Communications Advocate

Obama's Stimulus Approach

2009-02-10T22:06:00.003-05:00

Full disclosure: I'm an Obama guy. But I think that his rhetorical shift...or shift in tone and approach...has not served him well in the attempt to get his stimulus package passed into law. There is much to the notion of "past is prologue." Admirable as it is, his initial foray into Washington politics as a bipartisan healer was naive. It's simply not the way that city works. When he turned on a dime last week and assayed the "we don't need them" approach, the sudden toughness of rhetoric rang hollow to me. Felt like he was being handled a bit too much. In my book, there's much to be said for rising or falling on your own terms...be yourself and, if the conviction, credibility and consistency are there, your message will get heard and will provoke a more direct and pure reaction. Obama will get the passage passed but I think he lost a little bit of glow in my eyes by diving to the lowest common rhetorical denominator too quickly.

Rhetoric, Obama-style

2009-01-17T11:15:00.002-05:00

Great in-depth look in today's Financial Times at President-Elect Barack Obama's rhetorical style and its historical foundation. Social media and "the next new thing" can be great new avenues for communication, but there will never be a substitute for the ability to tell your story directly, personally, to a crowd of strangers, and inspire a clear action.

Measuring PR...Again and on any dimension

2009-01-14T17:43:00.003-05:00

I'm preparing for a measurement presentation tomorrow. It'll be a quarterly review and look-forward, hopefully, based on what my team and my agency have done and learned in the last three months. I've previewed the prezo and I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out and very impressed with the work that went into it. The only nagging issue for me is this: no matter how many dimensions we've analyzed and quantified, there's always going to be some strand that doesn't meet someone's needs. therefore the effort will be seen as incomplete. I disagree and feel the problem is i a lack of understanding of PR and earned media itself by non-PR-marketers in general. PR can be quantified but it'll never be as easy to measure as direct response, pay per click, radio or other paid media marketing tools. The disconnect is not in the methods of measurement but in the minds of the audiences. Solution: more and better advocacy. Better yet, more clearly defined goals prior to engaging in a measurement program. How about six months of dry-runs before the measurement template is "locked" so all paries ahve a comprehensive understanding of the task at hand, the parameters the project and the agreed metric for success.

Twitter Comes Through in the Real World

2009-01-10T19:07:00.002-05:00

...and when I say the Real World, I mean my world. This week, through a Twitter connection with a fan of Constant Contact (my employer for which I work as Director of PR), my team and I delivered on a fast-closing media opportunity in a vertical market in which we had little insight and zero customers -- or so we thought. We were going to take a pass on the opp in Range Report, a shooting/sportsman's magazine, because we could not sift through our 250,000 customer database quickly enough to find a customer that met the editor's needs. However, the afternoon before the deadline, I noticed a web link to a hunting site in a Twitter post of a new follower, who had noted that she loved Constant Contact in her first message to me. I tracked her down via Twitter DM and, sure enough, she's a marketing specialist in the shooting/sportsman industry who knows the publication well, and is a strong and happy Constant Contact customer. And she gracioulsy agreed to be interviewed by Range Report on our company's behalf. A happy accident, maybe, but a great application of the Twitter platform for real world work that got real world results, absolutely.

Tweeting the Conflict in Gaza

2009-01-06T21:17:00.002-05:00

I am fairly torn here. Or, better said like the good PR guy that I am: my opinion is evolving.

I missed some of the first wave of coverage of the Israeli Consulate's establishment of a Twitter page and their first Twitter-based news conference regarding the events in Gaza. I picked up on it the NYT editorial page synopsis this Sunday (yeah, I still read newsprint, kids...). I thought then that this was a wrong-headed move - smacked of doing something (Twitter, not war) just "because we can." And, frankly, a Q/A concerning war and death regardless of your political POV deserves more depth and detail than 140 characters can afford. Since then, the Israeli Consulate has hung around Tweeter and punched out a variety of links, perspective, context, and statements, such as today's link to information on the possible civilian causalities at a pair of locations in Gaza. This sort of follow on activity makes much more sense to me. It fits more closely with what I believe to be the main utility of Twitter for a larger organization: speed of response, a direct audience connection, and the ability to quickly point to more and deeper information on any topic from a single, easy to use site.

I started life as an hellacious Twitter skeptic. But, damn, if it doesn't make more sense all the time...even if it doesn't make sense every time.

