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‘Who Moved My Cheese?’ Newly Relevant

Sunday, September 19th, 2010

Image via Creative Commons

Twelve years ago or so, Dr. Spencer Johnson wrote a slender volume about change and dealing with it that featured mice and “littlepeople.”  I read it somewhere around that time at the behest of my boss, discussed it with my colleagues and promptly moved it into the “management cliche” category, soon to be followed by Total Quality Management.

When I saw “Who Moved My Cheese” (and its intellectual compadre, “The One-Minute Manager“) on the syllabus for my grad class on media management, I remembered just enough of it to see where the conversation was heading. “Cheese” tells a simple little story about two mice, Sniff and Scurry, and two littlepeople who ostensibly are smarter than the mice, Haw and Hem. The four live in a maze equipped with Cheese Stations and spend their days going to and fro, stuffing themselves with cheese.  The mice notice a change (less cheese at Station C) and take off to look elsewhere, whilst Hem and Haw (wait for it) dither until all the cheese in Station C is gone.

They’ve refused to change. They like Station C and expect that one day, the cheese will magically re-appear. That is, until Haw summons up the courage to face his fear of the unknown and leave Hem behind.

Haw finds new cheese, tries to convince Hem to move on, Hem refuses, and Haw goes back to the new treasure of cheese, but keeps his running shoes handy just in case he needs to move again.

Part of the books appeal is that it’s not complicated, and it seems to speak to many people in many ways.  The discussion 12 years ago was about who we saw ourselves embodying among the characters. Thus, we’re supposed to discover the wider truths of the book as it applies to us.

In the media management course, we’ve begun looking into media business models, and I see that most media organizations have been Hem — they’ve stayed with what worked in the past despite the warning signs, and are failing. A few are like Haw — they’ve realized their errors and have forged ahead, albeit slowly in some cases: “The Christian Science Monitor” dropped its paper edition; television news organizations now put “packages” together for both broadcast and Web; Slate and Salon stuck it out as online-only magazines, eschewing the temptation to put out print; “The New York Times” and “The Wall Street Journal” are planning to put most of their content behind paywalls.

But the cheese is still on the move.  The most popular online news sites are aggregators — Yahoo! News, Drudge, Google… Whither their models when the original content others are producing disappears?  What about the role of citizen journalism (or citizen curation, a la Digg, Reddit, etc.)?

The New York Times has an article today on Digg — positing that Twitter and Facebook have taken the space that Digg blocked out in 2004, and we know MySpace is hardly the force it once was.

Station C is already cheese-less, and so is Station D (the first social media station). The path to the new cheese is mighty narrow, strewn with boulders and broken glass.

Got anything to do with media at all?  Better re-read “Who Moved My Cheese.”

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Posted in Social Media, Strategy | Comments Off

The ‘Professor’ Becomes The Student

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

It's 1992...AGAIN!

For 15 years, I’ve known that when my corporate career wound to a close, I wanted to teach, write and speak. That always has meant I’d need to get an advanced degree, and the question only was exactly when that would happen. The master plan was to start a master’s degree in 2009, which would have been the start of my second year at National City Corp. You want to make G-d laugh? Make plans.

My experience at regional bank National City began in January 2008, just in time for the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression. By the end of the year, PNC had acquired National City with government help, and in short order, Communication AMMO was born. I flirted briefly with the idea of enrolling in a master’s program right away, but jumped on the small business train instead. Now, after nearly 18 months toiling through the Great Recession, and a year after beginning my teaching career at Kent State as an adjunct prof, the academic fire is burning pretty brightly in me.

So, I decided to start the next phase of my communication career with pursuing a master’s in public relations from Kent State University.

This presented an interesting sidebar — in my Theory of Mass Communication class, seven of my fellow students took my PR Theory and Ethical Practice course last fall, and one of them is in the PR Tactics course I’m teaching this fall.  No copying off Professor Williams!

I’m excited and a bit terrified — I was last a student about 20 years ago, and wonder if I still remember how to study.  Preparing to teach is an education in itself, but being accountable for academic readings and schoolwork is a dim memory. The first week of classes (I’m taking two) is under our belts, and I still have time to complete the initial assignments. I count that as a victory!

