Arrington Gets Spat On, Gets Death Threats

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington reports that media relations has gone to a whole new level of bad: he was spat upon this week and was the subject of a death threat last summer.

Serious stuff, and seriously out-of-bounds, it goes without saying. Arrington writes a blog, for godsakes. Yes, it is influential, but no company's life or death literally depends on Arrington's good graces. At least, that's what I think is at the root of this -- TechCrunch is known to drive traffic, so everyone wants Arrington to sprinkle some of his pixie dust on them. When he doesn't, people get disappointed -- or, it seems, worse.

So point of perspective #1 -- Arrington writes a blog. If your marketing strategy depends on getting mentioned in his blog, your company sucks and is going to die anyway. If you don't want your company to suck, find other ways of getting publicity.

Point of perspective #2 -- Arrington is a rare figure in the media, someone who has insisted on making up his own rules. I believe that these stupid actions by certain individuals are an unfortunate reaction to his go-it-alone style. So I would a) advise serious PR and media relations people to take a breath and continue to do PR with TechCrunch using proven and intelligent techniques, and b) I would advise Arrington to look at how he does business, compare it to how other successful media franchises do business, and adjust accordingly.

As Arrington titled his post, "something's got to change."

Does PR Need a Stronger Sense of Ethics?

At first blush, it’s a no-brainer that the PR industry could use a much stronger and enforceable Code of Ethics. The industry is rife with bad practices and shoddy, over-priced work, which is why we still find ourselves on the defensive so often. This is not to say that there aren’t a lot of hard-working, ethical and talented PR people, but unfortunately, it’s not a big enough percentage of the industry.

This is something that the leaders of the PR industry wrestle with on a regular basis, and this week, at least, I’m one of them. I’ve been serving as a delegate to the Public Relations Society of America’s (PRSA) international conference in Detroit, where this was a big topic at the official business portion of the conference.

For the record, PRSA has a good, if somewhat idealistic, Code of Ethics, but it applies only to PRSA members (about 22,000 of the hundreds of thousands of people making a living in this industry) and adherence is voluntary.

It appears that PRSA is going to take another run at this, and they asked the delegates to brainstorm on the topic. This is obviously a big topic, so here are a few things we mulled over:

• Should it be enforceable? PRSA’s Code of Ethics was enforceable for 50 years, from 1950 to 2000, when the enforcement provision was dropped. Why? Because of how hard it was to determine wrongdoing, and because PRSA’s enforcement mechanism didn’t have the force of law. Only 10 practitioners were sanctioned during that half-century.


• Should PR people be licensed? At first glance, this seems like an interesting idea. It would certainly raise professional standards. But there are some issues: what is PR, for licensing purposes? Licensing would raise the cost of being in the business, possibly pushing out smaller players, simply because they couldn’t afford licensing. Or it could create a two-tier system, like union building contractors and non-union contractors.


• Should we have a stronger certification program? Currently, PRSA offers an “accreditation” process, and those who receive it have the initials ”APR” after their names. There seemed to be a lot of support among delegate for strengthening this program. A logical step, then, would be to stress the benefits to clients of having “accredited” PR people, but again, it might lead to a two-tier system, and it might actually send the message to potential clients that while talented, accredited PR people were probably pricier than their non-accredited competitors.  

As I said above, it’s a no-brainer that we should work to strengthen the industry’s ethical standards. So I vote a big “YES” for having our national trade association continue to work on this for the coming years and decades. It is critical to the long-term economic success of the industry.

SoCal Train Wreck: PR Takes Fall for Telling the Truth

On Friday, an LA commuter train slammed into a freight train, killing 25 people. On Saturday, the PR person for the Metrolink train system said publicly it appeared that the passenger train’s engineer was at fault for the crash. On Sunday, her bosses issued a statement saying her pronouncement was “premature.” On Monday, she resigned.



This is a good ethics-in-real life case study in public communications. Was it right for the PR person to state the obvious truth before she was cleared to do so by her bosses? What if she believed she was told it was OK to announce the preliminary cause of the crash, only to find out the next day that she wasn’t fully supported in doing so?

