Tag Archives: #PR

February 6, 2012 · 10:43 am

BMW’s Storm Cooper: A Mini-Coup Rather than a PR Blunder?

Stormy Weather for BMW?

For a fee, Germany allows people or companies to sponsor the names of weather fronts. So last month, to promote the “wind and weatherproof” capabilities of its Mini Cooper line, BMW’s marketing agency purchased naming rights to a high pressure system that originated in Siberia.

But the Cooper storm turned out to be far more than weather forecasters and BMW expected. As the storm made its way through Eastern Europe, its sustained sub-zero temperatures were attributed to the deaths of more than 250 people.

PR industry pundits and critics have been quick to jump on BMW for its decision to associate its brand with what has turned out to be one of Europe’s most deadly winter storms on record. A headline in the Wall Street Journal announced: “Weather Deal Backfires for BMW’s Mini.”

But did it really?

Although BMW quickly and properly issued a statement saying that it regretted the weather front’s severity, and distancing itself from the deadly consequences of weather, the car company’s $400 investment in Storm Cooper may have been a PR bonanza rather than a black eye.

The Wall Street Journal’s position notwithstanding, few people are likely to blame BMW for the storm’s impact, or to associate the Mini Cooper brand with the casualties. However, if top-of-mind awareness is a beneficial marketing objective for a car company, then the exponentially greater, world-wide storm-related coverage for BMW’s Mini Cooper marque certainly won’t hurt showroom traffic or the company’s balance sheet.

In this case, the old saw, “All publicity is good publicity” may well be true. I’m confident that BMW’s marketing agency considers this a solid win, rather than a blunder.

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January 25, 2012 · 3:07 pm

Page’s Seven Principles of Public Relations Management

Arthur W. Page (1883 - 1960)

Although Edward Bernays is often characterized (largely through self-promotion) as the “father of public relations,” most serious PR practitioners consider Arthur W. Page to be the first and most influential apostle of modern-day public relations and corporate communications.

From 1927 to 1946, Page served as a vice president and director at AT&T, and his many contributions to the profession are recognized today as namesake of The Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication – a research center at Penn State’s College of Communications – as well as the Arthur W. Page Society, whose members are corporate chief communications officers or senior officials at public relations agencies.

Page’s most lasting legacy, however, may be the seven rules of PR management, known as the Page Principles, that he espoused:

Tell the truth. Let the public know what’s happening and provide an accurate picture of the company’s character, ideals and practices.
Prove it with action. Public perception of an organization is determined 90 percent by what it does and 10 percent by what it says.
Listen to the customer. To serve the company well, understand what the public wants and needs. Keep top decision makers and other employees informed about public reaction to company products, policies and practices.
Manage for tomorrow. Anticipate public reaction and eliminate practices that create difficulties. Generate goodwill.
Conduct public relations as if the whole company depends on it. Corporate relations is a management function. No corporate strategy should be implemented without considering its impact on the public. The public relations professional is a policymaker capable of handling a wide range of corporate communications activities.
Realize a company’s true character is expressed by its people. The strongest opinions — good or bad — about a company are shaped by the words and deeds of its employees. As a result, every employee — active or retired — is involved with public relations. It is the responsibility of corporate communications to support each employee’s capability and desire to be an honest, knowledgeable ambassador to customers, friends, shareowners and public officials.
Remain calm, patient and good-humored. Lay the groundwork for public relations miracles with consistent and reasoned attention to information and contacts. This may be difficult with today’s contentious 24-hour news cycles and endless number of watchdog organizations. But when a crisis arises, remember, cool heads communicate best.

Practicing and aspiring public relations executives would be well-served to keep a copy of these timeless Page Principles on the wall, or at least in their desk’s top drawer.

Life-long students of PR craftsmanship will also enjoy and benefit from reading the acceptance remarks from the Page Society’s Hall of Fame recipients, and from watching the videos from the Page Center’s collection of oral histories given by some of the profession’s most noteworthy PR practitioners from the past and present. Notably, the Page Center’s website also contains a great number of Page’s speeches and writings.

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January 5, 2012 · 10:44 pm

Glassdoor.com: Social Media Tool or PR Nightmare?

Learning to Live With Employee Opinion

Since its founding in 2007, Glassdoor.com has become an important research tool for job hunters, corporate recruiters, and anyone looking for unvarnished behind-the-scenes insight into what really goes on behind corporate doors. Although Vault.com – established more than a decade earlier – serves much the same purpose, Glassdoor.com represents a far greater online brand risk…largely because the website provides free access to remarks posted by real, bogus and often disgruntled employees, and because those negative postings are often found on Google page one searches involving the company under fire. For many of the 250,000 companies it currently covers, Glassdoor.com can be a PR nightmare waiting to happen.

