Online Public Relations Thoughts

I will deliver no opinions on the case of Maurice Greenberg, former CEO of AIG, except to say he is losing a PR war with Eliot Spitzer, attorney general of New York. Stories like this and this have convicted Greenberg even before he takes the Fifth Amendment. It hurts even more that Warren Buffett is testifying without apparent difficulty.

I want to scream, "Where is the PR counselor?" The answer is there doesn't appear to be one involved here. The confrontation is attorney-driven, so Greenberg is ducking behind his lawyer. He doesn't seem to understand he is against a canny PR practitioner in the person of Spitzer who knows how to manipulate media better than a professional publicist.

I wish in cases like this that CEOs would be smart enough to get PR advice before they put themselves in a bullseye, but it hasn't happened here -- or least, it appears that way. If there is a counselor, that person must be in the deep background. Meanwhile, Spitzer has Greenberg twisting in a noose before the public.

Spitzer can go for a settlement now. He'll get a big one to make all this go away. That is the way he usually works. He doesn't go to court when he can avoid it. He uses the power of the media and destruction of reputation to get what he wants.

It may not be fair, but it sure is effective.

This report was in the morning media news. I can just imagine what these kits are like:

• You too can monitor blogs. Three easy steps.
• Start your own blog and sell, sell sell.
• Reach your targets through blog ads.

Why am I skeptical when ad agencies get involved in such things as blogging? Chalk it up to experience.

It may well be that Carat Interactive is different. I don't know, but I would like to see one of these kits before I say I'm wrong.

Do you wonder what economists do when they don't have anything better to do? They write articles like this.

But there is an important point here. People buy perception whether they should or not.

Thus, it is always possible to have a featherbrained but handsome individual promoted to his or her level of incompetence while a competent but plain person is left in the background to run things. That's the way of the world.

Honest PR can to some extent balance misperception, but most PR practitioners buy into the "perception-is-reality" mantra. In other words, we're just as bad as everyone else.

Publicity can go too far.

Last night I wrote a note on the number of crashes and glitches that Blogger has suffered in recent weeks. I cited a Wired Magazine column where complaints are listed in detail along with howls of rage from frustrated bloggers. I then wrote a conciliatory note about Google and said I hoped the company would get the system fixed soon and finally.

I hit the publish button -- and the system crashed. It took everything with it. I couldn't get back in last night nor early this morning.

Now, I'm not gentle.

Dear Google, fix the damn system.

I've complained a lot in recent months about Blogger. There were times when it was so slow that it was unusable. There were times when it crashed completely and other times when I couldn't get in for a day or more.

It seems I wasn't alone. Here is a litany of complaints against Blogger and the parent company -- Google. It turns out the problem isn't entirely the fault of Blogger but for us poor lads and lasses trying to do entries late at night and early in the morning, it doesn't help to know that the ***** program has gone down AGAIN.

I second all the complaints in this article. Nearly every one has happened to me and on this site.

What this tells me is that the medium isn't the message but the medium can stop the message at any time without support. Google says it is trying hard to get control of the system, and I believe them.

I just hope that we don't have too many failures going forward.

Does money speak louder than reputation?

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1782393,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03119TX1K0000594

MCI says it is staying with Verizon although the bid is smaller, which would seem to indicate that reputation counts for more. But then, Qwest might not have given up in raising the bid. At what point does the equation change?

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050405/bs_nm/retail_walmart_dc

Sometimes in PR you encounter an implacable enemy who is out to destroy you. Nothing will mollify this opposition. It is you or them: Only one will remain standing. This is what is happening right now to the CEO of Morgan Stanley, Philip Purcell. His enemies are wealthy former executives of Morgan Stanley who want to destroy him as CEO. They are spending their own money to run ads, generate news coverage and stir opposition to Purcell in every way they can.

With enemies like this, if you throw them a sop, they don't go away. They become stronger because they know they caused you to crack a little. And, that is what happened with Morgan Stanley's sudden decision to spin off its Discover Card unit that Purcell said he would not sell. The opposition howled all the louder.

With implacable enemies, there is no niceness, no middle ground, no way to make peace. One must be prepared to conduct a scorched-earth campaign and have the courage to see it through.

