I read a lot of blogs.  My favourites change over time, but one of my current favourites is Chris Anderson’s blog (no relation).  The Long Tail, is without a doubt, the best book about communications I have read in years, and Anderson’s blog is teeming with insight into the world of digital culture.  If you don’t read it, you should.

Lately, Anderson has been talking a lot about “radical transparency,” that is, businesses operating in full view of the world – doing away with secrecy and letting it all hang out.  Blogging has tried to do this to a certain degree, but not to this extent.  Of course, I don’t think that Anderson is suggesting that all businesses should work this way, so much as posing the question “what if they did?”

So, I got thinking about PR, as I am wont to do, and how “radical transparency” can help our profession.  Certainly, being completely open about issues we are discussing puts bold claims above scrutiny.  Imagine touting a private company as the “leading maker of X” and being able to back that up with sales figures, staff numbers and other data that CFOs and lawyers would never in a million years let you publish.

Beyond these fevered dreams of cooperation, how can this idea help the profession of public relations?  One thing that has always struck me as odd (but I did anyway, because that’s how I was taught) is that we never give clients full contact details for our media lists.  Maybe this is just the firms I’ve worked with in the past, but I know a few that make this a practice.  Sometimes, I do this just for the sake of simplicity, in general, I couldn’t care less.

It’s ridiculous, and even a bit damaging to the profession, when you think of it.  In a way, it says to clients that our only value is in knowing someone’s phone number.  If we let our clients know that privleged information, they could easily do our jobs themselves.  Of course, this is not the case, but that is exactly what keeping this information so close to our chest says.

So sharing contact information with your clients isn’t exactly radical, but what if we shared that information with each other?  What if, instead of guarding that golden rolodex, we laid out our hottest media contact for each other to see, including pitching notes, bios, photos, personal websites, blogs, beliefs, insights and everything else that will help us understand the reporters we’re pitching, and give them better pitches.  What if this was all free, and all that was required is that you have to disclose as well?

Seems to me that this would be pretty handy.  Bowden’s only takes you so far, and unless you’re focused on one or two industries, it’s very hard to know the key media in every market as well as you’d probably like to.

So – my question to all of you is this:

If such a thing existed, would you take part?  Would you share your contacts in exchange for other contacts?

If you are, let me know.  I’ve got some ideas, and if I get enough people on board, I’m willing to make it happen.

Sometimes, I talk with students who want to go into PR because it seems glamorous – full of parties and big events. I’m always quick to remind them that for every day you spend in situations like that, you spend five doing things like calling every university publication in the country.

Suffice it to say, I was not at a party today.

A bit of a question for my media relations contemporaries. I’m reevaluating the media relations tools that we’re using, and I’d like to get some suggestions from the community to supplement my own research.

I’m looking for suggestions on a media clippings / research service as well as a media contact research database based on accuracy, usability, completeness, etc.

We currently use Bacon’s Mediasource, and it’s adequate, though local contacts are sketchy and usability is pretty weak, especially since it’s IE only and I use a Mac in my home office.

Any suggestions would be appreciated!

I read a lot of marketing / advertising / PR blogs.  Some are written by consultants, some by major industry leaders, and some by people who are just interested in it.  Whenever I read their thoughts, I wonder how they ended up getting into this world.  Not many kids say “I want to be a creative director,” when they’re little.

My story is this.

I wanted to be an architect from the time I was 12.  In highschool, I took five years of drafting (we had grade 13 – I wasn’t stupid), five years of art, plus physics and calculus and all that good stuff.  I had a good portfolio, good grades and had the whole extra-curricular thing down pat, acting in musicals, hosting coffee houses, directing productions.

For my senior art project, I designed an ad campaign for a fictional cola – Galaxy Cola.  I was fortunate enough in my small town to have an art teacher who, despite being a complete prick (it was kind of endearing, actually) was a former art director from Toronto.  He gave me some great advice, alongside his rants about leaving the ad game because his wife didn’t want to live in Toronto, and how he never wanted to be a teacher.

After highschool, I went to Carleton University’s School of Architecture for the same reason that everyone else does: Waterloo wouldn’t take me.  After a semester of drawing the folds of my shirt 1:1 on a tabloid page, and being told to ask my projects what they wanted to be carved with, it seemed that my adolescence-long dream of being as cocky as Frank Lloyd Wright was over.

I came home to visit my parents over Christmas, wondering what I was going to do with the rest of my life, when I came across the folder that contained my final art project.  I knew I had gotten an A on it, and that my teacher liked it.  I started looking through the pieces and found a post-it note among the storyboards and sketches that said:

“Ryan, you are incredibly talented.  If architecture doesn’t work out, consider advertising.”

