A Peak behind the Curtains (The Future of PR)

Posted on May 24, 2007 by rgeller

There has been much public debate about what the emerging
world of unmediated media means for the future of PR. 

It is well tread territory, and instead of rehashing this I
thought I might instead look to the future and both humbly and publicly make
some suggestions about where we go from here.

In doing so publicly, I can only increase understanding of
this profession, since, as many have pointed out, we are starting from a basis
of widespread mis perception and cynicism about PR. (Not that I am carping. If we are misunderstood, it is our own fault;
we are in the communications business).

No, I think we as a profession have perhaps all too much
enjoyed (if not basked in) the mystique surrounding PR. Magicians do not reveal their tricks, right?

The problem is that this actually does more harm than good,
because when people do not understand, they tend to cynically assume the worst. 

So in the blog-driven spirit of transparency, I thought I
would share my thoughts and opinions about how the profession might evolve from
here, in this first of a series of posts. I do this with the hope that the PR
Practitioners’ Guild does not revoke my membership (just kidding, is there
really an organization like this)? 

I start with a discussion of PR ethics. Yes, believe it or not such a thing exists!

I can talk until I am blue in the face about how there are
“bad apples” in every profession, and most PR people really are very ethical
and above board, yet we will still be referred to as flacks, fixers and
spinmeisters of weak moral character.

So, although it might not be the fun or sexy part of PR, it
is incumbent on us to constantly educate that PR does not translate to
“ethically challenged.” 

Also, given the subject at hand – The New Face of PR in a
New Media Dominated Media Landscape – it is an extremely important topic
because in the online world, it is much easier to deceive and possibly compromise
ethics. 

So, I think the established PR Code of Ethics (PRSA has an entire page with many
links devoted to ethics resources and standards, including this Member Code of
Ethics) needs to be updated
to address the ethical rules of engagement in a world where everyone can have a
blog-based megaphone, identities can become blurred if not completely veiled,
and people can submit and vote on their own stories. 

Please chime in if you agree, and if you have suggestions
about what would be important for an updated code.

 

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Defending Those “Cozy” Media Relationships

Posted on May 9, 2007 by rgeller

There are some blog rumblings raising alarms about the “cozy
relationships” that apparently exist between PR agents and the media (see below for links and excerpts).

As the stories go, PR people and journalists cut deals – over access to info and sources – that compromise objectivity and cloud otherwise
fine editorial judgment.  This results in shoddy or at least suspect reportage.

It would be amusing if it wasn’t so off base and
potentially damaging. After all, stories can have legs and reputations are at stake.

I think that, if the people who were casually propagating
this viewpoint did some real digging, i.e. if they looked beyond the simple
storyline and actually spoke with real PR people and journalists, they would get
a different viewpoint.

When I consider phrases that characterize
how PR and journalists relate, I do not think of the words "cozy relationships."  Adversarial?  Often, unfortunately.  Friendly? Sure, sometimes.  There can be mutual admiration, mutual distrust,
and all things in-between.

But cozy? No. At the end of the day, we all have jobs to
do. 

I think the reporters I have worked with would agree that
the most productive relationships are built on mutual respect and understanding. 

To the extent that we – PR people – can be of help with
information that contributes to a good article – i.e., we don’t waste
journalists’ time, and they, ours – the relationships by and large work well.

The PR folks that I know do not expect special treatment for
information and access to sources. We
know all too well that even implying that the reporter’s viewpoint  is for sale would surely spell the end of that
relationship. 

We
understand that it just is not good business.

So,
no – slaying the PR journalist relationship, or end running it through
blog-based citizen journalism, is not the sure way to pristine news coverage.

Valleywag said, in A
Flack Resistant Journal:  The Wall Street Journal‘s new
managing editor is bad news for the tech industry’s corporate
communications control freaks. Marcus Brauchli, who takes over
from Paul Steiger at the helm of the
powerful business newspaper, is a noted opponent of the media embargoes … the
younger generation of newspaper managers, Brauchli among them, are tired
of these cosy arrangements; and tired of being scooped if news leaks out to
the web before the embargo is lifted."

