Did Team Obama Flub its First Crisis Communications Test?

Posted on December 17, 2008 by rgeller

Opinion columnist Kirsten Powers thinks so, as she wrote in her piece NY Post piece Bungling on Blago yesterday.  According to Powers:

The Obama camp has managed to violate almost every tenet of crisis
communications – starting with Rule No. 1: Get all the information out
quickly, accurately and fully.

It's imperative that reporters don't learn something from a third
party that you could have told them. And, in the era of nonstop news,
"quickly" means within 24 hours…

Obama's response has been an exercise in dripping.

Blagojevich was arrested Tuesday, Dec. 9…In the intervening time, Obama has repeatedly stated defensively
that he had no contact with the governor or his office and had not
discussed the Senate seat, as if either would somehow be inappropriate.

In a Dec. 10 interview, he refused to say whether Blagojevich
talked with his top aides: "It's an ongoing investigation. I think it
would be inappropriate for me to . . . remark on the situation beyond
the facts that I know."

But then, in a press conference the next day, he had no problem
stating emphatically, "I'm absolutely certain . . . that our office had
no involvement in any deal-making around my Senate seat" – and then said he needed to "gather all the facts" about what contact took place so he could release that info.

Which left everybody scratching their heads: How could he be "absolutely certain" if he still had to gather the facts?

The Obama team has sometimes claimed that it's holding off on
giving details at Fitzgerald's request – and sometimes that it will
talk specifics as soon as it has found exactly what contact occurred.
Which is it?

She points out a couple of times that none of this should matter because there have not even been allegations about any improper involvement from the Obama camp.  Of course, there should be contacts and even some possible deal-making between Obama's staff and the governor's office over who will fill his seat (within appropriate and legal guidelines, of course).

She concluded:

The only scandal here, in short, is the way Obama's camp has mishandled the whole matter.

It is hard for me to argue with her logic.  At the same time I think that it is refreshing to see that there is after all a mere mortal with human flaws in Obama (hard to believe this, given all the positive coverage and heightened expectations). 

Hopefully he will be more focused on good policies and governing then on how he spins.

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Blag Hair Day

Posted on December 15, 2008 by rgeller

I decided that I needed to put aside for a moment my deep thinking on the state of PR and tech to S-BLAGO-large
explore something really weighty, namely embattled Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich’s hair.  It is something bizarrely fascinating, and it seems that even the serious news stories begin or end with an aside about his hair.

So, without further adieu, here are some of the better jokes I have heard (most come from last Saturday’s SNL Weekend Update):

Frank Rich (while being interviewed on the Don Imus radio show this morning):  It’s like its own warm up act.

Amy Poehler: It looks like you are wearing a toupee that is also wearing a toupee!

(Badum!)

Seth Meyers:

Is that really your hair or did you grow out your eyebrows and comb them up?

It’s like you have a proceeding hair line

(Badum Badum!)

Amy Poehler:

It’s like someone put the hair on backwards on one of the Fisher Price people.

The first time I saw you I thought you were walking away.

(Badum Badum!)

Little Known Facts about Blago’s Hair

According to the NY Times, Blagojevich does not suffer underlings gladly – he

 …can treat employees with disdain, cursing and erupting in fury for failings as mundane as neglecting to have at hand at all times his preferred black Paul Mitchell hairbrush. He calls the brush “the football,” an allusion to the “nuclear football,” or the bomb codes never to be out of reach of a president.

Chicago Sun Times reports that Blago’s hair may be a sign of narcissistic personality disorder.

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The Changing World of Content and What this Means for PR

Posted on December 12, 2008 by rgeller

The NY Times had a great article, written by Virgina Heffernan, about the changing world of media.  It explains how growing media choices and ways of consuming media are having a profound impact on the ways content gets done.  So journalists and writers need to reconsider their story lines, as do the owners of  publishing vehicles.

