Friday, July 28, 2006
HC+T Update: July 2006
HC+T Update: July 2006
HC+T Update
July 2006
- Eradicating Astroturfing
- Blog the Way We Tell You To. Right Now, Dammit!
- Prioritizing Customers Over Owners
- No Technology Used in Theft of Coca-Cola’s Intellectual Property
- Our Own Insulated Little World
- My Road Tour is Getting Closer
- Cost-Avoidance as PR Measurement
- May I Brag?
- Two webinars on tap
- Site of the month
- HC+T update
- Boilerplate and subscription information
As usual, this issue represents mostly material I’ve written for my blog over the past month. You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. And don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.
1. Eradicating Astroturfing
An email from Trevor Cook alerted me to a campaign Trevor and Paull Young are undertaking to fight the scourge of astroturfing. Young has created a campaign home page on The New PR wiki, and he and Erin Caldwell have developed the logo you see here, and in the affiliations section of this blog’s left-hand column.
I’m more than happy to support this cause. Astroturfing is one of those behaviors employed by the bottom-feeders of the industry that paint the rest of us with their brush. When exposed (as it more and more frequently is), it only serves to damage the reputation of the company associated with the campaign. While a read of the code of ethics of the various communication associations makes it clear that astroturfing falls outside the bounds of ethical behavior, these same associations don’t talk about it much. I was perplexed, to say the least, to read Young’s account of a seminar hosted by the Public Relations Institute of Australia that seemed to give tacit approval to astroturfing in some instances.
Astroturfing has no place in any PR practitioner’s toolkit. It is deceptive, dishonest, unethical. If you’re unfamiliar with it, the concept is simple—employ people to submit letters to the editor, blog posts, or comments to blogs that make it appear that a grassroots effort is taking root. A good example of this unconscionable practice is the instance in which the president of Halliburton arm-twisted employees to send letters to editors of their local newspapers extolling the company’s virtues in the face of increasing criticism. (The term refers to the artificial grass used in sporting venues; it’s hard to tell the difference between the fake and the real.)
While Cook’s and Young’s blog posts both contain the list of actions you can take to support this campaign, I’ll reiterate them here:
- Join the conversation - write against astroturfing on your blog or comment on the blog posts listed on the Anti-Astroturfing page on the New PR Wiki
- Declare you and/or your agency astroturf free
- Expose possible examples of astroturfing
- Link to the Anti-Astroturfing page with the image provided and add your name to the list of supporters below
- Call on your politicians to take tougher legislative action against astroturfing
- Call on your industry / professional association to speak out against astroturfing
- Encourage friends and colleagues to get involved
As I have repeated so often, the vast majority of practitioners in our profession work hard every day without ever crossing an ethical line, producing solid results for their clients while displaying amazing levels of creativity and innovation. Yet all of us are viewed as lowlife purveyors of spin and propaganda thanks to the minority of lazy, dishonest, talentless hacks who employ tactics like astroturfing to compensate for their lack of skill, talent, or professionalism. If we want to change the public view of PR, we have to eradicate these kinds of practices.
2. Blog the Way We Tell You To. Right Now, Dammit!
Back in the early 1990s, when I worked in communications at Allergan, Inc., the company introduced a new silicon intraocular lens, the artificial lens used to replace a bad organc crystalline lens during cataract surgery. A silicon lens offered significant advantages over the phacoemulsification lens that had been the industry standard since the Korean War. An ophthalmologist could insert the lens folded in half, requiring a much smaller incision that could be closed with a single stitch, promoting faster healing and reduced risk of infection.
Allergan’s marcom staff knew their biggest challenge was convincing doctors to try something new. Not only would they be skeptical and reluctant to change something they were familiar with that worked, they would also have to learn new surgical techniques. The effort to get docs to embrace the silicon lens would take years.
So it is in just about every profession, every business. New ideas do not sweep any business community overnight -— not the medical profession, not communications.
Knowing this, I’m growing a bit weary of the snipes and jabs at anyone who doesn’t immediately (man, am I getting tired of this phrase) “get it.” I saw a comment on the Repman blog yesterday that proclaimed, “digital has been around for 3 or so years, so if (PR) folks don’t get it yet, i doubt they will.” Oh, please. If medical device manufacturers gave up on doctors after three years, medical practices would be mired in the dark ages.