Emily Gould, co-editor of Gawker wrote in the NY Times op ed piece Coordinates of the Rich and Famous:  "But the Internet, instead of relying on the expertise of an
incestuous network of reporters and managers and publicists and
photographers, gets its information from an army of anonymous
strangers. And no matter how long and hard celebrities work to get the
well-timed, utterly staged attention that’s going to be most profitable
for them, the Internet can circumvent those efforts in a heartbeat.
Celebrities like Mr. Kimmel who pretend that this new generation of
gossip is hurting their feelings are covering up their real concern —
that it’s hurting their bottom lines.

The effects of
Internet-based, user-generated gossip aren’t limited to the stars
themselves, of course. Publicists’ jobs are made more difficult when
clients blame them for not being able to manipulate coverage by
controlling access. "

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User Generated News – Unintended Consequences

Posted on May 2, 2007 by rgeller

I discussed in my post Welcome to the New, User Generated Non stop Media Whipsaw, how user generated content and participatory journalism can stir the pot of news coverage, impacting the spread of news and the course of events that are being covered.

In theory, the trend in user generated content should be a boon to PR.  After all, if we are brutally honest with ourselves, hasn’t PR always been all about User Generated News?  Crafting interesting stories and content is part of our DNA.

There are obviously pitfalls.  Not just PR agencies have access to these mechanisms.  Anyone and everyone does: ad agencies, new media agencies, companies and consumers.

There are also unintended consequences.  The events of the day – Digg caught up in a controversy because of DVD encryption code hacks being Dugg on the site, reader response to Digg’s initial decision to kill the story, and Digg’s reversal on this (see BBC Story DVD DRM row sparks user rebellion, and mea culpa from Digg founder Kevin Rose: Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0) and Chase fuming over a YouTube video about a data breach (see Consumer Affairs article: YouTube Video Purports To Show Discarded Bank Documents) seem almost all too predictable in hindsight.

It just goes to show you, it will be the Wild West out there for awhile as all stakeholders wrestle with the rules of engagement and new realities of the user driven, user generated news world.

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“The Office” Does PR

Posted on May 1, 2007 by rgeller

It was great to see "The Office," one of my favorite shows, take on PR last week.

Sure, they were more concerned with creating a funny episode than a true-to-life portrayal, or educating about PR.  But cops, lawyers, doctors and mobsters like to weigh in on the accuracy of TV portrayals.  So I just thought I would offer my observations, as a PR professional in good standing (i.e., the last time I checked).

It’s a good exercise in exploring popular misconceptions, and the treatment of PR in pop culture.

Briefly, the premise was that the Scranton office of fictional paper company Dunder Mifflin had a crisis on their hands when a renegade plant worker placed an obscene watermark (two Disney Characters "doing it") on a production run of stationery, which  Quality Control failed to catch.  The offending paper quickly found its way into customers’ hands, leading to said crisis.

Regional Manager Michael Scott quickly (and correctly) decided to be proactive in the face of a crisis, but it was all downhill from there.   

The game plan was to host a press conference, spearheaded by chief flunky (or Assistant to the Regional Manager) Dwight Schrute, who intoned: "You are now entering the No Spin Zone."

Schrute has no experience in PR.  He started out the press conference by pointing out that the animals shown in the watermark were consenting, of legal age, and none got hurt in the process.  Pretty funny.

Of course, PR is all about and just about spin, press releases and press conferences (Myth #1).

There was no PR professional – either internal staff, or from an agency – on hand, and no apparent help from headquarters.

You don’t hear about PR agencies much in the TV world, and when you do it is generally about publicists – i.e. entertainment PR (PoweR Girls, the short lived reality series about Lizzie Grubman’s agency) or political (K Street, the short lived HBO series about DC lobbyists and PR).

When things came crashing down, Scott astutely observed that the fiasco was likely to find its way to YouTube.