Websites dedicated to employee dissatisfaction were social media pioneers; empowering workers to publicly call their manager a “5-Alarm Nut Job” without retribution, to gripe about low pay or a lousy lunchroom, and to warn others to look elsewhere for a job. The most notorious of these early sites included RateMyEmployer.com (currently on life support), F**kedCompany.com (which died in 2007) and JobVent.com, which was acquired by Glassdoor.com in 2009. The demise of this scruffy first generation of workplace gripe sites gave way to an even more powerful and credible second generation of professionally managed, sophisticated sites like Glassdoor.com, backed by private equity investment, and fueled by business models that ensure their long-term existence.

Here’s a survival guide for companies seeking to avoid, minimize or benefit from brand exposure that’s delivered on Glassdoor.com:

Address Root Causes – Companies that focus on employee satisfaction and provide internal channels for rank & file feedback have far fewer negative postings on Glassdoor.com. Effective workforce management, however, does not ensure a positive outcome on the site. For example, Texas-based Beryl Health (formerly Beryl Companies) is well-known for its employee-focused culture, and was a “Best Place to Work in Healthcare” according to Modern Healthcare magazine. Beryl’s former CEO Paul Spiegelman even wrote a popular book about the importance of employee motivation. But Beryl’s current Glassdoor.com rating is 2.5 (unsatisfactory) on a 5-scale, based on a few negative postings (of seven reviews in total) from its employees.

Work The System – To their credit, Glassdoor.com does have a protocol for screening out employee rants that violate their standards of legality and good taste. They also have a viable internal system for moderating comments that are flagged by another party as “Inappropriate.” As a last resort, if a posting is believed to be bogus, particularly harmful or libelous, a company can appeal directly to Glassdoor.com’s corporate General Counsel. There’s no need to be victimized. Companies should monitor employee comments on Glassdoor.com, and respond directly and aggressively when appropriate.

Purchase a Profile – For a fairly reasonable price, Glassdoor.com will provide an “Enhanced Employer Profile,” featuring a comprehensive description of your company. I don’t work for Glassdoor.com in any capacity, or receive compensation for promoting its products, but it’s a no-brainer to take advantage of an opportunity to provide credible, positive content that can offset misinformation, warts and shortcomings that others are sharing online.

Lobby for Support – It’s no secret that many companies “encourage” their happy employees to post positive comments on Glassdoor.com as a means to bolster their overall Company Rating. Unfortunately, some companies assign this role to their PR department, whose staff members pose as anonymous employees, pumping out false praise and motivating detractors to post additional rants. In some cases, it may be beneficial to lobby for employee support on Glassdoor.com by asking them to express their satisfaction with the company. However, this solicitation must be carefully planned and expressed in a genuine manner, or the potential for this effort to backfire, internally and online, is fairly high.

Embrace Criticism – When online detractors echo similar complaints, it usually means there’s some underlying truth to what they’re griping about. It also means that Glassdoor.com visitors will begin to believe them. Although it’s contrary to corporate instincts, the quickest way for a company to stop online rants is to fix the related problems, or to explain to employees why it won’t or can’t. Allowing Glassdoor.com to serve as a canary in the coal mine can avoid problems that may be more significant than brand reputation.

Glassdoor.com is an online reality that requires pro-active and consistent oversight by fiduciaries of the corporate brand. Understanding how to peacefully coexist and leverage this influential social media tool enables companies to minimize negative brand impressions, drive recruitment and demonstrate their institutional backbone to current employees.

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December 23, 2011 · 5:01 pm

3 Reasons to Avoid One-off Press Quotes

Your Media Strategy: Steak or Sizzle?

For reasons often directly related to justification of a PR firm’s monthly retainer, many corporate websites are littered with press clippings featuring one-off quotes from its executives. Although this popular genre of “Hey look at me, my name is in the news!” visibility can feed corporate egos, the exposure seldom moves the needle, in terms of tangible business outcomes. Here’s why:

