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Mark Ragan
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18
OK, I’ve had it with the green movement.
I really can’t stand it anymore. If I see or hear one more silly tip on how I can save the planet, I’m going to spend every last dollar I have and buy a Hummer.
And this is coming from a card-carrying member of the Liberal Media Elite (see earlier post)!
I have been a rabid environmentalist all of my life. Al Gore is my hero. I am in favor of $10 a gallon gasoline. My head pops off whenever I hear some oil industry lobbyist talk about getting their greedy hands on the Arctic wildlife refuge. On almost every major environmental issue you can think of, I am on the side of Greenpeace.
But the green lifestyle fanatics have pushed me over the edge. And I am not alone. There are signs that consumers have had enough with green marketing and PR campaigns. This has huge ramifications for the PR industry, which has counseled its clients to look in every nook and cranny of their organization to find something —anything—that will reveal their green-ness. As companies have raced to tell the world of their newfound passion for the planet, these well-intentioned campaigns have had the opposite effect: People are tuning out the messages and showing widespread impatience with a confusing torrent of contradictory advice.
So widespread is this consumer vertigo that there is now a name for it: “green noise.”
Everywhere we turn today there is a to-do list. Stop using disposable diapers. Don’t drink bottled water. Support the bio-fuels industry, buy only organic clothes, grow your own vegetables, purchase food from local farmers only and stop driving that gas-guzzling SUV. I passed the newsstand the other day and saw this headline: “Is your pet ‘green?’”
The problem that much of the advice is contradictory.
Just when you decided to buy that gas-sipping Prius, your best friend tells you that it would be better to snatch up a used car because the energy used to make a new car does more damage to the environment than the fuel-hogging 1979 Volvo.
Just when you decided to support those heroic farmers who grow corn for ethanol, you learn that you are now responsible for world hunger. And forget about buying those grass-fed, free ranging, yoga practicing chickens. The fuel it took to truck them to your farmers market in downtown Chicago did more to hurt the planet than those nasty, immoral chickens produced by the agribusiness down the road.
The problem, as The New York Times pointed out in an excellent story Sunday, is that much of the advice we’re getting is contradictory and even damaging. Because it is so pervasive, so self-righteous and so utterly demanding in it’s tone, it creates a sense of helplessness among the consumers its targeting.
People literally throw up their hands and say, “look, I love our planet, I want to help, but I don’t have the time to compost my own poop!”
If you think I’m alone in my frustration, consider this study from the Shelton group, a Knoxville-based advertising agency and marketing firm. In 2007, consumers surveyed by the company were between 22 and 55 percent less likely to buy green products than the year before.
“What we’ve been seeing in focus groups is a real green backlash,” Suzanne C. Shelton, the company’s president, told the New York Times. Consumers are literally rolling their eyes when Shelton’s firm screens new green advertising themes, as if to say, “not another green message.”
You know you have a problem when the Sierra Club begins worrying about message overload.
The true solution to climate change lies in public policy and massive shifts in economic energy inducements, the kind of sea-changes that can only be brought about by government initiatives, tax policy, public consensus and market-based solutions.
Consider this one fact:
Americans drove 11 billion fewer miles in May of 2008 when compared to the same month last year—11 billion fewer miles!—and all because of rising fuel costs.
All the poop composts and green pets in the world won’t do as much for the environment as a $1 hike at the pump.
So let’s all ease back on the green throttle and do our part to reduce “green noise” pollution.
Jun
17
That crunching sound you’re hearing in the distance is the sound of the information gravy train grinding to halt, or at least slowing down.
In a move that sent the blogosphere into shrieks of anger yesterday, the venerable Associated Press announced its intention to challenge the posting of its copyrighted material on blogs and Web sites.
While the A.P. backed off its strong words after a firestorm erupted in the blogosphere, it stuck by its pledge to challenge what it believes is the unfair use of its content on the Internet.
In a story reported by The New York Times, the wire service announced that it will “for the first time, attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites and excerpt without infringing on the A.P.’s copyright.”
This has enormous implications for Web publishing industry. For years, bloggers and small Web publishers have freely used copyrighted material from the A.P., The New York Times, and every other news organization without fear of legal action.
It is not much of a stretch to say that thousands of bloggers—including PR Junkie–feast off the Internet’s seemingly endless supply of news.