On one hand, you have to applaud the spokesperson, Denise Tyrell, for coming out with the honest truth in a timely fashion. The public, and the families, have a right to know as soon as possible, even if it wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the tragedy. On the other hand, Tyrell worked for Metrolink, and owed a duty to her bosses to follow their lead. [It’s unclear whether Tyrell was told to make the announcement she made or did it on her own.]



In the real world, PR has a big ongoing problem with situations like this. Most PR people are by nature communicators and storytellers, so our instincts are to find out information and tell people. But this is not always what our higher-ups want us to do — even when it is apparent that being forthright is the right thing to do, both for the institution and the wider audience. It puts us in a sticky, no-win professional situation: lie/obscure because it’s your job, or be more open and candid and risk losing your job.

Here are some more links for this story:

• Tyrell’s statement


• Was the announcement a rush to judgement?

(Image by ThreeWeinerGuy, CC 2.0) 

KMart CMO Takes A Courageous Step For What He Believes

It’s not every day you see someone walk the talk. There’s a lot of posturing out there in the business world, a lot of saying one thing and doing another.

Not so with KMart CMO Bill Stewart. Make that soon-to-be-ex-CMO Bill Stewart.

Stewart announced last week that he will leave the retailer on June 30 to become a full-time volunteer with Equality for All, which is leading the campaign against a ballot initiative to ban gay marriage in California.

Stewart told Advertising Age:

“We’ve had a great run and come a long way toward our goal of getting America to take another look at what we have to offer,” Mr. Stewart told Advertising Age.

But he said he felt personally compelled to go in a different direction because of a historic vote approaching in California. “It was something that personally was so important to me that I felt I needed to do everything possible,” he said.

Comparing the Benefits of Trained Versus Untrained Bloggers

Here’s a follow-up on Monday’s Catching Flack post about whether it’s better or worse for PR that bloggers are now being offered journalism training from the Society of Professional Journalists.

The vote so far on the poll: 14 for trained bloggers, 3 for untrained. I was glad to see some people vote for “untrained” — I’m not necessarily in favor of anarchy, but there are pluses and minuses to both points of view.

Trained:

• More thorough, less opinionated


• Better written and probably more accurate


• Broader coverage


• Potentially more accessible


• Potentially more mainstream


• Possibly more narrow in coverage


• Higher ethical standards


• Less likely to take freebies and give favorable coverage in return

Untrained:

• Rely more on being opinionated than on fact-gathering


• Possibly harder to work with


• Lower or perhaps non-existent ethical standards


• More likely to take freebies in return for favorable coverage


• Harder for PR to plug in to a professional working relationship

More McClellan Fall Out: I Told You So

Leave it to a lawyer-turned-journalist to be the one to take the bait and use the Scott McClellan tell-all as an opportunity to rip the PR industry. I told you this would be one of the consequences of McClellan’s sell out.

It happened on CBS Sunday Morning [I resisted posting this all week but felt called to post it today]. Commentator and legal analyst Andrew Cohen:

“Apparently, an industry the very essence of which is to try to convince people that a turkey is really an eagle has a rule that condemns lying.

The Public Relations Society of America states: “We adhere to the highest standards of accuracy and truth in advancing the interests of those we represent…” This clause strikes me as if the Burglars Association of America had as its creed “Thou Shalt Not Steal.”

Show me a PR person who is “accurate” and “truthful,” and I’ll show you a PR person who is unemployed.

The reason companies or governments hire oodles of PR people is because PR people are trained to be slickly untruthful or half-truthful. Misinformation and disinformation are the coin of the realm, and it has nothing to do with being a Democrat or a Republican.”

Of course, PRSA couldn’t avoid taking Cohen’s bait:

“Contrary to baseless assertions, truth and accuracy are the bread and butter of the public relations profession. In a business where success hinges on critical relationships built over many years with clients, journalists and a Web 2.0-empowered public, one’s credibility is the singular badge of viability. All professionals, including attorneys, accountants and physicians, aspire to ethical standards, and public relations professionals are no different, always striving for the ideal.”