Thankfully, few of us will have ever have to engage in such warfare but, as this affair shows, it can happen. What will Purcell do? News reports say he has kept his board on his side for the time being, and he has placed two more supporters on it as well. That doesn't mean his enemies are defeated. They will continue to undermine him: The worst way they can hurt him is to lure away Morgan Stanley's talent to competitors. Thus, even if Purcell wins the battle, he loses the war.

What is the PR department doing at Morgan Stanley? I'd like to know. I can hardly believe the department is on the sidelines watching the battle, unless lawyers have taken over and are running tactics. In any event, living through a situation like this matures one quickly as a counselor.

To understand how quickly reputation can be destroyed read this year's Pulitzer Prize winners. Specifically, read the citations for breaking news and investigative reporting. A governor and former governor ruined their reputations through misdeeds. The newspapers documented each in such detail that they couldn't run for dogcatcher, even if they wanted to.

This year in the first quarter a number of prominent CEOs bit the dust and lost their reputations as well.

Reputation is easily ruined. That alone should be justification for PR. It is nice to talk about PR as cheap advertising, and it seems that more and more of the business is going to promotion and product publicity. But, we should never forget that reputation is more important than publicity. Just ask the former governors and CEOs.

I've listened to enough CEOs speak and have written for enough of them to be opinionated on the topic. Hence, this essay. I'm not saying any or all of the ideas are right, but I hope you find they spark a thought or two.

As always, I'm eager to read what you have to say for or against.

It's interesting that in Fast Company's 25 Top Jobs for 2005, PR is nowhere to be found.

Here is an example of what PR used to do -- teaching people how to dial a rotary phone. This film from 1927 is a painful reminder that AT&T had once the largest public relations department in the world. Now AT&T is no more, and the thousands of PR people that once worked for the firm are retired or doing other things.

AT&T in the end forgot its monopoly existed by permission of the government that granted it and could be removed at any time -- as it was. When removed, the company learned it had forgotten how to compete -- if it ever knew. The collapse was slow in coming but inexorable. PR could not help in the end because AT&T's market was gone and its purchase on the minds of Americans lost.

A company is never safe and can never stop building its relationships with key audiences.

I'm embarrassed about my ignorance of Hispanic radio. There is an Hispanic station one floor below our agency, but I haven't the least idea what the station does. This article from LA Weekly is an outstanding description of differences between Hispanic radio and anything else we might listen to in the US. More than that, radio gathers a huge audience among immigrant populations. The closeness between announcers and listeners has little parallel in English-language radio and the civic mindedness also is unusual.

I know there are PR agencies that concentrate on Hispanic markets, but I never understood the cultural differences before reading this piece.

More agencies and practitioners are thinking about using Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) phones. I'm still skeptical about them because my experience two years ago wasn't the best. We dumped the service (Vonage) and went back to POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service). However, if you are thinking about it, read this. It's as good an explanation as I have seen.

There is a young and apparently upcoming magician in the UK named Derren Brown who can teach one a thing or two about communications. He does stunts that he explains afterwards so one can appreciate the fine points of his skill. There is a wonderful site here that shows videos of several of his mind-bending tricks with his explanations of how he did them.

What's clever about much of what Brown does is his manipulation of language and communication to distract an individual, to suggest an action or to determine what the individual is thinking. The first clip of his work is getting people to fall asleep in telephone boxes. This is a trick of pure communications since he lets the phone ring until someone picks it up. Then he bombards the person with a confusing set of instructions and statements for 10 minutes before ordering them to fall asleep. They do. His explanation of this trick contains insights into communications and politics that it are worth remembering.

If we feel that our brains are being overloaded with information, we panic and start to become confused. In this situation, if we're given a simple instruction, we grasp it like a lifeline. This technique is used in tricks to persuade people to behave in ways that are completely out of character. When commands are issued at the end of a stream of confusing instructions, people are so relieved they can finally understand what's being said that they will do whatever they're told.

Public speakers often capitalise on the same response. Have you ever listened to a politician giving rapid-fire statistics so fast that the audience can't possibly take them in, only to end the speech with a simple, memorable phrase? The soundbite comes as such a relief after all those facts and figures that this is all the listeners remember.

I suspect most of us have considered this sleight of words at one time or another, but if not, know that it works. You can even put an audience to sleep.

