Your PR Guy

Ten Things Journalists Want in an Online Newsroom

Comes today from the annuls of Tactics, the PRSA monthly newsletter for us astute PR practitioners, Iney Woodall of the TEKgroup tells us what journalists want. It's not breaking news that online newsrooms are valuable tools for the journalist and communications manager alike. But what we include and exclude can make or break a relationship with our media colleagues.

(Ok I may be overstating here, but as a former journalist, online newsrooms just make sense.) And I wish they were available when I was sweating the deadline, biting my fingernails to the nub, waiting on some communications pro to return my call.

Anyway, my post isn't to wax nostalgic, so let's get to it:

1. Searchable archives
2. Communication contacts
3. News releases
4. Backgrounders
5. High and low resolution photographs
6. Product information and press kits
7. Crisis communication tools (a dark blog or website that can be activated immediately)
8. Executive biographies
9. Events calendar and audio/video files
10. Financial information (the key here is understandable data for the average Joe).

So there you have it. It's not much different than what Shel Holtz has been preaching. And if you want an excellent example of an online newsroom, check out Haagen-Dazs -- Help the Honey Bees. Seems like our little friends are in a bit of trouble.Because the HD ice cream folks are concerned, they've launched an online newsroom to help us understand the bee-havior of those buzzing critters and why they are so important.

Other links that might interest you:
Haagen-Dazs Loves Honey Bees
Häagen-Dazs goes to Hill for honeybees, ice cream
Haagen-Dazs Helps the Honey Bee at Social Honeycomb

Pocket Sized Framing

I like things that are small and convenient. At our recent Hoosier PRSA chow, the speaker gave these as part of her damage control presentation. She was showing us how to get ourselves out of a mess and reframe a debate. It's a pocket-sized cheat sheet for those who find themselves at a loss in messy situations.

She show us some pretty funny clips on YouTube of people royally screwing themselves by not reframing correctly. Wish I had time to find one or two. Maybe next time.

Like the Status Quo? Keep Playing the Blame Game

Perceptions, or public points of view, rise and fall in the marketplace of ideas, sometimes quickly, while others persist. For example, most Americans inherently think government is too big, and it takes only a slight cue to get them talking -- or complaining in many cases -- about Big Brother. You'll hear that government is too bloated, inefficient and too big. On the other hand, you'll hear folks talk about  business with opposite points of view.

While businesses exploit this notion, it perpetuates "The Rot at the Top" frame, which is culturally part of every American's understanding and suspicion of government. I would bet this frame can be traced back to the original settlers who colonized the eastern seaboard. But my point isn't to hash history, but to discuss framing as a tool for effective communication that engage and invigorate social movements.

In Tales of A New America, Robert Reich wrote,

"Placing blame is among the most comforting acts, for it allows one to cast away responsibility in an explanation of the myth that informs American politics. The cycles of righteous fulmination, first against corporate malfeasance and then against government intervention and then back again, have enabled us to keep at bay some troubling questions regarding how a complex economy is to be organized, and how responsibilities should best be divided between public and private realms...[They] distract us from the need to enforce joint responsibility for our collective prosperity...We will know our mythology of the Rot at the Top is evolving appropriately when we tell fewer stories that sweepingly denounce either the greed of businessmen or the meddlesomeness of government -- the chaos of markets or the scourge of planning -- and when our scorn falls instead on private power that is willfully unmindful of the public interest and public power that neglects the importance of harnessing private initiative."

Reich leads us to believe playing the blame game is the most damaging flaw to communicating change. It's also one of the fundamental flaws of humanity, traceable into antiquity.  How do we overcome, or just mitigate the our own blame-gaming short comings?

While we are personally responsible for managing this basic human short fall in our own lives, in public relations we have to soften its influence. Using social research to dig deeper into the minds of those we want to develop a relationship with, we can pinpoint and study the very perceptions that make people behave as they do. We can understand why they believe what they believe. That data in the right hands, with people who have the right motives to affect social change, can be a tremendous power. We can reframe public debate, reshape conversations in the marketplace of public opinion and truly change lives.

Over at TellHetrick, the blog of Hetrick Communications, there's been a discussion about the rising fuel prices and how we should be thinking about them. The debate has been an interesting read.

Framing the Message: Hypnotic Communication

Part III of Putting 'Relations' Back Into 'Relationship'

Without first considering what's in peoples' heads, you'll rarely move pubic discourse in the direction you had intended. That's why understanding public perception is so important. Knowing and understanding what people value and why they value what they value is valuable information.

Noted political scientists Nelson Polsby and Aaron Wildavsky have said that most people are not interested in most issues. It's PR's to get a targeted public interested and motivate to engage in finding solutions or buying into possible solutions of a social issue. That's where message framing becomes important.

In a recent project I undertook, my team developed a communication plan to address the ever-shrinking Indiana poll worker pool.  While this affects most state nationwide, we found several values Hoosiers held:

• Feeling that those who have more should help those with less.
• Helping individuals meet their material needs.
• Giving back to society.

