The Slaughterhouse Five #nlpoli

Coupled with comparable high rates of staff changes in the senior ranks of the public service,  unprecedented staff turn-over in a critical part of Premier Dwight Ball's office raises questions that need to be addressed.

Premier Dwight Ball has entered the history books.

He has chewed up more communications directors than any Premier since 1972.

Word from the Confederation Building is that Erin Sulley, right, who left community television for the communications business only last October, is now the Premier’s Director of Communications.  It's the most senior political communications job in the provincial government

Sulley was host of Out of the Fog just before joining Ball's staff last fall in the media relations role. In what was a pretty clear conflict of interest, she also started writing a column for the Telegram at the same time.

If Jesus understood public relations... #nlpoli

Jesus understood public relations.

John 10:25 (Authorised Version)

Are you the Saviour?  Tell us plainly.

"I told you, and ye believed not: the works that I do in my Father's name, they bear witness of me."

Saying something isn't as important as doing it. Actions speak louder than words. This is a really simple idea but you'd be astonished at how many people do not get it.

Dwight Ball isn't any saviour;  no politician is.  But given the massive hole Dwight is in, he'd do well to take some advice from Jesus.

The Government's ongoing Communications Problem - the political side #nlpoli

To understand the communications problem the Liberal administration faces,  look at the first and so far only decision they have taken on communications to date.

Everything stays just as it is.

Nothing changes.

Nobody changes.

The official excuse a Liberal minister will offer when asked is that the cost of severance would be too great to get rid of them all.

But as bizarre as it was to leave directors of communications for Conservative Premiers in charge of communications for a new Liberal administration, the partisan bias of some of the folks in the jobs isn't the point.

The problem is that their entire approach to communications has been an obvious, dismal failure for five years.  Today, we'll take a look at the political problem the Liberals have.  On Friday, we'll dissect the Conservative mess the Liberals continue to use.

Self-massaging the message #nlpoli

The Telegram’s Pam Frampton has a neat column this weekend on Jerome Kennedy, Muskrat Falls, and the provincial government’s problems with explaining to people in simple terms why Muskrat falls is a good idea.

Frampton nails the biggest problem simply enough: 

The problem with the government’s Muskrat Falls message till now is that it has been a moving target. One week the project was all about clean energy, the next it was job creation, then it was all about being an affordable energy source, then it was a means of foiling Quebec, then it was a lure for mining companies.

Then she notes the critic’s arguments and the fact they they were,as Frampton, puts it often “shrilly spun” by government officials and others.

Kennedy tried to put a new face on government’s messaging during his appearance at the Telegram’s editorial board. as much as Kennedy seemed to change both his tone and his content, none of that stopped Kennedy from spinning  - to use Frampton’s word - either his own position or that of the critics. 

How surprising.

We get the message just fine, Jerome #nlpoli

“No, I don’t think that we have done a great job of communicating this,” natural resources minister Jerome Kennedy told the Telegram editorial board last week.

“I can give you a couple of examples myself that I’ve done. One is, ‘No debate! No debate!’ Then a week later, ‘OK, let’s have a debate now.’ That’s not good communication.”

The Telegram editorial on Wednesday then mentioned the provincial government’s general message to critics of the Muskrat falls project.  The editorial paraphrased it as “You’re all idiots, you don’t know what you’re talking about and you’re all wrong.”

Okay.

A bit of an exaggeration, but not much of one.

With all due respect to the newer, calmer Jerome Kennedy, the provincial government doesn’t have a communications problem.

What they said…Part Deux #nlpoli

Basic public relations problem.

Say one thing.

Say another thing.

A few weeks later, do something else, twice over.

For starters, here’s the what Premier Kathy Dunderdale said in the House of Assembly in March about job cuts and the provincial budget:

The Backdrop Problem #nlpoli

A picture from a recent Eastern Health news conference shows why at least a portion of their news conference backdrop needs to be tossed in favour of a new design.

Chief executive Vicki Kaminski looks like she’s in an advertisement for a freak show.  Kaminski appears to have a giant head coming out of her shoulder. Even without that big head over her right shoulder the pile of faces staring out is hideous and distracting.

Meanwhile,  another part of the back drop shows a different part of the background display that works reasonably well.

you can see Oscar Howell clearly.  He’s the focus of the shot and nothing distracts from him or his air of authority.

Vicki on the other hand looks like someone’s holding a small turd under her nose. Not a good image.

- srbp -

Rumour management and Twitter #nlpoli #cdnpoli

Via crisisblogger.com comes a link to a Guardian feature on the role Twitter played in rumours about riots in London.

The site gives seven specific rumours and tracks the life-cycle of the rumour from inception to death.

From the Guardian:

A period of unrest can provoke many untruths, an analysis of 2.6 million tweets suggests. But Twitter is adept at correcting misinformation - particularly if the claim is that a tiger is on the loose in Primrose Hill.

This is a fascinating study that uses technology to help tell the story in a compelling way.

- srbp -

Mine is bigger than yours: measuring the impact of public relations

This originally appeared at The Persuasion Business.

Odd as it might sound, public relations professionals spend a chunk of time trying to measure things.

Aside from wondering if what you are doing is actually producing anything other than billings, clients want to see some tangible indication of results for communications programs.

Simple stuff - like saying the story got front page above the fold in a given newspaper - is a bit dated and must inevitably be coupled with other things to give a sense of whether or not the news release got the message across. Then again, just getting a call from a reporter can give a big clue that something is headed off the rails. If the first one appears to have been a success, then there's always the other story that spins off it because your answers to the first set of questions just didn't ring true. There's at least one of those stories working it's way through the news media in St. John's these days.

