PR Studies

Now for The Fall of PR

Humans need narratives to simplify the muddy complexity of life. These narratives (stories) sometimes become so compelling that they appear to be the truth. But a narrative isn't the truth, it's a convenient and sometimes prevalent world view.

Here's a compelling narrative. Ten years ago The Cluetrain Manifesto proclaimed that 'markets are conversations' and that marketers should stop shouting and start listening. The text wasn't comfortable reading for public relations practitioners, but it suggested they were closer to mastery of the conversational style needed in the online age. (The book was written in the early years of Google and before the rise of blogging, social networks and twitter.)

Then, in 2002, brand evangelists Al Ries and Laura Ries narrated 'The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR'. Their thesis turned the normal thinking upside down: 'You can't launch a new brand with advertising because advertising has no credibility. It's the self-serving voice of a company anxious to make a sale. You can launch new brands only with publicity or public relations (PR).'

In The Long Tail (2006), Chris Anderson turned to markets. The whole process of launches and hits was becoming less important than the aggregate sales available in niche markets over time. Publicity was becoming less important than discovery in our Google-mediated world.

Then, in Here Comes Everybody (2008) Clay Shirky took a look at organisations in the age of social media. What are they for, he wondered, when individuals can come together freely to create knowledge and products that are often then made available for free.

There have been other good books in the past decade, but many contribute to the same narrative. It's a narrative about fragmenting media, shortened attention spans, about trust, transparency and who we permit to talk to us. It's important to everyone in the media, commerce, marketing and public relations.

An argument (a thesis) invites a response (the antithesis); the debate sometimes leads to a useful synthess.

A belated riposte to Al Ries and Laura Ries pops into my inbox in the form of a free ebook. 

It's a reassertion of advertising's importance and a critique of public relations.

At one level, it's simple. If the objection to advertising was that it operates as one-way communication, then change this.

So Amazon channeled its advertising budget to subsidise free delivery, and recouped free advertising recommendation from customers as a result. Smart move, but surely this is now a public relations triumph.

What are the author's objections to PR? It's that it's too good at achieving free press, at a time when the press is in decline. Then there are the usual objections to fakery, to astroturfing and to benefiting from bad news (through offering crisis management services). That's all it amounts to.

We're told that 'PR is a one night stand in a world where people are looking for lasting relationships with their brands'. 'Advertising can become successful if it becomes more interactive and creates a relationship with the consumer'. Indeed, but doesn't it then become public relations? 

PR deserves criticism in its press agentry form (the one night stand) but it doesn't seem far-fetched to claim relationships for an area that's known as public relations. This is a definitional problem that has been around for a long time: certainly, it's one of the crticisms of the Al Ries and Laura Ries book from a PR perspective. They view PR simply as publicity.

This new book cites the great exception to the prevailing narrative: Apple. The computer company that became a brand capable of extension into new product areas. The company that keeps control of the message, that makes heavy use of conventional advertising. The company that is fervently worshipped by its followers. David Brain and Martin Thomas addressed the paradox of Apple in Crowd Surfing, concluding that this company is 'the exception that proves the rule'.

I applaud the author's assault on fakery. 'The time is over when advertising can fake brands into becoming real... In today's transparent market, faking doesn't work, even if you have the budget to buy all the media in the world. The reason is that the truth can spread for free on the Internet.'

Stockholm-based Stefan Engeseth has written an interesting book on marketing and branding - but he doesn't have anything new to say about public relations. Turf wars over the rightful domains of marketing, advertising and PR are beginning to look very twentieth century. Meanwhile, we're still looking for a 21st century paradigm for marketing. This book proposes authenticity; I'd suggest legitimacy as the ultimate goal of public relations activity.

Note how the old-fashioned PR stunt of making third parties aware of the new product has worked in this case: how could a PR blogger fail to rise to the bait of a book called The Fall of PR and the Rise of Advertising?

Two new books about PR and web 2.0

At the turn of the millennium, I gave a talk for the then IPR on public relations and the internet.

