PR/Media Week in Review 04-19-2009

Quick takes on a beautiful NYC Sunday. The magnolia blooms are peaking.  

The Domino’s fiasco dominated PR news last week as a couple of dweebs in a local pizza pit dramatized every body’s worst nightmare about fast food kitchens. Letterman or Jon Stewart couldn’t do a better parody of how to bomb a company with a YouTube video. The PR lessons from this will be amusing and possibly instructive, and you have to wonder how Domino’s can right its public image without addressing its core business. How much can PR gloss over cold greasy pizza?

In a hotel room in Richmond, VA, last Friday I caught the sorry spectacle of Ashton Kutcher spinning his 1M Twitter milestoneon Larry King like an entrepreneur with a new ice cream cone. Then P. Diddy joined him waxing about his deepness, his soul, his “Twitter DNA,” that gets zapped out to 800,000 or so followers in 140 characters or less. Finally, communication that doesn’t involve actual writing, where you can infiltrate 1 M Twitter minds with barely 15 seconds of sweat. If you don’t have to write, then you don’t have to think, and thinking is, you know, tiring and, you know, frustrating.  That’s why bloggers are abandoning their blogs in droves for the more efficient, less taxing Twitter, thus validating our worst impression of most bloggers.  See CNN Buys Twitter Account. Touring the historic areas of Richmond, VA, where Abraham Lincoln walked in to the capitol of the Confederacy, April 5, 1865, I wondered: isn’t the Gettysburg Address, with its taut, precise prose, its brevity - isn’t it perfect Twitter material? Would Lincoln Twitter if Lincoln could Twitter? Or, would he reject the Twitter Twaddle and the obvious manipulations of the Celeb Twitterati? 

Holy Tweeters: Church promotes social media during sermon. Leaders of a Charlotte North Carolina-area church told members to bring their phones and data devices to Church and Twitter during services. “We want to leverage everything that happens technologically in our culture to bring people closer to God and to each other,” said the Pastor, who also pointed out that “we have a real desire we have in our culture and in our city for a human connection.” Twitter brings you closer to God?

Barack Obama’s first 100 days are coming up April 29 and the stories are already cranking. See Reuters timeline and supporting text and photos. Obama is a news magnet, charismatic, quotable, and his communication agenda is unprecedented and revolutionary.  How do you support our continuing experiment in democracy with digital PR skills? See Communication, Transparency, Participation.

A big thank you to everybody at VCU Mass Communications and the students who came from several surrounding areas to PROmoting Success, Saturday, April 18, organized by the VCU PRSSA.  More on this in the next couple of days.

 Web Video of the week

Communication, Transparency, Participation

Those are the three by-words of Barack Obama’s PPR (Presidential PR) strategy.

Precisely the minute Barack Obama was sworn is as the 44th President of the United States (noon, Jan 20, 2009), Macon Phillips (left), Director of New Media for the White House, published his first blog post, titled Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov.

“President Obama has committed to making his administration the most open and transparent in history,” wrote Phillips.

Communication is the easy part. In the blog/twitter/text era anybody can ‘communicate’ with virtually anybody (but are they listening?). Transparency can be faked or at least the law can be complied with and a public display of ‘transparency’ can lead to the appearance of open government (an improvement over the previous administration).

The most difficult element of this new communication equation is ‘participation.’  To foster citizen involvement in the federal government Phillips announced in his first blog post that “we will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it.”

It didn’t quite work out that way. The Washington Post  reported that the Obama administration did not heed its own mandate on recent legislation.  Of course, running a new media program to reach and engage 380 million Americans is a huge and seemingly impossible task (trying doing it with an organization of a few hundred with a few thousand constituents). They have run into technical issues, as reported in the Washington Post, and you have to wonder - is anybody really reading 5,000 character comments on pending non-emergency legislation, or is this simply a futile exercise in mass venting for the appearance of ‘participation’?

The White House YouTube channel currently has over 30,000 subscribers. The quality of the videos is excellent and they are nicely segmented into easy to search categories. The main White House social media communication channel is WhiteHouse.gov, a blog, or rather a blog portal that leads to many other blogs, according to agenda items, government agencies, etc.  The Obama Twitter channel has been mostly dormant since Jan. 20th, except for an alert on March 25th to join an innovative Open for Questions session through the Internet.  93,000 people submitted 104,000 questions and cast 1.8 million votes on which questions Barack Obama would answer over the net. Obama promoted the event through web video.

