18 reflections after 18 months away from PR

December 29th, 2009 / 5:00 pm

by Bob Pickard

Last year, when I elected to leave Edelman (where I served for six fiscal years, most recently as its North Asia President), it was time to come home to my native Canada and reconnect with friends and family after 13 years overseas.

I wasn’t sure whether I would ever return to the public relations business. Even with the exciting advent of social media and a plethora of stimulating industry sectors and consulting services from which to choose, PR can sometimes be a simple and repetitive occupation. I was feeling the need to hit the career ‘pause button’ and take stock of whether there’s enough meaning and fulfillment in the business where I’ve built a two decade career.

Early in 2010, I will be starting my next international PR adventure. I’ve been fortunate to build businesses living in four countries during the past two decades, but before we ship out for the fifth and hopefully foremost experience, I want to share some reflections after this, the third year-plus sabbatical of my career:

First impressions matter (‘how to start’) but so do the last impressions (‘how to leave’). There is a troubling tendency in the PR business for the quality of people to be judged by how much damage their departure inflicts on an organization, but I think the better measure of true executive timber is how well the organization succeeds afterwards owing to sound fundamentals built over time plus effective succession planning.
It is really important to take time for mid-career breaks to do some serious reflection, because like most modern information workers, PR people don’t have enough time to think — reflexive ‘doing’ often eclipses reflective thinking, and so critical skills either atrophy or remain underdeveloped.
At the same time, clients are underwriting advanced PR thinking with larger budgets than ever for ‘big brain’ consulting…whereas the economic basis for the basic commoditized PR of tactical order-taking is shrinking.
It’s more fun to have the money chase you than to spend a career chasing the money, so there’s a strong incentive for all professional communicators to increase the value of their time by growing the size of their PR brain through a relentless commitment to continuous improvement and lifelong education. That means reading books, fostering relationships with opinion-leaders, and learning new ideas from other disciplines.
With the flight to premium quality consulting gathering momentum, there has never been more commercial potential for insight-driven communications; recommendations rooted in research, assertions backed by evidence, strategy informed by analysis. Especially compelling is the PR firm that understands the psychology of persuasion, the power of digital storytelling, and client expectations for intelligent issues management.
PR really is becoming more of a measurable science than an intangible art…digital technology makes all forms of PR more accountable, and clients will rightly demand that agencies take responsibility for results.
At the same time, there have never been more ‘PR maven’ poseurs and ‘communications guru’ wannabees; too many ciphers who ape the rhetoric of the business, devaluing the PR industry currency but also increasing the stubborn determination of clients to tune out the ‘noise’ and find the ’signal.’
A lot of the self-styled social media ‘PR 2.0′ punditocracy who occupy a center stage that owes much to their just having been online using the new technology first — to be much admired from a pioneering perspective — weren’t in a lot of cases really on the PR industry stage before then. They weren’t ‘PR 1.0′ people or even practitioners during earlier analogue days in the early/mid-90s. There are some exceptions, but much of this crowd is so into the technology, they can’t map the latest cool new app to the real consulting world.
Then, on the other hand, a lot of the more experienced true-blue PR pros just don’t have the innate grasp of the technology, which changes in a more nimble way than the manner to which they have become accustomed. Most of these folks know that social networks are important, and may even be skilled at making exciting speeches about the brave new social media world, but they aren’t personally comfortable with the pace or the processes demanded by digital communications.
Because many of the people within these two solitudes often don’t talk to each other or understand what the others are really saying at the ‘unconscious’ level, there is an urgent need to bridge the generational divide in the agency business.
The most important thing in PR life is to work with bright, interesting and fun people who share a passion for being the best they can be, accomplishing new things that have never been done before, aiming at setting the highest PR standard. I know that sounds like management rhetoric, but I agree with the philosophy that the journey is just as important as the destination.
It’s essential to believe in what you are doing and to sincerely articulate your company’s point of view, but equally imperative to maintain a balanced perspective and not get too caught up in the synthetic artifice of hyped organizational myths.
The global PR industry is a small town (the biggest firms are only approaching half a billion dollars in revenue), so while we need to be unafraid of advocating our unique mission in marketing, individual egos and sales claims should be scaled accordingly.
Especially in light of the disintermediation effect caused by the rise of social networks online, it is vital for PR people to know how to ‘meet and greet the public’ offline, in-person, face-to-face. PR remains a highly tactile social undertaking, a people business. Particularly valued is the idea of contacting people when you do not need them for something, because when you do, they will remember your interest in the broader mutual relationship, not just in a narrow selfish transaction.
Because they are so rare and retro, old style analogue communications techniques like hand-written thank you notes, phone calls instead of e-mails and personal visits have tremendous impact.
Arguably more than in other fields, there are too many ‘politicians’ in PR, folks who will say they are your friend to get what they need for their careers, or be two-faced and say different things to different people in a vain attempt to be liked by everyone, but in the end this approach always fails to earn respect because it’s true that ‘what goes around comes around.’
Principles matter, and so is practicing what you preach. PR people are getting more powerful (because we now program media content in addition to brokering journalist relationships), and so the ethical dimension of our work demands honest reflection, not merely glib lip service.
Money is the vital energy of the PR industry; numbers keep score, but aiming at the quality first drives the revenue, whereas aiming at the revenue excessively can result in mediocrity.

