Holmes Report Blog

2009-10-13T05:40:00.003-04:00

As you may already have figured out, this blog is closed.

I am now blogging at: http://www.holmesreport.com/blog/

You can also follow me on Twitter (@sabreawards) and become a fanof The Holmes Report or SABRE Awards on Facebook.

Thanks.

2007-02-06T04:38:00.000-05:00

Gay-Bashing SuperBowl Ads, An American Tradition: I don’t know why the gay community is so upset about this Snickers SuperBowl ad and accompanying website. It doesn’t actively promote violence against homosexuals; it merely suggests that (a) revulsion is a natural reaction to anything gay; (b) violence is an appropriate response; and (c) that the revulsion and the violence are both highly amusing. What’s the problem?

UPDATE: The site is now down, and Masterfoods says the ads won’t run again. But for those unsure what all the fuss is about, the ad showed two mechanics eating the same Snickers bar until their lips accidentally touch, whereupon--in one of the alternate endings features on the Snickers site--they proceed to beat each other senseless with wrenches and other profoundly masculine objects.

2007-02-01T17:16:00.000-05:00

Guerrilla Marketers Mistaken for Real Guerrillas: Doubtless, many column inches will be devoted to the foolishness of the Turner Broadcasting System “public relations” people whose guerrilla marketing campaign on behalf of the Adult Swim cartoon show Aqua Teen Hunger Force led to bomb scares in Boston on Wednesday. And doubtless there will be those who take some satisfaction in the brief arrest of two men. Certainly, Turner was quick to issue an apology.

But I’m inclined to agree with Time’s James Poniewozik, author of the best television blog on the Internet, when he writes that the marketers’ real mistake was “what's the nice way of saying this?--overestimating the intelligence of the homeland-security apparatus.”

2007-01-16T06:59:00.000-05:00

What's Fair?: One of the posters responding to my Disney Disgrace item questions whether the use of clips from Disney Radio Station KSFO are really “fair use.” Under the circumstances, a definition might be handy.

From the U.S. copyright office: “Section 107 contains a list of the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered ‘fair,’ such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.

“Section 107 also sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair: 1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; 2. the nature of the copyrighted work; 3. amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and 4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.”

Spocko was clearly using the Disney segment for the purposes of criticsm, comment, and news reporting.

The use was clearly not for commercial purposes, and equally clearly was for educational purposes.

He used only excerpts, and did not post “the copyrighted work as a whole.”

The use had no effect upon the potential market value of the copyrighted work. Indeed, the nature of the news business is such that the market value of the work was non-existent by the time Spocko made his post. (It may have had an effect on the market value of KSFO's future output, but that's a separate issue.)

In other words, it is difficult to imagine a more clear-cut case of fair use.

2007-01-16T06:49:00.000-05:00

Meatpuppet Alert: If you were still wondering why wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has it in for public relations people, Ben Goldacre provides an example of the kind of inept and unethical activity that tars the whole profession with the same brush.

Goldacre is the author of the excellent “Bad Science” column in The Guardian, which is dedicated to exposing the most egregious examples of junk science. (That’s junk science as in science that is deeply, fatally flawed. Or non-existent. Not junk science in the Steven Milloy sense, which is to say science wll-supported by the facts but in conflict with the short-term interests of big corporations.)

Anyway, at his blog Goldacre discusses the editing of a wikipedia article about self-styled nutritionist Patrick Holford. (In the U.K., anyone can call him or herself a nutritionist; Holford’s only relevant qualification appears to be a Diploma in Nutritional Therapy, awarded by his own Institute of Optimum Nutrition.

Goldacre had written critically of Holford’s credentials and his tendency to make claims unsupported by science. A reference to those criticisms made it into wikipedia, but was later edited out. Some solid—but not especially brilliant—detective work by Goldacre traces the editing to a user calling himself Clarkeola, who turns out to be an employee of Holford’s public relations firm, Fuel PR.

Clarkeola has been banned under wikipedia’s “meatpuppets” policy, and once again the public relations industry as a whole is made to look sleazy, deceptive and—most worrying of all—completely out of tune with emerging digital media.

2007-01-06T03:26:00.000-05:00

Disney Disgrace: It’s always unedifying to see giant corporations use legal bullying against their critics in the media, but there’s an extra irony when the giant corporation involved is in the media business itself.

Disney has filed a copyright infringement suit against blogger Spocko, who has been waging a campaign against radio station KSFO and right-wing talk show host ?????. Over the past few years, it has become commonplace for leading supporters of the Bush administration to call for the imprisonment or even the execution of the administration’s critics, and Disney’s Melanie Morgan joined the parade earlier this year, calling for the death of New York Times editor Bill Keller.

Spocko posted audio clips from KSFO programming, triggering a letter-writing campaign that prompted advertisers including Visa and MasterCard to reconsider their support for the station. Disney responded by sending a cease-and-desist letter to Spocko’s ISP, claiming the use of the audio clips was an infringement of copyright and Spocko’s site was shut down.

The truth is that the use of audio clips was almost certainly within the “fair use” provision, which allows news sites to use selected material to illustrate stories. If Spocko was a vast news organization with large resources, Disney would never have considered using such a spurious lawsuit. But Spocko is a lone blogger, and his ISP apparently has no interest in defending the right of free speech on the Internet, so Disney has been able to shut down the site, for now.

2007-01-05T04:36:00.000-05:00

Paying a Premium: The Wall Street Journal seeks to defend Robert Nardelli’s $210 million severance from Home Depot by pointing out that most of the money he received in exchange for his departure wasn’t severance money at all, since it was guaranteed in the contract he signed when he joined the company—a distinction without any appreciable difference.

The Journal’s broader objective is to defend the extraordinary amounts paid to CEOs, which it does by claiming: “Top executive talent is hard to find, and boards are willing to pay a premium to get it. Their hiring decisions don't always work out—whose do?—but they'll pay a lot to reduce that risk.”

Spend a moment thinking about that and the argument boils down to this: CEOs are paid so much because they’re expensive.

What the Journal doesn’t claim is that CEOs who cost a lot are better than CEOs that cost only a fraction as much. It doesn’t claim that because it can’t. It can’t, because there’s absolutely no evidence to suggest it’s true.

The reality is that no one knows how much a good CEO is worth: it’s impossible to isolate the impact of the CEO from other factors—the quality of the management team, changes in the competitive landscape, global economic conditions—that affect corporate performance. It’s also pretty much impossible to predict whether a CEO who appeared to perform well in one job (perhaps because of some innate skill, perhaps because he was in the right place at the right time) will perform well in another.

Boards of directors are spending massive amounts of money based on nothing more than guesswork. It’s not even particularly educated guesswork. Top executive talent, as the Journal says, is hard to find. It’s even harder to identify with any certainty. So perhaps companies should avoid spending hundreds of millions of dollars until they know exactly what they’ve bought—any CEO confident of his own ability ought to be happy to accept a genuine pay-for-performance arrangement.

2007-01-04T07:56:00.000-05:00

Ticket Masters: Washington Sports & Entertainment, which owns the Washington Wizards basketball franchise and Verizon Center, has taken a bold stand against Democratic plans for ethics reform in Washington, D.C.

The company claims that any benefit to the public interest likely to result from curtailing the use of bribes by lobbyists eager to curry favor with lawmakers is far outweighed by its own need to profit from those bribes. Thus it will oppose efforts to close a loophole that allows lobbyists to furnish lawmakers with the best tickets. (The current law says lawmakers must pay face value for sports tickets, but stadium owners have circumvented the law by declining to put a value on individual luxury box tickets.)

“We support the concept of full and open disclosure on the part of lobbyists and lawmakers to comply with ethics standards,” says Matt Williams, senior vice president at WS&E. “However… this ban of tickets to sporting events as gifts will cause a negative impact on our business. Probably more than any other franchises in professional sports, Washington, D.C.-area teams count business from lobbyists as a contributing factor to our bottom line.”

2007-01-04T06:38:00.000-05:00

Sound-Bite Science: There’s a lot of nonsense in the world, and a good amount is spouted by celebrities (not as much as by politicians, activists, corporations or journalists, but still…) so a new initiative by the U.K.-based Sense About Science is to be applauded.

The group has listed statements made by stars on topics such as organic food, pesticides and ways to avoid cancer, and supplemented the celebrity advice with actual scientific information. It says it will offer a helpline for celebrities so they can check their facts before going public—something that should prevent both embarrassment and misinformation.

“There is a real problem when people present things as though they are scientifically grounded,” says the group’s director. “There is always going to be a fair bit of nonsense around, and particularly with the big interest in lifestyle. We are saying, ‘Before you go public, check your facts.’ All it takes is a phone call to us.”

It would be nice to see something similar in the States.

2007-01-04T03:44:00.000-05:00

Unjust Rewards: Last year, Home Depot gave Robert Nardelli $30 million in pay and stock option for serving as its chairman and chief executive. This year, the company will pay him $210 million for doing nothing… unless you count his decision to step down as a major contribution to the company’s fortunes, which shareholders apparently do: Home Depot stock was up 2.3 percent yesterday following news of his departure.

It is obvious that executive pay in America is distorted, grotesque and out of control. This is only the latest, and probably not the most extreme, example. Nardelli will receive almost twice as much for leaving the company as he received over the course of his six year tenure ($125 million) during which Home Depot’s share price went from $40.75 to $40.16. And that’s to say nothing about the company’s reputation: once a leader in employee engagement, social and environmental responsibility, the company is now just another big box retailer.

The outrage over Nardelli’s rewards is likely to add fuel to incoming House Financial Service Committee chair Barney Frank’s interest in investigating executive compensation, but it’s hard to envisage a cure that is not worse than the disease. The only solution likely to work involves boards acting responsibly of their own volition.

It would be nice to believe that those who have contributed to this sorry state of affairs would feel a little discomfort, but how do you embarrass people who have no shame?

2007-01-02T04:34:00.000-05:00

Plague of Flogs: Here’s my hot tip for the big public relations buzzword of 2007: “flog.” A “flog,” for those who have not been paying attention, is “a fake blog typically used as a sales tool.”

Early examples include, most notoriously, the Wal-Marting Across America blog created by Edelman for the giant retailer, which featured a written by a Washington Post staff photographer and his partner, a freelance writer, as they traveled across the U.S. in an RV, parking for free at Wal-Mart stores all across the country and posting conversations with Wal-Mart employees full of praise for the notoriously generous and tolerant retail giant. Unfortunately, the authors forgot to mention that their entire jaunt was subsidized by the company.

The latest example is brought to you by Sony, which shortly before Christmas set up a blog called alliwantforxmasisapsp (it’s now been taken down, but it’s parodied here), written in an “urban patois” by a hip hop artist called Charlie, whose cousin Pete really, really wanted a Sony PSP for Christmas but who couldn’t afford one.

If you haven’t already guessed, neither Charlie nor Pete was a real person. They were fictional characters created by some Sony marketing whiz whose enthusiasm for the blogosphere was matched only by his (or her) contempt for Sony’s customers.

“It’s a stealth marketing practice that’s unethical,” Andy Sernovitz, chief executive of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, tells the Sacramento Bee. “A business pretending to be a consumer is always wrong,” he adds—something that should be obvious but clearly is not. “I don’t think it’ll become a big trend, because they get busted almost as fast as they happen. The blogosphere does a great job of enforcing itself.”

So the technique is both deceptive and stupid. For that reason, I expect to see much, much more of it over the next 12 months.

2007-01-02T04:33:00.000-05:00

Public Interest? Don't Hold Your Breath: In his recent book Profit with Honor (reviewed in our newsletter last year), Daniel Yankelovich expressed the touchingly naïve hope that companies practicing what he calls “stewardship ethics” (a fancy new term for enlightened self-interest) would take the public interest—and not just their own narrow self-interest—into account in their public affairs activities.

How likely is that? Exhibit one for the prosecution: the Motion Picture Association of America.

A California law that would have prevented companies and their private investigators from using “false, fictitious or fraudulent” representations in order to obtain private information such as telephone records, has been killed because of lobbying from the motion picture industry.

The law, proposed after the scandal over HP’s egregious invasion of reporters’ and board members’ privacy earlier this year, was apparently sailing through the Senate before the MPAA voiced its opposition.

The MPAA claims—essentially—that it needs to engage in fraudulent behavior in order to combat film “piracy.” If there’s a more egregious example of an industry putting its own narrow self-interest ahead of the broader public interest, I can’t imagine what it would be.

2007-01-02T04:32:00.000-05:00

Welcome Additions: What better time than the New Year to update the blogroll with some interesting new additions to the ever-expanding public relations blogosphere.

First up, Leslie Gaines-Ross moved from Burson to Weber Shandwick in the middle of last year, but continues to blog prolifically and provocatively on corporate and CEO reputation issues here.

Ruder Finn has a weekly ethics blog, written by chief ethics officer Emmanuel Tchividjian. I’m a little dubious about the “weekly” thing, since it doesn’t appear to have been updated since early November, but it’s certainly a worthwhile topic.

In a similar vein, Arment Dietrich has launched a new blog dedicated to the “Fight Against Destructive Spin.”

And finally, Cohn & Wolfe’s corporate and technology practice has launched WolfTracking, which follows “the ever-evolving media landscape” and kicked off with a bunch of case studies and this post on the shifting media landscape.

2006-11-28T06:32:00.001-05:00

Cross Purposes: I’ve been following the controversy in the U.K. over a dispute between British Airways and one of its employees with interest. In short, BA bars uniformed employees from wearing hanging jewelry—necklaces, in essence—outside their uniforms, ostensibly because of the risk that they will get tangled in luggage, etc. The employee in question, Nadia Eweida, sought an exception for a Christian cross, claiming that since Muslims can wear veils and Sikhs turbans, she should be able to display her cross.

I happen to think that BA should be a little flexible here: whatever point it’s trying to prove is probably not worth the trouble. But the notion that this is an issue of religious freedom—or “a blatant act of religious oppression,” as the reliably hysterical Daily Mail would have it—is ridiculous.