I am equally bemused by the harsh judgement passed down by some on businesses just putting their toes in the water of social media. Dell has launched a blog at http://one2one.dell.com. The first post came on July 5; the official announcement of the blog’s presence was made yesterday. The blog was inspired by MSDN’s Channel 9, designed to create transparency and open a dialogue.
Consider what it probably took to get a Dell blog launched. More than likely, some executives needed to be convinced by lower-ranking enthusiasts. The execs’ reluctance was based on having already been burned in the blogosphere. They probably gave their approval after many presentations and memos, but with caveats and conditions. Still, the blog is accepting critical comments, and the company has made commitments about the blog’s openness. So with a mere seven posts under its belt and still feeling its way around, how has the blog been greeted?
Jeff Jarvis, the blogger who stirred up the storm of controversy with his Dell Hell posts, wrote:
“The subtitle is ‘direct conversations with Dell’ but this is as much a conversation as yelling at a brick wall. There is not one link there. It’s filled with promotions for Dell’s wonderfulness.”
Steve Rubel chided:
“When I read the one2one doctrine, their heart seems like it’s in the right place. Their actions don’t speak that way. Perhaps it might have been better for them to have stayed silent.”
Time for a deep breath. The blog’s authors are real people serving as human touch points for customers, and given a bit of time to find its footing, one2one could very well be exactly what Jarvis, Rubel and the other critics believe it should be. But blogs do need time to find their voice—especially group blogs—and corporations don’t move at the same light speed as individual bloggers and evangelist agencies. Is there no slack to be cut among the superior early adopters who have already figured things out?
Props to Andy Lark for counseling patience:
“The bloggerati just need to get over every blog coming out the gate reading like a conversation at the local pub and not rehashing the past trials and tribulations of bloggers. It takes time for a corporate blog to find its collective voice.”
There’s a fine line between evangelizing and sanctimony. Or, to put it another way: Guide, don’t chide.
3. Prioritizing Customers Over Owners
I had only been working for my new employer as manager of employee communications for a day or two when I was summoned to the president’s office. “We have adopted a new business philosophy and we need it communicated to employees,” he said. The new philosophy, adopted by the executive committee a week or so earlier, was a commitment to SVE—Shareholder Value Enhancement.
As I listened to the principles of SVE, I grew increasingly alarmed and concerned. Every decision made, the focus of every activity, had to be undertaken with shareholder value enhancement in mind. Employees would need to understand that and understand the drivers of shareholder value. I expressed my concern: “Can you really see employees jumping out of bed in the morning, fired up to get to work so they can enhance shareholder value?”
They should, I was told, seeing as how they were all owners themselves. True: Through the employee stock ownership program and the 401(k) plan, most employees held stock. The average employee probably owned 0.0000001% of the company. In any case, I was told, this decision was a done deal. (It had been pushed, it turned out, by the chief financial officer.)
The share price of the company’s stock the day that president retired was virtually unchanged from its value the day he took the job. In fact, the SVE movement has proved to be a dud. If you need an example of what happens when companies focus on shareholder value, look no further than Enron, another company that embraced the philosophy.
Of course, the notion of focusing on shareholder returns was not introduced with the SVE movement. Corporate mission statements are replete with shareholder statements, like this one:
Acme Inc. is committed to enhancing shareholder value through the active management of long-term investments and responsible corporate citizenship. It is of the view that these objectives are best achieved and risks minimized through sectoral and geographic diversification. (This is a real statement; I’ve just changed the company name.)
The immediate question that would arise in the mind of anybody in any audience reading this mission statement is, “Yeah, but what do you do?”
I certainly am not suggesting that a company should not strive to provide solid returns to their owners; it would be a rare company that would survive if it failed to make a profit. The point is that shareholder value is created as an outcome of what the company does. The better an organization fulfills its mission, the more money it should make. But if making money is the mission itself, companies are likely to fail miserably at it.
The problem is in the decision-making process. Decisions made with shareholders top-of-mind are often very, very bad decisions. If Johnson & Johnson had made shareholders their top priority when bottles of Tylenol were being poisoned, they would have left the product on store shelves. Instead, the company’s credo put patients at the top of their priority list and opted to pull all product, a costly decision to be sure, but one that bolstered their reputation and pushed Tylenol sales to new levels when the product was reintroduced with new safety caps the company had innovated.
