Online Public Relations Thoughts

Just in case you are the last person to read about this. Take time to visit Global PR Blog Week 2.0 that is running right now at http://globalprblogweek.com/. There is plenty of solid material on the site already and more to come.

Over years of sitting in brainstorm sessions, I have come to dislike them. One can get as many ideas sitting around with a beer in hand than in a formal brainstorming.

There are several reasons for my distaste. Few brainstormings are focused. They ramble from hither to yon but fail to deal with the issue at hand. This is the fault of the brainstorming leader who should work to keep a group on topic but frequently doesn't. Then, there is gamesmanship. Like it or not, one strives to have an original idea at least as much to uphold one's image among peers as to help the topic at hand. But, one person's idea frequently comes at the expense of another's. Or, at least, it seems that way. Here too leaders are supposed to keep egos in check, but too often, they don't. Then, there is pecking order. If a boss sits in on a brainstorming, the boss' idea is always better, even if it is worthless. The rest of the participants are minions yapping like puppies in a kennel. Finally, there are the ideas themselves. It is a truism to say that few good ideas come out of brainstorms. Most of what one hears could have been done sitting at one's desk for an hour and thinking.

Having written all this, I must also write that I have been in brainstorms that were useful, exciting and respectful of everyone in the room. There just hasn't been many of them. Perhaps it is time to give brainstorming a rest in PR.

This is one of several stories I have read recently that condemn sloppy science writing in the media. Unfortunately, PR people are often involved in writing initial press releases for scientific announcements, and they muddle clarity and add to misunderstanding. A primary job of a PR practitioner is to be an accurate translator between specialties and laypersons. We take the jargon and make sense of it without imposing inaccurate interpretation of what it is and spin as to what it means. When we fail, reporters who are not trained in science are sure to fail. Our job is to help them, and it looks as if we aren't doing our jobs that well.

Here is a creative use of corporate PR and blogging

Here is an example of PR 101 on the government level. The web unlocked vast archives of information and service to citizens. It is only the reluctance of legislators that keeps the process from moving faster than it does. The reluctance comes from targeting budgets to projects other than the web. Sooner or later, all interactive relationships with government will be done online. The sooner the better.

This is a tirade, so those of you who like dispassionate opinion may skip today's entry.

The tirade concerns a conversation I had recently with a young college student attending a well known university. I asked her what she is studying, and she told me broadcast journalism. I asked her what that consisted of, and she said newswriting and anchoring. Anchoring? I stared at her.

"Do you mean," I said "you are training to be an anchor? There aren't many jobs for anchors. What about street reporting?" "I don't think I would like that very much," the young lass said. The conversation continued, but I began to seethe. The fraud that journalism professors are perpetrating on impressionable young people is almost too much to bear. She will be lucky to find a one-man-band street reporting job in Fort Wayne, IN and get paid the miserly sum that drove me out of the business decades ago. Moreover, what kind of academic learning is it to sit and look at a camera with a pleasant expression on one's face? What she should be doing is studying history, political science, economics and physics, so she can be a good reporter at some point in her career. But no, she's studying anchoring.

I am an honors journalism graduate, so I feel I am qualified to write that most journalism and PR curricula fall woefully short of the education that a reporter and PR practitioner needs. Learning how to write leads and press releases is not enough to report accurately the complex world in which we live. I am not alone in writing this. Many in journalism have said the same thing -- and in PR too. The best journalists and PR people bring well-developed and rigorous minds to their work. They are curious. They dig. They are not satisfied until they understand.

In the old days, one trained under an editor who made you or broke you. We need that kind of OJT back in journalism and PR. We should insist that college students come prepared in solid disciplines and then train them in the techniques of each business. This could be done easily with a fifth year cram course rather than four years of learning how to write and do events or anchoring.

I feel sorry for the parents of the young lass. They are forking over tens of thousands of dollars to a university for little or nothing. They might as well bet on horses or the lottery for all the return they and their daughter are getting.

Yes, I taught in a university communications department, and yes, my feelings were the same there as well, which is why I wasn't well liked by the revenue-driven professors. They were more concerned with keeping the number of students up in order to collect tuition than they were with a good education of those entrusted to them. It sickened me and finally, I quit. (They were happy I did.) What has happened to education?