I decided to simplify the message and describe a case study of how a small, volunteer-run community club had saved money and improved its publicity and relationships with members by turning to simple electronic means, namely a website and email communications. This was the web 1.0 world, remember.

One practitioner in the room was clearly unpersuaded. 'Yes, but is it strategic?' he asked.

I still regret not countering this by saying, 'it's only as strategic as communications and relationships'.

This is the key message from David Phillips's updated Online Public Relations, written with Philip Young. (You see, I'm probably ten years behind Phillips.) This book, the most ambitious in the PR in Practice Series, provides a framework for developing a corporate internet strategy. It also challenges us to rethink the role of public relations. I have reviewed it together with Rob Brown's Public Relations and the Social Web for Behind the Spin.

Vintage Cluetrain

So The Cluetrain Manifesto is ten years old.

Much has changed since 1999 (blogs and other forms of social media have made the web a much more conversational space). But it remains an important polemic against most marketing and PR practices. These haven't changed fast enough.

Take the standard computer-industry press release (the authors write). With few exceptions, it describes an "announcement" that was not made, for a product that was not available, quoting people who never said anything, for distribution to a list of people who mostly consider it trash.

Is there any hope for PR?

But, of course, the best of the people in PR ... understand that they aren’t censors, they’re the company’s best conversationalists. Their job -- their craft -- is to discern stories the market actually wants to hear, to help journalists write stories that tell the truth, to bring people into conversation rather than protect them from it. Indeed, already some companies are building sites that give journalists comprehensive, unfiltered information about the industry, including unedited material from their competitors. In the age of the Web where hype blows up in your face and spin gets taken as an insult, the real work of PR will be more important than ever.

It still needs saying, so The Cluetrain Manifesto still needs reading.

PR: what is it good for?

W. Timothy Coombs and Sherry J. Holladay
It's Not Just PR: Public Relations in Society
144 pages, Blackwell Publishing, 2007

I've re-read this slim book as it's useful for a lecture I'm preparing, and I've found even more to admire second time round. Since it's probably too difficult and academic a book for most students, here's a summary in book review form.

The key question addressed by the authors (two respected professors of corporate communication from a US university) is this: does society need public relations?

To answer this, they first review the main critics of public relations. There are the negative media portrayals, the critical academic and popular texts from PR Watch authors Stauber and Rampton such as Toxic Sludge is Good for You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry. (Their UK counterparts Miller and Dinan of Spinwatch, authors of A Century of Spin published last year are not mentioned in this book, but you can find my review here).

The main criticism levelled by Stauber and Rampton (and Miller and Dinan) is that PR is too powerful. Its widespread use by large corporations serves to stifle discourse and restricts democracy. Their targets are multinational businesses and the international public relations consultancies that serve their interests.

Coombs and Holladay then consider some popular pro-PR books. They argue that The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR and Full Frontal PR define public relations in its narrow role of generating media coverage. 'There is no real defense [sic] of public relations to be found in these books. But public relations is considered useful to society because it does help business.'

The authors note how the professional bodies and public relations academics do distinguish between public relations and publicity (the PRSA states that 'public relations helps an organization and its publics adapt mutually to each other'). Yet they cite Heath in questioning whether the academic definitions based on the concept of 'mutually beneficial relationships' are a statement of an ideal rather than reality.

For the central issue raised by this book is power. Since an organisation funds its public relations efforts, there is an implied persuasive purpose to these efforts. Would the organisation confer a stakeholder group with no power with as much significance as one with significant power to affect the achievement of organisational goals?

Coombs and Holladay propose the following definition of public relations, based on stakeholder theory: 'the management of mutually influential relationships within a web of stakeholder and organizational relationships'.

In reviewing professional ethics, they note the tension and contradictions in 'balancing the needs of society and the needs of clients'. They quote Shannon Bowen's chapter on the Ethics of Public Relations in Heath's Handbook of Public Relations: 'The power to influence society means that public relations holds enormous responsibility to be ethical'. 

Two-way symmetrical communication (ie a genuine dialogue) is preferable, but 'the important point is that organizations and stakeholders may be partners in two-way communication but rarely will they be equal in terms of power'.

