Fortified in Houston

Public affairs conference on Marcellus Shale reinforces core beliefs of public relations

This week offered a rare opportunity for me to speak in front of 120 public affairs professionals drawn from top energy firms from across the country. The topic was Marcellus Shale, an issue near and dear to my heart and of great controversy here in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

More important than what I said, is what I heard from other speakers, all top minds in the industry. Their messages fortified me in many ways, because all too often I find myself defending the power and purpose of public relations.

Yet, there in Houston, surrounded by many whose job it is to provide voice and balance to an industry habitually under fire, I walked away re-energized in delivering the message to clients large and small. Here's just a sampling of what I heard:

1. The need for enterprises to tell their story and control their narratives has never been greater. It was said time and again, in ways big and small. If an organization isn't telling its story, its competitors, antagonists, and opponents are doing it for them. In other words, as one speaker summed it up, "If you don't have a seat at the table, someone else is eating your lunch."

Four more key skills for PR pros in 2011

I can't believe the number of people who contacted me about my post on key skills for PR pros. Kristin Jones, a fellow PR practitioner, took the time to comment and relate a couple of additional key skills. Thanks, Kristin. Great insights.

But as I mentioned in that post, I only gave six of the 10 skills, hoping that I could lure you back to read the additional four. So here are the four additional skills a new PR person needs to develop to make it in our industry.

7. An ability to balance tactical with strategic. This is perhaps the most important skill of all to gain for a new PR professional. It requires mastering the writing and media skills needed to land clients high-profile coverage. But it also demands an ability to determine the client's real business objectives and deliver on their needs -- all of which vary greatly. PR is not simply a game of gaining the most possible visibility for a client. Rather, it's the science of delivering the results that hold the greatest marginal value for a client. That requires an ability to empathize with the client, understand their real goals, and then create a plan that achieves those goals. It's no small undertaking.

So what becomes of the Old Spice Guy?

I guess our jobs just got a whole lot harder, and rightly so. The recent success of the Old Spice Guy's social media campaign illustrates just how much the world has changed, and how the integration of social media and advertising works to build impact and sales.

The numbers alone are awe-inspiring. Sales of Old Spice body wash products spiked 107 percent in the last month, and the customized video responses from our guy, actor Isaiah Mustafa, have now outreached traditional broadcast TV, becoming some of the fastest videos ever to go viral on the Internet.

Inspired was the campaign, which integrated advertising and social media, and sets the bar high indeed for future marketing efforts. Mustafa's bombast, coupled with personalized responses to tweets and YouTube comments, including one marriage proposal, gave the campaign just enough camp so as not to insult Internet sensibilities, while obviously reaching the product's target audience of young, college-age men.

Even before P&G announced its sales figures from the campaign, I still thought the campaign worked on many levels, and argued so here at Gregory FCA. Increased sales is always the objective. But even before the numbers were announced, the campaign was a winner as part of any effort to re-energize the brand, excite a stale sales effort, win more shelf space at retail, and excite buyers at major chains by demonstrating an ability to create awareness on a national basis.

But now comes the really tough part: extending the lifetime of the campaign so as not to be relegated to one-hit wonder status. No doubt the minds at P&G are already busy at work figuring out what to do with this gorilla who happily sits in their room.

Interestingly, there are already signs that the impact is waning, an all-too-real fact of life in the short-cycle world of social media. A quick study we conducted using the Nielsen BuzzMetrics brand monitoring and analytics platform shows that chattter about the campaign is falling faster than an anchor in choppy seas. Just take a look at the graphs below. (You can click to enlarge.)

The media are not our friends

As PR practitioners, we often fall into the trap of believing that relationships trump all, and that by being open and transparent with the media, we stand the best chance of winning favorable coverage. But underneath it all, the media's agenda is vastly different than our own.

Reporters are rarely promoted or rewarded for writing a positive story about a business, person, or politician. Rather, their own success often depends on exposing the negative, uncovering the wrong, and seeing the opposite in what is projected by the world.

Good thing, too. Without that skepticism, the value of public relations would be forever diminished. It's only through the prism of objectivity that media coverage gains its power. This is precisely why the consuming public values media more than marketing. A reporter's scrutiny confers believability. Skepticism portrays the reality of the world, and plays more authentically to the audience.

That's often not easy for clients to understand. A few years ago, I worked with a financial services company that was profiled in The Wall Street Journal. The story was positive in every way, except for a quote from an outside analyst the reporter turned to for a counterpoint. The client went ballistic, claiming that the entire article had been impugned.