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comments(0) Tags: continuous improvement, management, PR, thinking

18 reflections after 18 months away from PR

December 29th, 2009 / 5:00 pm

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The contradiction of charisma

December 28th, 2009 / 8:43 am

A new theory of charisma in this Boston Globe article: “[It] is the power of apparently effortless embodiment of contradictory qualities simultaneously: strength and vulnerability, innocence and experience, and singularity and typicality among them.”

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Which is more persuasive: time or money?

December 19th, 2009 / 11:00 am

This article in the Inside Influence Report produced by Dr. Robert Cialdini’s organization outlines the results of a new persuasion study which should especially interest PR people (as their product is professional time to which the market assigns a monetary value):

“A survey of the recent issues of four popular, high circulation magazines (New Yorker, Cosmopolitan, Money and Rolling Stone) revealed that out of a total of some 300 advertisements almost half employed a reference to time or money in their message. But does mentioning time or money influence peoples’ evaluation of the product or service concerned? And if they do which is more persuasive – time or money?”
“These [study] results…suggest that irrespective of the amount of money an individual might spend on a product…making references to time can influence people’s perception of a product’s attributes. Therefore it would seem to sense to initially include references to time rather than money when influencing others to consider your offers and proposals.”

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comments(0) Tags: cialdini, money, persuasion, psychology, time

Choosing the right PR firm

December 17th, 2009 / 1:55 pm

I just wrote a new opinion article with personal reflections about how to know the future trajectory of a PR firm’s fortunes.

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Word cloud for this site

December 16th, 2009 / 1:00 pm

Thinking it might help visitors to this site decide whether to subscribe, I imported its text into Wordle, generating this word cloud of content:

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Choosing the right PR firm

December 15th, 2009 / 1:00 pm

by Bob Pickard

During the past few years, and especially lately, I have been repeatedly asked by young people how they should determine what kind of PR firm to try and join (especially, in the case of students, after they graduate). Let me be transparent in admitting that I’ve been doing some of this thinking for myself recently, and soon I will be embarking on my next PR adventure.

My usual counsel starts with this critical question: is the PR firm going up, treading water, or going down? In every case, I obviously suggest trying to join the agency whose best days lie ahead, because its economic advance will help create the rising revenue tide of client work that propels young careers forward through richer learning, higher earning and more express routes to promotion.

It’s easy enough to advise that much, but the query that follows is more challenging: “How do we know if a PR firm is poised to grow in the future?”

