Online Public Relations Thoughts

Who was the first person who said that PR would be a great business but for clients? That person surely had experience in client service. There is nothing worse in PR than trying to serve clients who will not be served. By that I mean, a client does not and will not provide you with what you need to make the client successful. There are many reasons for this happening, none of them good. It makes no sense to hire and pay an agency only to let it fail. Yet, clients do this regularly because they don't know how to manage agencies. Agencies need information to work. They need responsiveness. They need to be told when a client has made changes or events have overtaken messages. Often, none of these things happen, and the client becomes furious because the agency is not doing the job. As my boss says, a client is never at fault, no matter how badly the client has abused the agency.

There is a time for an agency to get tough with recalcitrant clients and to explain to them that the client and agency will fail unless something is done. This needs to be said clearly and if need be, bluntly. But, it should not turn into a blame game. The agency should state what it needs and ask that it be delivered as soon as possible, so it can work. This can be done without embarrassing the client contact either, unless the person is the source of the blockage. Often, it is not the agency contact who is the problem but persons above the contact who have no interest in the program are or trying to kill it. One has to go around them to higher authority and get the job done. This isn't always easy to do.

No one gets paid long for standing around, even if the boss is the one who can't make up his mind.    

I don't know if you saw this from last week, but there sure are a lot of us out there.

Customer service and public relations can be little things, but even little things are appreciated by those who put up with annoyances. That is why this story about clocks in hotel rooms is both cute and an example of great PR. Hotels have known for years that guests hate to wrestle with clock radios that are impossible to figure out and set. I gave up years ago and ring the front desk for wakeup calls.

Kudos to Hilton for designing a dumbed-down clock for weary hotel guests and for making the clocks available in all of its rooms. Good PR doesn't have to be big events and huge displays of customer service. It can be as simple as a hotel clock.

The airline industry has been in business and PR crises for several years now. One has to ask how much more can an industry take when you have incidents like this? Delta Airlines and Northwest are getting ready to file for bankruptcy. United Airlines is in bankruptcy and has dumped pensions. There doesn't seem to be an end to it until the entire industry adapts a new economic model along the lines of a Jet Blue or Southwest Airlines. The question I have is how one practices public relations in an environment where everything one does is ticking off some segment of the public?

Microsoft pulled off a smart bit of PR with this announcement. All I can say is, "thank you."

Two days ago, I wrote in this blog that the first job of a PR firm is to get a story accurately. I swear I wasn't aware of this story from today's USA Today when I wrote that entry.

The PR firm involved was right to apologize. It was wrong to say, "We have no reason to doubt our clients."

I feel sorry for the firm: I've been there too. But, as a matter of record, we do check our clients' facts because we know that once a story is out, if there are discrepancies, someone is likely to find them. And, when they do, the result is never pretty.

If newspaper editors can use Google Maps online in news stories, shouldn't PR be doing the same in press releases that point to locations for events, etc.?

It's good when one can cast blame for failure on departed management, but now what does one do to lure investors back? The company is a shambles. A real PR challenge, if you ask me.

This is an interesting story. We have known for years that the internet has enabled protest groups and activists to coordinate their strikes, but the difference now is that bodies that don't even like each other can form loose alliances to fight a common enemy.

That's a chilling reminder to PR practitioners. The present and future of crisis communications are more difficult, and there may be no way to isolate and cut off activists opposed to an organization. One has to learn to deal with them in other ways.

This story interested me not because of weight loss, but because researchers have shown how to play tricks on memory.

Several scientists have shown convincingly that we dare not trust memories for much, and I find too often that people don't recall events as they were. It is an old saw in the news business that you check everything, and never trust anyone (Remember the wheeze, "If your mother says she loves you, check it out."). It is no different in PR.

One of the most important tasks of a PR practitioner is state matters accurately. Put another way, we function as in-house reporters for organizations. We report the news that reporters in the news media will eventually carry. Yes, we spend a great deal of time considering how to position stories, but too often we forget that getting stories accurately is the first task. There is nothing worse than posting a correction after putting out a release. That happened to a client in the last year. The client had researched a topic but overlooked critical facts and was swiftly corrected by two corporations left out of the client's study and release. I felt like I couldn't crawl over my shoe tops the day we put the corrected release out. We looked like idiots -- and we were. We had trusted the client's data and had not cross-checked it.

When clients relate to you what they remember about an event, take notes then check and re-check their "facts." You'll find some are just plain wrong and you will have spared your client embarrassment.

