Catching Flack

Some companies expend a lot of energy to fill out applications to be listed among the “most admired” or “the best places to work.” But do these lists really impact the business in any meaningful way, or are they effectively make-work projects for the PR department?

Burson-Marsteller came out with a list of the most sought-after lists to be listed on (got that?), including such lists as Fortune’s “most admired” and BusinessWeek’s Best Global Brands.

Aside from the “best places to work” that might sway some jobseekers, I just don’t see what value these lists have. I’m sure it feeds the egos in the C-suite and marketing departments, and may be an excuse for a cake-and-ice-cream celebration, but does it impact the company’s ability to generate leads, snag customers or boost sales? And on the flip side, does it hurt companies who don’t make the list?

George Bush’s online on-camera interview this week on the web site Politico marks a turning point in the use of the media — one that the C-suite ought to take note of.

The interview itself is unremarkable — it’s the decision to do an interview online that’s worth noting. Somewhere in the White House communications machinery, someone decided it was worth the President’s time to sit down for an interview that wouldn’t be seen on the major networks and cable, only online. That’s significant.

In terms of national politics, you can be sure it’s not the last time a President will be interviewed exclusively online — national politicians are actually a bit more willing to try to reach audiences through new media than business executives.

Where this development really ought to reverberate is in the executive suites of American corporations. That’s where the old media hold-outs are holed up.

Forward-thinking corporations are already using online communications to reach new audiences and demonstrate that they “get it” when it comes to new forms of communication. Unfortunately, that’s still a tiny minority of the business community — after all, only 13% of the Fortune 500 even have blogs. The predominant culture at this point seems to be a) stick your head in the sand and b) force your communications people to “prove” why the company should have an online PR strategy.

Well, here’s another proof point — if it’s good enough for Bush, it should be good enough for America’s business leaders.

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Need more fodder?  Ted Demopoulos of the Blogging for Business site has posted his slides from a recent speech called “How to Sell Blogging to Your CEO and Clients.”

Search around the web on Google News or elsewhere for the day’s round of press releases and you’re likely to find a vast majority still being written and distributed in the pseudo-news format that has been prevalent for decades. I’m not exactly sure why this model gained supremacy, because it has never been a particularly efficient way to disseminate news, but it persists today, even in the age of instant worldwide communication.

For awhile, before the Internet, this stodgy news release format went unchallenged, and journalists who were forced to wade through them to find the nuggets of news they needed did so largely without complaint. Now, however, there is a rising chorus of criticism for this format, and many suggestions about how to improve press releases to make them more user-friendly.

In the end, though, there are only really two elements that define a good press release: it needs to be brief, and it needs to contain real news. The definition of “real news” is that it be timely and contain some facts and figures about the news you are announcing. You get bonus points for including links to background information on the web. You also get bonus points for making sure the people who are involved in announcing the news — the PR person and the key spokespeople — are available to comment and follow-up with interested parties immediately after the release is issued.

If you’re interested in the subtleties of the evolution of the press release, head over to TechCrunch and read this blog post by PR 2.0 deep thinker Brian Solis.

In brief:

• Email filtering is now starting to be used by bloggers to block and delete PR spam before it even reaches the intended recipient

There really haven’t been many consequences to spamming journalists with unwanted PR pitches — until now.

In what is sure to be the beginning of a trend, a blogger has posted the code needed to block and delete PR spam from Gmail accounts. All a blogger or journalist has to do is follow the simple instructions and PR pitches from the agencies on the blocked list won’t even hit their inboxes.

Note that for right now, this only applies to journalists and bloggers using Gmail as their main public email account. But it’s only a matter of time before this technique is adapted and spreads to other types of email accounts.

Before agencies on the list scream “unfair,” consider what got you on the list: inane PR pitches that have zero chance of being relevant to 99.9% of recipients. That’s spam, and to get cynical about it, the only reason agencies send that stuff out is to justify their existence by claiming that they “pitched” their client’s story to “hundreds of journalists.”

To avoid landing on such lists, agencies are just going to have to start targeting their pitches a whole lot better — and fast. Well-targeted pitches aren’t spam, they have value to the media, and journalists and bloggers will continue to provide valid email addresses so you can reach them useful information.