I wish the young woman well in her pursuit of anchoring. I am sorry she was led to believe that she has to attend a four-year college to learn how to do it.

It is the fate of every PR practitioner to engage in writing by committee. This unseemly and inefficient method of developing communications comes from a known fact that every CEO, general counsel, executive vice president, CFO, CMO and dogcatcher writes better than you do and perhaps, better than Shakespeare.

Writing by committee is a deep annoyance that one endures from the first day in business until the last. I was lucky by comparison to other practitioners. I started by writing annual reports, and there is no more of a committee-scripted product in the world. Early on, I got used to bashings that CEOs, EVPs and VPs gave to copy, sometimes for the sole reason that they could. I, wretched scribe, collected revisions and ground out change 32 in route to a 50-draft report. This is exaggerated in that I never reached that high a number in my recollection, but I did have a heck of a lot of drafts piled in the file drawer.

Perhaps the worst feature of committee writers is that many never weigh in until the document is considered complete. Suddenly, there are grave gaps that should have been caught earlier or extensive rewrites that just have to be done. Excuse me, but where the hell were these writers earlier in the process?

One learns to bite deeply into one's tongue when writing by committee. There is always a rising desire to say something to somebody that will be taken ill -- and was meant. As I get older, I have learned to turn off my hearing for much of the discussion. On teleconferences, I play with the computer. In meetings, I try to doodle as well as my boss. This process of disengagement is solely intended to preserve sanity until conversation gutters out, and one can get a sentence.

Writing by committee is an incredible waste of time, and the only compensation for it is that we bill by the hour.

No matter what you think of President Bush, his public acceptance for Federal blunders after Hurricane Katrina was right. It was a proper public relations move. The boss stands up for underlings for good and ill, then makes sure failures never happen again. It looks as if Bush is taking this course, and if he is, more power to him. Criticism will continue to be withering, as it should be. But, he ran for the job.

To me, this is the test of his leadership. If he handles the recovery well, he is a better president than I have given him credit for. If he doesn't, I won't be surprised. I've never liked him that much. The true test of a leader is crisis and not times of good feeling. Bush handled 9/11 well, but his handling of Iraq is suspect to any objective observer. It's as if he has his good days and bad.

From a PR perspective, this administration has been puzzling from the outset. Bush has been effective in getting legislation through Congress, but he is a person people love to hate. It makes one wonder, especially since he said after the second election that he had gained a lot of political capital, and he was going to spend it. Circumstances in Iraq and the South spent it for him, and he is scrambling to get out of debt. Perhaps the PR lesson is that one should never look too far ahead. You never know what is coming next.

Everyone is aware that the internet wasn't much of a success until the web was invented to make it more usable. I wasn't aware that the same thing happened with the digital camera as well. The issue in both cases was usability. The internet was a university tool for geeks willing to put up with its text-driven eccentricities. The digital camera needed to reach a point where it was easier to shoot in pixels than on film. Usability is at the heart of technology and communications.

There are similar cliches for PR, but these are so true for advertising. Why is it that so few people are honest about daily life?

It sometimes hard to make the connection between ideas and people's lives, but three examples in the past week demonstrate it -- one little and two large. (I am writing this on the anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Towers, a wing of the Pentagon and aircrafts filled with passengers, all because of a clash of ideas.)

The Sunday New York Times reported that a difference in understanding between local and state government and FEMA contributed to the delay in getting people out of New Orleans. FEMA saw itself in a support role to local authorities, but local authorities were overwhelmed and couldn't handle the situation. The simple difference between supporting and taking charge caused vast misery. In addition, the article pointed out that when the state went to get busses to evacuate people, local parishes (counties) refused to lend them because of reported violence and the fact that most bus drivers are women. Fear kept them from acting, and busses stayed idle until FEMA stepped in.

The small case is a report of a hangup at PayPal where efforts to collect money for hurricane victims was stopped because PayPal was afraid of frauds. In this case, PayPal was acting responsibly, but it made no difference. It earned a black eye for its intransigence.

It doesn't look to me that anyone in these examples acted in a heinous manner. They acted without information and the courage to change concepts that weren't workable.

There are times to break rules, to change concepts, to look at what is happening and to suggest new ways to proceed. One doesn't always get advance warning of when such times might occur. It requires sensitivity and experience, and even then, it is possible to make large mistakes. Therein lies a choice that faces every one of us at times -- the desire to be right versus the will to act. We can look foolish either way. The question is what is right at this time, and there can be no answer until after one has chosen.

