Catching Flack

You know the boom times are over when it “bankruptcy PR” becomes the newest market niche for PR agencies. PRWeek reports that “retailer Mervyns is working with Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher for communications support during its Chapter 11 filing,” which the company made on Tuesday.

What does a PR agency do for a Chapter 11 retailer? According to PRWeek:

The agency is conducting proactive outreach to key vendors and investors via letters, e-mails, a restructuring hotline, and a section on the company’s Web site outlining the restructure, according to Andrew Siegel, a managing director at Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher.

The team also provided employees in the stores with communications materials to help address consumers who may have questions about the restructuring.

Our message is business as usual, and customers can continue to expect the same thing,” Siegel said. “[Vendors] are comforted that the company has a $465 million dollar dip [once court approved] with cash from operations to provide financing throughout the filing process.”

The agency will continue to update company stakeholders, customers, employees, investors, and landlords through Web updates and letters.

One question not addressed, but that agencies should consider: getting paid. When a company files for Chapter 11, bankruptcy judges and lawyers get involved regarding when and what order creditors get paid. This is usually negotiated before a business starts working with a post-Chapter 11 company.

When you think of Fox News, you may think of some of its positive attributes, such as its take-no-prisoners style and its obvious commercial success.

Chance are, though, that you do not think of Fox News as one of the world’s premier news organizations. You probably do not think of any Fox News reporters when compiling lists of the best TV news journalists, and you likely don’t think of Fox News as the place to turn in a crisis for complete, thoughtful coverage.

Whether Fox News deserves this positioning is debatable. But as an extraordinary recent piece by David Carr of the New York Times makes clear, Fox News’ PR operation isn’t doing the network any favors in this area.

Carr sticks his neck out by detailing the highly aggressive and borderline abusive behavior of the Fox PR department when dealing with reporters covering Fox News. He notes that reporters who dare to criticize the network run the risk of being mocked and ridiculed on the air, and that the PR operation is perfectly willing to try to intimidate reporters out of producing stories by threatening them with such treatment.

To which I ask: what good is this doing Fox News? Is it helping the organization achieve its business goals, which presumably focus on gaining viewers and advertising dollars? To the distant observer, it looks like this PR operation is more concerned with pushing Fox’s political agenda than with doing its job in support of Fox’s business objectives.

Fox News may be a special case, but I’m highlighting this story to make a few points, to wit:

• PR should never be the story. If you become the story, you’re doing something wrong. Go back and look at your tactics and figure out how to get yourself out of the news.
• PR is about positive relationship building. You should be building positive working relationships with the media, not simply to be an ass-kisser, but because such relationships will result in more favorable coverage of your organziation and will earn you the benefit of the doubt when your organization is in trouble and needs friends in the media.
• While there are times when you need to go on the attack against a journalist who isn’t giving you a fair shake, that’s a tactic that you should rarely need to employ. You should always be searching for common ground and only going on the attack when all else has failed.
• “Do unto others…” This is kindergarten-level stuff — show the respect for others that you would want them to show to you. How in the world can Fox News expect to a get respectful treatment in the New York Times — the New York Times! — when it doesn’t treat Times reporters respectfully?

Memo to Fox News: nobody respects a bully — they just put up with him until the time comes when the bully inevitably loses his advantage. Then they attack with a vengence.

One of the classic struggles in PR is the courtship process between PR agencies and their potential new clients.

The client, who needs the services and will pay the bills, wants to reduce his/her risk by learning as much about what the agency will do for them before starting to pay. The agency, for its part, wants to get the business, of course, but doesn’t want to give away its best “creative” work for free in order to secure the business.

This is all about marketplace leverage. The most desirable client has the most leverage and can demand almost limitless free work before starting to actually pay for it. On the other side, the most desirable agency can withhold all but its credentials and examples of past work and insist that a potential new client start paying before they see any “creative” work specific to their account.

In the middle, there is a constant tug-of-war, explored with insight and sensitivity by Jerry Johnson of Brodeur in the most recent issue of The Firm Voice, the online newsletter of the Council of PR Firms. Johnson naturally looks at the subject from the agency perspective, but his article offers insights for players on both sides.

