Once upon a time, when I was a youngster apprenticing at a PR agency here in Winnipeg, I learned that sometimes you had to tell your clients that they’re wrong. Back then, we were working for a large company that was constantly receiving complaints about poor service. It was bad for business and they were leaking a steady stream of customers to their rivals.

So they set up a customer service line, then they undertrained and understaffed it. Their next step was to come to us to promote their new customer service line, using public relations to show that they listen to their customers and cared about what they said. My boss told them he thought that was a bad idea. He asked them if they’d ever called their own custoemr service line. They laughed. So during a client meeting he called the line to prove his point. It rang more than 20 times before anyone picked up. The client was red in the face, part embarrassed and part angry.

You can’t use public relations tactics to tell someone it’s sunny outside during a rainstorm. PR doesn’t work that way. You have to be credible and a big part of credibility means being honest. And before you start talking to the outside public (customers), you need to talk to your inside public: your employees. They are every company’s best potential public relations tool, but if they are being fed sunshine on a rainy day their morale will suffer and they’ll become as effective as a dull chisel… and when they finally pick the phone on the 21st ring, you won’t want them talking to your customers.

Today, my colleagues and I counsel our clients to provide a steady stream of credible corporate communications to employees. Use newsletters, use an Intranet, start a blog, speak to small groups, have a party… do something, but make sure you’re talking to your people and they know why they should care about coming to work. 

I was asked to review a Web site recently for a friend. He had written the copy for it himself and hired a graphic designer to follow a crude sketch he’d drawn. It wasn’t good. To be fair, it wasn’t awful either. It was just aspiring to mediocrity.

The Web is still evolving and changing at a rapid rate. I liken it to what television went through during the 1950s and 1960s. There was a time, after all, that people thought Milton Berle and Lucy Arnez were actually funny. Production values were poor, the writing was worse and the medium was not used to its fullest potential. With all the Big Brothers and Temptation Islands we have to endure today, one has to wonder if television will ever get there. At least we still have Frontline, Extras and Rome… but I digress.

As they did with television 50 years ago, people are only just beginning to understand just how powerful the Web can be. The first comment (among many) I gave to my friend was that his site looked like it may have been created in (gasp) 2001. It was an online brochure; static in nearly every way. There was no room to expand it, to add new information, to stay fresh. There was no interactivity planned with his customers and no method to ensure they could get new information about his products. I told him that if he went with it as it was, it would be posted and forgotten; left to shrivel up, unseen, on the 33rd page of a Google search.

And he’d wonder why his site wasn’t drawing any feedback or getting any orders for his products. Many people in his position would blame the medium. They may say, “my Web site was a waste of money.” In his case, I’d agree because he was only posting when he should have been publishing.

The Web has become the first place people look for information on just about everything - from financial services to real estate and new computers to public relations agencies. Search engines are the tools they use to find that information and, like consumers, they search engines crave new, fresh content on the Web.

Whether you’re building your Web site in Winnipeg or Toronto or New York or Paris, the rules are the same. If you consider yourself a publisher, you’ll be that much further ahead of your competitors.

Don’t lie. It’ll catch up to you.

That’s the first rule of public relations and media relations. Just look at Eliot Spitzer. The now former New York State Governor is disgraced over his involvement in a sex scandal with a call girl.

His fate is a good lesson in the importance of practising what you preach on a public relations pulpit. Don’t go saying you’re a crusader occupying the moral high ground when you’re spending your spare time bathing in a stinky bog. (It’s not that I want to give stinky bogs a bad name. At least they provide much needed wetlands for water foul.)

The shame of it all is that with Spitzer hoisted on his own petard, investors will need to find someone else to take on corporate malfeasance and greed. No doubt he went too far in some cases, but he certainly bagged a few deserving crooks in the process.

Cheers, 

Adam Dooley.

There’s an awful lot of talk about Corporate Social Responsibility these days. Companies are verily tripping over themselves to out ‘do-good’ one another. In most cases, it’s nice to see how corporations are treating this topic seriously. After all, we should be doing right by our employees, our communities and our shared environment.