In brief:

• Lessons learned in corporate blogging from LinkedIn’s corporate blogger, who also links to a post by a blogger at EMC Corp. about their lessons learned

Face it — if you don’t already have a corporate blogging program, you’re probably going to have one in the next couple of years. It’s a little like the early days of the fax machine — at first, people asked “why do I need one,” but after awhile, the question changed to “how did I ever live without one?”

Maybe the biggest hurdle to starting a corporate blogging program is getting over the fear of the unknown. So take some advice from people who have traveled this path already — here are some tips gleaned from corporate bloggers at LinkedIn and EMC Corp.:

• Good in-house bloggers will rise to the top because they want to — you can’t force it
• Have an internal corporate blog “playground” for people to get up to speed
• Titles have nothing to do with who will be a good blogger, or for that matter, who will most effectively use blogging to further corporate objectives
• Keep corporate sensibilities to a minimum — we rail on this blog all the time about corporate-speak, and the point here is that no one wants to read a blog filled with corporate-speak or written by someone so constrained in what they can say. Create policies to limit damage, not to hinder creativity
• Social media means “social”: — make sure you foster and encourage the conversation.

Sarah Lacy of BusinessWeek.com caused quite a stir a few weeks ago when she conducted an on-stage interview of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at SXSW and asked a lot of off-the-wall questions that the tech-heavy audience thought was disrespectful and irrelevant. They were posting their thoughts from the auditorium on Twitter and the story started getting around the Internet even before the interview was over. I blogged about it here.

Larger than that tempest, though, Lacy is starting to emerge as one of the leading chroniclers of Web 2.0 and has a new book coming out in which she details the rise of companies like Facebook and Digg. In today’s fast-changing online world, its a good idea to keep track of folks like Lacy, because they can give you some insight into how things are changing and how that might impact your job and your career.

Lacy recently gave an extensive interview to PRWeek (sub. req.) about Web 2.0 and made some comments about PR, excerpted below:

PRWeek: You also used Twitter to respond to your critics. Can you address how journalists can use social media to respond to criticism and feedback?
Lacy: Larger than the whole SXSW thing, I’ve been a huge proponent of using all social media as a reporter to engage with readers. It’s a great way to directly interact with people who like your work, and it’s another thing that really facilitates this move where reporters who are successful are increasingly less and less reliant on their publications and are becoming their own entities. I am a huge fan of using social media to connect with people because I think there was this “ivory tower” aspect of journalism where people might read a byline for years but have no idea about the person who was behind it and never get to communicate with them or ask them a question.

PRWeek: What’s your experience with Silicon Valley PR people outside of working on your book?
Lacy: You know, they’re horrendous. I’m saying that partially jokingly. There are a lot of clichés about PR people that are there for a reason. But actually, I think PR people in the Valley are somewhat savvier because they have to be, because they have to deal with so many requests and it’s such a pressure cooker. That having been said, it never ceases to amaze me – or other journalists – the degree to which a lot of PR people seem to do things intentionally to piss you off. It’s like just the lack of common sense. For instance, I have a column in BusinessWeek called “Valley Girl,” yet I get constant pitches from people [asking me to meet them in New York]. I only write about Silicon Valley – why would you assume I’m in New York? When a PR person asks why is it a big deal that they got your name wrong or sent you a pitch on something you would never cover, it’s because when you get hundreds of those a day – it’s incredibly annoying. It’s basically like having telemarketers call you all day long for something you never want to buy.

Following up on the BNET1 post, CEO Candor on Steep Decline:

The post reports on the decline in trustworthiness of CEOs as measured by their perceived candor in the letters to shareholders that accompany annual reports. The study, by Rittenhouse Rankings, says that more and more CEOs are making “confusing and misleading statements” or creating a “dangerous fog” of misunderstanding.

This is not surprising. CEOs are at the top of the corporate-speak chain and are the ones who are most responsible for their company’s message and credibility. If the CEO believes in obfuscating, then everyone below him or her knows their job is in jeopardy if they provide too much factual, straight-forward information.

The serious problem is that this is hopelessly out-of-date, almost to the point of being comical. In the age of Internet communications, CEOs can’t simply wall themselves off in the C-suite and speak in regal tones. That might have worked 30-50 years ago, but it’s a dangerously outdated way of thinking now.