Then there is the question of the power of the PR practitioner within the organisation. In theory, the boundary-spanning role suggests power and responsibility, but the practice may be rather different. 'Everything considered, the power of PR professionals within the organization is really quite limited. They may not be able to truly let their conscience be their guide.'

Outside the organisation, the authors see public relations as playing a role in the 'marketplace of ideas' through issues management and social marketing. 'The web of relationships is used to build awareness of and concern for an issue or a problem. Relationships between stakeholders are the raw material from which larger societal changes are constructed.'

Though the argument that public relations is too powerful is challenged ('public relations is not as all powerful as its critics would have us believe') they argue that 'public relations plays a valuable role in society... It helps to maintain the relationships necessary for the effective functioning of society.'

This may seem an unsurprising conclusion to a European reader, but it's worth noting that this book comes from two US academics, and was written before the credit crunch and recession became apparent. I suspect it will find greater favour today as organisations come to realise the limitations of promotional culture and pay more heed to the need for social legitimacy.

Crowdsourcing book review

Some ideas quickly seep into the public consciousness so that they seem always to have been around. Yet Crowdsourcing (not to be confused with Crowd Surfing or The Widsom of Crowds) is a new book based on an idea first published in a 2006 Wired article (following in the slipstream of The Long Tail).

The writer Jeff Howe is careful to point out that he is not describing a new concept. He cites a long cultural tradition and Adam Smith's 'the invisible hand' as precedents. Yet the book inevitably draws its examples from the Web 2.0 economy of 'user generated content'.

In summary, it's cheaper, smarter and less risky to involve the crowd in solving problems and in developing products than relying solely on employees. Examples are drawn from the Open Source movement, music and entertainment (American Idol and computer games), and commercial photo sharing (iStockphoto). In this, Howe agrees with Clay Shirky, whose Here Comes Everybody (now out in paperback) has stolen some of the attention away from this book.

Like Shirky, he's an optimist, though corporate suits will find much to be gloomy about (there's a chapter called 'The rise and fall of the firm'). But Howe is at his best describing the failures and false starts, and we learn most from these contradictory case studies. For not every community takes off, and not every vibrant community acquires a viable business model. (He gives us ten tentative rules for community building in the conclusion to this book.)

For there's a 1:9:90 rule of user engagement (called participation inequality by Jakob Nielsen, though he's not cited in this book). For every hundred people on a site, only one will actually create content, another nine will comment on what has been created while the majority will simply lurk. The maths works out for Wikipedia (though a small few create most of the content) and for American Idol, though most communities will struggle to gain critical mass.

There are lessons in this for so-called citizen journalism, though Howe takes a balanced view: 'We are all better served when the crowd complements what journalists do, rather than trying to replicate it.' There are lessons for marketing because co-opting the crowd into research and development creates by this process a ready market for the resulting product (eg Threadless t-shirts).

Lessons for public relations are not made explicit, so I'll suggest them. One is that the crowd is the public, so we should by definition be experts in forging relationships with them. Another is that we need to focus on the quality of these relationships - public engagement in Richard Edelman's phrase - and community building brings many potential benefits. Last (not least), Google is now the key player and so links - the key to PageRank - are themselves a form of community and a benefit of community building.

Book review of the year

On the last day of 2008, here's my pick of the most interesting and provocative books about - or of relevance to - public relations published this year (first posted at PROpenMic).

1. Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky. Well-written, thought-provoking and optimistic account of human ingenuity and community-mindedness. (My full review).

2. Crowd Surfing, Martin Thomas and David Brain. Two PR consultants describe how to survive in a world that seems out of control. Important and prescient (and consistent with some of Clay Shirky's themes); this book was written just as the world was about to tip into a recession. (My full review).

3. Groundswell, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. There's definitely a theme emerging in my selection; Groundswell deserves its place because it's less optimistic, more realistic and better-researched than other books about social media. (My full review).

4. PR: A Persuasive Industry? Trevor Morris and Simon Goldsworthy. In some ways it's an odd book: more of a guidebook than a textbook; though written by two British PR lecturers, it's anti-academic in approach and written in US-English. But it's written for students and practitioners, and even where I disagreed with it I found it thought-provoking. (My full review).

