Richard -

You are definitely asking the right questions. It appears that the PR industry is a front-line victim of the public's willingness to accept "official" information as gospel, whether it's disseminated by government, industry or the media. You are making a case for the innate ability of the individual to discriminate between carefully constructed propaganda as opposed to "dialogue, transparency and speed to market."
Thinking about it, it seems to me (as an industry outsider) that the concept of PR is rooted in the idea of a democratic state, that is one where the opinion of the individual is considered of equal value to official doctrine, and as such should or must be encouraged. Ultimately, it is the challenge of the individual to resist the complacency that comes from the illusion of security and well being, especially in today's world. It takes courage to propose new ideas and go against the status quo, to encourage people to think that change is possible and desirable, which can then lead to "informed decisions." In the end, it's a matter of communication, and that's where your expertise is a necessity.

Best,
Cousin Rob

" When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and a true maxim, that a 'drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.'" Abraham Lincoln --From the February 22, 1842 Temperance Address

Dear Richard,


I am a frequent reader of your Blog and have just read your thoughts on "PR Pinata Game".

In my capacity as president of the Danish Association of Public Relations Agencies I was invited to Riga, Latvia in May to give a speech on "The role of PR has changed". The invitation came from our good colleague and Edelman affiliate Signe Reinholde who is president of the Latvian Association of PR agencies.

I used the enclosed 6 slides to speak from - and my angle was the lack of trust, the fact that mass communications is extinct and that all companies must engange in a more direct dialogue with all stakeholders etc.. Also that our advice to clients is: " Say what you do - and then do what you say". - because in a democratised world with a lot of transparancy no company can hide. Therefore our activities are for the most part based on a very pro-active approach and upfront differentiated information/communications with all stakeholders using a variety of media and other communications channels - and very little on the re-active and defensive activities.

Looking at my slide no. 5: I have tried to highlight the development in our industry since the sixties, trying to show that:
- the task has changed from creating attention and sales to real interaction with all stakeholders
- that the professionals in our industry has changed from a few journalists and people with mixed backgrounds to highly educated academics
- that in the companies the responsibility of PR has moved from the advertising department to top management

Maybe you can use this slide no. 5 and develop further from there in your dialogue with other professionals and your local media - and use it in the defense of the importance of our industry.

Best regards

Nils

This situation is just so endlessly frustrating, especially as we've been saying this for decades. I remember being at Boston University back in 87-91 studying PR and having the same discussions of trust, seat at the boardroom table, engagement, and so on.

I fear nothing is going to change about this as long as the "PR profession" as a whole has no standards, no accountability and anyone who wants to can hang out a shingle. (I am not saying that standards don't exist, but that they aren't used or enforced on any kind of consistent basis.)

Is it going to take all government PR budgets disappearing for there to be change? Is it going to require shareholder lawsuits about the amount of cash going to "propaganda operations"? As the public increasingly voices its discontent with the supposedly shady operations of PR and forces budget changes, then, maybe, the industry as a whole will finally respond with solutions that have teeth.

Until then, I fear that those of us who advocate for the positive role of PR will remain battered and bruised.

Elizabeth,

Don't despair. We should all commit to change and to very high standards of behavior. Then hold accountable even to point of public shaming those who do not comply. What do you think?

Richard

Oy I was depressed this morning about all of this. And I read a bit later that Ford is laying off thousands and the first to were the PR people.

I do think public shaming is a start. If we really start pushing accountability, that will help. Some peer pressure! But I really think our associations need to step up in a very very public way to address this head on. Together we are stronger than we are individually (old maxim, I know, but true!).

Your work on the big agency side is crucial. Thanks for being such a great role model!

E.

Richard,

Unfortunately, media training itself is often the only thing transparent in the public relations process. It's easy to spot the mark of a PR person ? the polished speeches, controlled hand motions, and repetition of key messages. It happened to Hillary Clinton when she ran for Senate and they are trying to do it to Harry Reid now. Senator Reid,the Senate Minority Leader, was quoted in the Washington Post recently (Land of Hard Knocks by Mark Leibovich, 7/17/05) as responding to his media coaching sessions with, ?All that nonsense about hand motions, projection points, 'staying in the box'?.Not for me.? Senator Reid is known for being blunt, and as a consequence authentic. If we want to change the perception of the PR business, we need to follow the lead of the Brits. Go for refinement, not polish. Good manners not manipulation. Then, maybe the message will be sincere and the good intentions transparent.

