BP’s feckless communication strategy, especially demonstrated by company CEO Tony Hayward’s frequent gaffes when speaking off the cuff, deserves to be pilloried. Hayward and company were obviously led by lawyers in this regard, minimizing the potential impact of the disastrous gusher, appearing too rarely in public and pointing blame to subcontractors. Hayward’s “I’d like my life back” rang especially tone-deaf in the wake of 11 deaths and the potential for catastrophic wildlife impact (not to mention the economic peril for the gulf fishing industry.) Several communication experts get quoted in Wallace Immen’s excellent piece, including Michael Stern (Michael Stern Associates), Prof. Julian Barling (Queen’s University School of Business), and Guy Beaudin, (RHR International).

Lululemon sells athletic ware, and by all accounts does a bang-up job of it. Some of the success, according to CEO Christine Day, is due to its use of social media — Twitter and Facebook.  Reporter Marina Strauss quotes Day: “We learn more about [which items are in demand] on Facebook and social media: what are the guests really screaming for, and so we use [the feedback] to get a little bit more indication.”

Keeping an eye on its 127,000 Facebook fans and 32,000 Twitter followers gets Day and company a faster view than its store performance metrics (and offers perspectives from people who are just thinking about going to the store, rather than having bought something there — that’s an interesting view on potential demand, the pipeline, some call it.)

The social media use has two purposes, according to the article — to gather information, and to drive traffic to the company website. When we’re looking for ways to measure the effectiveness of social media, website traffic is more often cited than the research value, which is a pity.  Going back to the ROPE method of communication planning (Research, Objectives, Programming, Evaluation), you don’t have anything without the research.

If social media served no other purpose than market intelligence, it’d still be worth the investment, no?

{P.s., my Canadian sojourn is nearly complete – back to a more regular schedule next week.)

Tools such as Yammer have brought Twitter capabilities (microblogging) into the enterprise. Authors Jeanne C Meister and Karie Willyerd cover the cases of LG Electronics and Meredith Corporation in using Yammer and Socialtext to reduce the lengthy process of designing training programs and communicate speedily and across silos, respectively. Use Microblogging to Increase Productivity is worth your time.

In Strategy By Any Other Name, Walter Kiechel notes that speakers who usually discuss business strategy have been shoved aside by economists and journalists talking about the global financial crisis. He finds, however, that strategy has just gone a bit underground — it’s showing up “all over the place in contemporary management literature, albeit sometimes under different cover.”

Kiechel covers a lot of ground, with links to many resources. One that looks particularly interesting is The Power of Pull, by John Hagel and John Seely Brown.  Their core thinking is that the old economy “was based on ‘push,’ forecasting what would be needed or what would sell and then mustering resources to fulfill that demand.   The new world is one of ‘pull’ — find people and resources exactly when you need them, attract them to you even before you know they exist, and then pull the best from within them, and yourself, to achieve your potential.”

Certainly Hagel and Brown’s idea has history — we communicators have been trying to puzzle out the push vs. pull argument for a really long time (at least as long as I’ve been in this career, anyway.) I’m eager to add the book to my summer reading list.

In the meantime, check these two pieces out — and if you’re not reading HBR in some form, get on it.

Rob and Susan argue that there are two flaws in the practice of transparency that need to be clarified, as per the summary of their paper:

1. Transparency often is interpreted as being completely open at all times — but there are times when it is in the best legal and moral interest of entities to not disclose, and in these times this is the most ethical stance for both organizations and their stakeholders; and
2. Entities increasingly are self-proclaiming “transparent” communication, when investigation reveals that the claims are smokescreens to deflect actual lack of openness and honesty.

The authors conducted a series of interviews with seven senior level PR execs or consultants who work with PR leaders around the U.S., asking when, specifically, transparency is needed and good for organizations and society; when it’s better to not disclose information; and in what situations does transparency actually harm stakeholders?

I can’t do justice to Rob and Susan’s thinking in such a brief post, but in short, they learned enough to come up with an alternative to transparency — not a new theory, they hasten to say, but a different perspective: Translucency.

Something translucent lets in light, and one can see the rough outline of things, but those things aren’t entirely visible. Rob and Susan say there are four key considerations under which translucency can and should occur:

1. Translucency is a commitment to communication to your stakeholders — not an advance commitment to what that communication will contain.
2. Translucency occurs when credibility as already been established.
3. Translucency might be most effective when there is reason to believe that an organization’s arguments and data are rock-solid, but not persuasive.
4. Translucency is most effective when and organization already has put in place a process and structure for bringing greater light of information through the glass.

No one seems to want to admit that there really is a thing called “too much information.” Rob and Susan do a fine job offering a possible filter to address that problem.

Seems like no problem to me, but then, I don’t have a Kindle. Amazon got to enjoy seven days of flame and shouting for its trouble.

Drs. W. Timothy Coombs and Sherry J. Holladay of Eastern Illinois University (kind of a hotbed of pithy PR scholarship), presented a paper about Amazon’s week from hell at the 13th International PR Research Conference.  Dr. Coombs is a preeminent theorist on crisis communication, the author of several books and papers about it, and a good presenter who carries a quick wit with his slide rule.  He a smart dude.