This story suggested a PR opportunity for companies in many industries. One can use a wiki to write "the book" on any number of subjects for which a company wants to be positioned as an authority. "The book" becomes a definitive statement of how much a company knows and by extension, makes it the lead spokesperson in an industry. This idea isn't new, but it hasn't been done online much, to my knowledge.

Where I have seen the idea done effectively is in Museums of Science and Industry. Over the years, I have seen wonderful exhibits in places like Chicago, Boston and the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, NJ that were products of companies, which sponsored them. (In fact, at the Liberty Science Center now is an exhibit on movie making that is worth seeing, but hurry, the museum is about to close for two years while it is expanded and rebuilt.)

It takes courage to suggest a project this size but the payoff is tremendous, if done right. Most companies today build web sites as resources, but the sites tend to be pastiches of knowledge rather than disciplined, in-depth statements about a subject. Wouldn't it be wonderful to see a site done like a museum exhibit with interactive experiments, logical exposition and theory all wrapped together? Think of the merchandising possibilities.

Let me give an example to spark your thinking. Visualize an auto exploded into parts on a home page. Click on each part and you learn what it is for, where it is made, how it works and where it comes from. You can click on the part to make it work or slip it into its correct place in the car to see how it fits with other parts. You can bore into the part to find out where the steel or aluminum comes from and how the steel and aluminum were made. You can assemble the whole car and see how it is distributed to dealers, sold to customers and serviced over its life.

In other words, the exploded car on the home page becomes the authoritative book on auto manufacturing and marketing. This can be done for any industry or service.

I am often critical of PR practitioners' lack of skills in online media. But it's not just us.

This story is from the beginning of August but I am mentioning it here because I thought at the time that it was a great publicity stunt. I still think so. It's publicity at its best. Silicon Graphics shows off the power of its graphics platform by using it in a novel way. Someone was hugely creative in thinking of this idea, and the company reaps the reward of worldwide recognition.

Here is a look into the murky future of media relations with guesses for how it will change over the next five to 10 years. It appears that with traditional media transforming under the pressure of online media, there will be shifts. I have tried to describe the transformations as well as skill sets that media relations practitioners will need to bring to a different future.

As always, I look forward to your comments, especially those that disagree with what is written here.

If true, this is a curious PR decision. I suppose it is possible to handle US publicity from the UK, but I wouldn't dare attempt to place UK publicity from the US. There are too many cultural differences.

I've written about this story before but I bring it up again because it is an example of how few changes there are in communications. I was a one-man film reporting band in the 1970s. So were the other eight reporters in the TV station. It was harder then because we shot and edited film, and we carried rigs that weighed close to 40 pounds.

This fellow wants to go back to the future. I agree with him, by the way. You learn more when you have control over your product and a good mentor. I was lucky to have a great mentor. Each day with every story, I knew what went wrong, and what I had to fix the next day. Over a year and a half, I learned to be a TV journalist. I was never as good as my mentor, but he was and is the best in the business.

There is no secret that I believe PR practitioners should be jacks-of-all-trades. We don't know what clients will need to communicate messages effectively, so we should prepare to do any number of things for them.

Communications skills are lifelong learning. There is never a time when one has mastered message or media. I have long been unhappy with resistance to learning among many PR practitioners. They don't want to be bothered with anything outside of what they know. As I have written here too often, I spent years trying to teach practitioners to use technology and new media. I failed. They didn't see any need for it at the time. Today, many have made progress, but they lag. And, they are not disturbed about the fact that they are behind. I don't understand that attitude: I never will.

This story obscures names and companies, and you will understand why. It comes from a friend of mine. He was complaining to me recently about his PR agency. He works in a global company with a brand name you would recognize readily. The firm he was complaining about is an instantly recognizable brand in PR.

Here is what my friend said. The PR agency has not been providing him good service for a long time, even though it is paid a significant sum monthly. My friend says the problem is constant rotation of juniors on his account. Once he gets a junior trained, the person is pulled off and sent elsewhere, and my friend has to start over again training another junior. He can never make headway because he is always retraining agency staff.

The firm also hasn't gotten results for him, even though he has one requirement for the account. Now, it is possible that the strategy behind the publicity campaign is wrong, but my friend said the agency never brought that up to him during annual planning. As far as my friend knew, the agency approved of the plans that were developed jointly.

Recently, my friend said the agency told him the amount of money the company was paying the agency was too small and that is why the agency can't get results. (The amount of money would make our agency happy, thank you.) Further, the agency had to move juniors onto the account to make up for budget shortfalls. In other words, the agency blamed the client for the agency's failure to perform. My friend, who is a direct individual, told the agency, "That's not my problem. It's your problem." He was seething when he said it.