5. Flat Earth News, Nick Davies. A British journalist's account of the declining power of national newspapers and the unstoppable rise of public relations. It's a bleak assessment on both counts, but too important a book to ignore. (My full review).

UPDATE: I'm aware of three more books coming out in 2009 on a similar theme (surprisingly, two are from the same publisher): 

• Brian Solis and Deirdre Breakenridge: Putting the Public Back in Public Relations: How Social Media is Reinventing the Aging Business of PR; 
• Rob Brown: Public Relations and the Social Web: How to Use Social Media and Web 2.0 in Communications;
• David Phillips and Philip Young: Online Public Relations: A Practical Guide to Developing an Online Strategy in the World of Social Media.

The death of subs

I'm enjoying Trevor Morris and Simon Goldwsworthy's new book on PR ('PR is perhaps the ultimate postmodern industry. No one knows what it really is, but it sounds interesting!')

The authors have an easy style and theirs is a lively, intelligent - but not academic - style of writing. A review should follow soon at Behind the Spin.

But having paid £25 for a new hardback, I'm dismayed by the number of proofing errors. Here's the third one I noticed in the first 25 pages, quoted in full:

"Subeditors become an costly luxury."

Evidently, as Carrie would say in Sex and the City (a programme frequently cited by the authors).

Practitioners: 'what do you read?' meme

I'm keen to start a regular 'bookshelf' column in Behind the Spin magazine. This will give PR practitioners a chance to say which books they most often consult. In previous issues, Lord Chadlington has mentioned his admiration of the novels of Anthony Trollope. Currently, Karl Milner praises Drew Westen's The Political Brain (a timely read about the pyschology of US presidential campaigns).

They could be books on politics, business or society; textbooks, style guides, self-help manuals or novels. They could be standards or surprises. Either way, I think it will help today's students and young practitioners.

Here are the groundrules. Choose up to ten books, and write up to 100 words explaining each choice. Send these to me with your portrait photo in JPG format (email address on right). You're also welcome to cross-post to your own blog.

To get you thinking, here are the top ten books I most often refer to (space does not allow descriptions):

1. The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell
2. Strategic Communication Management, by Jon White and Laura Mazur
3. The Empty Raincoat, Charles Handy
4. The Economist Style Guide
5. Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky
6. Journalism: Truth or Dare?, Ian Hargreaves
7. Naked Conversations, Robert Scoble and Shel Israel
8. Permission Marketing, Seth Godin
9. Evaluating Public Relations, Tom Watson and Paul Noble
10. The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR, Al Ries and Laura Ries

Toby Young's How to Lose Friends and Alienate People came surprisingly close to being picked and this morning I found myself recommending Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene whilst admitting I've never read it myself...

'You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf'

Book review: Crowd Surfing: Surviving and thriving in the age of consumer empowerment, by Martin Thomas and David Brain, A&C Black, 2008

What are consultants for? Whether they're PR, marketing or management consultants, their role is well described in Tony Benn's parable about prophets and kings, as retold by Charles Handy in The Empty Raincoat:

"What prophets can do is to tell the truth as they see it. They can point to the emperor's lack of clothes, that things are not what people like to think they are. They can warn of dangers ahead if the course is not changed... Most of all, they can offer a way of thinking about things, a way to clarify the dilemmas and concentrate the mind."

Consultants, in other words, help clients cope with a disorganised, complex and chaotic world (paradox is the word used by Handy). Crowd Surfing is the metaphor employed by two UK consultants, Martin Thomas and David Brain, to describe the new world of consumer empowerment.

This is a familiar narrative with some brilliant insights. They talk of the complexity of message control in a post-advertising age, and in doing so present Naomi Klein's No Logo from 2000 as a dated analysis of a historical phenomenon - the high water mark of corporate control of brands:

"This manifesto of the anti-corporate movement [No Logo] depicted a world in which consumers were under the thrall of global brand owners. Consumer freedoms were under attack; global brands were too powerful; too controlling. She talked about how 'in ways both insidious and overt, this corporate obsession with brand identity is waging a war on public and individual space; on public institutions such as schools, on youthful identities, on the concept of nationality and on the possibilities for unmarketed space'."

