Month: May 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. “

Anchorage is the latest in a long line of US cities looking for external PR assistance in building a more positive profile.

Another sign that the Internet is melting into everyday life, an Orlando PR firm, Bitner.com is renaming itself Bitner Goodman.

An interesting profile and interview with Las Vegas agency owner Solveig Thorsrud.

PR Week has an interesting feature on the role of consultants in the selection of a PR agency.

More on the Pan Pharmaceuticals crisis from the New Zealand Herald.

Further to my piece on the shrinking reputations of prominent financial analysts.  The Mercury News has a story on how one of the most prominent of all, Frank Quattrone is launching a PR campaign in an effort to regain lost ground.

Quattrone is calling in the Valley’s big guns to help out.  Tony Perkins of Red Herring fame is rallying around Quattrone calling him “a paragon of shrewdness, intelligence, business savvy and aggressive salesmanship.”

Burson-Marsteller has launched a new service called PRePARE which is designed to help companies ensure their websites will cope effectively with any possible crisis. 

From their press release:

PRePARE “incorporates the agency’s earlier September 11th research based on a review of 88 Web sites from Fortune 500 companies and the 50 most-trafficked Web properties. The study revealed that 86% of Web sites had in one way or another responded to the national crisis within one week of the terrorist attacks.

More from B-M at their press room. More at PR Week.

Note: (I’d link to the press release itself but there’s no URL in the pop-up window from their website and I just couldn’t bother trying to discover it. A criteria for PRePARE 2.0 perhaps?)

For anyone involved in the technology business Jon Udell’s blog is essential reading.  Jon is a full blown card carrying journalist with Infoworld, who also happens to write a hugely popular weblog and is open to helping PR people understand how all these new technologies can be used for good 🙂

In case you haven’t read Jon’s earlier posts, he outlines how blogs intersect with PR here, and also covers Phil Gomes’ RSS and PR whitepaper here.

He has an interesting post on the new virtual press room that has been created by Phil Wainewright (another media blogger) over at Loosely Coupled’s site. It’s a good example of RSS in action.

Phil’s blog is at http://www.looselycoupled.com/blog/

For all our clever inventions and sophisticated thinking, we really do have some major weaknesses.  The human race is simply unable or unwilling to learn from the lessons of history.

We make the same mistakes again and again and again, even with the knowledge of what went before.

Reputation Management and crisis communication is a great example of this weakness.

Let’s be honest, there is no harder discipline in Public Relations than dealing with the aftermath of a crisis. 

And of course when it comes to crises hindsight is 20/20. Looking back at past crises you can see the errors being made and you ask yourself how they could get themselves into this situation.  Unfortunately it’s a little more difficult when you are in the heat of the battle.

Anyone who has the potential to be involved in a crisis, and that includes every single PR people on the planet, should become a student of past crises.  There are valuable lessons to be learnt by evaluating them, lessons that could help you through a future crisis.

 Pan Pharmaceuticals in Australia could have benefitted from evaluating how a crisis way back in 1982 was handled. Johnson & Johnson’s handling of the Tylenol crisis was exemplary and even though we live in a very different world today the basics of good reputation management haven’t changed.

Based on reports from the Sydney Morning Herald, they could have done with the help.

Of course it’s not just PR that’s been getting a hiding recently.  Within the next couple of years I am sure investment analysts will have some movies of their own to discuss.

The aftermath of the Internet stock implosion has hurt the credibility of every financial analyst whether they are culpable or not, and in many ways the impact has been far more serious than some movie-inspired character assasination.

The news that ten Wall Street firms have settled for $1.4 billion is hardly a surprise. Nor is the negative attention that the prominent analysts like Mary Meeker, Henry Blodget, Jack Grubman and Frank Quattrone are now receiving.

What is a surprise, and is a very relevant lesson for anyone working in communications, is the wealth of information investogators were able to unearth from the banks’ e-mail repositories. We’ve all known for some time that e-mail records are now one of the first ports of call for investigators in any case, but it seems the message has been lost on employees of the banks.

By way of example, here’s an e-mail from an analyst at Lehman Brothers: “well, ratings and price targets are fairly meaningless anyway…. but, yes, the `little guy’ who isn’t smart about the nuances may get misled, such is the nature of my business.”

Or this beauty: “This profession is a bad joke.”  Which is an excerpt from an e-mail exchange between two Goldman Sachs analysts cited in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s case.

These misplaced e-mails are a growing Internet phenomenon. People don’t treat e-mail as they would other communication channels.  Just take a look at the e-mails you receive every day with bad grammer and poor spelling .  Furthermore, people seem to assume e-mail is safe. A cursory visit to InternalMemos.com will give you an insight into how lazy we have become in communicating correctly.

Sensitive issues should be communicated face-to-face, not just thrown into an e-mail because it’s faster and easier.

Communicating online requires you to marry the best of the traditional communication techniques with the new tools, not just taking the easiest route. I find that phone calls are increasingly more effective than e-mail in many cases.  Like elsewhere on the Internet, there is a balance required between online and offline tools. It’s in your interest to communicate based on content.

The new batch of films which have kindly portrayed our profession in what I might charitably call an unfair light, has been well covered on this blog. 

In response, Jim Horton, who runs Online-PR.com has written a great whitepaper entitled: “Truth Fact and Perception – A Constant PR Challenge” .

It’s definetely worth a read, as is Jim’s blog.

“There is no novelty about truth, fact and perception, but there is mystery.”