This is a topic on which I have written before, but it is time to mention it again. I was wondering yesterday about a former client that decided to disappear from the national scene. The company had never been comfortable in the media spotlight, and it had been trapped in a horrible crisis not of its own making. The crisis scarred the firm, and it stopped working with the media. It went silent, and I suspect it shall remain so for years but for earnings announcements and press releases on contracts and personnel changes.

When I first started in PR, this attitude was looked upon as wrong, and we would predict disasters for companies that failed to engage with reporters. Over the years, however, I have bumped into companies that preferred to remain silent, and they were just as successful out of the public eye as they were in it. Their CEOs asked why they should deal with the press. I used to give them standard PR arguments, but it occurred to me that I was being dogmatic. The answer is that as long as everything went well, they didn't have to deal with reporters. They could remain woodwork companies and enjoy anonymity. I recall this wasn't an answer that my bosses wanted to hear when I first began giving it. I was supposed to be SELLING business and not walking away.

But, there are hundreds of unknown public companies in America and tens of thousands of private ones. They know their customers: Their customers know them. That's all the PR they need or want. Only a few companies by the nature of their business must deal with the media constantly -- and they do. This means, of course, that media relations, the core of most PR activity, is a niche business. That's not a comfortable thought for many practitioners, but it is one they should remember.

Watching the events of recent days is a study in perception. We don't really know what happened to delay help to New Orleans and the South. There was some foul-up that prevented positioning of troops and supplies. But, it is not clear now what the failure was. It will become clearer when commissions pick apart the sequence of the days leading to the disaster. It will never be fully resolved because each side is busily spinning its version of what happened. No one wants to take the blame for this one. It will cost political careers. So, we are in the middle of a perception war, a mighty effort to point fingers and pin blame so responsibility is firmly fixed well before official reports appear. It's an ugly scene, in some ways uglier than the mess the hurricane left. One loses respect for humans quickly in episodes like this, and no depth of cynicism is unwarranted.

There are choruses calling for the head of FEMA , and he may have to go. This is the kind of decision a President has to make. Survival counts more than loyalty at times, and Michael Brown should understand that. It's lonely when one is on the wrong side of a perception war. Meanwhile, sit back and watch the charges fly about the political ring. Politics are the nastiest kind of pugilistics, and there are no rules against hitting below the belt.

This story was inevitable. By packing so many features and functions into cellphones, manufacturers have turned them into undesirable tools. When will engineers remember the KISS principle -- Keep It Simple, Stupid. People don't like to fight with machines. They want to use machines. PR practitioners should be reminding engineers of the public constantly. It looks like they didn't where cell phones are concerned.

One of the many giant tasks that Southern Louisiana and Mississippi have is a public relations campaign. That campaign will keep those in place who are determined to move and lure those back who have gone. It will also invite those back who visited New Orleans for a culture that has been nearly ruined. Settlement outside of affected areas has begun. Once completed, it will be difficult to get people to uproot and return. In fact, many won't, and others will take their place.

A second part of that public relations campaign should be to convince people never to settle so close to the water again. This is time to put in -- finally -- rules that prevent people from building on barrier islands and close to shores that are vulnerable to major storms. Inexcusable building on unstable coastlines, such as North Carolina's Outer Banks, has been occurring for the last 50 years. It should be stopped once and for all with the example of Katrina.

Here's a bet that it won't be. The power of public preference overwhelms wisdom time and again.

I find this interesting because of the many junk studies of all kinds that exist in every field. PR practitioners are responsible for merchandising many of them, and I am sure I have merchandised more than a few myself in spite of best efforts. We need to take extreme care, especially with medical research to make sure that findings are what scientists say they are.

Scientists are people too. Many are ambitious, vain and bucking for advancement, and their human qualities can affect their work. PR needs good statistical resources at hand to vet studies before merchandising them. It is not enough to say we are simply conveyors of other's messages.

You would think that wine publicists have enough to worry about without this. I wonder if the smog comes in red or white.

Today is Labor Day in the US -- the last official day of summer vacation. Tomorrow, it is back to work and to school for children who have not returned already.

