PR-Bridge

The New Year is nearly here, which gets me thinking about what tips, tricks, networks, and newsletters students (and professionals) should be utilizing. This list is by no means exhaustive, rather a couple places I feel students may benefit from accessing.

Networks:

Linkedin – Linkedin is the hot social network for business professionals right now. Rumors also have it as a key acquisition of several larger social networks, including Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace. According to the site, Linkedin membership tops 16 million and represents 150 industries. Simply a must in today’s environment, particularly for job seekers.

MyRagan (www.myragan.com) is a newish social networking site dedicated to communications professionals. I have been a member for awhile and love the vast amounts of information available on the site. However, its actual social networking aspects is not as robust as you will find on the larger sites. As the site continues to grow, though, this may increase. And, as always, what you get out of these sites is about equal to what you put in. I have not been an overtly active member.

Newsletters:

MediaPost Publications offers a wealth of informative newsletters, delivered daily to your inbox. The selection covers everything from metrics to gaming and a variety of marketing topics. My personal favs are Marketing Daily, MediaDailyNews, and Around the Net.

Bulldog Reporter/Daily Dog is the one-stop for all things public relations. It is a key resource for anyone who wants to keep up with the current state of the field. From case studies to op-eds, the Daily Dog provides thought-provoking information from working professionals.

Ragan’s Daily Headlines is another great source of information from the Ragan Communications group. I am a huge fan of Ragan, which provides communicators with a ton of useful, insightful information.

Tips:

Ned’s Job of the Week – Searching for a job or just trying to stay updated on the state of hiring in the industry, then Ned Lundquist’s site and weekly e-mail newsletter of new positions is for you. Ned is a phenomenal guy who provides an invaluable resource to the countless numbers of professionals employed due to his willingness to help. Join his community and you will have a network of nearly 10,000 communicators at your door.

Here are the simple directions: To subscribe for free, send a blank e-mail to JOTW-subscribe@topica.com.

Tricks:

PRSA provides a wealth of information for free, including articles from its award-winning publications at Tactics and Strategist Online. Searching its archives and Silver Anvil winners database costs non-members money, but for those of you who are members, these are priceless resources.

Craigslist – If you are interested in working in a large city, then use Craigslist in your job search and hunt for a place to live. One of my students recently decided to move to Washington DC. She has a job lined up, but nowhere to live. We looked under shared housing on Craigslist and found about 300 in one day’s worth of listings.

I would like to thank Karen Miller Russell for featuring me as a ”Meet the Teacher” profile at Teaching PR. Please direct any comments, questions, or thoughts my way at your convenience. And…happy holidays!

Here’s the direct link: http://teachingpr.blogspot.com/2007/12/meet-teacher-bob-batchelor.html

Dear Bill,

Your post on public relations and marketing is compelling. Upfront, I admit that I am in complete disagreement. I teach from an IMC perspective and believe that students who are PR “purists” or who learn from that point of view are entering the workforce at a disadvantage.

Based on my own decade-long career as a “communicator” (rather than PR and/or Marketing label) at companies like Ernst & Young, Fleishman-Hillard, and Bank of America, and my own teaching, I don’t see how PR can be “on board” in one sense, as you say, “support[ing] the marketing effort,” then out of the equation in another.

From my perspective, the breakdown is separating marketing and PR into silos within an organization, rather than looking at them from a truly integrated viewpoint. It is not about which branch will “dominate the partnership,” but building a single organizational point of view (Management by Objectives) that places the needs of the company/organization ahead of differences between marketing and PR.

Communications management, using a centralized view, then focuses on aligning all an organization’s efforts toward mutual ends. Thus, a PR professional may use her skills best in an internal communications setting, developing an intranet content system or designing a better employee-based newsletter, while at the same time, a marketer is doing product development work or presenting at a trade conference, but BOTH are working off the central plan set out in a MBO setting.

I am also not sure that the two-way symmetrical model is important enough to criticize marketing, just because they do not preach the same jargon. Grunig’s two-way model, like his (and his co-authors’) so-called “Excellence Theory” is filled with logical holes.

And, is it unrealistic to think that public relations practitioners can (or should) “walk a fine line between organizational goals and goals of society – kind of like an ombudsman or arbiter?” PR professionals are a part of this organizational conscious, but so are all other employees across the organizational chart. We could call into question how business schools and universities in general teach ethics, just as we are questioning the role of PR courses.

By labeling marketing “our evil twins” and using language like “surreptitious selling,” “infiltrate influencer groups,” and “the sell job,” you are guiding readers to see sales as a negative. I do not see companies and organizations selling products as an automatic bad thing.

Where I completely agree with you is in how the problem of misunderstanding PR begins. At the University of South Florida, we require students to take Economics, Management, and Marketing courses, and many minor in Business. However, because of admission requirements to get into the School of

Mass Communications, business students cannot get into our classes. However, I think the challenge runs deeper. Marketing professors, business school deans, etc., have no real interest in adding PR to their curriculum. So, future execs are getting their knowledge of public relations from a part of a chapter in a marketing textbook. All the sudden, they think they understand the profession. Obviously, the number of PR crises that occur daily show this isn’t the case.

