01/17

It will be fun and an old-fashioned donnybrook in the halls of Congress.  Some states have passed tort limits already because they have lost physicians who have quit practicing and moved.  OB/GYN physicians are in especially short supply, and there is scarcely a one that has not been sued at some point.

Complicating the picture is the desire of insurance firms to get out of the medical malpractice insurance business.  When the St. Paul Companies left the field last year, thousands of doctors scrambled for coverage.

The interesting part of this PR war is that it is not clear who is right and being right won't make a difference anyway.  Bare-knuckle politics will carry the day in spite of reams of statistics and hours of testimony pro and con.  

It will be interesting to see if Bush can pull it off.  If he can, he will go down as one of our more effective presidents, whether you agree with his politics or not.  Part of his challenge is that Congress is largely comprised of lawyers who won't willingly harm their own, and of course, trial lawyers are the mother's milk of politics for the large and continuous donations they make to election campaigns.

Place your bets, sit back and enjoy the show.  It will run for months.
 

01/16

He has been a great help to our agency and  his firm, The Birmingham Group (www.birminghamgroup.com) is one of the few that moves technologically deficient PR organizations into the 21st Century.

Pete sent me a note about a "damn fine online newsroom" that he suggested I look at.  You should inspect it too. 

It is the Duke University Health system site (http://dukehealth.org).  The admirable part of the newsroom is its completeness. It has much more than recent news releases.  There is an image gallery; a cross-indexed roster of experts on staff with photos, mini-bios and e-mail addresses; audio and video clips; media kits; a place for individuals who register to print, e-mail or download their selections of Duke news and imagery and a virtual tour of the Duke Medical Center. If that were all, that might be enough, but the newsroom offers health tips through a drop-down menu, a series of audio clips on health topics and whitepapers on medical controversies.  It tops this information off with its rankings in national polls for hospitals and maps and directions. 

I'm not sure I have found everything packed into the newsroom, but the nice part is that it is all easily accessible from a home page beautifully designed for quick access. 

I'm going to use this site as an example to my clients.  You might wish to do the same.
 

01/15

Anyone who pays attention to the media has watched a swoon in advertising and coverage.  When The Wall Street Journal lays off staff, there is a deep problem, for not long ago it was one of the wealthiest papers in the U.S.  The Wall Street Journal, of course, has been cutting staff and coverage.  And, looking at the Journal these past few days, I believe it is going to cut more staff.  The paper is tissue thin and there are days when there are scarcely more than two or three large display ads in the whole first section.

As a PR practitioner who is paid to get clients into national media, this is worrisome.  Reporters have larger beats and less time for any one company.  Only the biggest firms are getting any close coverage.  Everyone else scrambles for tidbits around earnings announcements.

We continue to have success with business television, but I fear there will be similar cutbacks at CNBC and CNNfn.  CNBC has lost about 40 percent of its audience and a great deal of desirability for advertisers.  CNNfn, of course, was the weaker competitor.

It's back to the future for old-timers like me.  When I started in PR too many years ago, business news coverage was indifferent at best.  It is better now, but it is sliding back to what it was before the great Economic Bubble.  That means we will have to work harder.  So be it.
 

1/14

But, of course, their feelings are silly because each has a job to do and neither is essential to the organization.  Companies get along without PR or IR departments.  PR and IR practitioners must prove their worth to companies that employ them.  That is as it should be. 

A problem arises when each department discovers the role the company holds in highest regard and takes a fierce grip on it.  For example, IR practitioners work with institutional investors and analysts.  PR practitioners work with reporters.  After awhile, each glories in what he or she does.  I have heard IR practitioners sniff at the thought of EVER talking to a reporter -- as if it were beneath the specialist's dignity.  I have heard PR practitioners dismiss IR specialists because all they do is run spreadsheets and talk to Wall Street.

In other words, each is narrow-minded and no longer thinking of the organization as a whole.  Rather, they think only of their livelihoods and how to remain employed.   There is nothing wrong with that except that it harms communication of the corporate message. 

The problem, it seems to me, is that many PR and IR specialists are lost in the mechanics of their jobs.  There are many reasons for this but a principal one, I believe, is an inability to think strategically.  They cannot go toe-to-toe with the CEO and help guide the CEO to better decisions.  Their answers stop within specialties they practice and that is often useless when the CEO needs someone to think about the whole picture.

There are strategic IR and PR practitioners, but they are few.  For some reason, neither field produces many at any time.
 

 01/13

I bring this up because I am putting my wife's PR business into technology that will make her more mobile, save weight and cut costs. 

The first thing we did was to dump her aging Dell laptop and buy her a Dell Latitude laptop that is two pounds lighter.   We specified that it be 802.11b-ready so we could connect her to the Internet via a wireless access point router, and she could roam the office -- and house -- with her laptop and work without dragging cables with her.

As soon as we got the new laptop we learned the following.  Networks using 802.11b broadcast at 2.4 GHz.  This is the same wavelength that many cordless phones use, and of course, we had one.  We had to change our cordless phone to prevent interference.  That cost money. 

Then we had to transfer data from her old laptop to her new one.  I bought a program called PC Relocator for that purpose.  It didn't work.  It would install on the new laptop with the Windows XP operating system but it would not install on the old machine with Windows ME although the box said it would.  I spent a week trading e-mails with the software house.  The software house finally told me to go to its website, download  the latest version and try again.  Sure enough, after some finagling, it worked and her new laptop is now loaded.

Next, I installed the wireless router.  I had to buy a new router because the old one attached to the cable modem was not wireless ready.  The Linksys router went in without much trouble, and I got a  desktop machine and the two laptops working with it using a connector cable.  The trouble started when I tried to get wireless working.  It wouldn't.  This didn't make sense so I checked the laptop's system for the wireless card.  I couldn't find it.  Curious, I thought. 

I called Dell and was put on hold for 45 minutes.  A Dell wireless tech answered the phone and said I had to talk to the Dell laptop tech.  More music and another lengthy wait.  The Dell laptop tech came on the phone and told me I couldn't get wireless because I  don't have a wireless card to transmit from the laptop to the router.   But I asked for it, I protested.  He responded that it wasn't put in and anyway, I wasn't charged for it.  He then shunted me to the salesperson who handled the original configuration.  He, of course, wasn't in.  My wife's  laptop still is not configured for wireless, and I am going to have wait another week for the card.

I would like to think I'm the only one who suffers like this, but I'm not.  It's typical.  Maybe some day the PC industry will invent plug-and-play but it isn't there yet.    The last step is to move the house phone line to Internet phone to save on phone bills.  I am sure that won't work well either, but hey, I'm used to it now.