In a free society, people have a right to exercise their religion, but there is nothing in the tenets of Christianity that says wearing a cross publicly (Eweida was told she could wear it under her uniform, but refused) is essential to the practice of the faith. This is not a dispute about the religious freedom but the right to proselytize on behalf of that religion in the workplace.

But it’s a fairly mild and inoffensive form of proselytizing, and as I’ve said, I think the goodwill BA would have earned for allowing it would have outweighed the cost in defending a principle.

2006-11-28T06:32:00.000-05:00

Bought and Paid For: I’ve railed in the past about the politicization of science over the past few years, but it’s still disappointing to learn that the National Science Teachers Association has been bought off by the enemies of sound science.

The association was offered free copies of Al Gore’s global warming movie An Inconvenient Truth, which might have made a useful teaching aid. But it rejected the offer, explaining that accepting the DVDs would place “unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters.”

One of those supporters, the Washington Post reveals, is ExxonMobil, a company dedicated to ensuring that the truth about climate change is obscured and distorted. The NSTA has received $6 million from the oil company over the past decade. Other corporate donors include Shell and the American Petroleum Institute.

2006-11-28T06:31:00.000-05:00

Smoke Screen: The New York Times editorializes about a new study showing that the anti-smoking efforts sponsored by the tobacco industry are “notably ineffective and possibly even a sham.”

Companies like Altria (the former Philip Morris) have spent millions of dollars on ads purportedly designed to discourage underage smoking, but the ads seem to have been more effective at deflecting criticism of the industry than at reducing teen cigarette usage.

The study, published in the American Journal of Public Health and authored by academic researchers supported by the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, concluded that ads aimed directly at young people had no beneficial effect, while those aimed at parents were actually harmful: the greater teenagers’ exposure to the ads, the stronger their intention to smoke and the greater their likelihood of having smoked in the past 30 days.

Without taking sides on the merits of the study, one thing is clear: if Philip Morris wants people to believe it is serious in its intent, it is going to have to produce better evidence of its commitment than it did in response to the Times, boasting about the number of teenagers exposed to the campaign. Exposure, obviously, is not the issue, and the company needs to research the impact its anti-smoking ads are having.

Unless, of course, it already has such research, and is secretly pleased with what it shows.

2006-11-16T02:18:00.000-05:00

A Missed Opportunity?: An interesting article from Knowledge@Wharton, the online (and subscription-only) magazine of Wharton Business Schools, focuses on a new development in product placement—the targeting of churches.

Did you know that church pastors were offered a chance to win a free trip to London and $1,000 in cash if they mentioned the Disney movie The Chronicles of Narnia in their sermons? Or that Chrysler is sponsoring a gospel music tour featuring Patti LaBelle in order to promote a new luxury SUV to affluent African-Americans?

Rather than bemoaning the spread of commercialism to what some people see as a non-commercial venue, the article focuses on the opportunities. The real potential of churches, according to Wharton experts—and I think they’re right—is in word-of-mouth marketing.

“They offer a particularly tantalizing opportunity for those intent on network or ‘word-of-mouth’ marketing, a strategy that capitalizes on social relationships to spread product information and influence purchasing, according to Wharton marketing professor Patti Williams: ‘Megachurch members are drawn together by a strong common bond. Networks that exist naturally facilitate word-of-mouth marketing, because people tend to share information with those they are close to,’ she says.”

And “pastors make ‘great connectors,’ adds Wharton marketing professor Christophe Van den Bulte, ‘because they reach a large audience once a week, and their words carry extra weight.””

PR firms all across the land have practices targeting African-Americans and Latinos and gays and lesbians. Does anyone have a practice targeting evangelicals? If not, why not?

2006-11-08T12:08:00.000-05:00

Because It Works: The morning after the nastiest election campaign in living memory (something that could be said after almost every election in recent memory), The Wall Street Journal op-ed page includes a piece by former Boston Globe columnist John Ellis bemoaning the negative tone of recent political advertising and making a “business case” for greater civility.

His basic point is that most smart marketers don’t spend billions of dollars attacking each other. “Imagine, if you will, what your taste for Miller beer would be if Anheuser-Busch spent half of its annual advertising budget describing all of the various Miller brands in the most unsavory terms. Or, what your taste for a Budweiser would be if the lads at Miller unleashed a $500 million negative ad campaign against ‘the King of Beers.’ Imagine both at the same time and you get some idea of what domestic politics is like for most Americans.”

Leaving aside the fact that Miller and Bud do, in fact, take pot shots at each other all the time (a campaign featuring football referees comes to mind), Ellis—now a partner in a venture capital firm—misses the big difference between politics and marketing, which is that politics is pretty much a zero-sum game.

“One would think that the major parties would grasp the concept that they are destroying the very profession they purport to love, and act accordingly,” says Ellis. In all likelihood, they grasp that fact, but the incentives to carry on as they do are simply too powerful.

The bottom line is that negative advertising works. There’s good reason to believe that the race-baiting ad run by the Republican National Committee against black Democrat Harold Ford in Tennessee swung the momentum back in his opponent’s favor.

In marketing, a rising tide can lift all boats. Convince people that a category is worthwhile, and all the products in that category can increase sales and profits. But in politics, if one “brand” is going to win, the other has to “lose” and the sad reality is that messages of fear and hate are easier to communicate and ultimately more effective in motivating people than positive messages.

2006-11-02T12:05:00.000-05:00

The Media, Protecting You From the News: In what surely provides the most telling evidence to date that traditional mainstream media have completely abrogated their responsibility, the Washington Post reports, eight paragraphs into its story on election night coverage:

“The biggest behind-the-scenes change in network coverage involves what has been dubbed the Quarantine Room. Determined to avoid a rerun of recent years, when its exit polls leaked out by early afternoon to the Drudge Report, Slate and other Web sites, a media consortium is allowing two people from each of the networks and the Associated Press entree to a windowless room in New York. All cellphones, laptops and BlackBerrys will be confiscated. The designated staffers will pore over the exit polls but will not be allowed to communicate with their offices until 5 pm.”

Yes, the elite media are devoting their greatest energy on election day to making sure that information does not reach the public.

I learned my journalism in a simpler time. Back then, it was widely believed that the role of reporters was to report the news, not to suppress it The argument, I suppose, is that the public isn’t responsible enough to handle this particular information, that voters might respond to it in ways of which the media disapproves. So the media would like us all to understand that it know what’s better for us than we do.

The next time you hear some reporter talking about the public’s right to know, just remember that not even the media believe that sanctimonious claptrap. As far as the mainstream media are concerned, you only have the right to know what they want you to know, when they want you to know it.

2006-10-30T08:39:00.000-05:00

Fatal Short-Termism: I have long suspected that the Bush administration would be less remembered by history for its actions in the war on terrorism than for its inaction on the far greater danger of global climate change.

An administration driven by ideology rather than facts managed to fabricate reasons for invading Iraq despite the complete absence of any supporting evidence for its claims, while at the same time ignoring an overwhelming scientific consensus around global warming and electing to pretend it just wasn’t happening.

In a way there’s nothing new about the conclusions of a report, issued today by former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern, which focuses on the potential economic impacts of climate change. The issue has never been whether we could afford to cut carbon emissions in order to slow the pace of warming, but rather whether—as a society—we would prefer to pay millions today, or billions tomorrow.

It should be no surprise that the Bush administration has chosen the latter. Almost all of its policies have been based on the same premise: that it is acceptable to steal from future generations so that today’s voters can live more comfortably. The burgeoning deficit is only the most obvious symptom of this approach.

What’s telling is that big business (with some notable exceptions: ExxonMobil) has been far quicker and more responsible in its approach to climate change than the government. Companies such as BP, business leaders such as Richard Branson, and a host of corporate titans have taken steps to improve their environmental performance and reduce their emissions.

Business leaders are notoriously focused on the short term, driven by quarterly profits, but the truth is that most of them care about the long-term sustainability of their enterprises. They make an attempt to balance the need for short-term profits with the desire for long-term security. But the current administration in the U.S. is uninterested in anything that happens after the next election cycle. That’s somebody else’s problem. As today’s report makes clear. It’s yours and mine.

2006-10-26T08:55:00.000-04:00

Wiki Whackiness: Reading through Strumpette’s article asking whether PR has become synonymous with spam, I was struck once again by the reasoning—or lack of it—behind Wiki-pedia’s decision to ban PR people from posting.

Strumpette quotes Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales: “The big problem with paid editing on Wikipedia is NOT that someone is getting paid to write, but rather that this causes a rather obvious conflict of interest and appearance of impropriety.”

There are a couple of fallacies at work here. The first is that the appearance of impropriety seems to be more important to Wikipedia than the real issue, which is accuracy of information. Can the fact that someone is being paid lead them to post inaccurate or biased information? Of course it can. Is it the only, or even the main, reason for posting inaccurate information? Not even close.

Some people post inaccurate information for ideological reasons, too. They hate Bill Clinton. They think big pharmaceutical companies are profiting off other people’s misery. They don’t like the environmental policies of large chemical companies. They think Greenpeace is trying to destroy the free market system. Do these people get a free pass because their motivation to spread disinformation is untainted by money?

The second problem is collective punishment. If there are paid PR consultants posting inaccurate information to Wikis—and I don’t doubt that there are—then by all means punish them. But to punish an entire class of people for the actions of a few members of that class makes no sense to me. Would Wales ban anyone who has an ideological bias—members of political parties or activist groups, for example—because some ideologues have posted inaccurate information?

Of course not. That would be absurd. But no more absurd than his current position.

2006-10-26T08:40:00.000-04:00

Still a Minority Pursuit: Information Week reports that despite the massive volume of words written about blogging over the past couple of years, fewer than 10 percent of the largest companies in America have a presence in the blogosphere.

According to the article: “For many businesses, blogs remain a mysterious medium dominated by teenagers and technology geeks. Most execs ‘do not read them, they do not understand why people write them,’ Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li says.”

GM and Wells Fargo get kudos from the magazine.

2006-10-26T08:39:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow’s Responsible Leaders: The FT reports on a study showing that MBA and graduate students in America overwhelmingly believe businesses need to balance profits and social responsibility.

About 81 percent of the students said companies should try to work “toward the betterment of society”, while 18 percent thought most of them were already seeking that goal. Nearly 90 per cent said business leaders should factor social and environmental effects into their business decisions, with 60 per cent saying such an approach could be profitable.

And 80 percent said they wanted to find socially responsible employment.

Whether their idealism survives contact with the real world of American business remains to be seen, of course.

2006-10-26T08:28:00.000-04:00

Are PR Ethics Incompatible with the Web: Strumpette sends in a comment to the Edelman/Wal-Mart post below, as follows:

“How much do you want to bet it happens again?

"This was inevitable. There is a fundamental contradiction between what PR does and what the web expects and demands. PR is summarily being locked out because of how PR defines ethics. (See http://www.strumpette.com/archives/201-Has-Public-Relations-Become-Synonymous-with-Spam.html.)

"C'mon Paul. At the scene of the accident, it's probably a good time to put your pom-pons down.”

Will it happen again? Probably. There are a lot of PR ppractitioners who won't learn the lesson from this, which is not so much that this kind of thing is unethical (though it is, as everyone seems to have acknowledged) but rather that it's dumb. Does anyone seriously think Wal-Mart's image (or Edelman's for that matter) is better now than in was when it started this blogging adventure?

Quite simply, good blogging -- joining in the conversation in an authentic, transparent, unspun way -- will benefit companies and their PR firms. Bad blogging -- opacity, dishonesty, spin -- will hurt them.

Assuming PR people will act in their own self-interest, in other words, there will be fewer indicents like this in the future.

2006-10-23T18:35:00.000-04:00

Snatching PR Defeat from the Jaws of Victory: The Bush administration and the public diplomacy office headed by the president’s close friend and adviser Karen Hughes have not gotten a lot right in public relations terms, but the comments of director of public diplomacy Alberto Fernandez during an interview with Arab news channel Al-Jazeera over the weekend looked as though they might finally have earned the U.S. some much needed and long overdue credibility in the region.

Said Fernandez: “We tried to do our best [in Iraq], but I think there is much room for criticism because, undoubtedly, there was arrogance and there was stupidity from the United States in Iraq. If we are witnessing failure in Iraq, it's not the failure of the United States alone. Failure would be a disaster for the region.”

Yes, I know Fernandez was only speaking the truth—and a truth that is obvious to anyone who has paid even passing attention to recent events—but it was refreshing to hear such candor from a high-placed official, and for a moment there it looked as though the U.S. public diplomacy effort might actually be embracing the concept of honest communication.

Yes, there was some predictable criticism from right-wing groups in the U.S., concerned about how these remarks might play in this country in the run up to the election. But Fernandez’s job is not to help the GOP in the midterms, it’s to improve the standing of the U.S. abroad, and there’s no question he did that. For Arabs used to patronizing platitudes, Fernandez’s words were a revelation, making the front pages of the regional media and, as the Christian Science Monitor observed, striking “the sort of tone that public policy experts say the US needs if it is to regain some of its credibility in Arab eyes.”

Determined to snatch public relations defeat from the jaws of a rare media victory, the Bush administration moved swiftly. Fernandez was forced to apologize.

A little context is provided by Arab media expert Marc Lynch, who says that reading a transcript of the interview “makes clear that the parts of Fernandez’s comments which have been quoted extensively are mostly a throat clearing preface to saying that Arabs need to move on and talk about Iraq’s future instead of ‘gloating’ over American problems. This is a way of establishing credibility and a reputation for candor with Arab audiences: two things that almost all American spokespeople who stick to the administration’s script lack.

“His humility treats those audiences with respect, rather than trying to force talking points crafted in Washington down the throats of skeptical listeners who live in the region and know better.”