With three speaking engagements this fall (PRSA International, the Parma, Ohio, Chamber of Commerce, and the IABC Research and Measurement Conference), the two classes, the one I’m teaching, the twice-monthly Twitter meeting, #ICChat, and the position as membership director for IABC Cleveland, I’m not going to lack for things to do.

I hope to still remain active here and elsewhere in social media, but don’t be too surprised if my frequency drops and length of post shrinks.

Of course, there no doubt are many of you who are hoping for just such a reduction. Anyone want to write a guest post?

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Posted in Education | 9 Comments »

Talking About PRSA, IABC, IPR on PRConversations Blog

Monday, July 12th, 2010

I’m honored (or honoured) to have written a guest post on one of the best blogs in all of PR/Communications — PRConversations — thanks to Judy Gombita, who recruited me.  The topic is my tripartite professional association affiliation — IABC, PRSA and the Institute for PR. Namely, are they valuable, necessary and a good value?  The comment stream alone is worth reading, with several luminaries weighing in (and no cursing or objects thrown so far, thankfully.) Give it a read and tell me what you think!

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Internal Communications at its Best

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

The UK’s Liam FitzPatrick wrote a post decrying the tendency of internal comms people complaining about manager communication incompetence.  FitzPatrick says: “I believe we get the internal clients we deserve.  If senior managers are used to a diet of crap communications support, that is all they’ll ever understand.”

He’s right, and he’s wrong.

The challenge always is whether to keep fighting or just give managers what they want.  FitzPatrick relates a story about a senior manager who wants “intelligence” about what employees are saying and thinking from her internal comms support.  There are a lot of things a skilled internal communicator can do to gather that intelligence, but much of the budgetary process is more output-focused than outcome-focused (echoing the same tendency elsewhere in corporate communications.)

The key for any of us is research (he said self-servingly — my practice includes research services, just sayin;.)

The research doesn’t even have to be quantitative, though tying qualitative assessment to intranet traffic, for example, can shed a lot of light on the effectiveness of our internal comms activities. We don’t have to do formal surveys, which can be very expensive and time consuming, if all we’re looking for is a snapshot to share for planning and strategy.

At Goodyear, we used an intranet poll to get just that sort of intelligence — it was a great window into what at least some employees were thinking, and it gave us a source of content, too.

But, there is no replacement for more formal measurement — even with qualification of our poll results, we still got management questions about the reach of opinion, which is a valid criticism. The old ROPE method (Research, Objective, Programming, Evaluation) still holds truth.

Meanwhile, read FitzPatrick’s piece. It’s worth reading (and commenting — no comments on his blog, so I wrote this post!)

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Posted in Internal Communications, Research, Strategy | Comments Off

Mainstream Thinks it ‘Gets’ Social Media

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

Two mainstream media stories 1 June tackle social media. The Wall Street Journal ($) offers perspectives on the ultimate measurement of social media effectiveness, direct sales through social channels; Cleveland’s The Plain Dealer looks at the risks of permitting social media use at work, quoting security consulting companies, lawyers and interactive marketing expert Dominic Litten (@DJLitten).

The Plain Dealer story is fairly predictable — “corporate challenges” presented by social media, together with tales of employees fired, foolish companies and an emphasis on the need for strong policies.  The central message is “CONTROL.” This disappoints me, especially because the story dwells so much on blocking social media. Katie Herbst (@katieherbst), who manages social marketing for an insurance company, offers a good counter to the blocking argument, pointing out that time-wasting won’t necessarily be limited by the lack of social media.

The Journal piece talks about apps that can turn social media platforms into sales generators — unmentioned is the time-honored technique of pointing people to a URL.  A couple of strange notes — a marketing professor is quoted saying that businesses must advertise to make people aware of their Facebook fan page, and that large numbers of fans are needed to “sway” buyers. This is a very traditionalist approach that ignores the relationship-building that’s at the heart of social media’s appeal.

Also, the story includes the requisite warning that social media could make for customer service challenges — another professor recommends an even higher level of service to support a Facebook page than other channels.  A Houston sports retailer added a Facebook app to its Facebook Fan page in 2008, but has sold only 50 products through it. Again, a narrow view of success, because unmentioned is the impact of Facebook relationships on other sales channels.