That was a pivotal moment in my life.  From a man who gave out compliments as if it were water in the desert came the advice that I was looking for. 

When I went back to school, I talked to everyone I could about how to get into advertising.  There was no such thing as a university program in advertising, and I wanted a degree.  I finally talked to my drawing teacher, who told me of a degree program called “interdisciplinary studies” that allowed second-year students to create their own curriculum, aimed at a specific course of study that could not be acheived through a normal degree program.

In the meantime, to take my mind off the pain of designing a house for my head in my studio classes, I auditioned for a production of Little Shop of Horrors at the school.  I got a tiny chorus role, and performing in the school musical became an annual tradition for me.

Because of my background in marketing and theatre, I was offered the job as publicist for a local festival.  I then co-founded a theatre company and handled all the marketing for it.  Because we had no budget, most of it was media relations.  I worked hard at it while I was in school, and took on little contracts for web and graphic design here and there, and when I graduated, I had a bit of a reputation for being good at it.  I planned to look for a job in an advertising firm, but people kept offering me PR contracts.  Eventually, one of my professors who also ran a PR firm called me and offered me a job. 

After a few years there, I became director of public relations for an interactive advertising agency, and my accidental career intersected with my intended career, and I was – and still am – extremely happy.

I never meant to go into PR, and in a lot of ways, the fact that I had a lot of random marketing experience opened a lot more doors to me.  In all honesty, I’m a mediocre graphic designer at best, so it’s unlikely that I would have been able to waltz into an agency as a creative.  Now that the world of marketing is changing so rapidly, I consider myself very lucky to be in the PR and interactive advertising field.  It’s like having a front row seat to the next stage in evolution. 

It was an extremely random string of events that brought me to where I am today, but I don’t regret a single one.

So, what’s your story?

This is probably old news to most of you (because, well, it’s old news) but I just came across the Consumerist / Edelman scandal, and I couldn’t not draw attention to it once more.

Long story short, Mike Krempasksy, one of Edelman’s consultants working on the Walmart blogging team met with Ben Popken, the editor of consumer blog The Consumerist and asked him how he could get Ben to stop writing about his clients. He had also asked for the discussion to be off the record.

When I worked at a PR firm, we taught a media spokesperson skills program to CEOs, Members of Parliament and the like, and in one of the bright red slides in the PowerPoint deck for the course were the words:

NOTHING IS OFF THE RECORD!

We have to remember as PR people that journalists are not our friends. This was the title of one of the first articles I read on the fine art of media relations. Journalists have a job – and that’s to get a story – bonus points if it embarrasses someone. As PR people, we can never expect that a journalist’s promise to you is going to outweigh their desire to get a nice, bloody lead.

I’ve said “off the record” a number of times, but only about something minor that I or my clients didn’t really want public but was so insignificant, nobody would care enough to write about it. My rule is to never say anything to a reporter or blogger that I wouldn’t want to read on the front page the next day.

Don’t get me wrong – breaking your word is a dick move, but it happens. PR people are lawyers in the court of public opinion. PR pros need to acknowledge that fact and ensure that privileged information does not get leaked because of loose lips and that we don’t say the wrong thing and publicly embarrass our clients (and ourselves) in the process.

I’m not going to lie.  A little part of me was dreading coming back to the office after having more than a week off.  It was nice to find that the first email of the day was from a reporter I had been talking to in the previous weeks about a project we’d been working on for a client, telling me that it ran today, and was picked up nationally by 11 newspapers.

A quick estimate places that at over 1,000,000 media impressions.  That number certainly made the transition into the New Year just a little smoother.

[in case you're curious what it is I do for a living (I know I am): link] 

I wrote a post about mentoring in PR back in August when nobody read this site. At then end of the post, I posed a question that nobody responded to. Now that slightly more people read it, I want to pose the question again.

If you could give students of public relations one piece of advice, what would it be?

Paste this question on to your own site, and answer it there, or leave a comment. If enough people contribute, I’ll compile them all here. Let’s see if we can’t give the wee nippers a bit of a head start.

Because chances are, your job is only hard because a) you’re incompetent; or b) the company you work for has not provided a sufficient infrastructure for you to do your job.

I’m not buying from you. I am buying from your company. You are just an incidental voice on the other end of the phone. I will try to be nice to you, but if you don’t let me, I have no qualms with being a dick. There is historical precedent for this.

I bought a couch online yesterday from The Brick. The Brick is one of the biggest furniture retailers in the country, but has one of the absolute worst websites I’ve ever seen. The customer service that supports their web sales, however, is even worse.

In the absence of any delivery information, I called their sales line to see if I could get some information on how much delivery was going to cost (the site said “$35 – $100″) and how long it would take to get there. The line was busy for 40 minutes, so I just took my chances and proceeded with my order.