The firestorm began last week when the wire service fired off a letter to the Drudge Retort, a left-leaning parody of the more famous Drudge Report, demanding that it take down seven posts carrying quotations from its work. The excerpts ranged from 39 to 79 words.
After bloggers screamed in protest, posting dozens of commentaries attacking A.P., the wire service backed off, saying it would regroup to fight the battle another day with a more well defined policy.
“Cutting and pasting a lot of content into a blog is not what we want to see,” Jim Kennedy, vice president and strategy director of The A.P. explained in an interview. “It is more consistent with the spirit of the Internet to link to content so people can read the whole thing in context.”
You can bet that the A.P. is silently being cheered on by the 1,500 newspapers that make up the news cooperative. Indeed, one wonders why it took the wire service so long to challenge the free use of its content.
Free information has been the oxygen supply allowing low-cost web sites to exist. Without it, bloggers would have far less material to publish and comment upon.
Some news sites in the PR industry rely almost entirely on mainstream news organizations for their own news bulletins. Bulldog Reporter and its Daily Dog is a case in point. Every morning, The Daily Dog is sent to thousands of readers hungry for news on the PR and media relations industry. But much of the content in the Daily Dog actually comes from a technique known as “covering the coverage.” Writers simply paraphrase or summarize mainstream press reports, being careful to attribute their information to the AP or The Wall Street Journal. The AP wants to challenge that practice for obvious reasons: These organizations are making money off their content.
Web site publishers argue that their use of mainstream news sources falls into the doctrine of “fair use,” an age-old legal principle that allows publishers to excerpt small passages of copyrighted material to make an argument. The classic example of fair use cited by most lawyers is the book reviewer who quotes from a novel he or she is reviewing to give readers a sense of the work.
Whether the fair use doctrine will shield bloggers and small web publishers from challenges by the A.P. will be decided if and when a case goes to court.
In the meantime, bloggers are right to worry about their information gravy train toppling over.
Jun
13
How do you handle lies and rumors about your organization? Do you have a strategy when gossip appears in the blogosphere? What do you do when rumors circulate about layoffs or about the CEO having an affair?
Rumors have always been around. But in the age of social media, they have become far more pernicious. A tiny bit of gossip can begin as a spark on an unknown blog and spread within hours to the mainstream media, creating a public relations wildfire that can do real damage to your organization or client.
In politics, the rumor and lying mill has destroyed candidacies. During his first presidential race, allies of President Bush spread rumors that John McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child—a lie that some believe cost McCain the important South Carolina primary.
Now comes the rumor that Michelle Obama once used the word “whitey” to disparage Obama’s critics during the Jeremy Wright controversy. Rather than ignore these rumors, Obama’s team has launched a Web site called fightthesmears.com.
Here’s what the presumptive Democratic nominee said in the hours leading up the launch of the site:
“We have seen this before. There is dirt and lies that are circulated in e-mails, and they pump them out long enough until finally you, a mainstream reporter, asks me about it. That gives legs to the story.”
It’s a profoundly simple site, as it should be. Lies are displayed on the home page, followed by “facts.” To boost the campaign’s side of the story, the Web site offers links to conservative bloggers who have also dispelled the rumor.
The most grabby section of fightthesmears.com is entitled, “Who’s behind the lies.” Here, Obama’s truth squad attempts to trace the origin of the rumor.
As the site explains, the rumored “whitey” video tape appears to be a work of fiction lifted “almost word for word from a novel published in 2006.”
Fightthesmears.com could become the model for crisis PR practitioners looking for innovative ways to fight the rumor mill both inside and outside an organization.
It’s worth checking out.
Jun
11
Hillary Clinton’s former spinmaster-in-chief is now trying to spin his way out of his new designation by the media: Loser.
This is made all the more interesting because Mark Penn is the worldwide CEO of Burson-Marsteller. If anyone should know how to rehabilitate himself, it should be this PR kingpin.
But alas, the spin is not very good and will be demolished in the punditocracy.
Penn is falling back on the classic excuse for losing a national presidential campaign: It wasn’t the message, he writes in an op-ed piece for The New York Times, it was the money.