In both of these stories, the reporting is surface-only. The frames in which they operate are very much rooted in mainstream marketing, and little in either story (apart from @DJLitten’s good perspectives on technology and productivity) reflect the reputational and relational opportunities that social media is really all about.

Of course, many marketers are guilty of similar biases — they see the “captive” audience of Facebook fans and want to broadcast to them. Learning to see these tools in their proper context is a challenge all its own.

Present company definitely included.

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Posted in Media Relations, Social Media, Strategy | 5 Comments »

Measurement Crucial to PR’s Business Value

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

My learned Australian colleague Geoff Barbaro waxes rant in a post from 17 May (US time), where he inveighs against measurement.  Perhaps not the concept, as much as the practice. He asks:

Do you measure how you look after your family? Do you count the meals, the trips to school, the time spent with children to evaluate effectiveness? When you buy that great new dress or suit that you love, did you then sit down and work through complex metrics to measure what you did?

So why do you think it’s different in business? I’ll tell you why, it’s because you don’t trust people to do the job you employed them to do. You don’t believe they are motivated and care about their work, so you can only make sure they are working by measuring what they do, and then argue that this is the motivational tool. Measuring because “we do what we measure” is a failure of leadership, a failure of motivation, a failure of selection, a failure to define values, a failure of engagement and a failure of communication.

Sorry, Geoff, but this is fuzzy-headed thinking about a vital enhancement to the profession of Public Relations.

I started a comment on Geoff’s blog (a fine and interesting read, btw), but found that it was all too likely that I’d hijack it. And that’s not right. So, here is my reply to Geoff’s shot across the bow. Man the torpedos!

========================

Oh, my. Nothing like an existential rant to get one’s blood up, eh Geoff?

Let’s start by differentiating terms. Measurement isn’t gotcha. It’s not “check-up-on-the-poor-employees.” Neither is it merely about outputs or activities, at least not when it’s strategic.

We in PR have long been the only department in a firm that can say to the C-suite, “trust me” and get away with it. The question on the CEO (and CFO, especially) mind these days, however, is, “What business value do I get for my investment in PR?”

We can take a SWAG (stupid, wild-assed guess) at the answer, but then we sound like witless weasels (um, we build reputation and protect…uh, no, uh, we get media coverage…no, uh, we help the organization communicate effectively, wait, ummmm.)

The fact is that most of us don’t have a clue what the quantifiable business value of PR is, and that’s why PRSA has commissioned a task force to work on that very question. It’s also one of the driving forces in modern PR. It’s created an industry specialty that people are finding value in, even though there is much sophistry and bad measurement out there.

In modern business, every department must contribute to the bottom line. So, direct sales and the support for sales is a winner, as is direct effort to improve efficiency, save money, etc. There’s also credible research about the effect on brand awareness, attitude and disposition of various PR activity. On the internal side, engagement metrics, and employee knowledge and behavioral metrics lend credence to a communicator’s value.

The trick is to a) Measure what matters; and b) Link communication outputs to business outcomes. This is, indeed, a hairy process, filled with risks — bad math the most prevalent, if you ask me.  Correlation is not causation, but frequently it’s a pretty good stand-in for it, if your math is good.  We mustn’t give up on the goal of establishing impact metrics and ROI just because it’s so much easier if we don’t!

I don’t know, Geoff, if I agree that “what gets measured gets done,” but I’m sure that if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it.

Cheers,

Sean

@commammo

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Posted in Measurement, Public Relations, Strategy | 7 Comments »

Theater of the Absurd in Social Media Metrics

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

As we PR people feel our way along in social media, the marketers are declaring the End of Times for everything else. Anecdotal evidence shows that big companies are pulling big money out of traditional advertising and funneling it into social media, and that bears examination.  But as I’ve said, I’m not ready to write obits for mass marketing/advertising in favor of “marketing to a segment of one” right this very minute.

I first heard that phrase (Marketing to a segment of one) from the lips of Steve Cone, legendary marketer and then-CMO with KeyCorp. He was the architect of dropping the “Corp” and/or “Bank” from the company name in favor of the symbol you see at right.

