PR Studies

Epitaphs on spin

We will surely never see times like this again. The UK's most influential and best-known PR adviser announces his (expected) resignation, and it's the biggest media story of the day.

For the record, this is how The Mirror, The Times, The Guardian and The Telegraph report on Alastair Campbell's departure. Only the last of these thought yesterday's Iraqi bomb blast a more important news story.

'How not to' guide

Two bad examples of online PR are circulating.

One was a crude attempt to contribute a guest article to Mitch Kapor's respected blog, an offer which went to several other opinion formers. Thanks to G2Blog for the link. Dan Gillmor offers a calm perspective on this, as ever.

The other was the PR attempt to promote a band by posing as a nine-year-old fan, recorded in Media Guardian. Thanks to PR Opinions for this.

Rise and fall of British business

It was the coming of the railways in Victorian Britain that led to creation of the modern company. The need for capital was so great that that investors had to be offered the reassurance of limited liability.

From this start, the authors of The Company (there is an excerpt in The Times today) tell a familiar story. 'Of the 2,000 cotton firms... only a handful had anything as sophisticated as a marketing department'. The public school disdain for trade added to the low regard for business in society.

There have been some high points. The authors point to Lever Brothers introducing Sunlight, the world's first branded and packaged laundry soap. This was in 1885. They also admire a few well-run and enduring family firms such as Cadbury. But it seems that, in creating companies, we were fonder of the idea than the execution.

Father Walter Ong

There is an obituary in The Times of Father Walter Ong, Jesuit priest and communications theorist (he had been supervised by Marshall McLuhan). Other, earlier, notices from US newspapers can be found here.

Clap trap or clarity?

Here's the proof. Companies that write clearly appear to outperform those that hide behind jargon and stale cliches. Is this a platform for proving public relations value going forward, I wonder (using two of the pet hates cited)? This comes from a study by Clarity, which provides copywriting services.

The Telegraph and The Oberver and Bloomberg all report the findings.

PR for PR graduates

There are welcome words in support of PR graduates from Kevin Taylor of Companycare Communications in a letter to PR Week:

Our experience with graduates has been excellent, and candidates with a PR degree certainly have a headstart when we hold interviews.

Online innovators

The challenge thrown down in the previous post was to identify examples of PR-led innovation online. Here are my first two examples. (I make no apologies that neither is a technology innovation - instead they use online media to further debate and dialogue). I'd welcome further examples...

Philip Morris owns several brands, but none so famous or so controversial as Marlboro cigarettes. Yet in the face of overwhelming medical evidence concerning the ill effects of smoking (as well as the potential lawsuits from sick smokers), it needed to face up to a tough communications challenge. Say little and admit nothing (the line probably proposed by the company's legal advisers), or own up and move on (thus protecting the company's customers and its non-cigarette brands). Here's what is written on the Philip Morris USA website:

We agree with the overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema and other serious diseases in smokers. Smokers are far more likely to develop serious diseases, like lung cancer, than non-smokers. There is no "safe" cigarette.

These words on this company website were a stunning revelation when they first appeared several years ago. They are still surprising today. I have no insight into the battles fought to get them there, but I'd like to praise the company's management and its PR advisers.

My other example of PR-driven corporate website innovation is a European one - and drawn from an equally sensitive business, oil extraction.

Royal Dutch/Shell Group has been under attack on many environmental and ethical fronts. These issues aren't going to go away. So how can the company's PR strategy face up to them? Quite simply, Shell uses its website to acknowledge that it is involved in a whole series of difficult Issues (previously, the page was more forcefully called 'Issues and Dilemmas', and was directly linked from the corporate home page).

Of course, the critics will call this a PR whitewash. Maybe it's a subtle point, but the language suggests it's more than this. It's an attempt to engage in important debates on topics that matter. It's a gentle and appropriate form of public relations persuasion.

Both Philip Morris and Shell are faced with unavoidable issues. Their future success depends on their ability to navigate these issues and retain the trust of the public (and legislators). That's why they've adopted PR-led communicaitons strategies.

Ethical dilemmas, or innovative uses of spam and affiliate marketing. What do you want to discuss?

Link it or lose it

I spent too long today driving on the M1 and missed a spirited online debate. So here it is for future reference.

Rick Bruner mocks PR people for our slowness to adopt new technology. He lists the many innovations marketers have introduced (think spam, among others),

Versus, what innovative uses of the Internet has the PR industry brought us? Well, let's see, there's the sending of press releases via email, and then there are press release archives on web sites, and virtual clipping services and...webinars, and...PRNewswire's ProfNet...and... I know I'm forgetting something. A little help?

He further criticises PR blogs for writing about PR, not for the purpose of PR.

Tom Murphy acknowledges the force of this argument, but resents the crude depiction of PR people as slow and stupid. Tom is a PR blogger and a PR practitioner in the technology sector. He can put up a better defence than most of us.

It will take me longer to come up with a list of PR-led online innovations. I'm thinking about it...

Faliraki

Many of our students take a keen interest in club and event promotions (a very simple function of public relations). Perhaps we should encourage others to explore the flip side (see BBC report for background to Faliraki's summer of drunks).

Images of war

If Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq by PR Watch editors Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber is a difficult book to review, it was also a difficult book to have written. It is notoriously hard to gain perspective when writing contemporary history, and this book discusses events of recent weeks and months.

Only yesterday, Alastair Campbell faced the Hutton Inquiry in London. Questions of government spin are still open on both sides of the Atlantic.

Within the last week, Libya's acceptance of responsibility over the Lockerbie bombing has shed startling new light on the British-backed US bombing of Libya in the 1980s.

To its great credit, Weapons of Mass Deception, does show perspective. It is well-researched and sourced, and is a dispassionate account of recent events. Of course, it's not comfortable reading for those of us who supported the US or UK governments, or for those of us working in public relations. But this is not itself a work of propaganda.

Instead, it contributes to our understanding of the uses of propaganda and mass media. For those who assumed that democracies were immune from manipulation, there's a chilling quotation from Hermann Goering arguing otherwise.

The book attempts a historical analysis of terrorism, concluding that terrorism is now 'a form of propaganda', dependent on mass media coverage. I would have liked their analysis to have gone further, because this raises many difficult questions for free societies and the mass media.

The authors are damning of the saturation media coverage of the war - so extensive and yet so limited. They also identify the hours of TV coverage as open to manipulation through government-controlled photo opportunites (the examples of this will be easily recalled). Yet they neglect to mention that individual voices could also be heard during this period, in a new form of unspun media. One Iraqi citizen became celebrated for his warts-and-all recounting of events in a weblog written from Baghdad in between power cuts. He is still writing.

Above all, the book provides perspective on the image of America around the world, during this period of Pax Americana. If I may be permitted a British historical perspective: when you're in a position of power, it's possible to act out of good intentions and still to be disliked. That's the hardest of public relations problems to solve.

Link:
Brian Eno's Observer review of Weapons of Mass Deception