Listen in:
While everyone loves to talk about the message, campaigns are equally about money and organization. Having raised more than $100 million in 2007, the Clinton campaign found itself without adequate money at the beginning of 2008, and without organizations in a lot of states as a result. Given her successes in high-turnout primary elections and defeats in low-turnout caucuses, that simple fact may just have had a lot more to do with who won than anyone imagines.
Sounds good until you consider that Clinton won key states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Indiana—states where she was outspent by Obama by 2 to 1.
Penn may want to try another line of reasoning. There are many of them:.
Clinton lost because voters want someone with a last name other than Bush and Clinton in the White House.
Clinton lost because her husband kept having temper tantrums, distracting the media from her message.
Clinton lost because voters were fed up with her thinly disguised references to race.
The problem with all of the above is that it doesn’t serve Penn’s purposes; namely, to reclaim his place in the political world as Grand Political Visionary and Maker of the Message.
Jun
11
Is Bill O’Reilly’s demise just around the corner? Is the man finally losing it?
Readers of PR Junkie will remember the video clip we aired recently showing a crazed O’Reilly verbally beating up his camera crew because the teleprompter wasn’t exactly how he wanted it.
Now comes this video showing an O’Reilly producer confronting liberal journalist and commentator Bill Moyers at a media event. I think you’ll agree that Moyers left un-bloodied while O’Reilly’s reputation suffered yet another blow.
Here’s the set up:
Bill Moyers invited O’Reilly on his show for 60 minutes of unedited conversation. O’Reilly countered with an offer to Moyers, who was justifiably concerned. After all, most O’Reilly “interviews” consist of the Fox News commentator bludgeoning his liberal guests.
In an attempt to ambush Moyers on camera, O’Reilly dispatched a producer to confront the newsman at the National Conference for Media Reform. The tactic backfired when Moyers refused to run and hide, taking the producer on in front of a gawking crowd of bystanders.
But what happened next was even sweeter. The producer got a taste of his own medicine. His interview done, he tried to leave the conference center but was blocked at every turn by a reporter and a camera crew who ambushed him, demanding to know whether O’Reilly considered the Moyer’s confrontation “real journalism.”
The whole thing is on—where else?—YouTube.
Take a look at this video from The Uptake, a citizens journalism site with the wonderful subtitle, “Will journalism be done by you or to you?”
And make sure you watch this video to the brutal end……
Enjoy.
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Will journalism be done by you or to you? |
Jun
10
Do you work for a company that is always running scared? If you’re a typical reader of Ragan.com, the answer is probably a resounding yes. Sure there are a handful of exceptions, but most companies seemed frightened out of their wits.
This irrational fear of everything is at the heart of all bad communication, and it’s why many Ragan readers are so miserable. You can’t say anything clearly and with conviction if you’re terrified that your words will come back to bite you.
This fear has always been at the heart of bad communication, but it’s getting worse. It’s getting so bad that companies now fear <u>good news</u>. Companies are actually refusing to cooperate with Ragan reporters on stories that are intended to praise their work.
Here is a recent conversation between one of my writers and the director of PR for a very large company based in the Midwest:
Reporter: We’d like to do a story praising the work of the writers on your communication staff.
PR Dir: Well, I don’t know. What exactly do you mean?
Reporter: Uhhh..we really like the work you’re doing with your employee publication, and we’d like to tell the world about it. Your communicators are really putting out some good stuff.
PR Director: I don’t know about this. I am going to have to run this up the flagpole, and I’m not sure I’ll get approval. Call me back tomorrow.
(Tomorrow)
Reporter: Hi, it’s me again. We’re you able to get approval on that story.
PR Director: I’m still working on it. People are a bit concerned about what the story is going to say.
Reporter: The story is about the great job your communicators are doing with the employee publication. The redesign is terrific. The writing has improved. We love it!
PR Director: Hmmm…Can you give me some examples of the questions you would ask in the interview.
Reporter: OK…let me see. How did you get to be so good?
After three days of negotiations, the company agreed to an interview and the story ran.
Now, if it’s this difficult getting approval for a story praising your organization, one can only imagine what it’s like when the same organization faces a media relations crisis.
Why have things gotten so out of hand? Why are companies so openly paranoid?
The fear of being burned by the media has always been around, but in the age of social media the possibilities for a PR disaster have skyrocketed.
One need only consider the recent Rachael Ray controversy to understand the rampant fear running through today’s corporate communications departments. A woman wears a scarf that resembles the headdress worn by Yasser Arafat and all hell breaks loose in the blogosphere.
