Chevron’s Aggressive PR Challenge - ‘buying’ bloggers?

Chevron is throwing down the gauntlet - conducting a bare knuckle PR campaign the likes of which we have rarely seen. At stake is a $27 billion judgement in an Ecuadorian court that, if leveled (a decision is expected this year), and if it sticks (it is not clear if an Ecuadorian court can extract payment from an American company with no current operations in its country), would be the largest environmental lawsuit in history.

Such a judgement could severely hamper Chevron and impact its stock. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is demanding a full accounting from Chevron (the state, through pension funds, is a shareholder). Dozens of blogs and web sites are devoted to slamming the company and generating a consistent stream of negative news -  including accusing the company of buying off bloggers. Chevron is aggressively fighting back.

Anybody who does not believe that high-profile civil cases are fought as much through PR as they are in the courtroom should study the Chevron case.

The latest flame-up in this story was the May 3, 2009, ‘60 Minutes’ segment titled Amazon Crude. Silvia M. Garrigo, Manager, Global Issues and Policy for Chevron, was in the unenviable position of facing the 60 Minutes grilling from Scott Pelley. Garrigo’s performance on ‘60 Minutes’ was ridiculed by many anti-Chevron groups although, from my perspective, she is a strong and credible advocate for her client.

Chevron responded to 60 Minutes by hiring former CNN correspondent  Gene Randall to narrate a ‘News” report that tells the story from its perspective. The video, Chevron Texaco Ecuador Lawsuit - Behind the Scenes, is on YouTube and a company web site devoted to the case.

Smack in the middle is a blogger called Zennie62, who, ChevronToxicoclaims, is a paid shill for Chevron. ChevronToxico offers no proof and Zennie Abraham, the blogger, does not confirm or deny payments in his blog posts. He posts prodigiously about the case and seems to have a wealth of information that would only be available to an insider. His blog posts and YouTube videos rank high in Google searches on keywords Chevron, Texaco (acquired by Chevron), and Ecuador.  Daryl Hannah, right, visiting environmental disaster site in Ecuador.

In 2008, Amazon Watch disclosed that Bay Area blogger Pat Murphy was a paid to post pro-Chevron comments on the Ecuador case in his small online newspaper.  Murphy has publicly acknowledged he accepted fees for control of editorial content, according to Amazon Watch.

Chevron’s Garrigo has acknowledged that this is a PR battle. The company claims that it cannot get a fair trial in Ecuador and they seek to sway public opinion in the U.S. if the case is brought here. This is not a ‘cut and dry’ case, despite the entrenched certainty of the opposing forces. There is plenty of villainy to go around. The Ecuadorian government has an atrocious environmental record - the big U.S. oil company is an easy target that reaps enormous political benefit, even if they don’t realize a dime from the lawsuit.

 “Paying so-called independent bloggers to post is just one part of a wide-ranging fraud designed by Chevron to cover up the company’s enormous exposure in Ecuador,” said Prieto. Prieto said Samson, Chevron’s public relations director, has built an “empire” of consultants in the U.S. and Ecuador to put out misleading information about the case.  Chevron’s environmental problems in Ecuador have become the company’s largest worldwide public relations problem. Samson has retained the New York office of the global public relations behemoth Hill & Knowlton — the same firm that represented the tobacco industry for decades– to manage Chevron’s image problems stemming from the Ecuador case. Chevron P.R. Director Donald Samson Behind Secret Payments to Bloggers to Hide Ecuador Liability

Hyper Local Talk #1

How do you get down in the fabric of the local community? How do you influence from the real grassroots, one-to-one? These are questions that rack the brains of marketers these days. The Internet is the great distribution pipe marketers and PR people could only dream about.  But hyper local marketing requires an authentic voice, tangible action that benefits the local community and most dauntingly, it requires time and patience.

An example of hyper local marketing that works. I live in Washington Heights on the upper west side of Manhattan.  On the corner of 157th street and Broadway I pick up a free copy of Manhattan Times from the box by the subway station. Washington Heights is predominately Latino with a heavy Dominican concentration, along with a growing minority of professional whites determined to gentrify every square inch of this island. This is heavy duty Hillary Clinton country and Manhattan Times is unabashed in its support of our Junior Senator.  