In PR we tend to sometimes get myopic and focus on the issues most obviously affecting us without looking at the big picture.  It was interesting for me to consider the impact of these changes on the intermediaries we seek to communicate with and through (true, social media allows anyone to be a publisher, but until or unless we all become A list bloggers, we will seek to get our messages heard through others).

The following excerpt from the article is aimed at journalists, but the message could just as easily apply to PR:

The journalist Jeff Jarvis has lately blamed his peers for not apprehending better the changes to our profession wrought by digital technology. The writer Ron Rosenbaum has responded
that the best journalists were too busy working to philosophize: they
were reporting, writing and editing. Both are right. For 10 years,
journalists have hoped to avoid radical job retraining. And who can
blame anyone in any profession, midcareer and set in her ways, for
avoiding seminars on writing Google-friendly
leads or opening her sources to readers?

Virginia Heffernan goes on to pose a provocative question and explain what this means:

Does anyone still believe that the forms of movies, television,
magazines and newspapers might exist independently of their rapidly
changing modes of distribution?

Sounds an awful lot like the "medium is the message" idea pioneered by Marshall McLuhan way back when.

She uses an example to make the point:

The fact that articles live in digital form and no longer, primarily,
on paper, frees them from certain constraints that seem absolutely
normal to old-media people and archaic if not just stupid to everyone
else...

When advertisers become content providers, magazines lose ads and
finally drop off newsstands. With no newsstands and no covers, there is
no need for cover lines; with no cover lines, the story no longer has
to be written in the cover-line-justifying way.

She concludes with some advice (again, without many changes the words could apply directly to PR):

People who work in traditional media and entertainment ought either to
concentrate on the antiquarian quality of their work, cultivating the
exclusive audience of TV viewers or magazine readers that might pay for
craftsmanship. Or they should imagine that they are 19 again: spending
a day on Twitter ….
Then they should think about what content suits these new modes of
distribution and could evolve in tandem with them. For old-media types,
mental flexibility could be the No. 1 happiness secret we have been
missing.

PR as a profession need to be cognizant of these trends and adapt accordingly.

More media choices and the rising importance of digital distribution does not just mean more places to pitch and get coverage – it means a fundamental re-evaluation of how we communicate, the stories we tell and what we expect to get out of it.

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Economic Crisis for Dummies

Posted on December 10, 2008 by rgeller

Since the recession has pretty much settled in (can someone please tell me why it took the
government a year to officially declare that we have been in a recession?) I guess we might as well get used to the fact we are probably going to be in this for some time. It is hard to know what to think, precious few called this before it hit so why are we to believe that the prognosticators have it right now?

Anyway, if you haven’t already, now would be a good time to dig in and get a better understanding of what actually happened. I saw two great articles that really helped me in my understanding.

The first was in Portfolio, entitled simply The End (inactive link), by Michael Lewis, star author of Liar’s Poker and Moneyball.

He picks up where he left off in the book Liar’s Poker, an excellent read about a newbie’s experience (namely his own) at Salomon Bros. on Wall Street in the late 80s. That definitely was a time and place where gambling with money was common, unlike nowadays where there are certified websites to gamble on (learn more here), it will definitely be an interesting read for those who want to see ‘behind the curtain’.

In that book he predicted the demise of Wall Street, and positions recent developments as the logical book end to earlier crises. In short, Wall Street’s way of doing business – of producing nothing of actual value and vastly overpaying its people – is now really, finally done and over with. The accompanying picture, shown here is pretty wrenching and depressing (I know a lot of people who spent their careers on the Street).

Lewis is a great story teller and he makes this all actually very interesting and edge-of-the-seat gripping, as well as understandable. He relates the experiences of some of those who saw this coming, and describes the roles of the instigators. I won’t give away too much of the ending, except to say that there is a climactic showdown in which ex-Salomon Bros. head John Gutfreund – the Wall Street Lion whose career Lewis effectively destroyed with Liar’s Poker – agrees to sit down and have lunch with Lewis.

