Mutually Inclusive PR

IABC Blog Speaks - 68 Days Later

Update: The blog posting I've been calling for finally was published on the IABC Chairman's Blog April 2. It's a cautionary tale for corporate blogs, and a candid admission that blogging "isn't for everyone". Kudos to David Kistle for his posting.
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Something popped up on my RSS feeder yesterday and I almost tapped the side of my monitor to see if there was a problem with the screen.

It was an update to the IABC Chairman's Blog.  The previous posting was 68 days ago, and as I clicked on the link, I was dying to see who was posting on the blog (could it be Chairman David Kistle?), and what response they had to the repeated criticisms of the long drought on postings.

What I found was a very straightforward, upbeat report from Kistle, describing progress during the past quarter and expressing optimism about the future.

No mention of any unpleasantness over the blog and its absentee author.  No link to a recent Ragan Report interview in which Kistle dismisses IABC's blog evangelists as a bit of a fringe element, admits he doesn't like blogging and commits the cardinal sin of blaming his actions on staff.

In isolation, the document is a great report on IABC activities. If it had been preceded the day before with a brief item explaining the lengthy delay in posting to the blog, apologizing to its readers, and putting the criticisms behind him (two paragraphs would have done it), it would have been a nice step forward for Kistle and IABC.

In the context of all the controversy, the update does a great job of doing the wrong thing.  The first rule of crisis management is to acknowledge the crisis, then calm people by displaying leadership that shows the situation is well in hand. By not mentioning his failure to publish for the past two months, Kistle reinforces the criticisms that he doesn't understand blogging. If the editor of
Communications World had neglected to publish one or two editions, you can be sure there would be an explanation in the next issue to be released.

I bear Kistle no ill will, and in many ways he's been tarred and feathered for doing no worse than many chairpersons before him. By ignoring instead of engaging his critics, he probably felt he was depriving them of the satisfaction of a public fight. As with all other media, however, the messages you send pass through to your ultimate audience. Kistle's long silence sent no message of reassurance to his membership. We deserved better.

IABC will move forward. Hopefully it will pay attention to some of its critics and will over the coming months and years takes steps to:

• prove its relevance to communicators
• prove the relevance of PR and organizational communications to business leaders; and
• extend the ways in which its members interact with and learn from each other.

I hope that IABC will get better at using the emerging communications technologies that are allowing organizations to talk with and listen to their most important audiences. A few missteps in a blog can be overlooked if IABC shows it has learned something from this controversy.

IABC needs to leap into the discussion about its future direction, the role of PR professionals and corporate communicators, and the ways in which effective communications makes stronger and more effective organizations. Some of that discussion is already taking place in the MemberSpeak area of IABC's web site. That's a good start.

Why Be Polite when You Can Be Nasty?

Update:  The Little Guy Clobbers the Corporation, Again

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"We'll just get the lawyer to send them a letter. That should put them in the mood to settle this quickly."

How many times have you heard words to that effect in business (or your personal life, if you know a lot of A-type folks)?

In the case of real estate development company Taubman, their decision to intimidate Hank Mishkoff is a textbook case of failing to pursue a mutually beneficial solution in favour of a legal dispute.

Mishkoff received a typical "drop what you're doing or we'll make you suffer" letter from Julie Greenberg, of a patent and copyright law firm, on behalf of Taubman, the owners of a new mall that Mishkoff had created a fan web site for. (Yes, people will create fan web sites about just about anything.)

Instead of running and hiding, Mishkoff cut through the legal crap and tried to get the firm to explain exactly what he was doing that was so terrible. His Taubman Sucks web site is a painfully detailed recounting of the nasty bully tactics the law firm used to attack the fan web site and force its removal. (Warning: unless you have several hours to spare, browse through the Condensed Version on his site.)

As Seth Godin succinctly points out, Ms. Greenberg would have accomplished her firm's goals at very little cost if she had just been polite in her first contact with Mishkoff. Instead, Taubman must have spent hundreds of thousands in legal fees to pursue a case that had little chance of succeeding on its legal merits, and that Mishkoff agreed to settle for $1,000 early on in the battle.

