PR

General Public Relations issues

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

One message does not fit all

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On episode 335 of The Hobson and Holtz Report, Eric Schwartzman shared bits of an interview he conducted with Maureen Kasper, senior director of communication at Cisco Systems. In the interview, Maureen addressed an issue that I’ll be talking about during my session tomorrow at the New Communications Forum: the blurring of the line between internal and external communications.

We did create content that was different—here’s the external face to something and here’s the internal face to something. I don’t think you can do that any more. It’s the same. It’s better communication. You’re not worrying about, “Am I thinking externally or am I thinking internally?” What you’re thinking about is, “What’s our message?”

Maureen noted that Cisco employees once criticized the company when they perceived they were getting the same spin on messages as external audiences. Now, she says, it’s a strength. “It goes back to transparency. What you say externally has to be the same as what you say internally, and vice-versa. If not, you’ll get found out very quickly.”

I agree—and I disagree. The core message absolutely must be consistent. The days are long gone (not that this was prudent or ethical behavior when those days still existed) when you could deliver one message to employees and another to, say, investment analysts:

Employees: We’re merging with Acme in order to absorb a major competitor and bolster our earnings.
Analysts: We’re merging with Acme because of the natural synergies between the two organizations and because we’ll be able to better serve the marketplace working together.

However, I don’t agree with the notion that you can craft a single communication for each audience. Whether or not you share your external communications with employees, they’ll see it—or, at least, have access to it. The message to analysts ends in analyst reports which find their way into investment blogs, the media message is published on news sites and from there into the blogosphere.

But employees still need the internal spin, and I’m using that word in the constructive sense. In a merger, analysts care about the impact on value and share price. Employees may also care about that—particularly if they own stock—but they have more immediate concerns that aren’t on the minds of other publics (including local communities, NGOs, activist groups, the government, and so on). They want to know about the security of their jobs, the status of existing projects, where they’ll wind up in the revamped structure of the new company and whether their benefits will change.

Spinning stories (in the good way) to accommodate the unique interests of each constituency is at the heart of effective communication. It’s why we research the audiences before we craft the communications.

By the way, I’m absolutely certain they do this at Cisco Systems and that Maureen didn’t mean to imply otherwise. Her remarks just led me to want to articulate this point of view, which also argues for the continued need for some traditional communication. A single blog post from the CEO about the merger just won’t get the right information into the right hands. Targeted communication can start targeted conversations among publics with different interests.

How blogging can work

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When I posted yesterday about the Nina Garcia story I’d picked up in my feeds, I made it clear that I wasn’t claiming the story was a fact. The report from a gossip blog said, “A little bird told me” that the New York PR agency had turned its interns loose on gossip blog comments to defend their client, and I was quick to note that “a little bird” is far from a substantive report. I also noted that I hoped somebody from Rubenstein would drop by and clarify.

Somebody did. A comment arrived this morning from Steven Rubenstein:

Our company policy - which everyone here signs - is to ID who you are and who you work for when posting a comment online.

As far as the Jezebel story about interns from our staff (or anyone for that matter) posting anonymous comments about Nina Garcia - it simply isn’t true. When we post, we believe in full transparency because it’s both the right thing to do and it’s good business.

Steven Rubenstein
Rubenstein Associates
(PR firm for Nina Garcia...amongst others)

So, I noted that a rumor was spreading in the blogosphere, asked if it was true, and got an answer in less than 24 hours which is now on the record for everyone—including the bloggers at Jezebel, the blog that started the rumor—to see. And my respect for Rubenstein PR has ratcheted up several notches, given not only the fact that the company is monitoring the space, but that Steven, executive VP of Rubenstein Associates and president of Rubenstein Communications, provided the answer himself, authentically, through engagement rather than some kind of formal statement.

Is this one way blogging works?

Monday, April 21, 2008

Rubenstein PR: The opposite of authentic?

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I have to confess that, before an article referencing her turned up in my feeds, I’d never heard of Nina Garcia. Based on where Garcia’s name is turning up, she’s probably much more familiar to my daughter, who is 19 and pays attention to these sorts of things.

