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“I ONCE HAD A GIRLFRIEND WHO QUIT JOURNALISM and went into P.R. because she said public-relations work was ‘more ethical.’”

lol

That’s an Instapundit lead-in to a link to this piece, about journalists cheating on an online poll.

As a PR professional, I will say this — about my firm, anyway.

First, our advocacy, when we go to work for our clients, is at least out in the open.

And second, we take credibility seriously, because we have to — if we lose it, our clients get upset with us and we stop making money.

Journalists, otoh — the bad eggs, anyway — seem to think more short term. “If I write a good fake story it will get me a full-time gig at this magazine/win me a Pulitzer/save me having to run around doing actual research.” Forgetting that, ultimately, their shenanigans paint everything it touches with a big ol’ tarnish brush.

Technorati Tags: public relations, journalism

Via Instapundit, here’s an interesting blog post about the consequences of bad customer service.

What strikes me is that the Internet has rendered the word-of-mouth marketing variable extremely efficient.

Years ago there was a so-called rule of thumb that if someone had a bad customer experience, he’d share his experience with, on average, 10 other people.

I have no idea if that is fact or myth, but for the sake of argument suppose it’s accurate.

Each of those 10 people, in theory, might pass the anecdote along — but like the kid’s game of “telephone,” it is likely to lose some of its impact, and perhaps be distorted outright, after it’s been passed down the line a couple times from its original source.

Contrast that with how things work today. Today the original story — with all its hair-raising details — can be shared with the click of a mouse — not only to people you meet physically, but to hoards of total strangers. And since it’s passed along intact, it loses none of its impact.

Delta’s customer base, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, comprises 11.2 percent of the 659 million Americans who will fly in 2007. Instapundit gets what, 100K hits a day? And that’s only the people who see Professor Reynold’s original post — you also have to add in the people who visit when he brings the story up again, plus the people who visit all the sites who link to his story, like LB’s Rambles did today. Seems to me that could easily add up to a measurable impact on Delta’s business. It’s not like these airlines enjoy big fat margins after all.

This is about more than the need to monitor what bloggers are saying about your company. This is about a change in the variables that can impact a company’s reputation and, ultimately, its bottom line. And there’s only one fix — prevention. Good customer relations has to be a top corporate priority, because once you’ve broken faith with the wrong person, it’s too late, you’ve just opened a vein and the red ink is starting to pour.

Technorati Tags: blogging, customer relations

Theresa Meyers, a writer who also does book promotion, has been interviewed by Kathleen Bolton on Writer Unboxed.

Part 1 is here.

Part 2 is here.

I do PR for my day job, so as per “it takes one to know one” I have to say I’m very impressed by what Meyers has to say.

Technorati Tags: book promotion

Okay, I’m doing my part to stop this meme from corrupting any more innocent bloggers. Read this before you believe the story about cows having accents. It’s a PR ploy. Make that, a PR cow pie. Hear that sound around the globe? It’s the sound of journalists munching. Munch munch munch.

Technorati Tags: cow accents

Via Booksquare comes the news that Penguin has a blog.

Here it is.

Okay. Far be it from me to suggest this is an original thought, although it’s only now I’ve articulated it to myself — I know there’s a whole sub-blogosphere obsessing 24/7 about how to leverage blogs for corporate marcom programs, and no doubt this has already been proposed by someone, somewhere — but here it is, fwiw: it’s kind of embarrassing when a corporation launches a blog.

It’s like watching a person of a certain age ape teenage dress and behavior. You can smell what may be a whiff of fear; you sense you’re being asked to play along, almost as if for pity’s sake, in what is at best an act of uncomfortable self-deception; you know the apparent spontaneity is a sham and that the real motive is a desperate grab for whatever bennies (attention, sex) can be wrung from anyone naive or dull enough to be fooled.

Blogs are too much about personality, and with rare exceptions corporations have to suppress personality in the service of brand. Dave Thomas could have done a blog for Wendy’s, for example. But how many corporations really want their executives to be that closely associated with their public personae?

Not very many.

But oh, what a tempting place the blogosphere is. All that conversation. All those prospective customers . . .

So finally, after chewing its nails for a couple of years, a corporation figures maybe it can have the blog without the personality–it can launch a blog, but just won’t let it be naughty.

Sorry. That’s just co-opting the word “blog” as a cover for launching a different kind of corporate website. A pseudo-informal website.

I do think corporations have to pay attention to blogs. It’s like listening to visitors in your tradeshow booth, or reading letters to the editor in your industry’s trade pubs, or tracking stats in your customer call center.

And maybe someday corporate execs — the generation that is growing up, now, blogging — will be able to blog and have it come across as genuine.

But if some established Fortune 500 corporation were paying me the long dollar to advise them on blogging, I’d say save your money. Use it on other things. There are lots of ways for corporations to reach their customers over the net — chats, podcasts — that convey openness and informality without risking you’ll just look strained & foolish.

(Now, if Penguin’s blog turns out to be readable, it’ll be me that looks the fool. Won’t that be something? LOL)

Technorati Tags: blogs

Steve Rubel reports that RSS advertising provider Pheedo has teamed up with PRWeb to display press releases as RSS feeds, and asks

Does anyone see a boy who cried wolf scenario coming where all press releases, even ones that convey news, become irrelevant?

In the past, a successful press release was a collaboration between the writer (as a proxy for the client) and the journalist(s); because the journalist was the ultimate arbiter, the writer’s approach has traditionally been very (wink wink nudge nudge) ritualized. Hence all the rules about what you can and can’t write, how to structure the release, how promotional you are allowed to be, etc.

So pushing releases out as RSS feeds is tantamount to a loss of decorum.

Oh, well.

I’m picturing, not the Fortune 50 company with its byzantine marketing structure, but the small-to-medium business, the guy who owns the local appliance franchise, the technology start-up, the marketing manager of some niche manufacturing sector OEM. For these people — whose opportunities to leverage old-fashioned style releases are, relatively speaking, few and far between — the real question is: will distributing releases this way get the phones to ring?

It’s a cheap experiment. And in any case, as long as there are journalists dedicated to reporting news, there will be PR agencies courting them the old-fashioned way, on whatever terms the journos dictate.

Technorati Tags: press release, public relations