Helping College Students with their Homework

One of the most common and valuable assignments communications professors give their college students is to have them reach out to working professionals to interview them on what life is like in the PR business.  The professors are doing their students a favor in more ways than one.

First, the students get to practice their interviewing skills, and then get to turn their notes from the interviews into written pieces.  This is the basic template for what PR professionals do.  There is a reason PR often falls under the umbrella of journalism in college curricula.  We are oftentimes internal journalists, working to make sense of events, developments and information so that it can more effectively be provided to working journalists and other targeted audiences.

The second reason this is a good exercise is that it helps current students start to build a network of contacts within the profession.  By making such contacts, students could end up with helpful mentors, contacts for internships and even a resource for their first job hunt.

With so much good that can come out of such an assignment the grade, as important as it always is in college, is secondary in terms of the big picture.

Because we are now predominantly an electronic communications culture, rather than pick up a telephone and call working PR professionals, most students today initiate contact via email.  Quite a few are also making first contact on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.  This may be expedient as students work to fulfill an obligation to a professor, but by removing the human interaction from this part of the process, they are missing a major opportunity to create a good first impression.

Over the years, I have received many of these kinds of inquiries from college students.  I’ve gotten used to the introductory email, and then the electronic Q&A process.  I try not to do their homework for them by only answering the questions they provide and not presuming what they should know or ask.  I don't preemptively answer questions they never mention.

That, however, is not the expectation of most students who now contact me.  The current attitude among most is, “I have this class assignment, I need to talk to someone, I found you, now answer this open-ended question via email.  What do you do?”

If I send them two or three paragraphs they seem happy.  I’m not sure what kind of grades these students get because they never follow up, and usually don’t say ‘thank you.’

Because this is the communications business, and how we go about interacting with important stakeholders is everything, I am always disappointed with these encounters.  I always hope that a student will come forward and actually call me, do an interview, and let me know what the finished product looked like and how it all turned out.  That never happens. 

Perhaps this would change if the professors would ask each student to provide contact information for the professional they contacted so the professor could contact us to get an assessment from our side of the equation.  Otherwise, we’re just doing kids’ homework for them.

Oreo's 100th: An Anniversary Campaign with Taste

I like Oreo cookies.  If I believed it’s possible to actually love a food item, I might be in that extreme fringe of Oreo cookie enthusiasts.  We rarely have them in the house because they wouldn’t last very long.  

I’m not one with a preference, creamy middle or crunchy cookie.  It’s all good.  And, yes, I would agree with the brand’s slogan that Oreo cookies are “Milk’s favorite cookie.”

But what I’m really kind of psyched about is how Nabisco has decided to celebrate the 100^th Birthday of the Oreo.  Just about any PR person will tell you, it’s never good when an executive walks into a conference room and asks the communications team to come up with ideas for celebrating any kind of anniversary.

The truth is, when it comes to the news media, no one really cares about the anniversary.  A number’s a number and journalists tend to hate press releases and PR activities all centered on the numerical benchmark, which really only means something to the founder or the founding family.

But what the media does care about, and everyone else does too, is what the company is doing to mark the anniversary.  The events and activities surrounding the anniversary are the stories that in the end come to define the successful use of an anniversary as the centerpiece of a PR campaign.  And the more creative the company is in implementing such an event, the more buzz the PR effort can generate.

Here are some of the things Oreo did to celebrate its 100^th: a special Web site with lots of interactivity; tons of social media tie-ins on Facebook and Twitter; special events and music concerts by hot country music bands; consumer tie-ins that invited their own customers to be a part of the celebration through contests, social media and live special events (including localized “flash mobs”); and even a “birthday cake” Oreo cookie that had a special cream filling that was created to taste like icing on a birthday cake.

That campaign has many facets, targeting demographics from kids to nostalgic adults who have had a special relationship with the cookie since childhood.    All of the activities worked well, but equally important, somehow the brand managed not to overdo it or cross into the lines of questionable taste.  It seems that such feats are now more difficult than ever.

Doing PR around an anniversary is never easy, but Oreo has proven that with the right amount of creativity, and a certain commitment to spending, it can be done right.

Ketchum's Leadership Study Contains Some Encouragement for Business Leaders

My alma mater, Ketchum, conducted a 12-country survey recently (Ketchum Leadership Communication Monitor) where it uncovered what has been called a global “crisis of confidence in leaders and how they communicate.”  I always find studies like this interesting ,not only for the information they reveal, but also in how that information either matches up or is at odds with commonly accepted wisdom.  In the PR business, the usual source for such “wisdom” is the media.