Darlene

Richard: If you go back to the comment I posted a week or so ago about the CEO of Shell stating that CSR reporting had to be taken away from PR, I think that you have just captured the "real" reason for his comment. As a neophyte in the CSR communications area, I see the consistent perception of PR as "spin". The CEO's comment related, I believe, to the fact that in CSR communications in particular, the communication has to be open, honest and transparent. These are not characteristics usually associated with PR in the past. A person once described the traditional PR person as "one who is in a fox hole, sticks their head up to see what is going on and if everything is okay, drops back down". That is REACTIVE. What you are advocating for PR in the future is extremely different to this analogy. PR must become PROACTIVE and play a very much more active and important role in the corporation - telling the truth, no matter what. As Don Taposcott in the Naked Corporation says, "The corporation, with all the new technology around like blogs etc., does not have a choice".

Bob Johnson

The PR Agency role is one of support to the corporate entity. So you're only as good and/or effective as the client will allow. It has always been thus.

Guess one answer is if there's no CEO access, 'just say no.' Money or principle? Spin or Transparency? Hard choices.

Or really not?

I've been in London for a couple of months talking to CSR-centric companies and their related agencies. Found a general lack of consensus as to the meaning of ethics other than the application of 'values' in a corporate context. And no particular agreement on what are 'values' either - other than basic compliance.

One dictionary definition of ethics I've come across is: 'actions for the benefit of all.' If such an ethos/mission statement/guiding principle was adopted by individuals (and thus the company) it would become an aspiration for constant social improvement.

Now wouldn't that be an idea worth communicating and a role worth playing - whether you're the CEO or PR professional.

Richard,

Obviously I love this.

I hesitate to point to the two places where I bristled; I recognize that I may be taking this too far. Nevertheless:

1. Change the vocabulary or change behavior? Changing vocabulary _sounds_ like spin. It seems to me that the PR industry has by and large (note the qualifier!) earned its reputation as spinners. The positive side of PR - the honorable and helpful side - doesn't get as much coverage, of course, because we only notice PR when it fails, i.e., when what's being said isn't being believed. Nevertheless, I've run into a hell of a lot of PR folks who are only 1 degree away from being outright liars. After all, who is the most visible PR person in the country: The PResident's press secretary who every night stands up and tries to control stories and spin answers.

2. This is harder for me to say, and it may be a point of genuine disagreement. I bristle at your use of the word "educate" because it implies that the company is still the authoritative voice. I personally believe that there are fewer and fewer topics about which companies have the right to assume the role of educator, and those topics are getting less interesting: The dimensions of the washing machine, yes, but I'm not sure the company is even the best source of info about how to use the washing machine to clean delicate clothing; the company is likely to err on the side of caution and to recommend soaps that it gets paid to recommend. So, overall I don't accept that PR is about educating markets. (I do appreciate that you use the term as a way of distinguishing good info from mere spin.)

Best,

David W.

David,

Vocabulary matters in a word based business
We as PR types need to get away from anything that smacks of manipulation. And part of the accusation against the industry is the parsing of words as you say being done by McLellan and others. So messages may be a word we need to drop. On education I merely want to inject into the conversation comments from people expert on subject. So yes yes to personal experience on washing machines. But also a professor on water recycling or other environmental topics as long as he she identifies Whirlpool connection would be important asset.

Richard

Great response, Richard. Thank you.

Suppose I were to start a PR agency (purely hypothetical!) that took this as its charter:

1. Our aim is to help knowledge emerge in public.

2. We recognize that knowledge is a property of conversations.

3. Scientists, industry experts, businesses, enthusiasts, users each have important and unique contributions to make to these conversations.
No one group holds all the knowledge necessary. (See #2)

4. So, the aim of this agency is to help enable the conversations from which knowledge emerges. (Here's where a list of services would go.)

5. (Here's where it gets really tricky) Our clients pay us to represent the public's interest in having the honest and useful conversations that generate knowledge...because they believe that an increase in public knowledge is good for their business.

Would such an agency be possible? Would GE pay an agency lots of money for this set of services? I don't pretend to know.