Moreover, “Fernandez has conducted literally hundreds of interviews in Arabic with various Arab media outlets at a time when few American officials could be bothered or could perform effectively when they tried…. What made him effective was not just his fluent Arabic, but that he is willing to argue, to get angry, to make jokes—in short, to offer a real human face and not just a grim diplomat reading from a script.”

Clearly Fernandez has the instincts of a great public relations person. Too bad he’s working for an organization that views his ability as a liability.

2006-10-20T06:47:00.001-04:00

The Wal-Mart Blog Fiasco: The blogosphere has been buzzing with criticism of Edelman’s involvement with a Wal-Mart blogging exercise that appears to have broken every unwritten rule in the book.

The Walmarting Across America blog was written by a Washington Post staff photographer and his partner, a freelance writer, as they traveled across the U.S. in an RV, parking for free at Wal-Mart stores all across the country and posting conversations with Wal-Mart employees full of praise for the notoriously generous and tolerant retail giant.

A Business Week article exposed the site as a venture of Working Families for Wal-Mart, a front group set up by Wal-Mart and Edelman, which sponsored the entire trip. As Online Media Daily reported, “WFWM paid for the RV and all travel expenses, rerouted the trip’s original plan, and plastered a logo on the RV's side. Though a banner ad announced WFWM sponsored the site, it did not divulge Wal-Mart paid for the couple’s RV, gas, food and other expenses.”

Blogger outrage mounted and for several days none of Edelman’s prominent bloggers said anything, until a post from Richard Edelman apologized for the faux pas: “I want to acknowledge our error in failing to be transparent about the identity of the two bloggers from the outset. This is 100% our responsibility and our error; not the client’s. Let me reiterate our support for the WOMMA guidelines on transparency, which we helped to write. Our commitment is to openness and engagement because trust is not negotiable and we are working to be sure that commitment is delivered in all our programs.”

That apology notwithstanding, Edelman has taken a lot of flack over this controversy. That’s not surprising. For one thing, Richard Edelman has been quick to criticize (and rightly so) the ethical lapses of others. And for another, he has been vocal in positioning his firm as a leader in social media.

I should make it clear at this point that I have had no discussion with anyone at Edelman about this incident, and no inside knowledge about how it came about. But I have had many conversations with Richard and others at the firm about their investment in social media, and I think they’re genuine in their conviction that it’s the way of the future and about their commitment to doing it ethically.

I’ve also been a close observer of Wal-Mart over the years. And there’s no doubt in my mind that Wal-Mart is as sincere about its commitment to use every dirty trick in the book to win its public relations battle as Edelman is about its commitment to set high ethical standards. I’m on record being as a skeptic (in a PR Week column a couple of years ago) about Wal-Mart’s efforts to establish a dialogue with some of its critics, and two years later I have seen no evidence that the dialogue in question involved any listening on the company’s part. (That may change not that Leslie Dach is heading Wal-Mart’s communications; the blogging effort appears to have pre-dated his arrival.)

So what happens when a PR firm with high standards works for a company with a win-at-any price philosophy? The answer is not as obvious as it sounds—there are PR firms who do great work for morally dubious clients—but often the tone is set by the person paying the bills, and we get Hill & Knowlton’s work for the tobacco industry in the 60s and the Kuwaiti government in the 80s, Ketchum’s more recent troubles involving its work for the Bush administration, and countless other examples.

When PR firms go to work for clients who have demonstrated little or no interest in true public relations—in building mutually-beneficial relationships with their publics—then those firms need to be extra careful to make sure that everything they do meets the highest ethical standards.

Because as Edelman just learned, it's not just the client's reputation on the line.

2006-10-14T02:37:00.000-04:00

Welcome: Fleishman-Hillard’s Out Front specialty group, which focuses on the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, has launched its own blog. According to practice leader Ben Finzel, “Our initial posts will focus on our core interests (e.g, media and advertising, corporate engagement with our community, the U.K. perspective), but we will address a wide range of related issues, too. “ Finzel will be joined by Steve Kauffman, Eddy Evans and other contributors and guest bloggers as well.

2006-10-13T08:38:00.000-04:00

Countering the Borat Offensive: In recent years, there have been films about the allegedly pernicious practices of pharmaceutical companies in Africa (The Constant Gardener) and about the evil influence of the oil companies on foreign policy (Syriana), and with Leonardo di Caprio’s new film about the diamond industry (The Blood Diamond) scheduled for later this year, there’s more fun to come.

The industries under fire can all learn a lesson from Kazakhstan, the former Soviet Republic that hads suffered mightily at the hands of Sacha Baron Cohen, the British comedian whose alter ego is Borat, self-appointed Kazhak ambassador whose portrayal of the country is hilarious but not too flattering.

After the Kazakhstan government attempted to counter the Borat offensive with an advertising campaign designed to highlight its pro-western policies, economic growth, and enormous oil reserves, Borat responded by denouncing the ads as misinformation planted by agents of neighboring Uzbekistan and threatened to “commence bombardment of their cities with our catapults,” if they do not stop.

At some point, the best response is probably a sense of humor.

2006-10-06T22:29:00.000-04:00

The First Blogger: Some of the questions that follow Esther's panel, which also features Ogilvy PR's Asia boss Chris Graves and Ajit Balakrishnan, CEO of India's Rediff.com, reveal a deep discomfort with the anarchic nature of the Internet.

One -- very persistent -- questioner wants to know what to do when an Internet site includes false and defamatory information. How do you wipe disinformation from the web? Answer: you can't. But you can counter it with accurate information.

Another questioner wants to know why she and her clients should pay attention to a 14 year old blogger with no credibility. But a quick exchange with the panel suggests that the blogger has credibility -- at least with his or her audience -- but lacks authority, in the traditional sense. The fact that the individual is 14, has no formal training, and doesn't behave like a journalist seems really troubling.

All the panelists are trying to explain that credibility no longer comes from traditional authority, but from having an authentic voice and a point of view that others find compelling. But the fact that the blogger is a teenager seems to be a sticking point. And it's at this point that Balakrishnan makes a killer point.

"Anne Frank was a teenager during the Second World War, and she was one of the most powerful voices of her era," he says. "Anne Frank wrote a blog."

2006-10-06T22:21:00.000-04:00

Communications Tools: Esther Dyson, whose long-awaited appearance turns out to be too brief, kicks off her presentation with a story worth sharing. She recalls a New Yorker cartoon, and asks her audience to picture it in their minds: a small store, a storekeeper behind his counter, a cabinet of shelves behind him, labeled "Communications Tools." She then asks the audience what's in the cabinet.

Laptops? pens? In the cartoon, she says, the cabinet was full of ears. The fact that no one in the audience -- myself included -- thought of that tells you a lot about PR people (and the people who write about them). I have a friend who is fond of saying that PR people are perfectly capable of holding one half of a good conversation.

But in the conversation age, the ability to listen is surely as important as the ability to carefully craft our clients' messages and find the right medium to convey those messages.

2006-10-06T09:21:00.000-04:00

The Disconnect: Peter Verrengia of Fleishman Hillard, talking about evaluation--and presenting the closest thing to the Holy Grail I have ever seen--tells a sad story.

One of the things his approach to evaluation demands is lots of data, and one of his PR clients was looking for employee turnover data, in an attempt to discover a link between employee communications messages and employee loyalty. The data took a while to gather, he says, because the human resources department couldn't figure out why PR (or corporate comms) people would want it.

Has the PR function become so disconnected from the goals and objectives of the business that our peers within an organization can't understand why we would want business data? Apparently so. The idea that PR people might see -- or hope to discover -- a link between their activity and a strategic bottom-line business objective, clearly sounds pretty far fetched to a lot of people.

And I can't help thinking that this company was not exceptional in this regard. And it's not that the HR people didn't understand PR; it's more likely that they understood it -- at least the way it is typically operated -- too well.

2006-10-06T09:15:00.000-04:00

From Control to Conversation: Publicis Group PR chairman Lou Capozzi talks about the shift from an age of controlled communication to a new age of conversation, which has been one of the themes of the conference already, and makes a compelling case for public relations to take a lead role in that change. Since he just got elected ICCO president, it's a presentation he'll get to make with some regularity next year, hopefully in front of clients rather than just other PR agency people.

Paul Taaffe of Hill & Knowlton, provides a lively counterpoint. He doesn't disagree with Lou, but he does question whether any public relations firm -- his own included -- is ready to step up to the challenge of driving conversations, and doing so in a media neutral way.

My own perspective is that there is a huge opportunity. PR people should be used to dialogue (they answer questions from skeptical journalists every day), to earning attention rather than paying for it, for reaching out to multiple stakeholders, to using a wide array of channels rather than a single communications vehicle -- all the characteristics of this new environment.

But never underestimate the ability of the PR industry to squander a great opportunity.

2006-10-06T09:10:00.000-04:00

A License to Thrill: Harold Burson in his mid 80s is still as spry and engaged as ever, uses his opening address to talk about some of the challenges facing the industry. He has interesting things to say about the lack of any institutionalized body of knowledge and therefore of any sense of history, all of which I agree with, but his speech is likely to be remembered for his endorsement of licensing. (He didn't make an explicit call, but his discussion of the benefits and his call for the industry to look into it made it fairly clear where he stood.)

I've always opposed licensing, and had several interesting -- and occasionally heated -- chats with Ed Bernays on the subject. But Harold always opposed it to, and he's rethought his position, and that's enough to convince me it's worth thinking and talking about. Which I will do at more length in this weekend's newsletter.

2006-10-06T09:07:00.000-04:00

Delhi Blogging: I'm in Delhi this week for the ICCO (International Communications Consultancy Organisation) World Summit, which has brought together some senior public relations people from around the world to discuss "next practices." The hotel-- which is extremely nice but some way outside the city -- has a pretty slow high-speed Internet connection, so posting is likely to be sporadic, depending on how patient I can be.

2006-10-02T10:16:00.000-04:00

The Netroots Battle for Net Neutrality: An article at Salon suggests that social media have leveled the playing field between big corporate lobbyists and grassroots activists, focusing on the battle over Net Neutrality and the way a “ragtag army of bloggers, Internet entrepreneurs and consumer-rights activists” has been doing battle with high-paid corporate telecom lobbyists determined to erect toll booths on the information superhighway.

The grassroots tactics have included videos on YouTube—one recent example, created in an hour—has been viewed 350,000 times over the past month or so—and an online petition.

We already examined this issue at length in the newsletter, and there’s clearly reason to be skeptical: the Net Neutrality issue is uniquely appealing to bloggers and others; the opposition includes high-priced lobbyists as well as the netroots (Internet companies such as Google and Yahoo! will have to pay most of the tolls) and in any event, the telecom companies seem to be winning the battle the old-fashioned way: they make really, really big campaign donations and play the inside game better than their opponents.

But the use of social media in public affairs is worth noting for a couple of reasons: for one, there’s no reason the techniques being used by the grassroots can’t also be used to great effect by corporate interests; for another, there are issues on which the grassroots matter (and there will be many more if the Democrats regain either chamber this fall).

Professionals neglect these developments at their peril.

2006-10-01T08:49:00.000-04:00

Another Lesson From the Age of Transparency: All right now, repeat after me: It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.

From the Clinton administration’s obfuscations about the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal to the Roman Catholic church’s attempts to keep pedophilia under wraps (the latter being especially pertinent now), why is it that large, sophisticated institutions seem incapable of figuring out that when aberrant behavior occurs, it’s always better to come clean than to cover up.

Now it looks as though the Republican Party is about to learn that lesson the hard way.

At first, the instant messaging correspondence between Rep. Mark Foley and one of his young male pages (including a request for a photo of the boy) seemed creepy rather than explicitly criminal. But as more messages emerged and Foley—the chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, naturally—announced his resignation, it became apparent that something more sinister was going on.

Still, Foley would not have been the first Congressmen to resign over sexual indiscretions. That in itself might have been a fairly short-lived story. But it now seems clear that the Republican leadership knew of Foley’s predilections, allowed him to continue in his position—finding the least appropriate person for any given position is becoming a tradition in this administration—and in general followed the Catholic church playbook for handling this kind of crisis: help the offender, protect the institution, and the victims be damned.

According to this Washington Post article: “House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) was notified early this year of inappropriate e-mails from former representative Mark Foley (R-Fla.) to a 16-year-old page, a top GOP House member said yesterday—contradicting the speaker's assertions that he learned of concerns about Foley only last week.”

The obvious questions are already being asked: “Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, questioned yesterday why Alexander had gone to the House Republicans’ chief political operative, rather than to other party leaders. ‘That’s to protect a member, not to protect a child,’ Emanuel said.”

The article goes on to say that “Republicans fear the scandal, coming in the wake of indictments of three GOP congressmen this year, might add to the public’s unrest at the party’s image and conduct, and some House members yesterday joined in the chorus of dismay and scorn.”

One of the reasons there will always be a demand for good public relations people is that leaders—political and business—seem incapable of learning even the most obvious lessons. And perhaps the most obvious of all is that the truth will out—and in an age of transparency it tends to come out in a hurry.

As a result, the Republican Party finds itself grappling with an ugly—and entirely unnecessary—crisis.

2006-10-01T08:48:00.000-04:00

Mindless Corporate Penny Pinching: Slate reported on Monday on what it calls “mindless corporate penny-pinching,” offering the observation that: “What ends up infuriating employees is that the scrimping on minor employee perks co-exists with a pay-any-price attitude for so much else. Credit Suisse, for example, pays seven-figure bonuses to hundreds of bankers every year. Telling associates who prepare deal books that they can’t print out color PowerPoint slides because the bank needs to pinch pennies seems an exercise in futility.”

More interestingly—and predictably—the article prompted readers to offer their own, considerably more idiotic, examples. Paper clips appear to be a particularly popular source of savings.

“Former Bear Stearns employee B.B. recalls being given a bag of paper clips on his first day ‘with the explanation that the firm would never buy paperclips … This was on the direction of [legendary gazillionaire CEO] Ace Greenberg, and the company seemed almost proud of this inane cost-cutting measure.’ A former Bank of America investment-banking analyst recalls that the megabank ‘once told its employees to use paper clips instead of staples because paper clips could be re-used to save money.’”

