PR

General Public Relations issues

Thursday, March 18, 2010

A blinding flash of the obvious: Reporters rely on PR pros for news

The folks at Crikey are shocked—shocked—to find that 55% of the articles published in 10 hard-copy newspapers were sourced one way or another by public relations.

The author of the article in Crikey—an Australian digital-only news source—believes this to be a dubious statistic, a view supported by the headline that reads, “Over half your news is spin.” The author (whoever that may be, since there’s no byline on the story) also seems to think that it’s a source of shame to practicing journalists. When called about it, “many journalists and editors were defensive,” he (or she) writes. “Who’d blame them? They’re busier than ever, under resourced, on deadline and under pressure. Most refused to respond, others who initially granted an interview then asked for their comments to be withdrawn out of fear they’d be reprimanded, or worse, fired.”

The study was conducted by 40 studnets from the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism at the university of Technology Sydney, and is available at a Crikey site (free registration required) with the provocative title, “Spinning the Media.” There, the ACIJ’s Wendy Bacon and UTS student Sasha Pavey conclude:

Our investigation strongly confirms that journalism in Australia today is heavily influenced by commercial interests selling a product, and constrained and blocked by politicians, police and others who control the media message.

The bar charts show the percentage of content across those 10 publications that was driven by media releases and by “other forms of public relations or promotions” and how many were published with “no significant journalism work.”

What strikes me most about this “Joint Crikey-ACIJ Investigation” is the notion that it’s something new. I attended a conference in the 1980s in which a speaker noted that an equally high percentage of the stories appearing in the mainstream press begin with some kind of PR contact. The same point was made in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s series on PR, “Spin Cycles,” produced back in 2007. And the Pew Research Project’s Excellence in Journalism unit found, during a week of reviewing Baltimore media, that more “more commonly than in the past…press releases from politicians, governmente agencies and companies were rewritten quickly by multiple outlets and posted on the Web with no additional reporting.”

Crikey and the ACIJ may have done a deep dive into the 10 newspapers they studied, but evidently they didn’t research much beyond that or they might have determined that the situation hardly warrants the sensationalist treatment it was given.

There are two separate issues here. The first is simple: Journalists get a lot of their news from PR people. Does this mean the news readers get from purportedly objective journalists is tainted by PR spin?

Let’s be realistic. Business and government represent a huge part of what journalists cover. And just how do the folks at Crikey think reporters learn about much of the news coming out of government and business? Are investigative reporters hanging around bars and diners hoping to hear snippets of conversation? Are they on the phones all day calling contacts, asking “Hey, mate, anything going on at Acme I should be reporting?” Does all news come from whistle-blowers and tipsters?

The role of media relations professionals is to inform journalists of their organization’s news. That’s how journalists find out that a new CEO has been hired, that a new product is launching, that a smaller company has been acquired, that quarterly earnings have been released. These are legitimate news stories. It is the newspaper’s responsibility to report them. And journalists rely on PR representatives to let them know when these events occur.

Once a reporter has been informed, he generally asks questions, does research, and produces a story. He does not accept the company’s spin. In fact, as former Financial Times reporter Tom Foremski put it, “In most news stories, the spin or angle, is set by the journalist” (the emphasis is mine).

There is a vast difference between spinning the news and providing relevant information about your company to the media. This is a relationship that most journalists take for granted.

Of course, newspapers don’t report on every press release or phone pitch they receive—just the ones about which theyr readers should know. God knows PR agencies shovel a lot of self-serving garbage to the press in the form of media releases and pitches, but that doesn’t mean those releases ever make it into print.

But what about that nasty second issue, that much of the newspaper content originating with PR was reprinted “with no significant journalism work?” Remember Foremski, who said the journalist, not the PR people, are the ones who spin the story? That happens, he says, in the first few paragraphs.

Much of the rest of the story is factual: what the CEO said, when the company was founded, where it is based, the stock price, the specs of a product, the price, etc, etc, etc. There is no need for journalists to rewrite this stuff…It is wasted effort because it duplicates work already done. The journalists should focus on their spin on the story, then assemble the news story from…the press release package.

