Triumph of the Punditocracy

Lots of comparisons are being made in the news between Michael Jackson’s untimely demise and the loss experienced by previous generations when first Elvis Presley, and then John Lennon died unexpectedly.

There is no comparison.

First, the obvious: Artists of previous generations dominated their medium is ways that nobody ever will dominate again.

But here’s the biggest difference: When Lennon and Elvis died, fans immediately went to their radios. There was the usual silliness (I remember my local DJ interviewing via phone George Harrison’s cousin about Lennon and she hadn’t seen the man in years.

DJ: How was John the last time you saw him?

C: Well, he was seventeen years old …)

Yeah, it was like that.

And it’s like that again.

But where is the music?

Stations with a formats even tangentially related to pop music went into overdrive, playing anything and everything by the late-great.

Michael Jackson died (as I write this) three and a half days ago.

I have yet to hear a single Michael Jackson or Jackson Five song on the radio. I have yet to see a single Michael Jackson video on the teevee machine.

Bits and pieces, sure. Usually interrupted for commentary by Donna Summer or Smokey Robinson or Corey Feldman (!) or somebody else whose opinion is … well, you decide. But the news media has a single narrative:

what is said about the man … or the event … is more important than the event itself.

Weird.

Everybody Knows Trial Lawyers are Out of Control, Right?

We are a litigious society.

We all know that. It barely gets noticed when someone says it anymore because, y’know … sky blue, water wet. Some lady got $3 million for spilling coffee for crisakes.

Yeah, we get it. So much of our national productivity is sucked away by lawyers trying to score a big judgment and a hefty one-third lawyer’s share that if we only could rein this in we’d all have briefcase helicopters.

Or something.

The poster case mentioned above, as dubbed by ABC News several years ago, is the McDonald’s coffee case. A woman who ordered hot coffee from a McDonald’s drive-through and instead got REALLY HOT coffee that, when spilled, resulted in third degree burns.

As Bugs would say: What a maroon.

It’s coffee after all. It’s HOT. A jury awarded the victim plaintiff almost $3 millon.

Let me say that again: THREE MILLION DOLLARS!

How long would you sit in hot coffee for that kind of money?

But think before you answer. Few remember that the judgment subsequently was reduced to less than a quarter of that amount based on proportional liability, comparable cases … lawyer stuff. They also tend to omit phrases like “skin graft” and “labial separation.” Few reports mention that anymore.

But $$THREEMILLIONDOLLARS!!! is a great headline and that’s where the narrative went.

That narrative is what remains. It’s what we call a … wait for it …

Dominant Narrative

The litigious society remains a problem for the American economy. That’s why you’ve probably already agreed to give up your right to sue your credit card companies, insurers, parking lot attendants, maybe even your employer. You did sign a lot of stuff on that first day, didn’t you?

Before you sleep too well,you should listen to this.

There's only ONE Original

Not the best version available but the best without embedding disabled.

So far.

Media Relations Making Lemonade ...

And that's how a shiny new narrative is born.

As Americans grow accustomed during the recession to spending more time at home and living in the same places longer, home-improvement companies are regaining momentum.

See the rest here.

Try to get it out of your head

Happy Friday

When Catholics Attack!

There’s a big stink up in South Bend over whether the University of Notre Dame should or shouldn’t have invited the President of the United States (!) to address its graduating class of 2009.

Really, what institution of higher learning wouldn’t love to have a commencement speaker who, aside from being a constitutional scholar, the holder of a juris doctor from Yale, also happens to be a guy with a two-thirds public approval rating in the U.S. (it’s actually higher in many places) provide the keynote to the highlight of its academic year?

Apparently, a bunch of people.

Let’s leave aside for the moment the image of Randall Terry appointing himself spokesman for Notre Dame alumni.

Or Catholicism.

Or any religion based on compassion.

Let’s also leave aside the whole presbyterian (small p) authority over institutions in their dioceses.

Finally, whether or not you think President Obama or Bishop D'Arcy is right on their respective interpretations of the United States Constitution, we’re left with a single question:

What went wrong?

It doesn’t seem that anybody – the president, the bishop, the university – wanted this controversy. The president was reaching out to new audiences and the university was seeking the prestige of just about the best “get” of the commencement season.

So who screwed up and where?

The smart money is on Father John Jenkins. He’s the president of the University of Notre Dame and a heck of a lot smarter than me. Maybe even than you. But here’s where he made the mistake:

Fr. Jenkins is a leader.

One of the cardinal rules of leadership is that those whom you seek to lead must at least understand your decisions. If you get too far out in front of the parade, you’re just a guy with a baton.