Leaving aside the propriety of focusing on such minor matters at a time when CEO compensation is increasing exponentially, these moves don’t seem to me to be designed primarily to save money; surely their main purpose is simply to infuriate employees.

2006-10-01T08:47:00.000-04:00

The Right Way to Plug a Leak: The ability of corporations to find complicated and unethical ways of doing things they could do simply and ethically never ceases to amaze me.

Kent Perkins, partner at Los Angeles-based private investigation firm Diversified Risk Management, which specializes in corporate work, explains why what HP did in trying to trap a boardroom leaker was not only “extraordinary” and “not legitimate” but also incredibly dumb.

“He said there was a simple, legal way for H-P to handle the matter: The chairman should have hired a firm like his to address the board and ask directors to sign a form that released their personal phone records over the past 90 days. Perkins would have told directors that the company could not force them to comply, but failure to release the data would have signaled that they were unwilling to cooperate with a reasonable request by management. The chairman and CEO should have signed the release on the spot in a dramatic flourish.”

2006-10-01T08:46:00.000-04:00

Rights, What Rights?: The Onion nails events of recent days, and the new law denying habeas corpus rights to non-citizens, on the head.

“Flanked by key members of Congress and his administration, President Bush approved Monday a streamlined version of the Bill of Rights that pares its 10 original amendments down to a ‘tight, no-nonsense’ six.”

What’s impressive, is that this piece was first posted December 18, 2002.

2006-10-01T08:45:00.000-04:00

Britany Bails on Publicist: Yahoo U.K. reports that Britney Spears has “fired longtime publicist Leslie Sloane-Zelnick and taken charge of her own public relations.” Sure, because look at all the good publicity Katie Holmes got after she did the same thing.

2006-09-21T14:43:00.000-04:00

Turning Up the Heat: The Royal Society, the leading scientific academy in the U.K., which represents the nation’s scientific community, had taken what The Guardian says is an “unprecedented” step of writing to ExxonMobil and asking it to stop funding groups that spread misinformation about global warming.

Exxon’s response is that “our Tomorrow's Energy and Corporate Citizenship reports explain our views openly and honestly on climate change.” In other words, because the company is quite open about the fact that it doesn’t believe in climate change, it is being honest.

That seems to me to be setting the bar for honesty pretty low. I mean it’s possible that there are people working in the cigarette industry who genuinely don’t believe cigarettes are harmful or addictive. If those people said, “We believe cigarettes are safe and healthy and children should start smoking them at age five,” they would, technically speaking, be being honest.

And that’s giving Exxon a huge benefit of the doubt, and assuming that it really believes what it’s saying. Al Gore recently told people he thought the global warming deniers got together with the flat earthers and the folks who think the moon landing was staged on a movie lot in Arizona to share their delusions.

But the people who believe the earth is flat don’t have any huge financial stake in that belief. You have to assume it’s genuine. You can’t say the same of the anti-global warming crowd. And the stakes are a little different too.

2006-09-21T07:27:00.000-04:00

Calm, Patient and Good Humored: Larry Foster, Bill Nielsen and Ray Foster have a blog on corporate reputation issues, and it’s first rate, as you would expect.

I can’t believe they need any introduction, but Larry was head of corporate communications at Johnson & Johnson during the Tylenol crisis, Bill was his successor—and a leading light of both the Arthur W. Page Society and PR Seminar—and Ray is the current corporate vice president for public affairs and corporate communications at the much-admired pharmaceutical company.

Between them, these three guys know more about the real world of corporate reputation than the rest of us will ever learn. Smart post here on the relationship between the weakening bond of loyalty between corporations and their employees and the declining reputation of large corporations generally, but the whole thing is worth a read.

Oh, and it’s called calmpatientandgoodhumored.com—three virtues in short supply in the blogosphere.

2006-09-21T07:26:00.001-04:00

Helping CEOs Be More Vigilant: Thomas Jefferson famously observed that “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance,” and now two Wharton business school professors suggest that the same vigilance might be the price of corporate survival too.

In an thoughtful article that comes as part of the excellent Knowledge@Wharton e-zine (subscription required, but it’s well worth it) George Day and Paul Schoemaker argue that issues can quickly become crises at companies where senior executives are more skilled at operational management than at vigilant leadership, citing Ford and Coke and Pepsi in India as examples of what can go wrong if managers are not sufficiently “open to new ideas, seek diverse perspectives, listen to a wide array of sources and foster broad social and professional networks.”

Much of what they discuss sounds like traditional issues management, but Day and Schoemaker make it clear that they see the function as more central to leadership than has traditionally been the case, and that the modern environment has made monitoring external issues a greater priority than ever before.

Needless to say, public relations people should have an active role in a vigilant organization—since vigilance requires engagement with the external environment. It’s another opportunity for PR to move up the value chain.

2006-09-21T07:26:00.000-04:00

No Ethics in These Boardrooms: If you want evidence that the moral bankruptcy of much of corporate America begins at the top, look no further than this survey of corporate directors, which found that 85 percent of responding directors place a higher priority on corporate confidentiality than shielding personal information. And just over half said they have served on corporate boards that have authorized the use of “aggressive” surveillance techniques—similar to those used by Hewlett Packard—to address a potential leak.

According to Larry Ponemon, chairman of The Ponemon Institute: “Board members feel like confidential corporate information is on a much higher ethical ground than personal privacy.” Let’s hope a few indictments—and if there’s any justice, a few convictions—will help restore a little ethical perspective in the boardroom.

2006-09-21T07:24:00.000-04:00

IBM Gets YouTube: Giant corporations are beginning to catch on to the reach and humanizing power of YouTube, and when IBM starts poking fun at itself in public you know there’s a sea change taking place. This video, a pretty effective homage to The Office, is the first in a series of three training videos that have become among the most popular items on the video sharing service.

At Slate, meanwhile, Peter Hyman takes a not entirely approving look at the “funniness epidemic” sweeping corporate America and wonders whether funnier workers are necessary or desirable.

All of which reminded me of a retreat I once attended in rural Pennsylvania with employees of what was then Creamer Dickson Basford (now absorbed into Euro RSCG Magnet). The team-building exercise involved a presentation by a humor consultant whose schtick including having people stand on one leg and put on fake red noses, on the assumption (I guess) that if they weren’t funny at least they might get some laughs by looking stupid.

At the time—and we are talking 15 years ago—I assumed the belief that a sense of humor could be taught was a peculiarly American notion. The only two people in the room who appeared not to be buying in at all were myself and a fellow-Brit from CDB’s U.K. sister company Biss Lancaster, presumably forced to attend as punishment for some horrible transgression.

The only funny thing about the whole episode was that after three days of team-building and warm-and-fuzzy culture building and work-life balance cliché, the meeting closed with a presentation from a client, whose message was simple and straightforward and a direct contradiction of everything that preceded it. “If I call at five minutes to midnight on a Sunday, I expect a call back by midnight or you’re all fired.”

No one laughed.

2006-09-12T03:59:00.000-04:00

AA Attacks "Irresponsible" ABC Movie: American Airlines offers a blistering response to Disney’s fabrication “The Path to 9-11” with a statement calling it “inaccurate and irresponsible” and Editor & Publisher’s coverage suggests that the airline might be considering legal action. If so it ought to get in line behind Sandy Berger and Madeleine Albright and others. I know the U.S. libel laws are tough, particularly for public figures, but there’s no doubt that ABC knew some of the charges it made against those two were false when it went to air, and that surely demolishes at least a couple of its possible lines of defense. And if the hurdles are still too high in the States, the show also aired on the BBC in the U.K., where libel is a little easier to prove and where American and others could use the court to win back some of their unfairly tarnished reputations.

2006-09-09T15:50:00.000-04:00

ABC's AA Slander: President Clinton and his former aides Sandy Berger and Madeline Albright are not the only ones to suffer at the hand of ABC’s “drama-ganda” about the run up to 9-11. American Airlines might also want to get its public relations people—and its litigators—ready to refute the show’s specious claims.

In an early scene, Mohammad Atta, the suicide pilot of one of the 9-11 planes, is seen at an American Airlines ticket counter. Warning lights flash on the screen and, according to one blogger who has seen the movie, “The AA employee called a supervisor who kind of shrugged and said, blithely, just let him through. The first employee, shocked, turned to her supervisor and said, shouldn’t we search him? The American Airlines supervisor responds, nah, just hold his luggage until he boards the plane.”

The only problem is that the incident in the 9-11 report on which that scene is based is different from the movie in several key respects: it happened at the airport in Portland, Me., not Boston, and more important, Atta was not trying to board an American flight, but one operated by USAirways.

This show is obviously a calculated insult to the Clinton administration and almost everyone involved in the attacks, but mostly—as Maureen Dowd points out today—it’s an insult to ABC’s viewers. Because by fictionalizing a tragedy that’s still fresh in a lot of memories, ABC is essentially saying that truth is not sufficiently dramatic, not sufficiently sexy.
So it’s been enhanced, distorted, “sexed up,” as they say in my new homeland, to make sure you don’t miss the moral of the story.

2006-09-09T07:49:00.000-04:00

Paying for Castro Criticism: In July, Juan Manuel Cao, a reporter for Miami’s Channel 41, confronted Cuban president Fidel Castro about his government’s refusal to allow a well known doctor and dissident Hilda Molina, to leave the island and visit her son in Argentina. Castro’s response was to ask Cao whether someone was paying him to ask that question.

At the time, the ageing Cuban dictator sounded paranoid, or perhaps confused. Tinpot dictatorships and banana republics pay reporters to embarrass their opponents, but to suggest that someone from a western media outlet was in fact a government agent was absurd.
‘
It was also, as it turns out, true. Because this morning’s Miami Herald reports that Cao was one of at least 10 Miami journalists paid by the U.S. government in exchange for anti-Castro reporting.

The president of the Miami Herald Co., Jesus Diaz, explains why his company severed its ties with three reporters who had worked for its El Nuevo Herald publication: “Even the appearance that your objectivity or integrity might have been impaired is something we can't condone, not in our business. I personally don’t believe that integrity and objectivity can be assured if any of our reporters receive monetary compensation from any entity that he or she may cover or have covered, but particularly if it’s a government agency.”

I just returned from Saint Petersburg, Russia, where a still maturing public relations industry is striving to eliminate the practice of paying for coverage. The industry leaders understand that pay-for-play can undermine the credibility of the media, one of the most important pillars of democracy. Some of them talked of the importance of conducting their business according to western, or U.S., standards.

Let’s hope they aim a little higher than that.

2006-09-07T12:40:00.000-04:00

Smoke and Mirrors: Slate’s Ryan Grim offers an excellent piece on the Bush administration’s evaluation of its own anti-drug advertising campaign. After spending hundreds of millions of dollars, the administration commissioned a piece of research that appears to prove that the ads actually increased the likelihood that young people would smoke pot. Or as the researchers put it, "greater exposure to the campaign was associated with weaker anti-drug norms and increases in the perceptions that others use marijuana."

Grim thinks the research shows that the campaign didn’t work. But I think he’s making a mistaken assumption about the purpose of the campaign.

Some big social marketing campaigns are an honest effort to address societal problems. Anti-smoking efforts like the “truth” campaign fall into that category, as do some of the AIDS education efforts underwritten by the states and by not for profit groups in the late 80s and 90s.

But a great many social marketing campaigns have a different objective: to convince voters that government is advocating “proper” behavior. Abstinence only sex education is a great example. Nobody seriously believes that abstinence-only education will reduce teen pregnancy or prevent the spread of STDs. That’s not the point. The point is to be seen by moralists to be delivering a “positive” moral message to the target audience. If members of the target audience ignore that message, the consequences are their problem.

The anti-marijuana ads are, I suspect, a similar case. They are not designed to discourage kids from smoking pot; they’re designed to make sure kids know that smoking pot is WRONG. So the government sat on the results of the study for 18 months—spending another $220 million on ads it knew were not effective—not because it likes wasting money, but because the money wasn’t wasted. Its supporters, particularly those who believe pot smoking is immoral, want the government to lecture people about the immorality of smoking pot.

The lecture is the point of the exercise, the results are irrelevant.

2006-09-07T11:35:00.000-04:00

Little Ditty, About Jack and Amanda: Strumpette Amanda Chapel, whose view of the future of the public relations industry gets bleaker by the day, has fallen into bed with Jack O’Dwyer, a May-December romance that leads to the publication on Amanda’s site of a guest article by the curmudgeonly commentator.

Anyone who knows me knows I don’t agree with Jack about a lot of things, and his suggestion that the Council of PR Firms is a symptom of the “European-ization” of American public relations is particularly odd.

Jack’s thesis appears to be that the Council, with 100-plus members (most of them smaller, U.S.-based independents) is in “bankrolled mostly” by Omnicom, Interpublic, WPP, Havas and Publicis—the five major communications holding companies—and that as “WPP, Publicis and Havas have dominated the Council, so to [sic] have European attitudes of secrecy” (the U.S.-owned Interpublic and Omnicom have presumably been either overpowered or outsmarted by the fiendish foreigners).

I can’t help thinking there is a little xenophobia in evidence here. These “European attitudes of secrecy” are in fact the result of Sarbanes-Oxley, an American regulation so poorly thought out that it appears to have caused a result entirely the opposite of what was intended. But beyond that, I don’t find the European PR business to be particularly secretive: there have been PR agency rankings in most of the major European markets, and in most cases local firms now complain because the American agencies withdrew from those rankings and rendered them meaningless.

Equally puzzling is Jack’s assertion that the trade press in Europe “supports” business rather than “covering” it. We could have an interesting semantic discussion about that—I wouldn’t have wasted 20 years of my life writing about PR if I didn’t support the industry, but I think being supportive of the industry requires criticism of those aspects that are misguided or unethical—but the terminology is not the point: the European media generally are much more hostile in their attitude towards business than the American media.