So on the one hand, there’s Crikey, sounding the alarm that organizations are infiltrating the press and scamming the public with a flood of fluff and spin. On the other hand, there is reality: PR professionals advising the media of their organizations’ news, followed by informed judgments by journalists about which stories warrant coverage. Sometimes these stories are written afresh, sometimes the reporter rewrites the first few graphs to infuse the article with her own perspective, then reporting the facts from the press release pretty much as-is. (And that doesn’t mean the facts haven’t been verified by the reporter, mind you. The appearance of press releases in those 10 Australian newspapers mostly as they appeared in the release does not mean that nobody checked those facts.)

Ultimately, the Crikey-ACIJ “investigation” is just a lot of hot air that doesn’t reveal a damn thing beyond a pathetic ignorance of the wholly ethical process by which the media-PR relationship works at its best.

Friday, February 19, 2010

Social Media News Release aligns nicely with Digital Media Pyramid

There hasn’t been much talk about the Social Media News Release (SMNR) lately. It must be time to stimulate some discussion.

When I was in journalism school (California State University Northridge, 1972-1976), the inverted pyramid was a staple of newswriting classes. The way it was taught to me made perfect sense: If somebody reads only the lede paragraph, they should walk away knowing the most important information in the story, the typical assembly of the who-what-when-where-why information. If she reads through the second graph, she’s now consumed content that is almost as important for the understanding of the story. As she reads more of the article, the information gets increasingly detailed. Wherever she chooses to stop, she’ll have absorbed the most critical information and left less important content unread.

The inverted pyramid is ideal for a linear print world. As the practice of public relations became more common, press releases adopted the inverted pyramid so editors could drop the release unchanged into their publications, chopping off as much of the end of the article as necessary to accommodate the space available.

As publications concentrate on web platforms, however, the linear approach doesn’t work, although it makes more sense than ever to lead with the five Ws. Adding link curation to the mix, being cognizant of ads appearing alongside stories that create unintended context, the use of other web-based content in pursuit of a balanced story and a host of other factors all need to be stirred into the mix.

It turns out that the journalism department at Rutgers has been teaching a new pyramid for the last seven years, an approach that could easily find its way into other journalism schools. Benjamin Davis—a new media news professor who was part of the MSNBC.com launch team—explained the pyramid in a piece he wrote for the Online Journalism Review.

Johnson calls the Digital Media Pyramid an enhancement rather than a replacement of the inverted pyramid:

It provides for the traditional brief introduction of facts (the five Ws) which are boldly separated from all supporting details. Yet the Digital Media Pyramid also addresses the need to surf the Internet for additional supporting information by permitting and explaining cut-and-pasting rules.

The pyramid covers the use of multimedia, interactivity and other non-text elements of a news story and creates awareness of ads that could be inappropriate beside the article. It also “encourages the self-eductaion of ‘users’ or readers, enabling them to quickly seek out balanced information on a news story through the use of embedded links, social neetworks and other resources.”

The Digital Media Pyramid should, Johnson argues, “find a place in the newsrooms and journalism classrooms around the globe.”

If it does, PR practitioners employing the Social Media News Release will be in good shape. The elements of the SMNR lend themselves nicely to this news-production model, with tags and links designed to assist a report conducting research, digital assets available to incorporate into a story and news facts ready to be turned into a solid 5W lede. One more compelling reason to start using the SMNR as the population of employed journalists begins to skew younger.

Does the Digital Media Pyramid work for you?

Saturday, February 06, 2010

Are we overvaluing real-time feedback?

Warning: Lost post follows

Back in 1995, “Snow Crash” author Neal Stephenson teamed up with his uncle George Jewsbury under the pseudonym Stephen Bury to produce a potboiler titled “Interface.” The premise: A presidential candidate suffers a stroke and has a chip implanted in his brain. The chip features a wireless connection to feedback from thousands of watch-like devices distributed to a representative sample of Americans. These devices gauge the wearer’s reaction to political speeches, allowing the candidate to make mid-course adjustments and bolster public reaction to his candidacy.

To me, this bit of speculative fiction defines the notion of a real-time feedback loop.

As the Web proceeds along its evolution into a more real-time network, a idea of a real-time feedback loop is becoming a popular topic of discussion. I attended a panel discussion on Thursday night, part of Social Media Week here in San Francisco, that focused on these loops, defining them as “a method for capturing ideas as they arise and bringing them back into the group for examination through the use of social media.” Promotional copy for the event asserted:

When an idea’s expression generates a creatively relevant or insightful response, a well-organized listening/engagement practitioner captures that flash of brilliance, and feeds it back to the originator as an enriched question, thus creating a real-time feedback loop.  In this transformational moment, a thought-leader may have a second opportunity to be heard and have their expression innovatively re-cast. 