The likelihood of target audiences seeing your quote is close to zero. Given the increasing volume of on- and off-line media noise, and because most people are surface readers, getting people to notice a quote buried in the fifth paragraph of a story is akin to getting on camera while sitting in the bleachers at the Super Bowl. More importantly, even if your quote does get noticed, it’s even more unlikely that readers will either remember it or act on it. In most reporting, quotes from sources simply support a premise the reporter is making; they’re not intended to make the sources look smart.
The marketing value of your media quote is absolutely zero. In media coverage that includes quoted sources, typically more than one source is featured, and those other sources often will be competitors. Having a competitor or two quoted in your media coverage will either kill or greatly reduce its merchandising value; meaning the piece cannot be leveraged as a sales tool. To address this issue, some companies extract or isolate their executives’ quotes to remove references to competitors, but this practice of “selective transparency” does not reflect well on the organization’s integrity.
Promoting one-off media quotes can devalue your company’s brand. Here’s an acid test: Do well-known, much quoted companies – McKinsey, Morgan Stanley, General Electric, SpencerStuart, for example – feature one-off media quotes on their websites? Or (God forbid), do they write press releases announcing that one of their executives was quoted in the media? A quick way to label your company as “bush league” is to base its media strategy around building and promoting an inventory of media exposure consisting of one-off quotes.

If your company is seeking to leverage media exposure to gain 3^rd party endorsements, and to establish bona fide thought leadership, one-off media quotes offer a highly inefficient way to accomplish those goals. More effective media placement strategies involve company profiles, interviews, bylined articles and OpEd pieces…the type of exposure that shines an exclusive and relevant light on a company’s intellectual capital, and that can be converted into powerful sales and marketing tools.

The challenge in pursuing a media strategy based on steak rather than sizzle is that the underlying content requires focus, thought and effort, and that the coverage is much more difficult to attain. Companies and their outside agencies must decide whether their media strategy will be based on short-term ego gratification, or on long-term, meaningful brand exposure. At many companies, that conversation never takes place.

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December 12, 2011 · 5:21 pm

Sales Tips from PR Legend Lee Levitt

Lee Levitt, sans fedora and shoulder bag

Lee Levitt, who passed away in 2010 at the age of 80, continues to be remembered as a PR practitioner who gave much to the profession; as someone who lived up to his characterization as an industry visionary.

Paging through Lee’s “Manual of PR Sales Strategy & Tactics,” the insights he offers are as relevant today as when he wrote them in 1992, and apply across all professional service disciplines, not just PR. Here are a few Levitt gems:

“What most managements want to buy today is the accomplishment of specific substantive corporate / institutional goals… So that is what you must sell. You cannot simply come in and enumerate the skills you have, the technical things you can do. You must explain how applying them will solve some substantive problem or take advantage of some substantive opportunity.”
“Telling people that you are going to counsel them can make you seem presumptuous and arrogant. No matter how diplomatically you put it, you seem to be saying that management is dumb and benighted, while you are smart and enlightened.”
“What prospects really want to hear about is themselves. They want you to tell them about themselves in exactly the same words they use… And they want you to want their business and be enthusiastic about it.”
“Never criticize what the prospect has done in the past. Let the prospect tell you what went wrong and whose fault it was… If asked if you could have done better, say you hope so.”
“Most salespeople believe it is their job to talk, and up to a certain point that is true. But once the prospect is primed to talk, it is your job to shut up and listen. Some salespeople never learn this.”

If you can find a copy of Lee’s book, buy it and read it. If you have a copy on your bookshelf, pull it out and re-read it. But don’t ask to borrow my copy, because it’s not going anywhere.

Lee Levitt embodied craftsmanship in public relations, and left a lifetime of wisdom for those who follow in his footsteps.

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December 2, 2011 · 6:22 pm

PR Lesson from a Twitter Flap

Emma Sullivan

@emmakate988

Just made mean comments at gov brownback and told him he sucked, in person #heblowsalot

When Shawnee Mission High School student Emma Sullivan jokingly tweeted her friend on November 21^st, expressing her opinion of Kansas Governor Sam Brownback’s education policy, she had no reason to suspect that her 87-character message would ignite a firestorm of national debate; generate media exposure from nearly every major news source; increase her Twitter followers to nearly 16,000 from 61; or make her the poster child de jour for the First Amendment.

It wasn’t Emma’s tweet that caused the high-profile controversy. The flap was created by a staffer in Governor Brownback’s office who was compelled to contact the leader of Emma’s “Youth in Government” program, who notified Emma’s high school principal, who demanded an apology from Emma, who responded by notifying the media that her God-given American right to tweet was threatened. Stop the presses: we’ve got ourselves a sexy story that’s ready for prime time.

At this point, Governor Brownback and the Shawnee Mission School District had a big decision to make: either hold your ground, or back off a controversy that the media was likely to milk for days, and would position the governor and educators as free speech bullies and social media terrorists.

