PR-Bridge

Monday starts a new semester, which along with the new year, provides a kind of rebirth for academics. There is power in this opportunity to start fresh, both meeting and teaching new students, at the same time refining and expanding on how we go about teaching them.

Living in 15-week spurts has disadvantages as well. Time goes entirely too fast. January bleeds into May, the short summer break comes, and then by the fall semester start in August, the year is basically over. The constant controlled and uncontrolled chaos of teaching pushes along at warp speed. The train is constantly moving and the destination seems a bit fuzzy. It is easy to develop a love/hate relationship with the semester clock.

Last week we lost electricity for a couple hours, just before darkness fell on our little piece of Florida. With a beautiful two-year-old daughter running around, the first instinct is to make sure she understands what is happening and, basically, does not freak out. To her, total darkness can be terrifying, so we made it a game with “magical” candles and fun sitting outside watching the stars. A few hours later, the lights came back on, and we packed up the Scion and went driving around to look at holiday lights around the neighborhood. We turned it into a great family evening.

The idea of the power outage stayed with me. My wife and I discussed how refreshing it felt without distractions, whether telephone calls or the constant blare of the TV (damn, it was nice to get a break from watching Caillou’s Xmas movie for the 1,000th time). For the first time in as long as I can remember, I actually felt decompressed. We pledged to turn everything off more often in the future in an attempt to recreate that unplugged feeling.

I realized that this conflicted feeling is similar to the way I feel about technology and teaching it to my students. On one hand, I love technology, not only working for years as a tech communicator and journalist, but exploring its power with my students, as well as the influence it will have on their careers. I think intellectual curiosity is the lynchpin of a career in communications and the constant technology evolution forces professionals to continue evolving, growing, and learning.

On the flipside, though, I hate my own addiction to technology…the gnawing feeling I get when I am not checking e-mail a million times a day; reading countless electronic newsletters, articles, journals, and essays; and trying to stay ahead of the curve on everything technology-related. When I give myself time to think about it, I know for a fact that I am spreading myself too thin, which is perpetuated by the way technology brings me closer to whatever pops into my head.

My lone attempt at fighting my own addiction is by completely repelling all technology based on cell phones. I realize that their are implications and that I am falling behind somewhat by not engaging in that arena, but there must be a stopping point.

Honestly, though, I can’t say that I use my time more wisely because I am not plugged in by cell, but I do devote some of it to the act of thinking. What I have noticed is that quiet time is virtually nonexistent in today’s society. We are so plugged in that reflection comes infrequently, if ever. Most college students cannot even walk across campus, whether a 7 a.m. or 7 p.m. without chatting away on the ubiquitous cell phone. For those of us over the age of 35, it is still unsettling to see people from a distant whose lips are moving or in the next lane over on the highway though all alone. I cannot be the only Gen Xer who gets a weird feeling in that fleeting moment before realizing that the person is on a cell phone.

Obviously, a blog is an odd place for such a technophile/technophobe confessional, but perhaps those who would read this are the most in need of thinking about the topic. These kinds of examinations are never simple and much larger than thinking about corporate America’s fascination with “work/life balance,” since technology is at the heart of the profession and unavoidable in the workplace.

More importantly, I do not think these issues should be pushed under the rug. Turnover (i.e. burnout) is a critical challenge in communications and tech-based chaos is a factor. My primary criticism is that technology should have made people more productive, thus enabling workers to work less, not more.

In fact, what happened is that technology gives management the opportunity to heap more on workers’ plates. I do not know a single communications professional who isn’t working the job of a person and a half or more. Fewer people on the payroll increases margins and profitability. Thus, the smartest, most efficient employees are given even more work, not a break from the onslaught. But, now I’m venturing onto another topic…

Getting back to the point. Technology enables us for better and worse.

I’ll admit: I am a technophile and technophobe. Are you?

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…

What is on my mind more frequently these days is the ubiquity of “branding.” For some of you, this is a “master of the obvious” topic. But at the heart of the matter, I’m not sure there is even a reason to be talking about “public relations,” “marketing,” or “advertising” anymore.

Teaching in a public relations “sequence,” however, keeps me wondering about what kind of information gets eliminated when all the professions usually lumped under the “marketing” umbrella get pushed to ”branding.” Are communicators then giving up too much power…the traditional PR “purist” argument against integration?

From a more self-centered point of view, is my personal emphasis on integration and branding helping or hindering my students? My gut and career in communications tells me that the move toward integration is critical for future success.

What are your thoughts?

The spate of bad press public relations received recently is disheartening, but accentuates the basic premise of journalist/practitioner relations — build the relationship on mutual trust and respect.

In the Anderson/Wired magazine case, he lashed out because of the number of unsolicited and irrelevant releases he received. Calling out the public relations professionals publicly (including those from many big “name” firms) may seem a bit over the top, but the it made an important point: do your homework before mass mailing yet another press release.