Yes, I am pushing that conversation thing hard. Here's a key to making sense of me: After farting around with the idea for a long time, I've come to fully and literally believe that knowledge does not consist of a set of true statements, but is indeed something constantly emerging from conversations. I finally came to this belief after realizing that the old idea that we argue about something and then settle on a belief is a false characterization of our situation. Rather, we argue and discuss forever, we rarely come to universal agreements, and the conversations are going to continue as long as there are humans. Our hope should be
(IMO) not that we come to universal agreement -- it ain't gonna happen
-- but that we have more conversations with more people, in a bigger world, and that the quality of our conversations gets better. That's as close as we're going to get to knowledge. IMO.

David W.

David,

Ok. Now I am getting it. But isn't continued conversation moving toward the end? Which is true knowledge? Note your Wikipedia example. People constantly trying to improve by conversation and input. This is truly democratized world.

Richard

Richard,

Thanks for your note.

I'm finding that the client buy-in is the biggest problem. My attempts, so far, to get my clients to dive into discussions has met with a bit of resistance. A few have started blogging, but even that isn't being embraced as I would have hoped.
PR people are communicators. Getting them to communicate more directly shouldn't be a major hardship, though it will require a clients to trust us a bit more.
This isn't the end of the change either. Barriers to content distribution are dropping, leaving us direct access to our targets.
The question will be: where do tasks like media relations fit in?

Best,

Chuck

Chuck,

I like the idea of stories. Robbie Vorhaus a terrific marketing PR guy, has made a business on basis of that. Much better than messages which sounds somehow evil.

Richard

Richard: Good ideas but difficult to implement in a world where media ROI has taken priority.

I complained in my blog (http://online-pr.blogspot.com/) last night about "Plastic PR" in which a PR person stays obsessively on message points and refuses to engage in dialogue with the listener. This kind of message hammering appears to be favored in political campaigning, for example.

Arthur Page was the first to state principles of PR as a deeper relationship, but Page principles seemed to have declined with AT&T. Yes, I am sick of being whacked too, but it may be that PR is responsible for most of the blows it receives because it found spinning to be easier than relationship building. Or, more accurately, PR clients find spinning easier than conversation. After all, ROI is about message control.

David:

What you are saying is that PR people should not have a point of view, we should simply be stimulators of conversations even if it is to the detriment of our clients. You also shy from the term “educate” from a PR person because it winds up being “spin.”

There is a utopian ideal floating around the blogosphere that blogs and interactive communication spell the death of advocacy or “education” – aggressively and comprehensively arguing a point of view – in public relations. That won’t happen, of course. We are advocates for our clients, that’s our role. Would you expect a lawyer to argue both sides of an issue?

Is it “education” or “spin” when George Bush presents his side of the Social Security issue. He is stimulating a conversation, he is forcing Americans to think hard about the Social Security issue, he presents facts to support his argument, he is a forceful advocate for the facts “as he sees them,” he uses all the power and resources of his position to tell his story and to achieve his personal agenda. The same could be said about our first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, on many, many issues. The same could be said of John Kennedy or any politician. Teachers, executives, all people in their personal and professional lives have their story and a point of view that they advocate. A lawyer advocates for the client in court. PR advocates to consumer, legislative, and business constituents.

I agree that there is no set reality. There are as many perspectives on reality as there are people – times the multiple personalities many of us have :) Ultimately public opinion or the courts decide and an issue will be resolved on its merits.

I am blown away when I see anti-smoking ads on TV sponsored by Philip Morris. They didn’t get to that position willingly or quietly. They were forced through an aggressive, wide-spread “education” or “PR” campaign, massive lawsuits, and a shifting public opinion that the tobacco companies need to at least acknowledge the serious harmful effects of smoking.

There is a great story from San Francisco Weekly called “Publicist Leads To Pulitzer,” about the relationship between PR and the media, and how a PR “education” campaign can bring about positive change. The SF Weekly reporter says that the journalist who won a Pulitzer for writing about an environmental issue should share it with the publicist who “educated” the reporter. Was that spin?

SF Weekly story: http://www.sfweekly.com/issues/2005-04-13/news/smith.html
My blog post about it: http://www.commtech.us/2005/06/publicist-leads-to-pulitzer.html

Anyway, this is my ongoing effort to educate the public about public relations. I am sure that you have your own opinion and will advocate for it.

yo, Jim - I guess there's a thin line between "forcefully advocating" and "staying obsessively on message." The problem with the latter is that it often works, like a grating, annoyinng commercial.
Mark

Elizabeth:

I believe that PR blogger watchdogs who are emerging and dialogue in blogs like this one will go a long way toward regulating abuses in the business. I think it is very difficult to implement broad industry-wide standards. It may be up to individual firms to set their own standards and for clients to demand accountability and codified ethical guidelines.