That made Key one of just three companies in the US bearing an eponymous symbol for its name. Shell and Apple are the other two.

Key made a strategy of getting people to see the Key logo and associate it with “bank,” as in, “I need to stop by the Key on the way home.”  The idea, Cone claimed, was to stop thinking of mass marketing — with all of its efficiency and logical, numbers-driven strategy, and think of “marketing to segments, eventually to a segment of one.” So then came emerging affluents, wealth management, small business, middle market, large corporate — all of those categories based on grouping customers in some logical way, then changing strategy to target them.

This requires information about customers and prospects. When it comes to social media, that information is scattered to the four winds, unless you’re on Facebook.  Twitter’s foray into geo-location, Foursquare, and many other social media firms are trying to gather as much data about YOU as possible to facilitate what is a pretty old marketing model.

Just as at the onset of the Web Age you had hundreds of companies popping up to “help” companies enter the Internet realm, now at the onset of the Social Media age you have companies popping up to “help” companies enter this realm. The part that twists my noodle is when companies purport to know how to measure social media come up with yowlers — like the Vitrue Facebook fan value imbroglio, the Altimeter study on correlations between social media activity and stock appreciation, and now Vitrue’s assertion that frequency of mention in social media is somehow a reflection of its social media reputation.

Vitrue offers a chance to compare brands in a handy Flash gobo that produces a cool pie chart. Just for fun, I compared Ford (which Vitrue pronounces its winner) with a couple of random words — sure enough, pop “the” in there, and you find upteen thousands (OK, 134,000) ‘somethings’ and the aforementioned cool pie chart. Ooh, and there’s a bar chart too! So kewl.  W00t!

I could go on for 1,500 words, but won’t. It’s another cow pie pretending to be a metric.  Resist this assault on rational thinking.

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Posted in Measurement, Social Media, Strategy | 2 Comments »

Hooked on PR Research

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

One of the great professional pleasures of my life involves an academic conference filled to the brim with fascinating public relations research. It’s the International PR Research Conference put on by the Institute for Public Relations, and I’ve attended four of the past five years. That it’s held early in March in Miami, Fla., has NOTHING to do with it!

OK, well, it has a little bit to do with it.  The tropical breezes feel especially fine in the icy wake of February in Cleveland, and there is terrific food, shopping, pleasant walks and an excellent pool. But, other than that, it’s all business for three days.

I’ve had the good fortune to present at IPRRC twice; the first time, 2008, I presented a paper with my research pal Dr. Julie O’Neil of Texas Christian University that covered one large company’s internal communication program, focusing especially on the measurement of the work. It won an award, of which I am very proud indeed – the Jackson-Sharpe Award for research by an academic and a practitioner (I’m not the academic, or wasn’t…).

This year, I presented a work in progress, an exploratory study of corporate blogs and Twitter activities, with an eye on whether they’re demonstrating James Grunig’s Excellence Theory – are they conversations? – or other PR theories.

The idea is to see what actually IS in this space for 18 companies – the work is ongoing (frantically; the final paper is due May 1), and I was able to share a few key findings.

  1. There’s a lot of using social media as a broadcasting tool – no two-way, no evidence of symmetry (mutual change) – and persuasion, therefore, still rules.
  2. There are a couple of firms that are doing yeoman’s work and engaging in conversations – there are also seven or eight companies who’ve abandoned their blogs since December 2009.
  3. One industrial giant, interestingly, has subject matter experts blog and then engage engineers and customers in a discussion about improving the product – this is a rarity.
  4. Twitter as link-bait is quite in evidence.
  5. The Cluetrain may have left the station, but it’s creeping along a siding, not hurtling on a MagLev track.

This is hardly conclusive or particularly scientific – that’s why we call the paper exploratory. Dr. O’Neil and I have more work to do this coming month, but this paper is intended to be the first of three. Next step is a qualitative discussion with some of the people behind social media at our subject companies, followed (we hope) by a quantitative survey of users of corporate blogs and their associated Twitterverse (we’ll see; that’s going to take some cash…).

In the meanwhile, stay tuned over the next few days as I recount some of the work that impressed me the most at IPRRC this year.  Once our paper is done, we’ll share.