And finally, Jack points to Tim Dyson, head of Next Fifteen, who has continued to report financial information despite Sarbanes-Oxley. Tim, of course, is English. Next Fifteen is a British company.

Look, I’m as unhappy about the pathological secrecy of big PR agencies as Jack is. I think it hurts our business. And I’m also disappointed that the Council of PR Firms has never lived up to its potential. But to depict this as the result of “European-ization” is a strange distortion of what is, I’m afraid, an American phenomenon.

2006-09-07T08:17:00.000-04:00

The ABCs of 9/11: Disney is the center of a maelstrom of criticism in the blogosphere—it’s beginning to seep through to the mainstream media—and from Democratic leaders for its upcoming ABC “docudrama” presenting the Republican spin on the events leading up to 9/11.

There are echoes of the CBS biopic of Ronald Reagan, which was withdrawn after conservative commentators claimed it was insufficiently hagiographical—except in this case ABC seems determined to press ahead regardless of the attacks on the show’s credibility.

There doesn’t seem to be much question that this is an overtly partisan move on Disney’s part. It commissioned a well-known conservative activist to write the screenplay, and it has distributed advance copies to Rush Limbaugh and right-wing bloggers while denying them to the Democratic politicians portrayed in the movie and to progressive bloggers.

Moreover, the network has been alerted to numerous factual inaccuracies, and simply refused to make changes. So this is not a case of being careless with the truth; it's a deliberate political maneuver.

So is this a smart move by Disney?

Any boycott of ABC, its affiliates and its advertisers is likely to have a minimal impact—most boycotts are ineffective, except at generating ink.

So I guess that if the movie succeeds in throwing some momentum back behind a floundering GOP and prevents the Democrats from retaking the House this fall—something political analysts had considered increasingly likely—Disney might have bought itself some friends in high places. But if the Democrats do as well as predicted, they’re not likely to forget something this brazen.

2006-09-05T04:31:00.000-04:00

Spinning the Discussion About Spin: Former government information service employee and later deputy director of communications for the Labour Party Lance Price uses the columns of The Guardian to bemoan the fact that “spin has become a term of political abuse to be used against Blair’s Labour party just as ‘sleaze’ was used to such effect against the Tories under John Major.

“As a result, perfectly honourable people find themselves traduced for the sins of others. The innocent victims are hard-working civil servants doing a necessary and unglamorous job.” (The piece if part of mediaguardian, which requires registration but is free.)

Responding to yet another attack on government spending on communications, Price makes all the necessary points. “Take the Central Office of Information, whose PR budget “soared” to £322m last year. Much of that money was spent, we are told, advertising flagship policies such as tax credits and extra help for pensioners. Since when was it ‘spin’ to inform the less well-off in society of the benefits to which they are entitled in the hope that they will claim their due…

“How many calls, I wonder, have government press officers had to field in the past 24 hours demanding to know why there are so many press officers? The public has a right to know what the government is doing in its name, and Whitehall has a duty to provide that information. The figures on which the Tories based their attack were provided by the very people they chose to malign. They would have been justifiably outraged if they couldn't get the answers they wanted.”

But the comments posted at the end of the story make it clear that most readers aren’t buying Price’s, err, spin.

2006-09-03T12:54:00.000-04:00

No Benefit: If BP (below) has earned the benefit of the doubt, the tobacco industry has not, as this apparently flawed survey and the coverage it received last week seem to show.

2006-09-02T16:19:00.000-04:00

Great Moments in Employee Communications: The Asbury Park Press reports that retailer RadioShack recently notified 400 employees that they were being laid off… via e-mail.

That’s pure class.

A company spokesperson told the newspaper that employees had been told at an earlier meeting that they would be notified electronically. So that’s all right then.

2006-09-02T15:31:00.000-04:00

Benefit of the Doubt: I don’t know whether BP is guilty of a disregard for safety or merely over-promising. But this piece in the FT, by the legislative affairs director of an Oregon environmental group, does show the value of effective public relations. Every now and then, all the deposits a company makes in the trust bank pay a dividend like this.

It’s hard to imagine anyone in the environmental movement rushing to author the same kind of column asking for the benefit of the doubt for ExxonMobil.

2006-09-01T12:02:00.000-04:00

Water Torture: Anxious not to be left in the dust by the Bush administration when it comes to demonstrating utter contempt for science, the British government—via the Medicines & Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency—is to allow the makers of homeopathic “remedies” to make medical claims about their products.

There will, of course, be no process of clinical trials, or indeed any requirement of scientific evidence, before these claims can be made. That’s because there is no way to distinguish, using any kind of scientific test, between a homeopathic “remedy” and a bottle of Evian—or indeed, the stuff that comes out of your tap. In short, there is no scientific evidence.

The question now is why anyone in the U.K. would bother to market ordinary bottled water as water. Presumably, under the new regulations, you could take your Evian and re-label it a homeopathic cure for cancer and be entirely within the law.

I suppose proponents of homeopathy could argue that since they are giving their customers a harmless placebo—something they drink every day without even thinking about it—there’s no risk, and so no need for clinical trials, etc. But medical professionals are not so sure. Michael Baum, emeritus professor of surgery at University College London tells The Guardian: “This is like licensing a witches’ brew as a medicine so long as the bat wings are sterile.”

Others worry that the gullible will be less likely to seek medical treatment for health problems if they believe homeopathic remedies are working—although why we would want those people to continue to pollute the gene pool is unclear.

The Guardian’s excellent Ben Goldacre, who writes the paper’s Bad Science column, has a wonderful take on the whole subject here and here.

2006-08-29T12:50:00.000-04:00

A Sorry Tale, Part II: Peter Sandman’s attempts to persuade the Australian Wheat Board to issue an apology, outlined below, stand in stark contrast to the position taken by Northeast Utilities chief executive Michael Morris back in 1997.

I know it’s not exactly a timely case, but I was reminded of the story while reading a new book, The Triple Bottom Line, by PricewaterhouseCoopers exec Andrew Savitz., which recounts what happened after Morris arrived at the company while it was under federal criminal investigation for violating EPA and Nuclear Regulatory Agency rules.

As Savitz tells it: “Morris’s first internal meeting, four days after he arrived at the company, took place in the main auditorium. A group of four hundred employees came expecting to get a routine update on the legal proceedings. The new CEO was the surprise opening speaker.

“‘I’ve just come from a meeting with the Connecticut attorney general,’ said Morris. ‘He told me some of his lawyers were trying to obtain documents from us related to the environmental investigation. When asked for those documents, one of our in-house lawyers told the deputy attorney general that he had no intention of doing her work for her….’

“There were a few sarcastic chuckles in the room, but Morris didn’t smile. Instead, he paused and looked directly at his audience. They went stone silent. Finally, Morris continued: ‘The next time one of our people is disrespectful or makes it more difficult for an employee of any public agency to his or her job, that person is no longer with our company.’”

A year later, the company pleaded guilty to 25 felonies and paid $10 million in fines. Morris entered the guilty plea personally, appearing in federal court to face the judge along with 20 longtime NU executives.

The guilty plea was embarrassing but the press coverage was surprising supportive of the company, praising it for taking the high road. Soon after, the Millstone power plant that had been at the center of the controversy sold for $1.3 billion—nearly twice what analysts had predicted it would fetch during the crisis.

That’s leadership—still a commodity in short supply.

On another note, Peter Sandman points out an error in the original post, below. Our last paragraph mentions “the mealy-mouthed pseudo apology [AWB] eventually issued.” Says Sandman: “Actually it never issued any apology. It wrote one I thought was pretty mealy-mouthed—though a lot better than nothing—and then decided to go with nothing.”

We also wrote, based on the original source, that the AWB “was recently forced to acknowledge that it paid $290 million in kickbacks to the corrupt Saddam Hussein regime.” Says Sandman: “That’s certainly what most of the media have said, and I think it’s approximately true. I don’t think it’s exactly true. AWB has acknowledged that it negotiated payment to a Jordanian company for ground transportation of the wheat inside Iraq, and that the Alia payments were passed through and paid/reimbursed by the U.N. as part of the Oil For Food program. It has also acknowledged that there is now considerable evidence of a connection between Alia and the Saddam Hussein regime, and considerable evidence that the Iraqi Government, not Alia, was handling at least some of the ground transportation effort.

“It hasn’t acknowledged (in fact, I believe it explicitly denies) that top management knew at the time that Alia was tied to Saddam or that Alia wasn't actually handling the ground transportation itself.”

2006-08-26T13:30:00.000-04:00

Specious Survey Watch: Having devoted several pages of the newsletter recently to the subject of specious surveys, I wouldn’t let last week’s excellent column by Wall Street Journal “Numbers Guy” Carl Bialik pass without comment, since it includes what appears to be a prime example of the phenomenon.

Simply put, the Wine & Spirits Wholesales of America took the results of a deeply-flawed survey into online alcohol purchasing among teens (the sample being deliberately biased to over-estimate the problem) and exaggerated them (miraculously turning the fact that 2.1 said they had bought alcohol online into the conclusion that half a million kids bought alcohol online).

Once again, the survey was swallowed hook, line and sinker by gullible reporters, despite the fact that the sponsoring organization clearly had a stake in the scary outcome. Some will argue that if the media are dumb enough to buy this kind of nonsense, PR people are going to continue churning it out. I say it just makes everyone more cynical about the manipulation of data and the credibility of corporate America.

2006-08-26T09:03:00.000-04:00

A Sorry Tale: Peter Sandman’s approach to risk communication—which includes maximum transparency coupled with extreme humility—is not appropriate for every company. It was not appropriate, obviously, for the Australian Wheat Board, which was recently forced to acknowledge that it paid $290 million in kickbacks to the corrupt Saddam Hussein regime.

As The Age reports (in great depth), Sandman was brought in at considerable expense to help the company craft an apology, which he did—apparently too well. Sandman took what had been a fairly bland apology and made it sound real. His apology explained that AWB employees who suspected wrongdoing should have stepped forward sooner, and that AWB, all the way up to the former chairman, Trevor Flugge, apparently lacked a culture that encouraged such actions.

He wanted chief executive Andrew Lindberg to concede that AWB’s responses had been “legalistic and ethically obtuse,” and to admit that “it was my job to create a corporate culture where my employees would identify suspicious circumstances and bring them to my attention. My ignorance of these details until far too late demonstrates how thoroughly I mishandled this part of my job.

“Although we ourselves violated no Australian laws or UN regulations, we were a party to transactions in which others undermined the fundamental purpose of the UN sanctions. We should have seen this and made an effort to stop it. We did not … This represents a serious failure of the AWB ethical culture, and of the company's systems and processes.”

That was apparently all too much for AWB’s management and public relations advisers, who felt it went too far. As The Age points out, AWB seemed genuinely convinced that Sandman’s advice did not reflect the reality of the company’s situation.

Sandman responded to the changes with a withering memo: “This whole list of facts reads to me like a one-sided effort to look as innocent as you can without actually lying. You are entitled to do that. It is a lawyerly thing to do. It might be the right thing to do if you think you are in legal trouble and need to argue your way out. Or it might be the right thing to do if you think you are being ethically criticised unfairly and are preparing to say you did nothing unethical and are the long-suffering, innocent victim of an unfair report from Volcker and unfair media coverage in Australia.

But “It’s a terrible way to begin if you are seeking forgiveness for ethical misconduct that everyone pretty much knows wasn't illegal … It makes the reader want to find something illegal to get you for.”

He went on to ask: “On what basis do you say your distress… is ‘shared by all at AWB’? You told me many at AWB thought and still think it was no big deal that Iraq’s money got back to Saddam. Have they changed their mind? Do you mean that they are distressed that these arrangements got AWB into trouble? Or is this the only statement that I have found that goes beyond half-truths and is actually a lie?”

Sandman seems to me to be right on every point, and the publication of his memo—which was entered into evidence as an exhibit in a government inquiry into AWB’s behavior—simply exposes a debate that goes on in every company accused of illegal or unethical behavior. Certainly, taking Sandman’s advice would have spared AWB much of the embarrassment it is now suffering for the mealy-mouthed pseudo apology it eventually issued.

2006-08-26T09:02:00.000-04:00

Naked Podcast: Don Tapscott, author of The Naked Corporation—one of the best and most under-appreciated business books of recent years—and an advocate of greater corporate transparency, is the guest for the first BusinessWeek Playbook Podcast. Tapscott’s new book, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everthing, is out soon.

2006-08-25T10:13:00.001-04:00

Orange Alert II: British blogger Stuart Bruce, who was way ahead of me on the Orange blogger suspension story (amazing what you miss when you’re on board the QM2, where internet access costs $20 an hour), also caught an aspect that I missed, which is that Inigo Wilson, the blogger in question, also posted a definition of consultation—presumably part of his community affairs job with the mobile phone company—as part of his Lefty Lexicon.

“Consultation,” he says, is “a formal system for ignoring public views while patronising them at the same time.” As Bruce points out in a comment below, that kind of attitude is a little more than just a mitigating factor in Orange’s decision to suspend the guy.

2006-08-25T10:13:00.000-04:00

Home Free: Slate’s Michelle Leder picks up on a new perk for CEOs—one that could be very costly indeed for shareholders if the housing bubble bursts. “Since the beginning of this summer, at least a half-dozen companies, including eBay and Nike, have disclosed in their routine Securities and Exchange Commission filings that they're now protecting their executives from real estate market forces….

“In other words, companies that depend on free markets are making sure their own executives are safeguarded from them.”

There’s likely to be a brief flurry of criticism over this issue, just as there was when it was learned that companies were backdating stock options to their lowest point of the year or quarter to ensure that senior executives benefited from any up-tick. But CEO compensation is one of those issues that seems to be immune to the ordinary laws of reputation management: no matter how great the outrage, CEO pay just keeps on rising.

What amazes me is that this is happening despite the fact that no one seems to know just how much value a good CEO adds to a company, how to isolate the impact of the CEO from all other factors impacting corporate performance, or how transferable CEO skills are (is a CEO who does a great job at X Company likely to do a similar job at Y?