The second article, Debt Watchdogs: Tamed or Caught Napping, ran in the NY Times last week. It answered a big question for me. Namely, the investment banks’ (and now, auto manufacturers’) efforts to get government help have thrust them into the klieg lights. Meanwhile, quietly skulking in the shadows has been the credit rating agencies. Where were they in all this? Wasn’t it their ethical and legal obligation to send up a flare about the toxic debt that they rated? This is why understanding your debt is so important in this day and age. If we don’t know what is going on these kinds of issues can crop up and you can get caught up in these situations, many already have. The Times article takes an in-depth look at the role of these companies in the mess, and in particular drills down on the conflicts of interest and drive to profitability that no doubt were a factor.

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More on Blogging and PR

Posted on December 8, 2008 by rgeller

A nice thing about blogging for PR is that it helps us walk in the shoes of a journalist and understand what it means to fill white space and work on a deadline (even if the latter is self-imposed).   It leads to some appreciation for the life of a  journalist, and thus helps us empathize with the people we approach to interest in our clients’ stories.

I have been at if for about two years now, and have been gradually building my traffic and ranking.  At some point Flack’s Revenge was added to Cision’s database, which meant a lot to me because of course many of my peers (including the agency I work for, Fusion PR) use Cision to track blogs and traditional media.

I knew that part and parcel with being listed in Cision was the fact that I would sometimes get pitches.  These last two items – being listed in a media database and getting pitched – of course add to the picture of what it feels like to be a journalist.

Since I blog about PR and tech it is only natural that the people in technology for PR take an interest in what I write.   One of the people I have struck up a nice dialog with is Heidi Sullivan at Cision.   She approached me early on about some of my Twitter and blog musings on these topics and we have gone back and forth quite a bit since.

That is exactly the way it is supposed to work.  Social media has given all of us soap boxes we otherwise would not have.   And it gives us the tools we need to listen and engage.   Clearly, Cision is doing a good job of listening to and communicating with their market, as evidenced by their social media team, their comprehensive blogger directory, Twitter efforts and the Cision blog.

To bring things full circle, I was mentioned on the Cision blog on Friday, as the subject of an interview Heidi did regarding PR and blogging.   Thanks, Heidi, for taking the time to chat with me about this, and for posting the interview (inactive) on your blog.

Posted in PR | 1 Comment

The Kids are Alright (Daughter’s First MacBook)

Posted on December 5, 2008 by rgeller

The Geller household experienced a technological sea change as this traditionally Dell-centric family acquired our first Apple PC, a new MacBook on the occasion of our eldest daughter’s 16th birthday. We already have many computers in our home, so we didn’t really need a MacBook. However, my daughter deserved one. Since we now have more than enough computers in our house, we are thinking of getting rid of one or two. Apparently, some companies can recycle your old devices, so that might be a good idea. Having electronic devices sitting around the house is pointless, so it makes sense to recycle them. Now we have our new MacBook, it might be time to get rid of some computers.

No big deal you say, except for the fact that I communicate about technology for a living, and am a lifelong student of marketing, tech and the convergence of the two areas.

It is one thing to read about the cult of Jobs and the Mac. It is quite another to experience it first hand.

We have been through our share of computers, and I am sure that just like in many other households they have multiplied, sprouted wireless networks, and occupied a larger portion of our entertainment, school and work-related lives. Perhaps we have gotten a little jaded and even spoiled with all this technology. It gets really enticing to buy new technology.

When my daughter said she wanted a Mac notebook, I discussed this with my wife. I even read an in-depth review to find out more about Macs. In serious and hushed tones we discussed the implications of all this – having a new OS and way of computing to support and deal with. My wife wanted me to make sure I let my daughter know what this meant – Mac’s don’t work exactly like PCs, you’ll need some new programs, etc. Except for the blindingly obvious fact that most kids have been there and done that already in the classroom for years, duh, as most schools sport Macs these days.