I'm confused. I don't know what business I'm in anymore. This story is the source of my confusion. Apparently, if the story is to be believed, we're in the cheap advertising business now on TV. That is, we don't do placements. We make cheap "news" spots, then we buy time to run them as advertisers do. At least, that is what Medialink is telling us to do. And Medialink justifies it by saying that we are going back to the future by citing John Cameron Swayze's advertisements for Camel cigarettes from decades ago.

Here is what Medialink Chairman/CEO Laurence Moskowitz said to Broadcasting & Cable magazine to defend what he is doing.

"We can produce a 90-second newscast for the cost of catering a traditional 30-second spot, and we can turn it around in hours," Moskowitz boasts, estimating the price tag for a three-minute news vignette is $15,000-$25,000. The average cost of producing a national 30-second TV commercial is 10-20 times more.

Who cares about the implied third-party credibility that public relations is supposed to produce by persuading journalists at arms length to report a story? Hell, we can shoot a cheap spot and buy time. No muss, no fuss and we don't have to work with reporters.

...Moskowitz says he is creating a new genre of television that blends news, PR and conventional Madison Avenue media-buying practices. In effect, he is competing with both Madison Avenue and the TV news industry, while blurring the lines between them.

Will someone please tell me what business I'm in?

If you haven't had a chance to read this story yet, take time to do it. It looks at predictions from 10 years ago for how newspapers would change online and compares the predictions to what is happening. The predictions were optimistic -- and largely wrong.

The most disappointing conclusion was the first one:

Online news is still a downstream product. For the most part, the news text comes to the screen after it has been edited for the print – and that means that the “extra” reporting has been edited out already, although there are sometimes exceptions in newspapers’ news sites.

Reporters on magazines like BusinessWeek write strictly for the online edition, but journalists at newspapers rarely do the same.

Part of the delayed future may come from the fact that American newspapers are fighting falling circulation without success, and they have no viable economic model for transferring newsprint to online. They're stuck in the middle -- the worst place to be. There is little doubt that more papers will fold, and newsholes will shrink unless publishers can find a formula to attract readers and advertisers to an online product. But when readers can get all the news they want from Google and Yahoo, why should they read a local newspaper site? And when advertisers can go to high-volume traffic sites for a greater return, why should they bother?

Thinking back, I'm glad that when I did my journalism masters long ago I chose television rather than newspaper reporting. But then, TV isn't looking good now either.

It is no secret CEOs are more reluctant to be seen in public these days. Too many former CEOs are now in court and some have been convicted. Boards have tossed out other CEOs for infractions real or surmised (Harry Stonecipher, formerly of Boeing, for example.)

CEO visibility is a concern now that it wasn't before the internet bubble burst five years ago. That is why I have written the following essay with thoughts for how to assess CEO exposure to the media and the public.

As usual, I invite your comments, critiques and disagreements.

It seems the politicians have figured out that blogging is good constituent relations and fine for fundraising too.

Jakob Nielsen is a usability guru for the internet. He examines how people use web pages then advises companies how to make sites consumer friendly. He recently posted a new study that is an eyeopener. It focuses on low-literacy users, of whom there are many. He found that those who do not read well are quite different in how they approach web pages by comparison with good readers. Good readers skim and skip through copy. Poor readers plow through copy a word at a time and pause at multisyllabic words to work them out. Poor readers read less because it is too difficult. Here is the key advice that Nielsen provides:

The main and most obvious advice is to simplify the text: use text aimed at a 6th grade reading level on the homepage, important category pages, and landing pages. On other pages, use text geared to an 8th grade reading level.

His other advice is common sense: Prioritize information. Streamline the page design. Simplify navigation. Optimize search.

Good advice for PR practitioners whether or not they work on web pages.

Singer Elvis Costello was widely quoted yesterday saying the record business is about to end. As soon as broadband is big enough, he opined, the record industry will go away.

He might be right, but the music publicity business won't disappear, even if the record industry does. When a listener has a choice of 10,000 bands and 100,000 songs, it takes good publicity to build an audience for any one band. In fact, if Costello is correct, music publicity will be full-employment. Rather than fearing the future, I would be excited. Practitioners who figure out how to make a living on direct delivery of music should do well.

