1. [Businesses] think they can tell portions of their story, leaving out the personal, messy, or confusing parts, and still have the media (and the public) consider their comments "truthful." The problem is, whatever you leave out of your story will be filled in—if not with facts, then with conjecture, rumor, or opinion. Is that unfair? It doesn’t matter. The media’s job is to tell a complete story. Your job, if you’re in the public eye, is to protect yourself by helping them get it, warts and all, with your perspective attached every step of the way.

2. Have you transmitted the same message to everyone? If there is one mistake that practically guarantees negative publicity, it’s adjusting your point of view for different audiences. Barack Obama, for instance, took a barrage of criticism when, after praising the values of religious worship and gun ownership at Midwestern rallies, he derided the same at a private fund-raising party in San Francisco.

3. Finally, have you taken your media coverage into your own hands? Time was, the media had the last word. The Web made it so there are no more last words. Sure, it can be used against you in a media firestorm, what with thousands of amateur news sites and blogs. But that’s all the more reason to use the Web for your own defense, if not offense. Celebrities now speak directly to the public about rumors; companies are doing the same. Individuals who feel maligned now have this option. You may not be able to change the course of your media coverage to your complete liking, but at least you’ll have an active role in it—in your own words.

When Campbell Brown of CNN asked McCain spokesperson Tucker Bounds about Palin’s experience, Mr. Bounds did what he was trained to do – he answered the question he wanted to answer and not the question asked.  But instead of doing what political media often (sadly) do and moving on to the next question, Ms. Brown pressed Mr. Tucker to answer the question he was asked.   Mr. Tucker was woefully unprepared and looked like he was avoiding the question (Watch the video and judge for yourself – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxMCp1vydEI).

Now, the McCain campaign has canceled a Larry King interview supposedly as punishment.    The result is risking a reputation for looking like they can’t or won’t answer the tough questions which opens up another “just like Bush” line of attack.

The problem was that Mr. Tucker, like most people in politics, was only trained to answer the question he wanted to answer.  While this is a well established and practiced media relations practice, it shows an incomplete media relations training.   Mr. Tucker was obviously not trained on what to do if a journalist presses on a tough question. 

We work most often with business and trade media.  While we do train our clients to get their message out by redirecting to answers they want to give, we also train and prepare them to make sure they answer the question asked in the most direct way possible.  It’s not simply to avoid a Tucker Bounds situation but to show transparency and create goodwill both with the audience and the journalist.  Whether it is a politician or business executive and regardless of whether a journalist pushes or not, people see when the person being interviewed is avoiding the question.   For audiences, avoiding the question reinforces the lack of transparency and truthfulness in politics.  Just imaging if a CEO avoided answering a question on explaining why the company missed earnings and simply talked about their vision?  One word – skewered. 

Beyond the PR lessons, my main hope for this political season is that, regardless of who wins, more journalists take note of Campbell Brown and realize that when they ask a question they should get an answer to that question.  And when they don’t, it should be noted publicly.  If this was standard practice, we would start seeing the transparency and truthfulness from politicians we all seek.

This post outlines those areas and translates them into the key business challenges that business  leaders, like politicians, must deal with.

1. The anti-market bias.  People don’t believe that helping a company do well helps them.  Witness the pharmaceutical industry.  Ridiculout paychecks and overpriced/underperforming drugs aside, you won’t find too many consumers who are sympathetic to high prices and high profits being needed for the substantial R&D that leads to drug breakthroughs.  But the economic fact is that slim profits would lead to little R&D which, in turn, leads to even fewer health improvements for consumers.

2. The anti-foreign bias.  Yes, we are xenophobic.  So is most of the world.   This reputation problem is best summed up by the fact that people love their cheap goods, but lobby against them being made in China.  Even though that is exactly what makes them cheap.   Likewise, most of us arrived as immigrants and have recent immigrants helping us today in one way or another, but are hesitant to legally open up our borders more widely.  Short term fear despit the long term gain.   Offshore related (and gardening, fast food etc) industries deal with this bias everday.

3. Equating prosperity with employment rather than production. This is one of the toughest ones larger companies have to face periodically – explaining layoffs.  The fact is, as companies grow, there are times when it must let people go in one area even if it is hiring and growing in another.  People may be let go due to lack of growth or even progress (e.g., Toyota automated it’s factories to cut the need for some factory workers but overtime still hired more vs. The Economist’s good story about an economist suggesting to a dam building foreman that they spoons instead of shovels if they want to create jobs). 

