12/19

I knew IPOs were alive again because four went out on the same day on Wall Street two days ago.  I didn't know so many companies are queuing to go public: I guess I should have expected it.  Bio-tech is an area much like the old dot-coms.  Every company is going to be a winner, and everyone is going to get rich.  It won't happen, of course.  Biotech will collapse in time and many of the companies going public now will be sold off or will close.  I just hope for my friend's sake that his companies have solid stories to tell.  It can harm one's reputation to have clinkers. 

On the other hand, I don't trust investment bankers and I never will.  It makes no difference that they were slapped hard after the dot-com madness of three years ago.  They will go right back to the same illusory efforts to launch public companies because, well, because they are greedy -- and most investors are fools.

My friend told me a second bit of information I didn't know, but didn't surprise me much.  A major agency in New York shut down its corporate PR department and fired everyone recently.  I wasn't shocked because another friend in a different agency had told my wife recently that he too was facing difficulty.  Why this is happening I don't know precisely, but I have hunches.  The big accounts are in marketing.  The influential accounts are in corporate PR.  Agencies want lots of revenue and care little for influence.  It's an old story of greed. 

What happens to practitioners who have been let go?  Well, my friend said his company interviewed some of them in the last day or so.  They are scrambling like other practitioners to make a living.  Great business we're in, isn't it?

12/18

How this worked was that several Web masters created hyperlinks between George Bush and the term "miserable failure."  After they did it enough times, when anyone asked for George Bush on Google, the first term that appeared was "miserable failure."   It's an interesting and offbeat protest.

I wouldn't bring up such old news except that what Webmasters did to Bush, they could do to your organization.  For example, they might link "Dick Grasso" to "greedy bastard,"  or "Ken Lay" to "fake and fraud" or "Coca-Cola" to "poison."  The Web allows for forms of protest that many are not yet aware of.  If you are concerned about the reputation of your organization and leaders, you need to know what can happen when you are not looking.

I have written many times that Web surveillance is an essential part of the PR business now.  It is not an elective.  You need to know what people are saying about your company and your leaders in e-mail, chat rooms, on bulletin boards and in Web page copy.   Politicians, of course, long ago learned to use e-mail to play dirty with opponents.  Libelous e-mails are broadcast even at the city level now.

Expect the same for your organization.  It will happen sooner or later.  The challenge is to catch and squelch allegations before they fester below the surface and then, erupt into mainstream media.  In the case of the Google Trick, the Web masters blew the whistle on themselves to maximize the publicity for what they had done.   Expect that as well.

We live in a different world when it comes to underground communications.  And, we need to pay more attention than we are.
 

12/17

Today's PR professional should be humble enough to realize that the power to persuade is very limited," he told a record audience of 230 PR pros and guests in delivering the annual "Distinguished Lecture" of the Institute at the Union League Club in New York.  "Success in the 21st century comes from reading the public mind, not manipulating it," he said.

It struck me that Golin was too narrow in his view of public relations and its tasks.  So, I sat down and wrote a paper examining the issue.  It is here.  Golin was looking correctly at what most PR practitioners do, but he was not inclusive.  PR practitioners still have at least three roles in communicating -- Leading,  Following and Getting Out of the Way.  The paper explains the conditions in which each role applies.

I will not contend my view is absolutely correct or the only acceptable interpretation, but I hope I make a solid enough case to provoke debate.  Public relations is a potent and complex form of public persuasion.  It should be more potent and more complex than it is, but practitioners lag in learning craft skills, especially in relation to the Web.

Secondly, PR practitioners are more than members of communications departments or of the PRSA or IABC.  CEOs are the prime public relations experts in every organization.  The President of the United States gives much of his time to public persuasion in order to get his agenda through.  We are not alone.

If PR practitioners are limited in the 21st century, it is because we limit ourselves and our thinking.  

By the way, this paper marks the 31st essay posted on online-pr.com for your use free of charge.  Look under white papers/essays for the others.  I am always grateful to hear from anyone.

12/16

Of course, you know the outcome.  The sister ordering online was done in 36 minutes from the time she logged onto her computer.  The sister who went to the shopping district spent hours and returned home with elevated blood pressure.  The story is here.  http://www.internetretailer.com/dailyNews.asp?id=10847 .

This is an old PR technique of comparison shopping.  How old?  Well, AT&T used it to promote use of its Yellow Pages more than 40 years ago.  In that case, one person went through the Yellow  Pages while another went from  store to store.

The point is that the technique still works.  All it needed was to be updated from the phone to the Web.  There are many "old" techniques that could be made new.  There isn't much that hasn't been tried in PR.  So, before you launch into a creative exercise to find a totally new way to make a point, shuffle through the old techniques of yore.   I'll bet that you will find most of what you are looking for. 

And if you don't know where to find references to past techniques, talk to your old-timers.  My guess is that they used most of them at one time or another.  Institutional memory has value.

12/15

Some of the best-known symbols of the Western world have had so many meanings that one can interpret them only within a specific context.  The Roman cross was a symbol of humiliating death until it was expropriated by Christians as a symbol of life after death and triumph.  That same cross again became of symbol of death to Muslims during the Crusades and Jews during the Inquisition.  It has been a symbol of ultimate weakness and of ultimate power.

Symbols have text and subtext.  There is rarely a clean image.  Thus, the President picked up a tray of turkey and fixings -- a great photo symbol -- during his visit to Iraq only to have it come out that he had picked up the centerpiece and ignored the steam table turkey soldiers actually ate.  Democrats quickly mocked the picture as they did the sign, "Mission Accomplished," after Bush flew to the aircraft carrier idling off the California coast.  Perhaps the best advice one can give on the use of symbols is to avoid them when there is controversy because opponents will surely pervert their meaning.

The West hopes images of a bearded and tired Saddam Hussein will become a symbol of  the futility of a guerilla war, but I suspect guerillas will use the same photos to renew efforts to disrupt a march toward representative society.  At least, American Generals in Iraq think that is what the guerillas will do -- and they should know. 

Ultimately, a symbol only has power that people invest in it.  It is too early to tell what Iraqis will see in pictures of a captured Hussein.