Social media and the Web have robbed companies of control over the message. Today a CEO
can say something outrageous during a town hall meeting with employees, and tomorrow it could be on You Tube.
Is it any wonder that conversations between reporters and PR directors have come to resemble something from Alice in Wonderland?
Jun
9
There’s hardly a day that goes by that I don’t watch a clip from Jon Stewart’s Daily Show.
I began this habit years ago after listening to a lecture on The Daily Show’s influence with Generation Y. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, who in my mind is the country’s foremost expert on communication trends, had done a study showing that a rising percentage of young people get much of their news from Stewart’s 30-minute parodies. The comedian’s mix of news and comedy matched well with the post-Boomer generations’ upbringing in a culture steeped in irony.
While all generations from the Boomers on have been weaned on television, the messages beamed into our living rooms every night were profoundly different. The Boomers had the Waltons and The Dick Van Dyke Show, weekly reinforcements of the American myth of goodness, charity and middle-class happiness and stability. The generations that followed mine were presented with Homer Simpson and Seinfeld, South Beach and now reality television—deeply ironic shows that refuse to bow to someone’s vision of what our culture ought to be like and instead told us what it is.
None of this could have happened if we didn’t also live in the Culture of Bullshit. We are so accustomed to being spun by politicians, lobbyists, news commentators and celebrities that the blurring of the truth is something we accept as normal. We’re so weary of the lies that we don’t really even hear them anymore.
My generation tuned into Walter Cronkite every evening, a man who would have submitted to the tortures of the rack before he would have expressed a personal opinion. So legendary was his commitment to journalistic neutrality that his one foray into personal expression—his famous commentary suggesting that the Vietnam War may not be winnable—is credited by historians with turning the middle-class against the war.
All of this brings me back to Jon Stewart, The Daily Show and Jamieson’s keen insight.
Last night I watched Stewart’s side-splitting comparison of the speeches delivered by Barack Obama and John McCain after Tuesday’s Democratic primaries. I came to Stewart’s clip after watching 24 hours of commentary on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC and CBS.
Of all the analysis on all the news programs, none nailed it as completely as The Daily Show. By tapping into the culture of Irony, where nothing is what it seems, Stewart has become the real truth teller. His show actually awakens from its slumber what we reporters once called our “bullshit meters,” that intuitive sense that we all have when confronted with fakery. It’s no wonder that Generation Y gets most of its news from Stewart.
In a world of spin, one comes to trust anyone—even a comedian—with the magical ability to pull back the veil.
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Walter Kronkite gives a rare personal view regarding the war in Vietnam |
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A segment of The Daily Show comparing Barack Obama and John McCain |
Jun
5
I collect escape clauses. These are the hackneyed excuses used by politicians and their brilliant tacticians whenever they’re nailed for being stupid, dangerous or both. We hear these phrases so often that we don’t actually consider their literal meaning anymore.
Let’s take the example of Mark Penn, the worldwide chief executive of Burson-Marsteller and the latest symbol of PR decadence.
Like Karl Rove and many other political strategists, Penn had become a celebrity in the political world. Reporters crowned him as a visionary for his work in targeting miniscule voting blocs for Hillary Clinton.
Then the law of hubris set in. One day Penn was perched on top of the world, whispering in the king’s ear. The next minute he’s in the tower awaiting execution.
Penn lost his place as grand strategist for Hillary when he was nailed for meeting with Colombian officials to help lobby for a trade deal that Clinton opposed.
In an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian, Penn dusted off one of my favorite escape clauses.
“With the benefit of hindsight,” he said of his work for Burson-Marsteller. “I would have done things differently.”
What does this really mean? How could Penn have not known what was in store for him? Did he really think that Clinton could tolerate her top strategist contradicting a very visible campaign pledge?
What he really meant to say is, “if I had known I would be nailed, I wouldn’t have done it.”
All of this reminds me of that great garage scene in All The President’s Men. Hal Holbrook as Deep Throat lets a young and naive Bob Woodward in on a secret about the power-brokers surrounding Richard Nixon.
“Look, forget the myths the media’s created about the White House–the truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.”
Jun
4
Now for the hard part: What to do with Hillary.
