Friday, March 06, 2009
HC+T Update: March 2009
All in one place, my favorite posts from the last five weeks or so.
HC+T Update
March 2009
- Too Crunched for Social Media? Use It To Save Time
- Ignoring New Media COuld Mean Ignoring New Markets
- Next Webinar: SharePoint for Communicators
- Why Bother With An Agency When You Have In-house Staff?
- IR Blog Makes IR History
- Licensed or Not, Public Relations is a Profession
- With Web 2.0 Synonymns, Everything Old Is New Again
- Sites Of The month
- HC+T Update
- Boilerplate and subscription information
As usual, this issue represents mostly material I’ve written for my blog since the last issue (with the exception of the blatant advertisement in the first item). 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. Too Crunched for Social Media? Use It To Save Time
When companies lay off employees, the work they performed doesn’t magically evaporate. Those left behind are expected to take up the slack. The stomach-turning phrase usually associated with assuming the work of your now-unemployed colleagues is “do more with less.”
Finding yourself in this position was bad enough 10 or 15 years ago. After all, few of us were strolling into the office at 9 a.m., leaving at 5 p.m., and taking no work home with us. The stress and pressure of having to assume even more responsibility when you’re already pedal-to-the-metal, jamming to get everything done in 14 hours a day, can be overwhelming.
But today, when communicators are also trying to figure out social media and integrate it into their work, the challenge seems even more daunting.
That was the message I got recently from several communicators when I gave a presentation on how social media fits into a corporate communications environment. The communications staff at this company had suffered a 25% reduction; those who remain are already stretched as thin as they can get. Where, they wondered, will they find the time to do the additional work associated with a social media effort?
Fortunately, I have good news. Adopting social media can actually make it easier to do more with less. If you take a strategic approach, you can reallocate to social media some of the work you have been doing using less efficient tools and channels.
In this regard, social media is like any other technology. Its adoption is spurred by the fact that it makes it easier to do things you’ve been doing all along with older, less nimble technologies. As Jared Spool put it when I interviewed him more than a decade ago, new technologies will succeed only if they can do one of three things: solve a problem, improve a process, or let you do something you’ve never dreamed possible before the technology was introduced.
If it can’t do one of these three things, why would anyone use it?
The first time I heard the case for reallocating old tasks to social media, it was from the CEO of computer company who had received a letter from his board of directors expressing their concern for the time he was spending on his blog. His reply to them: He was spending no more time communicating than he had before he began blogging. The blog had simply replaced some phone calls, speeches, meetings, letters, and other channels that he had been using before he discovered blogs.
John C. Havens (my co-author on Tactical Transparency) and I heard similar tales from other CEOs we interviewed for the book. Michael Hyatt, for example, the president and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, explained how he addressed an error about the publisher’s editorial policies that ran in Publisher’s Weekly. It would have taken hours to negotiate a correction, he said, which would have run deep in the paper, a week after the original error appeared, and would occupy about an inch next to some display ad. It took far less time to simply report the error on his blog. The correction reached all the right people and what could have been a reputational crisis evaporated in a matter of hours.
Here are some other ways you can embrace social media and spend less time than it took you to do things in the days before social media:
Monitoring
PR academics call it “environmental scanning,” the process of keeping your finger on the pulse of references to your organization, industry, products, people, and issues. Setting up a listening post using social media tools (with RSS serving as the infrastructure) will require a one-time investment of time, but after that keeping tabs on what they’re saying about you will take a few minutes a day. The scary-smart Marshall Kirkpatrick offers just one approach to achieving this kind of monitoring nirvana in a post on ReadWriteWeb.
Reach the press
Multiple studies support the fact that mainstream media has glommed onto social media. There are lists of journalists who are on Twitter (for example, here’s a list of journalists just from the Vancouver Sun. You can let reporters with whom you routinely work know you’re on Twitter, then link to the online version of any news you release. Since those journalists have opted in to follow you, the attention they’ll pay to your content will be better than normal (assuming you’re producing content that’s truly useful).
But you can still use older social media to reach reporters. At The Mayo Clinic, Syndication and Social Media Manager Lee Aase set up the Mayo Clinic Newsblog using the free WordPress.com hosted service. For a small fee, he’s able to map the site to the Clinic’s domain. Tweaking of the CSS code has let him skin the blog with the Mayo design scheme. He posts news items here, along with video — usually of doctors talking about new research — that he shoots with a Flip video camera and uploads to the Clinic’s channel on YouTube. The stories get picked up, since it’s easy to subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed, and the videos have been embedded on sites like The Wall Street Journal’s Health Blog.