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Posted in Public Relations, Research | 4 Comments »

Driving Me Crazy: Southwest Didn’t Err

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

Sometimes I really think the end of the republic is nigh.  A large man who usually buys two seats (because he is so large) wants to snag an earlier flight which has only one seat, cannot fit without discomfort to himself and his hapless row-mates, so he cries, “discrimination!” Oh, and he also has a new film coming out soon. Hmmmmm. Grrrrrr.

According to a story in the Newark Star-Ledger website, Kevin Smith fit into the middle seat with the armrests down, but the flight crew believed he was a safety risk and removed him from the aircraft. Smith activated his 1.6 million Twitter followers to take Southwest Airlines to task.

The story clips from several bloggers, including Sonny Gill, the HuffPo and a couple of others. The debate seems to be over whether airlines need to make accommodations for “persons of size.”

Southwest has a policy. If you’re big, buy two seats. Smith knew the policy and often did so, according to numerous media reports.  As a frequent traveler, I know that it’s good to get home early if you can. But if my choice is to wait a while and have my comfy two seats instead of being a human Panini, I’m waiting.

We all know that air travel today is like bus travel in 1966 (which I remember, thanks) — crowded into old, creaky seats, mashed together, with substandard sanitary facilities and somewhat, er, limited cuisine.  Southwest does a fab job, in my book, of making a rather unpleasant task bearable,  mostly with good cheer, Heineken and tasty bags of peanuts.

I don’t think they needed to apologize.

I can’t shake the idea that the esteemed Mr. Smith is subscribing to the old adage that all publicity is good. I wonder if we compare movie openings press coverage, that his clip count will be higher this time around.

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Posted in Crisis Communications, News Analysis, Public Relations, Social Media | 7 Comments »

Effective Messaging is Not Passe

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

As much as many of our social media mavens would like to have it so, the concept of messaging isn’t going away for some time. The methods of delivery are definitely changing, but in public relations, we still have to reach people.

There’s a fashionable trend denouncing “talking at customers” as opposed to “having a conversation.” the trend is going on15 years old, at least. Social media’s recent sprouting of new tools (kind of like a Swiss Army Knife) has made me ponder whether the inexorable decline of mainstream media would lead, finally, to a lack of organizational interest in messaging.

If so, that’s bad news for the PR industry, as Marc Hausman (@StrategicGuy) wrote today.

But I still believe that as long as organizations have objectives, they’ll need messages: crafted, interesting, tailored to audience, pithy, memorable, descriptive, fascinating, thought-provoking and even wise. For that, they’ll continue to need lowly, ink-stained (er, pixel-stained?) wretches who understand the transformative power of words.

A friend once wrote that words are powerful, they create reality. Motivation, excitement, laughter, sadness — in our Western culture, we depend greatly on words.

This becomes even more important in the social media age, when everyone is a publisher, and it’s up to the individual to glean the seeds from the dirt and chaff.  There still needs to be an organizational voice carrying consistent, clear messages to stakeholders. It may be one of many (and it should be), but it needs to exist.

Marc is right — if PR firms rely totally on media relations for their enterprise, they are doomed. Or, at least, they’ll be a lot smaller than they are now. Of course, social media doesn’t scale very well — cultivating a relationship with a blogger takes as much effort as doing so with a magazine editor or a reporter — but the number of people reached is typically much lower.

Now, before the “it’s not about eyeballs” people light torches and scream for my head, let me say that until we better understand the communities we might want to reach in social media, we’re stuck with the lack of scalability complaint.  It holds us back from helping organizations see the benefits to them of social media engagement.

Once we can get a better read on the characteristics of communities, we can make the scale work — it’s not much different than looking to reach readers of a given magazine. But, we need independent data on the communities and a clear understanding of what we can expect, whether we are selling directly to them, or merely engaging them for reputation purposes.

As astonishing as the advances in technology have been over the past five years, we still have audiences and we need words to help us reach, influence, reward and interact with them. We still have objectives to attain and a business to run. And messages aren’t going away just because the means of delivering them is.

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Posted in Public Relations, Research, Social Media, Strategy | 4 Comments »

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