There is no easy answer, and every agency goes through the peaks and troughs of a business cycle. But let me offer a few observations rooted in repeated personal experience gained in several countries and a few firms over the years. In my opinion, these are some key factors that help shape which way an agency is about to go:

What is the track record of the firm’s leader and is s/he still strongly motivated? Even at their largest global size (approximately half a billion U.S. dollars in revenue), compared to other industries, PR firms are pretty compact organizations and so the leader looms relatively large (and I mean global, national or local leader, depending on the recruitment context). Past results are strongly suggestive of future success, so knowing the size and shape of the firm today compared to when that person first assumed office is a fundamental issue. Still, past performance is no guarantee of future success and so some educated speculation should sensibly be considered. Looking at where the leader is on the career timescale can also be an indicator of results around the corner. Does this person still have fire in the belly because there are important wars yet to be won, or is there a satisfied complacency evident because what the leader set out to accomplish initially has already been met or even exceeded?

Who are the senior people and what is their motivation? Looking at the top executive guns in an agency’s arsenal and assessing their caliber is hard for a newcomer. How long they’ve been there is one telling measure; generally, assuming there is at least some new blood in the senior ranks, if most people have been with an agency for a long time, it means good things. It signals that they probably like working together and have co-created success through mutual trust and collaboration. There are exceptions to this ‘loyalty’ tendency, however. Sometimes senior people have suffered for a long time making compromises in an unhappy situation, because in the end they expect that there will be a considerable financial reward for their career sacrifice. So, while there may be shared interests around commercial objectives, disillusionment can also be a common bond. It’s not easy to find out if a company is a happy place or not, but I do know that in professional services, the happier firms with higher morale are the places to be. My own view is that the PR journey should be as enjoyable as any financial destination, and I do believe in this respect that it’s possible to have your cake and eat it too.

What is the ownership structure of the firm and can people earn equity as they rise through the ranks? I’ve worked for a publicly traded group and privately held independent agencies, and I can say there are pros and cons to each. The public firm can offer a fantastic breadth and depth of integrated group resources that deliver the full might of marketing where PR can be amplified by the powerful resources of a whole constellation of partner firms, but there can be impatient stock market pressures, corporate bureaucracy and sometimes PR can seem the junior partner. The privately held agency can provide a laser-like focus on PR, enjoy greater marketing freedom and act more agile with an entrepreneurial zeal, but private owners — and I’ve been a minority shareholder with two agencies — can act capriciously in what can be ‘messy’ unstructured environments where more systemic accountability, better corporate governance, and less random management would be ideal. Public or private, the key thing is that star players have a pathway to owning shares and increasing their equity position in return for consistently well motivated strong performance.

Who are the employees of the firm? Generally I would suggest that the most diverse consultancy has the edge. The more multicultural, the better, but I am not just thinking about ethnicity. PR is becoming an overwhelmingly female profession, and while I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, having run several offices across cultures, I can say that around the world, work life seems more fun and business can be more dynamic in mixed environments. The same goes for age and marital status. Having a blend of grey haired experience and youthful vigour makes a more complete operation, and offices where some are married and others single can be more exciting shops than ones where everyone is the same. Again, it’s hard to know these things from the outside looking in, but there are cues available online and if you ask around.

What is the staff turnover at the company? In general, there’s high staff churn in agency PR, but in some firms (and in some offices), there can be a constantly revolving door. Statistics are hard to come by, so trying to connect with former employees can yield valuable insights. Especially useful is knowing how successful the person to whom you would be reporting has been at recruiting, training, developing, and retaining talent. Does this person attract or repel strong people? During the job interview, if the person asking you questions seems to have thought about you and your career path rather than only what the company needs at the moment, then that is an encouraging indicator of it understanding the no-brainer truth that managing people well today is the key to generating profits tomorrow.

What is the character of the firm? Does it live its values, or just talk about an idealized image? Most PR firms list similar values, so knowing where these are practiced and not just preached can spell the difference between a delightful and disappointing PR firm experience. For example, if an agency seems to excessively emphasize integrity in its communication, does that mean it is sincerely the most ethical firm, or is honesty a sensitive area for some reason? Let’s look through another lens; everyone and their uncle say these days that their firm is a ‘thought leader.’ My advice is to look at a firm’s intellectual capital and consider its purpose. Is it being applied to help create positive business outcomes for clients, or does it look as though it is there primarily for agency marketing, to create the image of being the thought leader? Is the company synthesizing things that have been said by others, or is it actually articulating something new? Is it paraphrasing the same themes year after year, or is there a progression of fresh content that’s breaking new ground? The answers to these questions say a lot about a firm’s personality.