Now, CEOs and other corporate chieftains (with the help of their outside communications counsel) must embrace the new communications reality — and fast. One of the reasons I was intruiged by Kodak’s naming of a “chief blogger” was that it sounded like social media was getting closer to the C-suite (not true in this case, it was just a title).

Going forward, CEOs and CEO wannabes have to:

• Understand social media and Web 2.0
• Think through the implications of how major digital communications technologies like digital cameras, digital camcorders and digital sound recorders, not to mention Internet-enabled laptops, are smashing down communications barriers
• Get their messaging act together: know what you want to say, and know how to say it in audience-friendly language (using facts and figures, examples, stories, analogies and metaphors).

The last point is really the starting place to solving the candor problem. It’s a lot easier to be credible when you’ve thought through what you want to say.

Here’s a good one: Coach bags doesn’t like that its trademarked products are so often counterfeited and sold as real. So as part of its anti-counterfeiting initiative, it teams up with a college PR class to create a fake blog about a college student who loses her genuine Coach bag, posts signs on campus offering a reward for its return, then is outraged when the one she gets back turns out, alas, to be a fake.

You can read all about this saga here at AdWeek.

This is a what’s-this-world-coming-to story. It would appear that having lost its patience using truth and ethics as the basis for fighting counterfeiting, Coach has turned to lies and unethical behavior. Lovely.

And the larger story is one of managing — or mis-managing — brand image. While I doubt that this story will be so widely circulated that it will hurt sales, it’s not good for a positive brand image. It plants questions in the mind like, “if they’re willing to create fake news, what else are they faking?”

Of course, you could also argue that the ends justify the means: the idea behind this campaign is to raise awareness on college campuses of the evils of buying counterfeit luxury items, and that it has done, at least on one campus.

My colleague Sean Silverthorne over at BNET’s Harvard Business School blog tips me off to the temporary news web site created for the announcement of the proposed Delta-Northwest merger. His post is entitled “The Press Release of the Future” and indeed, this is a very creative, smart and modern way to use the Internet to handle the dissemination of news and background information on the merger.

Sean’s title got me thinking though: is it enough to post a site for a major news announcement, or do you have to do some proactive dissemination as well?

The answer, I think, is that this site is terrific as a portal for sharing news and putting your own spin on it, but you’ve still got to have a proactive strategy to push the news out to your key media and non-media audiences. You can’t just assume that people will find your web site via search.

And if that’s the case, what form should your proactive release take? I’m not totally sold on the so-called “Social Media Release” — I like the idea but I find it unwieldy and lacking in one critical aspect: storytelling. On the other hand, I’m appalled that most press releases are still written as long-winded pseudo news stories that are boring and fail to provide users with information chunks and links to more information on the web.

So my ideal proactive release to go with a temporary news site would have the following:

• Two or three paragraphs of hard news and one key quote
• High-level facts and figures
• Links to lots more background on the web

As for the Delta-Northwest site, it has all the info you would want: a comprehensive news center as well as information for other constituencies such as investors, employees and local communities. I give it an A+ overall and an A- for the news center.

Why the ding on the news center: strangely, the news contacts page is a bit sparse, with only the names of two agency people listed. I’m guessing they were trying to tamp down on non-media calls and inquiries but the page just looks half-baked.

Author Bill Holstein has a provocative new book out for CEOs called “Manage the Media (Don’t Let the Media Manage You).” It’s a slim primer for CEOs from Harvard Business Press designed to get them thinking about taking a more active role in media relations.

For anyone in PR, Holstein’s advice should sound pretty familiar. But I’m betting that this book finds an audience in the boardroom, where CEOs and other C-level executives can be insulated from the realities of corporate communications.

Among his tips:

• Incorporate communications into corporate strategy: don’t put PR in a silo. Let the PR people help shape the message
• Go on the offensive and shape the message: frame the story before your adversaries (unions, competitors) do it for you
• Prevent the emergence of broad coalitions: communicating early and often with your company’s critics will keep your enemies divided
• Embrace new media: it’s here to stay, so you ignore it at your peril

On the plus side, Holstein’s book includes many anecdotes about how CEOs have handled (or mishandled) their PR. On the downside, the book is very male/old-boy oriented and could use a few more facts and figures (and a few less generalizations) about how companies and CEOs have managed their PR efforts.