I haven't paid much attention to the music business, so I cannot speculate how PR might change in it. If someone knows, contact me, and I will report your experience here. I suspect there are hints of shifts to come with PR for the iPod. For one, we know that the "long tail" of the music business is still profitable when the cost of song delivery is kept low. A song might be ranked 100,000, but it costs so little to download one can still make a profit by carrying it in an online catalog. But does it make sense to publicize backlists? That I don't know.

What will Ireland have shortly that the rest of the world won't? All-digital cinema. About 500 cinema screens in the country will have 35mm projectors taken out and replaced with digital projectors. Having seen digital projection in two separate theaters, I can tell you the difference between film and digital is amazing. There is none of the washed-out color from an older print, scratches from too many passes through the gate and the occasional splice. Digital sparkles and has a realism that film doesn't possess unless it is a new print.

Why should PR practitioners care about digital projection? Because it is changing how the movie industry operates. It will change the industry economically, and it will change how one promotes films because there will be less time from editing suite to theater. There is even the possibility of changes after a film has been released. Digital films are uploaded from the studio and downloaded to the individual movie house. It is possible that a film could even change endings from one run to the next.

I don't like going to the movies anymore because films are often out of focus, and print quality deteriorated. I prefer watching DVDs at home on a large-screen TV where the image is crisp and colors true. Digital projection could change my mind quickly. On the other hand, digital projection may be too late. Recent books have stated that studios don't care that much anymore about theater runs. They make their money in other ways -- through tie-in promotions, through selling DVDs, through international distribution rights. Movies that bomb in US theaters prove to be solid money makers when all is toted at the end. It may be that movie publicity will move more toward supporting the DVD than the film, although I have yet to read that anywhere.

Anyway, all hail to Ireland for leading the change.

BusinessWeek this week has a major article on the wired hospital. It is a must-read for PR practitioners for a couple of reasons. As written here frequently, medical costs in the US are soaring and require concerted effort to control. I can tell you from personal experience that medical costs make life difficult in the agency world. An agency has to pass through most medical increases to employees, and increases hit the paycheck -- hard. Medical costs are among the largest expenses companies' have other than payroll.

The second reason is that medical technology needs a new kind of PR person, although the person is not a PR practitioner. At Hackensack University Medical Center, the focus of the BusinessWeek story, the practitioner is a doctor in charge of medical informatics. His real job is getting doctors to use the computer system because only a few use it willingly, and then, documenting the improvement for the doctors and the hospital. The hospital was astute in determining that it takes a doctor to persuade doctors. Communicators do not have the credibility to get the job done.

Take the time to read the whole story. It describes where medicine should have been five years ago and is still stumbling towards. The article points to the difficulties of automating, a stumbling block at many hospitals. The key is usability. If a system isn't easy to use, no one will take the time to learn it. Usability is an issue we have discussed in web page design. Note also that the hospital has dressed its robot in a lab coat with a stethoscope hanging around its "neck" to humanize the machine.

Hackensack is pioneering communications techniques to make its system work, and there are lessons there for anyone working in medical PR.

We've known for some time that one can no longer trust pictures. The advent of Adobe Photoshop allowed unlimited image manipulation for good and ill.

But pictures are powerful, and people fall regularly into the trap of believing that what they see is true. This is an issue PR practitioners deal with constantly. Political spinmeisters are forever finding the right backdrops for Presidential appearances, the right kind of middle-income family to use as a TV example, the visually perfect "weeper" for the climactic moment of a hearing or speech.

Thus, it was refreshing to read last Friday a Science Journal piece in The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) that details how scientists and laypersons alike are being fooled by visuals of brain scans.

Neuroimaging such as PET and fMRI are seducing laypeople and scientists alike into believing we know more than we do about how and why we think, feel and behave, some scientists say. The power of brain imaging, says Frank Keil, a Yale University psychology professor, reflects "the illusion of explanatory depth. If people see something, they are often deluded into thinking they understand it better than they really do."

That is a wonderful indictment of what many PR practitioners do (including myself) -- making superficial visual explanations of things beyond the understanding of laypersons. We believe we can simplify complex processes into meaningful pictures -- and we do. But, time and again, we go too far, and we simplify into falsehood. Sometimes this is unwitting but regrettably, too often it is a conscious decision. The worst outcome of such willed error is that we justify it as defending a client.