With social media we facilitate this process ever more effectively. It is like cold fusion—when used properly, it creates more value than it consumes, lowering the carbon footprint of innovation.

The idea of real-time feedback loops have been rattling around in my brain since Thursday night’s discussion. Then it occurred to me: What better place to organize my thoughts than my blog?

Where do real-time feedback loops begin?

The Internet didn’t invent real-time feedback loops. The thunderous applause of an audience that leads to a multiple curtain calls is a real-time feedback loop; so is tepid applause followed by a rush for the exits. The Grateful Dead’s symbiotic relationship with its audience influenced the band’s live improvisational music. The crowd’s response almost always affects a standup comic’s routine.

The Net, however, has added two dimensions to real-time feedback loops: specificity and reach.

Specificity—The aggregate response of the crowd is pretty simple. They love it, they’re into it, they disagree, they don’t think it’s funny, they hate it. The Net has provided individuals a voice that allow the performer or communicator to analyze why the crowd is reacting the way it is and respond to specific observations or alter behaviors in order to influence opinions. This is nothing new: For at least a decade, probably longer, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) has provided the infrastructure for backchannels, on which conference attendees discuss presentations with one another in real time. In some instances, these backchannels have been projected on a screen where a speaker can see and react to it. Now, Twitter’s hashtag convention—along with some other tools—have made backchannels available to more people than just the geek crowd who knew how to tap into IRC.

Reach—Streaming media and Twitter have expanded the reach of events—from keynotes and panel discussions to product launches and press conferences—to people who can’t be there in person. Again, this is nothing new. The presidential State of the Union address is one example of a speech that is available to larger audiences than just those who can squeeze into the chamber of the House of Representatives. The Net’s streaming capabilities, though, have made it possible to extend this ability to speakers and events that don’t warrant mainstream television network coverage. The most recent LeWeb, for example, was streamed to an audience hungry for presentations they couldn’t see in person due to the event’s cost (expensive) and location (Paris).

Combine these factors and the significance of real-time feedback loops becomes clear. Not only can an executive speaking at a product launch hear specific feedback in real time, but the audience is now expanded to customers or stakeholders from anywhere in the world.

Generally, this feedback comes in two forms: the general chatter of individuals expressing their opinions or talking with one another and targeted questions from individuals to the speaker. Both were in play last Thursday night as people watching a live stream of the presentation (courtesy of Justin.tv) talked among themselves and posed questions for panelists that were relayed by an in-person moderator.

All eyes on real-time

It’s clear that the Net has altered and expanded realt-time feedback loops. Google has incorporated real-time results into its search results. A new category of real-time search engines has emerged sporting names such as Collecta, Topsy and Scoopler.

Prominent people are writing about the real-time web, including the authors of influential outlets like ReadWrite Web, GigaOn, Mashable and TechCrunch. Jeff Pulver, Stowe Boyd and Jeremiah Owyang have written about it. It found its way onto many 2010 prediction lists.

Protocols are being developed to support it. RealTime RSS—from RSS godfather Dave Winer—sends updates when they’re added to a site rather than waiting for an RSS reader or other utility to poll feeds to find what’s new. Google’s PubSubHubbub is similar although not necewssarily a competing standard; the two can work together. Chris Messina described PubSubHubbub’s function this way: “Let’s say (you write) a new blog post; the blogging software then pings any number of hubs with a message: ‘Hey, new content here.’ The hub says, ‘Great thanks,’ grabs the content, and then pushes the content to everyone on its ‘subscriber” list.’

These two protocols expand the opportunity for anyone to get real-time feedback. A marketing executive introducing a new product to a live audience and a virtual one watching the stream can hear back instantly from those engaged over conversational channels (Twitter and IRC, for example) as well as those writing for online news outlets and blogs.

As a result, the focus on real-time feedback has become intense. Some have proclaimed the ability to assess sentiment through real-time search a replacement for costly polling that has been the province of organizations like Harris and Gallup.

But how important is all this real-time feedback?

Is it accurate?

What you think at the instant you hear something may not be what you think after you’ve had time to digest it. Consequently, your immediate feedback may not reflect your long-term view.

This is one of the issues many speakers have with members of the audience live-tweeting their talks or with journalists live-tweeting events.

