Source: New York Times - Economist Obama v BP Cover

The Economist is taking a lot of flack for putting an edited picture of Obama on the front cover.  The picture shows Obama alone whereas the original picture had Obama with several other people of prominence.   The Economist seems to think it was a small infraction as they were simply trying to convey an idea – that Obama was alone vs. BP – and not the fact that Obama stood alone.  Had they done a drawn illustration this would have been fine as an illustration, by definition, means it’s not a factual image.  However, they choose to use an image without disclosing it was edited from a different picture.  Many people, including myself, assumed this was a picture of Obama standing by himself.  

Now The Economist is on the defensive and trying to explain the picture instead of simply saying they messed up and will never again show an edited photo without disclosing that it was edited.   Generally, I like to trust The Economist with the facts. But unless they get their apology and photo disclosure rules in order, how can I trust them the next time they try to convey a fact with a photo?

Lesson to PR Pros (and clients) – there are bad apples everywhere, I do commonly see public relations professionals (starting with our team) always making sure communications are transparent and disclosure is up front.  The purpose is to make sure communications help engage and inform an audience…and never mislead.   And we always counsel to err on the side of too much vs. too little disclosure.   Because even a perceived misleading statement or piece of information means an organization

Here’s a good review of the situation from Business Insider./
http://www.businessinsider.com/busted-the-economist-photoshops-obama-to-make-him-look-more-depressed-and-alone-2010-7

And the article the photo refers to (the article photo seems to be simply cropped)
http://www.economist.com/node/16377269?page=2

While everyone loves a good PR-people-spam-journalists story,  it’s not difficult to find a journalist who can talk to how public relations professionals actually help them.   The problem is that there is too much focus on how to target the right journalist and not enough on what to do when you find them (the popular “build a relationship” advice is only nice if you want coffee).   If you first pick the right reporter, it just means they won’t delete your email.   If you provide them with a good story and facts to back it up, they are far more likely to actually give it consideration.  This is the second stage, targeting being the first, where so media relations often continues to fail. 

What makes a good story?  It depends on the publication but here are some general guidelines I used for my corporate communications work.  Following this list, I have a brief dissection on a Nokia story that shows how all the elements were brought together.

1. Why would a consumer care?  Many top publications have a large and broad readership.  Even a business publication often strives to attract the consumer in all of us.  They even increasingly have lifestyle articles in addition to business articles.

2. Why would an investor care?  Top general and business publications want to be seen as forces in the investment world – both professional and consumer investors – as that raises the value of their publication.

3. What is the economic impact? For both investors and general business readers, showing a substantial economic impact can be critical to getting the story published.  This is especially true where a company is claiming they will change or create a market.   Really?  Then show me how the numbers add up to an economic impact in the market. 

4. Who are you fighting against?  Who is the competition you will destroy?   Google fights Microsoft, ethanol scares oil companies, bidets flush the toilet paper market.   Like any great story, a good article has a strong and aggressive fight with a protagonist (your company) and at least one antagonist (a competitor or market forces) duking it out.  You can say there’s no competition or no fight until your blue in the face, but by that time the reader (or reporter) may have fallen asleep from boredom.   

5. Who is your main character and what makes them colorful?  If it’s the CEO, what are their hobbies? Do they feed into a business philosophy (running a business is like planting a garden…).  People want to read about interesting people.  Even negative facts like messy divorces are fair game and (and more likely to make it into an article).

An article on Nokia in Forbes this week provides a good example of this story outline in action.

Investor interest  - This isn’t just about the many numbers in the article but insights into Nokia’s strategy.  Nokia’s moves affect many different types of companies.  For example, if you want to invest in stand alone mobile portal companies, you need to know if and how they are threatened by Nokia’s new mobile portal (something covered in the story.

Economic impact - The article throws out numerous figures on the market, Nokia’s place in it and how the market may grow.  This can be of interest not only to an investor but anyone with a general interest in the cell phone and/or global markets.  Did the media relations rep help compile all these figures?  This should be a regular habit of any good public relations teams.  It’s not just about your own company’s numbers, it’s about all the relevant competitor, economic and consumer numbers that represent the market and it’s many elements.

Consumer interest – It’s Nokia.  Gadgets, new mobile services, cool designs.  Easily done.

The fight - Nokia vs. other manufacturers, old service provider habits, missteps in the US and more.  There were plenty of fights and the article takes them on one at a time to keep a good lively pace for the story. 

The main character - The CEO, Olli-Oeka Kallasvuo, is the main spokesperson and character.   The article closes with a tennis story that highlight this aggressive, never-say-die, learning attitude.  It’s an obvious metaphor for how Nokia is supposed to be portrayed in the story and one that makes a more colorful ending to a good business story.

Outlining the above element isn’t just for the media relations professionals, it’s for anyone involved in messaging and reputation management.  Many publics want to understand not only a company’s position, but the broader picture.  By pulling all the elements together, you provide not only the core message, but the context in which it should be seen.

