Catching Flack

We’re in a recession. If your business is going gangbusters, keep going! But if your business is softening or contracting, or if you’re afraid of that happening next year, you’ve got to think up some new ideas.

You know what they say: you can’t keep doing the same thing over and over and expect a different result.

My pal Doug Simon of D S Simon Productions, never one to sit back and wait, has announced an innovation that should at least spur you to think differently: “Financial Crisis PR Insurance.” Here’s how it works:

Clients pay a small insurance premium on top of the price for their Satellite Media Tour, corporate video, Internet Media Tour or other D S Simon service. On the project’s start date, the three-month low for the Dow Industrial Index is recorded. If at any point during the project the Dow falls 1,500 points below this recorded low, clients have the option to cancel their project, paying only the premium.

Says Simon:

“Marketers need to be more aggressive to avoid a major sales drop during the current economic turmoil,” said Douglas Simon, President & CEO of D S Simon Productions. “This insurance lets you plan marketing initiatives with the security of knowing that if the economic crisis widens, you can cancel the initiative without paying for it.”

So GM and Chrysler say they “get it” and that their CEOs won’t be flying in corporate jets when they return to DC this week for Round Two of begging/arm-twisting/cajoling/blackmailing Congress into forking over billions of dollars to their companies. (Ford hasn’t said yet what its CEO will do to get to Washington)

“We’ve gotten the message,” said GM spokesperson Tom Wilkinson.

Really? News reports out of Detroit suggest that so far, all they have “gotten” is that it would be beyond dumb to show up in Washington aboard three separate corporate jets, which cost about $20,000 each for a round-trip from the Motor City.

I’m not sure they’ve “gotten” the message that Congress and especially the public wants to see and hear a lot more from the Big Three than “give us the money or we’ll ef-up the country by going bankrupt.”

So I’m going to make believe for a moment that I’m sitting in a conference room at GM or Chrysler being asked to give my best PR advice on how to get the public on our side going into these hearings:

• Drive from Detroit to DC in Ford/GM/Chrysler cars or trucks!! This is the biggest no-brainer of all time.
• Get dealers, suppliers, union men and women, and multi-generation car owners to join your caravan.
• Drive through as many Congressional districts as you can on the way and stop once or twice in each to make note of the auto industry’s impact on that area.
• Send out PR info to Big Three dealers and other auto-related businesses across the country in every other Congressional district giving them talking points and simple PR guidance on how to get local coverage of the impact that the Big Three have in their town.
• Suspend all new car advertising — all of it! — for the 48 hours prior to the hearing, and replace it with heart-rending stories of Big Three employees, suppliers and car owners who would be hurt if the companies were to go under.
• When you get to Washington, have an awesome press conference on the steps of the Capitol with all your constituencies present, and make your case for the bailout, using as many personal stories as possible.

Oh, and one more thing: have an actual plausible plan that everyone can grasp about how you will use the money to stave off bankruptcy and get your companies back on the right track.

God bless social media. Last week, there was no such thing as a “Motrin Mom.” This week, it’s an interest group.

The story: McNeil Consumer Health Care, makers of Motrin (otherwise known generically as ibuprofen), posted a 50-second seemingly tone-deaf “ad” on their site offering Motrin as a remedy for mothers of young children whose backs ached from carrying the kids in front-packs and such.

Shazam!

As fast as you can say i-bu-pro-fen, the video spread around the Net, mainly by outraged mothers who were offended by the implications of the ad (you can judge for yourself here). They congregated around Twitter, in particular, to share their outrage. By Sunday night, McNeil had pulled the ad and apologized, though of course, the ad itself lives on on YouTube and elsewhere, as does this newly formed interest group.

So, the scorecard:

• Score one for activist online moms who were probably rightly offended by the tone deaf ad.
• Score one for the power of social media to give the aggrieved a place to vent and organize.
• Score one for Motrin as well. An expensive brand in a crowded field dominated by Advil and generics, they’ve now gotten free publicity in the Associated Press, the New York Times, and scores of other media. Can’t be bad for business, though some Motrin moms might disagree.