Bypass the press
Michael Hyatt is hardly the only person to reach an audience directly. Organizations are no longer constrained to the press as a channel to reach publics, and any number of companies have figured this out. A New York Times column by Thomas Friedman provoked a response from General Motors, but the company’s communicators were unable to negotiate a letter to the editor with the paper’s op-ed editor. Instead, they published the letter — along with more detailed explanations — to their FYI blog, which received widespread coverage and succeeded in getting GM’s message out—probably more effectively than a traditional letter to the editor would have.
Get your thought leaders quoted
Most PR professionals are expected to get their companies or clients ink (real or virtual). One way to do this when the company or client has no news worth reporting is to ensure its thought leaders are go-to resources for reporters covering other stories.
Social media has made the task a lot easier than it used to be. Several companies have provided a blogging platform to their thought leaders, like EDS’s “Next Big Thing blog, authored by the company’s fellows. As their observations get traction in the industry, the media covering the industry begins to follow the posts and then reach out to those individuals when they need to interview someone or get a good quote.
Even easier is subscribing to Peter Shankman’s Help a Reporter Out (HARO). Reporters, bloggers, and others seeking people to interview submit their queries to Peter, who blasts them out three times a day in a simple email. If your company or client has someone ideally suited to meet a reporter’s needs, just follow the instructions to reach out to that reporter.
Conduct research
Putting together most communications requires some research. Getting answers has gotten far easier thanks to social media. During a phone call with a client, I was asked if I knew internal communicators using Microsoft Sharepoint. I tweeted the question and got a dozen positive answers in less than a minute, which I was able to report back to my client.
It gets even better than that. You can put out questions on LinkedIn, which nearly always produces quality answers. And you can check the profile of those who reply in order to assess their qualifications before using their replies. Mahalo offers a similar feature that enables you to offer a monetary “tip” to the best answers, which could motivate the best resource to provide a detailed answer.
Inserting a poll into blog post can be a quick-and-dirty way to get information, while setting up an RSS-based listening post and conducting tag searches of blog search engines can reveal what others have already written about the subject.
Even the comments you get to in response to your blog posts and tweets can prove invaluable. GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz has noted that the comments car enthusiasts leave to his Fastlane blog have proven to be the best intelligence he’s seen in his decades in the auto industry.
Reach key stakeholders
Earlier, I noted that technology succeeds when it lets you improve on what you’re already doing. A recent Forrester report suggests that B2B organizations are poised to embrace social media that closely mirrors the more traditional channels they’re already accustomed to using, like online conferences, exhibitions, and buyer guides. According to the Forrester report, “Social media helps open participation to more people, and many don’t have to be physically present to be involved.”
But social media can help reduce the workload in more ways than those Forrester expects B2B companies to embrace. The Dutch computer executive I mentioned earlier was able to use his blog to reduce the amount of time he spent on individual phone calls, preparing and delivering speeches, attending trade shows, and crafting email. He didn’t completely stop these activities, but was able to reduce them dramatically because the blog served to achieve the goals that previously required the use of these older channels.
Generate leads
If your communication role requires you to produce sales leads, social media can help you, too.
Before it was acquired by Forrester, Jupiter Research produced a podcast associated with each of its reports. The principals involved in the research wold chat about the findings. Listeners subscribed to the podcast series would hear about reports that interested them, leading them to make a purchase decision.
Blogger and podcaster outreach can also grease the lead generation skids. Yesterday, for example, I spent about 10 minutes on “For Immediate Release talking about Forrester’s new study on social media in the business-to-business space. I was able to report on the study because a Forrester rep offered me a copy. While I can’t say how many listeners will order the report, I’ve heard from a few that they plan to.
Find new hires
The recruiting process can be expensive and time-consuming, but social media can reduce some of the pain.
Ernst & Young, for example, turned to Facebook to recruit interns and hew-hires based on the knowledge that 80% of college students in the U.S. have Facebook accounts. They were able to target their advertising to students at the three universities that produce the best accounting graduates. Employees in various types of jobs engaged with prospects in forums to talk about what it was like to be an auditor, for example, or an IT person at Ernst & Young. Students were able to get answers to general questions by interacting with recruiters on the recruiting page’s wall.