So of course our fears were unfounded. It gives you a sense of nostalgia to hear your teenage kids squeal with delight like little children. It was nothing short of sheer joy as they powered the system up, and it took them through the simple set up steps.

“Make sure you go upstairs and help them with this – bring the documentation and other stuff,” wife said.

What documentation? What other stuff? It was all a no brainer, they did not need technical support from the vendor or dad for this gig. They had miraculously gotten everything up and running, and onto our wireless network with almost no effort, making me feel like the proverbial unneeded Maytag repair man.

The two sisters, who normally might be fighting were huddled over the MacBook, computing away in no time. A little later, there were some raucous noises from upstairs and I thought that the girls were killing each other. I went up to see what was going on, it turns out that they had fired up a video chat program and were having great fun with another friend using some kind of photo booth program that distorted their images.

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Marketers, Start Making Sense

Posted on December 3, 2008 by rgeller

I have talked about the death of certain institutions and sacred cows of PR (see my PR Death Watch16568630-16568632-large
series).  I have also promised to counterbalance this morbid talk with positive recommendations and have already begun to do so.

Some in our field blithely continue until they are hit hard in the head with reality.  "Where is our social media strategy?" the client asks one day, blindsiding the PR team.   Or, "Gee, look what our Google Alert picked up – people are not being nice to us on some blog.  What the heck do we do?" (or stronger words to that effect).

Or perhaps the client does not even ask questions and goes out and finds a separate shop to handle online marketing work, and the PR team finds out later that some of the "lunch" that they thought was rightfully theirs is being eaten by another.

The cold hard slap of reality could come when the PR team and/or its client or employer patrons see that old ways of doing business and PR work are just not as effective any more. 

Many PR programs, especially those in tech PR, focused primarily on trade media.   But do the trade press really hold that much clout these days, that is the ones that are left?  Do many people take the time to fill out the bingo cards to qualify for subscriptions of the print publication?

No one cares much any more about bland writing on watered down industry topics that at least at one time typified trade media reporting. 

Why should they  when there are so many voices to choose from – when they can follow the Tweets, the minute by minute ruminations of the ones with social media mojo, the bright lights, those who really know their stuff and have proved that they can communicate about it in ways that rock the measures of online moxie?   What we are seeing is nothing less than a realignment of the influencer firmament and a revolution in ways that people get their information.

Marketers and PR people need to stop thinking, relating and most of all communicating like marketers. 

Studies have shown that people trust blogs more than traditional media.   One of the great lies of our times has been that media are unbiased.  Their biases, which pretty much everyone recognizes by now, may stem from the influence of business and advertising interests on coverage, or from personal opinions and points of view that color news stories.

People know that bloggers have biases but, correctly or incorrectly, they perceive blogs to be more genuine and not beholden to corporate interests.  Looking beyond blogs to social media in general, people care about real stories and experiences from their peers.   They care about the hard news, hot rumors and calling vendors and brands out on the carpet when justified.

So if you approach your story like a marketer and communicate in bland marketing and PR speak – the style that, if not loved, at least passed muster with the trade media at one time – and write buzzword and jargon laden press releases (social media or traditional, it doesn't much matter), no one will care.  

You can put your neat new video on YouTube.   But if your video looks too corporate or too much like a 50's era duck and cover drill, it will be mocked endlessly, or just ignored.

Get real, get in the conversation, relate, listen, engage and be genuine.   There's no need to hide from it or apologize if you are in marketing or PR.   There most certainly is a need to know your stuff, be intelligible and be interesting.

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Blogging in Support of Analyst Relations in Tech PR

Posted on December 1, 2008 by rgeller

We were recently doing some PR planning with a client.   The client had mixed emotions because they were for the first time going to be included in a major industry analyst report of their space (I'll keep the details intentionally vague, but to help in your understanding of the situation I will point out that the study was on par with a Gartner Magic Quadrant or a Forrester Wave report).