Much of the tweeting of live events is objective, though, rather than subjective. It’s more like note-taking than analysis. And even the opinions tweeted in real time have value. After all, you’re presenting in real time and people are reacting. Before, you could only see them shifting uncomfortably in their seats, or maybe actively booing or walking out. Now you can assess exactly why they’re reacting the way they are.

But in some respects, the critics have a point. Consider the widely-covered Apple iPad announcement. Information from Steve Jobs’ presentation was made available in real time through a number of channels and a lot (though certainly not all) of the real-time feedback suggested Apple had another sure-fire hit on its hands. But then came the analysis. Tech journalists, bloggers and others began producing the more thoughtful, detailed reviews after they had a chance to internalize the information, consider it, chew on it. FOr many members of the audience, digesting these views, then sharing them and discussing them with each other, led to a shift in their opinions. In the end, their early tweets didn’t reflect their ultimate views.

Is it representative?

During Thursday night’s panel, the point was made repeatedly that only about 10 percent of your audience will offer real-time feedback. And your larger audience—the customers for the product you’re launching, for instance—won’t even watch the event.

Reacting to real-time feedback, then, could mean that you’re taking action on information that isn’t representative of your customer base. In fact, those who pay attention to the live stream or real-time tweets of your message could be as far from a statistically valid sample of your population as you can get.

Is it contextual?

As I sat in the room where the panel was presented on Thursday, I was able to take in everything at once. There was the reaction of other panelists to what one panelist was saying, panel moderator Jennifer Lindsay‘s reaction, the panel’s reaction to Lindsay’s questions and the reaqction of the audience.

Those watching the stream, on the other hand, saw only what the camera allowed, and the camera was almost always focused on whoever was speaking. Those watching the stream got only a sliver of the experience had by those in attendance. IT’s even worse with those who see only the 140 characters broadcast by those who are live-tweeting the event. The reactions of those receiving these messages, then, could be based on incomplete or out-of-context information. It could conflict with the opinions of the people whose opinions you’re really trying to understand.

Because of these realities, the rush to embrace the real-time web can easily lead us to overvalue real-time feedback and make inappropriate decisions based on it.

When real-time feedback matters

Of course, recognizing the limits of real-time feedback doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be paying attention to it, only that you should be cirumspect in terms of what you do with it.

In a crisis, for example, you’d be foolish to ignore commentary emerging in real time. By monitoring public sentiment, you can determine the depth of reaction to the situation and quickly develop a response strategy. Real-time feedback in response to change initiatives is equally important. People resist change for a variety of reasons and listening to feedback can help you shape your efforts to overcome that resistance.

As for other feedback—to speeches, to announcements, to events—organizations will have to develop processes to determine which feedback requires immediate internalization and action and which becomes just additional information to factor into longer-term thinking. After all, how much can you really do with real-time feedback? We have no brain-implantable chips to help us adjust our comments in real time based on listener feedback. We can’t alter the presentation in mid-course when CNN’s cameras are on you. You can’t redesign the product if it’s already on trucks heading to retail stores. In most instances, real-time feedback won’t be more important than other forms of input, including the articles, reviews, blog posts, tweets and other consumer-generated content that will trickle out over days, weeks and months in response to your company’s message. Your best bet will be to add it to the mix in order to figure out your next steps, whether it’s a version 2.0 of your product, an enhancement to a program or a response to a query or criticism.

None of which means that engaging people through social channels is less important than it was before the real-time web became a hot topic. Engaging individuals through social channels isn’t necessarily the same as participating in a real-time feedback loop. Engaging in conversations, responding to questions and participating in communities is all part of an effort to establish strong relationships that will pay off over the long term.

Nor does this suggest that the real-time web isn’t important. The instant delivery of news means organizations have less time to prepare and more information through which to sift.

But when it comes to taking immediate action on the instant feedback to your message, tread with care. You could be solving a problem that doesn’t really exist.

Related post from Tom Foremski, who was on the panel (and is in the photo above): The Real-Time Web Turns ‘Conversational’ Media Into Noise

Sunday, January 31, 2010

Post-webinar Q&A on the state and future of the communications profession

Last Tuesday, I led a Ragan Communications webinar on the state of the communications profession and where the business is headed. There wasn’t enough time to answer everyone’s question in the time allotted, so I invited questions by email and promised to post them, along with my answers, here so they’d be available to everyone who attended. Here’s what I got and how I answered (and I’d love comments that offer your own thoughts or opinions on these questions):

You suggested having SEO as a core competency.  Which books or blogs would you suggest for a more in-depth look at this subject?

