Day: May 6, 2003

Some recommended reading…

Traffick a website that covers the search engine business has an interesting article that looks at the development of PR from Ivy Lee and his ground breaking work for the Pennsylvania Railroad at the beginning of the twentieth century through it’s development as propaganda in the second world war to the Internet and PR’s new potential role in promoting organization’s online reputation.

The piece was written by Greg Jarboe and Jamie O’Donnell who as I previously mentioned have established SEO-PR a firm focused on helping PR folks maxmize the potential of search engines.

Here’s a poser for you.  You head up PR at a very large global company. Following the economic downturn some media have been negative about your firm.  Some of it justified, some of it not. What is your approach to rectifying the situation?  Do you address the naysayers, try and get to the core of their issues, communicate with them or do you simply exclude them from future announcements and briefings?

From a different perspective, if this was an unhappy customer, do you try and fix their problems (in the knowledge you can’t win them all) or do you ignore them?

These are the questions prompted by a case study in PR Week this week.  It’s a look at Internal Communications at Oracle. Now Oracle is a company I have always admired, not least because it’s founder and CEO, Larry Ellison coined the phrase “Good marketing and average technology, beats average marketing and good technology every time”!

The article looks at new techniques Oracle is using to get consistency across their messages.  It’s innovative.  But then halfway through, it turns to media relations and it gets a little weird.

PR Week reports that many reporters it contacted said Oracle is no more difficult to work with than any other corporation.  So far, so good.  “But then there were those who said the company can be “retaliatory,” and “punishes” reporters by withholding information or access.”

Oracle’s response?  “Let’s just say we keep score,” says VP of corporate PR Jennifer Glass. “We can be extremely aggressive, because Oracle has rights in this game too. There’s no room for inaccurate and misrepresentative journalism. If a reporter does one of those stories, they will get a call from me, and it won’t be pleasant. Some publications go out of their way to give us an extra kick. I guess it makes good copy for them. We’re not looking for the sweetheart story; what we want is fair and balanced.”

Back in July 2002, I questioned the validity of this approach following another PR Week interview with Oracle’s VP of global corporate communications, James Finn, where he said that they (Oracle) “would not be as keen to work with reporters who take a one-sided view of the company.”  

Do you agree? Is your job to address the media’s issues, to deal with reporters’ negativity or to exclude anyone who steps out of (what you consider to be the) line?

I admit sometimes you simply can’t win.  But often working through a reporter’s issues can yield results.  I’d never advocate cutting off your nose to spite your face…

The Internet has created a medium where anyone can post opinions and information. Of course users vote with their mice and the best sites typically get larger audiences.

Now as the poor economy continues to struggle, and as magazines and newspapers continue to struggle, there are a growing number of influential journalists, who although not still working with a publication are communicating with their audience online.

The upshot is that as a PR practitioner the media landscape becomes more fractured and you have more sites to monitor and target.  I am not solely talking about blogs here, though they are the most obvious agent of change.

Infoworld recently moved from the traditional tabloid format to a magazine.  In the process they reduced the number of columnists and one of those who will not be contributing to the new magazine is Ed Foster who for many many years wrote the “Gripe Line” where readers could raise issues around problems with IT vendors, and not just technical problems but problems with licensing, contracts etc.

Now Ed has create Gripe2Ed a website which will continue the good work.  It is a good example of the fragmenting that is going on and why it means PR people will have to be on their toes more now than at any time in the past.

“Because the gripes I�ve been covering here show no sign of stopping, I�m not going to stop addressing them, either. It’s my intention to keep publishing this column or one very much like it. To do so, I�m going to borrow a little from the open-source philosophy and publish an e-mail newsletter that is free to all who want to read it. And, if possible, I�d also like to keep it ad-free because gripes and ads don�t really mix. “