Contrary to decision-making you might expect from politicians and bureaucrats, both parties immediately backed down. The governor issued an apology, and the school district publicly stated its support of free speech and said Emma was not required to apologize. Smart move.

The PR lesson from this tweet heard round the world is that an apology is often the most effective way to limit damage to one’s reputation or brand. It takes guts to admit an error, but if it’s done correctly, you can build goodwill that offsets the mistake. For some guidelines on how to apologize correctly, check out Ken Makovsky’s blog post on John Kador’s book, “Effective Apology.”

Emma Sullivan might want to put Kador’s book on her Christmas wish list. She has yet to learn basic diplomacy skills from her Youth in Government program. To date, Emma has refused to apologize for her salty tweet.

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November 27, 2011 · 10:48 am

B2B Marketing Strategies and Insights

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Tagged as #marketing, #media placement, #PR, #publicity, #thought leadership, B2B marketing, business development, Gordon Andrew, Gordon G. Andrew, highlander, highlander consulting, integrated marketing, marcom, marketing communications, marketing consultants, marketing counsel, marketing craftsmanship, marketing firms, marketing strategy, New Jersey PR firms, PR counsel, PR firms, PR strategy, public relations, public relations firms, public relations strategy, social media

September 28, 2011 · 7:19 am

Thought Leadership For Sale: Surviving in a Pay-to-Play World

Pay-to-Play Is a PR Business Reality

Most PR practitioners quickly learn that the Chinese Wall protecting editorial integrity from the influence of paid advertising can be, like the Pirate’s Code, “more of a guideline than an actual rule.” For better or worse, at a great number of well-known and respected media sources, advertising can purchase anything from regular coverage of meaningless news items, to top billing in an industry roundup, or even an outright puff piece.

Despite denials and indignation from journalists, money does talk at many print, electronic and online media sources; often in direct relation to the financial health and business prospects of its corporate owners. These quid pro quo arrangements are never in writing, and typically communicated over a lunch with a publisher or sales rep who, with a smile or a wink, assures the client or agency that, “I have no influence over editorial…but I’ll see what I can do.”

Trade and professional associations are not burdened with an obligation of intellectual honesty akin to that of the Fourth Estate. But it’s safe to assume association membership expects that guest speakers and “experts” featured on the agenda of their organization’s annual conference will be selected on the basis of experience, insight and presentation skill. A small number of these groups do restrict vendors from agenda participation, but at most industry conferences, any outside 3^rd party can purchase a prominent place on the program agenda…and many of those presentations are poorly disguised sales pitches.

This sale of “thought leadership”– market visibility with inherent credibility – is neither a recent development nor a crime that deserves a congressional investigation. Pay-to-play is a fact of business life, and to deal with this reality, PR and marketing professionals can either:

Use the market advantage that deep-pocketed companies have over their (limited budget) client or employer as a convenient rationalization for their inability to generate (unpaid) thought leadership; or they can
Stop whining, get creative, and lacking economic resources, promote bona fide content and foster personal relationships as currency to generate thought leadership.

With the media, succeeding in a pay-to-play world means two things. First, it means creating content that’s timely, tailored for the recipient and never delivered in a press release. Secondly, it means building good will with key journalists by consistently providing them with relevant information and ideas, regardless of whether it relates to your company or client, without any expectation of immediate return.

With public platforms, succeeding in a pay-to-play world mostly means advance planning. It can begin by attending the prior year’s event to get a sense of the organization’s membership, priorities and culture, and to meet the group’s leadership. Conference agenda development can start 9 or more months in advance of the event, so it’s important to be on line early with a topic likely to resonate with members. It also helps if your proposal features a dues-paying member of the sponsoring organization.

In both cases, succeeding in a pay-to-play world means managing internal expectations. From the outset, your CEO or client needs to understand that you’re running against the wind, and in exchange for that effort, you must be given permission to fail.

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Tagged as #conference planning, #content management, #media placement, #media relations, #PR, #press release, #public speaking, #publicity, Chinese Wall, editorial integrity, journalism, journalists, pay-to-play, public relations, trade associations

August 31, 2011 · 11:27 am

Death by Content: How Press Release Abuse Killed Public Relations

Self-serving Press Release Content Has Killed PR

The origins of the press release are unclear, but in the not too distant past, this communication tool was called a “News Release.” And its sole purpose was to provide the press with information likely to be of interest to the public; containing what journalists still call “news value.”

Prior to popularization of fax machines in the 1980s, news releases were delivered by human messengers to major wire services such as AP, UPI and Dow Jones, which in turn communicated that news to their subscribing media outlets over a broadtape machine – much like a financial ticker tape, but using a much wider roll of paper. For non-daily news sources such as magazines, news releases were often sent through the US Mail. Regardless of how they were delivered, news releases served an important role in mass communication.