I would love to see how much of American Airline’s reputation comes from customer service.  These days, almost every airline experiences delays, cancellations and other problems.  It’s how they communicate around these problems and treat the customer that can drive so much of the reputation.  Here’s my person example (warning: if you want to like American Airlines, do not read this):

I arrived at the airport to find out my flight was canceled.  Here was the response

1. The check-in machine rejected me without explanation.
2. I waited on line for over 20 minutes since there was no one to help those of us being rejected.  The lone floor staffer had to go search for someone.
3. An I’m sorry that I barely heard and sounded about as sincere as…oh, wait, I didn’t hear an apology.
4. An explanation that it was due to La Guardia’s traffic control.  Anyone reading the news about the airline industry knows American Airline’s has been overbooking flights at airports like La Gaurdia for some time now (lord knows why the airport lets them do that).
5. An offer to fly me to a different airport or the next day – without compensation to cover the cost of transportation between airports or for the hotel.
6. Saying since the tower told them they had to cancel flights they didn’t need to compensate me for a hotel, airport transportation (let alone the inconvenience).
7. General all around rudeness.

What’s the result?  I have  now upgraded my attitude toward American Airlines from neutral to telling people it’s worth the money to pay a bit more to avoid them.  Yes, and I’ll now be yet another person writing congress to ask why American Airlines is allowed to have such a choke hold on Dallas (where I flew from).  Even Delta and United staffers have better manners.

What could they have done?

1. Been staffed once they saw a flight was canceled.  Obviously, a canceled flight means no automatic check-in.
2. Apologized and sounded like they meant it.
3. Provided compensation for the money I have to pay for airport transportation (I skipped the overnight stay).  Even if cash is too much, miles, vouchers or other forms that have a high value to me and a low value to the airline would have been something.
4. Apologized and sounded sincere and provided some sort of apology compensation.  Yes.  It’s that important. 

What would have been the result?  Yes, I still would not have been happy with the situation.  But at least they would have had a chance and salvaging a small part of their reputation (scheduling stinks but at least the staff is decent).  Their training customer service representatives anyway, why not train them to actually care about the customer.

And I’ll be this plane ticket to the wrong airport that I’m not the only one on the flight feeling this way.

I often point to political campaigns as the best example of successful public relations campaigns.  Being a zero sum game, these PR campaigns can’t afford to focus on awareness, media measurement or other indicators of tatical success.  They either impact the opinion and behavior of their audience (i.e., get their votes) or they don’t.  To track how well they are doing during the campaign they don’t sit around and measure articles, they do opinion polls.

For those PR people that don’t follow political campaigns, the methodology can be (over)simplified as follows:

1. Ask people what they think of the company or product before a campaign.
2. Ask them during and at the conclusion of the campaign.
3. If the campagin was successful then it will show in this opinion survey. 
4. If you need tactical measurement, then you can ask what messages, media articles, speeches etc had an impact.

So why don’t more public relations teams do this?  I would suggest several reasons:

• Meaningful reputation changes come with meaningful business change.  PR teams usally just try and communicate around changes already made.  Some more business smarts and a little speaking up might give public relations executives a role in determining business moves such as product packaging, customer service scripts, product offerings, CEO compensation and other public actions that drive reputation.  See the recent Toyota post as a good example.
• To be able to offer business advice the public relations function must have a complete operational and financial understanding of the business as well as be completely audience researched based.  Two areas that are often weaknesses.  Instead, we offer counsel mostly based on our opinion and business understanding tends to be superficial at best (how often do you see business advice counsel offered along with the operational and financial impact).
• To have a true impact, public relations must be a truly integrated discipline that makes strong (read: big spend) use of tools like advertising.  Yes, advertising is still one of the most effective ways of hammering a message and position into an audiences head. 

If public relations ever wants truly business leadership success, it will need to stop presenting senior executives with tactical output like so-called share of voice and media analysis.  Senior management cares about one thing – business success.  They want to know what reputation will get them there, how to get that reputation and, along the road, if they are gaining that reputation.  And, for the most part, they want this based on research, not opinion.  If you’re not convinced, just take a look at what goes into those billion dollar ad campaigns.

I’m not sure if I was proud, bothered, or both when reading about the marketing ideas for engaging customers online.  These were ideas that I’ve seen developed and implemented in PR for years.  The sidebard story, Fighting Attention Deficit, lays out the following “new” strategies for engaging customers online:

1. Rally communities to build your brand – my team and other teams I worked with were doing this years ago.  We would work with clients to have them engaged customers and prospects in discussions groups (still huge), listservs (remember those) and other forms of online communities.  This was when the word “blog” was a spelling error to most and myspace probably referred to one’s cubicle.
2. Tap the Wisdom of Crowds (let your audience improve your products and services) – We would often spend hours pouring through the newsgroups, listservs and consumer written articles to get feedback for our clients.  We did this as a way of closing the feedback loop and letting clients know what their audiences were saying about them.
3. Hire ad people to let them know what search words bring in the most buyers.  Yawn.  The research team I worked with at Edelman spent an enormous amount of time testing messages and key words within those messages to determine which ones are most effective in getting a company’s audience to take action.   For that matter, ad agency researchers have long been doing the same thing for some time.
4. Explode your brand by allowing viewers to immerse themselves though podcasts, video blogs and other techniques.  This is simply  an extension of taking audiences inside a company (or brand) through stories on management, how a product is made, through customer driven events, publicity stunts and other techniques PR has used for years to create a stronger bond between a company (or brand) and its audience.