How does the company communicate itself? I am a big believer that ‘PR needs more PR,’ and so I think looking at how firms communicate their own story is strongly suggestive of their consulting quality. I would be skeptical about firms that don’t communicate much about themselves, but equally concerned about consultancies that communicate too much. Is a humble story being told, or is a boastful myth being sold? Self-congratulatory claims of superiority often reflect an arrogant hubris, so I suggest assessing such hyperbole carefully. Each firm should show the marketplace that it can handle its own PR in a way that inspires confidence worthy of being entrusted with conducting clients’ communications campaigns. I’d also look for content consistency as a plus and contradiction as a worry. Does the firm offer advice in the media about how clients should do their own crisis communications, but then bungle their own crisis handling? In general, PR firms are notoriously bad at managing their own internal communications (like doctors making lousy patients I guess…), so finding out how key people milestone announcements are made — and how succession is handled — can often be quite illuminating in seeing an agency’s executive competence in its true light. The PR firms that do their own internal communications well are often the best managed and highest quality consultancies overall.

Who are the clients and how long have these relationships been going? The continuity of client relationships anchors any agency and I think looking at who the customers are — whether they are leaders in their sectors — and how long they have been working with an agency says a lot about whether or not it is a client-centric environment. Client centrism and a focus on results rather than the appearance of activity is a critical augury of a firm’s fortunes.

These are just a few factors that I think play a role in deciding an agency’s future trajectory, a key issue in deciding which firm to join. What usually happens is this: the agencies that rally the most potent combinations of talent to build clients’ businesses — sustaining team cohesion and continuously improving quality — are the best places to grow one’s career. If you can find such a career sweet spot, embrace it and treasure it because such planetary alignments are altogether too rare and too temporary.

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Thinking about public relations

December 14th, 2009 / 3:19 pm

I watched this BBC documentary series over the weekend, and it got me thinking about the origins of public relations, including its connection to psychology and early practice as propaganda. I suspect that many fellow PR people would be interested to watch The Century of the Self:

In watching the series, it struck me how so many PR people seem to know little about their own industry’s often wartime roots, and made me feel proud about how far PR has progressed ethically and in terms of sophistication since its early crudely manipulative origins.

I also just wrote a rambling article on this topic, much too long for a regular blog post: Thinking about public relations.

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comments(0) Tags: bbc, persuasion, PR, propaganda, psychology

Thinking about public relations

December 14th, 2009 / 12:05 pm

by Bob Pickard

When I worked at Hill & Knowlton in the early 1990s, I knew that there was a John Hill and a David Knowlton who founded the firm in 1927, but for most of us employees then, the history of the firm didn’t loom very large. In general, I find this to be the case across wide swathes of the PR industry. I don’t think most practitioners know enough about their own company’s past or indeed about their own occupation’s roots.

PR people have been called the ‘world’s most powerful information workers,’ so especially if that mighty moniker is true, then we have a responsibility to take more time to actually think about our profession, to consider where it comes from and where it is going, and to be less ignorant of our own history. All too often, we are just swept along in a quotidian current of disposable information with scant opportunity to survey the whole picture and map our actions against broader contexts.

PR people aren’t just suffering from ‘attention deficit’ or ‘information overload’ or ‘continuous partial attention’ (multitasking is a myth as this NPR report shows). Regardless of how media of all kinds these days are now compressing forests of information into trees and increasingly twigs (with programming edited for flea-length attention spans), we still possess what has been called an ‘executive mind’ that is able to switch between different sources of information. The main problem is that we tend to switch between too many things too quickly. Therefore, to understand concepts more complex than a soundbite, we need to make a deliberate decision to use that mind and force its focused attention for ample periods of time on important issues that should command our interest.

Especially because we are in a position through our work to readily grasp things like the fragmentation of the public mass media commons into atomized private streams, we have a unique perspective to share; we need to illustrate a deeper and more profound view. Perhaps owing to legacy factors such as the PR industry’s past modest scale subservient to advertising, a service solicitous of journalists and gratified by client praise for the resulting publicity, I think we PR people sometimes have a tendency to be too conformist, too intellectually incurious, too timid about asking bigger questions. Then there’s the tendency to parrot (or just ‘Re-Tweet’) trendy-sounding but simple rhetorical explanations about our business from glib boasters or slick sloganeers.