Scott Monty, Ford Motor Company’s social media manager, put out the word that he was seeking an employee on Twitter and his own personal blog. Sure beats display ads in newspapers.
Collaborate
Business collaborative efforts can also be improved through social media tools. I was working with one company where a communicator shared that her greatest pain was the review process for the annual report. Twenty executives and others received Word versions of the report text. Each one made revisions using the “track changes” and then sent the document back to her. She then had to reconcile 20 different sets of changes and produce a single document. In a number of instances, multiple reviewers made different changes to the same text, complicating this reconciliation process.
She then sent the revised document out to the same group and repeated the same process — multiple times.
To resolve this problem, she moved the text to a wiki, provided password access to the 20 reviewers, then sent them each an email notifying them of the document’s availability and giving them two weeks to have at it before she sent the finished document to the CEO for final input.
More reallocation
If you’re using social media to ease the burden of work that used to require the use of other, less effective tools, share it here. The more ways to use these tools to relieve work burdens rather than complicate them, the more likely communicators will be to embrace social media even if they face the time crunch so common to those working during this tough recessionary times.
2. Ignoring New Media Could Mean Ignoring New Markets
Social media is often about the niche. For a mainstream media outlet to host content that satisfies the interests of a group, that group needs to be large enough to fit the CPM (cost-per-thousand) model. Social media makes it possible to identify and reach groups that fly under mainstream media’s radar.
That’s exactly what Melanie Notkin has done with her online venture, Savvy Auntie.
Melanie candidly explains in a blog post that she is unmarried and has no children of her own (so far). But she adores her siblings’ children (first becoming an aunt in 2001) and lavishes on them the attention most parents devote to their own kids. Melanie also recognized that she isn’t alone. There are, she explains, “cool aunts, great aunts, godmothers and all women who love kids.”
Through her social interactions — on her own site and on Twitter — Melanie has attracted and nurtured a community of this category she calls aunties (along with some uncles, too, I suspect) who look to her and her community for advice on a variety of aunt-related topics, including what to buy for those precious nieces and nephews. Through relationships with companies that sell these products, Melanie has turned Savvy Auntie into a viable business in a short seven months.
Having built a niche community with dollars to spend, however, doesn’t necessarily mean every marketer will recognize the spending power contained within the community.
Take Mattel, for instance. Mattel (in addition to being my former employer; I was a communicator there from 1984 to 1988) is one of the few iconic toy companies, dating back to the 1950s when its Fanner 50 toy gun was a primary sponsor of Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club. Over the years, Mattel has been behind brands like Hot Wheels and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. But nothing is linked in consumers’ minds to Mattel like Barbie.
Recently, Mattel hosted one of its premium events at New York’s Fashion Week to celebrate the Barbie doll’s 50th anniversary. Mattel has always had a knack for special events. I remember attending American International Toy Fair where, to celebrate Barbie’s 35th anniversary, Andy Warhol unveiled his portrait of the doll at a top-flight cocktail reception. Mattel paid Warhol a quarter of a million dollars for the portrait which, for all I know, is gathering dust in a storage facility.
The Fashion Week event was as natural an event to cover for the Savvy Auntie as MacWorld is for Calli Lewis and her video podcast, “GeekBrief TV.” Melanie includes Barbie products on her merchandise page and includes video content on the Savvy Auntie site, so she started seeking an invitation to cover the event.
Mattel should have been all over the opportunity to reach a target market traditional marketing just isn’t configured to reach. And it’s not like Melanie has no credentials. She is, for instance, (as her bio notes) a regular panelist on the Strategy Room on FoxNews.com.
Still, Melanie ran into a brick wall.
TWEET: I am trying to get in touch the Mattel Barbie PR. If you’re on Twitter, please connect? Thanks!
I can’t say I was surprised when I saw Melanie tweet her frustration at Mattel’s rejection. When you manage one of the most successful brands in history, you tend to start believing your own press and think nobody can teach you anything. It isn’t that Mattel isn’t on the lookout for new marketing opportunities. While I worked there, the company was just starting to target divorced parents whose children lived with their ex-spouse and grandparents, who were now living long enough to represent some serious dollars spent on their grandchildren.
Aunties who have formed an online community, though, was evidently just not mainstream enough to warrant Mattel’s attention.
