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08/20

A Step Back. It's time to take off and to get away from all things PR. I enjoy writing these thoughts. I hope you enjoy reading them.

The forced march of writing five times a week is not tiring. There are days when I sit in front of the computer screen and stare -- a blank slate looking for a magic hand. But, the pressure of writing forces me to look constantly at public relations issues wherever I find them -- from politics to customer service. Yogi Berra, baseball philosopher, was right. You can see a lot just by lookin'.

Sometimes, however, you need to check your eyes.

I'll be back in a week.

08/19

What's That Again? Ever wonder why companies have bad PR? Let give you an example that happened to me yesterday in a T- Mobile store at 52d and Madison in New York City. If it weren't serious, I would have laughed.

My Motorola digital wireless telephone failed to work during the New York blackout on Thursday and Friday. I couldn't reach any tower on either the New York or New Jersey side of the Hudson. It was clear what happened. T-Mobile had gone down with the power failure. Verizon, AT&T and Sprint, on the other hand, had power backups and worked sporadically, or even well, depending on call volume.

So I go to the store and am directed to a young service representative with shaved head and a jet-black, off-road bicycle leaning against the wall behind him. I told him that I couldn't get a single call through during the emergency.

He looked deeply offended and said, "You are aware that cell towers run off of electricity?" I told him I was indeed aware that cell towers use electricity. I noted that Verizon and AT&T and Sprint also use electricity and continued to work at least part of the time. He stared me down angrily and said. "Sir, we are an all-digital network. They have something that we don't have --redundancy." I said, "Exactly."

But he didn't stop. "If the electricity goes down, your phone goes down. I couldn't call out on my home phone either." He could have if he had a traditional telephone handset because the phone company supplies the power, and it doesn't go out in emergencies.

After this dressing down from a customer service representative, I returned to my office with a vow. I'm dumping T-Mobile, and I hope others do too. To make a fault out of a virtue --redundancy -- is too much even for this person who is used to bad customer service. And for T-Mobile to fail to explain the basics to its service representatives is inexcusable.

I hope T-Mobile advises the bald-headed young service representative to be more concerned the next time. Or perhaps, they can explain to him that redundancy is good. It's why we have cell phones for emergencies -- even power outages.

08/18

Smart PR. Hats off to Seattle Times for a smart community PR gesture that shows what clever thinking and the Web can do to reconnect citizens to their communities. This happened a while ago, but I just found about it.

There is a huge transportation project in the works for Seattle with alternatives for what the city might do if it had the funding. What the Times did was to prepare a map of the project and a set of game-like, interactive alternatives a citizen could fill out with a final amount automatically generated for comparison to the budgeted project amount. Here are the interactive alternatives and map.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/news/local/links/transportationgame/calculator/ (The alternatives.)

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/news/local/links/transportationgame/map/ (The Map.)

Readers were asked to choose projects important to them and to fill in the alternatives form. More than 2,000 did just that. The paper then used the 2,000 responses to write an article, which influenced the course of action on the project. The story is here from last May. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/134688960_buildit04m.html. The regional transportation board then changed the taxation scheme for funding the project based on citizen input through the Web site.

This clever idea could be repeated endlessly for community proposals, for company decisions and for strategic directions. I wonder why others have not done it. The cleverness comes not so much from interactive voting as it does from presenting the costs and implications of action. The Seattle Times understood that citizens are not fools to be protected from hard alternatives that politicians and bureaucrats face daily. There are trade-offs for everything and the function of government and business is to work through those. Citizens and employees, unfortunately, are too often divorced from the process.

Part of the reason for this lies with citizens and employees themselves who sometimes do not want to deal with hard choices. Part comes from bureaucrats, politicians and corporate executives who do not believe citizens and employees can understand the implications of action. Yet another element is a need for speed. Especially in corporate America, executives sometimes cannot wait until there is consensus. Issues such as job losses may mean the difference between the life and death of a firm.

On the other hand, when hard choices are presented honestly with interactive alternatives, it seems to me that it gives some control back to those who feel they don't have it. One trusts them to act like grownups rather than self-interested and spoiled children. Most will rise to the occasion and by rising, they provide the credibility and backing to government and company executives who must act.

Think about this idea the next time your organization is debating what to do.

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