As of this writing, the situation has not gotten better.

From both agency and client perspectives, this is a horror story and failure of client relationships 101. First, you don't blame a client for failure to get results unless you document clearly that the client has not delivered what is promised. Even then, you place blame carefully. Second, you don't provide excuses for inaction on your own internal dysfunction. Third, you don't ask for a budget increase from a position of weakness.

I would have thought better of the agency involved. It is a wonderful brand. But, my friend thinks the agency is falling apart because many people are leaving. Who knows what the truth is, but the agency has left a perception of incompetence. That's not good any way you look at it, especially since this fellow is in a position to make his unhappiness known to other companies looking for agencies.

It's never good to make a client angry.

This story about web page complaints is worth reading, especially if you have influence over your organization's site. The biggest complaint, of course, is about pop-up ads.

It is the second biggest irritant that gained my attention -- a requirement to register and logon. More news publishers in the US are placing this barrier before viewers, and it ticks them off. (However, there is no easy way around registering since newspapers must make money from their sites. Their print circulation is declining seriously. )

The next irritant is surprising -- requiring a software download. I have gotten used to this -- especially when it comes to audio and video.

Other gripes about slow loading pages, dead links and confusing navigation are longstanding and have been around since the beginning of the web.

Check your web site and see if any of these irritants are part of it. Then, get them changed. Your motivation is the chart at the bottom that shows how many will simply stop coming to your site if you bug them.

This story isn't new. It's rediscovery of a management wheel, but it's worth remembering. Any CEO with operational experience knows he or she doesn't know what is happening in the ranks. All the reports that CEOs get obscure what is happening. Most business is personal interaction that results in numbers that go into reports. The numbers don't tell the tale of relationships until too late, if at all.

This is why operational CEOs spend an enormous part of their time doing customer visits, plant tours and store drop-ins. They know that they don't know and to maintain a feel for the ongoing health of a the company, they want fingertip sensitivity to what is happening at the bottom where company meets customer. But, even there, humans will work to sanitize what a CEO sees. It is the Potemkin Village phenomenon.

"The CEO is coming. Quick! Police the parking lot! Check the front of the store. Clean up the endcaps."

By time the CEO arrives, all employees are on their best behavior. I heard a CEO say one day that his store managers throughout the US keep watch on tail numbers of private jets landing at local airports. They know the tail number of the CEO's jet, and surreptitious phone chains alert store managers that the CEO is in the area if they spot his plane. The CEO chuckled about it. He wasn't a fool, but he had tricks as well.

This is a long way of getting to an old point that PR practitioners forget too often. We are contacts with the outside world, and we see things that are covered up in the bureaucracy of organizations. It is our job to make sure they are revealed and that the CEO knows what is happening. Honest CEOs are grateful for the information and depend on the eyes and ears at their service. Arrogant CEOs deny or are offended when brought bad news. It doesn't take long to determine into which camp a CEO falls.

But, even if a CEO doesn't want to hear bad news, it is a PR practitioner's duty to deliver it. This requires tact and timing. One may have to wait days or weeks to catch the CEO at the right time, and one may have to phrase the news in a way that the CEO can choose to see what is being said or let it pass by without comment, such as packaging bad news with good news to temper the effect. Unless a CEO is involved in illegal activity, there is no great merit in getting oneself fired.

Delivering objective observations of the outside world requires personal courage and a relationship with a CEO that endures through rough spots. It's a privileged position to be in but a precarious one.

Here's how to keep employees happy and eager to come to work. Time their potty breaks. Who said a company needs employee relations when you can treat them like slaves?

'Nuff said.

While we debate the merits of blogs and e-mail, teens have already moved on. I'm not sure how you use instant messaging for PR purposes.

I saw this story a couple of days ago, but I didn't want to let it slide. Hollywood is yet another industry undergoing transformation. It is of concern to PR practitioners because Hollywood has always been -- and still is -- a heavy user of publicity. If theaters shrink in favor of in-home entertainment, will publicity change?

The first response is that it probably won't. Talent will still go on tours to flack pictures, and media will lap up the pompous things actors and actresses have to say. There is still need for press material and for other publicity activities.

But, on the other hand, if the economic picture changes to one of extreme localization, will the revenue from each film be as high, or will earnings be greater without distribution costs that film cans and film stock incur? That is, will it still be as effective to conduct publicity tours?