I won’t ruin the ending, for those who have TiVO’d it.  Suffice to say that it was a funny episode, even thought they did not get everything exactly right.

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Further Thoughts on Semantic Web / Adding News to your Site

Posted on April 27, 2007 by rgeller

Lest I be accused of too quickly dismissing the semantic Web (Alan Morrison, the lone commenter to my previous post, correctly pointed out that some of the industry’s best minds are working on this), I will delve a bit deeper into the technology and issues in upcoming posts.

Meanwhile, my astute readers (duh, you are all astute!) will notice a new section, Buzzword Du Jour in the left column of my blog.  And the topic of the day is, of course, the Semantic Web.

This was generated in about five minutes using MySyndicaat, as previously described in my posts "Newsmastering: So What," and "Tracking Buzzwords in the Wild."

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Bling, Bing, the Wiki’s Dead

Posted on April 25, 2007 by rgeller

So I went out and got myself a domain. FlacksRevenge.com (the very URL you are now parked on).

Get it? PR guy turns media
critic. Clever, right?

Started a blog of the same name. So far, so good. Time to build traffic and an audience.

What’s this, you say?  My blog needs bells and whistles? It needs Web 2.0 bling like tag
clouds, widgets, and so on? That is, it
is no longer enough for me to have a simple Web soapbox, my blog needs to be a social
networking-enabled, Diggable, tagable Web 2.0 application? 

(As if it were not hard enough to just come up with all the interesting topics needed to meet the objectives of paragraph 2). 

Like senses that become inured to persistent unchanging stimuli, the
hive mind quickly tires of the same buzz and no sooner does Web 2.0 catch on in
a big way then it is time to move on. If
Web 2.0 were great, 3.0 must be better right? And now it must be time for 3.0, since we have been buzzing about 2.0
for awhile. 

Web 3.0 has something to do with the semantic Web (Wikiepedia Definition). And this has something
to do with building intelligence and structure into the ideas and information
on the Web. 

Blogging caught on in a big way because it is light and
easy. Web 2.0 added some intriguing
elements and also some tech overhead. Still, the principles of keeping things light and loosely coupled
prevailed. 

My early impressions of Web 3.0 are that it is neither light
nor loosely coupled. The technology and
ideas do not easily propagate. Can
anyone offer me a description of Web 3.0 that is as easy to digest or elegant as
“Read/write Web” or the “Web as a social computing platform,” ideas that typify Web 2.0 and
separate it from Web 1.0? Can anyone
explain to me how Web 3.0 technology will propagate as quickly as tags,
widgets, Ajax and RSS have?

We risk killing with technology “kindness”  the wonderful ability of blogs and Wikis to
free up information and ideas and connect people.

My advice: keep it light.

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Welcome to the New, User Generated Non stop Media Whipsaw

Posted on April 20, 2007 by rgeller

Wildride_3
Sounds like a lovely place, doesn’t it? Or, perhaps, a page
from Freddy Kruger’s travelogue?

Actually, this represents the media as it exists today. As we have seen from recent events, when you mix
a hot story with 24 hour news cycles, add a dash of user content, and
the power of the Internet and cable TV to keep wrenching visual imagery alive in
a recyclable, non-stop  stew and it becomes impossible to predict what
will result.

One thing is for sure: it can be a wild ride. 

Predicting how information will diffuse and what will
resonate has always been a tricky business. What news and information will catch on and generate a buzz? What will languish and die on the vine?

Much can be learned by
studying the elements that lead to popularity. E.g., a recent NY Times
piece (“Is
Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?”) cited research that
seemed to show why it is difficult to predict hits in the music business.

The article reports that, despite the attempts by many to
study the components that make movies and music catch on, the influence of peer
groups is the wrench in the works that makes this almost impossible.  This
element can produce different hits out of the same selection of songs every time,
based on how others rate their initial experiences. The article calls this “cumulative
advantage,” or the “rich get richer” effect.