So in the Manhattan Times I learn about the Bizz&Buzz campaign . It started in 2007 to promote activities in Washington Heights and Inwood.  Says the Manhattan Times site: The campaign includes special events, a regular email blast of upcoming events, and the paper’s weekly “Shhhh!” column, which reminds readers of the business openings, celebrity spottings, and media attention in Northern Manhattan, the city’s best kept secret.

So I get on the weekly Bizz&Buzz email list, which alerts me to Annette A. Aguilar & the StringBeans performing Latin jazz at the Garden Cafe on 207th street and Braodway on Valentine’s eve. I never heard of the band or the club but I had been sweating to find the right place to take my sweetie on the special day. Bizz&Buzz only has 362 subscribers. If it is confined to two neighborhoods by nature it will not grow too big. But it is the arrow in the bullseyes when it comes to hyper local marketing combining traditional (newspaper) and 2.0 (web and email marketing).

Google goes local.  Type in your city or town name or zip code and you get news results with your local news at the top of the search. Google says that this promotes local news sources but I suspect it also helps them target ads more effectively.  

Richard Prince, the Guggenheim, annoying

Annoying Communication:  You’re in the Guggenheim, digging the permanent collection - all the heavyweights Picasso (some stunners, especially from the early years), Cezanne, Degas, Kandinsky, Rousseau, Rothko, Koons - after doing the marble down the chute bit of the Gugg for the master show on Richard Prince that’s closing in a few days. Richard Prince was a great show for the space, expansive, allowing for a natural upward progression of his development. The cowboys and bikers and nurses the other connected Tribes of Prince’s mind get spaces of their own, along with the enormous quips and cocktail napkin jokes that keep you off balance and keeps the audience (it’s that kind of show) laughing.  You are not contemplating the bust of Homer here, you are singular and invincible, facing the open western spaces with the Marlboro man, conjuring iamges of the highway ticking off highline poles on the road to freedom, the destination that is always someplace else. Read Peter Schjeldahl’s bitchy review in The New Yorker. or Roberta Smith’s kinder and more instructive piece in The New York Times.

Anyway, I am digging the permanent collection when one of the new “Guides” they have wandering the Gugg comes up to me and says “I see that you are looking at the art.” Considering the smart aleck Prince show fresh in my mind two possible responses popped into my head.

• Really? Because I am in a museum shuffling around the periphery looking at the objects on the wall. Is that the clue?
• No, I am actually trying to catch the M86 bus. Is this a stop?

He was persistent, this Guide. He was about half my age. “What is it about this painting that you like?” he asked, trying to prompt a discussion about art. It was his job, he said. “Everything,” I said. Undeterred, he dug deeper. On it went until he got me talking color and composition and all that. It was Cezanne, the beautiful French countryside. “Maybe it is so good because it was painted outdoors,” he said. I could have said, “Really? Imagine painting the outdoors from the outdoors. What innovation! Ah, the French.”

Coolhunting Totally Transparent PR

I have been on to these Coolhunting guys for a couple of months, since they started the Swarm Creativity Blog in  a marketing push to support their new book “Coolhunting - Chasing Down the Next Big Thing” . Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper, co-authors of the book, were members of a live online Coolhunt for a month, ending in May, and logged it on the Swarm blog.

These are cool characters. Gloor studies Collaborative Innovation Networks at MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence, develops networking and data visualization software, and wrote “Swarm Creativity – Competitive Advantage through Collaborative Innovation Networks”. Cooper is a writer and a research affiliate at the MIT Sloan School. 

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They Kill Cats, Don’t They?

First off, Mr. D is going to make it.  For those who did not follow the first PRBlogNews post on the pet food recall, Mr. Darcy is a eight year old Maine Coon who weighed 17 pounds.  He stopped eating and grew jaundiced (you can tell by the inside of his ears and mouth) and showed all the symptoms of being afflicted with the killer pet food (see Pet food recall continues to widen, Reuters, 4/20). He dropped to eight pounds and the vet was not at all sure if he would make it. His chances were 50/50 at best.

We had a feeding tube inserted but he would vomit his food. The tube came out and he had to go under anesthesia to have another inserted. He stopped breathing during the procedure. Then he came back. The area around his tube grew infected and he was raspy with a hint of pneumonia. He recovered from that. Vet bill: $2,400. We figured Mr. D used up three of his lives; he has six left.