No one can forget survey research of some kind, but that too doesn't quite capture what some people are looking for. Increasingly, it is fraught with its own challenges, like just getting enough people to participate. Then there's the problem, as in the case of provincial politics in Newfoundland and Labrador where some publicly available polls are frequently goosed in one way or another by one of the clients.

Simply put, though, clients want some reliable indicator of what they get for their money. They want to see a return on investment (ROI) and they need to see that expressed in a way that is meaningful, let alone meaningful to them.

Practitioners have an interest in clients seeing the value of their work, especially in long-term program or in a crisis. There are people whose professional keysters I have pulled from the flames of a controversy and earned their gratitude and their friendship in return. Some people get it.

Yet as strange as it might seem, there are others who strolled over the Credibility Chasm blissfully unaware of how the work done on messaging, interview techniques, or just simply getting their heads focused actually helped them survive a crisis. These are the people who think it's all simple because the practitioner's skill and ability make it look simple.

Just to give an idea of how big an issue measurement is, take a gander at Katie Paine's blog which is dedicated entirely to research and evaluation for communications.

That's on top of KD Paine and Partners' company website.

Katie's written a book, Measuring success. True to the spirit of ecommerce, social marketing and all those other current trends, Katie's distributing the thing free-of-charge.This is definitely not a case of you get what you pay for. Take the time to download it and Katie will reward even the non-practitioner with some insights into what public relations is really all about.

There's also Cymfony, a company that does measurement as its entire book of business.

The Canadian Public Relations Society measurement committee - yes they even have one - developed a method they endorse that measures editorial coverage and ROI. You can find more on it at cprs.ca.

Measurement is just part of research and research is the starting point for any effective plan. Research is itself a speciality within the public relations field and the real treasure is finding people who can not only spit out data but also paint a coherent picture of what the data means. The links above will give you two treasures. Plenty can lay the mosaic individual tiles. Few can then step back and help you see see the profile of Abraham Lincoln.


Bond Papers is the product of research. All the bandwidth devoted to the provincial government positions and how Danny Williams operates comes from observation. Research forms the starting point of what your humble e-scribbler needs to give clients advice on how to approach an issue involving government. Knowing the environment also helps to know how to avoid government's radar screen, but that's a whole story in itself.

What turns up on your computer screen from Bond or at Persuasion Business is just the tip of the over-used iceberg analogy. Virals, poll goosing and all that are the PR equivalent of showing how to lift an ice cube with a piece of string and some salt. The real challenge comes in knowing how to shift the entire freakin' berg of attitudes and behaviour.

And knowing why you want to move the berg in the first place.

Bond Papers has its impact and there are ways to measure that. Does it reach the target audience?

Absolutely. The three separate traffic trackers reveal the size of the Bond daily audience, the number of people subscribing, the computers they run, the browsers they use, screen resolution, language, the pages they visit, the google search terms used and a host of other bits of detail.

In many cases, the trackers identify the Internet service provider handling the visit. I can't tell specifically which individuals are reading, but there is enough demographic information to know that the people who should be reading are reading Bond. There are a lot more who ought to be reading Bond's utterances, but for now the audience is the right size.

Do people like what they see?

Yes and no.

Someone invented e-mail so people can send a note of encouragement or, more often, a rocket taking exception to something. It all goes into the research hopper to guide future development. They must like what they read, though because they keep coming back in steady and larger numbers. By the way, scroll to the bottom of Bond Papers page and you can see at least one set of results from one tracker.

As a last way of telling the impact, consider the number of stories posted here originally or linked here that turn up on the evening news, on radio or in the papers a day or two later. Ask Tom Rideout about Bond Papers and Chief Justice Green's report. The story came up again today on CBC Radio's Crosstalk on Media panel.

After the "oh, gawrsh" moment of modesty, the mention gets tossed into the research hopper.

- srbp -

In the court of public opinion (repost from The Persuasion Business)

These originally appeared in two parts on July 23 and July 24, 2007 at The Persuasion Business.

Part One

You don't have to be Conrad Black or Brian Mulroney to find yourself facing a legal battle and at the same time face a battle over your reputation in the court of public opinion.

Cases involving large companies, alleged injuries to members of the public, alleged wrongdoing by politicians or other prominent people usually attract news media attention. It's true in Chicago with Conrad Black and Los Angeles with OJ, Paris Hilton or the latest flavour of the moment.

Yet, it is equally true even in a relatively small place like Newfoundland and Labrador. Max Ruelokke, currently the head of the offshore regulatory board, found himself speaking with reporters on a legal action to resolve a dispute over his appointment to the job he currently holds. Ruelokke, a senior executive in the private sector and former public servant likely never expected to find himself at the centre of a political controversy but that's where he wound up.

These days, though, any case is liable to make the news. Even in appeals courts, cases that would normally draw yawns have earned news coverage either because there was something peculiar about the subject matter - a bizarre constitutional challenge on a fisheries violation, for example - or because one of the lawyers was particularly colourful in his arguments before the court.

Parties involved in a court proceeding - especially one that is likely to make news - must deal with the court of public opinion just as they deal with legal aspects of whatever matter they may face in a court of law. Reputations are at stake and as several high-profile cases - like Mulroney and Airbus - a successful co-ordination of public relations strategy with legal strategy can have a profound influence on the outcome.

It's not just a matter of having a lawyer make comments to a reporter. Most lawyers, even the ones who make a habit of granting interviews, run on whatever innate abilities they have. But being knowledgeable in the law and persuasive in a courtroom or in a boardroom doesn't necessarily guarantee success in the other, less formal and often more combative court. The rules are different. That's where counsel comes in. Just as no one with half a clue would walk into court without a lawyer, no one - including lawyers - should wander into the court of public opinion without experienced counsel.