Catching Flack’s take on this: Mr. Cohen, the legal profession has more than its share of liars and truth-shaders. In fact, it could be argued that lawyers are simply a better trained and better compensated group of liars and truth-shaders. Your self-righteousness rings rather hollow.

Scott McClellan Sells Out the PR Industry

Scott McClellan is going to be rich man. The former Bush press secretary’s about-face regarding what he and the White House said while he was Bush’s spokesman will make his book fly off the shelves and will probably double his speaking fee (and the demand for his services).

It’s safe to say that if McClellan had continued to parrot the party line in his book, it would not have been as good for business.

In order to cash in, though, McClellan had throw the PR industry under a bus. Thanks for the push, Scott.

Here’s just a sample of the fallout:

Anderson Cooper on CNN this week: “Isn’t this the job of PR people to spin constantly? Wasn’t lying for the administration his job?”

Actually, no. Believe it or not, most PR people, most of the time, are not lying outright about their company or their client. They may be shading the truth, putting it in its best light, omitting negative information, but they’re not constantly lying. And before you get a good chuckle out of the sentence above, who among us doesn’t want their story presented in its best light?

The PR industry has a code of ethics.  One of the values is honesty:

We adhere to the highest standards of accuracy and truth in advancing the interests of those we represent and in communicating with the public.

David Vossbrink, former spokesman for ex-San Jose Mayor Ron Gonzales, says he adhered to the following four principles in his job:

1. Tell the truth


2. Represent somebody or something you respect


3. Answer all calls


4. Never become the story yourself

Said Vossbrink: “Looks like our friend Scott missed at least three of these.”

Fighting Crime By Using a Fake Blog

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.

Pentagon Plays the PR Game To Win

I’m having a hard time getting terribly worked up about the New York Times story that the Pentagon used media training tactics to prep retired military officers for appearances as military analysts on TV talk shows.

This has nothing to do with my position on the Iraq war. The tagline for this blog is “smart ways to win the public relations game,” and I’d have to say that the government’s tactics meet that standard.

If anyone deserves being taken to task over this story, it’s the network executives who hired these analysts and then didn’t bother to vet them (no pun intended). From the Times story:

Some network officials… acknowledged only a limited understanding of their analysts’ interactions with the administration. They said that while they were sensitive to potential conflicts of interest, they did not hold their analysts to the same ethical standards as their news employees regarding outside financial interests. The onus is on their analysts to disclose conflicts, they said.

So let’s get this straight: the Pentagon recruits gung-ho retired officers who would probably support their position regardless, then gives them inside information and preps them so they are even more credible when speaking about military affairs. Then the networks “hire” these third-party endorsers and fail to use even the simplest journalistic techniques to discover whether these analysts came with a pre-conceived point of view. Who’s looking bad here?

In other words, none of this would even be a story if the media did its homework. Presumably, with thousands of retired military officers to choose from, the networks should have had little trouble recruiting their own independent analysts who were not being briefed and prepped by the Pentagon. All the Pentagon did, basically, was to take advantage of a media all too willing to be co-opted.

The Pentagon knows how to take care of its supporters, too [memo to businesses seeking third-party endorsements — take notes]:

In interviews, participants described a powerfully seductive environment — the uniformed escorts to Mr. Rumsfeld’s private conference room, the best government china laid out, the embossed name cards, the blizzard of PowerPoints, the solicitations of advice and counsel, the appeals to duty and country, the warm thank you notes from the secretary himself.

“Oh, you have no idea,” Mr. Allard said, describing the effect. “You’re back. They listen to you. They listen to what you say on TV.” It was, he said, “psyops on steroids” — a nuanced exercise in influence through flattery and proximity. “It’s not like it’s, ‘We’ll pay you $500 to get our story out,’ ” he said. “It’s more subtle.”