Garcia recently left her job (some say she was fired) as fashion director for Elle magazine, which (according to the gossip sites) put her future as a judge on the cable TV show ”Project Runway” at risk. The reason this bit of pop culture got sucked into my feeds, though, was this line, from a gossip blog called Jezebel:

WWD reports that Garcia hired Rubenstein PR to speak for her. And! A little birdie tells us that Rubenstein has handed off some of the Garcia damage control work to its interns, deploying legions of them to comment on sites like Perez Hilton and TMZ. The minions leave encouraging and kind remarks, complete with stats on Nina’s many successes while at Elle in the comments.

Rubenstein Public Relations is the PR arm of Rubenstein Associates. The PR group has a website, kinda, which currently features a home page and an under construction notice, which shows about as much online savvy as having interns pretend to be fans contributing comments to blogs on behalf of a client. (I read through the comments to posts at Perez Hilton cited in the Jezebel article and didn’t see one in which the author disclosed that he or she was a Rubenstein intern.) In a world where authenticity is prized, this behavior, if true, is the opposite of authentic.

I say “if true” because “a little birdie tells us” is hardly conclusive and I’m too busy to play reporter and call Rubenstein. With any luck, though, somebody from the agency is monitoring the blogosphere and will leave a clarifying comment here.

Oh, and don’t fret for poor Nina. It appears she will be back judging next season. I’ll be sure to not miss avoiding a single episode.

Friday, April 04, 2008

Geoffrey Moore’s curve still matters

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It may seem like I’m piling on Steve Rubel. I’m not, really. I like the guy, admire him, respect him and often agree with him. But re-reading his post on the Pollara survey that shows people trust friends and family more tha A-list bloggers, a line he tossed off grabbed my attention; I’d glossed over it before.

This comes as more of the action shifts to micro communities like Twitter or Friendfeed...

I would challenge this assumption. What action, exactly, is switching to Twitter and Friendfeed? Yes, some action is, but it’s the action of the innovators and early adopters, not the mainstream. The mainstream hasn’t heard of Twitter. They’re still wrapping their minds around Facebook and blogs. And Friendfeed? Way, way too leading edge.

Don’t get me wrong. I love both Twitter and Friendfeed, and am waiting to get an invitation to SocialThing. But I’m an early adopter. I’m a geek (and proud of it).

I’ve just spent two days in Saskatchewan talking to recruiters from several large companies about how to use social media in their recruiting efforts. I did three sessions with a total of maybe 30 people. None of them had heard of Twitter. Not one of them. Neither had my client, a local agency that brought me up to do the talks for their clients. If the recruiters haven’t heard of Twitter, it’s a safe bet the people they’re trying to recruit (such as agronomists) haven’t either (with the rare geek exception). These folks are still just getting accustomed to the idea of “social media,” the label Steve wants us to abandon in favor of just calling it all “media.”

Are we really ready to ascribe our innovator and early-adopter behaviors to others who reside elsewhere—early majority, late majority, and laggards—on Geoffrey Moore’s curve? They do represent the majority of the people we seek to reach through our PR efforts, and where they are today is roughly where Steve was three or four years ago.

I’ve always resisted the idea that the PR social media space is an echo chamber, but if we’re ready to say bloggers are moving to Twitter and Friendfeed—and their readers are following—then I may have to change my tune. 

Friday, March 28, 2008

The social media manager debate: Can’t we get the fundamentals right first?

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Steve Rubel and Jeremiah Owyang are at odds over the future of a job labeled, “Social Media Manager.” The job description of a social media manager revolves around the coordination of a company’s activities in the social media space.

Steve believes the job will be extinct in short order:

Who should “manage” these sites? Is it the social media specialist or someone in PR with specific vertical sector expertise who also gets digital? My strong feeling is that it’s the latter.

Owyang—who held a social media manager position with a previous employer—disagrees:

While I agree that social media skills will eventually become a normal bullet point in nearly every marketing resume in the future, today, and (for) the foreseeable (future), we’re needed specializing for the following two reasons: 1) The specific duties are foreign to most other marketers 2) Online communities (like the support team) require a dedicated role.

It’s an interesting debate, but one that I believe misses a bigger picture. Jeremiah is right that full-time focus is required for some online communities. Even Southwest Airlines had to hire staff just to handle the moderation of comments to its blog, “Nuts About Southwest.” But Steve is also right that the day is coming when anybody engaged in communications will include online social skills in their toolkit, right along with good writing skills (the entry-level requirement).