It is good to know that science tangles with the issue of visual explanation as much as we do in PR. But, it is a warning that even the sophisticated can be misled by a strong image. There is no substitute for accuracy in the end, whether visual or not.

Clients aren't always right. Sometimes they work against their own best interests. Sometimes, they're dead wrong.

I have been reflecting on this lately because it seems the same failures show repeatedly in account service, and they never get fixed.

It is depressing for an agency to be hired by a client, then ignored and eventually fired. The client either didn't know how or didn't want to manage the agency correctly. Data wasn't provided. The agency was never taken into confidence. Programs started and stopped and stuttered and half-started again.

I 've been on the agency side of the business for my career and at a loss to understand why clients cannot manage agencies better. It would seem if one is spending the money, one would want to get the most out of the investment.

There are always reasons why programs have momentary lulls and those are understandable. There are timing issues and a client might have trouble distilling a message or getting logistics in place. Agencies can work with that. But, it is a persistent inability to get work done that frustrates agency personnel. I have seen them nearly roar in frustration because they are desparate to DO something for a client and the client can never seem to get started.

It is easy to pick on agencies for incompetence or lack of productivity. Sometimes it is true that we don't get a topic and we don't work as hard as we should. But, to be honest, I have seen less of that in my career than a client who is uncertain what to do and ends by doing nothing.

The agency-client relationship IS a relationship. Both sides have to contribute. When one or the other falls down on the job, there is little chance that a program can succeed.

Blogger has been in and out (mostly out) for most of the day. I have tried off and on to see if I could get it to work. I finally broke through at this late hour. It is not clear to me if it is Blogger or something else, but it happens occasionally then goes away as mysteriously as it came.

It is frustrating.

Sorry that I didn't get any updating done on online-pr.com yesterday. When I woke up, I discovered the cable was out and took my internet connection with it.

Now Blogger is acting up, and I am having trouble posting.

Sigh.

The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) sent me their Spring 2005 Resources Guide yesterday. It is filled with professional development courses for PR practitioners.

Something struck me about the 44-page guide the instant I opened it. Among dozens of courses, there are but one or two that deal with anything on the web. There are lessons on leader coaching, on strategic communications planning, on crisis communications, on measurement and evaluation, on development of presentations, on building and evaluating employee communications programs and on and on.

Buried in the center of the booklet on page 23 is a course on "Anatomy of a News Release, Pitch and E-mailed Release." On page 27, there is a course titled "I'm not a Journalist, but I Play One on TV: A re-examination of who and what a journalist is today." This section actually mentions "bloggers" right after "bloviators" in a sentence that says it all, "With an ever-increasing number of self-styled media commentators, critics, bloviators and bloggers, what has become of the definition of a journalist?"

Is it me or is the PRSA out to lunch?

In fairness to the PRSA, the society offers courses for which there is demand. And, there is probably not much demand for learning focused on the internet. But, if that is true, what does it say about PR practitioners? It seems to me the Society is facing the same challenge as most revenue-driven educational institutions. Do you give students courses that students want or courses they need, whether they want them or not? The PRSA cannot compel members to be more web-savvy, but still, it is disappointing.

I started online-pr.com, the resource site to which this blog belongs, in 1997. It was during a brief period of unemployment, and I wanted to use training materials developed in my previous job to launch a resource site. At the same time, I noticed there was no similar site for PR practitioners that was regularly maintained. I made two decisions. The site would be free to all, and I would take no ads. Since 1997, I have spent hundreds of dollars and thousands of hours maintaining online-pr.com. This is not a complaint, simply a fact.

Recently, Google contacted me and suggested I could use their Ad-Sense program on the site and perhaps, pay for its maintenance. That is appealing, but I told my contact there will never be ads on the home page of online-pr.com. Practitioners like a clean, unfussy page. Google assured me that I could put Ad Sense only where I wanted it to go. So, I told them I would experiment with it.

There is only one place where I am going to try it for the time being -- the section that lists PR job and career links and job hunting tips. It seems to me this is the least objectionable place to start a test. I'd like to know if you think the same.

My objective is not to make a living from ads but to pay for upkeep. I thought you should know so you won't be surprised if you see a change in that section by next Monday.