We estimate that your complete order will be available for delivery on
December 28, 2006.

Important! You will be contacted no later than 2 days before this estimated date to set a
confirmed delivery date.

Okay. So… my complete order should be ready two days after I ordered it. Sounds pretty standard. And I will be contacted “no later than two days before” the estimated date. Awkward sentence, but to me, this means I’ll be contacted at least two days before the 28th… which, in my books, is the 26th. In other words, I should get a call the same day I ordered it. Cool.

Except I got no call. No problem, I thought – it’s boxing day, they have a huge sale. I’ll call them the next day to confirm.

So I called their customer service line today. I was on hold for 20 minutes. When I finally got through to someone, they informed me that the order would take 3 – 6 days to process, and then they would check stock, and send me an email letting me know when it would be available.

“Wait,” I said. “So this won’t even go through your system for a week?”

“Three to six days, sir.”

“Okay… but the receipt I have says that it will be ready for delivery on the 28th, and that you’d call me no less than two days before that date to confirm the actual shipping date.”

“That’s an estimated date, sir.”

“But you’re telling me that you won’t even have my order in your system before the estimated delivery date. So, that’s not a very good estimate, is it?”

“The computer doesn’t know how many items we have in stock, sir.”

“Okay, fine, so can you give me an estimate as to when you can deliver this that isn’t completely wrong?”

“No, sir.”

“… This is a pretty crappy system you’ve got there.”

“Thank you, sir. Have a nice day.”

How hard, exactly, would it be to have made my receipt say “your order will be processed in 3 – 6 days, and you’ll receive an email with an estimated delivery time” rather than giving me an estimate that they blatantly know is wrong? Why would they increase their phone traffic by confusing every single person who buys something online and making them call to find out why they haven’t been contacted with delivery information? Why would you then piss off your customers by telling them that the furniture they expected in two days is going to take and indeterminate amount of time?

I’m sure the bitchy woman that I talked to on the phone is quite busy. Back to my original point – I don’t care. You can’t counter my complaint of being lied to with an attitude of “that’s how it works.”

Maybe there’s nothing she could have done, but she didn’t even open my file. She just told me she couldn’t help me. Am I going to cancel my order? Probably not. Am I going to buy from the Brick again? It’s hard to say, but it’s leaning more in the direction of “no” than “absolutely.” It wouldn’t have been very hard at all to sway me the other way – just an honest estimate, customer service that doesn’t sound like I’m interrupting their day and some feedback on a fairly big-ticket internet purchase. Give me that, and I might not become a vocal evangelist, but I would at least not start my relationship with the company with negative feelings.

Seth Godin talks a lot about “delighting” the customer. That’s a fantastic notion, but companies like the Brick need to concentrate on “not alienating” the customer before they can make that leap. It’s a sad state of affairs that the bar is that low.

It occurred to me this morning that at points in my career, I have been essentially a professional hypocrite.  This occurred to me as a needle was going into my arm at our office flu shot party.

This was my first flu shot ever.  A lot of people were in the same boat, but I had no excuse.  Back when I worked at a PR firm, one of the accounts I worked on was the Canadian Public Health Association on their flu shot campaign.  I told millions of people to get the flu shot, but I never did.

I wonder if there’s something wrong with that.  How can I, as a communications person, advocate that people do something that I wouldn’t personally?  When you think about it practically, there’s no possible way that most PR pros could possibly do everything that they suggested, but how much leverage do we have in believing our own messages?

Certainly, I believed that it was in the best interests of public health for everyone to get the flu shot.  I just didn’t want to.  If I was vehemently opposed to the flu shot for some reason, could I, in good conscience, promote it?  What about smokers who promote anti-tobacco initiatives?

I don’t feel bad for promoting public health, obviously.  Likewise, I don’t feel bad promoting products that I don’t personally have a use or like for, but that I know might appeal to someone else.  I think to those outside the marketing industry, this might seem nefarious, but it’s a reality of the communications world.  Not everything you promote will match your world view.

That being said, I think it’s very important that PR people do draw the line somewhere.  Earlier in my career, I managed the public relations for a municipal councillor’s campaign.  I found out well into the campaign that the person was dumb as a sack of hammers, and that I didn’t agree with any of his views on politics.  I finished the campaign because it was near the end and frankly, I needed the billable hours, but I never want to be in that position again. 

Thankfully, my candidate lost, due in no small part to ignoring my counsel and getting nailed by the local press. 

What do you think?  Can PR professionals work on acccounts that they don’t personally agree with and maintain a clear conscience?  Is there a line?  Where does the need for agency billings cross the ethical border?