“What’s past is prologue” said Shakespeare, and this is an apt expression for the modern public relations industry because I sense a lack of memory and of thinking (as opposed to just saying ‘yes’ to any passing fad and reflexively ‘doing’). Some trends that are actually old seem new again, but if we don’t recall history and apply its lessons, then it seems to me that we aren’t getting any wiser.

Recently I experienced an epiphany on this. I have been giving a presentation on PR campuses (next up is Humber College on January 20th) on the ‘digitization’ of persuasive storytelling, and emphasizing how the unconscious mind (or the ‘emotional brain’) is key in marketing and how metaphors can be marshaled when content is communicated as a ‘conversation’ to make PR narratives more compelling.

I include several contemporary sources in this speech, but also cite Dale Carnegie, whose 1936 book How to win friends and influence people remains a relevant classic. I don’t include any material from Edward Bernays’ seminal 1928 book: Propaganda. Most PR people who know of it are repelled by the book’s equating of public relations with propaganda, but I think it is largely unknown to most modern practitioners. It includes a chapter called “The Psychology of Public Relations” that contains some chilling parallels — written 80 years ago — with what some depict as modern communications practice.

Recently I came across The Century of the Self, a BBC documentary that looks at the roots of 20th century mass marketing (especially things like the unconscious mind and the psychology of persuasion), and was reminded that breathless digital jargon aside, many of the concepts that are being trumpeted as ‘new’ today go at least as far back as the First World War.

I certainly don’t agree with everything this TV series says, but I do think that getting alternative viewpoints helps us gain perspective on our profession. In that regard, The Corporation and Manufacturing Consent are two classic documentaries of the genre. These videos cast PR in a pretty sinister light, in an exaggerated, misleading way relative to what I know is current practice.

Even though it makes some of us feel uncomfortable to admit it, it is pretty clear that PR shares a common history with propaganda. However, I feel that there has been a clear divergence between these concepts. I’ve repeatedly chimed in with this point of view before, in The Japan Times newspaper and in BusinessWeek some years earlier.

When it comes to PR industry credibility, it does the profession no favors to pretend that all we do is “share perspectives” or “create relationships” or “listen to stakeholders” or “engage in dialogue.” It’s true that PR people do all of these things, but we’re not doing them for academic purposes or just for the heck of it. We’re in a persuasion business, trying to get people to do or think what we are hoping they will do or think.

In that sense, very little has changed in PR since its birth. What has changed is we’re transparently letting people know what we’re doing, and while deliberately misleading and manipulating people for nefarious purposes is now seen as the province of propaganda, PR has earned its distinction as a practice of ethically sharing information openly so that people can reach their own conclusions.

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The surprising ways that metaphors shape your world

December 11th, 2009 / 3:00 pm

This article from the The Boston Globe says that:

“Drawing on philosophy and linguistics, cognitive scientists have begun to see the basic metaphors that we use all the time not just as turns of phrase, but as keys to the structure of thought.”
“By taking these everyday metaphors as literally as possible, psychologists are upending traditional ideas of how we learn, reason, and make sense of the world around us. The result has been a torrent of research testing the links between metaphors and their physical roots.”
“To the extent that metaphors reveal how we think, they also suggest ways that physical manipulation might be used to shape our thought.”
“While psychologists have thus far been primarily interested in using such manipulations simply to tease out an observable effect, there’s no reason that they couldn’t be put to other uses as well, by marketers, architects, teachers, parents, and litigators, among others.”

Indeed; these days, there’s a lot of thinking being done in the area of ‘conversation communication’ and ‘digital storytelling.’ Where the two meet allows persuasion marketers to tap into PR applications for metaphors, which are said to be the keys to unlocking the power of the unconscious mind, the place where most decision-making takes place.

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comments(0) Tags: communication, language, metaphors, PR, psychology