Ultimately, though, whether engagement with people is online or off, social or traditional, one-way or multi-directional, multimedia or text, it all comes down to one thing:

Reputation.

I have heard calls for companies to create a C-suite position called “Chief Conversation Officer,” someone to manage the various online social channels that produce conversation. Again, that misses the point. What companies need is a Chief Reputation Officer to ensure all communication with core publics is coordinated in the company’s best interests.

This is not an original concept. Charles Fombrun, chief executive officer of The Reputation Institute and author of books like “Corporate Reputation,” has been proposing the job for years. To this position, through single- or double-solid-lines, would report anybody in the organization who engages with publics. The idea is not to make sure they all utter the same corporate jargon, but rather to make sure the company’s plans, strategies, values and actions are addressed honestly and consistently. A social media manager is a fine idea, but if he says, “Our product is shipping late because of manufacturing issues” while a media relations manager tells a Wall Street Journal reporter, “Our product is shipping late because we’ve had to redesign a part,” that inconsistency will spread through the cycle-less media space—online and off—like wildfire. Whether it’s conversation or a traditional press release, the communication channel must be used to communicate honest, transparent, accurate information.

Few organizations have anybody in a position like this. Even if there’s a senior-level public affairs person, Human Resources and employee communications often don’t report to him, and both communicate to vital publics (employees and prospective employees). Community relations often reports elsewhere, as does investor relations and government relations. And all those employees with their individual blogs? Who’s providing them with the resources they need to represent the company accurately and fairly?

Who ends up managing social media spaces is an interesting argument, but seems to me less important than making sure whoever does it is part of a network through which accurate and candid information is funneled. It’s time to look higher up and beyond the niche. We should get the basics right before worrying too much about the details.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

PR is a two-way activity

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While I think Josh Bernoff has hit the nail on the head in terms of a corporation’s participation in social media, I had to sigh when I read this line: “PR and advertising are mostly one-way, broadcast type communications, and these folks continue to try to adapt those one-way modes of thinking in the two-way, read-write world of social computing.”

That’s true of advertising but decidedly not of public relations. I’ve made this point in several venues but I don’t think I’ve ever addressed it head-on here. Now’s my chance.

Most people, when they think of public relations, equate it with media relations. Media relations is, in fact, just a small subset of PR. True, a lot of it goes on, and it is clearly the most visible PR activity to most outsiders, but behind the scenes and away from public view, PR practitioners engage in a great many other dimensions of PR, the ones addressed in textbooks and reviewed carefully in ”Excellence in Communication and Public Relations Management,” the PR literature review from James Grunig and his colleagues, commissioned years ago by the IABC Research Foundation.

Let’s consider just two characteristics of excellent public relations practitioners, according to the Excellence study:

• Negotiation skills—Good PR people engage in negotiation with publics all the time, clearly a two-way communication skill.
• Boundary spanning—If you’re going to communicate with (not to) a constituent, you need to understand things from their point of view. Boundary spanning requires a communicator to get out of his comfort zone and truly perceive things from the other side. If you do it well, your bosses may wonder whose side you’re on because you can speak the other side’s language so incredibly well.

Public affairs, including government relations, is a subset of public relations—most PR agencies have government affairs practices. The counselors in these practices engage routinely in both negotiation and boundary spanning. Investor relations is another practice in many PR agencies that requires two-way communication. A lot of PR practitioners get involved in investor and labor-related communications, which also require direct engagement.

In fact, if you read the PR textbooks, you’ll find that media relations usually occupies only one chapter. The rest deal with topics like research and direct engagement with critical publics. Even the most basic of PR departments focus much of their effort on seeking input from constituents and responding to the issues and concerns they raise. Again, that’s a two-way activity.

Yes, media relations can be one-way, but most PR is two-way, which situates the PR function perfectly to guide an organization’s social media efforts. Unless, of course, media relations is the only thing the PR function in your organization has ever done.

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

IABC assumes sponsorship of social media release initiative

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Hot on the heels of IABC‘s unveiling of eXchange, the association has announced its new leadership role with the social media release (SMR). IABC issued a press release this morning along with an associated social media release.