Nevertheless, while the market, the keeper of “wisdom of crowds,” may praise these moves, the mass market understandably finds them painful and reason to be pessimistic.  Over time, people may acknowledge the benefits, but they’ll always find it bitter in the short term (and rightfully so).   There is not good communications cure for this medicine.  The best companies simply focus on making the transition to new job opportunities as painless as possible through strong benefits and top notch job training. 

4. An economic bias towards pessimism (we always think the economy is worse than it is).  People are alway worried about where the economy is headed.  If the reputation of a company is that it is dragging down wages it may be deemed a corporate devil, even if it’s untrue (Wal-Mart).  Likewise, if they see a company as driving economic progress, it will be hailed as a hero (hello Intel).  While this bias may not affect the bottom line in the short term, it can open up areas of attack over the long term.  Wal-Mart found this out when attacked on wages even though it was paying decent wages compared to the mom and pop stores it was accused of putting out of business.  So as not to turn off the lower wage shoppers (it’s core base), it tool a public lead in the lobbying effort for higher wages in order to address this economic-bias reputation challenge.  Intel, on the other hand, is seen as driving economic growth and  productivity.  As a result, people want to see it succeed.  A useful sentiment for both sales and valuation.

I’m not going to claim all these biases are correct all the time or that the suggested solutions are appropriate.  However, these are biases that often reflect the sentiments of the mass market.  As a result, they are biases the care takers of corporate reputations should carefully be watching.

Going on the rule that numbers rule, I’ve found that Economic Positioning is one of the most effective approaches of outward looking corporate positioning.    Positioning refers to corporate positioning frameworks that show how companies address  major economic issues and what the economic (financial) upside is for the company.  In other words, what is the market opportunity a company is addressing and how bit is the potential market to fix that problem.

A great example can be found on the front page of Sunday’s New York Times in the article Frustration Grows at Carousel as More Baggage Goes Astray.   A not very well know company, SITA (they make transportation technology solutions – such as tracking baggage), received outstanding attention (saying who they are and what they do) on the front page using economic positioning.

The article uses SITA’s number to build an economic argument.  It sites from numbers such as 30 million bags being mishandled each year, airlines spending $2.5 billion finding and delivering them, 183,234 passengers had mishandled bags in September alone.   These numbers came from third party sources such as the Transportation Department but may well have been compiled by SITA (or should be).  

What we’re seeing here is SITA being well positioned not by saying what a great company they are or how they help airlines and consumers, but by quantitatively articulating a major market problem that affects consumers, the economics of that problem and then providing a solution that consumers can understand.  Basically, they let the numbers drive their position.

I don’t know exactly how SITA arrived at their numbers but it’s not difficult to figure it out.  If almost 200,000 bags were lost in the US just in September, saying 30 million being lost around the world annually is not a difficult extrapolation.   If the cost of a bag being found and delivered is $80 to $90 per bag (time looking, delivery costs for big bags etc), then arrive at $2.5 billion (30 million * $83/per bag) is easy math. 

If the PR department put these numbers together for the reporter.  Bravo.  If the reporter did it, good for them and PR professionals should take a lesson in what drives an article. 

I also took a look at SITA’s site to see how they were leveraging the article.  Sadly, they weren’t.  There was no messaging on the front page tied to what was in the article.  There was, however, a nice collection of industry reports, making the site a valuable place to visit even if you don’t need their products today or are simply doing media research (perhaps the reporter just took the information and didn’t work directly with the company).

 Either way, SITA still has obviously done a good job making sure they can present a major economic problem that affects consumers and then show how they solve it.  It’s not about me the company, it’s about me the audience (and my wallet).

To oversimplify the matter, I would break business media stories into two basic categories: hard news and soft news.  Chances are if management is asking about business media, they don’t qualify for the first category.  The tough part is that only a small percentage of space gets used for soft news oriented companies. 

The first category of business news is hard news about companies that move markets either through market share (e.g., IBM, GM), actively moving/high valuation stocks (Google) or news that affects the first two companies (winning a major contract over IBM).

The second category of business news is soft news about companies, developments or trends that are currently or are highly likely to affect companies covered in the first category.   For example, stories about YouTube and other video sharing community sites is significant as they affect major media companies and the entire marketing industry.