I have a question for all of you PR Junkies reading this. If you were part of Obama’s inner circle, how would you handle this powder keg of an issue? If you were Communications Director, what would you advise?
But first let’s review the game.
The long national nightmare is indeed over. The Democratic primaries, which now seem longer than the NBA playoffs, have come to a historic end. Barack Obama will be the first Black man ever to run for president.
Barack, take a few minutes off and enjoy the splendor of it all…..
Done? Good, now it’s time to grapple with the Hillary question.
Like her husband, Hillary Clinton has this annoying tendency of never going away. And this could become a PR and media disaster for Obama if he doesn’t handle her the exact right way. This newly victorious and articulate leader of the Democratic Party is one misstep away from alienating Hillary supporters. One soundbite, one ill-chosen phrase could unleash a civil war between the two camps.
Obama took the first step last night toward reconciliation by devoting a huge chunk of his victory speech to Clinton.
His homage to her was so persuasive, so all-encompassing that one wanted to rush out and add a Hillary Clinton statue to the National Mall in Washington.
Unfortunately, this will not be enough.
In a move that my PR friend Fraser Seitel descirbed to Fox News last night as “blatant chutzpah,” Clinton told a group of lawmakers that yes, she would accept Obama’s offer of the VP slot. By doing this, Clinton made sure that Obama would not enjoy his spotlight alone. By squeezing the vice presidential question into the news before the primary results from South Dakota and Montana were in, Clinton stepped into that circle of light. And believe me, she’s not going away.
So what does Obama do now?
If he chooses Clinton as his vice presidential running mate, he must live with a candidate whose ego is so large and whose presence is so big that Obama runs the risk of being overshadowed. Is it possible for Hillary to take a subservient role here?
Then there’s the very real political question involving the one word Obama pounded into our heads since Iowa: Change. How are you the candidate for change if you’re putting the one person on the ticket who represents the old way.
“It’s backward looking to pick a Clinton at this point — and he’s all about forward looking, to being about change,” Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a moderate Democratic organization to The New York Times this morning. “He’s all about a fundamentally new kind of politics. Picking a Clinton is by definition backward looking, and I just don’t think he wants that.”
Then there’s the bizarre question of what to do about Bill. If you’re having a difficult time grasping the enormity of this question, then imagine Bill Clinton in the vice presidential mansion with nothing to do.
Better hide the china because something’s gonna break.
Jun
3
If this were the 18th century, they’d be meeting in a field at dawn with their single-shot pistols drawn and accompanied by their seconds. But we live in the Internet age, so the duel being played out by the Public Relations Society of America and CBS Sunday morning is happening on the Web, and it’s a doozy.
For those of you who’ve been napping in a cave somewhere, here’s the background:
In a commentary Sunday about Scott McClellan’s tell-all book about the Bush White House, CBS legal analyst Andrew Cohen condemned the PR industry as being made up of liars, cheats and frauds.
The code, said Cohen, “strikes me as if the Burglars Association of America had as its creed “Thou Shalt Not Steal. Show me a PR person who is “accurate” and “truthful,” and I’ll show you a PR person who is unemployed.”
Cohen’s artful jeremiad came complete with every explosive and insulting word one would use to prick on an opponent, including the sweeping statement that PR people are trained to be “slickly untruthful.
“During the time it took me to write this essay I’ll bet dozens of PR people blatantly lied to their audiences, despite the presence of proclamations declaring that they should not, ” Cohen continued.
The PRSA struck back with its own letter, sent to CBS and e-mailed to all of its members.
“Truth and accuracy are the bread and butter of the public relations profession,” PRSA’s CEO Jeffrey Julin wrote in a statement issued after Cohen’s commentary. And not having a PR job “is reserved for the professional who has lost his or her credibility.”
The battle raged on Monday as PRSA members flooded the Sunday Morning Web site with letters condemning Cohen, who issued a bizarre statement that began with a burst of new insults before winding down to a nonapology apology for condemning an entire industry.
Though Cohen was clearly using strong language to draw a crowd, his commentary raises two fundamental questions:
Is the very nature of the profession one of deceit, or is it possible to represent a bad client without becoming bad yourself?
Even if it is possible to maintain individual honesty as a PR professional, is a “code of ethics” just a silly attempt to provide cover to those who can’t?
Here is a link to the Cohen commentary that ignited this war of words:
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