If you have any role in either pitching clients or selecting agencies, you should check out the whole article. But here are his take-away tips for agencies:

• Pitch creative selectively. Creative is akin to marketing and promotion. Do it selectively. Only include speculative creative for opportunities that are (a) well matched to your agency’s strengths; (b) well funded; and (c) have good long-term promise that merits the investment required of good creative.
• Pitch creative strategically. The issue is not necessarily the specific creative content. It is the content that opens a client’s eyes to the agency’s core skills and underscores its strategic skill set. Not everyone responds to the same thing in the same way. I loosely follow an outline called “Chemistry by Design” to try and organize creative in a way that makes the most sense given the personality and culture of the client.
• Pitch creative economically. The good news is that with today’s technology, there are more and more economical ways to show creativity that are not very costly. Want to put together a video? Purchase a flip video camera for $125, shoot, edit and upload to YouTube. Off-the-shelf packages can produce a podcasts for peanuts. Online and overseas outsourcing agents can develop logos and creative around simple concepts at incredibly low prices.   

Every four years, we are treated to the spectacle of journalists and moderators asking tough, pointed questions of presidential candidates, only to have the candidates completely ignore the questions and launching into their pre-planned talking points.

And every four years, corporate spokespeople wonder — is that how I’m supposed to answer questions I don’t like? By ignoring them?

No, says Tripp Frohlichstein, media interview trainer and master of media messaging. Not only shouldn’t corporate spokespeople follow this mistaken model, Frohlichstein believes that politicians are ill-served by this tactic as well.

“What politicians are doing is not serving their purpose,” he says. “Why do you think people hate politicians? In part, it’s because they don’t answer questions directly.”

Frohlichstein believes that if politicians really wanted to connect with the public, they would “be themselves. They would be honest and direct. I think the public wants a straight-shooter.”

That goes for business spokespeople as well. It’s never a good idea for business spokespeople to ignore the questions they are being asked and instead only repeat their sound-bites. You’ve got at least acknowledge the question and if you don’t want to answer, say so.

If you want to make sure the information you are trying to get across is picked up, you need to make sure it is interesting. Too often, business information is full of fluff words and jargon that makes it impossible for other people to care.

But what are the building blocks of interesting information, or “quotable quotes?” Here is what I call the FAME Formula. I’ve also uploaded a worksheet for you to use to develop your own quotable quotes using this formula:

• Facts and figures: Details tell the story. For instance, you might say there were “six engineers who worked on the project for 10 months, with some of them pulling all-nighters and canceling vacations to make sure the product got out on time,” instead of “the new product was produced by a dedicated group of professionals.”
• Analogies and metaphors: these are rhetorical devices that essentially help us explain things that people don’t know in terms they do understand. This is actually fairly commonly done, saying for example that a distance is the “length of 10 football fields” or something is “twice as tall as the Empire State Building.”
• Make a reference to pop culture or current events: this is actually another twist on trying to explain things in terms people will understand. You don’t have to stretch and claim that Angelina Jolie uses your product or is coming to your ribbon-cutting if those would be falsehoods. Instead, you can say something like, “not everyone can have a glamorous lifestyle like Angelina and Brad. If you won’t be in Hollywood this weekend, be sure to attend the Alameda County Fair…”
• Examples and emotions: People in business are prone to generalize and hide their emotions. Often that’s a good business decision. But when you’re trying to communicate, it comes off as bland and lifeless. Instead, give real-world examples of how people can use your product or service, or share some emotional component of the effort to bring that product or service to them.

Here’s that FAME Formula downloadable worksheet.

****

Oops –I did a terrible job of proof-reading before posting this one. But I think I caught and corrected all the tpyos. Thanks for the heads-up. (jg)

Let’s say a reporter asks you the following question: Do you like chocolate ice cream or vanilla ice cream? How many possible answers are there? Did you say two?

I’ll tell you how many there are: five.

1. Chocolate
2. Vanilla
3. I like both equally
4. Neither — I prefer a different flavor
5. I don’t like ice cream

The point of this illustration (courtesy of Tripp Frohlichstein) is this: you’ve got to listen carefully to questions being asked and prepare in advance to address the range of possible questions with a range of possible answers.

You don’t have to be cutesy — you just have to open your mind to the fact that just because you were asked a certain question in a certain way (as in this case, a) assuming you like ice cream and b) assuming that you have a preference between chocolate and vanilla) doesn’t mean that’s the only way to look at the situation. Yet in many interview settings, the interview subject will act as though they are being interrogated and that everything they say can and will be used “against” them.

This is the wrong attitude.