Here’s your PR tip of the week: write yourself a page of new messages that include the phrase “because of the bad economy…”

As in, “Our revenues are flat because of the bad economy.” Or, “We have to lay off people because of the bad economy…”

Now, I’m not making fun of companies that are really having serious economic problems as a result of the increasingly perilous economy. But I’m skeptical of companies that are starting to roll out “bad economy” as an all-purpose excuse for whatever goes wrong.

Take Circuit City, for example, which filed for bankruptcy protection Monday. It has been a far less well-managed chain than its main competitors, mainly Best Buy and Wal-Mart, for years, during the good times and now the bad. So it was far than just the “bad economy” that felled Circuit City. But I didn’t hear anything about “poor management” in the post mortem about the chain.

Of course, it’s convenient and easy to blame the economy rather than taking a look in the mirror.

But I caution you to use the all-purpose excuse sparingly.

Why?

Because it’s a credibility killer.

Sure, it’s a tough economy right now. But the economy isn’t to blame for everything. So if you use ‘the excuse’ and it turns out not to be true, it will make you look foolish. And less believable.

There’s no hiding in the Internet era, especially if you are a company with a tech-savvy employee base. According to a very interesting article in today’s New York Times, companies are now being forced to write blog posts about things like layoffs as soon as they happen:

Blogging about staff cuts is particularly prevalent in Silicon Valley, where tech gossip sites pounce on every rumor and Web-savvy employees broadcast their every thought on personal blogs and Twitter feeds. Companies feel pressure to break bad news on their own blogs so that they can better control the message.

However, experts in human resources and public relations say it is only a matter of time before companies of all sizes and in all industries will feel compelled to blog about painful news.

“Control the message.” I put that in bold above. Either you control your message (as best you can) or other people will do it for you. That was true before the Internet but it’s especially true now and going forward.

This requires a new mindset, if you don’t already have one. And it probably takes practice. Here’s the drill:

• Think hard about what other people might find interesting about your company
• Be honest about whether they are likely to blog about it or release it in some other way
• If there’s any chance it could come out (and assume there is), get your messages together and figure out a way to get ahead of the story and tell it your way, rather than reacting to what other people say

Here’s a quiz: which of the following environmental terms resonates most strongly with consumers:

a ) Conservation

b) Green

c) Energy Efficiency

d) Sustainable

If you answered “b) Green” — you’re wrong! The answer is c) Energy Efficiency. That’s according to Suzanne Shelton of Shelton Group, who conducts annual surveys of consumer attitudes toward environmental issues. Shelton’s research indicates that only 61.5% of consumers have a positive association with the word “green,” 63.5 percent feel positively about “sustainable,” 74% feel positively about “conservation” and a whopping 88.2% feel positively about “energy efficiency.”

Why? Because it’s a term they can understand. “Energy efficiency” means turning off the lights, lowering the thermostat, buying a hybrid car, and so on — things consumers can actually do. But what does “green” mean? It can be all things to all people, Shelton says, and consumers already see through the hype — that “green” is mostly a marketing buzzword designed to boost sales.

Other excellent tidbits from Shelton’s top-rate presentation at the PRSA International Conference in Detroit:

• Consumers are “armchair environmentalists” — they can see lots of things other people should do, but don’t want to do much themselves, unless it’s easy and saves them money
• People don’t know what the right things to do are — there’s an unmet need for a credible third-party to certify products and services that are good for the environment
• Consumers currently associate “energy efficient” and “green” with “more expensive”
• The economy is definitely having an effect: in 2007, consumers said that the first thing they would do if they had an extra $10,000 to put into their homes would be to replace flooring and countertops; in 2008, it was replace windows and upgrade their heating and cooling systems to save energy
• Most consumers know enough about sustainability and environmentally friendly products and services to “get through a cocktail party,” but that’s about all

And here’s the kicker of kickers: do you know what is the largest source of greenhouse gases? It’s not personal cars and trucks or even all of the transportation sector — it’s coal-burning electricity generation. That’s right — the whole push to do things virtually and plugging in is actually worse for the environment, as a whole, than getting in our cars or taking an airplane.

It’s PR gospel that you shouldn’t “repeat a negative,” that you should instead focus on the positive and turn negative questions into positive answers. I’ve been hammering on this a bit on this blog of late because both presidential candidates have been repeating negatives quite a bit, though it would appear that Obama, at least, has started to learn his lesson.