But the news release has lost its franchise as a communication tool, for two reasons:

Thanks to technology, news releases became an anachronism. Online news portals and email killed the underlying functionality of paper releases as a news dissemination tool. The internet delivered news faster, and this was a good thing.
Thanks to the PR profession, news releases (aptly re-named press releases) became platforms to deliver content with little or no news value, and largely of no practical value or interest to the press. Flacks began using the press release as a marketing and propaganda tool, and this was a bad thing.

Over the past two decades, the sustained volume of press release abuse by PR practitioners – driven in large measure by CEOs (and clients) who fail to understand that journalists are not ad hoc members of their company’s Communications Department – has greatly diminished the stature of the public relations profession in the eyes of journalists, and has also reduced the ability of PR pros to leverage the media as a valuable means of securing objective, third-party exposure and validation for their company, product or cause.

As the number of journalists who post “Do not send press releases or pitch story ideas to me” on their Cision or Vocus profiles increases every year, the PR profession will eventually lose one of its most fundamental roles: to discover or create content that has bona fide news value, and to properly package and present that information to media sources.

If journalists find no practical need for flacks, organizations will likely follow their lead. For public companies, dissemination of financial results and material events will be handled by their legal department. Because press releases are now considered sales collateral by their target audiences, “media relations” for all companies will be managed by the marketing department. Public Relations, as a profession and a function, will simply cease to exist.

Twitter, blogs and other social media-based “pull” tools may eventually replace the press release. But unlike social media, press releases have been pushed at journalists, filling their inboxes, wasting their time, and reinforcing the media’s perception of PR as a self-serving and often ignorant generator of meaningless noise.

It may be too late to repair the self-inflicted damage done to the PR profession by years of press release abuse. Morphing from a Public Relations professional into a Social Media professional may buy some additional career tenure for young communications practitioners, and hopefully they’ll learn from the lessons of PR’s suicide: that whether it’s tweeted, posted or contained in a press release, news and information lacking intrinsic value will always reflect poorly on its source. And over time, it will make you irrelevant.

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Tagged as #AP, #cision, #content marketing, #DowJonesNewswire, #flack, #flak, #mass communication, #media placement, #media relations, #news release, #news value, #PR, #press release, #PRfirms, #reporters, #tweet, #UPI, #vocus, journalism, public relations, social media, Twitter

August 19, 2011 · 1:39 pm

Brochureware Is Not a Dirty Word

Brochureware is the term used, often with derogatory marketing implications, to describe websites consisting entirely of static pages that promote a company’s products and services, people and value proposition. Most brochureware websites contain no content that requires updating, and other than perhaps a “Contact Us” form, no interactive capabilities. Brochureware simply sits online, like a printed brochure sits on a coffee table.

A big problem for many companies, from a brand marketing perspective, is that:

Their well-intentioned graphic design firm has provided them with a website with functions requiring new and refreshed content. These functions might include: “News”; “In the News”; “Upcoming Events”; “Thought Leadership”; “Case Studies”; “White Papers”; “Webinars”, etc.
Although they understand the potential marketing and SEO value of those website functions, companies often lack the motivation, resources or raw material to supply them with new, relevant, engaging content on a consistent basis.
As a result, website visitors might see…a company blog with only 3 posts over the past year; no press releases issued since 2009; a “Coming Soon” graphic for the In the News section; an archive of quarterly newsletters with many issues skipped; a 2 year-old white paper that’s no longer relevant; and zero upcoming events scheduled.
Based on these impressions, website visitors will likely conclude one or all of the following:

This company is out of business.
This company doesn’t really care what clients and prospects think of them.
If this company doesn’t care what I think of them, how well will they serve my needs?

Having seriously out-of-date or missing content on your website is akin to showing up to a first meeting with a prospective client wearing no shoes and the same shirt you’ve worn for the past 6 months, sporting a jacket with lapels 4 inches wide. Based on first impressions, that prospect has already crossed you off his list.

If your company’s website is incurring brand damage as a result of outdated content…and if it has no intention of building disciplines to consistently feed this online beast…then your best course of action is clear:

TELL YOUR GRAPHIC DESIGN FIRM TO REMOVE ALL WEBSITE FUNCTIONS THAT REQUIRE REGULAR UPDATING.

Your company will be better served – from a brand perspective – by having a website featuring 100% static brochureware, than by having a website that aspires to be something it’s not.