What grates on my nerves is when CSR appears to be only an empty exercise. How can you tell the difference? It’s not that hard, actually. Good corporate PR strategies need to flow from the core values and priorities of the corporation. In other words, they have to actually stand for something. If you don’t know the business plan (from mission to financial metrics), then you can’t possibly draw up a comprehensive public relations strategy. If you don’t know the raison d’être of your business, then you’re just guessing when it comes to corporate communications strategy. The best you’ll get is a piecemeal approach to developing your corporate reputation.

When a company issues a CSR report that talks a good talk but is clearly out of sync with its corporate culture, then it’s worse than window dressing. Employees will immediately see through it and shareholders will eventually suss it out. You’ll end up feeling like you’re all dressed up in borrowed, ill-fitting clothes.

Yours, 

Adam Dooley.

In the history of advertising, there have been some very bad campaigns… Campaigns with creative that makes you wonder who on earth approved it… You can forgive bad advertising when it’s expected, like those late night television pitches for the amazing lettuce knife. You can’t forgive it at all when the ads come from a big agency working for a big company that should just know better.

Take Ford Canada’s recent “Drive it like you stole it” campaign, which ran across the Prairies, for an extreme example. The Globe and Mail wrote an interesting piece on this campaign this week (March 4, 2008) that examined how the ads saw the light of day, as well as their resulting drag on the corporate reputations of Ford and its agency, Y&R.

It was, as they say, bad PR, to suggest someone should drive a vehicle like a car thief. It was especially bad PR in Winnipeg where we have battled chronic car theft for years. We don’t have run of the mill car thieves here. Our car thieves run down joggers and cyclists; they jam accelerators to the floorboard and ram cars into apartment blocks; they screech down streets and ricochet off cars and buildings.

As a communications and public relations consultant, I find it amazing that a credible creative team could have recommended such a harebrained concept. Shall we “Do our books like Enron next?” Or, perhaps 7-Eleven would like us to “Shop like we’re armed?” I have to conclude that the creative team was either completely unaware of Winnipeg’s car theft problem, or merely oblivious that their ad might offend. It was dumb regardless.

Don’t they read the news?

I’m currently teaching a course in Public Relations Fundamentals at the University of Winnipeg. I tell my students that it is the role of a PR consultant to know what is going on in the world. If you don’t know what’s going on, and what the media is writing or saying, you can’t do your job. Most advertisers do the same, but this episode certainly makes a strong case for having public relations expertise working on your advertising account.

I am glad Y&R pulled the campaign immediately. The agency also, properly, apologized for it. In the end, Ford’s image will probably not carry a permanent scar from this episode. I’m not sure if the same can be said for the agency.

Adam Dooley

Today’s Winnipeg Free Press carried an interesting piece on the ownership battle at Gluttons, one of our city’s more feted restaurants. Piecing together the story from court documents, the reporter retold the story of co-owners fighting each other for control of a successful small business.

I won’t rehash the dispute here, because what interested me was that all the parties wisely stayed away from the story. The reporter attempted to interview several of the key players, but none was available for comment.

The reporter managed to cite only the former chef, Makoto Ono, and “he couldn’t shed any light on the management dispute.” I think it’s more likely that Ono “wouldn’t”, because he “shouldn’t.”

When I give media training sessions – for small business owners, executives or whoever – I always counsel that they are not obliged to give interviews at all. Just because a reporter calls, doesn’t mean you need to get into a tell-all discussion on the inner workings and personal conflicts at work in your business.  

It’s fine and good to foster a positive, collaborative relationship with the media, but when you give an interview, it’s like inviting a reporter to your home for a visit. You will tidy up the place and maybe you will break out the nice china, but you’re not likely going to show them the laundry room or the broom closet (even if they ask to see those places).

The media has a right to write a great many things. In this case, if the players keep quiet, the story (a short-term pain, no doubt) will likely just go away.