If there’s anything that stinks in this scenario, it’s that these analysts not only had network gigs, most were also slurping at the trough of military contracts, consulting with military contractors and bragging about the “inside access” their analyst role afforded them. And according to the Times story, analysts who didn’t keep parroting the Pentagon’s talking points, or who actually dared to criticize the war, were threatened with having their access cut off.

But that’s more about the inside workings of the military-industrial complex than the Pentagon’s PR machinery. I suspect that these and other retired officers working the consulting game hype their connections for all they are worth, whether or not they are one of the relatively small handful who appear on TV.

The Right Way and Wrong Way to Do Media Interviews by Email

An emerging PR tactic is to insist on being interviewed by email. It allows the interview subject to have almost total control of the information provided to the journalist, and creates a record of what was said.

I recommend this tactic when appropriate. Times when it is appropriate include: when time is short and the interview subject doesn’t have time for a verbal interview; when the journalist has a known track record as a bully, distorter or poor interviewer; and when the interview subject has something terrible to hide and wants to avoid as much scrutiny as possible.

None of these conditions existed, as far as I can tell, in the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor News case. To summarize, the Ann Arbor News was preparing a story on “how and why many student-athletes land in the [university’s] general studies degree program.” The series, which ran this week, is a damning portrayal of the use of easy courses to keep student athletes from losing their eligibility to play big-time collegiate sports.

This is sad but hardly devastating. Big-time college athletics is a corrupt system through and through.

The paper sought an in-person or phone interview with university president Mary Sue Coleman, who would only agree to an email interview, which the paper declined. So as a result, the series ran without comment from the leader of the university.

From the story:

A university spokesman said Coleman was too busy to be interviewed, but eventually offered to answer questions via e-mail.

Too busy? Puh-leeze. That line begs for a Freedom of Information Act request to review her schedule. How could she not have an hour or two to prepare for and give an interview? After all, she was willing to be interviewed by email, and that would have required some time, even if an underling drafted the responses.

It was lame of Michigan to duck legitimate questions about its student-athlete program. Once again, here we are talking about something we would have heard little about if they had just given the interview.

The paper isn’t without fault, either. I don’t blame them for not wanting to be manipulated, but they could have accepted her emailed answers and reprinted them with a caveat about their origin. To get into a tiff about the terms of the interview so that a major figure in the story is excluded is short-sighted and detracts from the impact of the story.

Get Ready for the New World of Media Ethics

In the good old days before the rise of social media, most established media outlets had pretty strict ethical guidelines designed to impart an air of objectivity on their reporting. No fancy lunches, no cases of liquor, no expensive Christmas presents, no all-expenses-paid trips. Product samples were to be tested and returned or donated to charity.

But the rise of social media has started to change all that — and it’s just beginning. At the same time that non-journalist bloggers are starting to wield increasing influence over public opinion, many traditional newsroom budgets are shrinking and those staffers who remain are being expected to do more with less.

The result: ethical walls are starting to crumble, and fast.

Today’s evidence? A major article in the New York Times about the freebies flowing to influential bloggers in the fashion and beauty industry.

According to the Times:

“Bloggers’ inquiries for products started out as an annoyance,” said Alison Brod, whose namesake public relations firm represents the Laura Mercier and philosophy brands. “It was a cost for our clients. It didn’t seem fair that anyone could say whatever they wanted about a product and have an audience.”

But in the last year or so, as more women turn to blogs for advice on bronzers or facial scrubs, and magazines like Allure and Glamour have started their own beauty blogs, the cosmetics industry has stopped seeing bloggers as bottom feeders.

“It would be foolish to ignore them,” said Ms. Brod, who recently hired an employee whose job is to get bloggers to write about clients.

The same bloggers who once begged for samples are now being sent the latest lip glosses and perfumes, all the free makeup they want and, in some cases, what many beauty editors commonly refer to as swag — luxurious presents to keep them happy, like designer purses or all-expenses-paid trips to Paris.

This doesn’t seem like much a surprise, since the fashion and beauty industry is so dependent on having a positive image with its customers. But it also can’t be long before it spreads, in one form or another, to most other industries, even dry B-to-B businesses like IT and professional services.