Aggressiveness has its place, but politeness and a conciliatory manner are a good starting point, particularly when dealing with consumer evangelists for your product (in this case a shopping mall). As Godin says, you can always be mean later, if politeness doesn't work.

This story is burning around the Internet and blogs lately. The end result: Mishkoff and his godsend lawyer Paul Levy  will be known as the Davids who used truth and the law to defeat an ugly Goliath; and for the next decade people will say, "Oh, you're that Julie Greenberg" when they meet the woman who pissed off a little guy who used the Web to publicize his cause.  As for Taubman, this latest boost of negative publicity for a case several years old should boost the Taubman Sucks web site up a few notches in search engines, rightly tarnishing their reputation even more than it already has been.

CEO Visibility Examined

Jim Horton takes a look at CEO visibility in a new essay. He asks for feedback on his commentary about when increased CEO visibility is a good thing, and when a company's leader should stay out of the limelight and focus on internal and industry audiences.

Horton posts a chart to illustrate the decisions to be made about visibility.

With the recent flame-out of several American CEOs with a penchant for publicity, Horton's timing is good. Just because you can get lots of media attention for your organization's top dog doesn't mean that it's always a good idea.

The Anti-Semite Within

The Globe and Mail's Michael Valpy has long been an observer of (and champion of) racial tolerance, social justice and personal responsibility.

His latest feature Anti-semitism, in Saturday's Globe (for paid online subscribers only) goes back 50 years to his thoughtless treatment of some Jewish classmates. He asks some guys he went to high school with what he was like. The answers are a little unsettling for someone whose coverage of anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa was exemplary and insightful.

There are no Jew beatings in his past, but he realizes that he adopted the anti-semetic attitude of 1950s Canada, and did his part to ostracize his classmates with, "Our jokes about lampshades and melting our classmates into bars of soap and screaming 'Jew!' down the hallways of Point Grey and Magee High School."

Valpy uses this personal and humiliating realization of his past behaviour as a jumping off point to examine the prevalence of anti-Jewish sentiments in Canada before, during and after the Second World War. People were aware of the atrocities committed in Europe against Jews, but that didn't move them to change their attitudes.

Valpy cites Holocaust historian Michael Marrus (University of Toronto) on the doublethink that allowed Canadians to oppress an already oppressed people in the face of documentation about European death camps:

The operative issue is not how much information was available. There was plenty of information available. Rather, it was what people wanted to know. I would make the point that, not only did general society not want to know, but Jews did not want to know very much.

In his thoughtful essay, Valpy makes the point that we are all capable of willful blindness. By unearthing his own complicity in Canada's shabby treatment of one people, he raises the warning that similar behaviour can today be disuised as patriotism and visited upon a racial group, "notably Muslims at the moment."

It is a brave piece of writing for a dedicated social reformer. And in keeping with updated disclosure standards, the veteran writer acknowledges research assistance from Rich Cash and Amanda Valpy.

Manipulating Bloggers 101

Josh Peterson of 43 Things fame rightly notes that Yahoo! is manipulating bloggers to get some advance buzz for its coming service Yahoo! 360.

This fairly standard public relations tactic has worked for decades on supposedly seasoned, professional journalists, so it's no surprise that it's effective with bloggers.

I can't count the number of gushing articles I've read by journalists given an early look at a product, celebrity or other tidbit before it's widely available.  It's just human nature to be excited about being among the first to see something. Normally jaded commentators often gush with frivolous details as they describe the scoop they've achieved, along with 250 other journos at their sneak preview.

It's amazing how responsive people are when they are told they are one of a chosen few influential people who have been hand-picked to try something out. Go ahead, you try and turn down an invitation like that. It just hits too many flattery buttons to resist. Plus these advance review opportunities usually makes good copy.

It's a proven media relations tactic. Including bloggers in the mix is a smart move for Yahoo!, because they tend to spread the word quickly. And don't blame them too much for being sneak preview enthusiasts. It's a phenomenon that seems to affect all of us when we get to open our presents early.

Agency Billings Probed in Sponsorship Scandal

Update: A media ban on testimony becomes the main story
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The Gomery Inquiry into Canada's sponsorship scandal has turned its attention in the last three weeks to ad agency billing practices. A review of recent testimony reads like a list from an ethics lecture on dubious practices.