This lesson about building trusting relations with journalists is important for students and young professionals. Having spent more than a decade as a freelance journalist, I have seen the downside of spam e-mails. I routinely receive releases about food, travel, and other topics that I have never written about as a journalist. And, I am just a part-time freelancer…I cannot imagine the number of releases that would cascade in if I were a magazine or newspaper staffer.

Both public relations professionals and journalists realize that they need each other. Trusting relationships are fantastic and mutually beneficial. Great PR pros I have worked with while wearing my journalist hat helped illuminate stories by providing additional (key) information and access to executives. Furthermore, practitioners on both sides have seen the studies that reveal about 75 percent of the news each day comes from a PR source. We need each other, so why not build the relationship on trust?

Brian Pittman’s exclusive interview with Anderson for Bulldog Report’s Daily Dog is revealing in many aspects, particularly for students and young professionals. Anderson talks about his own use of PR at Conde Nast:

“Condé Nast employs hundreds of PR people. I have PR people on my own staff. We believe in PR. We spend a lot of money on it. Some of our best employees’ functions are driven by PR. In fact, we’re changing the game internally here by using what we’re calling PR 2.0 to train staff to do their own marketing and outreach for their work and stories.”

So, Anderson’s criticism did not indict PR in general…it slapped sloppy practitioners who do not do their homework. Or, in other words, don’t try to build a lasting relationship with journalists at target publications.

Anderson’s “tips” for pitching are just about textbook, as well as the challenges. I’m going to end with a long quote, because it indicates a major problem that the PR industry must address:

“Read it. Freakin’ read what you’re pitching to. I shouldn’t even have to say that. Why don’t more PR people do it? The reason pitches are inappropriate is because making them work requires reading and a real interest in the industry you’re promoting. You have to care about it. We all want emails from people who really understand what we do, why we do it, and who are sophisticated about their own industries and who can speak the language. So, I guess the tip here is to really consume the press in your areas.

I don’t think you’ll ever get a 23-year-old communications major able to talk to me about my robotics interest in the same way as the engineer who created the product. So another major tip here or area of focus for PR people should be coaching the guy in the know and plugged into the development process on how to reach out to me himself—not some entry-level PR person who doesn’t even get the product. This is facilitating, not gatekeeping. If this is the only thing we can change about PR in our lifetime, it would be enough.”

Think about the facilitator/gatekeeper analogy…Is this the Public Relations 2.0 model?

Dear Public Relations (Hiring) Professional,

Students are getting mixed messages about the state of entry-level employment in communications. While some recent articles lament the “talent drain” in communications, pointing to a need for great talent, others examine how to woo today’s college graduates, with at least an air of “you don’t understand them and they don’t understand you,” which does neither employer or potential employee any good.

I say, let’s cut to the chase. If we work together, the resulting system to pipe top students into meaning positions will make for happier employees, thus solving the first half of the retention issue. And, working with Public Relations teachers (those of us surrounded by students daily), you will get the “inside baseball” look at candidates that far surpasses what you can find surfing around MySpace or Facebook.

One does not have to look far or wide to see examples of how this works in practice. For instance, all professional sports leagues have talent scouts that work closely with coaches to identify talent. The role of coach is one that can really benefit agencies and companies. We know the work of our students intimately and can talk about their strengths and challenges at length (just as sports coaches discuss 40-yard dash times, arm strength, etc.).

The easy counter to this idea is to say that PR teachers already serve as talent managers, conducted through our personal networks. My thought is that filling the talent system would work better if formalized to some degree. [A concurrent benefit is that as a level of trust builds between professional and teacher, a dialogue opens regarding other ways to utilize the talents of each.]

A formalized system, to some degree, would also attract better students into PR programs and get them thinking about the benefits and possibilities for a career in communications earlier. For example, if students knew that the University of South Florida School of Mass Communications and Fleishman, Edelman, or other agencies had direct ties, the students entering the program work harder for the potential payoff.

So, public relations hiring professional, let’s work together. Please hire my top students!

Thanks,

Bob

The last couple sessions in my “Public Relations: Issues, Problems, Practices” class we discussed consumer relations from the perspective of companies and how professionals build brands. This is an interesting topic for a variety of reasons, including that I have heard several high-profile executives claim that PR does not even exist anymore…they see the function existing under the umbrella of “branding,” along with advertising, marketing, and other forms of communications.

The discussion spurred thoughts regarding how students could use the idea of branding in preparing themselves to go out on the job market. I urged my students to begin thinking of themselves as a brand and to build that brand in advance of the job hunt. These notions are not new, bright business minds like Dan Pink have talked about the “free agent nation” for years and how the changing idea of work transforms society. However, I see our value as teachers in bringing this kind of information to students’ attention…we have the time/inclination to interpret these ideas for them, and then give the best and the brightest the opportunity to put them into action.

There are several simple steps a student can take to build their brand. First, set up a communications-related blog. Blogging is inexpensive (free) and does two things: shows potential employers that the student has a grasp on social media and gives the student a forum for displaying how smart she is. I think students should assume that their future bosses have an expectation that the student will know more about social media than they do. However, I do not think this is the case, at least as I’ve noticed in talking to students from around the country. They know a ton about cellphones, but so little about using social media for reputation/branding.

