Public Relations

YouTube mashups as attack weapon

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Johnson & Johnson learned the painful way how a social media could be used against you. See previous post and the YouTube video by angry Motrin mom.

This is not exactly a new approach. It was only last November that someone called out Unilever on it’s Axe positioning,  mashing up the brilliant Dove commercial about ‘real beauty’ and the same company’s sex-ridden ads for Axe —below.

These videos tell a different kind of story. The Motrin video is vary basic, the anti-Axe quite slick. Yet they achieve a few important things:

  • They assemble and summarize supporting evidence against the offending brand
  • They make the problem seem big enough to recruit new supporters of the cause
  • They provoke the marketer to react

To think, not too long ago, the only tool at one’s disposal when offended, was a letter to the editor of your local paper!

Motrin’s ad brouhaha: is social media nasty medicine?

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Motrin’s baby-as-fashion accessory ad that created a lot of comment among moms in the blogosphere, also created a teaching moment about how social media can be used to monitor, respond and even prevent such a brouhaha.

Thousand of tweets, articles, and angry blog posts later, we need to step back and ask ourselves: how could a marketer learn form this.  AdAge has great analysis of this story with respect to the social media backlash.

First some background: About six months ago, Dunkin Donuts responded to a similar attack (by Michelle Malkin) about an ad that purportedly used a ‘terrorist’ icon, a kaffiyeh. The attack was without any substance, by the marketer took the ad down, fearing the negative chatter in the blogosphere would damage its brand.

Motrin’s parent company, Johnson & Johnson, no stranger to controversy, issued a statement apologizing missing the mark.  I don’t think it needed to have gone there, and could have done better damage control by engaging those they had offended. But hindsight is 20-20 in a crisis, and maybe they did not know how to engage the groups via social media.

Which brings us to pre-emptive public relations, and the ability to use new media to listen first. Without that, social media seems like a btter pill to swallow, because it all seems like a noisy echo-chamber waiting to take you out.


Quotes for the week ending 15 November, 2008

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“We are now offering a 25% Discount on all Collectable McCain/Palin08 products left in inventory”

Fire sale notice from the McCain-Palin campaign store.

“Simply put, things are already close enough between Change.gov and the Google Gang.”

Chris Soghoian, at CNetNews, commenting on Google’s relationship to the incoming White House administration. He also recommends BitTorrent for Pres. Obam’s fireside chats.

“massive employee raiding.”

Agency.com’s complaint that Scottsdale-AZ based agency, specifically Don Scales, a former Agency.com staffer, has been poaching its employees and clients.

“I go dark some weekends and evenings until 8 p.m. because my kids come first. It’s not easy, but I don’t need to be big on Digg.”

Jason Falls, Head of social media at Doe-Anderson, interviewd by Jason Baer

“Martin Eisenstadt doesn’t exist. His blog does, but it’s a put-on. The think tank where he is a senior fellow — the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy — is just a Web site. The TV clips of him on YouTube are fakes.”

The not so shocking news that an unnamed source for the Sarah-doesn’t-know-Africa-is-a-continent story a fabricated person, carefully set up by two film-makers. Many media outlets were duped.

“Create a video hub for the executive branch – call it GovTube – that aggregates all video content throughout the government in a searchable, user friendly video portal.”

One of the recomemndations by Dan Mannet, at TechPresident, for how the new administration could use multi-media.

Quotes for the week ending 8 November, 2008

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

“Thank you for painting your barns, canvassing by horseback, and volunteering alongside your Llama for Obama.”

Message of thanks on the BarackObama.com blog

“We should be careful of these zero-sum games where the new media drives out the old.”

Andrew Hayward, former president of CBS News, in The New York Times, commenting on political campaigns in the web 2.0 world.

“If I actually had a set of tear ducts, I’d probably cry.”

Angela Navtividad, at AdRants.com, reporting on the jubilation among Manhattanites on Barack Obama’s victory on Tuesday.

“The long nightmare is OVER!”

Comments by an avatar (!) going by the name Jordanna Beaumont, in Obama’s unofficial Second Life Headquarters.

“It’s marketing, not news … a bad idea executed with pompous pancake-faced flourishes and meaningless ta-da’s.”