All this is by way of saying that IAMS makes a stupendous blunder in its full page ad in the “A” section of The New York Times today. The ad is wordy and pointless on an orange background that is difficult to read. There is not one picture or graphic in the ad. The last thing mentioned is the web site.

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Anatomy of a Blogspat

When you look from space you see flare ups across the earth, weather systems, lightning, fires. The skies are always in motion and the earth is revolving. The same with the blogosphere. Little flare ups across the globe sometimes lead to bigger questions, resolutions, or all out war.  This keyboard I am typing on is merely the hardware, emotion still goes into it and that can make blogspats downright ugly. The Kathy Sierra fiasco (read Strumpette’s excellent dissection) is like the O.J. Simpson of blogspats. As ugly and bizarre and sensationalist as you can get in a virtual world. Then there are the little schoolyard brawls that are constantly brewing – like the one I inadvertently (or intentionally?) kicked off here last week.

Rosen says Mark Rose is a clown

There it is, Jay, that’s the headline you wanted to see here to counter the headline to the post I wrote on your presentation at the New York Social Media Club last week. See post: Jay Rosen - I Can Do Whatever The F%#k I Want

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Jay Rosen - I Can Do Whatever The F@#k I Want

“I am a tenured professor of journalism, I can do whatever the fuck I want,” said Jay Rosen (right), NYU tenured professor of journalism. Rosen was speaking at the New York Social Media Club meeting, at Edelman Worldwide New York headquarters, last Tuesday.  

Rosen was explaining why mainstream media would never undertake his current project of “Pro-Am” journalism fittingly called  Assignment Zero. The schtick is to combine ”citizen journalists” and “professional” journalists to collaborate on a giant, evolving story.  Rosen says he already has 700 people signed up for the project, nearly triple what they expected. Every edit, thought, revision is recorded on the web. All this is intended to prove … ?

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The Revolution According to Richard

Coming next Monday, April 2, in-depth interview with Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman Worldwide, the world’s largest independent public relations firm.

Edelman’s Me2Revolution is the big first mover and widely acknowledged PR agency leader in “social media” (we’ll call it that until a better term evolves). The Me2Revolution has been a semi-secretive skunk works that has taken serious hits for questionable blog practices for clients Wal-Mart and Microsoft.  I have been a consistent critic - on this blog, other blogs, and Edelman blogs - of Edelman’s silence and ineffective PR on its own behalf for the past year as its social media practices were scrutinized in high-profile mainstream media. Suddenly but inexorably, the ground shifted. Edelman became the story, overshadowing its clients. And the longer it was silent, or not fully forthcoming, the more we wanted to know.

There are other reasons to delve into Edelman’s Me2Revolution. PR agencies are anxious to get a piece of the “social media” pie if they can figure out what it is, how to measure it, and how to bill it.  This is like catching water in a collander as blogs, MySpace, YouTube, Second Life, Twitter and other community enhancing applications rise in favor and then fall off the cliff.  How do you build a foundation in social media when the Internet is an inherently transitory, ethereal place that can blow back and burn you in a flash?  

The catalyst for this interview was a blog spat. I wrote an appreciation of Strumpette that included Amanda Chapel’s evisceration of Me2Revolution and a prediction of its imminent demise. Richard took exception in a comment on this blog and insisted I check with him in the future before posting on the topic. Fine, I said, set the record straight with a Q & A here. 

The groundrules for the Q & A were simple: I ask tough questions, Edelman gives straight answers.  No prerequisites, no topic off limits. I asked Richard’s toughest critics for advice on topics to explore. I gave him seven multi-part questions and encouraged him to expand as much as he could with specifics (understanding that his competitors would like to know everything) and anecdotes.

This is an exciting and difficult time for the public relations industry. New media/social media is demanding that we alter our traditional practices to account for a new media landscape and consumers who are increasingly used to information unimpeded. We want access, we want answers, and the more bull that is fed through the Internet the less likely we are to accept it. Some question whether or not PR should even be in the social media space, and if our efforts here skirt some ethical boundaries.

“The most difficult barrier to entry for established agencies is the mental shift from talking from a set of messages to relating in a continuous dialogue. We must move from selling to listening then speaking,” says Edelman. Tune in next Monday for the full interview. Between now and then we will be examining some of the current social media public relations practices being espoused at Edelman and elsewhere. 

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