BusinessTN

2006 marks the 100th anniversary of the first press release sent out by Ivy Lee, the father of the public relations industry.

Lee’s public handling of a Pennsylvania Railroad accident, as well as his consultancy to coal operators trying to balance the news during steel union strikes, were each seminal events in industry history, cementing it as an everyday part of corporate relations. (Lee would one day end up on the advisory staff of John D. Rockefeller.)

A century later, Lee’s industry is experiencing a resurgence. More and more companies and corporate decision-makers are turning to PR services for their effectiveness and cost-efficiency. With the sector so hot, BTN recently pulled together some of the top minds in the field in Tennessee to discuss how PR is best defined in current terms and where it is going in the future.

Ralph Berry • Thompson & Berry Public Relations

Mark McNeely • McNeely, Pigott & Fox Public Relations

John Van Mol • Dye Van Mol & Lawrence

Darrell Akins • Akins Crisp Public Strategies

Sandra McQuain • Howell McQuain Strategies

Conventional PR tools—the press release, the press conference, the media pitch—may be going the way of the typewriter now that your targeted audiences are communicating with each other and the media in completely new ways. Let’s discuss the rapidly changing news environment where mass media is literally splintered into thousands of new information sources. How does PR strategy fit into that fragmented communications landscape?

Berry: I don’t think they are going the way of the typewriter, but what they are becoming is tools in a much bigger universe of tools. You have to look at the needs of your client and see whether the traditional methods—the news releases, the pitches to the media, the news conferences and so on—fit their particular need, which in some cases they do, or whether you really need to find other ways to tell the story. The word “fragmented” was brought up. You need to figure out how to take a very precise message and make sure it hits your target audience within that fragmentation.

McNeely: I might be the only person assembled who actually as a reporter went through the transition from the typewriter to the selective electric typewriter to word processors to actual PCs. The technology changes are immense, but really it boils down to whatever was newsworthy then is pretty much newsworthy now. If you don’t have a story, no matter what technology you are using, it doesn’t go very far.

Van Mol: We occasionally will fire a shotgun blast, but more often it’s about six or eight rifle shots just trying to hit that particular fragment of the audience that our client needs to reach. It might be news, it might not be news, it might be a special event, which is a whole other tool that everybody is using these days.

Berry: Ultimately, we’re storytellers, and what we need to do is find the best way to tell that story—whether it’s acting it out in a special event, writing it out ourselves or passing it from person to person through a MySpace account.

You are all talking about capturing an audience. Let’s talk about the opposite objective. If PR is totally about control, then has the PR industry struggled to cope with the proliferation of sources of information and opinions that are available on the Internet?

McQuain: We’ve found that we have to be so much more nimble in how we respond and put ourselves in a position to react and propose things on behalf of our clients. On the upside, it almost helps us get an instant reaction concerning the question “Did we accomplish what we planned to with the stories we placed?” We do some work with the Memphis Grizzlies. They have very active blogging sites, and—good, bad or otherwise—we get pretty good feedback about the information that we’re helping them put out there.

Akins: Think about what the clutter was 20 years ago and what the clutter is today. How much more clutter can there be? So, as you think of all these different technologies it just makes that basic fundamental of making sure that you’re targeting the right audience and delivering the message in the most effective way more important now than it ever was. Many people get hung up on overanalyzing this stuff, and wind up contributing to some of the clutter rather than just taking a step back and really focusing on message, on audience and on effective delivery. Then you measure to see if you accomplished what you were trying to accomplish.

Van Mol:I would agree. I have learned to keep an exceedingly light grip on what I think I know about the Internet. Namely, hire younger and smarter people, which, at my age, is not difficult.

So, despite technological advances, the profession’s main ingredients remain the same. What is different?

McQuain: I have clients where I sit in weekly with their executive committee in their discussions. They really understand how everything they communicate to each other, to the managers, how important that is at every level and especially on the public relations level. We are really becoming the new advisors to the companies out there. It’s been interesting to watch our role change as opposed to the traditional model of the ad agency. Now PR takes the lead, and everything that comes behind it has to reinforce the messages we’re placing out there.

Akins: I probably spend 75% of my time sitting in meetings, just like you were talking about, providing advice and counsel to senior managers and CEOs about dealing with problems. What is the best way to do this? Who do we need to talk to? What do we need to say? When do we need to say it? When do we need to stay quiet? When do we need to be aggressive? Our clients are paying us for our perspective, experience and ideas as much as for going out and writing speeches and press releases and putting on special events.

What do you say to those who refer to PR as just good press “spin” or all about image and no substance?

McNeely: As far as I’m concerned, credibility is number one. Whatever tools and whatever technology it takes to do our jobs, credibility is the most important thing.

Akins: If you have a reputation of being somebody who exaggerates, doesn’t tell the truth, can’t be relied upon for what you say, your effectiveness on behalf of your clients is zero. On the other hand, if you have the strategic relationships coupled with a reputation as a reliable provider of solid information that is interesting and useful, you have a much higher likelihood of a good result. This is regardless of whether you are communicating it to a member of the media or to an influential individual to whom you are trying to communicate your client’s message.

How does a client best measure the results of what PR offers? Does it make a measurable difference to the bottom line?

Berry: Measurement of public relations has been one of the age-old Pandora’s boxes. People use all kinds of things to try and gauge it. Ultimately, the value of PR has to be measured based on what the client was trying to accomplish with his or her product or service. If the goal was to increase sales, then did sales increase after the additional attention that you generated? If the goal was to increase the positive awareness of a brand, does the brand see a positive bump in impression for it? Ultimately, for anything in marketing, the end result is to improve the performance— be it sales, reputation, being elected, readership, etc.

