Online Public Relations Thoughts

If you aren't "media meshing," start to think about it soon. It is a new technique for advertisers and PR. I can think of a number of ways that it might be put to use right now for PR purposes.

I wrote a few days ago about AP trying to get license fees from Google. AP has gone farther than that now and wants fees from everyone who uses its content online.

Yesterday, I wrote about a reporter who so blew a story that he should be fired. It happened.

The best revenge against stupid reporting is to show a reporter and most importantly, the reporter's editors every instance in which the reporter went wrong. That is why this is a particularly satisfying story. The reporter should lose his job over it. And, the worst part is the article was printed in the Los Angeles Times.

PR practitioners don't often get a chance to defend their clients chapter and verse. It takes an exceptionally dumb piece of work to offer that kind of opening. But even the best newspapers nod once in awhile. Just ask The New York Times.

It is too soon to raise hopes, but this story seems to show that newspaper publishers in the US finally understand that they have to do something about the internet. We PR practitioners should be cheering them on.

This story sounds suspiciously like much of PR, and it's depressing.

If AP gets its way and Google pays for using its news, that will be a second wire service to remove its content from the free internet. There is nothing wrong with AP doing that, of course. It owns the copyrighted material. But, wouldn't you expect other news organizations to follow the example? I would, since newspaper circulation is falling and ad revenue from print sources is declining as well. In fact, in the last quarter, The Wall Street Journal's online subscription edition outearned its print edition. We may be looking at a transition point between print and online news. That means to me that online news will be more expensive going forward. News publishers have to find a way to pay for content they produce. If they can't pay for it in print, they will demand payment online. And, they will get it.

This is a typical disaster when installing a new IT system. For some reason, they rarely go in right, and the company doing the installation has to make amends over and over. In fact, in one of the rare instances where a major overhaul did occur successfully, the CEO boasted that no one heard anything about it.

IT project managers check and recheck everything before plunging ahead, but for some reason -- client changes, poor usability, bad structure -- what seemed to be a simple operation turns into a nightmare. And IT nightmares seem to duplicate themselves. They are never one thing that goes wrong, but one domino that topples another and another.

Being a PR practitioner in an IT company means preparing for disaster as a normal course of operations.

It sure looks like it. http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3497776

This is proof of the need for objective standards in all that we do and communicate. Hey, I've got old book notes lying about. I think I'll call them word painting. Who's willing to bid $25,000.

When is this and this and many other instances like it going to stop? Each organization has suffered a major blow to its reputation for poor information control. It is online destruction of reputation.

This story is interesting and a case when a company has to make an example of a customer. Although it isn't clear yet, it is beginning to look as if the woman dropped the finger into the chili to blackmail the company. Wendy's didn't buy her story and even though the woman is withdrawing her suit, Wendy's isn't backing off.

The restaurant chain is going to make an example of this woman and probably prosecute her if she is found to have contaminated her meal. That's as it should be. No company can tolerate the destruction of its reputation that such an instance can cause. Pepsi proved that a claim of needles in its cola was a case of deliberate contamination and the individual was jailed. Other companies have proved similar cases to be false and attempts to make easy money.

Public relations is a two-way street. The customer owes honesty in the relationship as much as the company does, but when a customer violates trust, the company should show no mercy. Why? Because lawyers will show no mercy to the company.

These statistics tell as much about the future of auto dealers as they about the bad PR dealers have reaped over the years through shady sales practices.

http://www.fastcompany.com/online/19/progressive.html

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/93/pr.html

Recently, we wrote about PR in a dying business, so it is interesting to note that the current issue of CFO magazine has a discussion of the same thing with a real example -- Blockbuster, the movie rental stores. The magazine states the PR challenge for CFOs succintly:

...finance executives in challenged industries are in a precarious position. Publicly, they must tout their companies' commitment to innovation and long-term goals. Yet instead of investing in new technology, they can become enamored of their current business model—especially if it is successful. And their unrelenting focus on shareholder value can blind them to the fact that they may be facing a Waterloo moment.

The article also examines the collapse of the typewriter business and the imminent demise of the check printing business. The article stresses that no one knows the outcomes of business choices to avoid death.

So how does one do PR in circumstances like this? Every one of these companies had or has PR help. In Blockbuster's case, the CEO and CFO made a decision to let the firm be featured in the story. That was a gutsy move, but the point of the company's presence is to tell shareholders that Blockbuster is aware of its challenges and not sitting back.

I would like to think that PR counsel helped shape their decision. It was a risk to participate but a considered one, and it faces squarely the future of the firm.

That's good PR, it seems to me.

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.