What to do? Here are some ideas:

• Know your bloggers: first of all, you should know if there are influential bloggers in your space and what their point of view is. Some will hold themselves to higher ethical standards than others, so you’ll need to figure out who’s who.


• Prioritize: there are important bloggers and then there’s everyone else. Again, you need to know who’s who.


• Develop a strategy: you’ll probably need buy-in from your superiors and others if you start to test ethical limits in terms of freebies or other inducements for coverage. Thinking it through beforehand may save you from unforeseen problems.


• Check out the competition: try to get some intelligence on what others in your industry are doing. It may not make sense to be ahead of the pack, but you really can’t afford to fall too far behind, either.

Don’t Be Shy About Doing Research on Journalists

If you were going in to a major sales meeting, you’d want to know everything possible about the potential customer: their likes and dislikes, their career history, their interests, and so on. It would be no-brainer. And the same is true for most other business meetings with important people from other organizations, be they attorneys, partners, competitors, government regulators — even journalists. Yet journalists always express surprise when they find out that we prepare for our meetings with them.

Why this would even be an issue is something of a mystery to me. Of course a sophisticated corporation is going to want to minimize its risks and maximize the opportunity for success by developing background briefing materials on the reporter they are going to meet, and to do some planning about how to handle the interaction. They’d be fools to do otherwise.

Journalists, on the other hand, seem to want to believe that they work in a perfect world. That the people contributing their time and thoughts toward the production of their story are doing so, I don’t know, out of the goodness of their hearts. Or maybe out of simple naivete. That they should be able to get their story without interference or “spin.”

What prompts this little rant is the tempest that blew up when Waggener Edstrom, the main outside PR agency for Microsoft, mistakenly emailed a copy of a briefing document to Fred Vogelstein of Wired magazine, who was working on a major story about Microsoft’s internal blogging initiative. Wired posted the full briefing document (or “dossier” in Vogelstein’s hush-hush language) on its site. Vogelstein likened reading the document to “reading my FBI file.” Oh please.

Would an attorney say that about the briefing docs prepared by the other side in a major case? Would a major customer say that about the briefing docs prepared by a supplier hoping to win their business? I don’t think so. It might make you squirm to read about yourself and see what others think about you, but grow up — you’re a reporter for a major magazine. This isn’t Little League.

My take? WaggEd’s briefing doc is run-of-the-mill PR work. Documents like this are being written every single day in the PR business. This is what we do. (If you’re interested in WaggEd’s view, here’s a link to their post).

One of the comments on Wired wondered this: “there could be dossier’s for every darn a-lister out there and its not come out yet!!”

There is. It’s called NewsBios. It’s a great service that compiles background information on key business journalists. You should check it out. Here’s a link to a sample of their materials.

Don’t Hide Behind Screen Names

A few months ago, Whole Food Markets CEO John Mackey was exposed for posting anonymous comments on the Yahoo message board dedicated to discussions of his stock. Amazingly, he kept his job and mostly got away with just a wrist-slap, as well as having to endure a few weeks of some ugly PR. Let’s face it, it was a pretty dumb thing to do.

Now, Whole Foods has come out with a strict new rule about such activities, in a classic case of closing the barn door after the horse has run out. To wit:

No member of Company Leadership may make any posting to any non-Company-sponsored internet chat room, message board, web log (blog), or similar forum, concerning any matter involving the Company, its competitors or vendors, either under their name, anonymously, under a screen name, or communicating through another person.

This is the right policy, one that really shouldn’t have to be articulated in print. But now that a high-profile exec has been caught violating it, this company has written it down — and so should you. Cut-and-paste this into your company’s ethics policy, whether or not you are a publicly traded company.

If you are posting on the Internet about your company, your competitors or your industry, don’t hide behind screen names. Ethically, it’s the wrong thing to do, and it doesn’t make business sense, either. If you’ve got something to say, you should be willing to sign your name to it. If not, that’s a clear sign that you probably shouldn’t post it in the first place.