Eventually, though, Melanie reported that she received an email invitation to the event from out of the blue. So she gathered her tools and went, only to be turned away.
TWEET: I am leaving Barbie Show. Full and won’t let me in. What was the point of the ticket? Fail.
She wasn’t alone. It turns out, as she said in a tweet, that hundreds of people got the same invitation. Mothers of young Barbie-loving girls dressed their daughters up and made the trek to the event venue, where they, like Melanie, were told they couldn’t get in. Apparently, more VIPs showed up than expected, leading Mattel to reneg on the invitations.
TWEET: Saddes thing abt the incredibly unorganized Barbie show were the little girls who could not get in. all dressed up. I choked up!
Turning away little girls — the end consumer of your product — who were promised they could attend is bad PR. Failing to see the opportunity to reach a new market is dumb marketing. As Melanie put it in a tweet, “You’d think they’d want me in there as CEO of the site that reaches all the Aunts who buy Barbie for nieces.”
I’m not picking on Mattel (which later apologized to Melanie), but I am holding them up as another example of companies that have taken some preliminary steps into social media but still haven’t grasped it enough to recognize, as David Meerman Scott would put it, that the rules of marketing have changed. The retailer Target was an earlier example when it issued a statement asserting that it did not respond to queries from bloggers, including mommy bloggers, who have become a new source of influence over purchases made by mothers who increasingly turn to them for advice and recommendations.
Has your company identified new niche markets for its products within the social media space? What’s the niche and how are you tapping into its potential value?
3. Next Webinar: Crisis Communication And Social Media
A new Webinar featuring Toby Ward
President of Prescient Digital
Beginning Monday, March 16, 2009
$195 covers the entire five-week Webinar!
Register: http://tinyurl.com/dh3ef4
Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) is becoming the dominant intranet technology platform with nearly 40% of large to medium-size organizations using it (or the previous version) to power some or all of an intranet’s components. Many communications professionals have asked, “Is SharePoint good for my company intranet?” This webinar answers the question with advice on how to proceed.
In this five-week online workshop, we’ll examine MOSS as a technology platform, and as a communications platform for managing content including news and social media. MOSS is not known as a strong solution for a large-size enterprise intranet. But it is good starting platform in a Microsoft environment, and is very good for team and group collaboration. This workshop will consider all of the pros and cons of MOSS, with expert opinion and advice for non-techie business users and communicators. Included in this Webinar will be.
- Introduction to MOSS — An overview of the technology in non-techie language.
- Pros and cons of MOSS for communicators — The good, bad and the things Microsoft won’t always tell you.
- MOSS for content management — The elements and functionality of the content management system and how it compares to other systems.
- Planning & Governance — MOSS can in fact create more problems without the necessary planning and governance. We’ll tell you what you need to prepare.
- Plug-ins and alternatives to MOSS — MOSS is a very complex platform, but there are many additional modules and plug-ins that can enhance it greatly… We’ll also compare MOSS to other alternative solutions.
During the Webinar, you’ll benefit from lectures, links to other online resources, downloadable handouts, and interaction with your instructor as well as other Webinar participants. All this costs only $195-a fraction of what you’d spend on a similar session in a hotel meeting room - and you’ll never have to leave your desk.
Webinars are asynchronous - you participate when it’s convenient for you. A new text-based lecture is posted each Monday morning, but you can take advantage of it whenever you have the time. Be sure to watch the video demo of the webinar format to determine if it’s right for your professional development needs. (The video is at http://www.shelholtzwebinars.com/index.php/site/info/C11#video) If you have questions, contact me at mailto:shel@holtz.com.
Toby Ward, the instructor for this session, is one of the world’s leading authorities on intranets. He has worked for dozens of Fortune 500 companies and big name brands including CBC, HSBC, Intel, Mastercard, Nintendo, PepsiCo and dozens of others. He is a leading advocate for the value and power of communication from your organization’s leaders.
Don’t miss the opportunity to propel your internal communication efforts to new heights.
Register: http://tinyurl.com/dh3ef4
4. Why Bother With An Agency When You Have In-house Staff?
Most organizations — and particularly those funded by taxpayers (whether an essential government agency or a bank that received bailout money) — are under increasing pressure to cut unnecessary expenses. With most people feeling the effects of the recession, ire rises when they see what appears to be profligate spending.