Part Two

There are at least five reasons to deal with reporters and, in the process, co-ordinate action in both the court of law and the court of public opinion.

It's called litigation public relations.

1. Preserve the presumption of innocence.

This may be the cornerstone of our legal system, but often the first allegation made in public is the one that sticks.

Far too often people and organizations facing allegations will decline public comment. Just as silence is consent, silence in the news media usually implies agreement with whatever is being said about you.

Consider any of the high-profile cases currently taking place in Newfoundland and Labrador. Current and former members of the House of Assembly face allegations about improper spending of public funds. Charges have been laid against one - and he continues to decline comment of any kind - but all are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty.

Ask anyone about the case and see how many are willing to maintain the presumption of innocence after the onslaught of allegations from the Auditor General. In a court of law, allegations are subject to scrutiny and cross-examination. Weaknesses in an argument, faulty work, or in some instances a lack of credible evidence may win an acquittal.

Eventually.

In the meantime, those allegations are all that are available publicly. And every time there's another news story, the allegations get repeated sometimes without direct refutation.

For example, take the case of the former director of finance in the legislature who faces a civil action brought against him by the provincial government to recover money he is only - at this point - alleged to have inappropriately obtained or which he is alleged to have approved for others. His lawyer filed a statement of defence to the claim, until now the only comment of any substance made on his behalf and it is 13 months after the first allegations were made.

The CBC coverage of the filing is accurate and apparently thorough. But look at the amount of space devoted to the allegations in a story on the statement of defence.
The same could be said of a radiologist in Burin accused - merely accused - of misreading radiology reports. Find someone who hasn't heard of the case. Find someone who doesn't believe the guy is guilty of screwing up more than 6,000 reports.

Silence implies guilt.

2. Provide accurate, factual information about the case from the client's perspective, or as may be the case, correct inaccurate information.

The basis of solid legal argument and solid public relations argument is fact. Nothing persuades better than a consistent, logical and simple series of factual propositions or statements.

It isn't spin. Spin is misrepresentation, which is a slightly more polite word for a falsehood. Spin erodes credibility which undermines reputation which rots relationships.

In all cases, but especially when the allegations are emotionally charged, it may be important to defuse emotionalism with facts.

Sometimes allegations may involve inaccurate information or a news report may include inaccurate information from any source, including third parties.

The inaccuracy may come from a comment or it may result from the context, like the example of a health authority announcing the suspension of a radiologist immediately before an announcement of a public inquiry into breast cancer screening problems.

If the subject is complex or the issues involved are arcane or intricate - like how claims were processed and who approved them - important details will be omitted or simply misunderstood.

3. Provide reporters with background information not necessarily related to the case so that reporters may understand the legal proceedings.

Reporters are usually bright people but even reporters who have covered legal issues for years before may be unaware of important aspects of the process.

A key part of any public relations job is translating complex issues into accurate but understandable language. Legal cases are no different than engineering or mathematics. Keeping the level of comprehension high fights against inaccuracy and the resulting wrong impressions.

Lawyers and others may often need to provide background information to ensure reporters get the story right.

A few years ago, I dealt with reporters covering a high-profile set of charges. My client was not directly involved.  Reporters were obviously having some difficulty understanding the circumstances under which bail is granted in Canada. The lawyer representing the accused didn't provide any information - simple background - and when I referred the reporters to the two Crown prosecutors on the case, both lawyers declined any comment.

Reporters were evidently frustrated and they were directing questions anywhere, including in my direction. As a result, I gathered some information, consulted a couple of solid sources and gave them a bit of background. Doing that helped direct questions away from my client - where attention shouldn't have been focused anyway - and also helped reporters understand the circumstances that likely influenced the judge's eventual decision to grant bail with some fairly stringent conditions.

The sad part of that episode was that both the Law Society guidelines and guidelines for federally-appointed courts on media coverage of court proceedings all encourage exactly that type of comment by lawyers even those directly involved in litigation.

4. Know what to say and when; know what not to say and when not to say it.

As important as it is to say something, it may also be advisable to hold back some information for the courts or even to avoid making some comments at all.

Ask Conrad Black's attorneys about that last bit when it comes time to sentence the former media baron.

More likely though, it may be generally inappropriate to lay out in detail every aspect of a defence or a prosecution, of an allegation or a response, in public before making the comments in court. That's something lawyers will know.

But consider the alternative: the need for disclosure in the court of public opinion.

In their book, Buck up and suck up, James Carville and Paul Begalla recount the initial stages of Whitewater. Bill and Hilary Clinton - being lawyers - instinctively approached the allegations like lawyers. They hired lawyers.

And the lawyers did what lawyers do: they said nothing, admitted nothing. They advised against saying anything. The lawyers acted in what they perceived as the clients' best interest based on what works in their world. However, as Carville and Begala point out, "stonewalling is the biggest, brightest red flag you can wave to a reporter."

Closer to home, consider the piece of information withheld from the public on breast cancer screening, apparently on the advice of lawyers. It's easy to trace and entire public inquiry to the furor created by just that one earnest and well-intentioned piece of advice based on experience in one court but used in the wrong one.

Openness breeds confidence. Stonewalling breeds something else.

5. Everyone follows the news and vice versa.

We'd be naive if we didn't understand that everyone watches television, listens to the radio and reads the newspapers or surfs the Internet.

Stories can't be contained any more by the fact they happen in a town with only a single daily newspaper, a couple of radio news outlets and a couple of television stations. For anyone doing business outside his or her own community, odds are that media coverage will reach. In addition to dealing with immediate legal problems, widespread media coverage may make it hard to carry on business elsewhere.