Of course, holders of Johnson & Johnson stock benefitted mightily from the company’s customer focus…as do owners of any company that puts its attention squarely on the people upon whom the company depends to buy its products or services. A good mission statement is not about making money or providing a return, which any company must do. A good mission statement is about what the company does that will make customers want to do business with them. Southwest Airlines’ mission statement reads…
“We are committed to provide our Employees a stable work environment with equal opportunity for learning and personal growth. Creativity and innovation are encouraged for improving the effectiveness of Southwest Airlines. Above all, Employees will be provided the same concern, respect, and caring attitude within the organization that they are expected to share externally with every Southwest Customer.”
And Southwest is the most profitable airline in the U.S. Which is not to suggest there are no profitable companies with lousy mission statements. In many companies, mission statements are little more than words on the wall. A customer-centric focus is produced from other corners of the organization.
But the issue does not end with mission statements. Companies need to get their employees focused on customers by any means. Employees who design product, those who manufacture it, and those who provide service to customers who have already bought product are equally critical. Equally important is investing in these activities, notably customer support and tech support, which has taken a hit in recent years as part of cost-reduction efforts.
Some may dismiss the need to invest in customer support, but anybody who has taken a single business class knows how desperately companies rely on repeat business and referrals to grow the bottom line. Unhappy customers—even those who have already plunked down their money—will produce unhappy owners every day of the week. What’s more, unhappy customers can affect a company’s reputation, and Charles Fombrun has proven a correlation between diminished reputation and diminished profitability.
There are other ways to focus employee attention and company investment. A statement of strategic intent is a short-term mission that provides employees with a laser-like focus. Caterpillar once had a statement of strategic intent: “Beat Komatsu.” The idea was simple: If you’re working on something that isn’t helping us beat our number one competitor, why are you doing it? But of course, creating and retaining satisfied customers would be critical to beating the competition, the likely place customers would go if they’re not buying from you.
Hence, anybody who suggests that companies shouldn’t desire strong relationships with their customers is, frankly, an idiot. Solid customer relationships may be costly, but having no customers is far more expensive. The return on solid customer relationships is exactly what shareholders crave: repeat business, referrals, growth and profitability.
As the leaders at Johnson & Johnson will be the first to tell you, take care of your customers first and shareholder value will take care of itself.
4. No Technology Used in Theft of Coca-Cola’s Intellectual Property
In a large company, odds are there are a few rotten apples. No matter how rigorous the recruiting process, how thorough the background checks, a handful of these losers will sneak through the net. It’s just inevitable. They grouse and complain about their employers no matter how well they’re treated. They take sick days when they’re not sick. They abuse privileges. Given the opportunity, they can engage in criminal activity. And they don’t need the Internet to do any of it.
The case of three arrests in Atlanta yesterday should be instructive to companies implementing draconian policies to lock down their intranets and restrict the uses to which hard-working, honest employees put the company’s networks. Joya Williams, an administrative assistant to a high-ranking Coca-Cola executive, was arrested along with two others on charges of wire fraud and stealing Coke’s trade secrets, then trying to sell them to rival Pepsi-Co. How do federal prosecutors say Williams did it? By rifling through paper files and stuffing documents, along with a sample of a new Coca-Cola soft drink, into a personal bag. The offer to sell the items to Pepsi came in a letter in one of Coke’s official business envelopes, mailed through the U.S. mail.
Huge props go to Pepsi, which turned the evidence over to the feds. Dave DeCecco, a Pepsi spokesman, was quoted as saying, “Competition can sometimes be fierce, but also must be fair and legal.”
The point, though, is that locking down computer networks did not prevent Williams from doing what the feds claim she did. It’s not the networks; it’s the people. Most employees would never engage in illegal behavior or deliberately damage the company they work for. These employees can, in fact, produce even better work if given unfettered access to the Net. As for the ne’er-do-wells, they don’t need the Net to damage their employers, as the Coke case clearly shows.
So companies might as well loosen their restrictions so the vast majority of employees can take advantage of the resources available online, while dealing with the bottom feeders as a matter of exception.
5. Our Own Insulated Little World
Many corporate communication departments operate in a silo. They take instructions from above and perform environmental scans, and prepare communications to address needs coming from both directions. This model worked fine when all messages between a company and its publics were filtered through the communications department.
In the era of social computing, however, employees are in direct contact with customers (I have a personal example: Microsoft developer Dean Hachamovich responded directly to my complaint about a glitch in Internet Explorer 7, and I’ll bet he didn’t clear it with PR first). Remaining blissfully unaware of the connections employees are making with audiences can have significant repercussions for PR departments.