Instead, if you’ve prepared in advance, you’ll recognize the subject matter of questions being asked of you and will have a ready answer, regardless of whether the interviewer asked it in a form (in this case, as an either/or) that doesn’t fit the information you have to share.

You’ve probably heard about the “Long Tail” theory of the web — that instead of needing to rely on big hits, businesses on the web could expect to see a trickle of steady business as people in need of their products or services used the web to find them. But did you know that the concept also applies to PR?

The idea is that when we put out press releases and other content on the web, it becomes part of an interconnected web of information, and that long after the initial release of the information, people who are interested in it have the opportunity to find it.

OK — but what does this have to do with PR?

Social media maven Sally Falkow points to the example of the USC Marshall School of Business, which has had success raising its profile on the web by posting social media content from the school. For instance, here’s an example of a professor who did a study about the stock market effect of review by the Wall Street Journal’s influential tech columnist, Walt Mossberg. In addition to posting a press release about it, Marshall also posted a video of the professor on its web site and on Youtube.

A few months ago, we posted excerpts of an interview with Chris Anderson, the Wired editor who coined the term “long tail.” Here’s the key quote from Anderson:

It’s not about reaching everybody through The New York Times now. Instead, it’s about seven million blogs and learning to communicate with those fragmented audiences or communities. Traditional PR is oriented around mass media. The new era is about niche media. That is PR 2.0. It’s also “Long Tail PR.”

Crisis communications experts like to say that every organization is going to have a crisis sooner or later, and that in fact, the underlying reasons for your crisis are probably already festering in your organization.

Larry Smith, president of the Institute for Crisis Management, likes to point to the story of the Firestone tires that started failing on Ford Explorers in the 1990s. The first reports of these problems came to light in 1993, but it wasn’t until 2000 that the story “blew up” into a crisis — in other words, Ford and Firestone had seven years to avoid a crisis, but due to inaction, they didn’t.

But crisis planning is a little like estate planning — a very good thing to do that most people don’t do. Smith, who makes his living advising clients about how to create and implement crisis plans, says companies should actually have three plans:

1. Operation plan: what to do when a crisis erupts
2. Communications plan: what to say
3. Business recovery plan: how to get back on track

If you’re like most businesses and don’t have a plan when a crisis hits, here’s what Smith says to do:

1. Figure out as quickly as possible what you do and don’t know about the problem
2. Identify the key audiences that need to be communicated with (e.g., employees, their families, customers, shareholders)
3. Create your messages: what do you need to tell people, and who do you need to tell?
4. Do something! Fix the problem.
5. Continue communicating throughout the crisis period and after, until the situation settles down

There are really two types of questions that you think you don’t want to answer: questions you don’t have an easy answer to, and truly touchy questions that you’d really rather not answer. Here’s a process for figure out which is which:

Preparation is the key to success:

• Brainstorm potential questions
• Develop answers (or non-answers) in advance. You’ll probably find that a lot of questions you think you didn’t want to answer you can answer, one way or the other, if you give yourself time to think through the right answer

“Bridge” away from questions you don’t want to answer to the safer ground of what you do want to talk about:

• First, acknowledge the question and provide some sort of answer to the question asked – don’t just ignore it
• Then, “bridge” to what you do what to talk about: “I’m glad you asked that because it’s something we’re taking very seriously. I can’t provide you with a lot of information on that right now, but what I can say is…”
• Stand your ground: once you have answered, do not allow yourself to be drawn into answering it again if the reporter repeats or rephrases

Good ways to say anything but “No Comment” to questions you really don’t want to answer:

• “I’m sorry but I’m not able to speak to that subject”
• “Thanks for asking but I’m not able to answer that question”
• “I’m sorry but that information is proprietary”

How to handle emotional questions:

• Acknowledge the emotional content (“I understand your concern…”), then bridge back to your messages (“… but what I’d like to talk about is…”)

Know your rights as an interviewee:

• If you don’t understand a question, ask the reporter to rephrase it
• If you don’t know an answer, say so

There have been a lot of posts recently about how to do a better job pitching bloggers that I wanted to share with you:

• Ready to Pitch a Blog? Take This Quiz First
• Pro Blogger Darren Rowse on Targeting Bloggers
• 21 Tips for How to Pitch Bloggers
• Blogger Relations Case Study: Mommy Bloggers
• SAP Blogger Relations Case Study (PDF download)