'It is an image of the world that, in hindsight, seems almost charming in its naivety,' the authors add.

Crowd Surfing builds on key texts such as The Wisdom of Crowds, Wikinomics and Naked Conversations, and fits alonside two other recent books on consumers, corporates and social media - Groundswell and Here Comes Everybody.

Where it differs from all these is in asking questions about the type of leader best suited to this changing world. The authors quote historian Niall Ferguson describing good leaders as 'the ones that realise (a) I'm fallible, and (b) the world is chaotic. Insecurity is ... an important part of being a good leader. You have to be aware of your vulnerability.'

They quote WPP's Sir Martin Sorrell echoing this: 'In an increasingly networked world, the 21st century is not for tidy minds. I think - certainly in our business - trying to simplify complexity actually ends up in destroying value.'

'Leaders such as Sorrell appear to be the ones most likely to thrive in this new world', according to the authors, because 'they are comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty, possibly even chaos.'

Here's another paradox: in a fragmented world where people are increasingly 'meeting' via screen and keyboard, how do you expain the popularity of live events? For the authors, 'the crowd is, in effect, our new family, and sporting events, political rallies and rock concerts provide the platforms for the crowd to congregate and the sense of community that we all need.'

Who will succeed in this chaotic world: 'interesting' companies and brands. 'Interesting businesses such as Unilever, Innocent, IKEA, 42 Below and JetBlue keep the crowd engaged and involved by always being interesting... They benefit from a virtuous circle in which the more interesting they become, the more likely they are to attract interesting people with interesting ideas, to recruit the most interesting employees, to be written about in the most interesting media and talked about on the most interesting blogs. They save millions of pounds on advertising because they can rely on positive word of mouth to maintain their profile. Now that's interesting.'

So much for leaders and businesses; but what of consultants and their consultancies? The book addresses the implications for marketing services agencies. 'To marketing heads and senior advertising professionals, PR has been accused of being unsophisticated, lacking strategic and empirical rigour. It feels 'fluffy'... This is changing. Smart advertising and media agency heads are putting aside their prejudices and applying many of the practices and principles of PR to the way they plan their campaigns.'

This small book successfully describes a big topic: how to cope with chaos. It's an excellent and intelligent commentary on what's changing and where we're going. I'm a picky proofreader but only spotted one small error: the suggestion that Robert Scoble (famous blogger and co-author of Naked Conversations) is a Microsoft employee, when 'was' would have been more accurate.

It successfully fuses the corporate and technological perspectives (presumably supplied by David Brain) with the consumer and brand marketing perspective (Martin Thomas's speciality).

It even addresses the biggest paradox of all. How come Apple is so successful when it breaks all the rules? 'Apple is an enigma - a business with a rebellious, freewheeling persona, run by a brilliant control freak... We decided in the end that Apple was the exception that proved the rule.'

Perhaps rules are too rigid and inflexible a prescription for coping with chaos. I'd say this is more of a guidebook than a rule book, and it's a recommended read. To answer my question about the role of consultants, we need them to show us the way.

Sex, lies and celebrity

Mark Borkowski (2008) The Fame Formula: How Hollywood's Fixers, Fakers and Star Makers Created the Celebrity Industry, Sidgwick & Jackson

Mark Borkowski writes that 'in the media world, very few genuflect to the past - the zeitgeist is all.' Yet he's rather different ('I fell into publicity because I failed to get into university to read history' he says) and has written this history of the Hollywood publicity machine in follow-up to his previous book, Improperganda: The Art of the Publicity Stunt.

It's full of stories: Barnum's elephants, a Tarzan publicity stunt involving a tame lion, and the hilarious tale of how a publicist protected the reputation of actress Tara Tiplady and her co-star after an incident involving oral sex and a hot frying pan required medical intervention. Tiplady was starring as the Virgin Mary in a film about the birth of Christ at the time, so publicity would have been a bad thing.