For a case in point, look to Jon Udell’s blog post of of June 3 (which I just saw, thanks to a pointer from Andy Lark). Here, Udell recounts what happened after a developer at Google invited him to look at a new API. Udell told the developer he’d rather talk to someone about the GData API. The developer promised to have someone get in touch with him. What followed was a series of contacts with a PR department that had no clue about what was going on. When he explained he was responding to a contact with a developer, the communicator said, ““Can you also please contact the communications team rather than going to the product folks directly so we can make sure your inquiry is routed to the appropriate party and answered in a timely fashion?” Remember, Udell was contacted by the developer, not the other way around.
Then, to make matters worse, when Udell reiterated his interest in talking to someone about the GData API, the communicator said, “What does Gdata refer to? We don’t have a product called Gdata that I’m aware of…”
By the time the PR folks at Google got back to Udell offering an interview —- assuming he forwarded his questions first —- Udell was disenchanted enough to pass. Google lost the opportunity for some coverage by Udell, an Information Week writer.
I don’t mean to pick on Google’s PR team. It’s a story I’ve seen repeated in dozens of companies where the communicators are so insulated from the rest of the company that they don’t know who’s talking to whom or what the company’s working on. Part of functioning in a PR role in the world of social media includes establishing processes for staying in touch so we can be prepared to address questions and issues as they arise.
Does anybody work for PR in a company where such processes have been established? I’d love to hear what those processes are and how they’re working.
6. My Road Tour is Getting Closer
I’ll be on the road in October and November with a new two-day workshop titled, “Connecting with the Wired World.” In this workshop, I’ll cover how to…
- Reach your many and varied audiences through better and smarter online writing techniques
- Develop audio, video and animated content that will engage your audiences as never before—and reach new ones
- Monitor what customers, competitors, employees, activists and others are saying about you online and in the blogosphere—and be ready to influence the discussion
- Sell the concepts of blogs, podcasting and other social media tools to a management skeptical of new tools and technologies
- Engage your audiences in an online conversation—and mitigate the risks inherent in participatory communications
I’ll relate this to intranets, blogs, wikis, social media sites, social bookmarking and tagging, citizen and open-source media, and RSS.
Here’s the lineup:
10/05-06: San Francisco
10/23-24: New York
10/26-27: Washington, DC
10/30-31: Chicago
11/02-03: Atlanta
11/13-14: Toronto, ONT, Canada
Get the details and register online at http://snipurl.com/ragan_connect.
7. Cost Avoidance as PR Measurement
Earlier this month, I reported on coverage of a Kansas City councilwoman’s dismay that the city had spent $2 million on public relations. My point, based on my reading of the Kansas City Star article, was that the PR industry has done a lousy job of explaining its value. As a result, nobody is surprised when people like Councilwoman Becky Nace express outrage that civic funds would be invested in such a clearly worthless activity. The money, she suggests, could have been better spent elsewhere.
John Wagner (whose blog is on my must-read list) thinks Councilwoman Nace’s objection may not be to the PR activities per se, but rather to the amount invested. In a comment to my original post, John wrote, “Doesn’t it strike anyone that $2 million is a lot of money to spend on educating people about sewers? Perhaps Nace isn’t really questioning the importance of PR ...she’s questioning the amount of cash it takes for these agencies to get the job done.” That’s not the way I read the Star article, but it’s still a valid question, and one that gives me the opportunity to raise the notion of cost-avoidance as a metric for public relations efforts.
I first started thinking about cost-avoidance about eight years ago when I interviewed the manager of a website called Camisea.com (it’s long gone so don’t bother looking for it). The site was the effort of a consortium of energy and engineering companies that were exploring for natural gas reserves in the Camisea region of the Peruvian rainforest. Rather than offer spin and hype in support of the project, the site was an early example of pure transparency. It included the full text of the environmental impact report, a comprehensive archive of documents outlining the exploration plan, and even a forum where visitors to the site could voice their concerns. The site cost US $250,000, much of which was spent on paying independent experts to author sections of the site; for example, Smithsonian anthropologists penned the section dealiing with the people of the Camisea and the potential impact of the exploration on their way of life.
A quarter of a million dollars may sound like a huge investment —- particularly in 1997 or so —- for a website. However, the dozen-and-a-half companies comprising the consortium were acutely aware of the investment companies like Mitsubishi had made in response to Rainforest Action Network activities that targeted them…hundreds of millions of dollars in Mitsubishi’s case. The quarter-million-dollar site was designed to make sure the Network had all the information it needed to determine that no action was necessary. In fact, the site creators asked the Network to partner with them to develop content that would address its constituent’s needs. As a direct result of the site, the Network took no action against the Camisea project (which was eventually abandoned as economically unviable).