The White House has inevitably faced many problems in its rush into social media. By using YouTube are they favoring a third-party provider, rather than serving the videos themselves?  Why not use any of the other video servers? “It’s an ongoing experiment,” said Phillips. Our experiment in democracy has survived wars, economic depressions, man-made and natural catastrophes over the past 250 years … but hey, this federal government social media experiment is close to 100 days old. Where’s the results? Welcome to the 140 character or less, immediate gratification Twitter age. No wonder Phillips is burying his head in his hands.

PR/Media Week in Review 02-22-2009

Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are a vexations to the spirit … Ben Franklin said. Fair bet that ol’ Lightnin’ Ben would not have sidled up to Rick Santelli, the over caffeinated CNBC financial pundit. Santelli’s rant on CNBC this week about the unconscionable stimulus for the loser homeowners who are dragging down capitalism with their wasteful ways, hit a nerve like dentist’s drill in a root canal. 

It is not that Santelli ranted, he does that often. It’s that the White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs responded in a press conference very specifically, with calculated emotion and a touch of humor. This sent CNBC financial pundits into bloviating glee as they circled the wagons to protect their own.

What this is really about can be summed up in a single word: ratings. The Santelli rant was supposedly the most emailed video in the blogosphere for the week and Santelli landed on the morning talk shows. The greatest insult to a ranter is to be ignored.

The Obama administration also boosted its ratings because of this episode. Gibbs did not respond to Santelli entirely off the cuff. He periodically peered down as if he was reading message points. His nearly five minute response to Santelli was clear, concise and specific. On a broader scale he was answering all critics of the homeowner mortgage stimulus. Despite a sudden rash of attention, Gibbs neutralized Santelli, who will sound like a hurt kid in the schoolyard desperately vying for attention if he continues this tack.

Cogent Santelli slapdowns have come from an unlikely source - SeekingAlpha, the most popular finance blog. See a couple of posts: CNBC’s Specious Reporting on the Housing Plan and Rick Santelli: Critic or P.R. Man?

PR? It’s murder.Can U.S. public relations influence the outcome of a murder trial across the Atlantic? The battle over Amanda Knox, dubbed Italy’s ‘Trial of the Century,’ ramped into high gear last week in a courtroom in Perugia, Italy.  This story has it all  - a vivacious American coed from University of Washington in Seattle, an alleged drug-fueled orgy that led to a grisly murder, conflicting testimonies and relentless spinning of stories to paint the accused, accomplices, prosecutors and legal authorities in a bad light.

Driving the U.S. push for Amanda Knox is a group of students, family and friends from Seattle called Friends of Amanda.  They are offered as  ‘character witnesses’ to the media. They proclaim Amanda’s innocence, present ‘facts’ of the case colored through their prism, and solicit donations through the Amanda Knox Defense Fund. 

The PR battle over Amanda Knox has become so heated that Italian prosecutor in the case Giuliano Mignini is reportedly suing the West Seattle Herald, a small community newspaper, for defamation.

Will these maneuvers impact the trial, expected to last at least six months? Last week the trial began in earnest and the PR spin ramped up. The Beastblogger Barbie Latza Nadeau is covering the case - see Sex and Murder in Italy - and the TV news shows are presenting frequent updates.

“I was asked by ‘Friends of Amanda’ to help turn around this supertanker of bad press over in Italy and get the truth out about Amanda’s innocence,” said Seattle attorney, Anne Bremner. “The prosecution has no forensic evidence at all. Zero. None.” - West Seattle Herald

Will Obama Transform Government Communication?

Fifty years of tromping through the streets of Manhattan and I never experienced the widespread spontaneous elation that erupted in this city election eve, 2008. At two in the morning the subways were still full of people so overcome with joy they would yell and break into dance with no prompting. In Harlem, where we live, the smiles on people’s faces were wide and unabashed. If you grew up in the 60’s it was a long, long time coming - a feeling that we can actually hope for a better day and we believe once again that we have the power to change the world. It is a sense that individually we can make a difference, and we don’t have to do it through coercion and bullying, it can come through intelligence, compassion and thoughtfulness. We can lead by example, not by force.

As communicators we have to marvel at the transformative nature of the moment. When you expect gloating, Obama chooses humility.  When you expect forcefulness, Obama chooses deference. We know that politics will never cease (enter Rahm Emanuel, the enforcer) but within that is a larger agenda - we all share the same planet, our experiment in democracy never ceases to evolve and survives only by the will of the people.