I took up the fight and explained that quite to the contrary, it was the counterpoint that gave the article its weight and legitimacy. By finding a negative, the reporter did us the favor of demonstrating objectivity, and conferred a degree of credibility we never could have achieved through simple advertising.

The client never agreed with me. We went our separate ways. Philosophically we never connected on the real power of PR as more than just a tool for exposure, but rather a vehicle for credibility in a world full of illegitimacy.

So in a world where the media are not our friends, we as PR professionals need to act accordingly, remembering:

A client's interest trumps a media relationship. A dirty little secret of PR is that many practitioners would rather error on the side of the client, rather than alienate a media contact. But the media are big boys and girls. They understand the dance we enter into, and have short memories when you enter the arena as a worthy adversary.

No comment is sometimes the best response. It's become a tired refrain in PR to never say "no comment." Too often, that counsel comes from PR people who simply don't want to alienate a media contact who they might need in the future. After decades of high-risk crisis work, I have come to realize that no comment often does more to protect the interests of a client than some half-baked empty response that nibbles at the corners of liability. No further comment.

The media love no one. This is why Gen. Stanley McChrystal got tattooed last week. He believed that if he could just bring the reporter into his world, and share with him the blood and guts (and finger-pointing) of war, the coverage would be favorable. The big egos often fall into this trap. You see it all the time in sports. Athletes believe they're beloved by the media, and then can't understand when the media turns on them. Tiger Woods fell victim when, during his press conference, he attacked the media for stalking him and his family. In reality, Tiger was devastated to realize that the media never loved him. He was just a story. When access was easy, the storytelling was favorable. When it became difficult, they did what they had to do to get the story. They didn't love him. Never did.

Manage the negativity, but don't discount it. I have used 101 techniques in my day to prevent the negative from being exposed by the media. Heck, I once holed up a Santa Clause in a hotel after he was accosted and the media wanted to report on crime in my client's mall. But important stories have two sides. It's the presentation of both sides that comforts the audience and opens them to a more worthy perspective.

Five fundamentals of public relations that still hold true

Last week was an exciting one here at Gregory FCA. We deployed teams of professionals to media events throughout the country to handle a number of client programs. Friday's end-of-week debrief meeting was pretty intense with everyone sharing what worked and what didn't out in the field.

As teams presented, I realized that the more things change in public relations, the more things stay the same and some fundamentals always hold true. Certainly in the context of live events, social media tools and tactics can easily be leveraged with traditional strategies to amplify the PR effort. And at all our events, our teams were tweeting and posting photos to Flickr and videos to YouTube. But still, a few immutable fundamentals of PR held true, they being:

Media watching TV on Mitsubishi's new 3-D sets

1. Media events still work. In New York, we pulled off a major coup for our client, Mitsubishi Digital Electronics America, by managing their media day (actually two days) to showcase their new line-up of 2010 TVs. Even in this day of social media, when some PR practitioners contend that face-to-face is dead, the turnout was unbelievable. Some 60 media people stopped in to learn more about what's new in TVs. They attended because no matter how mediated communications has become, nothing replaces face time with the media to fully explain a product, technology, direction, or opinion.

2. Satellite media tours are effective for consumer products. We completed one last week for a client that produces a dental sterilization product, and used Hershey Park as the backdrop. The theme, summer travel tips for moms, was ideally timed to summer travel. And the resulting media coverage on TV and radio amounted to placements in well over 100 outlets nationwide, when you factor in the number of syndicated media points that took the feed.

3. Relationships still matter. There was a time when public relations was conducted over lunch between a reporter and a PR person. No one has time for lunch anymore. Yet relationships still matter. By leveraging our combined relationships drawn from everyone in the firm, we vastly increased our footprint. For instance, one senior AE leveraged a five-year-old relationship to entice "Entertainment Tonight" to attend a media event. Treat the media right over the years, and they will reciprocate.

4. Research and product knowledge are keys to telling bright-line stories. For every story, we squeezed as much fact as possible out of the topic to win coverage. For instance, for our New York event, our account team learned everything possible about 3-D TV in order to explain the technology to reporters from media as diverse as Broadcast Engineering to Rolling Stone magazine. By being able to talk the talk, the media realized that this was a can't-miss event that demanded their attendance.

5. Follow-up is key. One e-mail is not a PR campaign. A news release is often akin to a tree falling in the forest. What works best is constant follow-up to ensure that the news was received, that the event was explained, that attendance is required, and that subsequent stories appear.

So even as the sands of public relations shift under our feet, the fundamentals of our business remain the same. A week-long series of media events proved that point, and won media coverage around the country, all secured the old fashioned way -- earned.