Jim Veihdeffer, commenting at ValleyPRBlog on a post about the way a local TV news station did a story on LinkedIn.

“The public relations practitioner in me has to wonder why clients – even celebs – smugly throw their communications team under the bus when they aren’t happy with a decision made by management?”

Blog post at Phoenix PR agency, HMAPR, on ABC firing Brooke Smith in Grey’s Anatomy, and co-star Patrick Dempsey’s comments about the decision.

“He deserved better from his supporters. I was embarrassed when I heard the booing.”

Dan Wool, co-blogger at ValleyPRBlog, commenting on the response John McCain got during his concession speech, from an invitation-only audience of his “base” in Phoenix.

“I’m really glad it’s over.”

Raja Petra, a 58-year old blogger and editor of a site in Malaysia who was released after two months.

“insisting on a 20th century world behind the walls of the State Department while the watching a 21st century world develop outside the walls is not a sustainable posture…”

Sean McCormack, Assistant Secretary of State, on launching Briefing 2.0 on YouTube.

Don’t vote for these guys

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As I made my short list of whom to vote for in my district & county, I struck out a few people for the simple reason that they have come off so negative. I get it. Negative ads move the needle a bit, but not where I come from.

There were a few other marketing-related reasons as well why I thought they don’t need to be in charge of things.

  • They use some very, very old, unverified databases – I get mailers to three versions of my name. I have two words for them: database cleansing.
  • They present half-truths (as verified here) that assume the voter is dumb, and that we only get our information from their 9″ x 6″ flyers.
  • They kill a lot of trees to get their message (fiscal conservativism, responsible stewards yada yada).
  • They use the same format, same size, possibly the same print company. Did they not get the memo: one size fits nobody? The guy who sent us hand-addressed “letters” from his wife? Oh, come on!
  • They have no clue about variable-data printing. If they need to ask what this is, their campaign staff don’t need my tax money.

YouTube as your briefing room – State Department shows how

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Hey, whoever said the government was slow to adopt and risk averse? Take a look at what the State Department is doing, as an extension of what has been going on at DipNote for the past year.

They asked people for video questions and responded to it via video, in a briefing room at YouTube.

Sean McCormack takes your questions!

McCormack makes some excellent points in his post last Friday, saying this Briefing 2.0 strategy was not done for the expected reasons –to bypass the mainstream media:

“insisting on a 20th century world behind the walls of the State Department while the watching a 21st century world develop outside the walls is not a sustainable posture…”

I’ve never, in all my years of travel, considered connecting with diplomats and state department officials except from the other side of a piece of glass two inches thick. Who knows, it might be possible to ‘friend’ them one of these days on a social network.

In many of our organizations, we may think ourselves more user friendly and accessible than a government office, but we have our two-inch thick firewalls. It’s called standard business practice. The officers on the frontlines of our online press rooms do not take questions. They are there to tell us things, not respond.  When they put things down in print, to give us a bit of insight, it comes in the form of a boilerplate, at the bottom of a press release. Certainly not a blog post. Dipnote shames the business world into becoming more accessible.

Public Relations not a game

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

This is a follow up to my post last week (“do we trust journalists?”) and how important it is to understand what they want.

I frequently come across the argument that while PR people like to be proactive about pitching stories, they don’t do a good job of targeting, and even responding. It’s often a cat-and-mouse game.

Alec Klein, professor of journalism at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern wrote a thought-provoking piece this week on the PR game, and his experience as a journalist when trying to get the gatekeepers to be forthright. He talks of how, “when PR people essentially stonewall a reporter, all they are doing is forcing the reporter to find other ways to learn what is going on.”

Last Friday, after the Media Relations training session, I asked one of the attendees her reactions, one big take away was that reporters are not the enemy:  “We have to understand that they are just doing their job, and we could always find ways to help them improve their story,” she said. As long as you you how to talk to the media, you can turn what seems like an inquisition, into a dialogue. Bottom line: It’s not a game. Even if it seems like one, both sides need to win.

Sidebar: Speaking of which, this may be slightly academic, but in case you are interested, the Institute for Public Relations has a very good exploration on Ethics and Public Relations. It delves back into Plato’s Dialogues, truth and advocacy in the modern age.