In some respects, what we are seeing here is a corporate version of the “great man theory,” the belief that history is shaped by individuals. That theory is out of fashion in academia, where today’s historians look at a more complex web of social and economic forces to explain events. But it’s still very much in vogue in the business world, perhaps because compensation policies are set by those who either are or have been “great men” themselves.

2006-08-25T07:06:00.000-04:00

Orange Alert: The suspension last week of a community affairs manager who works for British mobile phone company Orange raises a number of issues for bloggers and corporate blogging policies.

Inigo Wilson was suspended after the company received complaints about a “Lefty Lexicon” posted on a conservative website. The humorous posting defined “Islamophobic” as a term describing “anyone who objects to having their transport blown up on the way to work,” and described Palestinians as “archetypal ‘victims,’ no matter how many teenagers they murder in bars and fast-food outlets.”

The Muslim Public Affairs Committee objected, encouraging members to write to the company complaining.

Normally, I would consider this another example of corporate over-sensitivity. Wilson was not posting in any official capacity, and his words and actions outside of the corporate context are surely his own business. Moreover, this is one of those issues on which any action is going to offend someone. I suspect conservatives—and those on the left who value free speech over political correctness—will be appalled by Orange’s actions.

Indeed, the political commentator and former Conservative candidate Iain Dale said: "Inigo was acting in his private capacity. Orange have [sic] a choice: are they on the side of freedom of speech? The article is an attack on the left’s approach to language and the way language is used to shut down debate and promote a particular world view. It is intended to be satirical. Sadly, his opponents have proved his point to him by their reaction.”

But in this case, there are a couple of mitigating factors. The first is that Wilson identifies himself rather prominently in his lead-in as a community affairs manager for a large telecoms company—although he doesn’t identify Orange by name. I suppose it could be argued that by mentioning his corporate affiliation at all, he opened himself up to attack. And then there’s the fact that he’s a community affairs manager, perhaps not the ideal job for someone whose views of a segment of the population are so jaundiced.

One obvious message is that companies should have clear rules about these issues—online and off—rather than making up policy on the fly when an incident occurs.

2006-08-24T12:49:00.000-04:00

Chocolate-y Goodness: On the subject of authenticity, it’s nice to be able to point to an example of transparency in the blogosphere as a counterpoint to all the deceptive practices that still seem commonplace.

The Chocolate Blog, created by Hill & Knowlton on behalf of LG Electronics (for the company’s wildly popular chocolate cell phone, is a gold standard in this regard. Click on the link “The Programme” at the top of the page and there’s an explanation of the PR campaign, the reason for the company’s outreach to bloggers (LG “realises that consumer-to-consumer recommendations carry a higher trust factor than virtually all other forms of advertising, and that word of mouth is a frequent factor for purchase [and] that bloggers are the most important initiators of online conversation right now.”

There’s even information about H&K’s social media team (and yes, the transparency also serves the more selfish purpose of an ad for the firm’s work) as well as to the blog posts of the individuals involved.

2006-08-24T12:48:00.000-04:00

Still Dancing: We are now six years into the Bush administration and the White House press corps is still dancing to whatever tune Karl Rove decides to call.

The latest example is the coverage of Katrina victim Rockey Vaccarella, who travelled from New Orleans to meet with the President and thank him for the great job the administration is doing with the clean-up in the battered Gulf region. Most of the media lapped up the story of a regular guy trekking north in his trailer in the hopes of being granted an audience with the most powerful man in the world.

Of course, the entire story turned out to be “fake news” in the true sense of the term. Rockey turned out to be a wealthy businessman and Republican politician, who stood for office as a GOP candidate whose journey was far from the speculative adventure the media portrayed: he had an invitation and an appointment before he left his home in St. Bernard Parish.

How do you preach the gospel of authenticity to clients when reporters fall so eagerly for the inauthentic?

2006-08-20T10:35:00.000-04:00

Young Folly: Sometimes, I almost feel sorry for Wal-Mart. Earlier this year the company’s attempt to show a softer side was thwarted by the publication of an internal memo suggesting ways of cutting employee benefits. Now, the company’s decision to hire normally reliable shill Andrew Young has backfired after he made some culturally insensitive remarks about Jews, Koreans and Middle Easterners in an interview with a black newspaper in Los Angeles.

The reason companies hire Young—he was serving as head of the Working Families for Wal-Mart front group—is because he can normally be depended on to say exactly what his corporate paymasters tell him to say and because (for reasons that escape me) he still has a few shreds of credibility in the black and Hispanic communities.

The company reacted quickly to denounce Young’s bigoted comments. It couldn’t actually fire him, I guess, because that would mean admitting that Working Families is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the retail giant rather than an independent citizens’ group, but he soon announced that he was stepping down.

The question is whether Wal-Mart has been unlucky in the reputation setbacks it has suffered this year, or whether despite it’s best efforts to repair its image, what’s happening is just the company’s true character showing through.

2006-08-20T10:33:00.000-04:00

Mid-Atlantic Blogging: I’m blogging a little sporadically from the Queen Mary 2, somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, as I complete my long on-going move from New York to London. Internet access is neither as easy nor as cheap as I’d like, so posts are somewhat infrequent.

As many of you know, I’m headed back to the U.K. for (at least) a couple of years. I’ve actually been ensconced in my London apartment for a few months, but now the wife and dogs are joining me, and we are doing the boat thing because we didn’t want to fly Jake (our English bulldog) whose already labored breathing could be upset by heat, excitement and air pressure, all factors in air travel.

The kennel facilities on the Queen Mary are quite nice, the crossing has been smooth, we get to visit with the dogs (the other one is Molly, a Shetland sheepdog) for up to six hours a day, and Robinson, the kennel attendant is both pleasant and extremely efficient. Both dogs seem to think this is a fine adventure. I’d recommend it to anyone who has to transport pets and who has six days to take out of their schedule to do so.

2006-08-17T07:05:00.000-04:00

More VNR Madness: The Federal Communications Commission has mailed letters to the owners of 77 television news stations again reiterating its position that TV producers should not be allowed to decide for themselves what goes on the air.

FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, quite possible the stupidest man in America, says: “You can't tell any more the difference between what's propaganda and what's news.”

Well, here’s a handy definition: News is what happens when journalists and their producers are allowed to make their own decisions about what viewers get to see, as is currently the case. Propaganda is what happens when the government decides to intervene in that process, which is what Adelstein wants to see happen.

2006-08-17T06:29:00.000-04:00

Airline to Employees: "Go Dive in a Dumpster": Employees of Northwest Airlines, a company with an ugly history when it comes to labor relations, are receiving some helpful advice from management after the nation’s fifth largest airline imposed massive pay cuts as it prepares to exit bankruptcy.

A booklet handed out to employees and posted on the company’s website (now sadly removed), called 101 Ways to Save Money, advised workers that one way to make ends meet was to fish through garbage to find things that are too expensive in the shops. So if you see a disheveled individual fishing through garbage cans in Minneapolis or Detroit, don’t assume he’s homeless; he could be one of the truly unfortunate.

The airline withdrew the booklet, and spokesman Roman Blahoski acknowledged that “some of these suggestions and tips… were a bit insensitive.”

Personally, I think there is a communications opportunity here. To reinforce the message of “shared sacrifice” that is de rigeur at times such as there, chief executive Doug Steenland could share with workers all the examples of useful items he has found while dumpster diving.

2006-08-15T22:33:00.000-04:00

Flight Risks, Part III: Okay, this is really really the last word on this subject (for now) since it’s obviously off-topic as far as this blog is concerned, but…

Surely the most telling evidence that I’m right, that the security measures imposed at the end of last week were an over-reaction, is that those measures are no longer in place. If I was flying from London to New York today, I would in fact be allowed to board the plane carrying both a laptop computer and a paperback book.

So what has changed over the last couple of days? Has anything happened to make laptops and paperbacks less threatening than they were on Saturday? No. The physical properties of both are unchanged. Has anything happened to make those who wish us harm to suddenly embrace the western lifestyle and renounce their previous hostility? Again, no.

In other words, if paperbacks and laptops really were a threat on Saturday, they are still a threat today. Ergo, either the policies of last week were an over-reaction or the policies of this week are negligent. I suppose there’s room for disagreement on which of those two possibilities is most likely, and I suppose it’s obvious where I stand.

(Of course, the same logic applied last week: if laptops and paperbacks were dangerous at Heathrow, they were surely dangerous in Brussels, where I was able to board a plane with both. Surely a terrorist of even moderate intelligence could have done what I did: taken a train to Brussels and boarded a flight there with his potentially lethal John Grisham tome in hand?)

2006-08-15T21:33:00.000-04:00

Flight Risks, Part II: Matthew Yglesias at American Prospect has an eminently sane column about the new air travel restrictions that have become the subject of some debate here (see two posts below and numerous invective-filled comments) following my rant about the difficulty of leaving Britain last week.

Yglesias shares my view on these so-called "security" measures: “People have been allowed to carry liquid onto planes since time immemorial and we're clearly not awash in exploding aircraft. What's more, inconveniencing air travelers isn't simply a matter of inconvenience. The more hellishly annoying you make it to fly, the more people will drive, either by switching methods of getting to the same destination or by choosing closer destinations. And air travel remains—despite the risk of a bomb disguised as perfume—enormously safer than driving. Despite our best intentions, in other words, security can kill.”

In what is probably a forlorn attempt to bring this discussion back to the purported subject matter of this site, let me say that this discussion illustrates perfectly one of the great rules of risk communication: that people always more prone to outrage and over-reaction when a threat is acute and apparently beyond their control (terror threats against airlines) than chronic and at least perceptually within their control (car crashes).

Of course, it's probably important to note that Yglesias and I are both on the left of the political spectrum. I quite understand that those on the right—on both sides of the Atlantic—are unlikely to share my views on the correct balance between personal freedoms and “security," and it was naive of me not to realize how politically charged this subject is.

On that note, I’ll leave the last word, until my detractors return to post their (largely anonymous) disagreement, to Yglesias: “In moments of political peril the administration has consistently found that its interests are served by fostering a climate of panic and paranoia—blowing the risks of conventional terrorism all out of proportion in search of improved poll numbers and drastic enhancements in executive power. At best, this results in waste of resources. At its worst, it does direct harm—shredding the Constitution, destabilizing the Middle East, radicalizing the world's Muslim populations, and encouraging potential adversaries to unite against us, all while accomplishing nothing to reduce the genuine risk.”

ADD: Count Slate's Bill Saletan as another skeptic when it comes to extreme security measures. Indeed, Saletan has discovered levels of absurdity beyond those I encountered: "At Dulles, a passenger was ordered to peel her banana. Do you think somebody capable of hiding an explosive inside a banana peel isn't capable of hiding it inside the banana?"

Saletan's conclusion, which echoes my preference for the traditional stiff upper-lip over last week's hysteria: "In a liquid world, you can't seal off evil... You need resilience. You can't be untouchable, but you can be undefeated."

WEDNESDAY MORNING ADD: Here are some Guardian readers who share my perspective. I particularly like the last guy’s description of the new measures as “security threatre” rather than “security threats.” (More, from the Guardian blog, here).

Meanwhile, over at the Wall Street Journal (of all places) a columnist echoes some of my points from below.

2006-08-15T20:12:00.000-04:00

Flight Risks: So it appears that not everyone agrees with me that the security restrictions imposed on British air travel in the wake of the alleged terror plot last week were both extreme and, for the most part, nonsensical.

There are so many points to make here, it’s hard to know where to start, but…

1. The notion of using liquids to blow up a plane was neither new nor unknown to the authorities. The fact that nothing had been done in the decade—that most airport security machines don’t detect liquid explosives—since the first such plot meant that when action was taken, it was hastily implemented in the most disorganized and inconvenient way possible.

2. I have yet to have anyone explain to me what danger would have been posed by me or anyone else taking a paperback book on board a plane. The only reason I can imagine for this is again that the new security measures were implemented so hastily that the authorities simply banned everything they could think of. Again, the haste was unnecessary, given that this was not a novel threat.

3. Once again, the authorities were simply reacting to the latest threat. This has become a pattern: after the 9-11 attacks, we banned nail clippers and other sharp objects, because that was what the terrorists used last time; after the shoe bomb attempt, we started asking people to take off their shoes, at some airports, for a while; after the alleged plot last week was discovered, we banned liquids. What happens next? Just like the shoe thing, the liquid ban will gradually be relaxed. Some other threat will make headlines and there will be another hasty over-reaction, that will last until those headline are replaced by some new scare. Is a well thought-out consistent policy really too much to ask.

4. Airline security remains woefully under-funded. There’s no reason airports could not run efficient security checks on laptops, books, infant formula and whatever else passengers want to take on board, except the government won’t put up the money, and airlines are not prepared to raise fares for security. So even the cursory checks provided today add an intolerable delay to air travel—for little or no discernible benefit. And at the risk of belaboring the point, when security is stepped up there aren’t enough people to do real checks, so the solution is simply to ban everything.

5. All of this focus on the cabin ignores the real threat, which is the stuff that goes in the hold, which gets an even more cursory check than do the passengers. The fact that more luggage is going into the hold increases the risk of flying.

6. The last piece of my rant below about a no-security airline was a joke. I know irony was one of the victims of 9-11, but I guess I assumed some slim strand of it had survived somewhere.

In short, current airport security is deliberately designed for maximum inconvenience and minimum efficacy. This does not seem to me to be a particularly controversial view. It’s shared by British Airways (“when the moment struck, BAA had no plan ready to keep Heathrow functioning properly”) and by almost everyone quoted in this USA Today story (“Security has finally reached the nether regions on the idiocy graph.”)

The broader issue, of course, is the extent to which we should be prepared to give up ordinary freedoms in the face of terror threats. As a Brit who has spent 20 years in New York, and who has homes in Times Square and on Oxford Street (both of which could be considered high-profile targets), who makes 20 trans-Atlantic air trips a year, I guess my position is fairly obviously that I am disinclined to compromise on that point.