From these values we crafted message points to frame information in speeches, blog posts, news releases, editorials and other communication tools.  These were our message points:

• You have the time; you have the resources, now it’s your turn to be a poll worker.
• Without new poll workers many people will be cheated out of their right to vote. New volunteers ensure every citizen who wants to vote can.
• Donating a day from your busy week is making an investment in your community.

We also recommended a few delivery points:

• Keep information simple.
• Be explicit about how the information impacts the target audience. Explain in lay terms.
• Stick to voting and poll worker related volunteerism themes.
• Carry the same message, no matter which part of Indiana you target.

Deriving message points from the values of a public creates a sticky mixture for the information we would like to communicate. When the information is mixed with a group's values, that makes social concepts and ideas about an issues more concrete. They're more believable because the new information seems familiar. At least that's what 40 plus years of cognitive linguistic research has led us to believe. People only remember facts when they are framed in a pre-existing frame, or points of view, of the public.  If we communicate information without framing it first, we can be assured of one thing. People won't remember what we tell them, and they surely won't change their behavior either.

So what is a frame, anyway? Point of view might be a more familiar term. These points of view [frame's if your into the academic literature] are socially shared, persistent, symbolic and help us structure meaning in a world jammed with information galore.

So when we wrote a PSA script for the client, we considered all our research on perceptions to craft the following:

THE GREATEST GENERATION BORE THE HARDSHIP OF THE DEPRESSION AND WORLD WAR II. THEY HAVE BEEN THE BACKBONE OF POLL WORKERS FOR MANY YEARS – STEPPING TO THE FRONT LINES EVERY ELECTION DAY TO MANAGE OUR DEMOCRACY IN ACTION. NOW IT’S YOUR TURN. BE THE NEW GUARDIANS OF DEMOCRACY. DONATE YOUR TIME TO BEING A POLL WORKER. CALL YOUR LOCAL COUNTY ELECTIONS ADMINISTRATOR FOR MORE DETAILS, OR THE INDIANA SECRETARY OF STATE’S OFFICE AT 317-XXX-6513.

With this radio PSA script, we touch the heart of what Hoosiers value. While I haven't received data about the success of this ad, I'll keep you posted. The state agency for which this PSA was written has a new communication director. We'll give him time to get up to speed.

Putting "Relation" Back Into "Relationships" -- Part II

There's no doubt we are facing serious social issues: global warming, rising energy costs, a corrupt government. These are grand scale issues. Whatever the issue, encouraging people to solve social issues is much different than convincing them to buy the newest iPhone. (That's not to say product PR is any less valuable. It's just a different way of communication with different goals in mind.) Buying a iPhone won't bring down the cost of  oil. And purchasing one won't help the environment either.

Unfortunately, some social movements, such as Rock The Vote and Declare Yourself, used traditional product marketing strategies and failed. Why? It's simple, actually. Engaging social issues requires a long-term effort.  On the other hand, buying a product is a rather spontaneous decision made between a finite group of other choices. For example, when I stand in the soap isle at my local Super Target, I have a relatively small range of soap choices to choose from. And my decision to purchase one brand over another can be based less on deep seeded emotional values. There's no real relationship there. One that's deep and meaningful. Once Lever gets my money, their happy, I'm happy -- but the relationship is shallow.

Addressing the rising cost of the morning commute (or any commute for that matter) Bruce Hetrick of Indianapolis-based Hetrick Communications wrote, "One reason the ride is so expensive and our dependence on oil so high is that we’ve moved further and further from the focal point of our communities." He added, "We’ve abandoned the city for the suburbs, the suburbs for the exurbs. And as each ring grows more densely populated, we whine about crowded highways, add more lanes and drive even further." While we feel the pain at the pump, how can we create a social movement to engage people to abandon the suburbs and return to cities and towns. How can we move the conversation in the marketplace to a discussion about revitalizing inner city neighborhoods, inviting the middle class back to the city, and creating a transportation system that moves people efficiently and swiftly to and from work and other destination throughout a city, essentially making the automobile as we know it less of a must-have.

One of the problems with creating communication campaigns using product marketing strategy is that it presupposes citizenship is another form of consumption. Susan Nail Bales wrote, "Citizenship is about participating in a messy process that is devoted to winnowing down a broad array of purported solutions to achieve the broad public good."

To do this we need to understand what prior attitudes a public holds toward civic engagement. Put another way, we need to know what they value and for what reasons they value such in such. Understanding the deep seeded values of another, gives us the opportunity to craft messages that touch those values. It also gives us the needed sheath to cloth new facts a public has never considered. The point is, product marketing may appeal to our basic desires of sex and self-esteem -- lower and  primitive Maslowian notions on his famous hierarchy of needs. There's no question we want better sex and to feel better about ourselves. But communication campaigns that address a social issue are different, if they are to succeed. The strategy is to find the deep seeded values of self-actualization, which are at the opposite end of Maslow's scale. Once we have determine those values, we need to create messages and massage them into those higher-level value.

When we do that over a sustained period of time, our perceptions change, or behavior toward solving a social issue changes, and we trigger a public's urgency to engage and find solutions.