Another guy smarter than me, who happens to be an alumnus of Notre Dame, told me that the university sees itself as America’s “elite Catholic university.” He said that the real question is whether they put the emphasis on “elite” or “Catholic.”

Not sure that’s the last word. A university must accept, even invite divergent points of view. That’s what universities do.

It’s an oxymoron to call an institution elite if it turns away the elite.

It’s incongruent to call an institution Catholic – or Christian – if it’s not compassionate.

It’s nonsensical to call an institution a university if it can’t tolerate dissent.

There are more constructive ways to bring prestige to an institution without alienating significant audiences. The good father could have created a forum for discussion of the borders between morality and legality. He could have invited the president to address the faculty or to speak to a collection of legal scholars.

Where Fr. Jenkins missed a step is in awarding a specific honor to an individual that some part – probably a minority but a very vocal one – of his constituency simply cannot abide.

And I Shall Smite Them with My Social Media Hammer of Justice

The second great narrative about PR is the shiny tool. In the last two decades there has been an endless supply of new tactics and applications that have changed the profession forEVAH.

Seriously.

Many of them have to a degree: at least in the sense that where practitioners spend most of their time – at least as a team – has changed dramatically. For example, PR pros very rarely walk into a newsroom and sit next to a journo’s desk to pitch a story anymore. When was the last time you ran 400 copies of a news release? Or licked a stamp?

Yeah, it’s like that.

Today the shiny new (NEW!1!) tool is something called … wait for it … social media. Social media will bring on the golden age of public relations. Or, social media will destroy and/or replace public relations as a business discipline.

Or something.

Todd Defren touched on a little bit of this several weeks ago. What Todd misses is that many organizations will accept the “PR is soo over” narrative and shoot themselves in the foot. While he and I have to let good people go write crappy blogs like this one.

See? Nobody wins.

We can’t worry too much about what propeller-heads think about what we do. Historically the people who create technology either vastly overestimate or underestimate its impact.

Short version: They have no idea.

The point here, is that if the value you deliver to your clients or your employer can be changed radically by a new a technology …

wait …

If YOU have changed radically the way you support or advise your clients or your employer because of changes in technology, be afraid.

Be very afraid.


Fear change because you are using a distribution model. Channels of distribution for information always have evolved. Right now, we’re picking up the pace. If you or your agency sees public relations as a tactical exercise, you’re … well … screwed.

You’re focused on HOW.

Public relations is about WHAT.

The other Ws (who, when, where, why) remain. This is where you live because it’s the basis of your relationship with all the audiences that influence your mission.

Because I get angry emails I’m compelled to point out that I’m one of the organizers of something called Cincy Social Media. I don’t hate the technology, I embrace it. But while technology changes, the basics do not.

These are simple truths:

People trust people more than they trust organizations.

People are social animals: they like to be with a crowd of folks that seem to be like them whether for support or affirmation.

Sharing is fun: Everybody likes to feel smart, whether they’re teaching the neighbor kid how to grip a slider or telling a co-worker about the hot new club.

Face-to-face interaction trumps any electronic interaction. That’s why in the face of iPhones and MySpace we still have MeetUps and TweetUps.

There are plenty more, but they come down to this: Real life matters.

But what matters most in real life is your message. And your message had better be based on What. You. Do.

Public Relations is absolutely not (just) about Telling Your Story. Neither is it remotely related to how many people follow your Tweets. Or fan your FaceBook page.




Image Cred: ripped from Ross Training who actually offers cool ideas on how to work out on the cheap. No kidding.

Hey, boy, where you been?

This is the question one of my older colleagues asked me a couple of weeks ago. After showing him how the RSS machine worked, I think I implied a more consistent level of activity here.

Hoping to fix that shortly.

In the meantime, Cincinnati Social Media really has taken off, both as a movement (love that word … so vague …) and as an organization. I make a point to avoid blogging about teh social media, at least to the extent possible. On one level, it’s a bit like blogging about the fax machine or, as Pete Blackshaw would tell us, the phone.

Even so, it being the shiny new tool and all, I find myself talking about it all day – internally and externally – and that leaves less time for thoughts about the whole dominant narrative thing.

Still, I have enough material in the analog notebook to fill another year or so. The only challenge is finding those moments to organize and upload them.

You have been warned.

Anyway, for the dozens or so of you remaining, my apologies and stay tuned. Especially tomorrow morning, when I finish that thang I started a month or so ago.

Image Cred

Behold the Venn Diagram of Truth

Successful public relations counsel is based on experience and observation. It’s not easy per se … in the sense that anybody can do it without really knowing much about it. But neither is it terribly complicated.

Unlike the law, accounting, philosophy or countless other professions, most of the top finishing schools that each spring release thousands of freshly degreed PR practitioners on an unsuspecting population spend most of the four or six years they have a student’s attention focusing on tactics and case studies.