I’ll save the suspense and summarize here what appear to be some of the more intriguing findings:

·         More people believe leadership will get worse in 2012 (31%), while 27% believe leadership will get better.

·         The report said that leadership credibility requires a combination of decisive action and transparent communication, which can be attained primarily through the leader’s own presence and involvement.

·         Business leaders were depicted as the most effective leaders, outdoing politicians, nonprofit and religious leaders.  Roughly 36% of those surveyed felt that business is providing effective leadership.  Forty-eight percent see them as effective communicators.

·         Only 25% of politicians and religious leaders received the same kind of rating that so many business leaders achieved.

Still, Rod Cartwright, Ketchum’s director of its Global Corporate Practice said in the company’s news release that the study “reveals for the first time the full extent of the world’s disappointment with its leaders across every category of human endeavor.”

According to the study, however, the business sectors that house the best leaders are technology, media, telecommunications, and then banking.  Energy and financial services followed, just ahead of consumer businesses.

The primary source of leadership credibility for companies, according to the study, was trustworthiness, and key to that was a hands-on approach on the part of the leadership.  Old-fashioned face-to-face communication is tops in terms of believability, followed by televised speeches, broadcast media and print media.  Social media, blogs and advertising were deemed to be significantly less credible. 

What this Means

Here’s where I offer my take on the Ketchum study.    It tells us what we already know.  Strong leaders are decisive, honest and transparent.  Because of that they are perceived as more trustworthy.  And because of that, employees will follow them through tough conditions to get a job done.  The hope is by trusting the leader, they will be rewarded with job security, and perhaps even a chance for advancement or increased income – not to mention, the sense of being a part of something important.

But as I mentioned, I always look for the thing that defies conventional wisdom, and this item goes right at the source.  After three years of almost non-stop political and media attacks on business in nearly every quarter, business leaders fared better in this survey than politicians and religious leaders.  Prior to reading this survey, I would have expected business leadership to have suffered, but instead it led the way. 

I did some additional reading and some analysis and arrived at my own theory for your consideration.  The media and many people in the PR business have bought into the narrative that the business sector created the recent economic turmoil and that corruption, greed and questionable ethics were the major contributors.  This worldview drove many organizations to adopt strategies for improved transparency on the basis that business leaders are not trusted.  The hallmark of such PR activities is the apology. 

I’ve disagreed with this way of thinking throughout and have never been one to counsel clients to use the apology as a PR tactic.  But many of my counterparts do.  They counsel their organizations to apologize and make quick reactionary organizational changes to appease critics in the hopes that the spotlight moves on as quickly as possible.  Too often, such PR decisions are made in the spirit of a legal plea bargain, never addressing whether indeed the company was “guilty” or “innocent,” but just striving for compromise to reduce the pressure.  To me, it’s a PR strategy built on defeatism.

And fortunately, the Ketchum study kind of bears that out.  If we are to glean anything from this study and use it to help our organizations, we may want to consider the worth in helping leaders stick to their positions longer, to be more patient, and while it’s always important to communicate early and often, don’t be so quick to make changes in direction or apologize.  With a little patience and strength, you may just find that your company’s strategies are the right ones, and the only real challenge is the effective communication of those strategies.

We should be able to presume that the leaders we represent want to do the right thing and that in order to do so they need time.  The role of PR under such circumstances is to use communication to give leaders the time they need to make their strategies work.  Of course, not every headline may be a glowing endorsement during this period, but if we do our jobs correctly, we should be able to educate reporters and the public on the dynamics at play as part of a larger picture so that the end, they are more willing to let leaders lead.

Based on the results of Ketchum’s study it appears the public already knows that.  In that sense, they just may be a step ahead of the PR community.

PRSA and its New Definition of PR

Last week, the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) unveiled its new definition for public relations.  Within the PR community the process for coming up with this definition was as controversial as the definition itself.

A Little Background

A couple of the ongoing challenges the industry has faced, seemingly since it was founded, was a general lack of understanding of what PR actually does.  Tied to this, for as long as I can remember, there is a common outcry within the profession that alleges it does not have enough of a presence in the boardroom.

