can. He'll cut reserves for bad debt. None of these things are wrong, but they are not recommended. The problem is the next quarter the business still has not picked up, and the president has to make the bogey again. He becomes even more aggressive with accounting. It happens the next quarter too and the quarter after that. Pretty soon, he has uncollectible receivables and erroneous inventory levels. There is nothing he can do except to continue the fraud until someone discovers it, and the reputation of the executive and the company are damaged.

The president didn't start out to be dishonest. The CEO pressured him and created a "no-excuses" environment that was more than the president could bear. The president didn't engage in massive irregularities at first. He did little things that took control of him rather than he controlling them. The fraud grows and grows, and there is no way out. Eventually, it bursts.

Every one of us has seen companies run like this, and most of us have probably gone along with the pressure because "that's the way business is." The point this attorney is making is that isn't the way business should be. Honesty is the first and best policy. The first person who was dishonest wasn't the president but the CEO who would not accept the cyclical nature of the business. Unfortunately, the CEO is likely to get away unscathed and the division president take the fall.

There is not much PR practitioners can say when CEOs become arrogant, but it should be a warning to get out of the company before the house of cards collapses.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is the focus of the current Economist survey. Do yourself a favor and read it, although it is lengthy.

The key section is Profit and the Public Good. The magazine points out that the first responsibility of a business is to make a profit. In the process of making a profit, a business produces social good in specific ways. (This assumes a business is ethical to begin with and not in drug-dealing or other destructive behavior.)

There is room for regulation where the pricing of products does not account for the full effects of the manufacturing on the environment -- e.g., global warming and air pollution. But, the idea that a firm should reduce profits to raise social welfare is foolish in that it is an attempt to "borrow virtue," as the magazine says. In fact, the magazine provides the traditional four-box matrix to show where CSR makes sense and where it doesn't. Where CSR both raises profits and social welfare is termed "good management." Where it reduces profits and social welfare is called "delusional CSR."

While there are businesses that are able to do good and make a profit at the same time, the magazine is frank about the fact that most businesses are using CSR cosmetically -- "borrowing virtue."

The survey is worth your time, especially sections where the magazine states that many CSR economists misunderstand economics. That's good for argument.