Sure, attorneys learn the case law, but how many PR degrees qualify a graduate to think like a practitioner.

[I renew my plea for a simple noun to refer to the profession. Seriously: if you practice Santeria you’re a practitioner. /rant]

There are two consistently competing narratives about PR and its future.

Behold my Venn Diagram of Truth

One seeks to paint the profession as hopelessly complex. This theory makes for very interesting coffeehouse conversation, not to mention quite a bit of google love.


Proponents take the basic planning step of audience identification and turn into a quasi religion. Instead of deciding how your organization should address each audience, they fill binders and ppt decks with lots and lots of different messages that each audience needs to hear. Or read. Or share. Or … something.

Audience identification is essential, make no mistake. And various audiences can have disparate and specific interests. But beginning with the massive Theory of Everything elevates a tactical consideration to something far beyond strategic planning.

If it’s an art, put it in a museum.

This is Gnosticism of the first order: If there’s something somebody knows that ONLY they know then guess what: They wouldn’t be hustling you for you PR budget to tell you.

Next: We’ll Tell Your Story

Does CNBC Get its Reputation Back?

By now, anybody really interested has seen the great Stewart/Cramer beat-down. And make no mistake: a beat-down it surely was.

If you’re just curious, look here, but not in the office and after the kids are safely asleep.

There are three DNT lessons here.

Prepare

The first, obvious to even the casual observer, is that anybody who goes into an interview unprepared is a fool.

Cramer is a ridiculously wealthy man and a savvy communicator. Like too many business executives, he seemed to believe he could rely on his own considerable charm and personal brand to weather the initial onslaught and fight his way to an agree-to-disagree stalemate.

He-said, she-said.

Nah-gonna-hapn.

He came out in his trade-mark sleeves-rolled performance costume (Did he have a flat tire on the way to the studio? Did he have, say, 24 hours LESS notice than I did that he was going to be interviewed Thursday night?)

Right off the bat, he shows disrespect for the forum, for the host and therefore for the audience. If you have neither the time nor the resources to prepare for a 15-minute interview with a COMEDIAN, you should, y’know, have a scheduling conflict. Send somebody who’s ready to play.

Know Your Own Record

Cramer is on the TeeVee machine for an hour every night during the week. He throws things. He refers to bank presidents (even central bank chairmen) by their first names. He says things about securities he owns, used to own, and will own in the future.

Clearly, he notes when he discusses an issue in which he has a stake. But Stewart was loaded for bear. He had tape of the jacketless one explaining how hedge fund managers manipulate markets while staying within regulatory rules.

These were not candids. The most damning footage had Cramer explaining how to manipulate stock while he quite obviously knew the conversation was being videotaped. It’s apparent he meant what he said. He just didn’t expect Stewart – or you – ever to see it.

Again, with the research capabilities of CNBC, this guy couldn’t make inquiries? He couldn’t prepare a response … an explanation … a rationalization? He couldn’t even throw himself on a sword for the sake of the organization that gives him his platform?

Or even vice-versa?

Something?

Nothing ...

Going into an interview where your counterpart knows more about your business than you is a symptom. As a PR practitioner, I understand that the spokesperson is not always told all of the facts. Or even all of the truth. But still, this is CNBC’s star: their money man.

If the tragic flaw of the traders and brokers and bankers who caused this mess was hubris, well, the jury remains out on whether they ever actually will be punished. But Cramer is guilty of that and worse: arrogance.

He seems to believe that kinda-sorta saying that he could have done better and maybe his network should have tried harder will be just the mea culpa he needs.

The American Public won’t buy it.

But guess what? Maybe the Cramer public will.

Know Your Audience

Jim Cramer is a cheerleader. His show is presented as advice for average investors and it’s that positioning that makes it so attractive to its target audience.

That target audience is not average investors.

CNBC is a cash cow in NBC Universal’s holdings. But it is by no means the most popular.

Almost nobody watches it.

Really.

It’s profitable because its business model is based on advertising and advertisers are dying to reach CNBC’c admittedly small audience: affluent traders and brokers.

Cramer’s Mad Money is sales spiel that these insiders can repeat the next day to soothe worried clients. It’s one continuous sales seminar. And if it didn’t work, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

Will Cramer Survive?

He just might.

If that core audience keeps tuning in, CNBC gets to keep ringing the cash register. But his credibility doesn’t rely solely on ratings. It relies on the fact that several “client” segments … the people to whom those traders and brokers and bankers repeat that Cramer wisdom … trust his advice.

They trust it because Jimmy said it.

That may be hard to maintain in the long term.

IMAGE CRED: JON SWEENEY