Austin plane crash throws spotlight on federal crisis comms

IRS, FBI convey a sober tone and solid information in a post-9/11, instant-media world

"Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words can never hurt me."

Remember that saying from childhood? Those words filled my ears as I read the ramblings of Joseph Stack—a deranged and disillusioned man who gave up on life Thursday.

Disgruntled and dismayed by the unfair hand that life and the IRS had dealt him, his attack on an Austin IRS facility in a small airplane offers an unusual glimpse into the efficacy of governmental crisis communication in an age of instant information and news gratification.

Let’s look at the crisis itself: News outlets immediately reported that nearly 200 IRS employees worked at that particular building. Any act involving an airplane, a building and a crash profoundly echoes the Sept. 11 attacks, adding a dimension of fear and fascination to the situation.

Add to the mix the relatively bizarre nature of the event—the attacker left behind a suicide blog (so 2010) documenting his list of troubles with the IRS, compete with Shakespearean allusions—and you have a news item that presents a barely manageable crisis communications incident ready to spiral out of control and spread like wildfire among the tweetoblogosphere.

Click here to read the rest of the article at ragan.com.

Getting Into The Mixing Bowl (from Media Post)

In terms of exposure, Super Bowl space has a potentially big payoff; this year's game ended up being the most-watched television program ever, capturing an average of 106.5 million viewers, or 213 million eyeballs. But what about in terms of efficacy? Or more specifically, did advertising during the Super Bowl truly advance a company or organization's messaging in any meaningful way?

It's true, individual ads are hit or miss, as reviews in AdAge, New York Times and Slate will tell you. Each review will have had a positive or negative effect on the sales of a particular product or service. But for one of the ads, which probably received the most pregame buzz, those golden seconds of airtime during the Super Bowl were dedicated to advancing a chaste position, while in fact not selling anything.

So if managing a brand or brand image is the main purpose of these ads, or taking a "moral" stance in the case of the Focus on the Family Tebow spot, are Super Bowl ads also influenced by larger factors than the ad itself? I would argue yes. Contrary to what Big Advertising will have us think, these crazily expensive Super Bowl ads might never be as effective at advancing a company's message -- particularly when it is about something as personal and polarizing as abortion -- as a great PR campaign could be.

In other words, the nuclear option doesn't work for everyone.

That's because an ad's efficacy in terms of brand and messaging can be directly affected and diluted, simply by association. Join the ranks of other advertisers and earn the label of a 'Super Bowl Ad' -- your brand becomes -- one of them. And the overall theme of any given year's Super Bowl ads can also infect or amplify a message or brand image.

To read the article in full follow this link.

Trust Barometer raises salient issues for PR professionals/from ragan.com

Credibility matters in the market place; how, then, do you promote without (excessive) ‘spin’?

Edelman’s Trust Barometer, now in its 10th year, is an ambitious project, quantifying something as imprecise and shifting as trust. It’s no easy task, and that makes the results of Edelman’s efforts all the more interesting.

The report doesn’t ask whether consumers trust the brand of toothpaste or shampoo they use, it asks whether citizens trust their government and why, and how the public shapes its opinions of industries as well as individual companies. How Edelman has achieved this without a hint of partisanship is really quite amazing.

Trust is transient and tenuous

The first and perhaps most persuasive theme is that trust itself seems to be extraordinarily transient and influenced by factors ranging from macroeconomic forces to perceived spin on an individual news item. Who knew? It seems that the level of trust enjoyed by governments, industries, companies and brands is by no means constant, nor certain. For big business, this implication—which is threaded very nicely throughout the Edelman report—is twofold. One, entities must be very cognizant of the public’s trust in and of them, and two, efforts can be made to address and modify the public’s trust.

In terms of trust in industries and companies, Edelman’s report links this transient nature of trust to the idea that business will return to the way it was. Although trust in business rose slightly this year over last, the report overtly indicates that this level of trust is fleeting and tenuous, undercut by the belief that businesses will revert to old bad habits as soon as they can—in other words, after the honeymoon period is over and businesses have regained the public’s trust.