In an increasing number of cases, public relations — notably services provided by outside agencies — is viewed as one of those expenses that ought to be trimmed from the budget.
The latest example comes from Chicago, where the Daley administration earlier this week dropped 11 PR contracts worth $55 million. The contracts were canceled, according to an article in the Chicago Sun-Times, to drive home the point that taxpers can’t afford to supplement the “highly controlled message” coming out of City Hall. Here’s what Mayor Daley’s press secretary, Jacquelyn Heard, said:
“We get it. We absolutely get it. We understand that it would seem absurd at a time like this to be using taxpayer funds for this kind of non-essential service. It’s been made abundantly clear to every department that they are not to use these contracts…The door is locked shut on the use of these kinds of firms at this time.”
The Sun-Times had earlier reported that City Hall signed its 11th contract for $5 million just this week — for translation services designed to get content distributed to neighborhoods into the non-English language spoken in those communities. That contract set off alarm bells, since Heard has promised just last fall to spend nomore money on outside PR until the city dug itself out of its current budget crisis. The attack was led by people like Alderman Scott Waguespack, who called the use of outside PR “wrong-headed.”
None of the 11 agencies involved are big international names. You’ve got Jasculca/Terman Associates, MK Communications, Carolyn Grisko & Associates, Landrum & Brown, Valerie Denney Communications, American Marketing Services, Better World Advertising, Interpro Translation Solutions, Metropolitan Group, Jim Mudd Advertising Agency, and Cultural Communications.
The line in the Sun-Times article that struck me was this one:
Aldermen found the contracts particularly galling because every city department has at least one public information officer. That’s in addition to the mayor’s press office, with a staff of 15 and an annual budget of $1.2 million.
In another Sun-Times article, Waguespack questioned the need for “outside spin doctors,” even during the best of financial times, adding, “I don’t think they provide any more service than the dozens of other PR people we already have in the city.”
My favorite part of Alderman Waguespack’s quote is “I don’t think.” Evidently not. It wouldn’t have taken too much of the alderman’s time to know instead of guess. And I’m certain the people in those 11 firms working hard on the accounts would take exception to the portrayal of their efforts as valueless. In fact, the notion that outside PR isn’t necessary when you have internal staff makes about as much sense as berating an internal legal team for hiring outside counsel. The internal team sets the company’s agenda but is generally not large enough to handle actual litigation duties. This is well understood. Similarly, internal PR staff guides the organization’s communication, but doesn’t have the time to spend days on end on the phone pitching media. That is often what internal PR staffs outsource to external agencies.
Todd Defren wrote a wonderful piece, by the way, extolling the virtues of external agencies. It would make for illuminating reading for Alderman Waguespack.
Be that as it may, the attacks on organizations paying for PR efforts isn’t limited to government. AIG — American International Group, AIG, the company that has taken billions of dollars in federal bailout money — has already been caught engaging in some spendthrift behaviors. But now the company has been caught spending money on PR — what Fortune Magazine has characterized as a “dizzying PR binge.” That’s based on the revelation that AIG has four PR groups on the payroll. And again, the source of angst seems to be the fact that AIG also has an in-house communications team.
In AIG’s case, the outside teams are fairly well-known global brands, including Hill & Knowlton and Burson Marstellar, which are involved in government communication efforts. The Fortune article argues that, despite the money spent on PR, “the company has given little clarity on taxpayer losses to date or indeed much communication directed toward taxpayers at all.”
This could be the fault of the PR staff. It could also be based on counsel from outside PR agencies. Most likely, though, it’s a final decision from company executives who are opting to ignore the advice of its communication advisers to be more transparent and forthcoming. Whoever’s responsible, the situation — like the one in Chicago — is fueling the growing belief that external PR is unnecessary if you have an internal team. And while some external engagements may not be the best use of budget dollars, most inside PR staffs know exactly what they’re doing when they budget for external resources.
It’s worth noting that the recent Annenberg report on the impact of the recession of PR confirms that agencies are being hit much harder than internal staffs.
If the PR profession ever decides to undertake a genuine campaign to address these inaccurate perceptions, the roles of internal and external teams needs to be added to the mix. Otherwise, uninformed pundits like Alderman Waguespack, who have no interest in determining the real value PR agencies provide in exchange for their fees, will be telling our story for us.
