Category Archive

I’ve been on the road most of the past week in  the US and UK and have watched with fascination as the Beijing Olympic Torch relay unfolds. Though the coverage across the various global media channels varied - I got info from everything from the BBC to USA Today to Le Monde - the story was fairly consistent. China’s attempt to burnish it’s reputation as a country and global leader through the Olympics is in shambles - at least so far. By any measure - save perhaps the assessment by the Chinese government officials - the relay has turned into a PR fiasco of historic proportions. After the carefully planned relay devolved into brawling and demonstrations - all captured by the global media TV cameras - Chinese officials tried to control the message by staging surreal non-events - such as the relay in India which banned any spectators and involved the runners going around an enclosed stadium dozens of times. They also added about 15,000 police for good measure. Subsequent stops were similar - heavy-handed security, private events and stitled celebrations with forced smiles all around. Beyond the politics of this development, what are the lessons here for communication professionals? Here are a few suggestions:

• In the digital era where global media -and citizen journalists - provide 24-day massive coverage of most events instantly, the stage-managed style of PR favored by countries like China is becoming more disingenuous and less effective. The only place where China can successfully control their message is in China, due to draconian censorship and state controlled media. China is learning that their propaganda productions don’t work so well in the real world. Welcome to the Web 2.0 world!
• There’s probably a lesson here how powerful the Internet has become as a news source and force for social movement and debate. Based on what I saw the Web served as an important platform in the planning, promotion, discussion and coverage of the torch demonstrations. Conversely, China seems able to control much of the internal national discussion through their tight censorship of the Web - though they are happy to loosen the reins when their citizens jump with nationalist frenzy with cries to boycott Carrefour stores.
• If anybody needed another reminder, companies that align their marketing with famous stars or countries with dubious track records do so at their own peril. Just yesterday Coca-Cola announced it was ”adjusting” its marketing plans for the remainder of the torch relay. Whether any of the countries can benefit from the Olympic Games themselves probably depends on whether China can turn the PR tides and stem the loud global criticism and avoid major boycotts. Either way, I suspect Lenovo will come out as the biggest loser. As a Chinese company, this is their global coming out party. Bad timing.
• Issues blend and overlap into a messy public relations morass where the public dictates the communication agenda, not corporations or governments. China clearly thought it could segment (or ignore) geo-political issues like Darfur, Tibet, tainted medicine and food and the environment and keep these distasteful issues from the Olympic Games. No such luck. Many saw the Games as precisely the right time to lump all these together into a loud proclamation for change by China. It will be interesting  to see whether China will try to defuse any of these issues (probably behind the scenes) or just continue to plow forward.
• Finally, I note that China’s main crisis-management strategy seems to be to paint demonstrators - and the Dalai Lama - as dangerous malcontents with a nefarious agenda. (Strange how Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe did the same thing this week, accusing critics of trying to re-colonialize his country.) In other words, when in trouble go on the attack. The track record of this tactic seems to be very bad, and I doubt it will work this time.

This is PR on a broad world stage. Let’s watch and see what happens. It’s shaping up to be an interesting summer.

The latest PR fiasco for Southwest was noteworthy for its timing. During roughly the same time period, I saw two widely divergent depictions of the airline. By coincidence more than otherwise, I witnessed several examples of SWA being positioned as a legend in the PR industry - savvy, successful and carrying a boatload of wisdom and kudos. One trade group was even positioning them as a savant in the area of social media (for what achivement it wasn’t clear.) A number of conference briefs on my desk featured SWA presentations on topics ranging from their unique, ”fun” culture to their mastery of media relation metrics. And this trend has been going on for years. It’s rare you attend a conference where SWA isn’t featured as a bright light in employee engagement, media relations, marketing or even lobbying.

But this laudatory, almost obsequious stream of industry hype was in sharp contrast to what was actually happening in real life. Not content to demonstrate its reactionary, outrageous tendency to ban passengers showing a little skin (at least three times in the past year by my count), Southwest has now really stepped into the mud with reports that it ignored safety guidlines and flew planes it had not properly inspected (it was subsequently confirmed 6 of the planes had cracks in the fuselage.)

How did SWA’s incredible, leading-edge PR machine respond to these claims? At first, their website and blog (which to me is little more than a light-weight, heavily perfumed platform for their marketing machine) made no mention at all. Never happened. I suppose there was no room with all the employee profiles, leadership pep talks and self-congratulatory features. In the face of the media onslaught over the weekend, SWA belatedly and reluctantly came out with a mix of denials, clarifications and excuses - including blaming the FAA. As the weekend progressed they decided to parade CEO Gary Kelly, who said he would vigorously defend his company’s commitment to safety and that the $10 million fine levied against the airline “felt unfair.”

There are two lessons one can draw from this sorry episode. One is how not to respond to a media crisis…but I’ll leave that to another time. But the more interesting one, to my mind, is how the PR industry tends to operate in a dangerous vacuum. Southwest was never as smart or progressive as they were positioned by an industry only too happy to have a super star at the ready. Industry events and awards have always flirted with irrelevance and a sense of detachment from the business world, but now they risk losing their credibility altogether. Now we’ll have to see what they present at their next conference keynote: How to leverage social media in a crisis, perhaps?

This recent post by Steve Rubel is just the latest account of the blurring of traditional lines between advertising agencies, consulting firms, PR agencies, design shops and virtually any other organization involved in digital media and content. Steve’s post suggests we may have put the old media companies out to pasture too soon, since according to Booz Allen they are gradually beginning to offer some of the services and talents traditionally offered by ad agencies - such as media buying and even “idea generation”…what George Bush might call strategery. Witness another example in my own little world from the past week. Part of my new gig is rebuilding my company’s intranet, so I’m looking for everything from strategic counsel to design help and social media expertise (we’ll be including a blog and collaboration tools.) Where to go for help? Well, it could include one or all of the following: big PR agency, intranet design firm, local production house, social media boutique in a PR agency, local ad agency, event marketing agency, big HR consulting firm, small IT consulting firm, internal communications agency…and assorted freelancers and one-trick ponies. Everybody is encroaching into everybody’s else turf. Of course, not all of these attempts at diversification are credible or robust, but they definitely define a real trend. So… who will I get help from? I’m still not sure, but one thing I’ve learned is that people who have real chops in social media are few and far between, so in that case I’ll go to the team I used in a previous life that has actually built blogs and gone through the online wars. In this fast moving world, there is still no substitute for expertise and experience.

If we needed any more evidence of the immense influence of the Internet, look no further than the latest redesign of the venerable BusinessWeek magazine. As detailed in this New York Times article, BW is using a number of design and format lessons from the Web to goose the magazine’s appeal and circulation. Elements of the redesign include more summaries, inserts (or “links” with references to outside publications), shorter articles, and distinctive sections focusing on specific topics or themes with their own tables of contents. Cynics quoted in the article suggest BW may have been better off just dumping the magazine and making improvements to their online version. And of course, the central elements of any online publication - the added dimension of conversation and links - cannot be duplicated in a paper document. Time will tell if these changes will help the magazine, since the ultimate question is whether there is any need for magazines with the increasing ubiquity of digital content - including business news. Time will tell.