Yet the report indicates that by placing more emphasis on honest and transparent practices, companies increase public trust in them. It also shows that trust in businesses to do what is right has returned to historical norms and that CEOs are viewed as more trustworthy in their comments and actions.

So despite a relatively hollow sense of trust, there remains reason for optimism but with a caveat: It’s to be accompanied by trust-building practices. The PR implication, then, is that trust is both important and malleable, based largely on perception, and that with careful crafting it can be controlled.

Can you see the sales pitch forming here?

The new credibility is old news

The second resounding theme in the Edelman report looks at the way the public gathers its information. I don’t understand why this is less plainly explained in the report, but a few of the survey questions hint that the changes in trust as it relates to information about a company are shaped by changes in the way the public gathers information. This “finding” surely contradicts what PR professionals and the media have been grappling with for the past year—that social media will become a more powerful influencer than traditional sources and news media.

The report states that top sources for credible information are academics and experts (64 percent), followed closely by analysts (52 percent), and the top outlets for that information were analyst reports and business magazine journalism. Least credible were those sources most controlled by the corporate interest—the regular employee (32 percent) and advertising materials (17 percent).

Falling fastest in terms of credibility was information offered by “a person like yourself” and social media outlets and conversations with peers. Ha! Social media pundits be damned. That finding demonstrates the public’s weariness with regurgitated opinions schlepped about the blogosphere. Social media, blogs and the online opinion factory have soured the public on the worthiness of common information, and the survey indicates the public is hungry for expert, authentic, reliable sources. This hunger is best displayed by the top credibility ranking of analysts and stock reports, even though these analysts often are paid by the companies they analyze.

There is some good news here for PR. Corporate advertising and social media cannot achieve the transparency and authenticity the public values most. By obtaining coverage in reputable media (traditional media still rank relatively high—business magazine articles are considered credible by 44 percent of respondents; radio, 38 percent; TV, 36 percent), good PR can boost the public’s trust in a company.

This revelation, in my mind, is probably the most important part of this study for the PR industry, as it indicates the importance of credibility, authentic communications, transparency and, most of all, providing knowledge and value, which has proved difficult to achieve through social media or advertising.

Building trust = building business

Everything in the Edelman report, including the existence of the report itself, points to one great truth: Trust is an incredibly powerful business development tool. Looking at the values shown in the report as they related to trust in 2006 versus 2010, they’re almost entirely inverted. This, it would seem, is a very strong indicator of the new American psyche—profits come last, but honesty comes first. The cultivation of trust is becoming one of the most important goals for businesses in every sector.

For PR pros, that means that the importance of strong, effective PR is also on the rise—not that it ever waned. It is the answer to the credibility gap that has developed in the age of (shoddy) information overload.

As for Edelman, no doubt they’re already out there pitching the Trust Barometer report to exactly those companies who’ve been hit hardest in the trust stakes.

CAN'T WE GET ALONG FOR THE SAKE OF THE KIDS!?

In addition to the myriad crises happening abroad, a still-struggling economy and mass unemployment levels, we mustn’t overlook another crisis we’re facing here at home – EDUCATION.

Did you know that 6.2 million students have dropped out of school, and that's only for the year 2007? And that over one third of all public high school students(with a disproportionate percentage of that figure representing minority groups)fails to graduate from high school? This means that each year there are millions of young adults entering society without the tools, knowledge and skill sets required to survive in this increasingly complex and competitive world.

These teens and young adults are primarily kids from forgotten neighborhoods who haven't been given the encouragement and opportunity needed to fulfill their potential. They are kids from diverse backgrounds who may not fit the standard education mold, and while it may not be our problem today, it certainly will be tomorrow, unless both the left and right in Congress can come together and forge a plan to get these millions of future American citizens up and running with skills that can land them jobs, get them into college or enable them to start their own businesses. We have to equip them with the tools they need to participate and contribute to society, and to fulfill their destiny.