Equally, while it may have been possible once to pull stakes and move to another province or even another country to start again after a legal disaster, those days are gone. What will drag along behind is not just the legal disaster, but virtually every comment made - accurate or wildly speculative - and if the person or business happens to gain some prominence in the new local, old ghosts may return to haunt.

In the immediate world of a litigation though, we'd be equally naive to believe that judges and prospective jurors don't follow the news and we'd be just silly to think they also don't start forming some opinions based on what they hear initially. They are human.

Rather than vacate the field to whatever allegations are made, presenting factual, accurate comment in news media can influence a case. (Making wild and silly comments can produce the opposite, but that's another war story)

Consider the case of Max Ruelokke. Appointed to chair the offshore regulatory board by a process established by federal-provincial agreement (the 1985 Atlantic Accord), Ruelokke faced a situation in which the provincial government delayed issuing the order in council making the appointment official.

As it turned out, Ruelokke had to sue the provincial government to get the job he won on merit, but in the process, he faced public criticism from the Premier. Ruelokke didn't seek the limelight, but he never shied away from it either. He accepted interview requests and presented himself calmly and consistently. He was impressive, even as the whole process dragged on for months.

Would it have made a difference if he kept his mouth shut? Hard to say. Ruelokke had a strong case anyway, one the judge hearing the case described as a "slam-dunk" even before final summations.

Had Ruelokke lost his temper in the face of some of the comments made against him, he may well have damaged his case. By maintaining a cool demeanour and dealing simply with the facts, Ruelokke may well have helped confirm that he was simply a professional executive entitled to the job he had been awarded in a fair process.

Ruelokke's calm persistence in the face of the Premier's bluster may also have helped persuade the Premier to abandon his futile legal fight.

One sign of the impact Ruelokke had? After the case was settled, the Premier whined about Ruelokke being "in everyone's face" throughout the process, although Ruelokke had appeared in interviews on only a handful of occasions.

Ruelokke's response was characteristic of his overall performance:

"I have not gone seeking the attention of the media. I have not failed to respond, however, to media on my views on what's happened," he said.

That's the essence of litigation public relations.

- srbp -

The Johnny Cab Minister (repost from The Persuasion Business)

This post originally appeared February 27, 2008 at The Persuasion Business:

Johnny Cab is a clever character in the 1990 movie Total Recall.  It's an automated taxi, voiced by veteran character actor Robert Picardo. You may recall him as the doctor on Star Trek: Voyager or as the witch Meg Mucklebones in the cult-hit Legend.

Taxis in the movie are entirely controlled by on-board computers.  To give them some semblance of normalcy, Johnny Cabs have robot drivers consisting of just a head and torso.  The computer is programmed with stock taxi driver lines like "Please state your destination" or "Helluva day."  If you don't ask a question to answer one that fits into the programming, the Johnny Cab will fall back on one of its stock lines.

You hear the same sort of thing with some people being interviewed by news media. Either they've had no media training, bad media training or the good training they had never took. No matter what the question, they refer back to their talking points or scripted lines. That's all the say.

Talking points are a standard feature of interview preparation.  A media relations officer will give three or four major points or ideas for the person being interviewed to make.  There should be some background or detail to expand on the point.  no set of talking points will ever be complete but good preparation means that someone being interviewed can make the points they want and nothing should be asked that comes as a surprise.

If the media person is doing his or her job, they already know the subject inside and out.  He can anticipate questions and provide sensible answers that convey meaningful information. The person being interviewed should also have more information;  he or she should be knowledgeable about the subject. If they aren't the interview will be incredible and the whole idea is to present credible, believable information from someone who knows what he or she is talking about.

After all, a media interview is a stock part of the persuasion business.  You want to gain support - not from the interviewer but from the audience -  and the way to do that is to present information in a way that people can relate to and understand.

A couple of times over the past week or so, provincial environment minister Charlene Johnson has wound up sounding like a Johnny Cab Minister.

In an interview with CBC's Ted Blades, Johnson was asked repeatedly over the course of a seven minute interview why her department didn't conduct regular structural inspections of 125 bridges over which thousands of people on the island pass ever week. She really never answered the question.  She fell back on her talking points, referring to a single bridge closure in 2006, or referring to her department's reliance on public complaints to know when a bridge needed some expert attention.

Now it's not like Blades was asking a bizarre or overly aggressive question.  Johnson herself said that public safety was paramount, that a human life was very important.  Blades' question gave Johnson a chance to give a concrete example or a convincing statement of how her department would put that sentiment into action.  After all, actions speak louder than words in the persuasion business.

Johnson could have easily said that the report from Transport Canada had caused her to re-examine the policy.  She and her officials would now work with the public works department and incorporate her hundred odd bridges into the others inspected annually by another department.

Her talking point  - her aide memoire - would have been something like this:  "Public safety is extremely important. It's so important that even though we had thought our policy was working, it isn't.  Now we'll be doing regular inspections."

And if hit with the question again or asked how they might have thought no inspections was a good idea, her response would be:  "You know, we all make decisions that make sense at the time but experience shows something else. So now we are inspecting these bridges and we'll do regular inspections by civil engineers to make sure the bridges are safe.  Public safety is that important."

But that's not what she had and, even though she is a cabinet minister responsible for running a department, she couldn't stray from the confines of her programming.  As a result,she sounded incredible, insincere, or at the very least laughable.

