New Page 3

Over 177,000 people are registered for Dean get-togethers through Meetup.com.
The campaign uses the Internet to encourage people to organize offline. Offline meetings drive the campaign.

The Dean campaign has mobilized about 180,000 volunteers through its online efforts.

Dean himself doesn't get involved in Internet operations. He leaves it to Internet experts and communicators.

The campaign considers the Internet essential to empower people.

The campaign is well-staffed with Internet pros. It has three full-time programmers, a database team, volunteer coders and more than 100 people working in open source on Dean-related projects.

My take: To use the Internet right, you have to trust your people and give them the resources to get the job done. How many organizations do that today?

01/24	A Pleasure. I had a pleasure yesterday of interviewing a woman who is a retired Human Resources executive of a global company. The satisfaction came from the fact that she did not talk nor think like a typical HR person. This woman is a businessperson through and through. In her career, she worked on mergers, spinoffs and technological breakthroughs that meant the difference to her company's long-term competitiveness. A colleague and I talked to her about her experiences and views of HR's future. For a soft-spoken person, her comments were as blunt as a dull ax. No, she did not think CEOs and HR executives had formed a strategic partnership. Why? Because CEOs still don't know how to use their HR executives nor what to ask of them. No, she didn't think that most boards of directors worked with HR executives. Why? Because she had worked for four CEOs in her career and only one allowed her to present to the Board. No, most HR executives were not ready to step up to demands placed on HR by global outsourcing and communications. And on it went. After listening to her and with some knowledge of her background, I asked if she had started her career outside of HR. Yes, she had. She had been a business planner and a technologist who entered HR by accident. She was definite in her belief that HR people should not stay in HR for their careers. They need to rotate into other departments to see how business worked. She said every HR executive should have a business degree. I thought to myself that what she was saying is close to what I have contended about PR. PR specialists should not be allowed into the field until they have served in other roles. They need the same broad view this woman says is needed in HR. It would be nice if PR people could be rotated into line positions and back. I don't think I've seen that done but it would give practitioners perspective on what business is and challenges PR should be solving.
01/22	Stunts. Being a compulsive scribbler, I'm announcing that another article has joined the essays about public relations on this Web site. This one focuses on publicity stunts. Stunts might seem to be old-fashioned PR done by agents in funny hats and checked suits, but stunts have a valuable role in a communications mix. A good stunt gains awareness more quickly than press releases, press conferences or spokesperson tours. Every PR practitioner should know how to do a good stunt and have the opportunity to pull a few off during a career. When I started asking myself what made a good stunt versus one that is forgettable, a range of considerations came to mind. The principle one was that stunts themselves might be memorable, but the concept/service/product they market are often forgotten. That's because there is a disconnect between the stunt and underlying concept. Good publicity stunts join action to the idea being promoted -- and that is not always easy to do. In fact, there are products and services that are not amenable to stunts because they are too serious or variable or dangerous. Anyway, read the paper, and let me know what you think. There are several examples in it, some of which might make you chuckle. As usual, if you feel I am wrong, I want to hear your reasons.
01/21	Expectation is Reality. The caucus results from Iowa were funny. The front runner ended up third: The candidate about to leave the race ended up first. How do such misperceptions get started and embedded? It is as bad as something that happened recently to a client. The client reported outstanding sales and earnings, but the client's stock dropped. It is all a game of expectations. Howard Dean was anointed front runner because he has more cash, and he is doing innovative things on the Internet. The client was expected not only to do well but to do manifestly better than a competitor. Now that Dean is embarrassed, he is open for a "journalistic" kill. Stores about his temper and shoot-from-the-lip style will have questioning tones to them rather than accepting admiration. This, by the way, has started. Should Dean recover his footing quickly with a win in New Hampshire, expectations will put him in the lead again, but not as unanimously as was the case until Monday night. There is not much one can do with expectations except to play against them. Rather than glorying in front-runner status, one says early and often that standings mean nothing. Rather than running after Wall Street and pandering to analysts who rate your stock, do what you do well and let analysts catch up. Perhaps the biggest mistake of the Bubble period was that companies lived and died for Wall Street's expectations, "whisper numbers" and conventional wisdom. It turns out Wall Street had no more idea what it was talking than political analysts in Iowa. Don't get caught in the expectations game.
01/20	What Now? There is nothing worse than making a public mistake, one you can't explain away easily and one that embarrasses not only you but everyone around you. CEOs don't often err this way, but it does happen. The Bush administration has a global mistake on its hands. The mistake has cost the administration reputation and credibility -- two attributes one needs to lead domestically and internationally. That mistake, of course, was claiming Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and was poised to use them. It is easy in hindsight to fault the administration completely, but that would not be fair. Intelligence was not clear, and Saddam Hussein had no credibility in the eyes of the world. Where the Bush administration can be blamed was using WMD as a justification for going to war with Hussein. The administration knew full well what it was doing, and it acted against the expressed wishes of many in the US and overseas. But so far, all evidence indicates Hussein was telling the truth that he had no WMD, and our conviction was wrong. It was a giant and embarrassing mistake made before the world. Picture yourself in the White House. You are the communications counselor to the President. What do you tell him? The classic advice is to admit one's error and to move on. But that advice is not easy to give. Iraq is the size of California. It is unlikely the US or any other country has looked in every possible place for weapons. One could look for decades and not find every possible hiding place. So, do you advise the President to tough it out when every report from Iraq is coming back negative? That advice is not so wise to give because increasingly the President is looking out of touch with reality. So what do you suggest? Perhaps you have the President say we haven't found WMD yet, and it is possible Hussein had destroyed them. That leaves the door open for an admission later when the mistake can no longer be denied. But, having said that, the President's critics will bay louder than they have done already. And, it is an election year. Maybe you have the President say we haven't found WMD, but we got rid of a bad actor, and that is justification in itself. But, that leaves one open to tapes played over and over of the President contending that Iraq had WMD, to accusations of lying and to responsibility for the slaughter of American soldiers and civilians. So, Counselor, what do you tell the President? Be quick about it. The State of the Union speech is tonight.
01/19	What Dean Is Doing. There is no doubt that what Howard Dean is doing on the Internet has changed how presidential candidates will campaign. How he operates should be a textbook case for PR practitioners who are uncertain how to use the Web to persuade. I happened on the following article. It is an interview with Dean's Internet director, Zephyr Teachout. http://rss.com.com/2008-1028_3-5142066.html Here are details if you don't have time to read the entire piece: Over 177,000 people are registered for Dean get-togethers through Meetup.com. The campaign uses the Internet to encourage people to organize offline. Offline meetings drive the campaign. The Dean campaign has mobilized about 180,000 volunteers through its online efforts. Dean himself doesn't get involved in Internet operations. He leaves it to Internet experts and communicators. The campaign considers the Internet essential to empower people. The campaign is well-staffed with Internet pros. It has three full-time programmers, a database team, volunteer coders and more than 100 people working in open source on Dean-related projects. My take: To use the Internet right, you have to trust your people and give them the resources to get the job done. How many organizations do that today?