Lafleur Communication Marketing head Jean Lafleur had memory problems when asked to explain what his firm did to earn millions from the federal government. His son Eric's memory was somewhat better. Maybe it's just a numbers thing. Jean Eric only had to explain $2.8 million in earnings from work to spread the federal government's name and image around Quebec in the wake of a nearly successful succession campaign by the Quebec government. His father had $9.3 million in personal earnings over almost a decade to explain away. Multiple billings for the same work was one of the irregularities that Eric Lafleur admitted seemed unjustified.

Gilles-Andre Gosselin was on the stand to explain his 3,673 hours of billings during 1997. He explained that he was working between 13 and 17 hours most days, and ruined his health doing the work that helped his two PR firms bring in $11.3 million in revenue that year.

Billings in addition to commissions, charges for work done by sub-contractors (in addition to direct bills from the sub-contractors) and other questionable expenses have been closely examined by lawyers and inquiry commissioner John Gommery in recent weeks.

The inquiry is looking into about $100 million in agency earnings related to the $250 sponsorship campaign run over a number of years. The federal government has launched a lawsuit to recover $41 million of those agency fees.

Thanks to CBC News, The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star.

I'm a Whiner in the Blog-o-sphere

Shel Holtz has had enough with people whining about the use of "blogosphere" to describe the universe of people who write blogs, and their collected output.

His words of advice to me and others who, like me, whine:

Oh, please. Give it up. Blog, blogosphere, podcasting...they’ve all reached the plateau of common usage. This is what these things are called and all the whining and bitching in the world won’t change it . . . . Folks, you’re battling a lost cause, and if you don’t call it the blogosphere, nobody will know what the hell you’re talking about. Just for God’s sake get over yourselves.

What other words have entered the realm of common usage that you wish hadn’t but you use anyway?

Here's my response:

Shel:

For the record, I have nothing against defining the blog universe as a place that has spherical qualities, it's the "o" that I find embarrassing. I thought the porn industry was the one bringing The Big O to the Internet, not bloggers.

Yes, I know everyone calls it the blog-o-sphere, and there's no turning back time.  If I choose to be idiosyncratic and mock the use of the word, it's my reminder to those few people who care that it's very hard to say blog-o-sphere to a roomful of people and not sound like a dork.

If I have to do some syntactical gymnastics to keep my references to the blog-o-sphere to a minimum, that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. (Of course, I've already proven myself to be a dork by writing about this topic, so I guess I should give up and embrace my inner dork.)

Flickr Day in the Life of March 21

WWI Memorial
Originally uploaded by Mutually Inclusive.

Well, I did my bit. Brought the camera along Monday and posted my pictures as part of Flickr's Day in the Life Of event.

Click to see a bigger version of the photo, or others in my photostream.

Online Ads Boost Canadian Tire Campaign

The case for online advertising gets stronger every time a study can show an identifiable increase in ad campaign performance. The Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada points to Canadian Tire's Father's Day campaign as such an example.

Tracking shows that consumer awareness of the campaign was higher than similar past campaigns that didn't have an interactive component..

Canadian tire rep Terry Yakimchick explains:

We strongly believe in the integration of consistent themes and branding through all of our communications as well as our in-store customer experience.

IAB also has a best practices white paper available for download.

Publication Design Myths

Anne Van Wagener tackles some of the standard design rules for publications, showing that some of them are actually guidelines, not hard and fast rules (sound like a line from Pirates of the Caribean?).

She shows that effective design is much better than mindless adherence to edicts that have been passed down by generations of editors and designers.

Myth 1: Photos pointing off the page make readers leave the page. Not necessarily. Faces pointing into the page are a nice-to-have feature, not a must-have.

The one myth I was surprised that Van Wagener even found existed is that cutlines and captions don't matter. This may be partly because so much attention goes into the editing of an article, but the cutlines are added at the page design stage. Of course they matter!  And don't listen to anyone who tells you otherwise.

These principles apply equally to organizational publications. Van Wagener teaches at the Poynter Institute and designed the elegant Poynter Online web site.