So why doesn’t PR get credit.  In some cases, some would argue advertising did it first (such as testing messages).  In others, I might just attribute it to the PR industry having, ironically, bad PR.  Maybe, despite all our talking (mostly to each other it seems), we’ve still barely made a dent in having the marketing community understand what we do.

Take a look.  This is worth viewing…perhaps as a potential messaging training video.

Another case of a blogger, Catherine Sanderson, being fired for blogging about her company, Dixon Wilson, was reported by CNN. The article quoted another blogger which raised an interesting point:

On Wednesday Daily Telegraph Paris correspondent Colin Randall, who first wrote about the plight of “La Petite Anglaise,” used his own blog to ask whether print journalism is about to be smothered by the online age and “the march of the New Media.”

One blogger responded: “I find it interesting that bloggers claim to be `the New Media’ and then complain about being terminated from their positions at companies for being bloggers: would you expect to be terminated if you `moonlighted’ for the traditional media?

“Say you worked for a large corporation, and in your spare time you wrote an anonymous ‘insider’s view’ column for the Financial Times. Would you expect anything less than termination upon discovery?”

The debate goes back and forth in the article but the bottom line point remains the same – when you blog, you are publishing public content. Employees or anyone else should treat their public blog as no different than publishing their thoughts in a newspaper or speaking on a soap box in a park. If you would expect that shouting out your thoughts in a public park might get you into trouble (as they might any employee publicly berating a boss), don’t expect different treatment when you do it through a blog.

1. Assume your customer is armed with all the information you have about your product and your competitors’ product.  These days, consumers can access all types of product technical, pricing, quality and customer service information, and compare it to competitors.  Assume the consumer has all this when laying out the companies positioning.  This means companies can no longer say they have great customer service if they don’t.  A consumer can easily find out it’s a false message, and that affects the consumer’s belief in anything a company says.

2. Defy comparison (I love this one).   Any product should have something unique – it may be it’s design/simplicity, a technical feature, price or product quality.  Find that unique aspect that appeals to the buy base and focus the message around that.  This makes it difficult, if not impossible, for competitors, media and other influentials to make potential negative comparisons.  For example, Motorola’s Razr isn’t a technical marvel (in fact, it turned out to be a minor technical mess) and many would argue there are nicer looking phones.   However, it was the slimmest when it first came out and that’s what the messaging centered on.  It turns out, people loved slim and, ignoring the technical and feature quality, consumers bought a ton of these phones.

3. Match the message to the target.  This was always true for public relations but it’s become for more critical.  Today’s communications and marketing environment is one of a highly segmented target audience.  Demographic A watches one show,  B surfs a specific Web site, C is a sports fanatic, etc.  Mass messaging is like throwing out a giant, expensive net to catch several fish.  Instead, figure out what bait (message) and fishing spot (demographic group) matches up, and go fishing.  Don’t do this and lose out to companies catching more customers with fewer marketing dollars (i.e., better businesses).  And, yes, it’s the start of fishing season here in the Northeast.

4. “Deliver what you promise.”  You’d think this was a Duh statement.  Remember the statement, ”you can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time”?  For years companies seemed to focus on the latter group and get away with it.  Cigarette, anyone?  In today’s environment, there’s a good chance that a broken company promise will be a top search result when people search for the company. 

It can seem quite simple – treat your customers as educated consumers, position your product as unique, match messaging to audiences and keep your promise.  Like so many things, it’s easier said than done.  But in this case, not doing it isn’t simply bad business, it’s an exposed business.

By making me a part of their content decision making process, the acquirium has drawn me in to being an internal audience.  After getting the email, I thought about the differences and gains companies make by making the customer, an external audience by default, an internal audience. I came up with a few differences.  Do you have anything to add?

To put it in terms of a simple decision making tree process: look at the company’s reputation challenge and decide if it is due to A) a communications problem where the company is being misrepresented in the public’s eye; or B) a business problem where a lousy business practice is being properly presented in the public’s eye.  If A, professionals must push management to make business changes first, then turn to PR second.  If B, it is in the communications department realm of responsibility first. 

The graphic below illustrates both this simple decision making tree as well as where companies usually fall down on the job – by ignoring business problems and pushing for PR to communicate the problem away.

Today’s Wall Street Journal Marketplace section has an excellent case study on how making fundamental business changes can lead to fundamental reputation changes.  The article covers how the credit bureau industry is being seen as far more consumer friendly by not simply communicating with consumers, but by offering helpful services.  This is a far cry from only a few years back when credit bureaus were often cited as consumer credit enemy #1.

This is a perfect example of why public relations professionals, especially at the corporate level, should be business consultants as much as communications consultants.   Communications professionals need to both recognize when reputation problems stem from business problems, not communications problems, and then articulate how different business strategies will affect the company reputation.   When we are at the point where it is both common for our industry to not only provide this advice, but to be listened to, then we’ll have truly earned that figurative seat at the table.