While I understood some of the thinking behind this, I’ve always worked according to the old motto that life is what you make it.  Adapting this to my career, I’ve always felt that, too is what you make it. 

I really can’t complain about a general misunderstanding of PR.  Yes, I’ve run into it, and yes, I’ve done what I had to do to dispel confusion and clarify the issue, at least to the extent that I could do my job.  Sometimes it’s worked, sometimes it hasn’t.

Same thing for boardrooms.  I’ve been involved in some relatively benign situations where my client was the CEO and the hall pass to the boardroom was not an issue. And I’ve been involved in some highly complex situations where it would have been nice to have access to the CEO and his actual words, but that didn’t happen.  You work with what you’ve got.

In every instance, I never even considered that a new definition of PR would help.  But some people did feel this way and so they embarked on a journey to this:

“Public Relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.”

That sounds all well and good, and I don’t disagree that PR people do some of this, but it’s not the essence of what we do.  I think this as this definition strives for specificity it is ulimately somewhat exclusionary. 

Yes, PR is strategic, but not always.  Sometimes the goal and what has to be done is self-evident, and there’s just not a whole lot of strategy involved.  Other times, there’s much more strategy than you’d expect. 

Then there’s the issue of “mutually beneficial relationships.” Really?  Does that mean if we’re not striving for mutual benefit, we’re not doing PR?  What if your company is getting unfairly attacked by some third party and/or the media, and you have to respond just to help the company protect its good name?  Where is the mutual benefit?

Then there’s the issue of whether PR can only serve organizations or whether it can be a tool for individuals as well.  Individuals, it seems were overlooked in our new, streamlined definition.

The Process

PR as an industry is a sucker for fads.  The recent trend towards “crowdsourcing” is based largely on the idea that more minds leads to a better outcome. So, PRSA put the process for coming up with this rather mediocre definition to “1,447 votes, hundreds of submissions, abundant commentary and nearly a year of research.”

The definition that was selected was one of three voted on, and it received 46.4 percent of the vote - not a majority, but more than either one of the other two candidates.

The truth is, just about every PR practitioner you meet will have his or her own definition of PR that serves as a touchstone.  The one I tend to use in my work casts a broader net than PRSA’s.  It may not be your definition, but this one works for me:

“PR helps to create the right atmosphere to achieve a desired outcome through the use of some form of communications.”

In my mind, if I’m not doing all of this every time, then I’m not doing PR.

Accreditation in PR

Every now and then a discussion on LinkedIn prompts me to chime in to join the dialogue.  One discussion recently centered on accreditation in public relations.  The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) decades ago established an accreditation program of individual professionals to mixed reviews.

To receive your accreditation and earn the right to put the letters “APR” after your name in business correspondence, you have to have at least five years’ experience and then do the proper prep work before taking written and oral exams. 

Almost immediately, seasoned PR vets reacted negatively to the notion of having to take a test to prove they were qualified.  Because PR is centered on public communication, the large part of its work is protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and is therefore unregulated. 

This is not to say PR pros can’t get into trouble.  There’s the ever-present threat of litigation, accusations of libel or slander, and the possibility that in the course of any sort of disclosure you could reveal information you shouldn’t have.  Then there are the regulators – SEC, FTC, FCC, FDA, to name a few.

In some way, communicators can run afoul of certain regulations that are in place to govern such things as insider trading or claims made to promote or sell products.

Still, the vast majority of professional communicators have and continue to navigate these waters without accreditation, which does not touch government regulation.  The ethical or compliance component of accreditation centers on the PRSA's Code of Ethics, which if well understood and followed can help individual PR pros avoid some of the possible trouble I mentioned just previous. 

I earned my APR in 1990, and since then have been asked by young people if they should do the same.  This was the question I responded to on LinkedIn.  The answers from other experienced PR pros were predictable. Many were in favor of it, some were neutral, and as is often the case, the more vocal respondents were adamantly against accreditation. 

The critics were all seasoned vets who never saw the need to get accredited and never saw clients or others expect that they should be accredited.  Based on this, they did not see the value.  I understand that.  Even though I was accredited 21 years ago, I doubt that I ever would have been penalized for not being accredited.

But here’s the thing.  Over the past ten years, I have seen a difference in how people outside the profession have reacted when seeing that I was accredited.  Curiosity on what “APR” stood for quickly turned to appreciation of the fact that PRSA has a vetting process of sorts to ensure that its accredited members have a baseline of professional knowledge.    While this is great, I mentioned in the discussion why I think this vetting process is even more important today.