But what does it tell us? 'The great skill of the publicist in this era [ie 1930s Hollywood] was making journalists think they had the measure of power they craved when in fact they were simply desperate for access to be granted.' Not perhaps so different then from the world of sport, entertainment, politics and even big business today.

There is a special case to be made for Hollywood, of course. Since show business manufactures make-believe, why should its publicity be held to higher standards of veracity? Is it such a bad thing to tell white lies to conceal the sexuality or height of a leading man? Note how this 'entertainment industry exemption' is the defence used by Max Clifford to this day - the 'Freddie Starr ate my hamster' school of entertainment PR. It's all about the stories; if you want to keep something out of the media, feed them a better story.

These ethical questions are not Borkowski's main concern; he's also interested in the stories. He quotes a newspaper report on two celebrated publicists, Harry Brand and Russell Birdwell: 'Lots of people can run a publicity department, but it takes a peculiar man to think up ideas... Harry and Russell are primarily idea men - each with a different approach'.

This is revealing: to succeed in publicity, you need to come up with big, bright ideas. What's the word for people who deal in ideas? Intellectuals. Students will find this surprising; they sometimes complain that their lecturers over-complicate things and seek to take the moral high-ground. But the implication is that celebrity PR is itself an intellectual activity: let's call it 'cerebrity PR'.

The topic was also rehabilitated recently by one of the UK's best known public relations academics. Jacquie L'Etang's latest textbook considers celebrity PR worthy of academic study.

Borkowski's isn't an academic study, but it's a lively account of some large characters written in an appropriately Chanderlesque style. 'Jim Moran was a large man with a penchant for wearing a big beard - unonventional in clean-cut mid-century America - and a fez. He was one of the biggest personalities in an industry rife with larger-than-life personalities, so much so that his personality wound its way inextricably into many of his stunts.'

Some of these large characters gained positions of power over matters of life and death. Referring to Howard Strickling, MGM would advise its stars: 'If you get into trouble, don't call the police. Don't call the hospital. Don't call your lawyer. Call Howard.' The murder of 'platinum blonde' Jean Harlow's film director husband by a former lover became a much more convenient suicide at the hands of the publicists in order to protect her reputation.

In a less troubling example of the publicist's art, Jack Tirman invented a non-existent exotic dance duo in order to promote a Manhattan nightclub. He gained plenty of publicity for the dancers but was surprised to read a stinking press review of these performers, 'who for obvious reasons hadn't put a foot wrong'. Two wrongs don't make a right.

Yet publicity had started a slow journey towards becoming a respectable business. Henry Rogers played a part in this: 'He hosted parties for his clients, put himself into the social whirl of Hollywood and made sure he was well read enough to be able to talk anything but shop when he was out on the town.' He focused on relationships with the studios and thus offered his clients more than press agentry. His business, Rogers & Cowan (formed in 1945 and later acquired by Shandwick) became a recognisably modern public relations consultancy, able to adapt to changes in business and the media. 'Dog food and movie stars are much alike because they are both products in need of exposure', as Rogers said.

We're now into the short-attention-span television age in which anyone can seek their '15 minutes of fame'.  But we're given a useful distinction: 'Publicity is about noise and the excitement of the moment, whereas public relations is more about planning and carefully structuring a series of events that build to a bigger picture. The successful public relations merchants...are as much media strategists as press agents.'

One such strategist, Pat Kingsley - a useful counterpoise to all the male publicists featured in the book - realised the value of less publicity in a media-saturated age and rewrote the rules. 'If you can't stop celebrities making mischief, she reasoned, then at least you should try and stop the journalists from making mischief.'

The formula of the book's title may be an awkward addendum; the book may be more concerned with answering 'how?' than addressing 'why?' - but this is an entertaining read and a valuable contribution to the history of public relations.

If this review is brought to the author's attention, he may enjoy this. In the same year as Borkowski began his career in theatrical publicity, your reviewer was accepted to read history at an ancient university. Perhaps as a result, his career has never reached the same heights as Borkowski's.