I recently was interviewed by Ann Meyer at the Chicago Tribune about word-of-mouth marketing.  I touted this blog and talked about how important it is that we are ethical in all our dealings with new media and word-of-mouth marketing.

Ann called me a few days later and called me out on our ethics.  She said she’d been to the Shoes by Marky MySpace page and discovered that some of my team were friends of hers, but it was not clear they work for the PR firm.

Clearly, we changed that and now are clear about the fact that Marky is a client and we’re not friends with her just because we like her and her shoes…a lot!

But that led us to wonder where the ethical lines are drawn.  My team didn’t feel like they’d done anything wrong.  After all, their employer was listed as part of their descriptions on the site.

Last week, the Washington Post ran an article about unmasking word-of-mouth marketing.  It announces that the Federal Trade Commission is involved and that “companies engaging in word-of-mouth marketing, in which people are compensated to promote products to their peers, must disclose those relationships.” 

It’s a good thing Ann called us on the MySpace page and we continue to be able to get on our soap box about ethics in PR. 

But the bigger reason to be over-the-top ethical, if you don’t believe in the Fight Against Destructive Spin, is you can get in some real trouble with the FTC:

The FTC staff said it would go after violators on a case-by-case basis. Consequences could include a cease-and-desist order, fines and civil penalties ranging from thousands of dollars to millions of dollars.

Ann Meyer’s article is going to be printed in the Tribune tomorrow.  Positive or negative, check back to see what she said about our ethics.

Every year, the PRSA Chicago board honors one leader in the PR industry that has had a big effect on change for the year.

Last night’s honoree was Ketchum CEO, Ray Kotcher.  A very nice man who has ties to Chicago, he spoke about this year’s major changes.

The seven headlines he discussed were:

1.       New media

2.       The pace of globalization of the PR business

3.       The extraordinary volatility in the world and the role that PR and corporate social responsibility can play in beginning to address some of these issues

4.       The year of employee engagement

5.       Recruiting and retaining talent

6.       PR measurement clearly showing strong return-on-investment

7.       The extraordinary relevance of public relations as compared to other communications disciplines   

Additionally he discussed the very nature of ethics in our profession and how important it is, especially now in the day and age of social media relations and corporate social responsibility. 

We couldn’t agree more.

When I attended the PRSA Delegate Assembly in Salt Lake City (Ski Utah!) last month, I picked up research from the Commission on Public Relations Education about teaching the next generation of public relations professionals.

I was quite interested in the study because, as a boutique PR firm, we receive a minimum of 10 job inquiries every day.  Job inquiries that come through our “contact us” email on the Web site and typically say something such as, “I’m wondering if you have any job openings.”  Or (my favorite), “I think I can contribut to your pubic relations firm.” Yes, two misspellings in one sentence is going to get a response from us.  And it happens quite a bit.

I wanted to see what the report said about teaching kids how to find a job.  And once they found that job, what did the report say about how to keep that job?  Did it say anything about teaching ethics in PR? 

I was intrigued. 

The report, a consensus of 35 practitioners and educators representing 12 communications professional societies, says, in effect, “Look carefully at what today’s public relations college students are exposed to in their curriculum and in their supervised experience (internships). Look at the breadth and depth of that preparation. Then keep that in mind whenever you’re hiring at the entry level.”

It turns out the report sets a standard:

A minimum of five courses should be required in the public relations major —introduction (theory, origin and principles); research, measurement and evaluation; writing and production; supervised work experience; and a course in law and ethics, planning and management, case studies or campaigns. For graduate study, the report highly recommends that students have prior experience in the field.

So ethics is included, but nothing about finding and keeping a job.  And it’s been my experience that a good portion of new college graduates slept through their ethics classes. 

I’d like to challenge all intern coordinators and employers to work with the university of their choice to make certain the next generation of PR professionals really learn what will make them successful, and ethical, throughout their careers.

Having had our offices burglarized last week has made me think about how life would be if we all lived by the Golden Rule. 

My Poppy (and now my mom) used to say, “Remember who you are and what you stand for”.  Wouldn’t life be so much better if we all remembered that simple thing?

The same goes for us as PR professionals.  What if we remembered who we are and what we stood for when we worked with clients?  What if we always approached our jobs by living the Golden Rule?