Keeping this in mind, even if your company has a good soft news story, it still needs to deliver

1. Tie into a major trend but preferably one that is being recognized but is only starting to be covered.  If you break the trend to a reporter, you’ll get more space.  If you join in after the trend chorus has started singing, you’ll be one of too many voices.  A while back I recommended to a client that they do a marketing campaign within Second Life, arguing that it was starting to get a lot of attention as a virtual world platform.   After providing my recommendations they decided not to pursue it at the time.  If they were to ask again today after seeing all the Second Life coverage, I would suggest they not bother.  Too many voices.  Instead, I might have them look at SMS communities such as those by Upoc as it’s a growing trend with strong revenue implications that is only starting to be covered. 

2. Have a colorful anecdote.  A Business Week story about computer dashboards starts with a anecdote about Oracle’s Larry Ellison honeymooning on his yacht.  There’s little doubt that a company well featured in the story, Netsuite, provided that nugget of info (Ellison is an investor).  That certainly helped capture the reporters attention and, in turn, have them focus more on the company that provided that and other information.

3. Have big numbers.  No one cares about a company being a leader.  They care by how much.  How much money will your company make on a hot product?  Prove it.  How much money will you make for major companies?  Show how.  Working with Musiwave, my team put together numbers that showed the billions of dollars the music and wireless industries could potentially make through mobile music.  We did this by getting research on the number of mobile phone users with music players, the number of people using portable music players, listening and purchase habits.  This allowed reporters to take our potential revenue figures and see the logic behind them. 

4.  Know the downside and show it.  The best articles provide a 360 degree view and that means showing the downside.  Explore what the potential downsides are and present them to the reporter along with how the company is addressing the.  Certainly, reporters were often skeptical of Musiwave’s mobile music strategy.  So not only did we quickly show how we were addressing roadblocks such as making it easy to purchase music on a mobile basis, we had demos so reporters were able to try for themselves.

5. Have history and context for the reporter.  In the Business Week dashboard story, the reporter showed were the ideas for dashboards first came from and how they were developed.  This is the kind of background information that rounds out a good story and is appreciated when presented by PR folks.

Now certainly the above rules aren’t a gaurantee of a business story.  But they are critical components.  When brought together, they most certainly raise the likelihood of a story being serious considered. 

One thing to notice, very little of this post focused on information about the company itself.  That’s becuase unless you are a hard news type company, the best way to be a part of a business story is…to be a part of it.  Don’t focus on your own company and let the media figure the rest out.  Instead, show the media the whole story and where your company fits in.   Do this and you’ll get a fair hearing.   

In a post about large vs. small agencies, Mike Bawden  makes the good (and what should be but isn’t always obvious) point that what is really important is the quality of people.  Quality in communications often comes down to knowledge, experience and common sense.  Sadly, an early question often asked by companies is the contacts of an agency and not about the quality of the people.  In truth, they should ask about both.

It’s not that contacts don’t matter as they can certainly make it easier to open a door or provide insight into a publication.   But stories get written because they are good stories, not because of contacts.

So what kind of knowledge does matter?  There are a few key areas companies and agencies should be looking for and it can be found both in people with a range of experience in media relations (starting with none).

1. Common sense – This is in short supply with no relief in sight.   Does the person think about the schedule of the reporter (when are they on deadline), read up on what the reporter covers and how they cover the topic (this is one reporters beg PR pros to do…but it is still often forgotton) and think about how they can help the reporter.

2. Know the topic to be a help…not just a call – This isn’t just about knowing the company or product being pitched but being a category expert.  Can you answer questions about competitors and their products? Growth of the industry?  Describe the consumer base?  If you can be an expert you can be a resource.  If you can’t, you’re just another cold caller.

3. Know what’s going on in the world – Too many PR people just read about their industry.  Be a news junkie.  Any reporter is going to want to fit their story into the hot topic of the day (e.g., security during a war, gifts and shopping or ecommerce during the holidays etc).  Be the first to suggest how a topic the reporter covers ties into a current trend, be prepared with data on the trend, and then be prepared for at thank you.

In the end knowledge and common sense rule.  In any profession, a combination of consideration (including people manners) and knowledge is a winning combination.  That may be more true in media relations even if it at times does not seem more common.

And by the way, my team has a great set of media contacts.  But a good portion of the time (perhaps most), we’ve gotten the best results by matching up our best pitches with the best reporter and not the one we know the best.  It’s often a huge difference.