And, I do not throw all the blame on business schools or scholars. As a profession,  public relations has a long history of doing little or nothing toward getting these distinctions softened. After all these years, there are still arguments about the true definition of PR, like that matters in the bigger picture.

You wonder if you are “fighting a war of semantics” at the end of your post. I think you are correct in questioning the relationship between the two disciplines. I just see the battle differently. What we should be fighting for is to get public relations into business schools.

The PR profession also needs to be a part of this effort, initiating a communications campaign to reeducate the public about the field and its historical and current benefits. It’s all our concern (and fault, perhaps?) if people assume that PR is nothing more than pimping the Hiltons and rap stars of the world.

Respectfully yours,

Bob

Communicators are taught that it is not “if” a crisis happens, it is “when.” As a result, a response plan needs to be in place. In today’s 24/7 media environment, crises are bigger stories than in the past and disseminated faster. And, believe it or not, some flames are fueled by the media into even larger proportions.

A CEO sticking his foot in his mouth and responding in anger to criticism is not new. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is another in a long line who displayed poor judgment when facing an unwelcome spotlight.

How should Facebook execs respond to recent criticisms by Fortune magazine’s David Kirkpatrick and Josh Quittner? Are the concerns of these influential writers simply too “inside baseball” for the site’s users and the wider public to even care? I’m wondering if the disconnect between their criticisms and Facebook users is real or sensationalized by the press to generate a story. If so, what do communicators do to deal with the resulting consequences?

Let’s take a look at some of the language Quittner uses, for example, to discuss Facebook’s challenges. On his Fortune “Techland” blog, Quittner used the title: “RIP Facebook?” Here is his lead:

“A lot of people say that Facebook has jumped the shark. That’s flat out wrong. In fact, Facebook is now being devoured by the shark. There’s so much blood in the water, it’s attracting other sharks. And if Facebook’s not careful, one of them is bound to come along and finish it off. I’ve never seen anything like it in the annals of fast-rising tech companies that fail.”

He qualifies the lead with the “a lot of people say” phrase, but it is pretty clear that he is leading readers to agree. In essence, Quittner is saying, people say this really bad thing, it’s actually much worse, and I’ve actually never seen anything worse. Sounds a bit overly-dramatic doesn’t it? Among the thousands of Web companies that failed during the dot.com crash, Quittner’s never seen anything worse? Hey Josh, remember Webvan?

Quittner’s second paragraph:

“The really weird part of this story is that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with Facebook. It works as well as it ever has, and many of the people who use it (my kids for instance) are unaware of the worsening situation about its privacy-invading Beacon social ads scheme that tracks people’s web-surfing habits even when they’re not on the site. That’s bound to change. The market is fickle, something better is in the wings, and as soon as it arrives, the alienated and angry mob will race to it. Delphi’s errors begat Prodigy and its errors begat AOL, which was crushed by the Web.”

Reading just these two paragraphs, it struck me that Quittner could have easily led with the second paragraph, which would have been closer to the story he outlined. However, the doom and gloom of the lead gave it that little negative angle that journalists use to get the reader’s attention (perhaps if we replaced “attention” with “publicity” we would be even closer to the truth for using such language, but as a PR professional, I certainly wouldn’t want to publicly call out a journalist for self-promotion, would I?).

Anybody thrown by the “many” in the second paragraph? He equates Facebook’s users to his kids (without identifying their ages) in an attempt at disparaging the company:  “many of the people who use it (my kids for instance) are unaware of the worsening situation…”

Another shocking aspect of Quittner’s complaint, to me, is that he blames Facebook’s troubles on bad PR:

“What’s harming Facebook - perhaps to a terminal degree - is enormously bad PR. For a social media company, these folks don’t understand the first thing about communication; they have alienated the press by being arrogant, aloof and dishonest. Their idea of press relations is sending a stupid message to a What’s New at Facebook Group that directs you to another website for a canned statement.”

Calling out Facebook’s “enormously bad PR” is legitimate. A company as powerful as Facebook in the Web 2.0 world certainly should be on top of its game in terms of communications. However, is this another case of PR playing the role of easy target?

PR is playing whipping boy, which seems to be a favorite game of journalists lately, including the infamous Chris Anderson outing of those he labels as bad practitioners.

The problem I have with Quittner’s post blaming PR for Facebook’s current troubles is the air of superiority he takes (surprise, surprise), which those in communications are used to getting from journalists, and the insinuation that it is PR “folks” who “don’t understand the first thing about communication,” basically indicting the entire industry in one fell swoop.

In response, Quittner’s using loaded language, certainly designed to generate publicity for the blog/magazine. There are countless reasons that Facebook might fail, but it’s laughable to believe “that it has no one in its corner that anyone in the media trusts,” thus doomed to history’s dustbin. So, don’t worry about the 57 million Facebook users…move over sock puppet, make room for Zuckerberg. Sure…