She did much the same thing in an interview on Wednesday with Chris O'Neill-Yates on the collapse of a paper recycling program in St. John's for want of $100,000 a year in operating cash.  A request to the provincial recycling agency was turned down even though, as CBC had earlier reported, the Multi-materials Stewardship Board had a surplus of $2.0 million last year.

Johnson couldn't commit to reconsidering the policy of not funding operating grants, even though she is the environment minister and recycling is a key part of government's waste diversion policy.  Nope.  better to send it to the dump, supposedly, as Johnson had earlier said when confronted with the issue.
And when asked about possibly reviewing the mandate of the decade-old recycling organization, Johnson talked about the board's "wonderful" work and the need to give news media a briefing on what "wonderful" work they were doing.

Yes.

Wonderful work.

Even though, as a result of an old policy, a recycling project has collapsed and tons of recyclables are now going to the dump instead of to the recycler where they are supposed to go as part of the government's waste diversion, management and reduction policy.

It doesn't make sense.

But it was in the talking points.

And when you are a Johnny Cab Minister, the programmed talking points are all you've got.

-srbp-

Bashing your own guys over the head is soooo strategic

An article in the current issue of Embassy magazine examines the European Union’s seal ban and how it is that Canada found itself outmanoeuvred by the anti-hunt movement.

University of Calgary political science professor Donald Barry told Embassy that two things gave the otherwise moribund seal crowd a new lease on life.

One was a hike in quotas that brought the number close enough to a million to give it some propaganda value again.

The other was…

Mr. Barry says another key development was the fierce exchange between Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams and former Beatle Paul McCartney and his then-wife Heather Mills McCartney on CNN's Larry King Live in March 2006. During the show, Mr. Williams alleged, among other things, that the FBI was investigating the International Federation for Animal Welfare and other animal-rights groups for terrorism, and that the McCartneys were being used by the groups.

"The publicity propelled [IFAW] right back into the forefront of the opposition," Mr. Barry says. With IFAW's ability to mobilize support and the Humane Society's strong public relations machine, "you have a series of groups whose strengths complement each other and they're practiced at what they do."

So basically that whole Larry King foolishness turned out to be a gigantic help to the other guys.

And that one trip to Europe did exactly diddly-squat.

Like, no one saw that coming.

- srbp -

.

Size matters

Well, it used to matter to leaders like Lyndon Johnson, anyway.

Here’s the now-legendary photograph of Johnson showing off the scar from his gall bladder surgery to a gaggle of reporters.

Biographers Irwin and Debi Unger argue that Johnson was merely trying to show that he was healing well. 

It didn’t come across that way.

That story leads off a paper by University of Missouri – Columbia professor Jeffrey Pasley on American presidents and media coverage of presidential health issues.

Unknown to the public and the press, Johnson's doctors had also been concerned about the possibility of more dangerous conditions, such as pancreatic cancer and a recurrence of his earlier heart troubles; true to their fears, the president actually developed a superventricular tachycardia (dangerously accelerated heartbeat) while undergoing anaesthesia. Trying to allay suspicions that Johnson was seriously ill, press secretary Bill Moyers "snowed [the White House press corps] with details," including full-color anatomical slides, and the news media duly carried daily reports of Johnson's convalescence, including such minutiae as how well the president slept on particular nights, Lady Bird planting a tree outside the hospital room window, and his viewing of "Hello, Dolly!" on television. Unfortunately, Moyers had no idea how far the president was willing to take the full disclosure policy. On October 20, [1965] Johnson was holding forth to the press as he sunned himself on the Bethesda Naval Hospital grounds.

"Apparently feeling words to be inadequate" in describing how he felt, the Baltimore Sun's Muriel Dobbin reported, "the President whipped up his blue knit sport shirt," and, as Time put it, "let the whole world inspect the ugly twelve-inch seam under his right rib cage" where the surgeons had done their work. Many newspapers and both major newsmagazines carried a photo that week of a squatting, squinting LBJ exposing his flesh for the press.

Moyers’ efforts are typical of what politicians and their staff try to do in order to dispel rumours about a politician’s health.  . Moyers pushed out bags of detail at a time when that volume of information was unheard of.  He might have been on safe ground too, if his boss hadn’t opted for the more earthy approach.

Pasley summarises a number of episodes that demonstrate just exactly how some episodes of presidential illness have been handled and mishandled. Take a minute and read the article. You won’t be disappointed.

There is a lesson in the American experience with illness and transparency, one that would be useful for any politician to heed.

Just as daylight is the best disinfectant for political corruption so too is factual information the curative for the diseases that fester in the often incestuous world of politics.  As with physical disease, moralising and ex poste facto rationalisations are seldom useful for preventing or curing a partisan pox.

-srbp-

Experience counts…again

A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client.

Someone who plays at being their own public relations counsel?

Same thing.

In light of recent events, it seems appropriate to remind people of that fairly simple and, one might have thought, obvious proposition.

For those who missed it, here’s an old collection of scribbles from the original version of the Independent that your humble e-scribbler wrote after seeing the published transcript of Danny Williams’ first major national editorial board interview as Premier.  There are a few paragraphing changes to improve readability.  It first appeared in this space in January 2005.

_______________________________________________

Experience Counts

For those who don’t know, I have been in the public relations business for the past 15 years. That includes seven years in politics and another eight in the public and private sectors. It’s an interesting field, if for no other reason than you keep running into people who think that because they read the papers, listen to the radio and watch television, they can do a PR job easily.

Sadly for those people, the news is filled each day with stories a buddy of mine used to call Homer Simpson moments – you see the story and the only thing to say is “D’Oh!” because the gaffs are easy to spot.

They were predictable.

They are damaging.

They were avoidable.