This goes back to our fight against destructive spin.  Remember who you are and what you stand for and your careers will take you where you want them to go.

As the incoming president of the Chicago chapter of PRSA, I attended the Delegate Assembly in Salt Lake City last month.

Thinking that sticking needles in my eyeballs would have been more fun, I was pleasantly surprised to hear Rhoda Weiss, incoming president of national PRSA, discuss spin.

She began her speech with, “Spin is a four letter word!”

Yeah, Rhoda!

But that was just the beginning.  The conference, itself, was a call-to-action to STOP THE SPIN.

Cheryl Procter-Rogers, current PRSA national president, set the tone for the opening session, according to Daily Dog.  

Procter-Rogers emphasized the challenges facing the industry and the mission of the conference is to be a forum for discussion of these challenges. She revved up the crowd with her message that “every person sitting there needs to be the moral compass of your company.”

The general session continued with guest speaker, Tavis Smiley, who spoke on the topic of what Americans want.

Smiley says what Americans want is simple: “They want to live in a nation that is as good as its promise.” And PR professionals have a role in that process to make America as good as its promise. For that to happen, though, he says it’s time to “stop the spin.”

Jon Meacham, editor at Newsweek, delivered the closing keynote.  During his remarks, he focused on the changing political climate in the United States.

“In this country, it’s time that we all, the media, the strategists, the candidates and those doing the ‘spin’ need to think beyond viewing this country in terms of red and blue states.”

Moral of the story?  We’re not the only ones who think spin sucks.

A couple of years ago, we heard Joe Paterno had commissioned EA Sports to make changes to Madden NFL so his incoming freshmen could learn the Penn State playbook.

Brilliant, we thought.  After all, most kids play video games and what a great way to help them learn what you need to teach them.

But this is pushing it a bit far.  Wired reported a story yesterday about a new video game purchased by the U.S. Army to use in recruiting.  The game allows a new recruit to be in the heat of battle and provides confidence to do the same thing in real life.

Missions include planning and executing a night raid on a populated area, and protecting a border and an airstrip in a notional country having problems with its notional neighbor. The game provides terrain maps and data about the strength of the equipment.

The catch is you can’t lose.  Which leads us to wonder if this is ethical and if it’s spin at its worse.

According to Wired, gamers on Battlefront give the title good reviews, but “complain about the game being paid for with their taxes.”  They also feel it offers “an overly optimistic view of America’s tactical superiority over fictitious enemies.”

So I asked my brother-in-law, who served in Iraq, what he thought.  He said, “The idea is to give a recruit the feeling for what it’s like to be in the Army.  It’s to help them understand how to control the battlefield, not to understand how to die.”

Okay, we get that.  But it’s the job of a PR professional to be worried about false perception.  Do you think this can hurt the reputation of the game maker?  What about the Army?  We do.

With that, we agree what one blogger says:

The point is at the heart of what marketers and PR practitioners do, there is a fundamental difference. Each discipline views the world in its own way. Marketers train to complete transactions. PR practitioners train to explain accurately, protect reputation and complete transactions. Both should reach the same end point if they do their jobs right, but marketing wants to get there more quickly. Given the pressure the Army has to recruit, it will favor marketing’s approach more often.

Spin sucks!

With Thanksgiving, new clients, and loads of travel, we’re behind in our blog entries. So please forgive us while we catch up and comment on things that happened more than a week ago.

What the heck happened to Burson-Marsteller?  We don’t like to find the weaknesses in other PR firms, even if they are competition, but this is asinine.  

According to the U.K. drug industry’s self-regulatory body, the PR firm offered cash to journalists to attend a hearing of the government drug regulator!

Even better, it was written:

As it is possible that the hearing will take up most of the day, and we understand that your time is valuable, we are able to offer £200 (~$388) if you wish to attend.

The article we read states that Burson-Marsteller told PR Week that it was “human error”, but we could not find the article nor could we find any information on whether or not the employee still works for the firm.

While we don’t advocate firing an employee if it was human error — albeit a very big mistake that affects the entire firm’s reputation — we do believe in coaching our clients if they ask us to walk the ethical line.

Spin sucks, especially if PR professionals are offering journalists money to cover a story!

On Sunday, the Philadelphia Inquirer published a Q&A with Helen Thomas, a syndicated columnist for Hearst News Service.