Jim,

You are so right. But we have to persuade our clients that there is short term ROI and longer term ROI. You can get away with spin once--then you destroy the trust between PR person and journalist forever. And that journalist or blogger is contaminated for all PR people henceforth. And the word spreads within media that PR people are still rotten. So that is why Mr. Page was right about relationships.

Richard

Rob,

Thanks for writing and for reading my weekly blog. We have to make sure the consumer/voter/individual is prepared to make these decisions by giving him/her a full picture. You are right--basis of PR is democracy.

Richard

Interesting coversation string here. I suppose the media always do get the last word and their slagging off at PR will always get a better run than a correction or apology if it is ever provided. PR industry is too quiet about the amount of help it provides to media and is coy about making too much of it least it burn relationships with journos or affect media outcomes. Fact is PR is helping the bottom line of many media organisations by alerting them to second tier news and providing free research assistance to boot. Our journo friends need to be more honest about the level of help they get from PR. Our industry has taken the place of the junior reporters and researchers. We do a good job but the outcome is still in the hands of an editorial gatekeeper who is only too adept at editorial spin. In fact I think 'spin' was invented by journos looking for a more exciting way to tell a story.

Richard,
There is great irony that a profession so closely associated with image has such an enormous image problem. When I began in PR, I saw myself as a facilitator. I saw the media as my real customer and my clients as the outsource provider of product. My concept was simply to find product providers who had something that interested my customers. Over the years,my clients changed fairly often, but my customers remained the press that covered the technology sector where I focused. I told both press and clients what each wanted from the other, then tried to take myself out of the dialog I opened. When I owned a PR agency, I made it known that I would fire any employee caught lying to the press and made it clear that I had an itchy trigger finger to make an example. Richard I admire the big picture focus you take, but I think the issue is fundamental and tactical. PR people are not vigilant about the truth. They are vigilant about making clients look good, about scoring big media hits. At the essence of the PR industry's image problem is that too many of its practitioners respect the truth too little and treat it as an aside, rather than something essential.

Richard -

I think what you are doing with your web blog is terrific. By putting out these ideas, and your responses to current issues that concern all of us, you are giving people an opportunity to express their opinions openly, without editing their thoughts, as they might in a professional meeting or in the same room with company rep who might be offended by their honesty.

It's not just in your industry that transparency is needed, but in every professional area that affects our lives, certainly in the medical field, where the process of the decisions made by the FDA, for example, need to be constantly monitored, since so much is at stake, not just for the drug companies, but also for people's health and well-being.

Anyway, keep up the good work. It's the same in the Arts really; let's learn from history and from our own mistakes, and not take our freedom(s) for granted.

Best to Roz and your young ladies -
Rob

Shel,

That is why we must improve the reality of the PR business. Specifically we can tolerate no Armstrong Williams pay for play deals and we must emphasize to our colleagues that truth is the best public relations--spin will not do.

Richard

Stephen,

We are more often now the sources for good stories as media is forced into cost cutting. We should also be conscious of our greater responsibility for insuring veracity of our material--not tolerable to be a spinner--hurts the entire profession. Thanks for writing.

Richard

Richard,

I absolutely agree. But Richard, on a personal level, where and when did it go wrong. When I began in the field in the late 70s, editors used to go directly to the PR guy, because we would get them what they want with minimal BS. Over the years, we became the obstacles, the embellishers the spin masters. Armstrong Williams did not do all that.

-Shel

Shel,

It started with the cult of the pr person in the Clinton administration with the Carville and Stephanopoulos stuff, then Wag the Dog, then the command and control under Bush with Ari Fleisher. When PR folks got famous...

Richard

Richard,

Thank you for the reply. It would be nice if CEOs of the other large agencies were to speak up as you do. This business needs visible leadership.

Thanks again,

Jim

Richard,

I think you're right. For the book, I tried to track down the source of the term "spin masters," but could not. It goes back at least until the late 80s. I admire the ethical stands you have taken in this area. But I see PR worried more about improving their images so they can be more effective, rather than improving their ethics so they can more credible.

After 23 years, I had lots of reasons to step out of PR, but I had really grown tired of people not believing me, because I was a PR guy. When Robert and I announced the book project, our very first comments was: " Oh great. A PR guy and a Microsoft mouthpiece writing a book on blogging. This should be a devious piece of fiction."

-Shel