Danny Williams’ interview with Macleans this week was a big Homer Simpson moment. The drunk comment came in response to a leading question from someone who hasn’t worked in the province since the scotch-soaked salad days of Frank Moores. The premier fell into an old trap and joked that now the House is completely drunk. D’oh!

Understand that the editor’s question came after the Premier volunteered the opinion that the House of Assembly was “unproductive” and joked that if he had his way he would probably never call it in session. D’oh! That question came after the Macleans crowd asked the Premier why the provincial deficit was so big. His response was mismanagement over the past 10 years. There was a lengthy bit about the Stunnel; two sentences on the fishery. D’oh! The last question had the Premier calling for a seal cull. D’oh! The Premier made some misstatements of fact, for good measure (D’oh!) and a couple of big ideas got a handful of words, without explanation. D’oh! Take the whole interview and you have a bunch of poor, laughing drunks, complaining about having no money, who apparently can’t manage their own affairs, and yet who want to build grandiose megaprojects and kill seals.

That interpretation is a bit facetious, but it fits rather nicely with the condescending view some central Canadian editors hold of Newfoundland and Labrador. What was missing from the interview? Overall, the premier needed to put our issues into terms that would be meaningful to his audience. There could have been a frank explanation of how developing the Lower Churchill benefits the whole country. The Premier could have talked at length about the local companies competing successfully around the globe in the energy, manufacturing and high tech sectors. For another, he could talk about how diversifying the provincial economy gets us off the equalization rolls. The Premier could have showed how offshore oil and gas can provide Canadians with a secure supply of vital energy and give Newfoundland and Labrador economic benefits like those in Alberta. That’s the Blue Book, Danny’s supposed plan.

Talk that way and you get a feature article, at least, not a cheesy question and answer session following a reporter’s agenda. You might even get the cover. Instead, readers got a piece that Michael Benedict, the 70s cub reporter and now Macleans executive editor, could have written from his old notes. Danny made the front page of the National Post, alright, but only because someone took offence at his jokes. D’oh!

Since the interview was so far off the Blue Book, this all happened for one of two reasons. Either Danny Williams’ advisors, the people he derisively referred to as handlers, are not doing their jobs or, taking his own advice, Danny is ignoring them because he feels they are trying to turn him into something he is not. If they aren’t doing their jobs or giving dumb advice, then Danny needs new advisors ASAP. If Danny is ignoring their good advice, then he needs to take a look in the mirror.
Public relations is not a job anyone can do. It takes skill and experience. Good advisors don’t change people into flavourless mush. They knock off the rough edges and help focus thinking so someone like the premier gets his point across. They are crucial to success. In PR, like in law, the guy who acts as his own counsel has a fool for a client.

By the way, who made the cover of Macleans last week? Rick Mercer – a Newfoundlander who gets paid to be funny.

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Top qualities in a new PR practitioner

The always insightful Dave Fleet posted on 14 essential attributes for new public relations practitioners and – as one might expect – the thing has attracted huge amounts of attention and comment from people in the business.

It’s all good stuff.

Around these parts, your humble e-scribbler would point to the writing skills point.  This is gigantic.  Too many people have trouble with this in too many walks of life but in the public relations business not being able to write a clear, coherent sentence is deadly.

For newbies – to whom Fleet’s list is directed – this is a big one.

There are far too many who wind up in the PR business or who claim to be communications professionals who have basic problems with basic skills.

Your humble e-scribe would also had a characteristic or cluster of characteristics which is strangely absent from the list:  inquisitiveness and its cousin, scepticism.

One of things PR people do is explain stuff to others.  In order to do that effectively you have to understand the “stuff” first.  You gain understanding by being inquisitive, by being nosy.  Ask questions.  Learn how to find out stuff.

Related to that, be automatically sceptical of anything and everything.  Ask lots of questions. Allow nothing to go unchallenged.  Better to get to the bottom of something and expose all its facets before you wind up in public.

Inquisitiveness and scepticism will ensure there are no surprises once a bad news story goes public.  On the positive side, they may turn up an angle that no one thought of before.

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Connecting sources with reporters: killing bad pitches

Over the past couple of months two new web sites have sprung up - one Canadian and the other American - aimed at connecting reporters with potential sources for stories.

HARO stands for Help a Reporter Out. Consider it a sort of match-making service.

If you are a potential source of information, sign up at the HARO site and you'll receive an e-mail up to three times a day containing a short description of what reporters might be looking for.

If you are a journalist, there's another page consisting almost entirely of a form to enter your contact information and the background on what you are looking for.

HARO is the brainchild of Peter Shankman, a marketing public relations consultant in New York City. As Shankman describes it,

I built this list because a lot of my friends are reporters, and they call me all the time for sources. Rather than go through my contact lists each time, I figured I could push the requests out to people who actually have something to say.

These requests only come from reporters directly to me. I never take queries from that other service, I never SPAM, and I'm not going to do anything with your email other than send you these reporter requests when they arrive in my in-box.

Many of us in the business get the same sort of calls from time to time. Shankman just decided to do something with a broader reach.

Meanwhile, three Canadians have started a similar concept north of the border. Journalistsource.ca is newer and will likely take a while to get rolling. Your humble e-scribbler signed up a couple of days ago and so far there's been one e-mail looking for a connection. Two public relations professionals and a journalist are behind the site.

Occasionally a journalist will want to remain anonymous, so in this case, we ask that you email us your response to the request, and we’ll send it on to the journalist on your behalf.

What do we ask in return? That’s simple too - When you see a journalist’s request that you think you/your organization is capable of fulfilling, please be SURE your response fits the request before replying. Why? Because one of JournalistSource.ca’s main goals is to eliminate PR Spam.