And it wouldn’t hurt if agencies as a matter of course produced some kind of ROI metric, even if the client isn’t paying for it, just to have evidence in hand that these pandering attacks just plain have it wrong.
5. IR Blog Makes IR History
It has been a long time — November 1, 2007, to be precise — since I’ve been able to point to an investor relations effort that has embraced social media. That was when I posted an excerpt of an interview Neville Hobson and I conducted with Lynn Tyson, Dell’s VP of investor relations, who had launched the Dell Shares blog. In the interview, Tyson told us there weren’t many blogs to which we could compare Dell Shares; most IR types were too concerned about regulatory issues to even consider blogging about investor issues.
That’s why I was delighted to read a post on Dominic Jones’ IR Web Report that another company — a much smaller one than Dell — has not only launched an investor-focused blog but is using it in a practical manner that promotes transparency.
What’s more, it turns out I had a hand in it.
I referred Tiffany Bradford to Dominic after she contacted me looking for advice on introducing a social media component to her company’s IR efforts. My own IR experience is limited (although I once was a member of the National Investor Relations Institute for a whole year), and I wasn’t comfortable speaking authoritatively with her, so I put her in touch with Dominic, knowing her time would be better spent with him. I’ve never met anybody with as comprehensive an understanding of IR in the current business environment as Dominic has.
Today, Dominic posted the outcome of his conversations with Tiffany. It turns out that, on Dominic’s advice, she she launched a multi-author blog for investor relations and marketing. The blog, Displayground, launched as Microvision‘s official blog at the end of last year.
It’s what Tiffany did with the blog recently, though, that was worthy of Dominic’s praise. “She called for investors to submit questions on the blog so that she could address them on the company’s upcoming earnings conference call,” Dominic wrote. “Even I was surprised by the response from investors. They loved it, and have submitted a total of seventeen comments as I write this, the most comments of any post on the company’s blog to date.” (The emphasis is Dominic’s.) Dominic also points out that investors love being solicited for their input.
During the conference call, which occurred earlier today, various company representatives fielded all the questions that had come in via the blog.
Dominic sums up the history-making event better than I could:
“When I suggested recently that companies open up their earnings calls to bloggers there were grumblings from the old school IR pros about it not being their jobs to talk to “the masses” and that it would lead to a degradation of the discourse on the calls.
“Microvision shows that there are ways to be more open and inclusive in IR and that it doesn’t have to be a free-for-all. Tiffany Bradford isn’t one to seek the limelight, but she deserves a lot of credit for taking the lead in the IR profession to use a blog to open up the lines of communication between management and retail investors.”
Hat tip to Bryan Person, who pointed me to Dominic’s post.
6. Licensed or Not, PR Is A Profession
Every now and then, somebody prominently proclaims that public relations is not a profession. Usually this is based on a single narrow definition of the word that requires practitioners to obtain a license or some other form of legal authorization to engage in the work of a professional.
Even if you acknowledge this as the only definition that matters, PR is a profession in some parts of the world. Licenses are required to practice PR, for example, in Brazil, Panama, and Nigeria.
Even in the US, the idea of licensing public relations gets bandied about every few years. The father of public relations, Edward Bernays, was an advocate of licensing. The movement never goes anywhere, though, because the ability to license is based on a defined set of ways to do things. Passing your dental boards, for example, requires that you know the appropriate treatments for a cavity. To pass the bar and become a lawyer, you need to know the exact precedents to apply in a given situation.
In communications, there are too many variables to produce a set of right-and-wrong approaches. Two well-educated and experienced communicators could take two entirely different approaches to the same challenge and both could be right as long as they both achieved the goals they intended to. The approach taken in a pharmaceutical company may well not work in a snack food company, even if the ultimate goal is to increase market share. An audience of small-town residents in the Bible Belt will drive a different approach than an audience of Manhattanites.
In the world of licensed professions, someone who deviates from the defined right approaches can be censured, even lose their licenses, because the governing body can review standards and declare that injecting a patient with medicine A was not an accepted treatment for condition B. The fact that a governing body could not make the same kind of judgment about whether the use of humor was an appropriate way to communicate with audience A about issue B does not diminish the skills, education, and experience required to practice PR effectively.
This leads to the next argument: Without licensing, any bozo can claim to be a professional; you can be prosecuted for practicing law or medicine without a license. But a license is no guarantee of quality; contractors are licensed but I’d like a dollar for every story I’ve heard of shoddy construction. And there are plenty of people engaged in some tangent of healthcare and law who don’t need licenses but still deceive and mislead — or, in some cases, produce better results than the licensed pros.