I received my second masters from this school. It's about time for the university to address convergence and train future communicators to handle it.

I find this fellow offensive, but I admire his tactics in the last presidential campaign. He could not get established media to report charges he and his group were making against Senator Kerry, but he was able to get his message out effectively anyway. The Kerry people worked hard to stop them, but here is what happened according to O'Neill:

TAE: Did the attempts of Kerry's people to stop your message only help publicize it more?

O'NEILL: They helped us tremendously. The threats against the station managers led to extensive publicity, particularly on the "Hannity & Colmes" show and then on other FOX News shows. Then it spread to CNN and to MSNBC. More than 1,400,000 people downloaded that first ad, and it swept through the Internet. It also allowed thousands and thousands of people to start donating money to us at our Web site.

Note that people downloaded the ad. The Swift Boat Veterans made much of their case through the internet. This supports an earlier observation that citizens aren't reading newspapers as much, but they are getting information from the internet.

The same question asked here yesterday must be asked again, "What are we as PR practitioners going to do about this?"

We justify much of what we do in PR by appealing to the implied third-party authority and credibility of the media. So what do you make of this? The study concluded that news stories about Bush were three times more likely to be negative than those about John Kerry. Yet, Bush was reelected handily over Kerry. If the media have implied credibility, wouldn't you expect a result the other way around?

Or, does the American public no longer trust the media in some matters, especially matters of politics. Or, worse yet, are fewer Americans bothering to read the media, and print journalists write to a minority of voters who do not influence the outcome of races? I favor this last explanation because newspaper circulation is falling. More Americans get news from TV and online than from turning the pages of a paper.

This opens a question we don't like to ask in PR. If that is true, why do we spend so much time getting placements in newspapers? We justify our existence by saying influentials read papers though others might not. But is that true? I don't think it is. Most CEOs have no time to read a paper. They scan news summaries prepared by a PR department. News summaries come from a variety of sources so any one medium's credibility is not as much an issue. I suspect this is true as well in the halls of Congress. Aides read papers not Senators and Congressmen. So again, to whom are we speaking when we get a placement in the newspaper?

These are tough questions, but a time is coming when we might be forced to give better answers than we do now.

Remaining secretive about work invites criticism such as this and this. It's time for PR agencies to come clean. A VNR is a good tool as long as it conveys news rather than hype.

Consider the following. There are two VNRs. One conveys health information from the Center for Disease Control and the other conveys a message about the benefits of a new law. Which is news and which isn't? Actually, either can be news or hype depending on how the creator of the VNR handles them.

Despite The New York Times , VNRs have been used for decades. It is only recently they have become a political issue because journalists were allowing themselves to shill for the Republican administration. The Times piece, by the way, is a must read for PR practitioners. The problems, the article shows, are complex and broad with local TV stations as much to blame as PR agencies.

VNRs are under a cloud, but they won't disappear. Practitioners need to be cautious in how they make them. Accuracy is rule one. It has always been rule 1. News is rule two. A VNR should provide timely information that otherwise might not be reported. Transparency is rule 3. Let people know who is behind the VNR.

My colleague, Mike Cargill, sent me a link on Friday with an advisory, "Blog this!" OK, I will.

The story he pointed to was about a Gallup poll that showed few Americans are aware of blogs and even fewer read them regularly.

Three-quarters of the U.S. public uses the Internet at work, school, or home, but only one in four Americans are either very familiar or somewhat familiar with blogs (the shortened form of the original "Web logs"). More than half, 56%, have no knowledge of them. Even among Internet users, only 32% are very or somewhat familiar with blogs.

Lest we get too messianic about blogs, we should remind ourselves they are still the buzz of the chattering classes and of the young.

Blog readers are younger than the population at large. Although 17% of the public is aged 18 to 29, a quarter of all blog readers (those who read even occasionally) are in this age bracket. At the older extreme, 17% of Americans are 65 and older, but only 6% of blog readers are this old.

Blogs will grow in importance but they aren't where we might like them to be yet. They will always be niche media: It is a matter of the size of the niche. If 100 percent of Americans were reading blogs but only 10% reading any one blog that would be about the best anyone could expect. It's a question of finding the right 10%.