A lot of blogs address search and SEO. The ones I read include…

SearchEngineLand
SearchEngineWatch
Lee Odden’s TopRank blog
Matt Cutts
Best SEO blog

I’ve only read one SEO book—SEO for Dummies (by Peter Kent),
believe it or not, but these come highly recommended:

Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day
The Art of SEO
SEO Warrior
The Truth About Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization: Your Visual Blueprint for Effective Internet Marketing

I’m curious why when you talked about the future roles of PR professionals you never talked about the fact we’ve really evolved into strategic advisors? We’ve worked so hard to have seats at the head of the table, instead of being an afterthought, that I was hoping to hear a greater emphasis on communicators as strategic advisors.

I certainly don’t disagree with you, but I think we achieved that status about 10 years ago, so I didn’t see any point in raising it.

Given that all of the technologies we’ve discussed are based on “pulling” content we value as individual or community, how will a technology such as realtime rss feeds be able to maintain our interests and relevance?

There are a couple things to keep in mind. First, the real-time dimension of the web will augment, not replace, the static web. What will change is the speed with which you are notified of alterations and additions to pages, along with the delivery of news.

Right now I subscribe to a few hundred RSS feeds. Once an hour, my reader polls these feeds to see if something has changed and I see a scrolling window of updates. With the real-time web, those blogs and news sites that have new content will push them out to me almost the instant they occur, so I’ll have access to the news when it’s fresh, not potentially 59 minutes old.

Remember, the only content that will be pushed to me is the SAME content I would have received through the time-delayed pull. I’ll just be getting it faster, so the relevance isn’t affected…only the speed with which I get the stuff that’s relevant to me.

Here are some good resources to help further understand the real-time web:

ReadWrite Web’s “Introduction to the Real-Time Web”
“4 Emerging Trends of the Real-Time Web” from Mashable
ReadWrite Web’s “Ten Useful Examples of the Real-Time Web in Action”

One more great example, this from Dave Winer, the programmer behind RealTime RSS ():

What is the Real-Time Web?
Four words: It Happens Without Waiting.
Narrative: Today I wrote a piece about the Berkeley Public Library on InBerkeley.Com. I wanted to find a pointer to the library website, so I switched over to Google. Looked up Berkeley Public Library. My piece, published less than a minute earlier. was the first item. Real-time web. (True story.)

I represent a school district with a superintendent who is a lightning rod for criticism because of bold choices and decisions she is making.  I know I need to “brand” her and we are using our destination website to try to market her in a positive way.  She answers scores of critical emails a day.  What would be a way for her to communicate with our mass without having to address each email?  Our technology is very traditional.  Where should we begin to move technological as a district to get our messages out?

With email, generally speaking, there is an expectation that when I send you one, you’ll reply. There is no such expectation in social media, particularly in blogs and Twitter. With a blog, the superintendent could articulate a position, allowing interested parties to comment. They would not expect each comment to receive a reply, but she could selectively add her own thoughts to the comment thread or (as GM Vice Chair Bob Lutz does on his blog) respond to a number of comments with a follow-up post.

Some people will comment on Twitter rather than the blog itself, so it would be important to monitor those responses (not a difficult task) and incorporate them into a response strategy. She can also use Twitter to notify her audience of a new post.

This approach is one that would require the superintendent to write her own posts (or for her to disclose that her staff is working with her on the blog), but it would engender a conversation rather than a one-way push of information. Obviously, listening becomes an important part of the process.

She wouldn’t be the first school superintendent to blog. Here are just a few examples:

http://www.bryanisd.org/default.asp?pageID=199
http://blogs.tampabay.com/classroom/
http://npssuperintendent.blogspot.com/
http://superintendentsblog.blogspot.com/
http://barrysblog.jordandistrict.org/
http://www.cchs.k12.pa.us/district/blog/

Saturday, January 23, 2010

FIR Live #17 - January 23, 2010: The relationship between marketing and PR

Content Summary:A panel of veteran PR and marketing practitioners and academics discuss the relationship between marketing and PR and how it impacts the structure of a communications function within an organization.