All of which assumes that you accept this single definition. If you do, it’s at the expense of several other views of what it means to be part of a profession. The venerable Oxford English Dictionary calls a profession “a paid occupation, especially one involving training and a formal qualification.” That’s especially, but not exclusively. THis is not a distinction the OED would make lightly. Wikideia uses the word “usually” which, again, is decidedly not a black-or-white difference.
Princeton’s definition is even looser, calling a profession an occupation requiring special education. Of Random House Dictionary’s six definitions of “profession,” none make any note of special qualifications or oversight by a regulatory board. One of the key definitions is simply “any vocation or business.”
And of course, there’s the most common definition of a professional: someone who gets paid for what they do. Professional athletes, musicians, and entertainers are those who earn a paycheck. Are bloggers journalists? Sure, a lot of them are, but are they professional journalists? Not unless they’re getting paid for their reporting.
If you look at these definitions, a couple of general requirements emerge. First is the academic angle. There is a huge body of academic research and literature in public relations, a discipline in which you can earn a PhD (just as Dr. James Grunig or read the book that bears his name, “Excellence in Public Relations and Communications Management,” which reviews the literature).
To be sure, there are people working in PR with no formal education. That includes me — my degree is in journalism. In fact, as newspaper reporters find themselves on the street, a lot are looking for work in PR, usually in the media relations corner of the business. I know one outstanding PR practitioner who started out as a chef.
The fact is, though, that you can take the bar without having attended law school. How professional you are depends on how well you understand the business. Balancing the inability to license PR in most countries with the need to assess a practitioner’s professionalism, PR’s professional associations have forged a middle ground: accreditation. Accreditation is the means of ensuring that an individual qualifies under a set of acknowledged standards to perform certain work.
Accreditation, unlike certification, is voluntary, and there are plenty of outstanding, professional PR practitioners who are not accredited. And it’s as likely you’ll find an accredited communicator who behaves badly as you are to find a lawyer who acts less than ethically.
But when faced with two communicators who are unknown to you, but who both seem to be equally capable, you can be more assured that the accredited communicator is going to perform his job based on a thorough understanding of communications’ models and standards because he has gone through a process and judged knowlgeable.
You are, of course, obligated to perform within the ethical codes of the professional body that presented you with your accreditation.
Between accreditation and a body of work that reflects professionalism, it’s not hard to identify communicators who reflect the best of the profession.
The purists can argue all they like, but PR is a profession.
7. With Web 2.0 Synonynms, Everything Old Is New Again
The first time I heard the notion that there’s nothing new under the sun, it was about 30 years ago on my first communications job. Our design goddess was flipping through an issue of Communication Arts magazine looking for layout ideas. Several of us got into some good-natured banter about whether that was copying or adaptation, and that’s when the “under the sun” concept was uttered.
If you spend much time reading social media — blogs, tweets, whatever — you would think the space was loaded with new concepts. I find many of the more popular memes, though, are just old concepts repackaged and relabeled. Three of my favorites: transparency, tribes, and personal branding.
Transparency
As the co-author of a new book on transparency, you’d think I’d be all over this. But it seems most of the time I read someone talking about transparency in business, what they’re really talking about is disclosure.
Take the @thebklounge discussion about the Twitter account used by Burger King’s icon, The King. Because it wasn’t clear who was authoring the tweets — someone from Burger King or someone from the restaurant’s advertising agency. Whether this is actually important (not, in my opinion), making this information available is not a question of transparency. It’s disclosure.
Transparency is access to information publics need to make informed decisions. I’m not sure which public would be unable to make an informed decision because they don’t know who’s tweeting on behalf of a fictional character. If Burger King decided to make that information available, however, it would disclose it.
“Disclosure,” also the name of a Michael Chrichton thriller featuring lawyers, is a legal-sounding term that lacks the hype factor of “transparency,” which cable news commentators are throwing around as an anticipated characteristic of the Obama administration. Hence, “transparency” has become the Web 2.0 synonym for “disclosure.”
Tribes
I like Seth Godin‘s work. I really do. But through my reading of “Tribes” and listening to him speak (thanks to the “Marketing Over Coffee” guys), I had trouble cramming the concepts presented into the definition of a tribe.