Next, become active members of a social network, such as LinkedIn.com or MyRagan.com. LinkedIn is a general business networking site, while MyRagan is specifically built for communicators. I have a student who used LinkedIn to not only show his boss his extensive list of media contacts, but how the student himself linked to the future boss, even though they were a continent apart. A potential employee who can impress his future boss this way is going to stand out on so many levels.

Yes, these steps are extra work, which students will need to load on top of all their coursework, etc. But, the payoff exists. I have seen it already. Have you? Please share your experiences with us. If you’re a professional, let us know if this jibes with your mindset when hiring young people.

Public relations is both a profession and discipline. The field has a rich history coinciding with the birth of industrialization in the United States and the dramatic growth in mass communications technology. At its best, public relations historically served as a catalyst for openness and change. At its worst, public relations created a fog of disinformation shrouding the abusive nature of modern corporations.

Currently, the field’s history does not exist as a coherent whole, thus leaving it devoid of a sense of heritage that defines the profession’s culture. Unlike other disciplines/professions, there is little sense of pride or honor derived from understanding where the public relations came from or its overall importance in transforming American culture for more than a century.

Without a history, the field proceeds based on the fragmented experiences of individual practitioners, not the collective knowledge acquired over the past 150 years. There is a need for current professionals and students to learn from history’s successes and failures, which will help build a stronger profession overall. What is needed is an honest, well-researched history of public relations that will provide readers with insights and methods to deal with today’s (and tomorrow’s) challenges.

Robert E. Brown says, “Today, we need to ask not only when and how did public relations arise, but what really is it? Without a deeper sense of history and culture, we have no foundation on which to build better theories.” Brown sees current scholarly interpretations of PR history lacking “a passionate engagement with culture and aesthetics.” This neglect undercuts the field’s critical place in the nation’s history.¹

In most American universities, public relations majors receive virtually no information about the field from a historical perspective. Usually one lecture in a semester-long course is set aside to introduce students to the topic. In the typical “Introduction to Public Relations” course, this lecture is based on one of the poorly researched and written “The History of Public Relations” chapters in the leading textbooks. The authors attempt to boil the entire history of the field down to a whirlwind overview taking the reader from pre-Colonial history to the present in approximately 20 pages.²

In today’s textbooks, the historical chapter is not only poorly researched and written, but is ill-conceived from the start. Most authors spend a significant part of the chapter building PR’s history on propaganda/press agentry roots that should not be part of the field’s history. These writers mistakenly place publicity under the umbrella of public relations. Publicity, however, is a separate field. (The same holds true of political “Spin Doctors” who exist on ammunition of distortion and lies.)

A new history of public relations must shake publicity from PR’s coattails by redefining what public relations is and has been in modern American history. By looking at the broader societal aspects of PR, the project places the field within American business, cultural, and political history and gives it a legitimacy that it currently does not possess.

Another aim is to provide the field with a supplemental text for introductory and advanced public relations courses that more fully explains PR’s rich history. The history is not hagiographic, nor is it completely evil, but it is entirely necessary. A robust PR history will strengthen the drive toward establishing PR theory, because theory must be grounded in history.

What is required of a new history of public Relations? First, the study draws from multi-archival primary sources, interviews with leading practitioners, and the existing secondary research. The work builds strong ties to affiliated fields such as business history, economics, popular culture, political science, and labor history. The project applies intellectual rigor necessary for compelling interpretations of the subject and its wider importance. What is also a necessity is capturing the collective knowledge of industry leaders, like Fleishman-Hillard’s John Graham, Edelman’s Richard Edelman, and others of this echelon.

Because the history of public relations has been neglected, sensationalist interpretations gained a footing without real counterbalance. For example, the two most prominent recent trade books about public relations are harangues against the field, emphasizing the role of Edward L. Bernays as “the father of public relations.”³ Bernays is an easy target for these writers, particularly since many of the most famous incidents in his career were actually publicity stunts.

The only favorable book-length history of the field is little more than a narrative listing of episodes in the profession’s history (including publicity) from the seventeenth century to early twentieth century. The book is rarely used by public relations professors and made little impact on the broader historical field.⁴

In the end, a new history of public relations should be accessible and a learning tool for students, professionals, and academics. Without such a history, public relations will continue its current state – beating itself up over questions of whether or not CEOs allow professionals “at the table” and which academic theory best interprets the discipline.

ENDNOTES
1. Robert E. Brown, “Myth of Symmetry: Public Relations as Cultural Styles,” Public Relations Review 32 (2006) p. 206; 212.

2. For example, see Don Lattimore, Otis Baskin, et al. Public Relations: The Profession and the Practice. 4^th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004), pp. 20-40.

3. Larry Tye, The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations. (New York: Crown, 1998); Stuart Ewen, PR! A Social History of Spin. (New York: Basic, 1998).

4. Scott Cutlip, Public Relations History: From the 17^th to the 20^th Century. The Antecedents. (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994).