But if there are compromises to be made, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that they be well thought-out, logical, and provide some tangible benefit in terms of safety. I don’t think what happened last week meets any of those criteria.

2006-08-15T09:44:00.000-04:00

Let Every Voice be Raised: One of the things I admire about Peter Sandman is that he’s not afraid to challenge the conventional wisdom. His latest column is likely to provoke some strong disagreement from crisis public relations experts, as it takes on a near universal law of crisis communications: the notion that an organization under siege should speak with “one voice.”

According to Sandman, the “speak with one voice” dictum means “that risk communicators and crisis communicators—and in fact all communicators—should do whatever it takes to ensure message consistency. The most extreme version demands total centralization of the public communication role; everyone is told to refer all inquiries to a single source. More moderate versions involve generating a set of key messages that everyone is supposed to stick to.”

The problem with that, he says is “the frequent presence within the organization… of more than one opinion. In such cases, speaking with one voice necessarily means suppressing discrepant voices. Often, in fact, proponents of a particular perspective in an ongoing debate advocate speaking with one voice as a way of urging everyone else to pipe down.”

But organizations facing a crisis or an issue should engage in robust internal debate. Management should listen to a diversity of viewpoints before making a decision. That means organizations have three choices when it comes to communicating: They can pretend everyone had the same opinion, in effect denying that any internal debate took place; they can pretend that the those on the “losing” side of the debate all came around to the “winning” side’s way of thinking; or they can acknowledge the debate, the difficulty of the decision, and the fact that not everyone agreed.

“Convention favors the first two options,” says Sandman. “So does management’s ego.” But he makes several arguments for the third option, the first of which is that it is almost always the truth. But he also believes it has value because it prepares the public for uncertainty, and let’s them know upfront that there are no easy answers.

“A company or government agency explains a situation to the public in a way that makes it seem less complicated, less uncertain, less debatable, and therefore less upsetting than it really is,” he says. “The public swallows its doubts and accepts this interpretation. Then the complexities, uncertainties, and debates start to emerge. In large part because it feels blindsided and misled, the public now gets more upset than the situation justifies. And the company or agency fails to notice that its own earlier decision not to brief the public properly is what precipitated the overreaction. It concludes instead that people obviously can’t take the unvarnished truth, so the wisest course of action is to keep pretending that things are less complicated, less uncertain, less debatable, and therefore less upsetting than they really are.”

Other benefits of allowing diverse voices to speak: it improves the quality of public debate, encourages organizational flexibility, it teaches the public that the organization respects diversity. And Sandman makes another important point, which is that attempts to speak with one voice when the reality is one of diverse opinion usually fail.

“Journalists are taught to seek out conflicting voices,” Sandman says. “What your company or government agency considers presenting a united front, a good reporter considers stonewalling—and a good reporter will inevitably go searching for chinks in the wall.” Moreover, internal morale may be improved by acknowledging the dissenting voices.

Not all crisis communicators are going to find Sandman’s arguments persuasive. The “one voice” imperative of deeply embedded in the traditional approach to crisis management, and many will consider that its advantages outweigh any of the problems Sandman raises.

But at a time when companies are increasingly being encouraged to speak to stakeholders with a human voice, to avoid corporate-speak, to be more transparent, it may be time for a rethink. Are those ideas only valid when times are good? Should they really be abandoned when the going gets tough? If so, are companies really only paying lip service to the value of conversation and the benefits of transparency?

2006-08-14T11:52:00.000-04:00

Flight Plans: My prolonged silence over the past few days is the result of my escape from the Gulag also known as the United Kingdom.

As part of a global strategy clearly designed to identify terrorists by creating conditions so onerous that they are the only ones prepared to put up with airport security, the U.K. banned pretty much every item of carry on: no laptops, no iPods, no books—which on a trans-Atlantic flight essentially means either eight hours of staring at the back of some guy’s head or enduring a movie in which Antonio Banderas teaches underprivileged high school kids to dance.

But flights from Brussels are slightly less restrictive. Most important, you can take a laptop on board, which given that the eight hours from Europe to the U.S. are my most productive was a big deal. So I gave up my Virgin ticket and took the Eurostar train to Brussels to catch a flight a day later on which I could actually work. The cost was not insignificant—a Eurostar ticket, a night at the delightful Brussels airport Sheraton, and a ticket on a major U.S. carrier—but worth it for the added productivity.

Or it would have been, until my laptop imploded at the Sheraton, and all I could get was a message telling me that I had a boot error. So no computer and no work, though at least I was allowed to read. Then, when I made it home I had to wait for my IT guy to come rescue the contents of my hard drive before I could get any work done.

Anyway, it would not have helped with the laptop problem, but I am so ready for someone to launch a no-security airline. I would happily pay an additional $1000 or so per trans-Atlantic flight for an airline that didn’t wait me stand in line for half an hour, take off my shoes and belt, start up my laptop, surrender my iPod and generally inconvenience me in an effort to persuade me that all of that will somehow make me safer.

I don’t believe it for a second and in any case, for me personally, the trade-off isn’t worth it. I’d rather take my chances with the bomb-making whackos.

2006-08-08T01:00:00.000-04:00

YouTube Abuse: Why is it that the first response of some public relations people to a new technology is to try to figure out how to abuse it?

There’s no question that the sudden emergence of YouTube and other online video sites presents an opportunity for public relations people to reach out to young people, to join their conversations. And yet the first use of this new medium to attract the attention of the media involves what appears to be an egregious example of deceit.

A PR firm that counts ExxonMobil among its clients has created a video trashing Al Gore’s hit movie An Inconvenient Truth (the one about global warming). Nothing wrong with that, of course. But the video was designed to look like the kind of amateurish production that might have been cooked up by a disgruntled youth in his bedroom, and there was no indication that it was produced by a professional public relations firm.

Not only is that unethical, it’s also stupid. The ruse was discovered through some very rudimentary detective work on the part of The Wall Street Journal and quickly brought to light. By now, everyone on YouTube knows that a PR firm tried to deceive them. They will presumably find that deceptive and patronizing.

There has to be a better way.

2006-08-08T00:59:00.000-04:00

Culture Clash: Forbes magazine has always been about the rawest, most red-blooded variety of capitalism, celebrating the views of Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand, glorifying the profit motive and ridiculing anyone with the temerity to suggest that corporations might have any other responsibility.

Bono, meanwhile, has been a frequent advocate for a new, more progressive view of the corporation, suggesting that companies can combine profitability with social responsibility. His recent launch of the “Red” brand of cause-related products and his interest in saving the world—Africa in particular—would appear to be diametrically opposed to all that Forbes stands for.

So it’s interesting that Bono is a member of the group of investors that recently bought into the magazine. Bono’s spokesman says he was attracted to the magazine because it “has a point of view.” It will be interesting to see whether that point of view changes under the influence of its new shareholders.

2006-08-02T07:05:00.001-04:00

Deconstructing Mel: Mel Gibson’s first apology was apparently enough for one Disney executive. Oren Aviv, head of the Disney film studio, told Slate: “I’ve worked with Mel on several films over the years and we have a great relationship. We all make mistakes and I’ve accepted his apology to what was a regrettable situation. I wish him the very best on his path to healing.”

And that was before Gibson’s second, by-the-numbers apology, specifically to the Jewish community, saying he was “in the process of understanding where those vicious words came from” and that he wants to “meet with leaders in the Jewish community, with whom I can have a one-on-one discussion to discern the appropriate path for healing.”

It will be interesting to see how many people buy Gibson’s approach, which is pretty much public relations 101. Some in the media are clearly sophisticated enough to deconstruct Gibson’s strategy. The Boston Herald’s Beth Teitell, for example, offers a witty explanation of Gibson’s apology: “That’s the real Mel Gibson talking. The Mel Gibson authorized to speak for Mel Gibson, not the rogue Mel Gibson going around ruining Mel Gibson’s reputation. And now—how unfair is this?—the Hollywood powers are debating whether Mel Gibson has a future in Tinseltown. Which means Mel Gibson is as much a victim of Mel Gibson as are a female sergeant at the police station (‘sugar tits’ in Gibson’s parlance) and the Jewish people (the ones ‘responsible for all the wars in the world’).”

That’s the kind of cynicism we need more of.

2006-08-02T07:05:00.000-04:00

Projecting an Image: Tony Snow’s latest initiative to address the Bush administration’s image problem is to redecorate the White House briefing room.

The new press room will likely have “a video wall that could display everything from ‘flags waving in the breeze [to] detailed charts and graphs,’ according to a senior White House official working on the project. For TV viewers, the video feed could be the sole on-screen image, or could share the space with the speaker.”

The video wall will supplement the White House PR team’s ability to provide the appropriate visuals for any news story. President Bush won’t have to visit an aircraft carrier to declare “mission accomplished” any more. He can do it against a backdrop of an aircraft carrier from the safety of the White House.

“Putting a video wall in the White House allows any administration to shape almost any story much more directly,” Ralph Begleiter, a former CNN foreign-affairs reporter and now a professor of communications at the University of Delaware, told the Wall Street Journal. It’s “an extension of the idea that the government wants to speak directly to the public with a voice that’s very carefully crafted, without room for the analysis or critiques or amalgamations of fact that reporters routinely bring.”

2006-08-02T06:59:00.000-04:00

Philanthropy is Not CSR: Strange op-ed piece at the FT on the decline of corporate social responsibility. Christopher Haskins, a former chairman of Northern Foods, seems to be conflating CSR with corporate philanthropy, or perhaps community relations, when he bemoans the fact that 21st century companies—unlike the 19th century businesses he holds up as exemplars—no longer support their local communities the way they once did.

This leads to the bizarre contention that companies in the U.K. lag the U.S. in terms of CSR. American companies do indeed give more to charities than their British counterparts, but that doesn’t make them more responsible. Indeed, I suspect many American companies use their giving as an excuse not to do all the things that really constitute responsible behavior: progressive workplace policies, environmental protection, purchasing at fair prices from suppliers in developing countries, providing equal opportunities to women and minorities.

The fact that both ExxonMobil and Wal-Mart have robust corporate philanthropy programs does not make them any more responsible.

Moreover, Haskins seems to view even philanthropy in parochial terms. He praises Boeing (no irresponsible behavior there in recent years) for its commitment to its local community, but global companies are not—and should not be—focused on their home towns. Their responsibility is to the world, and that should be reflected in their giving policies and, of course, their behavior.

2006-07-31T15:24:00.000-04:00

A Passionate Respone: Rich Klein, whose Riverside PR blog is focused on litigation and crisis public relations, questions the ethics of Rogers & Cowan, the PR firm representing Mel Gibson, in the wake of the actor’s drunken anti-Semitic rant while being arrested.

My own interpretation is that Gibson, who clearly identifies with messianic characters (from William Wallace to Jesus Christ) literally thought he was being arrested by the Jews and was about to be sentenced to crucifixion.

Seriously, it’s hard to interpret the Passion of the Christ as anything other than an anti-Semitic screed, even without this latest evidence of Gibson’s feelings on the subject. The four gospels each present a different version of the crucifixion myth. Gibson could have chosen any one of them as the basis for his movie, but instead he cherry picked from each, and in every case chose the version least favorable to the Jews (Herod’s refusal to get involved from Luke, the scourging of Jesus in front of a Jewish mob from John, Pilate’s washing his hands of responsibility from Matthew). It’s hard to accept those decisions as simple coincidence.

Klein raises interesting questions about whether Gibson deserves continued representation, but the real PR challenge is likely to be faced by Disney’s ABC television network, which last year commissioned Gibson to produce a non-fiction TV movie about the holocaust. (Don’t ask me why.) Jewish groups are likely to question whether Gibson is the best man for such a sensitive project. But expect Gibson’s followers on the Christian right to react with fury—and a boycott—if he’s dropped.

2006-07-31T14:49:00.000-04:00

Snake Bit: The FT wakes up to the Snakes on a Plane phenomenon.

2006-07-31T10:54:00.000-04:00

Lessons in Trust: To study the dynamics of trust, what happens when trust is violated, and what can be done to restore it, three Wharton professions set up a money game that allowed them to measure changes in trust over time. They began the experiment, according to this article at Knowlegde@Wharton (registration required) with a widely held assumption—that trust is fragile, easily broken and hard to repair, but found the truth to be a little more complex.

Instead, the money game experiment revealed that “trust harmed by untrustworthy behavior can be effectively restored when individuals observe a consistent series of trustworthy actions,” the researchers conclude. And making a promise to change behavior can help speed up the trust recovery process.

But when a person’s trust is violated, and the violation includes deception—for instance, a friend didn’t merely forget to return a DVD as promised, but also lied about it—it is difficult to restore. “It’s okay to screw me over, but don’t deceive me as well,” says one of the researchers. “If you screw me over and lie about it, it’s going to take even longer to recover from it.”

2006-07-31T07:58:00.000-04:00

Astroturfing Sucks: I must offer my support to TheNewPR’s anti-astroturfing efforts. It’s interesting to note that while 25 leading PR bloggers have signed on to support the campaign, very few of the leading agencies have done so. Do they not know about it? Or is astroturfing too valuable to give up, even though they know it's wrong?

2006-07-31T07:53:00.000-04:00

Meat Market: The U.S. Meat Export Foundation “has a long-range plan to build confidence in U.S. beef among Japanese consumers” according to a report at CattleNetwork.com. Good news, I guess, although an official acknowledges that rebuilding confidence will take time. I wonder if it occurs to anyone in the cattle community that it would have been easier—and cheaper—just to bring American beef safety monitoring standards up to those of the rest of the world. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the industry’s reasons for resisting those standards were ideological (regulation is bad!) rather than pragmatic.