Labor Day is an ironic holiday on which many work. All stores are open, as well as fast food outlets and gas stations, etc. In other words, the people for whom the holiday was meant are the ones who can't take time off. But, it is the perception that we honor labor that counts. So often in the US, perception means more than fact.

As a public relations person, it is important to distinguish as much as possible the differences and to highlight facts. It is fact that importance of labor does not equate with pay. The most important jobs of all -- mother and father -- are unpaid. There is no money that can compensate parents for what they do well. Among the least important jobs are overpaid -- finance and investing -- where money is made by handling money and not by producing anything. Workers in textiles and food have historically, and even now, been underpaid yet where would we be without clothes and food?

There are some signs that pay inequity in America is changing. Among the most disturbing for those of us who have degrees is that the pay for college graduates has dropped five years in a row in the US. Postgraduates have apparently been able to maintain their standard of living but one wonders how long it will be before that changes too. (What can one do with a masters degree in English literature? I have one, and I have never figured it out.) It is also a fact that labor in manufacturing has declined in America and will never recover because in order to remain competitive, surviving manufacturers have had to replace people with machines. (This is true worldwide except in developing countries like China and India.)

I have worried for some time about what people will do in a post-industrial, wired society. People are working but it looks artificial to have millions laboring in low-paid retail to sell to others serving in equally low-paid fast food jobs. That is why discount stores have done so well and why American society looks again like a society divided between wealthy and working poor with a middle class shrinking in between. Of course, my perceptions may well be wrong, but there is one fact that isn't. The internet has created a global economy that everyone senses, but few understand. America is not yet competitive in that economy, and there is no guarantee it ever will be. Government can encourage change, but it can not force people to act differently. The economy itself has to find a path out of the conundrum in the form of millions of entrepreneurs, managers and laborers who adjust day by day to what they sense is happening around them. Labor Day should be celebrating this change and not the last day at the beach.

I had no intention of commenting on Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath in New Orleans. Everyone else is writing about it, and many are more qualified than I. But then, this e-mail came to me yesterday.

I am interested to see your thoughts on how President Bush's somewhat "lack of presence" in New Orleans, or the South for that matter, could turn into a PR fiasco in the remaining years of his term. There's a strong presence of local and state politicians in the South, even our own Texas Governor on Larry King last night. But just a "fly over" in Air Force One? His father was criticized for not reacting fast enough to Hurricane Andrew, and later lost the election. Seems fishy. I'd be interested to read your thoughts.

With that kind of invitation, how could one resist?

So here's what I think strictly from a communications and perception point of view. Bush shot himself badly by going to San Diego and being photographed with gift guitar in hand. Perceptually it looked like he didn't care or wasn't informed. Neither position is acceptable for a President to take. However, Bush didn't kill himself. He can recover if he's careful -- and he and his people have had a history of being careful about public perception. Time will tell whether he can make up for lost ground. After all, he was criticized for failing to return to Washington immediately after 9/11, and he survived that.

Bush has several challenges now that he didn't have during 9/11. He has an unpopular war on his hands that already cost him popularity. He has high gas prices that upset drivers before Hurricane Katrina and has them screaming now. He had Hurricane Katrina in Florida before it reached the Gulf Coast and New Orleans. He has most major newspapers against him and eager to score points. Finally, he has had four years in office and is working on a fifth. That is plenty of time for people to dislike him for one reason or another.

Given these challenges, there is little chance his popularity will ever again approach the levels that he had post 9/11. But, it doesn't have to, and he can still be effective. It's a question of when and how he acts to seize the initiative. He doesn't have much time left before the whole affair gets away from him. Some would say that he has lost his chance already. However, he hasn't been a "White House President," who stays in the Oval Office. He did travel to New York to talk to the firefighters. He is going to the Gulf Coast to survey the damage.

There is still a chance that he can win the perception war, but he needs to move quickly -- and he knows it. (Now, pardon me if I don't comment on this topic again.)

I need to correct one opinion from yesterday. MediaMap is not just slow in the afternoon. It stops dead. Won't run. Can't make it run. Come back later. This happened yesterday to two of us, and we're under a tight deadline. (Cue gnashing of teeth.) What infuriates me is that the company is aware of the problem but is making customers live with it.