One of the comments I got asked the following excellent question: how do we know that repeating a negative is bad? What’s does the research say? At the time, I have to say I was stumped — I had always taken it as a given.

But I did some looking around and it turns out that there is definitive support for the theory that you shouldn’t repeat a negative.

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I used to be a PC person, and I’m writing this post on a PC. But that’s only because I’m waiting for a new Mac to be delivered. I switched over three years ago. The dirty secret of switching over, if you care, is that Macs are just as frustrating to use as PCs, only the frustrations are completely different.

One quick example: I LOVE the Google toolbar. Can’t live without it. Except I have to, because there isn’t one for the Mac browser I use. 

So I straddle both worlds. The Mac I’m about to get has the ability to run Windows, and I’m not sure what I will do: will I install Windows at all, and if I do, how much time will I spend working on Windows versus native Mac applications? We’ll see.

This is all by way of asking you a question: what do you think of Microsoft’s new “I’m a PC” ads? Are they cool, stupid, funny, boring, or just right? And how do they make you feel, whether you’re a Mac person, a PC person, a Linux person or just a person?

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As much as anything, what people are craving right now is some guidance on what to say to employees, customers, partners, the media and others about how the financial crisis is impacting their business. Unless you work on Wall Street, what’s been going on is largely a mystery, and unless it has walloped you directly, it’s a little hard to know what to say about it. Any help is appreciated.

This blog has already offered some guidance, but here’s some more: an excellent new white paper from Waggener Edstrom called “The Communications Impact of Financial Turmoil.”

It’s a quick five-page read and I recommend you download it and read the whole thing. But here’s the kicker at the end, titled “What we are recommending to our clients:”

• Most importantly, stay focused on the long term. This crisis will pass; there will be fallout, but the globaleconomy will continue on. This is an opportune time to broaden interaction with stakeholders; to think globally; and to begin employing innovative communications tools such as social networking and online strategies, to support corporate business goals and strengthen those critical stakeholder ties.
• This is not a good time to cut back on employee communications. In fact, constant and open dialogue between company leaders and employees is essential during times of uncertainty. Clearly all of this external communications needs to map as well to internal communications —both formal and informal. Senior management will want to understand this media dynamic and why story lines are being altered — but broader employee communication will be of value in maintaining morale and helping the company as a whole understand how its story is being told in a media climate that is lunging from headline to headline. Now is the time for CEOs to be more visible than ever before, not less
• Utilize every communications channel. Organizations need to move beyond (but not exclude) traditional media communications. This includes a heavy focus on direct stakeholder interaction (global citizenship, investor relations, employee communications, to name a few key elements). The use of online and social communications tools, from blogging to tweets, opens up new avenues for organizations to build communications bridges beyond mainstream press.
• Be authentic. Not just today, but every day. Transparency and global citizenship are increasing in importance every day, and are key differentiators in the marketplace. Given the current degree of media scrutiny and public skepticism over the motives behind corporate behavior and performance, an organization’s activities — and to whom and how they are communicated — must be ethical, authentic and credible. Indeed, we believe that authenticity will become the single biggest defining factor for successful corporations and those who lead them into the future.

There was an interesting moment in the McCain-Obama debate on Tuesday when Tom Brokaw asked both of them “Who do you have in mind for Treasury Secretary?”

It was a pretty stupid question, actually, since Brokaw knows full well that neither is in a position to reveal this information even if they know for sure who they would nominate. But sometimes in media interviews you get stupid questions, and you still have to answer them with something other than “no comment.”

Unfortunately for McCain, he had to go first, so he stumbled around a bit before trying to “bridge” his answer to safer ground talking about the economy in general. Then Obama got to go, piggybacking on McCain’s suggestion of Warren Buffett (very unlikely, totally safe suggestion) to give a direct answer and then bridging to his safer ground of talking about the economy.

And that’s the point — when you get one of these questions, you first have to give some sort of credible answer, then “bridge” with a line like, “but the larger point is…” to your safe ground of your pre-prepared talking points.

The transcript follows to further demonstrate what I’m talking about:

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