The move to convert theaters to digital projection is advancing precisely because the studios want to cut distribution costs, but who knows? There is also a mass effect of an audience in one place and sharing the emotions of a film. That could go away if groups of two and three see movies in the home and news interest in Hollywood declines. Of course, Hollywood would need the media more than ever should movies be made primarily for home viewing.

Somehow, I guess Hollywood publicity will change over time if theaters decline to a minor revenue source for the studios. Publicity might be done more online and with less personal media contact. If I were working in Hollywood, I would be watching developments closely, very closely.

For those old enough to remember, before Watergate and the resignation of President Nixon, reporters were lax about gifts and "gimmes." In fact, they were so lax, that many made up for slim salaries with holiday and other gifts that poured in from PR types. Some reporters were so efficient about their taking that they specified to PR practitioners exactly what they wanted -- and demanded that they get it.

After Watergate, American media put an end to much of this. The appearance of payoff was too much for reporters who were coming under the same scrutiny as legislators. The supposed words of a great California legislator, Jesse M. Unruh, made no difference anymore: "You have to be able to take their money, drink their booze, screw their women and then go out and vote against them the next day."

Good reporters had, in fact, divorced boodling from reporting, but not all did. That is why it is surprising that some reporters continue to grasp for gimmes. This story from the Boston Herald is an eyeopener. It is interesting that PR practitioners supplied the fellow with so much. Many years ago, we backed off on such gift-giving, and we advised clients to do so as well.

There will always be room for some freebies from PR practitioners to journalists, but it should be small amounts and highly controlled. It is an expense and risk that PR doesn' t need.

Over decades of working in PR, I have had occasion to meet practitioners who are obsessed about staying on message. They have a set of bullet points on a sheet or PowerPoint slides, and they repeat the points over and over. Ask any question that expands the points, and their response is the points. Try to get them off the points, and they come back to the points. The points are everything and if they say them often enough, they believe they will beat you down until you too believe the points.

I call this plastic PR because it is a facsimile of relationship building that PR espouses and not real relationship building at all. In real PR, one listens to the other side and explains a message in as many ways as it takes to get the other party to understand. That, by the way, is staying on message too but in a more human way.

Perhaps the most plastic of PR practitioners are those trained in political campaigns. They are reluctant to use any words but the approved ones because they fear -- and rightly -- that the media will confuse the message. And, the function of the media is to carry the message to the electorate. The media are mules in the politico's eyes and not humans. Needless to say, the media get impatient with slavish adherence to message -- and I don't blame them. Plastic PR practitioners are robots. You could replace them with a tape recorder and get as much relationship building.

Plastic PR practitioners don't help PR because they are too busy selling. Real practitioners listen as much as they speak.

Whenever I think that I have done something in PR, I step back and wonder what is real accomplishment. To me, physical change is more important than conceptual change. The fact is that PR people rarely resolve debates. We represent positions, and we hope to influence the course of events a little, but we don't derive the equivalent of a theory like evolution or the mathematics of subatomic structure. So, it is important to accomplish something physical once in a while.

That is why I have a feeling of satisfaction that a room we have been working on for weeks is nearly finished. All the carpentry, patching, scraping, priming, taping and painting is largely over. The canvas has been cleared from the floor. Everything is swept and mopped and the windows have been scraped clean. Now, it is a matter of fixing peccadilloes that lurk here and there and putting furniture back.

There are times in the middle of projects that one knows they will continue forever. It is an earthly version of hell. The end seems just in front but something goes wrong. Something always goes wrong, of course, as happened in this room as well. Two times in a row, paint peeled from the ceiling for no good reason other than it failed. We are in the middle of a third attempt, and that is the biggest task remaining. If it doesn't want to stay up there, I don't know what I'll do, but I'm not going to let it interrupt a momentary feeling of accomplishment.

It feels even better than working in PR.

There have been stories in recent weeks about a new technology called Slingbox. While this blog is not about new technologies, it is concerned with how technologies affect communications and PR. Slingbox does both. Essentially, it takes TV signals from any location and routes them to any other through the internet. It has removed geographical barriers of television just as TIVO removed time barriers. We know TIVO threatens the economic model of commercial television because it allows viewers to skip commercials. Slingbox takes away targeted promotion. On the other hand, it allows local messages to reach across geography, which might be a benefit.

The importance of Slingbox is that it is a final step in the complete transformation of electronic media as we know them. That means it is a final step in how we deal with electronic media as well. While it is too early to know how PR will have to adapt in years to come, we know that it will change its approach. My guess is that the change will be evolutionary and will coincide with the growth of Digital Video Recorders and forwarding technology like Slingbox. But it's fun to think about the possibility of getting a spokesperson on air in Wichita with the intent of getting the message to Kansas City and beyond because people are forwarding it automatically. (I'm not sure I understand what this means yet.)