Mainly, tribes are generally not groups anybody opts to join because it synchs up with your interests. Tribes are anthropological constructs, usually made up of bands (smaller subgroups), defined by traditions of common descent. They share language, cuilture, and ideology. Someone from the Cheyenne tribe couldn’t decide that those Cherokee do a rockin’ rain dance and join that tribe. I couldn’t turn my back on the Levites and join the Zebuluns.
So when everybody gloms onto the “tribes” notion, what they’re really talking about are “communities.” But community is a concept that has been discussed to death. Call it “tribe” instead and new life is breathed into the notion and we’re off and running with whole new discussions.
Personal brand
I know I’m going to take some heat for this one, but after long consideration, I’ve concluded that “personal brand” is just another synonym for “reputation,” which can be defined simply as what you are known for. As I review the elements of a personal brand, derived from a variety of sources, they all — every single one of them — come down to what you are known for. Whether you’re genuine or artificial, reliable, responsible, innovative, a good listener, a good communicator, funny, a spiffy dresser — that’s all what you’re known for. It’s your reputation.
But, as with “disclosure,” “reputation” has a distinctly corporate smell to it. So Tom Peters introduced the euphemism of “personal brand,” and everybody gets excited.
Understand, this doesn’t mean I have a problem, per se, with the idea of a personal brand. It’s just that your personal brand existed long before the term did.
But I recently heard somebody (I honestly can’t remember who) suggest that Michael Jordan is a personal brand. Well…he has a reputation as a great athlete, a nice guy, a talented individual. He is also, distinctly, a brand — when you see him in an underwear commercial or see his name on a pair of shoes, you react based on your association with the Michael Jordan images and experiences you have collected.
Would Jordan’s “personal brand” lead you to decide to join a pickup game with him? That would be his reputation (he’s going to kick your ass). Would you buy a pair of Nike Air Jordan’s based on his personal brand? Again, it would be the brand (forget personal) that would drive that decision.
Am I picking nits?
Probably. But it gets tiresome hearing some folks talk about these concepts as though they invented them when, in fact, they’re actually age-old concepts that have just been relabeled.
These three aren’t the only ones, of course. What other Web 2.0 concepts are long-standing notions with shiny new names?
8. Site of the Month
Greasemonkey Plugin for Firefox
If you use Firefox and haven’t installed the Greasemonkey add-on, you’re missing out on the power of Firefox.
There are probably ways you’d like to see web pages displayed that the site designer didn’t bother to implement. For instance, rather than have to click to the next page in long search results, you’d rather just scroll. You’d like to sort the results of a delicious.com search by the number of times the page was tagged. Or you just can’t find the RSS feed on a blog to which you’d like to subscribe. Greasemonkey to the rescue!
By itself, Greasemonkey doesn’t do a thing. But there are thousands of scripts created by various people designed to give you more control over pages you see. There’s one that adds an MP3 player wherever an MP3 file is linked on a page. Another lets you expand or contract the size of a text entry box.
You’ll find Greasemonkey here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748
http://www.greasespot.net/
Scripts are all listed here:
And there’s a great 5-minute tutorial on using Greasemonkey here:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_start_using_greasemonkey.php
9. HC+T update
- I will be consulting with two Texas hospital systems on launching a strategic social media effort.
- This doesn’t suck: In May, I’ll be teaching at a communications university created specifically for Petrobras. I teach on Thursday and then again on the following Tuesday. The catch? It’s in Rio de Janiero. I’ll just have to cool my heels somewhere Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.
- I’m delivering the keynote address at Blog Potomac in June.
10. Boilerplate and subscription information
You received this newsletter either because you asked for it or somebody who likes you forwarded it to you.
Please feel free to forward it to someone =you= like!
HC+T Update is published monthly by Holtz Communication + Technology.
You can subscribe by visiting the HC+T site on the World Wide Web at http://www.holtz.com and selecting the FREE email NEWSLETTER page. You can subscribe ,unsubscribe and view back issues at http://darkstar.holtz.com/hct/mamboserver/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi?f=list&l=hct.
You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this newsletter by adding “http://blog.holtz.com/update.xml” (without the quote marks) to your news feed reader.
Holtz Communication + Technology helps organizations apply online technology to strategic communication efforts.
(C) 2009, Holtz Communication + Technology. All rights reserved.