The latest issue (Summer 2004) of the PRSA’s Strategist magazine has an interesting roundtable with six senior PR pros from the New York area representing Fleishman-Hillard, Hill & Knowlton, IBM Global Services, Novartis, Porter Novelli and Weber Shandwick.
It’s a good read that covers the importance of measurement, the growth of procurement, careers, the healthcare market and the importance of credibility.
“The word “spin” came to corporate America from the political realm. We’ve created a monster. There are those in the profession who like the idea that they can control things. Maybe in politics that’s OK, if you get down to one day where one person votes in one voting booth and that’s the end. But we have relationships with our audiences, and this question of credibility versus control isn’t a moral question, it’s a factual question of what works. If you spin, you don’t win. We have to untrain a generation of management who didn’t think about public relations, then learned to think about it the wrong way. Now we’re on the quest to get people to think about it the right way. Some of our colleagues still feel the glee of getting the right quote and the right story even if it isn’t true. In a crisis is there a temptation to present things in a different light so that a bad thing doesn’t appear on the news? Everybody’s tempted to get away from the negative.”
The Summer issue also includes an interview with Wall St. Journal Editor Ronald J. Alsop on corporate reputation:
“In the book, I write that [Martha Stewart] handled this whole thing terribly given the damage it did to her company. Her sale of that stock is a personal issue, but because she is the company, she should have tried to get it behind them quickly and settle it somehow. I find it amazing that somebody who could so brilliantly create a business and an image – her whole company is image – could let her image be shattered like that. Now she has apologized on her Web site to her employees, but it’s still one of the worst examples of crisis management in recent times.”
Murphy's Law 