That last hyperlink is in the original text. It will take you to one of several sites that have cropped up detailing some of the horrible pitches arriving in newsrooms from marketers and PR consultants looking to place stories with a news organization.

It's a legitimate part of the business but when it's done poorly, everyone suffers. Other sites try to combat the bad pitch.

HARO and Journalist.ca are two new efforts to get past the bad pitch and connect people with stories to tell to the people who are looking to tell a story.

Oh. If you think this will just make a handy list for you to spam from, be warned. It gets back quickly and thus far Shankman hasn't been shy in his circulars in outing the spam artists.

Death to bad pitches.

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Authentic

No sweat to tell the difference between a public relations professional who knows how to use the tools to do the job compared with well, the opposite.

On the opposite side, we have this ham-fisted piece of nonsense from the company doing advertising for the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador. Incidentally, the ham-fist is not the billboard on the Gardiner.

Then compare it to Joseph Thornley's personal pictures from a recent holiday in Prince Edward Island. Sure he used it as a means to talk about how easily he uploaded the great photos to his blog and to Flickr, but what he is telling is a simple story of someone who went to the Island, had a great time, took gorgeous pictures and then uploaded them to the Internet complete with geotags.

I uploaded about 100 pictures of the attractions and historic areas of Charlottetown, North Rustico Harbour (the epitome of a Canadian east coast village), the beaches and cliffs of Prince Edward Island Park (look for the picture of the fox that trotted right up to our car while holding a rabbit in its mouth) and, of course, Green Gables (if you’re the parent of a girl, you’ll know what that is.)

I uploaded photos from my flickr page directly to PlanetEye. It was simple. Took about 2 minutes for each batch of 20 to 25 pictures. And then the geotagging worked perfectly. I simply dragged and dropped my photos onto a map in the location where I’d taken them.

The difference between the two approaches is a simple word: authentic. Thornley's experience carries with it all the credibility of someone who has actually been there and done it. There's a story to be told here and the pictures are part of the whole thing.

Now theoretically, he could be working for the PEI tourism department or the software companies he mentions but nothing on the site would suggest he is. Ethically he'd be obliged to disclose such a connection and base don a number of factors, including the fact he doesn't comment on the issue, it's a reasonable assumption that he isn't. Note that one of Thornley's viewers chides him about the software developer.

Even after a suspicious mind has gone to that point and returned, you come back to the integrity and the sincerity of the post.

His last line, which will be seen by thousands in exactly the demographic Islanders are looking to hit, says it all:

If you’re interested in an unspoiled place for a summer vacation, take a look at Charlottetown on PlanetEye or at my Charlottetown photo set on Flickr .

A simple call to action - for you marketers out there - and the links are left in it so you can act, just as Thornley would have wanted.

Compare that to the other thing. There was a conventional media story in the billboard. The thing would have to be pitched and worked to get coverage.

A n Internet search turned up this story online, albeit in a media trade publication. There's another mention, again from a trade publication that focus es on the agency and not the client. The Telly had a picture on July 11. Notice this story appeared the very same day as the release, suggesting it was organized ahead of time.

There might be other stuff but it sure as heck isn't turning up online where the video and the story of the billboard had a chance to go truly viral.

If handled properly.

And that's the catch.

This was a potentially hot new media story, completely with daily blog posts about the development, complete with amateur video done by the creators as they were doing it. Three weeks worth of material is stuff most blogs would kill for, especially stuff as compelling as that. When you combine the story inherent in the billboard production with the authentic flavour of a local artist hired to complete the work you have a truly delightful tale that tells itself.

And seriously, except in a world where agency self-stroking is the goal, the trade pubs that showed up in the search are useless to accomplishing the client goal of boosting the number of people who don't usually come this way headed to the farthest eastern airports in the country.

It's not like the record on this over the past couple of years has been anything to write home about, although plenty has been written and spoken at home about it.

Throwing more cash into tourism advertising isn't necessarily the way to go in a highly competitive market at a time when it's tough to get people to travel.

Being genuinely creative in your approach - being authentic - sure can make a difference. As the great advertising persuader put it, authenticity helps break through the wall of cynicism about advertising generally.

It's easy to talk about authenticity, but sometimes it's pretty obvious that some people don't get what the word means.

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Meaningless numbers

At what point will someone in the provincial government's business department decide to tell the people of Newfoundland and Labrador just exactly what sorts of regulatory requirements have been eliminated or reduced as part of the so-called red tape reduction program?

"We have further reduced the number of regulatory requirements by 32,866, which means the elimination of an additional 11,651 requirements since April," said Minister [Kevin] O'Brien. "We have successfully reduced the regulatory burden by just over 10.5 per cent. This achievement puts us on the way to the halfway mark of our objective to reduce the number of regulatory requirements within government by 25 per cent."

This is the kind of vacuous statement that brings public relations into disrepute. Without knowing what the "regulatory requirements" are, no one can tell whether or not eliminating even one of them actually means anything.

This isn't news.

It's drivel.

Vacuous, meaningless tripe.

Let's not even discuss the tortured grammar of that first sentence of the quote.

Rather than this pile of words, the two communications directors involved - that's right, it took two people to issue it - could simply have printed a limerick.

You know the one:

There once was a young man named Paul

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The Persuasion Business: Actions speak louder than words

If public relations is fundamentally about relationships, there are two words that are crucial to any relationship: reputation and credibility.

The two are linked, but let's take a look at reputation.

Reputation is an attitude held by an individual about another individual or an organization. An attitudes is set of beliefs, a sets of feelings. It will have positive and negative qualities: good versus bad, for example.

Attitudes are important because at some point they will drive or influence behaviour.