Akins: Oftentimes, you can feel it more than you can actually measure it. What I mean by that is hearing comments by peers, by the very people one is trying to influence—that kind of feedback is much more believable than, for instance, doing some survey.

A key competency you all offer clients is crisis management. What’s the worst mistake managers make when a crisis is developing?

Berry: Ignoring it…[Laughter]

Van Mol: Probably underestimating the speed with which it needs to be handled and handled effectively. There’s a big sort of conflict there. The first information at the scene of a crisis is always wrong—100% of the time, every time—so the first requirement to me is to determine what is the truth. The second is to get it out quickly because the Monday morning quarterbacking starts immediately both inside and outside the organization that has the emergency. The nature of today’s media makes it really hard to keep up with a breaking story, much less get ahead of it. Our approach is always to try to have one team dealing with the right now, to make sure that people are safe and the situation is handled, and then a second group thinking ahead. But the biggest mistake is underestimating the speed of how quickly it can escalate.

Is there a way to prepare for a crisis management situation?

Akins: The biggest problem you run into is the tendency just to overcomplicate things. To have four-volume crisis management plans that are sitting on somebody’s shelves—thinking that is a crisis management plan when it is so complicated and so unworkable. When something does happen, it’s probably worse than having nothing at all. The biggest challenge in the preparation stage is to keep things simple. What’s the line of communication? Who has the authority to do what? What are some of the most likely scenarios? Make sure that you’ve got all of the right people in the loop. Also, it’s crisis management, but it’s also opportunity management. It’s looking at a crisis as an opportunity to make something positive happen on the other side. It’s not always negative.

Berry: If you handle it well, you should come out of a crisis either better or equal to where you were before. The key is to be honest throughout the crisis. Those who tend to be damaged most by a crisis are the ones who don’t respect the world around them and think that they are more important than everybody else who is being touched by this crisis. Those are clients that really don’t come out of it showing that they have personal or corporate integrity. And if you can come out of it showing that you have such integrity, most people can eventually get past the crisis at hand or the event at hand that caused it. As for planning for it, in most industries you can’t plan for the crisis because you don’t know what it’s going to be. But you can certainly plan for how your company’s integrity can be preserved and how you can act responsibly throughout.

McNeely: Leaders of companies or institutions in a crisis seem to sometimes forget that one of their most important audiences are the people that work with them. They always want to leapfrog to the public before sharing it internally. I see that all the time. Many times, there’s a little complicating matter called attorneys [laughter]. Doing the right thing is always the way to go. It’s 100% effective in my mind. But in today’s society where anybody can get sued by anyone for anything, attorneys can step in and really throw cold water on executing a crisis plan. I’m not saying they do it all the time, but it’s an element that we’ve all dealt with that makes something that should be relatively simple more complicated.

McQuain: We have seen more requests coming from law firms as it relates to litigation-related PR. It used to be the plaintiff side had the reputation of trying cases out in the court of public opinion, especially when they were crisis-related. You’d oftentimes find that the hit to the brand ended up costing more to the company than the actual litigation. Now you are seeing corporate law departments and corporate communication departments wanting outside counsel that have some basic understanding of the media as part of the communications process as opposed to a roadblock. We are seeing more and more law firms request litigation PR training to try to help them better understand how they can be more involved with the process with the client, as opposed to just the obstacle.

McNeely: We’ve gotten involved quite a bit here in the last year with doing something called predictive news analysis, which basically is to have a reporter there for the mock trial and write the story straight up and let them see what it would look like.

Several of you work with the public sector as well as private sector clients. Do you approach public sector assignments differently, and if so why? And how do you respond to the naysayers who say PR programs in the public sector are a waste of taxpayer dollars?

McQuain: I’m not sure that I approach public sector clients differently. Certainly they live in more of a glass house than, say, a physician group. There is always going to be greater scrutiny of what they say and of the messages that are put out there. There is a great impact because often they are all worried for the most part about survivability in terms of the next election. We just have to realize the medium and the audience to whom they are communicating and be sensitive. But I’m not sure we’d take a different approach.

McNeely: You have to take into account the limitations that a publicly funded campaign or effort may have. Obviously, there is much more transparency in records and memos. Much of that stuff is public record, and you might want to be careful about what you commit to paper. But we do that anyway.

Akins: In this day and time, if you are not paying attention to what you put into an e-mail or are not very judicious in how you do certain things, it doesn’t matter whether you are doing it in the government sector or the private sector. You just are not being very smart.

Van Mol: The public has some right to know what its public institutions are doing, and many times it’s more efficient and less costly to have an outside contractor do that than to have that on the payroll, or on the public payroll. So I view it as partly educational but also partly the public’s right to know that everybody is getting paid right.

Berry: Ultimately, you have to step back and be able to defend that what you counseled that organization or that person to do was a good use of the dollars. That holds true whether it’s a board of directors that is going to scrutinize what you are spending or the citizens of Shelby County.

What are some basic things that smaller businesses that may not even be able to afford a PR firm could do, or a mindset they could adopt, that would help them enhance the way they are perceived?

Van Mol: Customers and employees are your greatest ambassadors. If you treat both of them right, the word will spread.

Akins: Whether you are a small business or a large business, your personal and company reputation—and valuing and cherishing relationships—are equally important.

Berry: I’d actually say the smaller your business, the more important your public relations are because you’re on a smaller balance beam and the difference between success and failure is much narrower. So as you just said, treatment of your employees, your customers, your suppliers, your neighbors, your neighborhoods and your communities all play an important role in what reputation you have out there.

McNeely: One of my best mentors in the world is John Van Mol and he told me a piece of advice almost 20 years ago when I started a little one-person consultancy that I’ve never forgotten: “There is no piece of business too small” [laughter].

Ruble: Interesting conversation. Thanks.