Most people who started in the business when I did had some reporting experience on their resumes.  This presumed they could write, perform a broad range of analytical activities, and hold their own in rooms with Type A clients and the media.  When the field started to become dominated in number by entry-level PR majors who came from college programs where journlastic writing was de-emphasized, there was a significant drop in the quality of writing and some of the other skills we need.  This lingers to this day.

As more and more PR majors gain experience and earn accreditation, they have brought the bar back up.  I’ve noticed that when you work with those who’ve been accredited, you rarely have to worry about their foundations.

To be sure, accreditation can’t take the place of real-world experience and all that comes with it.  To try to compare accreditation to a graduate degree is apples to oranges.  One is affirmation of what you know, the other represents a major educational step.  A master’s degree without the five years’ experience associated with accreditation is not an edge in terms of immediate employability, but any graduate degree is certainly a good thing over the long term.

In the end, I told the young LinkedIn questioner the same thing I’ve told college classes when they have asked about tattoos.  Typically, a student will ask whether having visible tattoos will hurt them in their PR careers.

My answer on both accreditation and tattoos is the same: “Not if over the next 25 years you only plan on working for people who don’t care about it.”

In the Spring a Young Man's Fancy Turns to...Baseball?

“In the Spring, a young man’s fancy turns to…baseball.”  Well, there are a few things wrong with that phrase, particularly coming from me. 

First off, the original line is, “In the Spring, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.”  It is arguably the most famous line of a 194-line poem called "Locksley Hall" by Alfred Lord Tennyson. It was first published in 1842 before baseball as we know it.  I’m sure if he had been familiar with the game, big Al may have substituted “love” for “baseball,” but he didn’t.

I’m not sure who was the first to bastardize the phrase, making the change, but I'd bet it was an English major turned sportswriter trying to breathe life into a story on Spring training.  Now, the phrase is so cliché, it’s sure to pop up in your local newspaper’s sports section this time every year.

There is another reason you won’t hear me repeat such a phrase with any degree of seriousness.  I am from Pittsburgh.  Here, not many men, young or old, have a fancy that turns to thoughts of the Pittsburgh Pirates this time every year.   Sure, we read the sports pages, listen to the games and watch them on television.  The green grass of sunny Bradenton, Florida is a welcome sight on our televisions after a typical Pittsburgh winter.

But to seriously get caught up in the notion that the Pittsburgh Pirates will lift our hopes and win more than half of their games and possibly compete for a championship is a cruel thought for many disillusioned Pirates’ fans.  We’ve been left at the altar too many times.

And that’s what brings me to the PR topic of the day: How seriously should anyone take the hype coming out of Florida ballparks each year?  My recommendation is not much. 

Baseball purists marvel every year that in the Spring, every team is perfect, every one of them has the right to envision themselves in the World Series.  But the truth is, there is a financial disparity between major market ball clubs and the small market teams that ensures the larger market teams have a better chance.  Add to this that in some of the smaller markets, uh hum, teams have a long track record of investing the bare minimum in the team just enough to keep the fans coming to the ballpark to buy beer and Primanti’s Brothers sandwiches.

So the PR staffers at baseball teams churn out news releases, and they arrange press events and interviews with everyone from the General Manager, the owner and the field manager, to the established stars and the young guys just trying to make it to the big leagues.  No one needs a sheet of key messages to spread their optimistic views of the upcoming season.  It’s a nice tradition and actually a nice escape if you don’t take it all too seriously. 

That said, I do feel for the PR staffers who have to manage the expectations of ball club owners who oddly enough seem to fail to understand why the press and the public are a little skeptical when they hear the owners make promises of competitiveness each Spring. 

What's In a Subject Line?

Apparently quite a bit.  The words in our email subject lines most often determine if the recipient even decides to open the document, and that’s only if it makes it past the spam filter.

A company called Baydin, which makes the email “plugin” Boomerang, recently conducted a study and found that certain words are effective in generating interest, and these are:

• Apply
• Opportunity
• Demo
• Connect
• Payments
• Conference
• Cancellation

And what about the bad ones?  You might want to avoid using the following words in your subject lines:

• Confirm
• Join
• Assistance
• Speaker
• Press
• Social
• Invite