Behaviour is important because, at some point, the behaviour contained in our definitions of public relations is support.

If that sounds like your last undergraduate course in psychology or in political science, then don't be surprised. We are talking about human interactions - relationships between and among human groups.

While we all can have and likely have had short-term relationships, for most of us relationships tend to last over a long time. Some are constantly important, like say a relationship within a family. Others are intermittent, becoming important at some points in life while being in the background during other times. Inherently though, relationships tend to last in one form or another over a long time.

Relationships - like attitudes - are therefore likely to be dynamic. That is, they are likely to change over time based on any of a number of factors.

In another post, we'll discuss attitudes and behaviour in greater depth, but at this point let's stick with the catch-all term reputation and the connection to behaviour.

Attitudes are linked to behaviour in competitive situations, like the choice between one bottle of soft drink or another. Most of us are so familiar with these ideas that they seem obvious. But what about in a monopoly, like health care?

In the example used in the first post, we discussed at some length a current problem facing a health authority involving problems with important medical testing and public disclosure of information. In Newfoundland and Labrador, the health authority is a monopoly or part of a larger monopoly. If someone gets sick in eastern Newfoundland, and, like most of us, lacks the money to jet off to some other part of North America for care, it's not exactly like he or she can go to another health care provider to show displeasure in the way the testing issue was handled.

Absolutely correct.

But...

This is a democracy and health care is provided from public funds controlled by politicians who periodically have to go to the polls. Those politicians need votes and those votes are held by people who will need health care at some point. If you doubt the connection, consider the 1997 federal election results in Newfoundland and Labrador. As much as anything else they were driven by public concerns over access to health care.

Now health care is entirely a provincial responsibility in Canada, but that didn't stop voters from making health care a major issue. The election results, translated into provincial votes by the nervous political operatives sent a disconcerting message to the provincial government. A provincial health minister was replaced. New funding turned up. Government organized a forum to discuss the issue and propose solutions. It was all very public and very obvious.

The problem didn't go away, although there was a decline in the very vocal criticisms of the health care system. Flip ahead to January 1999. Brian Tobin went to the polls looking for a second majority and his campaign launched on the heady promise of economic prosperity from offshore oil and the Lower Churchill. Everyone else was talking health care. Major shift in campaign communications including the hasty production of new television commercials highlighting social programs, especially health care.

Fast forward to 2007, another election year. Questions about breast cancer screening led to the appointment of a public inquiry headed by no less an authority than the most senior justice of the Court of Appeal (in terms of years on the bench) , the highest court in the province. In an unrelated matter that cropped up at the same time, health officials were given a mere two weeks to re-evaluate almost 6,000 radiology reports when concerns were raised about the competence of a radiologist at a rural hospital.

To forestall unwelcome voter behaviour - i.e. voting for the Other Guys - the governing party took swift action.

Action.

Implicitly, the politicians involved knew that attitudes wouldn't be adjusted merely by words. It wasn't good enough to say that things were fixed. Well, they tried that initially, along with some actions that likely dealt with the entire matter as far as the health care authority was concerned.

The problem was that the important attitudes aren't those of the senior managers of the authority. They like themselves anyway. Ask any of them how they do their jobs and they will tell you what a marvellous job they do, working long hours for little pay.

The problem lay in the simple fact that the attitudes that were important were patient attitudes. Those attitudes shifted, as we noted before, once it appeared that the health authorities had held back important information. More action - very obvious action - was needed.

Actions speak louder than mere words, especially when it comes to influencing behaviour.

Next time we'll look at credibility and what happens in the gap between what you say and what you do.

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Public Relations Measurement

Public relations professionals spend a chunk of time trying to measure things. Aside from wondering if what you are doing is actually producing anything other than billings, clients want to see some tangible indication of results for communications programs.

Simple stuff - like saying the story got front page above the fold in a given newspaper - is a bit dated and must inevitably be coupled with other things to give a sense of whether or not the news release got the message across.

Corporate clients want some reliable indicator of what they get for their money; they want to see a return on investment (ROI).

One of the big measurements - and one of the raging debates - is effectiveness.

Just to give an idea of how big an issue measurement is, take a gander at Katie Paine's blog which dedicated entirely to research and evaluation for communications. That's on top of KD Paine and Partners' company website.

There's also Cymfony, a company that does measurement as its entire book of business. The Canadian Public Relations Society measurement committee - yes they even have one - developed a method they endorse. You can find more on it here.

Research is the starting point for any effective plan, let alone a public relations plans. Research is itself a speciality within the public relations field and the real treasure is finding people who can not only spit out data but also paint a coherent picture of what the data means.

Plenty can lay the mosaic individual tiles. Few can then step back and see the profile of Abraham Lincoln.

Bond Papers is the product of research. All the bandwidth devoted to the provincial government positions and how Danny Williams operates comes from observation.

It forms the starting point of what your humble e-scribbler needs to give clients advice on how to approach an issue involving government. What gets put on a computer screen here is just the tip of the over-used iceberg analogy.

Virals, poll goosing and all that you've read about here are the PR equivalent of showing how to lift an ice cube with a piece of string and some salt. The real challenge comes in knowing how to shift the entire freakin' berg of attitudes and behaviour.

And knowing why you want to move the berg in the first place.

All of this is just an excuse to link to a post at Offal News that itself winds up at an amazing website maintained by the New York Times. The Times has used some simple software to let you wander through George Bush's state of the union speeches searching for keywords. You can see where the word turns up, the speech context and the frequency it shows up.

Curious stuff.

Fascinating in a nerdy/geeky sorta way.

But it's inevitably the start of someone's strategic plan.