The client was ambivalent because they were unhappy with their positioning in the report.   As such, they were considering opting out – a choice the analyst firm offered to them.  Apparently, there was little else the client could do for the time being to change their standing.

In reviewing their situation, our team realized that the client had a point.   The company has an offering which really is pretty innovative and disruptive for the space.   The analyst firm clearly did not fully appreciate this or was not convinced that the client's differentiators were that significant.

I pointed out that opting out of the report was a little bit like cutting off your nose to spite your face.   First of all, a lot more people would learn about the company if they participated.   Secondly, participating was a first step and not a final step with the analyst firm.  Participating would give them a better chance of building a relationship with the analyst firm and influencing the client's standing over the long term.

Finally, a beautiful thing about the emergence of social media is that it in some ways allows us to have our cake and eat it to.

We could stay in the report, and use the situation as an opportunity to educate the analyst firm and industry by blogging (in an informative way, not to flame or bellyache) about why our client's differentiators are important.   In this way we could call attention to our inclusion in the report, which some might consider to be an achievement; we could also start a dialog with industry watchers and elevate issues we feel are important; and we could leverage another channel to engage and hopefully influence the analyst firm – a public channel which would be difficult to ignore.

It was an interesting situation and emotions ran high because we were pretty evenly split on both sides across the agency and client side teams.   In addition to our team's counsel, one thing that seemed to tilt things in favor of staying in  the report: we solicited the opinion of a Fortune 500 CIO, who said that in his experience most IT organizations take these reports with a grain of salt, and on balance it would be better to be in the report.   In other words, they probably would not use the report to rule a vendor's technology in or out assuming the vendor otherwise met their needs.

Posted in PR Tech | 1 Comment

PR Golden Turkey Awards 2009

Posted on November 27, 2008 by rgeller

That’s right, it is that time of year again.   This time last year I had a hankering for some golden Z69686315
fried turkey.   Now, for Thanksgiving I think I’ll get me one of those big juicy turkey drumsticks – the ones you see people wielding at the theme parks, Fred Flinstone style.

The drumstick represents the cudgel of ineffective PR and image crafting, and as such is an apt symbol for this year’s PR Golden Turkey Awards.

Read on, and as always please feel free to volunteer additional choices.

A Great Step for Mankind, a Fall for Irony

Yea, I voted for him, and it was wonderful that we will have a Black president.   But there is nothing, I mean nothing funny about Barack.   Add to this sad state of global economic affairs and you have some once again predicting the death of Irony (see NY Times piece Irony is Dead. Again.)

The Death of Stasis

Part and parcel with Obama’s victory was the end of Stasis.  Now, Change rules.

I once heard someone say in a speech “the only one who likes change is a baby.”

I am not a baby.  I am a middle-aged white guy.  I like my couch.  I like my remote.  I like my TV.  Too much change or other tomfoolery makes me crusty (crustier than my usual crusty self, anyway).

Negative Campaigning and Fear Tactics

The beautiful, truly wonderful thing about Obama’s victory is that it showed that leadership and inspiration trump fear and negative campaign tactics: the ones  embraced by the right (first Lee Atwater, as I described in my post The Dark Prince of PR (inactive), and later his protege Karl Rove) and co opted by the left (Hillary used fear in her “3 am call” campaign ad).

Right Wing Talk Show Hosts

McCain was not their darling – the Hannitys, Limbaughs and Mark Levins of this world.   Sure, the talk radio and cable TV talking heads can be entertaining and draw large ratings.   But what conclusion can we draw from this year’s election other than that the Greek Chorus of the right are out of step with mainstream America?

The State of California and Arnold

They have had a pretty bad run, first almost running out of money, than the requisite natural and man made disasters, and finally Prop 8.

The Sate of Nebraska and Parenthood

It sounded like a great idea – let new parents who can’t handle the stresses of attending to baby’s needs and would otherwise do something horrific give up their infants to the state of Nebraska.  One small problem, they did not specify an age cutoff, and people promptly (and in droves) dropped off their surly teens.