This has lots to do with chaos, and theories of emergent
behavior (think of the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings and
changing the course of history) that say that, with complex systems, patterns can
emerge that are difficult to predict.  This applies to the weather, the ways in which
ants and bees swarm, and waves crashing on the beach – each will vary every time from the
same basic set of inputs.

Which of course has always been true. What has changed is the increasingly
participatory nature of media. The media have traditionally decided which stories to feature
by taking an educated guess at what will sell (yes, let’s not forget that the
vaunted fourth estate is also a business).  Information flowed in one direction, from top down.

Now, they no longer need to guess – people raise their voices in myriad ways, contribute content, and in doing so, can change the course of these stories.  More
inputs mean more ways to stir the soup.

Amidst these new realities, there are some fundamental rules
as to what makes a story hot . These
haven’t changed; size  and locality matter. Stories are built on character and
narrative. Sex and violence sells.

But the staying power of these stories and the direction
they take are greatly influenced by the Whipsaw.

And, just like as in
quantum mechanics, watching and participating in the experiment
changes the experiment.

Would events have unfolded in the Imus story the way they did,  at warp
speed (it became an exhausting week that seemed to come to a conclusion in
record time)?

Would this have happened in the absence of the constant
recycling of the sound clips? Or the
thumping bass background of his apology tour and those who were screaming for his scalp, all brought to us live as it unfolded, with people piling on in increasingly polar opposite and raucous camps?

And, in the case of Virginia Tech, would NBC News have played the incendiary video if they didn’t perhaps feel compelled to compete with YouTube?

I wonder

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Interview with Mark Weiner is on the Fusion Blog

Posted on April 17, 2007 by rgeller

I interviewed Mark Weiner, author of “Unleashing the Power of PR. a Contrarian’s Guide to Marketing and Communications.”

Please check this out on the Fusion blog.  The interview is posted there.

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Difference in West Coast vs. East Coast Web 2.0 ‘Tude?

Posted on April 17, 2007 by rgeller

MaccommercialAre there important differences in outlooks of East Coast vs. West Coast Web 2.0 plays?

East Coast companies are supposed to be all about business and the bottom line.

West Coast plays are all about the consumer and building a revolution.

(Or so the thinking goes).

I decided to do some digging around to see what people are saying and found some interesting posts  on a couple of blogs, although the take was a bit different.

In a post entitled "Ouch That Hurts," VC blog High Contrast noted "I’ve seen several West Coast companies’ pitches that go along the lines of ‘Web 2.0 is huge. We do that.’ ‘Nuf said.”

His post was in response to Jeff Nolan, who said on the Venture Chronicles blog that "in my discussions with the Boston area venture capitalists I was left
with the impression that this whole “2.0″ thing is something that isn’t
widely grasped outside of the Valley."

Perhaps the most amusing was the 93 South blog, which wondered "is the Boston the PC and and San Francisco the Mac?"

The post says that the "East Coast is so cautious and, as a result, lagging well behind the West Coast when it comes to web innovation."

It invites people to write a commercial spoof featuring the Apple and Mac guys from the TV commercial.  Pretty funny, yet not a flattering image for us East Coast types. 

Could all this VC trash talking just be sour grapes over the fact VC funding does not seem to be as mandatory as it had been in previous tech waves (see the NYT piece "For Startups, Web Success on the Cheap?").

And, while it may be true that the East Coast does not have the same VC network and supportive ecosystem as the Valley, let’s not forget that NY is the media capital of the world.  Web 2.0 is as much about content as it is about technology.

(Although a primary driver seems to be user generated content.  In fact, perhaps the old saying "content is king" should be updated: "user content is king").

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Goodbye, Kurt

Posted on April 12, 2007 by rgeller

This post sadly notes the passing of one of my favorite authors, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Although I am otherwise not a big science fiction fan, I thoroughly enjoyed his works in my youth, especially Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five, the latter which was also a great movie.

I was listening to the NBC Today show this morning, and in their brief mention of his death, they noted that he was a PR guy for GE early in his career.  Who knew!

As Paul Harvey would say, and "now you know the rest of the story." (Good day!)

We’ll miss you, Kurt.

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