Discussion participants were FIR co-hosts Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz, and our panelists:

• Deirdre Breakenridge
• Beth Harte
• Mitch Joel
• Valeria Maltoni
• Bill Sledzik

Plus, our listeners who called in to the live show with commentary as well as those in conversation in the FIR Live chat room at BlogTalk Radio: see those additional perspective on the discussion in the conversation and questions (plain-text file, opens in new tab/window) from the chat room.

Get FIR Live:

• Download the MP3 file (24.7Mb, 61:38)
• Subscribe to the FIR RSS feed
• Get the show at iTunes

Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com.

You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show. To receive all For Immediate Release podcasts including the twice-weekly Hobson & Holtz Report, subscribe to the full RSS feed.

This FIR Live Call-In episode is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years. Information: www.ragan.com.

Monday, December 28, 2009

PR disasters that aren’t

Year’s end brings it with it the inevitable parade of lists, top 10 this and worst that. The end of a decade merely exacerbates the need that compels so many to create these lists. 

One of the more intriguing lists I’ve seen so far details the 15 biggest PR disasters of the decade. But the more I read through this (and other) lists, the more I wondered: What constitutes a PR disaster?

Looking at the incidents covered on most lists, it would seem to be any event that got bad press. But PR isn’t about creating the illusion that everything in an organization is 100% hunky dory 100% of the time. It’s about building strong relationships with constituent audiences and maintaining a strong reputation.

Companies experience plenty of disasters. There are explosions at factories, oil tankers that spill their loads into ecologically sensitive seas, unethical executives who get caught doing unethical things, stupid executives who get caught doing stupid things, honest mistakes in judgment, and more. It’s wrong, though, to label all of these PR disasters just because they get ink.

It follows, then, that a PR disaster is one in which…

• The organization loses the support of its constituents and finds it harder to engage in its normal activities, or
• The company’s reputation takes a hit so severe that its performance is affected

Even operations or some other function is to blame for the disaster, companies rely on communications to retain stakeholder support and to shore up the company’s reputation. The disaster becomes a PR disaster when communicators make bad decisions (or when the company fails to pay attention to its PR people, as was the case when AIG decided to host a half-million-dollar retreat on the heels of receiving $85 billion in taxpayer bailout money).

By this standard, few of the disasters listed by The Business Insider qualify as true disasters.

Some of the items on the list aren’t PR disasters at all. Take JetBlue’s 2007 nightmare, when the airline kept planes on the runway when others were beating it back to the terminal, stranding passengers for up to 11 hours on cold planes with inadequate food and beverage and backed-up toilets. This was an operational disaster, to be sure, but most consider it a PR triumph, one in which then-CEO Dave Neeleman became the poster boy for authentic direct-to-consumer communication with his now-famous YouTube video. In that video, Neeleman outlined JetBlue’s passenger bill of rights, heading off legislative action that would have likely resulted in even more onerous rules.

More to the point, though, is the fact that JetBlue did not lose customer loyalty and grew even more successful in the wake of the disaster. JetBlue’s tale is about an incident that could have been a PR disaster but, through effective and honest communication, never became one.

That same year, the Cartoon Network had devices with flashing lights placed under bridges, which prompted a panic in Boston as bridges were shut down so authorities could investigate what appeared to be a bomb scare. This led to criminal charges and the departure of Cartoon Network chief Jim Samples. But did viewership of Cartoon Network shows decline? Did advertisers bolt? Did the network’s reputation suffer at all? It seems not.

And so it goes with most of the “disasters” that made the list. Janet Jackson’s wardrobe “malfunction” during the halftime show of the 2004 Super Bowl? Lots of complaints ensued (the FCC logged over half a million of them) and the NFL has been careful to book only family-friendly acts, but nobody boycotted the 2005 Super Bowl, as far as I know, and the NFL never took a hit. CBS was fined a record $550,000, but did CBS lose the support of its constituents? Was it harder to conduct business? Other than the fine (a drop in the bucket for a company that made just shy of $14 billion in sales in 2008), the experience doesn’t seem to have had any long-term consequences.

The entries on the list that seem to qualify as true disasters are, in fact, the ones with long-lasting repercussions. The worst of the batch involve ethical breeches, like Merck’s decision to release Vioxx despite preliminary research that the painkiller could result in heart attacks. The 2004 recall of Vioxx after four years on the market cost the company one fortune. Settling litigation cost it another. The company’s reputation plummeted. It lost the support of some of its constituents, and its credibility has suffered a blow from which it has not recovered.