Financial Times, 12/30/09: Hard Lessons Learned in 2008

2008-12-30T13:51:00.007-05:00

Great, dispassionate and sober discussion of Hard Lessons on Confidence in today's FT by Joseph Quinlan, Market Insight columnist. A communications component to most of it, if read with that perspective in mind -- the barrier-free world, shattered confidence/credibility is hard to rebuild, truth vs. rumor.

Story and message springs from vision, conviction

2008-12-29T21:27:00.002-05:00

Watching Barack Obama on 60 Minutes this week, I was heartened by some of the insider accounts of how he handled the Reverend Wright eruptions of last Spring, culminating in a landmark campaign speech on his views on the history and current state race issues in America. Essentially, Obama held a heartfelt conviction on the issue, ignored most of his handlers advice on spin and message control, and delivered a speech with the belief that either America would get it, or it wouldn't. In ether case, he'd have spoken from his heart, with conviction, and told his story, even it meant, in the end, that he wouldn't be President in 2009. The comparison here between the brilliant delivery of the personal story of Barack Obama, driven by vision and a "consequences be damned" conviction , and the flaccid and cringe-worthy performances of Caroline Kennedy in her feckless run at becoming the junior Senator from New York are stunning and painful. Caroline, without an ounce of conviction and zero vision, has meandered through various public appearances while leaving the impression that her sole motivation and qualification for holding public office is, in fact, her last name. I've been jolted by an intense sense of deja vu over the past week while watching Caroline stumble around in a glazed public fog. I've seen this show before from the second-generation Kennedy clan. In fact, I was in the room in 2001 when Max Kennedy basically urped on himself while fiddling with a run for Joe Moakley's vacant Congressional seat. As Andy Hiller, a local TV political reporter mentioned to one of my colleagues, a veteran Democratic consultant and operative, after the horrorshow speech, "Good thing he isn't just running on his name." The same can and should be said of Caroline who, with no real reason to be in the running, no vision, no conviction and no story to tell, will be history in terms of NY State politics inside of two weeks.

IPO Plate Freeze in 2009

2008-12-24T20:28:00.004-05:00

Much is made of the credit freeze and its various knock-on effects for the state of business finance. As insidious is the choking off of the IPO market -- not just the delay of certain offerings, but the possible extinguishing of a public tender completely. Dealbook's piece linked above is a fairly harrowing account/prediction of the moribund state of the IPO market today and, perhaps, into the foreseeable future. This is as much about perception as anything and this is where the art and science of corporate communications and investor relations come in. Today, it's impossible for a company to talk it's way into a bloc buster IPO, like it was back in the boom-boom years of the 90s. That said, it may be possible to focus closely on a limited set of influencers and market makers, tell a compelling and credible story backed up by real numbers, and get a touch of traction with the right audience...if you're a) brave and focused enough and b) willing to accept a lowered set of expectations for an IPO haul (remember, an IPO is only a first step). To my mind, most anything is possible if you understand your story and it is truly solid and you believe in the notion of accurate scoping.

Credibility and Criminality

2008-12-16T22:02:00.005-05:00

We talk frequently in the PR business about the need for credibility. Preferably, credibility that is creatively presented and consistently delivered. Today, look at the role of credibility in the downfall of two people who were, once, active if not professional, communicators. Right, good guess: Gov. Blagoevich and Bernard Madoff. Gov Blago was a hyperkinetic communicator, seemingly incapable of shutting his yap about all manner of issues far preceding his attempt to auction off Barack Obama's vacant Senate seat. He suffers from a lack of cred from jump street -- though a veteran of tough Chicago politics, most of the legends that preceded him could claim some degree of credibility in their corruption. Blago was all talk and bluster, with little thoughtful planning or brains behind the jabber. Pure artifice, zero credibility. One wonders how anyone could take him seriously. Madoff, on the other hand, apparently oozed credibility. Sufficiently so to buffalo apparently sober individuals, investment managers and nonprofits into give him titanic sums of money to manage without so much as a whiff of due diligence in advance. Point being, the notion of credibility is but one factor, a single point on the communications graph, that can be simply fudged on it's own when taken out of context. At the service of some richer ideal or broader point, with multiple inputs and more meaningful context, credibility is a strong factor -- a less easily perverted factor -- in the ability to tell one's story effectively.