(A shorter version of this appears in ValleyPRBlog)

Do we trust journalists?

/ Angelo Fernando / 2 Comments

I spoke to someone whom I thought might be interested in a Media Training session today. His reaction was “I don’t talk to the media. Nothing good ever comes out of it!”

Wow!

I was slightly taken aback, even though I have heard something like this before. (No, it was not Sarah Palin.) In fact, I have a mailer on my wall that announces “Don’t talk to the media…” On the reverse, is the line “until you talk to Gerard Braud.” Gerard is an IABC member I met earlier this year, who conducts this kind of thing, and his point is that you could tell an honest story, stripped of spin, and still have a great media experience.

Which brings me to the whole point of this. A survey of journalists just out (Bulldog Reporter/Techgroup International) on media relations practices. It’s an excellent insight into how journos think, what they do to connect (or avoid) PR spin, and how they stay on top of stories using social media. Among the findings:

  • Only 29% of journalists read 5 blogs or more to keep up with their beat. The positive side of this is that 75% read one blog or more. One year ago, about 26% read 5 or more blogs.
  • RSS usage us low (58.4% don’t use it), journalists abhor phone calls from PR people, and those not familiar with their media outlet.
  • Interestingly, newspapers are still a key source of news for them (so will all those newspapers-are-dead promoters stop making it seem worse than it is?), and a large number of them are big on Electronic News Kits.

So if you don’t want to share the same oxygen as journalists, at least try to make it easy to let them suck in your RSS feed from a distance. And that’s not just your from press releases, and your ‘about us’ page, but from your white papers, interviews, podcasts, blogs & thought pieces (same thing, huh?). We may not trust them, but we could trust them to do their ground work if we give them less puff pieces.

Hey, I can afford to say this because I wear two hats. I communicate with the media on behalf of whom I represent, but I also interview companies for my freelance writing.

Quotes for the week ending 25 October, 2008

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

“YouTube is a clip culture … But we saw that there was a demand for longer form.”

YouTube’s director of content partnerships, Jordan Hoffner, on its move to allow videos longer than  10-minutes.

“Start iterating– fast.”

Robert Scoble on what newspapers can learn from the technology industry.

“he displayed … intellectual vigor”

Colin Powell, on endorsing Barack Obama.

“What reality are you in?”

Alec Baldwin, responding to those who thought it was a mistake to put Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live, because it might sway voters.

“It is an acceptance mark.”

Antonio Lucio, the new CMO of Visa, on what the brand stands for, and his plans for moving a piece of plastic into the digital age. Quoted in Advertising Age.

“… we see that technology allows for new kinds of connectedness built around cell phones and the internet.”

Tracy Kennedy of the University of Toronto, commenting on the Pew Internet and American Life study on Networked Families, just out.

Wal-Mart is not afraid of negative reviews from customers.”

Josh Bernoff, on how Walmart has turned the supertanker around and is embracing social media.

“Be flexible, consider part-time work, take a paycut, work hard”

Annie Waite, at Internal Comms Hub, the Melcrum blog, quoting Lynn Hazan, about strategies for communicators to survive the down turn.

McCain-Palin campaign needs more mavericks on the bus

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Now that the attack ads, Governor Palin’s SNL appearance, and the unconvincing “socialist” line using surrogate Joe-the-Plumber have not moved the needle, the campaign is calling for McCain Marshalls and McCain Mavericks to be deployed. The “campaign deployment program” is a last minute attempt to stop the downward slide in the polls.

From a messaging point of view, the Palin-McCain campaign (oops!) is completely off kilter, and I bet there’s a huge tussle between the campaign staff as to whether to be consistent or scatter shot. I bet Rick Davis wants to unleash the real McCain, but having let Palin walk in and change the tone of the campaign (+ the search results if you check YouTube etc), John McCain is less and less what his brand stood for.

There is a considerable amount if chatter about “letting McCain be McCain” but either Davis’ media monitoring widget isn’t working, or they they have too many cooks in the kitchen.  As one disgruntled Republican put it, “The “Straight Talk Express” was derailed in September.” Meaning the maverick was muzzled.

No wonder they’re scouting for some new voices.