In fact, the social media release appears on an eXchange blog that was developed as a home for all future IABC social media releases. How’s that for synergy?

(eXchange lets members create blogs “for networking and collaboration.” Neville Hobson blogged about eXchange yesterday.)

The importance of sponsorship

As a member of the social media release working group, I brought the idea of getting involved to IABC. A lot of versions of the social media release have emerged since the concept was first trotted out over two years ago. Some agencies have embraced certain elements while rejecting others. A rapidly growing number of companies have issued social media releases. But the development of standards has languished, largely because the working group was unsponsored, just a collection of guys who believed in the effort. Not to put too fine a point on it, we were getting frustrated.

Under IABC’s sponsorship, I’m confident that we’ll be see accelerated progress. For example, it should be easier to get the press release distribution services more involved; Business Wire and PR Web have already committed to participation since receiving an invitation from IABC.

What the SMR is all about

None of which diminishes the work done by the likes of Edelman, The Social Media Group, WebitPR, Canada News Wire and others. In fact, all those efforts a great. The social media release is not about trying to get everyone to adhere to a rigid, inflexible format. It’s more about…

• Recognizing the need to configure company news in a way that makes it usable by online reporters and bloggers, particularly given that more and more people are turning to the Net for their news and information.
• Embracing the tools of social media, including RSS and social bookmarks, to name just two.
• Integrating links that make it easy for bloggers and journalists to conduct additional research.
• Providing multimedia elements that are easily clipped from the social media release and embedded into a blog post or online news report (just as I’ve copied from the IABC SMR into this post the following video of Chris Heuer—who founded the working group under the auspices of Social Media Club).

There’s work to be done

Some issues remain unresolved. For instance, there’s the question of commenting. One viewpoint argues that a social media release isn’t social without a comment field. Another maintains that there’s nothing inherently social about a social media release, but rather than it’s designed for easy use in social channels like blogs.

And then there’s the issue of tags that will make it easy to identify elements of any press release using search and other discovery tools. Once a tagging standard is finalized, a reporter or blogger would be able to find, for example, all quotes by a particular executive or all core news facts dealing with a particular issue.

The nature of that standard is a ways off. Canada News wire has launched a service that looks a lot like a social media release that automatically adds tags in the NewsML standard, an XLM scheme adopted by the publishing community. That’s great, but NewsML doesn’t address everything a press release might contain. There is some support for developing a microformat, but there’s also some resistence in the microformat community, suggesting that the hAtom microformat is adequate. It’s not, because there would be no way to distinguish an authoritative company news release from any other content.

Anyway, that’s all work to be hashed out by the working group that will grow and accelerate its activities under IABC’s guidance.

Here come the party-poopers

The IABC announcement will undoubtedly open the floodgates on a whole new flood of anti-SMR sentiment, led by the notion that it’s all just lipstick on a pig. The press release is dead and dressing it up in a social media costume won’t revive it. Instead, the pundits argue, companies should just blog.

Utter nonsense on both counts.

First, the traditional press release isn’t dead. To be sure, the number of terrible press releases crossing the wires is horrific. But a well-written press release has its place and still serves a lot of people. There is a growing body of evidence that the traditional press release has been reinvigorated by online placement.

Second, I agree that companies should blog. But who would want to read a blog—by a CEO, a product manager, or a frontline employee—that contains every bit of information about a new product, an upcoming merger, a response to a crisis? People read blogs for the individual’s perspective and insights, not for a lengthy recitation of facts. I would hope even the CEO, the product manager, and the frontline employee would be able to use a social media release to cherry-pick information and resources to include in their blog posts.

There’s also a camp that wonders why we’re bothering, since there hasn’t been an outrcy of demand for the SMR. I addressed this in a recent post noting that many innovations we take for granted today—even couldn’t live with out—were introduced without a surge of demand. From my perspective, the SMR just makes sense.

So, as I say, I’m encouraged by IABC’s new role as the shepherd of the SMR initiative and look forward to staying involved. Huge kudos to the IABC executive board and staff for agreeing to step up to the plate.

Incidentally, for the February installment of Cafe2Go, IABC’s monthly podcast, I interviewed Brian Solis—another member of the working group—about the SMR.