Parky posts

Seth Godin's blog post this evening is 'when should we add marketing?' He cites the old "Mad Men era" when "..we added marketing last."

The same question should be asked of public engagement where, unfortunately, the Mad Men are still around.

Along with Seth's marketing, PR should also be first in our thinking. 

Too often the PR team is brought in at the end to "promote what was made" or cover off issues that might emerge.

Enlightened organisations include communicators from the start. And I mean right at the start. Right from concept: whether it's developing a new widget, creating a new community or deciding where to locate a fast food outlet.

Communications should not be perfunctory or worse: an afterthought.

Communicators can do more than just flag PR matters early - saving time and money. They can help the product or service find a clearer voice and build a more compelling storyline. They can also provide fresh insights and healthy input to strategic thinking through the total development process. 

We should add PR as early as we can. 

What a privilege it was to get up close and personal with the handwritten manuscripts of famous writers and musicians. 

Handwritten, an exhibition at the National Library of Australia, placed me a thin layer of glass away from the pen and ink efforts of names like Dickens, Einstein, Machiavelli, Dante, Nightingale, Luther, Darwin, Livingstone, Michelangelo, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven - to name just a few.

While the 'ten centuries of manuscript treasures' was awe inspiring (like the 1707 pen strokes of Georg Friedrich Handel above) it did prompt me to ask if the qwerty digital efforts of the current era will be treated with such reverence in future.

Will DIGIscripts command the same interest and respect as MANUscripts? Does it matter?

parky

Professionally we rarely get a chance to take a breath and ask: 'How did we get here? What theories are we applying? On the shoulders of which giants do we now stand?'

Here’s an explanation of how PR has evolved that works for me. I developed it with fellow Edelman Director Trevor Young.

We defined four eras. They overlap somewhat. Each builds on and evolves from the previous, so that today our profession benefits (well .. mostly) from them all.

The development analogy we used across these eras was architectural. Starting with an enclosed feudal style of fortress, each subsequent era saw the gradual opening up of that fortress. The four buildings are, of course, the evolving organisation or corporation.

As with most spheres of knowledge, we start out simple and naïve and move over time to the complex and informed.

1: the propaganda era

• starting in the 1920s when media started to become mass
• radio flourishes as press empires continued to boom
• the communication theory central is the propaganda or hypodermic model
  • a message is loaded into the needle (read newspaper, radio or speech) and injected into the complaint mass
    
• educationists call it the ‘jug/mug’ theory where the full jug pours the message into the empty mug
• no room for dialogue - the process was unidirectional
• the new and developing study of the mind led by Sigmund Freud adds impetus to influence
  
• propaganda becomes more popular and more sinister in the lead up to and during the Second World War.

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Channel Nine political commentator Laurie Oakes gave this year's Andrew Olle Media Lecture in Sydney last night.

Journalist Amanda Meade covered the lecture in The Australian today. She focused on Oakes' comments about McNugget journalism. There's a synchronisity in there somewhere that the same edition of the Oz also welcomes its new-look subscription website.

Anyway, thanks to Meade and The Australian I read Oakes' Andrew Olle Lecture online.

Oakes' lecture is a plea for balance, or rather rebalancing, in how journalism (political in his case) can best serve society.

Just on the matter of serving society, Oakes refers to a Media Alliance report on the future of journalism titled 'Life in the Clickstream' which he said found "that journalists overwhelmingly believe that what they do benefits the public and that, without their work, society would be worse off.

"To be precise," he says, "93 per cent of journalists agreed when the proposition was put to them, 63 per cent agreed strongly." Oakes has firm views on what this means: "If we're not fair dinkum about the public service aspect, in my view, we shouldn't be calling ourselves journalists in the first place."

Rebalancing: Bite size -vs- Meal size

On the one hand Oakes accepts, albeit with fear, ".. the pressure on journalists to produce more stories at ever greater speed would lead to what BBC political correspondent Andrew Marr calls 'bite-sized McNugget journalism'."

"My fear is that tomorrow's press gallery will be serving up Happy Meals," Oakes laments while also referring to the Hamster Wheel that is today's fast-paced news cycle. 

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I was taken by the combination of messages in this simple road-side poster on Sturt Street South Melbourne.

First: the use, effective I believe, of this most ancient medium: the poster. Retro and grundgy and perfectly placed: it really works.

Second: the return by Olympus to 50s styling for its Pen camera. It's also retro. Underlined by the copy line about "it looks like it came from your dad."

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As a PR it's always interesting getting a ad exec's view on corporate reputation.

I'm not through Philp's book Consumer Republic yet and am not entirely sure I agree - yet - with his central premise. It focuses on brand choice (i.e. name brands) being heavily swayed by the insurance and accountability such brands give consumers. Which boils down to: I know where to go if something goes wrong. In many aspects, Consumer Republic resonates with some of the red flags raised in Reputation Renegades (see my earlier post).

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Synchronicity. Let's put it down to that.

I was reading a great blog post this week by Steve Sammartino titled Soundbites from the future. Trevor Young alerted me to it.

It was the most compelling article I've read in a while.

Essentially it's a discourse on where our current market/society is at and where Steve believes it's going in future.

What prompted me to pen this post though was beer!

As I read the post I was trying a new beer: Cavalier Brown Ale. It's from a new micro-brewery in inner Melbourne.

Apart from being a delicious drop, what struck me most was how this beer synched with what I was reading. As this Steve Soundbite observes:

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I attended a concert at Melbourne Recital Hall this week where Pieter Wispelwey played a number of cello suites.

He played 2 of Bach's cello suites and 2 of Benjamin Britten's. 

Just Wispelwey and his cello on stage: that's all.

Later in thinking about the concert, and apart from the delight of the music and the company of my cello-playing wife, a communications theme keeps bubbling through my mind. And it's this...

Sometimes simple is superbly sufficient.

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It’s a scary question.* Frighteningly similar to another I read this week: “If a conversation took place on the social web and you weren’t there to hear it did it really take place?”**

Fear, it seems, continues to keep many major organisations from using social media as part of their communications mix. This fear is prominent in a recent blog post - “The Social Media Alarm you hear in Australia is fear” - by David Meerman Scott. 

He was commenting on a Sydney Morning Herald article by Asher Moses titled Reputation Wrecking: social media alarm sounds.   

I know the institutional inertia that PRs have to work with inside corporations. But the greatest risk (the SMH story was based on a risk survey by Aon***) is reflected in the two opening questions of this post.

It’s the risk of not knowing. 

As Scott notes: “unless you are participating online, you’ll never know what’s being said at all.”

The corporate reputation asset has always been exposed to the risk of being wrecked. 

But to continue to dismiss what you can’t see and to not engage.. now that really is something to be feared. That really is a risk.

Like continuing to sail close to icebergs.

If more shareholders were more vocal about how this risk to reputation is being handled - and just maybe raised that concern online, via Twitter or an action group on ning - fear levels would decline in Board Rooms and C-suites. parky

footnotes --------------------

* the opening line of my eBook for corporate affairs practitioners.

** from slide 5 in a presentation by Brian Solis: drawn to my attention via a comment on this David Meerman Scott post by Michael Green of igo2 group.

 *** the survey notes: ‘Brand and image’ continued to be ranked as the number one risk concern and has been ranked among the top four risk concerns since the survey’s inception. Increased use of social networks was specifically sighted as providing potential risk to an organisation’s brand, image and reputation.

photo credit

My recent post ‘reading the signs’ highlighted the alluring smorgasbord of reading that the net now provides.

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