The State of Alaska and Sarah Palin

So who knew that we had such ambivalent feelings about the 49th state to join our union?  I don’t know if Alaska tarnished Sarah Palin’s image, or vice versa, but all we heard during the campaign were jokes about crystal meth capitols, moose hunting and shooting wolves from helicopters.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving, all!

Posted in Fun Stuff | 1 Comment

Trend Discovery Tools in Tech PR

Posted on November 24, 2008 by rgeller
Last week’s topics focused on tech trend discovery.   In this post I will highlight a few sites that can help in the process.  Nothing I have previewed provided a silver bullet in terms of being able to automatically identify up-and-comers (at least, not to my satisfaction), but all can be useful in providing a better understanding of hot technology topics, words and phrases, and can help in exercises related to product positioning, for example.
BlogPulse
BlogPulse (inactive) let’s you graphically chart occurrences of search terms and compare the popularity of various labels.  This can help when you are comparing and contrasting differentword combinations.
You can vary the time horizon and compare up to three terms at once.  It makes for a spiffy chart for your presentations, as you can adjust labels for the terms and other aspects of the appearance of the graph.   The graph is interactive – you can drill down on a peak to view the related stories, and thus see for example if a spike in the occurrence of a term corresponds to related news of the day.
The downside is that it does not automatically identify terms that are rising importance; you need to specify search terms.
Google Insights for Search
Launched earlier this year, Google Insights for Search builds on the earlier work of Google Trends.   It lets you pick from a predefined list of search categories and compare terms that you specify within these categories based on time horizon or geography.  If you don’t specify search words it will show you the most popular searches within the category, and those that are rising in importance relative to others.
I gave it a try using some of the search terms from my previous post, and also generally looked at the area of enterprise tech, to see if the ones rising in importance bore any resemblance to the human-picked top trends (see Dueling Tech Predictions).
As you may recall, the example I cited in my last post was solid state storage – a category that many industry watchers feel has legs because falling chip prices and rising storage capacities are making it increasingly practical to use SSDs in place of traditional disk drives and thus take advantage of faster performance.
I decided to start out generally; I picked the category of Storage to see if SSD would make the list.  Although the Top Searches in the left column below make sense, the rising searches do not appear to me to match terms that I know are increasingly being buzzed about in storage (with the exception of iSCSI SAN).

Storage

Looking at Enterprise Technology below, again the Top Searches column seems to make sense and map to familiar terms, but in Rising Searches as you can see below I got what would appear to be spurious search terms like “Toad for Oracle”

Storage2

Finally, in the Storage category I entered three terms that I know are popular: deduplication, iSCSI and SSD to compare them.
You see the terms charted on a graph, almost like BlogPulse, and can also cycle through them one at a time to see the regional breakouts for each, and also related search terms.  You can also get a graph of these terms compared with the baseline category search term, Storage in this case.
Storage3
Additional Sites
I looked in vain to see if technology prediction markets can help.  As I previously blogged, prediction markets tap into the wisdom of crowds and let people place bets on certain outcomes, like technologies that will break through.   There are some sites that do this, but none seem to go wide and deep into tech (Yahoo had a technology futures market at one time but they discontinued the effort).
It seems to me that Wikipedia is the most logical place to chart emerging technologies and trends. Many people come here first to better understand new things.   A buzz index of rising Wikipedia search terms would be extremely helpful.  And a listing of newly added entries could provide help here as well.   As reported on Read/Write Web,  the WikiRage search engine can give some insight into Wikipedia trends by showing editing activity.
Finally, it seemed to me that social news sites like Digg and TechMeme might be good places to look to spot trends.   Of course, there is the TechMeme leaderboard, which I have blogged about. This reports on the sources most frequently posted to TechMeme.
Digg Labs has some tools that are absolutely mesmerizing.   They show buzz happening in real time, and displays rising chatter on topics via some pretty cool, animated visual effects.
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