I can be accused of dredging up odd examples of public relations, and the accusation would be true. Oddities surface that I can't resist mentioning and here is one. The story is about poker- playing robots that have just completed the World Poker Robot Championship. The first thing that strikes one is that this is a wonderful publicity gimmick along the lines of IBM's chess-playing computer, but it is more than that.

A spokesman for the casino where the competition took place said that people would use the robots eventually, so rather than fight them, the company was allowing them into the casino where it could study how well they work. (Poker playing robots are illegal in human games.)

That's smart PR, a heck of lot smarter than the music industry fighting online technology because people can swap music. The casino is embracing the future and learning how to adapt to it. The music industry has finally done the same, but not until it fought a losing battle.

In spite of talk about the need to change and to keep up with competition, most industry leaders don't like change. They want to freeze competition around a set of rules and play by those rules far into the future. The telephone industry worked exactly like until deregulation.

Rapid technological change upsets economic models and injects mortal risk into the game of business. No wonder most industries would rather fight than switch. Poker robots, however, are a technology that at least Las Vegas casino has welcomed. That's smart PR.

This blog is not meant for weather commentary, but the heat and humidity on the East Coast of the US this year have been bothersome, to say the least. The East Coast is just one global hot spot. The West Coast of the US has sustained high temperatures. France, Spain and Italy are baking. The Alps continue to melt and the Arctic to lose its icepack.

There might have been argument about global warming in years past, but not now. And, here is where we get to public relations. The weather itself has been the best proof of the contention that the world's average temperature is rising. When we had cool summers, you didn't hear as much discussion of global warming as you do now. Granted that this is a passing phenomenon and next year might be OK, but I have noticed even the president of the US said recently that manmade sources have helped boost the temperature of the earth.

The point here is that some issues must play out over time before people accept them. Communications are water on rock. They help change attitudes but only a tiny amount at a time.

We have two other controversies in the US in which this is true -- social security and health care. Both are broken, but everyone would rather fight over a solution than come to a consensus. When both crises reach fever pitch, the public will demand that legislators "do something." Something eventually will be done, but there are only competing interests now.

Big issues often develop at their own pace. No matter how much PR you do, you can't rush them.

Just a couple of posts after praising someone for approaching a blogger correctly, there's this piece of tripe that hit my e-mail box today. I'm masking the name of the company because I won't help it with the publicity it seeks.

Big fan of your blog and as a PR pro myself wanted to share with you this amazing new service that's going to make all of our jobs as publicists a zillion times easier and less labor intensive. We all dream of getting TV coverage for our clients but sometimes it's a hassle to deal with getting our clients the info they want. I'm talking about eliminating having to screen every electronic hit we get for clients, figure out the metrics such as placement and value and whether a story is positive or negative and the hellish process of creating intricate presentations for clients, boards of directors etc. XXXX just came out with YYY that lets us for the first time do all this online instantly - check it out for yourself on _________! I think if you mention you're a PR blogger, you'll get a free trial.

If this person actually read my blog, he or she would know that I dislike breathy publicity and exclamation points. The person would also know that using adjectives like "amazing" and "zillion" turns me off. If this is the way this person approaches the media, I suspect he or she has trouble gaining the attention of sophisticated journalists as well.

Spare me. Tell me about the product or service and cut the hype, puh-leeze.

I don't suppose this individual will contact me again because the e-mail looked like a mass mailing sent to dozens of PR bloggers. But, if the individual wants to try again, that's OK with me. I might even review the product with a decent approach.

Dell computers has been taking hits lately for its customer service. You may recall that I linked to a blog here a short while ago in which the blogger seethed publicly about his customer service difficulties with the company then bought a Mac.

Dell is catching flak again because it has dropped some customer care message boards. Customers accuse the company of not giving a "damn" about service. Dell in riposte said that it shut the message boards down precisely because it cares about customer service. It seems some questions on the boards required divulging personal information, and the company doesn't want that done in public.

So who's right and who's wrong? It doesn't make a difference. When things go bad, anything you do appears to be wrong whether it is or not. Dell might be in the wrong for failing to explain clearly enough why it is shutting the boards down. On the other hand, the message board moderators might be blamed for complaining loudly when Dell has a proper case.

I've said this before and I'll say it again. In some cases, no matter what you do, you can't win from a PR perspective. You have to do the right thing and take the heat. Maybe someday, people will understand, but that is cold comfort when you are under attack.