Today, the day Obama visits the White House of the most unpopular U.S. President on record, a President who has raised government secrecy and intransigence to a new level, the transition team unveils Change.gov, a web site meant to support the open flow of information from the government to its people, and a means for the people to interact with the Federal government.

Does this mean that we can send an email to the federal government and expect an answer? I doubt it. But the intent is there, and a blog, and a method to apply for a goverment job, and the understanding that we are living in the digital age when school age children and middle age executives rely on the web to get their information and stay connected.

The thrill of Obama is that we don’t know what to expect from him. He has the ability to surprise in a way that seems measured and logical, in the moment and playing to history. If we at least have the sense that government is listening to us we believe that our involvement in government has value and can be reciprocated. That is the art of public relations.

PR/Media Week in Review 09-14-2008

JOHN McCAIN’s WEEK OF SHAMEFUL LIES

This was a watershed week in the race for the Presidency as John McCain and his gang of rough riding PR clowns hit us with a blizzard of lies that proved - if we needed a reminder - that the Bush Doctrine of nasty, base, deceitful pre-emptive attacks is very much alive in politics. Fred Thompson and Karl Rove were at their salivating, bloviating best (or worst) but the buck stops with McCain, who made such a rash, horrible decision with Palin that the Republican political mob can only go on the attack.

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PR/Media Week in Review 08-03-2008

Politics & PR rumble, tumble, toil ‘n trouble

McCain’s Obama onslaught, launching negative ads that generate buzz in the pre-convention lull, is smart PR, what you expect from a wounded combatant. He’s using the media to generate media attention way beyond the ad buys alone. The first “negative” ad, which reportedly ran only six times in local markets, serves as the shot off the bow of a skirmish that will employ aggressive and creative PR tactics. It is proof of the power of PR - leveraged beyond its cost if employed correctly. McCain now has a Rove-trained attack dog who knows how to apply pain that reverberates through traditional and social media. Early advantage: GOP.

Barack Obama has so much money (his real advantage) that he can employ the best PR minds (sic) that money can buy.  Can Demos fend off the ‘wimp’ and ‘neophyte deluded celebrity’ tags the GOP is trying to pin on Obama? The answer to that could lead to victory in November. Lieberman and Kerry squared off on “Meet the Press” today to set the tenor of the escalating attack vs response cycle that will spin out as we head to the conventions. Obama can gain advantage by sticking Kerry in a corner and taping his mouth shut for the next couple of months. He seems to embarass Demos, and himself (not that he has that much self-awareness) whenever he speaks. He’s a loser - didn’t anybody tell him?

Mark Penn, head of Burson-Marsteller, is still smarting from the lashing he took as head Hillary Clinton pollster and message maven. Upfront it was obvious that Penn would go down in flames - you can’t head a PR agency involved in as much high level weirdness as Burson and not bring down a Presidential candidate. Penn has been on a mission since rejoining Burson to to present a non-partisian face to the public, most notably by hiring failed Republican spinner Karen Hughes to bolster business from both sides of the aisle.

Apparently, top-level Demo and GOP spinsters agree that money is infinitely more important than beliefs. And Hughes showed right off that she is perfectly suited for the PR agency business by dispatching an email to Bursonites full of hyperbole, obfuscations and excalmations that reads like a qualifying statement for $600+/hr PR consultant:

“today’s leaders in business and government face the challenge of thinking globally and acting locally, developing broad umbrella themes that shape perceptions of their industry, brand or product, while also customizing those messages for many different customers and cultures.” - excerpt from Karen Hughes email to Burson employees

This week 23/6 (Some of the news/Most of the time) launches its Get Your War On animated series by comic David Rees. First episode below, new episodes weekly. The political season is upon us.

Barack Obama is a bomb-throwing Muslim radical

That’s the message you’re supposed to get from the cover of the New Yorker that has the Obama campaign PR machine in a tizzy over how to react. I am a New Yorker, not necessarily a New Yorker reader. To me, the cover is obviously satirical and not much more radical than some previous New Yorker covers, so what’s the big deal?

The purpose of a provocative magazine cover, of course, is to generate buzz and sell magazines. Judged by that criteria, this is highly successful commercial art. Both Obama and McCain can write this off as further proof that the east coast effete intellectual media is out of touch with the rest of the “normal” people out there who find this grossly offensive. I am rarely offended by free speech and artistic expression, and I am always amused by how the “rest of the country” can both admire and revile, and attempt to dismiss us here in the naked city.

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