03/21

Every news outlet on earth is relaying battle news of some kind to eager readers, viewers and/or listeners.  Hundreds of reporters are scratching for stories.  Retired generals and colonels have new jobs as commentators on CNN, NBC, CBS and ABC.  What can I add to that river of information except noise -- and there is plenty of noise already?

Bloggers have gone overboard. One is commenting by the hour on tidbits of information that he is scraping out of the Web, off TV, the radio or from print.  Enough already.  The fact is we don't know much about the strategy of either side.  Wars are fought with secret plans because lives are at stake.  One doesn't broadcast to the world what he is going to do to win a war.  The most a general will do is to set a broad objective -- in this case, removing Hussein from power.  Where the helicopters fly, what the aircraft bomb, how the satellites and spy planes maneuver are all top secret.

I was amused that the impromptu bombing of Baghdad elicited comments of surprise from the retired generals standing by for NBC.  It wasn't supposed to happen that way. The opening of the bombing was supposed to be overwhelming and ferocious.  Instead, there were surgical strikes and nothing more.   Clearly, the retired generals were expecting the last war with Iraq and not  this one.

I might comment at one point or another about a public relations aspect of the war, but that will be all.  I beg forgiveness if you were expecting more.
 

03/20

Formula 1 has been until recently the most glamorous and hard-fought open-wheel racing in the world.  It has serious competition now from other circuits but for many years, the greatest drivers were in Formula 1 and the most powerful racing teams.  But recently, it has become so expensive to compete that teams have withdrawn, and Ferrari has dominated the circuit .  So Formula 1 has changed the rules to make the playing field more even, and it has built a web site designed to take fans inside races as they occur. 

It's doing this by giving real-time race data live online during races wherever they are held in the world.  During the competition, users get all times from every race car, including how long each car is taking to complete a lap, the gap in time between cars and the timing for each sector of the track as a car wheels through it.  The web designers are hoping fans will keep the timing up on their computers while they watch the races on TV, so they can handicap the outcome along with the experts. 

Injecting fans into the tactics of a competition has parallels in other sports.  For example, in American football, the moves of inner linemen are as important as the quarterback on TV now.   Auto racing has always been more difficult because circuits are large, and there are 25  to 30 cars at a time spread over the length of a track.  The web site provides a way for TV viewers to get a holistic understanding that was not available before because TV cameras tend to follow race leaders.

It's a good idea and smart PR. 
 

In science, mathematics and similar endeavors, intellectual arrogance is a virtue.  It takes fortitude and self-confidence to launch into the unknown and return with proof or facts no one else has discovered.   But that same self-confidence can become overbearing to others and nearly impossible within organizations.

We all know of leaders who brook no opposition and hear no one but themselves.  Some are successful and some fools.  The successful ones become worse as their success verifies they are geniuses.   The fools in their comeuppance sometimes learn humility.

As PR practitioners, intellectual arrogance is dangerous.  We are not paid to discover new worlds.  We are paid to persuade others that new worlds exist, and they should pay attention.  This requires listening and an ability to go in the audience's door then out your own. 

Intellectual arrogance frightens me.  I was reading statements made by a world-famous scientist a couple of days ago who dispatched certain areas of human endeavor with a short phrase.  These areas hold no interest for him.  He knows what he knows, and it frames his vision of the world.  His vision is powerful but it is not the whole world.  Unfortunately, I doubt he will ever learn.  He would not accept easily that he might be wrong.

I just hope I avoid the same attitude, but all of us are subject to "old fogeydom."  We've seen everything before, and we know what works and what doesn't.  We reject ideas from juniors with a wave of the hand.  We know what we know -- alas.
 

03/18

Agriculture Online (http://www.agriculture.com/) won the Jesse H. Neal Award for
Excellence in Journalism.  Who would think a bunch of editors from Des Moines could triumph over long-time mavens of high-tech from the Boston corridor, but they did.  They took home a plaque and medallion naming Agriculture Online the best Web site among trade and business-oriented entries.  And, it was the first Neal award to recognize excellence in online journalism. 

The site proves one can form a community out of a dispersed and disparate group such as farmers.  These older men (Most farmers are in their 50s.) will seek and provide advice to others when you provide a place for them to do it and the credibility.   The site, in existence since 1995, built presence the old-fashioned way.  It earned the respect of farmers by remaining close to and interactive with them.

This is a lesson for PR practitioners who wonder how they can communicate to hard-to-reach groups.  The answer is presence and service.  In time, the target audience -- or some of it, anyway, -- will come around. 

That has been the case for online-pr.com.  When I started in July 1997, I did not think I would be running the site in 2003.  Over time I discovered there wasn't another site quite like it, and it might prove useful.  I didn't get much feedback: I still don't.  But, enough people contact me now for me to know PR practitioners use and like it.

I began writing these thoughts as well after consideration whether I could maintain a daily "thought," and whether anyone would care.  Slowly, readership is building.  I'm not getting rich:  Heck, I'm not earning anything.  But, it has been fun.  So here's to Agriculture Online and the farmers who use it...  They are an inspiration to me at least.
 

03/17

Chirac acquitted himself well and pulled off a PR coup, it seems to me.  He brought his argument against the Bush administration's proposals to Bush's backyard and did so with disarming affability.  It is not for me to say whether Chirac is right or wrong.  I examined how he  presented himself.  There was no defensiveness, no bullying or braggadocio.  He simply said a good friend has the responsibility to tell another when he is wrong.   That's a difficult argument to counter.  Chirac put Bush in the position of contending that the US is right without sufficient proof to back the view.   Score points for Chirac. 

In further disarming his opponent, Chirac agrees Saddam Hussein is an evil person.  He maintains the argument is not over Saddam Hussein but how to deal with him.  Score more points for Chirac.  No wonder the Bush administration is frothing about France. 

Even if Chirac is dead wrong, he presented a persuasive view.  That is enough to confuse the simple message the Bush administration has been communicating.  In defense of the Bush administration, defining something simply is the most powerful way to communicate, but that assumes others will not challenge the simplicity.  In this case, others did.

There is no easy out for the Bush administration and the declaration of a deadline today for diplomacy is a line in the sand that follows the logic the administration is using. 

Sometimes simple is not so simple.