I suspect I know the reason for the slowdown. It isn't hard to build a hypothesis. The system starts to seize at noon when the entire US comes online from New York to California. It is OK in the morning before California work hours and after 6 pm when the East Coast goes home. It is underpowered. Some IT person built it for average performance and not for peak usage, which may be OK for other applications but is lousy for people working under deadline. The system needs to be built for reasonable response under peak loads. It isn't there now.

If anyone has a suggestion for a better system, I'd like to know it. I've looked at a lot of them over the years. They promise a great deal but their databases are indifferent at best.

The keys to a good media database system are simple but difficult: It must be accurate and easy to use 24 hours a day.

By accurate, I don't just mean the name of the reporter or editor but also the person's beat, interests and other pertinent information that helps one target the right individual rather than spamming. Easy-to-use speaks for itself. MediaMap is not easy to use. It tries to do too much and, as a result, it confuses people who can't take the time to learn all of its tricks.

Our agency is engaged in a crash program that requires targeted media lists for 40 US markets in short order. It has given us a chance to see how MediaMap can sing and dance. For the most part, it has done well, but there are flaws that madden anyone who uses the software database. I wish Bacons would get around to fixing them.

The worst feature is MediaMap's speed -- rather, the lack of it. The program crawls on a good day and is a slug every afternoon. The company apologizes, but so far speed has not approached anything acceptable. That leaves users like myself muttering when I have to watch the damn thing trundle for a minute until it shows me a reporter's name.

The second annoying feature is an interface that is anything but intuitive. One has to learn the system over time, and it isn't easy. Most of my colleagues won't touch MediaMap for that reason. I don't blame them. It shouldn't be so hard to build lists.

The third feature that needs changing are sudden interrupts. For some reason, MediaMap will start glitching and doing odd things at inconvenient times. Fortunately, we haven't had much of that in this job, but it has happened to me often enough in the past.

Even with these annoyances, I don't see how we could get this job done in the time allowed without MediaMap. And, once we got a search system down, it has moved smartly. An administrative assistant figured how to approach this job, and her solution proved to be the right one. Kudos to her. She taught me things I didn't know about MediaMap in the process of doing individual TV, radio and print lists.

My feelings about MediaMap are more positive than not, but one shouldn't acquire the system as a perfect solution. It isn't.

This is where blogging shows itself to be a medium of power. I wonder how we got along in disasters before blogs.

Every newscast in the US led yesterday with hurricane Katrina and its threat to New Orleans. The BBC reported the hurricane about eight places down in its early news headlines. US TV was nearly hysterical with predictions of what would happen to New Orleans. The BBC was more concerned with the constitution in Iraq. (This, by the way, changed by the evening when the hurricane led the news on the BBC.)

All news is local whether international or regional. That's hard for PR practitioners to remember. We may think we have a good global story only to find no one cares about it elsewhere, and one can't dictate reporters' interests.

This was a fact I had to explain to a client recently on a completely different topic. The client was wondering why US reporters pay attention to stories about women directors on corporate boards but rarely write about more important corporate governance issues. They just do, and as hard as I have worked to change their focus over 10 years, I haven't succeeded yet. It may be they find corporate governance boring, and the number of women directors is an easy factoid to report. It may be they don't understand corporate governance, and they don't want to take the time. It may be their editors don't consider the subject important. Whatever the reason, or mix of reasons, they yawn when they get original data related to corporate governance.

So, while US reporters were flooding into New Orleans and Biloxi to document wind, rain and destruction, the BBC was spotlighting 500,000 revellers at the 41st Notting Hill carnival.

Reporters and editors are notorious for being grumpy with PR people but sometimes their dislike is funny because of its extremes. The following is a statement from Sam Grobart, Assistant News Editor of The Wall Street Journal that I picked up from MediaMap, the media contact database.

Grobart is an Assistant Features Editor for the Weekend Journal overseeing that section's coverage of Automotive, Shopping, Travel, Decor,Consumer Electronics and Food. In regards to PR contact, he says, "If you send me e-mails that clearly indicate you have no knowledge of where I work or what I do (for starters, I don't want to do a profile of your dermotologist client), I will promptly delete your message, add your address to our corporate spam filter and make sure you never do business with me or my firm again. I could tell you what topics I cover, but if you're reading this to find out, you're already someone I don't want to talk to."

So there.