In a recent article in the Huffington Post, Amy Rosen, President & CEO of NFTE, Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, reminds us of Obama's words at the beginning of his administration where he decidedly named Entrepreneurship Training "the best anti-poverty program around." Rosen applauded the amount of funding allocated to the "Race to the Top" education stimulus fund, but the work is far from done.

Click here to read Ms. Rosen's pointed article. When you look at the big picture, this issue – educating youth out of poverty - affects us all, doesn't it?

If you want to learn more about the great work that NFTE does around the country to help young teens and adults stay engaged in school, build dreams and develop their own small businesses, visit www.nfte.com..

Because everyone needs some help in life. Sometimes all it takes is a little push, and for someone to tell us that we can succeed if we try hard enough.

NYT's finest says, "Charge 'Em!"

When I heard about the New York Times’ plan to begin charging visitors a flat fee to access its website beginning in 2011, I had a handful of reactions that ranged from puzzlement to rabid indignation. Well, maybe my indignation wasn’t quite rabid; I didn’t foam at the mouth or anything. A quiet indignation, then, like what I might experience if Starbucks started raising the price of my morning latte by fifteen cents.

Price increase notwithstanding, I am prepared to shell out and I think my reaction characterizes the straight-up consumer reaction to the Grey Lady’s so-called “paywall” for content. Diehard readers will pay whatever nominal fee the Times imposes, because somewhere in the back of their minds (and I think with the Times’ readership demographic we can assume that they can make this logical leap) they know that the content they consume online deserves to be paid for. The current system, industry-wide, of offering up the efforts of trained professional journalists and columnists for free is untenable; compensation must come from somewhere. YOU don’t work for free, do you???

The trouble is, many of us assumed it would come from advertising. And this is the origin for my second reaction, puzzlement. If any publication should be able to support its online presence through advertising, it is the New York Times. It has the quality content, the extended page views, and the traffic that advertisers ought to be creaming themselves over. The site attracts more than 146 million visitors annually, has more than twice the number of unique visitors than the next most popular newspaper website (it’s 59th among all websites), and has spawned 22 of the top 50 most popular newspaper blogs. Yet a company the size of the Times needs well over a billion pageviews per month to generate enough advertising revenue to stay afloat, which it’s currently not getting.

As the Times has tried charging consumers before, déjà vu was my third reaction. Times Select, which charged for access to popular columns and other features, was discontinued after two years after bloggers routinely reposted content that lain behind that particular paywall. It seems rather strange that the Times would try something so similar again, and with little promise of achieving different results.

Is the move is a good one for the Times? I want to yes because I support paying for quality content, but I’m torn because they tried this once before.

The social media sphere is so much more developed today than it was at the outset of the Times Select “experiment”, and therefore more important as a traffic generator for the site. If the NYT limits this source of trackbacks and links, traffic will fall further at the site than it might anyway, and artificially restricting the newspaper’s online presence is hardly a good strategy in this day and age.

Well, there you are. I’m conflicted, a jumble of confusion and (mild) frustration. I guess that puts me in the same boat with the Times executives behind this decision.

Anyone else out there who is also feeling conflicted?

Re: Sex and the Digital City

Picked up Robert Wright’s posting in the Times Opinionator blog a couple of days ago entitled “Sex and the Digital City”, and my takeaway -- beyond the impression that he’s my kind of writer, with just enough post-ironic, witty self-awareness in his prose to make his point palatable -- is that he touched on a couple of critical points about our culture and way information is disseminated in a hyper-connected age.

This concept appears to be the elephant in the room that everyone can’t stop talking about, and yet couching it in terms of marital fidelity lends it a visceral quality while simultaneously stripping the ever-titillating topic of who’s-screwing-who of some of its juice. Wright maintains that the age of paperless communication is actually the age of immortal ‘paper’ trails, and whether you’re a pro golfer or the Governor of a small southern state or just the philanderer next door, you can expect your latest tryst to be accompanied by an army of zombie missives revived from trash folders and T-Mobile’s memory banks.