Look at the list for yourself. How many do you think are genuine PR disasters? In my view, most stories labeled PR disasters are really just tempests in teacups, usually because the organization suffered no dire consequences, often because PR came to the rescue.

Which, of course, is one of the reasons companies have PR capabilities to begin with.

Monday, December 07, 2009

The marginalization of Rolodex PR

I was interviewing for a job about 15 years ago, a PR position with a high-tech startup. It only took the person interviewing me—he was the president or the CEO, if memory serves—to ask about my Rolodex.

For the uninitiated, I wasn’t being asked about the rotary card index loaded with removable cards where I kept contact information. (I still have a paper Rolodex which, in addition to my digital contact lists, I use frequently.) I was being asked specifically about how many industry media contacts I had. Truth be told, I didn’t have too many contacts, and the interview ended shortly afterward. No matter how much I tried to explain that good PR isn’t about quantity of contacts, this company wasn’t interested in anything but.

They’re hardly alone. In another job, I was constantly asked to “get out your Rolodex” and had to remind the boss that I didn’t practice Rolodex PR.

Good PR is not, in fact, about the number of relationships you have developed with media contacts. It never has been and, as we navigate our way through the shifting media seas, it is less important than it ever was. Getting people to tell your story is not about the relationships you have with reporters. It’s about the quality of the story and how well it aligns with the reporter’s beat and interests.

I tried explaining this to the startup exec: If I have a great story to tell, I can get it placed without having ever spoken to any given reporter. On the other hand, if the story sucks no amount of time invested in building a close relationship will get a reporter to cover it.

Getting a great story placed also requires finding the reporters who have reported on similar subjects in the past. Fifteen or 20 years ago, Lexis-Nexis was an ideal tool for finding reporters who have shown interest in your topic. (It was also a great way to check the work of reporters calling you to find out to learn how they have covered companies like the ones you represent.)

Media relations-focused PR professionals who practiced Rolodex PR are finding even less value in their connections today. The composition of a publication’s editorial staff has always been fluid—particularly on smaller papers and trade publications—but the shakeout in the journalism business means a lot of those well-established contactds aren’t working in the business at all any more.

The changing nature of journalism, including the rise of blogging and citizen journalism, has even further marginalized the value of the Rolodex. In a post on Rebooting the News, Dave Winer suggests that journalism training could become part of everybody’s education, not just those who enroll in journalism school:

In the future everyone can be a journalist, and the people who will be most valuable are those who are experts in areas outside journalism. That means, to me, that everyone should get a basic journalism education, in the same way it’s a good idea for us to take a semester of math, English lit, chemistry or physics.

My own recent experience speaking with a journalism department faculty proved (to me, at least) that the future of journalism is up in the air. Hundreds of models are being proposed and experimented with. But Dave’s view (that everyone can be a journalist, not necessarily that universities will embrace journalism-as-core-curriculum) should serve as a shake-up call for PR practitioners who have relied on the Rolodex.

First of all, I have experience with journalists who become experts in other fields. A good friend with whom I attended journalism school decided he wanted to cover law, so he went to law school in order to improve his depth of knowledge. He grew so close to the field that he could no longer report effectively to people who didn’t have his own level of understanding. (He eventually gave up journalism and has been a public defender for the better part of 30 years.)

One of the goals of journalism training is helping reporters learn to translate complex topics so lay readers can understand them. As experts in their field become journalists in an everyone-can-publish world, PR can help them make their messages understandable to outsiders…that is, we can help them tell their stories.

But more important is finding those journalists—professional or citizen—who would be genuinely interested in telling our companies’ or clients’ stories. And when everyone is conceivably a reporter, you’d either need the world’s biggest Rolodex, and more relationships than any one person can possibly maintain, or a different approach to getting your story out.

Practitioners who have always found the right outlet and pitched a great story have a leg up in this environment over those who build relationships with a diminishing pool of professional journalists. And assuming Dave’s vision is accurate, we’ll also help our clients—the experts in their fields—be their own journalists.

As with all things, this isn’t an either/or proposition. Some solid relationships with important journalists will always be important. (Having that relationship with Walt Mossberg or David Pogue, for example, would be invaluable when representing tech clients.) That is, I’m not about to fall into the trap of proclaiming Rolodex PR dead. In general, though, Rolodex PR is fast becoming a niche activity rather than a core PR practice.