I don’t know what led the directors of Kansas City’s water agency to decide it was important to assemble panels with diverse memberships to meet frequently to decide which wastewater technologies were best suited to their neighborhoods; the following is purely hypothetical. But what if there already were rumblings of community-based lawsuits designed to oppose the project? What if the agency’s leaders had experience with local opposition? What would it have cost the city if work began, then was halted as citizens took the city to court? It is not unreasonable to assume that the costs of such action would far exceed the cost of working with an outside agency to build community consensus. Thus, it would not be unreasonable for the agency to invest half a million dollars in the consensus-building effort in order to avoid spending $20 million in legal and construction delay costs later.
In a comment to another blog, Wagner writes, “Doesn’t $2 million sound like an awful lot of money to educate people about sewers??” But clearly the effort went beyond education and into the realm of negotiation and consensus-building. (This was just one project, by the way; the total $2 million was paid to four agencies for a variety of projects.)
Institutions need to understand the potential damage that can occur when they fail to engage in two-way communication and determine what it’s worth to do the work upfront. Half a million dollars -— assuming the agency’s billings reflect legitimate and necessary work that produced the desired results -— could be a real bargain if it saves $20 million down the road.
8. May I Brag?
I just received the evaluation results of the breakout session I conducted on the last day of IABC‘s 2006 international conference. Normally, I scour the written-in comments for tips on how to improve my presentation style and I don’t shout out that I ranked in the top five or the top 25. But the results I got today lead me to toss humility to the wind and proclaim:
I’M NUMBER 1!
Yep, out of 73 breakout speakers, my session—“The Practical Impact of Social Media on Your Organization”—was top of the charts. A couple choice comments from the session evaluation (and I didn’t pay for a single one of these):
- Have Shel back every year! Amazing, revolutionary, great ideas!
- Dynamic speaker, info-packed session. Rating: A+ + !
- Shel is great once again. My most valued session. Hope to have my yearly next great idea from this session.
- Wow, this is amazing. I feel prepared for conversations with clients about social media.
- Great information. Excellent resources. It’s an important enough topic to be either a general session, or one with minimum competing sessions.
Okay, that’s enough. Brag-mode off.
9. Two New Webinars Slated
Two new Webinars are slated for August.
First, beginning August 7, we’ll repeat Steve Crescenzo’s incredibly popular Webinar, “Writing for Employees.” This is the fifth go-around for this Webinar, which has attracted about 100 participants each time it’s been presented.
Then, starting August 28, we’ll begin “The New Fundamentals of Employee Communications,” which I’m heading up. This Webinar will look at the changes to some of internal communications’ ground rules, many of which are the result of social media’s impact while other are based on changing employee perceptions of work, management, and companies. If you work in internal communications, this is a can’t-be-missed session!
For details, visit the website for Shel Holtz Webinars at http://www.raganwebinars.com.
10. Site of the Month
SHIFT Communications has introduced a 30-page PDF guide to the world of social media aimed squarely at the public relations community. As SHIFT’s Todd Defren points out on his blog, regular participants and readers in the PR blogosphere won’t find much new here, but most practitioners aren’t anywhere near up to speed on the tools that are altering the communication landscape or how to use them.
The free download—titled ”PR 2.0 Essentials: A Necessarily Living Document“—is neatly organized, covering RSS, blogs, podcasts, wikis, social networks and social bookmarking. There’s also a section on memes, one on the social media press release, and one on IM and SMS. Two additional sections provide links to tools and other reference materials.
Each section covers not only the fundamentals, but also material of particular interest to PR practitioners, like how to pitch to bloggers, how to employ them as PR tactics, and why these tools and channels are important to clients.
http://www.shiftcomm.com/downloads/pr2essentials.pdf
11. HC+T update
- I’m conducting an intranet audit for a major national dairy cooperative. I’m thrilled to be working once again with Tudor Williams, ABC, on the project.
- My speaking calendar is filling up. I’m conducting sessions in the months ahead for Lockheed, The Conference Board, IABC chapters in Phoenix and San Antonio, the University of Arizona, a Texas bank and the Portable Media and Podcast Expo, in addition to a couple Ragan conferences, among others.
- I just wrapped up a social media review for a travel company. They wanted to know their risk in the blogosphere and how to address it.
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