And like all good zombies, they don’t stop until they consume everyone’s brain.

Wright asks, toward the end of his piece, whether our new culture scourged with binary sex zombies (which, Dave Barry (if you’re reading), would make an excellent name for a rock band) will lead to fewer instances of infidelity, out of fear of exposure, or more, having created an environment where such deviancy is effectively the norm. He hinges this argument on increasing instances of hypocrisy- the more hypocrites get exposed, the more a particular behavior becomes acceptable.

Without agreeing completely with Wright’s conclusion, I believe that the modern information echo chamber lives on hypocrisy of this kind, and it will continue to feed itself with the help of its information-zombie minions. There is no escape.

Does that mean the collapse of American family life, and the dissolution of faithful marriage in general? No.

A little erosion, perhaps, but nothing that the previous half-century hasn’t already sloughed away.

Who Can Nonprofits Turn To For Help? From Marketing Daily

There isn't a person in this country (excluding, perhaps, Pat Robertson) who hasn't been deeply saddened by what happened in Haiti on Jan. 12. Actually, make that most of the world. Watching the heart-wrenching coverage, we are reminded that natural disasters can strike anywhere, at anytime. It's how we react and respond in times of need that can make a difference.

For many, myself included, the crisis in Haiti is a throwback to August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf States and wiped out more than 850,000 homes and displaced several hundred thousand Americans. While the death toll doesn't even compare with that of Haiti, millions of Americans lost their homes and more than $10 billion was spent on rebuilding levies, which devastated a land mass bigger than Haiti. But the fundraising efforts and how the country reacted then to today's crisis is strikingly different.

In just two days, the American Red Cross was able to raise $8 million, according to Mobile Marketer.com, with millions more raised by nonprofits, including Yéle, UN Foundation and the International Rescue Committee. Millions of people were moved and money was mobilized -- instantaneously -- thanks in large part to mobile donations.

Just a year ago, however, most people hadn't heard of mobile donations; only a handful of behind-the-scenes companies like GiveOnTheGo and mGive, that had been developing this powerful fundraising platform for charitable organizations, knew what was brewing in the mobile space.

Now, sadly, thanks to the Haitian crisis, millions of consumers have been abruptly introduced to mobile giving overnight. And they don't seem to have a problem with it.

For nonprofits, fundraising -- on any scale -- is an operational imperative. Without supporting funds, there is no organization, period. And while mobile giving is being crowned as a charity's newest savior, it's a rather useless one if the organization doesn't have a proper structure. And by proper structure, I mean a having robust and sensible PR and marketing strategy -- of which mobile is a part. Simply having a mission and a vision to "do good" is all well and good, but it falls flat when no one knows about a nonprofit's work.

In today's climate, a nonprofit has to market itself like a business, yet most don't. I'm not talking about The Red Cross or Médecins Sans Frontières or Oxfam. I'm talking about the 1,569,572 or so nonprofits in this country that have set out to create change, to help those less fortunate and to make our world a much better place. They might not be selling products or services, but they are selling a cause.

For many of those nonprofits, however, PR and marketing is ranked number 8 or 9 (10 being the least important). And where does PR/marketing rank for a for-profit company? Number 2, 3 or 4.

So why the disparity?

In working with nonprofits, I've found it to be an inherent part of the funding and grant-writing structure. Foundations and large donors enforce strict stipulations about the amount of money a nonprofit can spend to promote itself. And yet, if it doesn't promote itself to endear its cause and mission to a new generation of donors and consumers, its fundraising and awareness building-efforts will be severely limited. It's a Catch-22.

I'm not saying that all nonprofits need to go crazy with big marketing budgets. But if they want the world, or even just their local community to know about their invaluable work and deeds, they need to invest in themselves and their story a lot more.

In times of crisis, it's clear that millions of people pay attention to these worthy organizations.

But it's the rest of the time that nonprofits have to worry about. Because that is the time when having a robust PR and marketing strategy can be the difference between success and failure for many of them.

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