The story, “Verbatim: Spin is not the truth” discusses the nature of information coming from the White House and how much things have changed in the 57 years Helen Thomas has served as a correspondent.  

Philadelphia Inquirer: Are successive White Houses getting better and better at making sure journalists learn as little as possible?

Helen Thomas: Oh, it’s state of the art now. Each administration has learned more and more about how to spin events, especially in recent years. But spin is not the truth. Never the twain shall meet.

Inquirer: So is spin a kind of lie?

Thomas: Well, you never want to say people are lying. Spin isn’t really a lie – it’s their accent on the truth. All I can say is that we certainly were spun in the run-up to the war on Iraq.

We try to be apolitical at FADS so we’ll stop at the run-up to the war on Iraq and you can read it online if you like.

But what we can discuss is the nature of our business – from government to non-profit to corporate America.  How much does it really help to “spin” a story when you or your client ends up looking terrible in the end? 

We’re willing to bet you can sit down right now and think of all the times PR people have spun stories that have turned out terribly in the end.  We did and this is what we brainstormed in less than three minutes:

·         Dick Cheney shooting his hunting partner

·         Hurricane Katrina relief

·         The Wal-Mart blog debacle

·         Bill “I did not have sex with that woman” Clinton

·         Britney Spears ruined marriage weeks after she said it was “awesome”

·         The Kobe Bryant sex scandal

·         Scott Peterson’s denial of guilt over the murders of his wife and baby

As our colleague’s mother used to say, “you’re lying by omission”.  Spin sucks!

I’m not a smoker; I’ve never even tried to smoke a cigarette.  I hate it when people light up in front of me.  I don’t want to inhale someone’s cigarette smoke.  It’s one of the few times I become a hateful person; when someone lights up and blows their smoke in my face.

So imagine my dismay when the Daily Dog ran a story last week about the tobacco industry’s anti-smoking campaign seen as a PR stunt.  A PR stunt?  To negate harmful media buzz?  

Is Big Tobacco using spin to hook a new generation of smokers?

The Nov. 2 post on HealthDay.com describes the findings, which was led by researchers at The Cancer Council Victoria in Melbourne, Australia.

The researchers found that, among young children, there weren’t many links between exposure to tobacco company ads and smoking attitudes and behavior.

However, among high school students, seeing parent-targeted ads was associated with kids expressing a lowered sense of smoking as harmful, a stronger approval of smoking, stronger intentions to smoke in the future and a greater likelihood of having smoked in the past 30 days, the researchers found.

The American Journal of Public Health published the research online.  They found that Philip Morris has admitted that the aim of this program was to “delay smoking until age 18.”  This goes against the very idea of public health-funded programs, which encourage people to never take up smoking. 

Critics of Big Tobacco find the PR tactics misleading.  Stanton Glantz of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education adds, “These programs, like earlier efforts by the tobacco industry, simply serve the industry’s public relations needs and support their political efforts to displace meaningful tobacco.”

Tobacco, like spin, sucks.

Did you know the press release turned 100 years old this past weekend?

According to Greg Jarboe, co-founder of the tech publicity firm SEO-PR, the press release was born on October 28, 1906, as described in a blog entry.

On October 28, 1906, at least 50 people lost their lives when a three-car train of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s newly equipped electric service jumped a trestle at Atlantic City, N.J., and plunged into the Thoroughfare creek. That afternoon, Ivy Lee, who some consider to be the father of modern PR, created the first press release. The Pennsylvania Railroad was one of his clients. Following the accident, Lee not only convinced the railroad to distribute a public statement, he also convinced them to provide a special train to get reporters to the scene of the accident. The New York Times was so impressed with this innovative approach to corporate communications that it printed the first press release verbatim on Oct. 30, 1906 as a ‘Statement from the Road.’

It’s interesting how far the release, and our profession, have come since then.  For instance, with the birth of computers, the name changed from “press release” to “news release”.  And now our profession is changing with technology and the trendy tools are word-of-mouth and social media relations.

Shift Communications is a “no hype” public relations firm with offices in Boston and San Francisco.  They have published a white paper about PR 2.0, which includes social media relations.  Here at Arment Dietrich, we think they’re pretty freaking smart and think you should check them out, if you haven’t already.

Maybe 100 years from now, Shift will be referenced changing the news release as we once knew it.