I was listening to a reporter last night on Public Broadcasting's The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. The reporter was discussing oil companies in Nigeria and difficulties they face in the corrupt country where taxes from oil money never reach the poor. He was commenting that oil companies have taken some civic action to help the destitute because the government isn't doing anything. He then said that oil companies face a choice of making changes to help the poor or just doing "public relations" moves.

I winced. Here we go again. This fellow is a sophisticated reporter, and to him, the term public relations only means perception, not real action. I could get angry with the reporter, but before I do, I should get angry with my own industry for letting standards drop. We have no one to blame but ourselves.

I read this opinion piece a few days ago, but it stayed with me. I'm not sure what to make of it. One could say this fellow was living in a dream world for much of his work career. In this dream world, money did not matter -- only information. On the other hand, the environment in which the fellow started was one of fun -- I recall it well -- and of little responsibility for the bottom line of a news organization other than reporting stories well.

What strikes me about it in the end is that newspapers have been profit-making enterprises since the beginning and someone somewhere was worried about the bottom line. Certainly the circulation wars of the 19th and 20th Centuries were about revenues and profits. The raging headlines of the Hearst and Pulitzer papers were about selling more papers on the street. Tabloid journalism is tied closely to revenue.

I'm not sure that the Founding Fathers had a Great Mission and Moral Imperative in mind for newspapers from the beginning. In any event, newspapers are a medium and not an end. Journalism can survive in any number of ways -- and will. It's the content, and not the printing press. If newspapers go away, online will still be here.

Richard Edelman in his blog on two occasions recently discussed what PR should be. He was unhappy with the idea that PR practitioners are merely message crafters and distributors. His view isn't new, but it did address a fundamental split between those who see PR as relationship building and those who see it as cheap advertising or publicity.

Edelman's unhappiness got me to thinking about what we do. I wrote this essay as a result. It is called, "Staying on Message: One-way Communication versus Relationships." Edelman is quoted at the beginning to set the scene.

I don't take sides, but I do highlight the difficulties of thinking about PR as a relationship business. The challenges are enormous, and PR practitioners are their own worst enemies in achieving the goal of becoming relationship builders. Just about everyone in PR comes in for criticism, but the only ones who can reform PR are from within.

Although I don't say it in the paper, I believe it is independent PR agencies like Edelman that can forge a new course for the business. None have succeeded yet. There is no guarantee they ever will because PR departments in corporations and buyers of PR services are firmly fixed in message-crafting.

I would like to see Edelman's vision come true, but it is time to stop talking about what PR should be doing and get on with changing our ways. Regrettably, it is easier to talk than to act.

Any time there is change in the fundamental course of life, there is a temptation to react with fear, sometimes deep and unreasonable. This article points to a lack of reason surrounding the price of oil. A hard task as communicators is to maintain perspective when life altering events occur. By restraining emotion, we might warp reason, and by being too emotional, we also may go off track. It is difficult to find a North star, but we should try.

My mother-in-law died yesterday and people have been tremendously kind in expressing their sentiments. I notice, though, that there are no words one can use for something so final. There have been extraordinary orations, most notably President Reagan's speech for astronauts who lost their lives, but for survivors, words cannot fill the canyon that death creates. Yet, death is a normal course of all life.

It is a mystery beyond communication. Perhaps that is why we fear it.

Those who read this blog regularly know that one of the regular themes is usability -- making things easy for people to access and understand. The guru of usability is a fellow by the name of Jakob Nielsen, whom I have quoted a great deal since this blog began. Here is a recent interview with Jacob that is worth reading and understanding.

Too many web sites fail when it comes to ease of use. Web site designers and builders are busy following their own agenda rather than needs of users. This is an area where PR practitioners should be speaking out and too often we don't.

One standard publicity technique is to propose that a reporter be a participant in an interesting activity. The Knoxville News Sentinel has opened a wonderful door for publicists by having one of its reporters do a videolog report that is posted on its web site here. The reporter's visual technique is crude at best but the authenticity of the experience -- shooting a pistol for the first time -- comes through. Think of the possibilities here and your mind begins to spin. Have a reporter do a factory visit, for example, or work in a store or film interviews with executives as part of a print story. So far, only the Knoxville News Sentinel appears to be doing this but as other newspapers catch on, the opportunities should be endless.