2006-07-28T10:29:00.000-04:00

Rumor Control: If you work in public relations, you’ve probably heard the one about Procter & Gamble donating a portion of its profits to Satanist groups, or the one about 7-11 store managers celebrating after the 9-11 attacks, or the one about Mexican brewery workers urinating in Corona beer, but this one might be new to you: an e-mail doing the rounds suggesting that CVS pharmacies only place anti-theft devices on black hair care products.

This put me in mind of a story in The Wall Street Journal more than a decade ago involving a Brooklyn-based soft drinks company that had been making major inroads in the black community with a sugary soft drink. (I don’t remember all the details, and couldn’t find the article via either Google or Factiva.)

Posters started appearing claiming that an ingredient in the drink was designed to make black men sterile. “Did you see last week’s 60 Minutes,” they asked, giving implied credibility to the rumor, even though there had been no such report on the CBS show. The company suffered substantial losses before it was eventually revealed that the posters had been put up by a rival drinks company.

The Wall Street Journal story painted the company as a victim, which is true as far as it goes. But a company that had built good relationships with the black community—its largest demographic—would have been a lot better placed to fend them off.

2006-07-28T10:28:00.000-04:00

Information is Empowerment: Tony Blair, according to this headline in the Financial Times, “Puts Onus for Good Health on the Individual.” The story goes on to quote the British prime minister: “Government cannot be the only one with the responsibility if it’s not the only with the power. The responsibility must be shared and the individual helped, but with the obligation also to help themselves.”

All of which would make sense, except for the British government regulations that are designed to prevent its citizens taking responsibility for their own healthcare, by placing restrictions on the ability of pharmaceutical companies to communicate directly to patients. Those restrictions are not only anachronistic—the information is freely available on the internet—they are also counterproductive when it comes to empowering people to take control of their own health.

2006-07-26T02:36:00.000-04:00

Reflective Leviathans: The Financial Times reports on a new initiative by British think tank Tomorrow’s Company, undertaken with the support of 11 major multinational corporations, to address the governance issues faced by the next generation of corporate leivaithans.

According to John Manzoni, head of refining and marketing at BP and co-chair of the inquiry, “Companies should be addressing some of the problems facing the world, not in a philanthropic way but in a core, strategic way. But we seem to be among the least-trusted institutions, so there’s a dilemma.”

The inquiry will conduct interviews with major business leaders, NGOs, writers and academics, seeking the answers to four broad questions. Since they’re unlikely to ask me, I figured I’d provide the answers here anyway.

What should be the role of a company in society, globally and locally?: The role of business is to meet stakeholder expectations. That obviously means delivering profits to shareholders, but other stakeholders—customers, employees and communities—have more complex and changing expectations. Failure to live up to them will be costly for business. Companies need to monitor these expectations constantly, manage them as far as possible, and do what what they can to meet them.

How should companies collaborate with financial institutions, governments and civil society to tackle problems such as climate change? Err, yes.

How can companies manage and benefit from a diverse workforce while maintaining a strong core purpose? Put values as the center of the company. Make sure that those values are both real and distinctive (bland generalities mean nothing). Communicate those values aggressively internally and externally. Find ways to make them relevant to that diverse workforce. Empower people rather than exploiting them.

How can companies form productive and positive relationships with their critics? Listen. Go away, think about what you’ve heard. Then listen some more. Engage in conversation that is both honest and human. Make concrete promises and then deliver on them.

2006-07-25T02:10:00.000-04:00

Risky Business: And Tony Snow thinks his critics are tough.

2006-07-24T05:31:00.000-04:00

The Media's Role in Governance: Some new research from the University of Chicago suggests that media coverage can be more effective at enforcing high standards of corporate governance that regulation.

The authors analyzed two Russian companies: Sidanco, a little-known holding company in the oil and gas sector, and MGTS, the telecommunications company for Moscow. In 1998, both companies attempted to issue shares to parties linked to insiders at well below the prevailing market price. But while both companies committed similar corporate governance abuses, Sidanco included the Hermitage Fund—an activist fund—among its investors.

Hermitage was actively involved in trying to generate media coverage about Sidanco. The authors found that Sidanco’s actions were reported in 23 news articles, 14 of which appeared in credible international publications, including the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Economist. In contrast, MGTS had only three articles mentioning its corporate governance violation. In the case of Sidanco, the abuse was reversed, while in MGTS the dilutive share issue was quickly approved.

According to the article at Capital Ideas, “the authors were able to show that it was a component of foreign press coverage driven by the Hermitage Fund action that drove the results, suggesting the link between coverage and outcome is more than a mere correlation.”

2006-07-24T05:24:00.000-04:00

Fox Flacks Flame Foes: An amusing AP article suggests that Fox News takes the same hardball approach to public relations as it takes to anyone who opposes its pet administration. Author David Bauder chronicles all the critics of Fox who have been “wished well” by the network’s PR pros over the years, something it likens to “a kiss from a Mafia don.”

Says Fox PR chief Brain Lewis: “Has there ever been a more disingenuous phrase in the corporate handbook, or the PR handbook, than ‘we wish him well’? ‘Earnings have fallen in the last eight quarters and we wish Joe well as he leaves the company to pursue other interests.’ We know what they mean, so we just thought we’d have some fun and point out the hypocrisy of the term.”

2006-07-21T05:10:00.000-04:00

Wal-Mart Jumps Down Into the Mud: Steven Silvers draws attention to a Wal-Mart site (actually operated by the front group Working Families for Wal-Mart) called paidcritics.com that he says “comes right out of the Swift Boat playbook.”

He doesn’t mean that entirely as an insult. In fact, he thinks Wal-Mart has scored some points by turning the transparency tables on its critics, and to an extent I agree. The reality is that organized labor uses front groups the same way companies do (Wake Up Wal-Mart is the mirror image of Working Families for Wal-Mart) and that they should be subject to the same skepticism and the same ethical standards.

The problem I have with paidcritics.com is not its content but its tone. It is, as Silver says, “a name-calling, nastily aggressive little website.” I can’t help thinking the same points could have been scored—and more effectively—without the snide ad hominem attacks. Wal-Mart might also have taken the moral high ground by highlighting these facts itself, rather than through a proxy organization.

2006-07-21T05:06:00.000-04:00

The Reluctant PR Guy: A former reporter explains to the Poynter Forums why he was forced to abandon journalism for public relations. Not exactly brimming with enthusiasm for his new line of work, is he?

2006-07-21T05:03:00.000-04:00

Strumped: Howie Kurtz tries to provide an answer to a question absolutely nobody is asking. And fails.

2006-07-19T00:46:00.000-04:00

Google's Ground-Breaking Grassroots Effort: The FT seems to believe that Google’s lobbying efforts on behalf of net neutrality are “challenging not just the style of Washington lobbying but the central fact of power in the capital: that money often speaks louder than democracy.” Using the Internet to mobilize supporters—including progressive bloggers, who have been vocal on the issue—“they have got the voters talking directly to the legislators—without the intermediary of opulently shod lobbyists—in ways that could profoundly influence the future of lawmaking and lobbying.

I suspect the FT may be overstating the case in a couple of ways: first, I’m not convinced that Google has entirely eschewed traditional lobbying (surely there’s someone somewhere wearing Gucci and carrying around a check from the search engine company); and second, I’m not convinced that the grassroots mobilization effort the FT describes is all that different from the fairly traditional approach of mobilizing as many citizens as you can in support of your cause. I’m not even sure that using the Internet is particularly unusual.

What is interesting about the net neutrality debate is the extent to which bloggers have weighed in on the issue, which pits Google and other content providers against telecoms companies, who want to be able to charge those providers for carrying their content—despite the fact that you and I are already paying a hefty monthly fee to receive the “programming.”

Google is concerned for obvious reasons, and progressives are concerned because giving telcos the right to charge content providers raises the very real possibility of discrimination: while The New York Times could presumably afford the fees, the average blogger could not—so pages from the little guys would load slower, the democratic culture of the Internet would be turned on its head and media power and influence would be restored to its rightful owners, the rich and established.

Telcos could even decide to charge The New York Times more than The Wall Street Journal, or Fox News more than CNN. (These are the guys who helped the Bush administration listen in on its critics phone calls, remember; they’re capable of anything.)

It’s an issue that resonates strongly—perhaps uniquely—in the blogosphere, and it has unleashed the public affairs power of blogs. Is it a one-off or a sea-change?

2006-07-18T14:16:00.000-04:00

The Courage to Ignore the Spin: The summer 2006 issue of Nieman Reports looks at journalistic courage, and while most of the essays are pretty much what you might expect—journalists risking their lives in war zones, or facing jail to protect a source—this offering by the Washington Post’s Walter Pincus should be cause for some reflection—not least among his Post colleagues.

“I believe a new kind of courage is needed in journalism in this age of instant news, instant analysis, and therefore instant opinions,” says Pincus. “It also happens to be a time of government by public relations and news stories based on prepared texts and prepared events or responses. Therefore, this is the time for reporters and editors, whether from the mainstream media or blogosphere, to pause before responding to the latest bulletin, prepared event, or the most recent statement or backgrounder, whether from the White House or the Democratic or Republican leadership on Capitol Hill….

“A new element of courage in journalism would be for editors and reporters to decide not to cover the President’s statements when he—or any public figure—repeats essentially what he or she has said before. The Bush team also has brought forward another totally PR gimmick: The President stands before a background that highlights the key words of his daily message. This tactic serves only to reinforce that what’s going on is public relations—not governing. Journalistic courage should include the refusal to publish in a newspaper or carry on a TV or radio news show any statements made by the President or any other government official that are designed solely as a public relations tool, offering no new or valuable information to the public.”

I’m not holding my breath. But obviously I’d welcome it if reporters accepted Pincus’s suggestion. Maybe then politicians and their advisors would be forced to practice real public relations—you know, dialogue—rather than the spin they get away with today.

2006-07-18T14:03:00.000-04:00

A Brit CEO Blogs: The Financial Times reports on plans by John Petter, chief executive of U.K. telecoms giant BT, to start his own blog, apparently in response to a similar move by a smaller rival, and repeats one of the most common misconceptions about blogging: “It can also be a risky strategy—if uncensored comments are allowed—that gives individual employees and customers a new level of influence over a brand.”

Blogging doesn’t give employees and customers more control, of course; it simply makes it far more difficult for a company to ignore the influence those stakeholders have. Still, kudos to Petter for taking the initiative, and to the FT for a taking a serious look at the topic.

2006-07-16T12:03:00.001-04:00

Lay’s Eulogy: Disgraced Enron chairman Ken Lay’s greater public relations triumph—dropping dead before he could rot away as he deserved in prison—continued with rapturous eulogies at his funeral.

I don’t expect much in the way of ethical seriousness from any man of the cloth, but the Rev. William Lawson, pastor emeritus at the Baptist church that Lay frequented without any apparent sense or irony, appears to be particularly challenged in terms of his understanding of right and wrong, likening the crooked Bush crony to an innocent black man who was lynched and dragged to death by a car.

“Ken Lay was neither black nor poor, as James Byrd was, but I’m angry because Ken was the victim of a lynching,” said Lawson, who “predicted that history will vindicate Lay.” That’s the kind of thing that makes me believe I believed in an afterlife, so that Lay and Lawson could one day be reunited in a warmer climate.

2006-07-16T12:03:00.000-04:00

The Much-Maligned Magnates: The Wall Street Journal carries one of its periodic complaints about the negative stereotyping of CEOs in film and television, picking up on a study by the Business & Media Institute that details the unflattering portrayal of businessmen. The study looked at the top 12 TV dramas during May and November in 2005, “ranging from crime shows like CSI to the goofy Desperate Housewives. Out of 39 episodes that featured business-related plots, the study found, 77 percent advanced a negative view of the world of commerce and its practitioners.”

The Journal makes an explicit comparison between poor, oppressed billionaire CEOs of today and the poor, oppressed minorities of the past (referencing Amos & Andy and the Frito bandito in an attempt to elicit sympathy for the downtrodden business leaders). I suppose some of their especially self-pitying readers might buy it. I’m sorry to say I don’t.

I am not for a moment suggesting that the majority of CEOs are violent criminals. But I will say that the percentage of major corporations that have been convicted of some crime over the course of their lifetime is astonishingly high compared to even the most recidivistic demographic. If they want more favorable portrayals I’d suggest they change their behavior rather than—as the Journal would apparently prefer—forming some sort of victims’ rights groups and whining to the press.

2006-07-16T12:02:00.001-04:00

Ketchum Kudos: The G8 summit has been at best a mixed success for the Russian hosts—there is only so much lipstick you can put on a pig—but Ketchum, which was brought on board to convince people of Russia’s commitment to democratic ideals, earned some kudos for a two-hour webcast in which he fielded “more than 162,000 questions ranging from when he lost his virginity to why he kissed a five-year-old boy on the stomach during a Red Square walkabout last week.” There were, of course, more serious questions about Chechnya and North Korea, and Russia’s relationship with the U.S., which can hardly have been improved by a testy exchange between Putin and President Bush.

After Bush suggested that Russia should establish a democracy with a free press and free religion, like the one the U.S. hopes to establish in Iraq, the Russian premier retorted, not unreasonably that “We certainly would not want to have the same kind of democracy as they have in Iraq, quite honestly.” Don’t suppose Ketchum scripted that zinger. (Bush’s point about a free press was later undermined by the fact that the exchange was purged from the initial White House transcript of the conversation.)

2006-07-16T12:02:00.000-04:00

Burberry Blues: If you thought Cristal had problems, spare a thought for British company Burberry, which has been adopted by the “chav” population of the U.K. as its emblematic brand. According to this Slate article, “In the United States, some brands have experienced spectacular growth after being adopted by people on the fringes of polite society (see Timberland and hip-hop). But it doesn’t quite work that way in Britain. The Financial Times noted that ‘wearing the brand became cause for exclusion from pubs, clubs and football grounds because it had become the uniform of troublemakers.’”

Things have gotten so bad, apparently, that Burberry has been forced to open stores in the Midwestern United States and market itself to middle America. Oh the indignity.