Apparently, the “Kindle Community” was pretty angry about having “their” stuff unceremoniouslyyanked. Amazon’s notification statement lacked complete information, or ordinary human compassion, according to those who read it:

“The Kindle edition books Animal Farm by George Orwell, published by MobileReference (mobi) and 1984 by George Orwell, published by MobileReference (mobi) were removed from the Kindle store and are no longer available for purchase. When this occurred, your purchases were automatically refunded. you can still locate the books in the Kindle store, but each has a status of not yet available. Although are rarity, publishers can decide to pull their content from the Kindle store.”

Commenters went ballistic, and before you could blink, there were boycotts threatened. So Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos posted an abject apology, saying in part: “Our ‘solution’ to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles.” He beat on his company pretty hard.

Coombs and Holladay found that the florid, nearly over-the-top apology worked very well. 71 percent accepted the apology, nearly 16 percent accepted it conditionally, and just 13 percent rejected it.  More important, more than 21 percent indicated they were more likely to buy from Amazon versus 10.5 percent said they were less likely to buy.

So what’s that mean? It means that Coombs’ main theories of crisis communication are holding steady in the online world — the process of admitting you’ve done wrong, taking steps to rectify the situation and ensure it won’t happen again, and beating yourself up a bit in the process result in restoring positive feelings among your stakeholders.

There surely are crises where this won’t happen — some things are just too bad — but this study gives additional support to the basis for advice during crisis times.

Watch for the complete paper in May when the IPRRC proceedings are released.

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.

The Institute for PR Measurement Commission condemned AVE last fall, AMEC (the professional organization for media evaluation firms) has declared its intent to find a logical replacement, and a recent paper offered Weighted Media Cost as an element worthy of inclusion in measurement programming. Where does this leave us?

I have no stake in this game. My personal belief is that AVEs are bad science, but I’m also sensitive to the need to help clients. AVE is easy for a client to grasp — “if we paid for the space our story ran in, it would have cost us X.”  Katie points out that doctors won’t prescribe a medicine if it’s not right for the patient. AVE isn’t life and death — but what do we do after we’ve explained the drawbacks and negatives and the client still wants it?

I can’t help but put myself in that situation — young company, trying to latch on with a client. Do I tell the client “No. I won’t do AVE” and risk having him/her say, “Well then, I’ll go find someone who will!” ?

#MeasurePR had much more great content than this AVE nonsense, and I really do wish we could collectively move on. I’m done writing about the debate, at least for now.

Looking for a quick way to improve measurement?

Start setting objectives and measuring your attainment of them. Stop worrying about generating lots of eyeballs and do some audience research to reach the right ones. Start looking for correlations between your various communication outputs (and outtakes) and business metrics, such as revenue, cost savings, cost avoidance, time saved, help desk traffic, speed of benefits enrollment, travel system savings, expense systems savings, etc…

The AVE practice has been under attack by some of us, poorly understood by others, but more widely used in PR agencies than many would like to think. It even was formally condemned by the Institute for PR Measurement Commission this fall.

AVE has major flaws — measurement experts (including one notable, even famous one) have decried the practice and detailed why frequently. I’ll not repeat the argument here. This paper provides those details in part. Instead, I’ll merely say that even with substantial adjustments to methodology, it never represented a business outcome, was based on an assumption of equivalent understanding on the part of the receiver, and was wholly unsuited to describing success in social media. That alone was a huge problem for me.

The thing is, there is substantive research that supports the idea that editorial content about a product and an ad are perceived similarly by receivers.  A paper by Dr. Don Stacks and Dr. David Michaelson (albeit based on one experiment) found ads and editorial to be equally effective in generating interest in a new product. If that’s so, evaluating the PR placement in comparison to ad cost makes sense. PR costs orders of magnitude less than advertising.

Two papers by Angela Jeffrey, Dr. Stacks and Dr. Michaelson explored the linkages between volume of media coverage and share of media coverage and business outcomes (such as unit sales, tickets sold, etc.) and included media cost data in calculations.  This set the stage for a controversial finding: Media costs improved correlations, significantly.

Now, Jeffrey, vice president of research for VMS, and Dr. Brad Rawlins, Brigham Young University, and Bruce Jeffries-Fox of Jeffries-Fox Associates, have written a brilliant paper further detailing the relationship between cost and outcomes, with four case studies.  The “Weighted Media Cost” has a strong effect.  From the paper:

…if we’re getting better results with costs for purchasing media space and time data, should we…set new parameters for its proper use?”

Emphatically, yes. The paper, written in a very approachable and intuitive style, makes a compelling case.

Read the paper if you care at all about measurement in our profession.

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.

There isn’t anything particularly earth-shattering in the interview, and truth to tell, there usually isn’t. But I continue to be heartened by the focus on communication as a business process that I see in this feature almost every week. Faust says:

“I spend a huge amount of time reaching out to people, either literally or digitally, and with alumni networks all over the worl, so that I can connect. Leadership by walking around — that a digital space now, it’s virtual space.  An enormous amount of my job is listening to people, to understand where they are, how they see the world so that I can understand how to mobilize their understanding of themselves in service of the institutional priorities.”

The interviewer says, “But you can’t make everybody happy.”  Her reply:

“No, you don’t make everybody happy, but if people feel they were listened to, they’re going to be much more likely to go along with a decision.”

If that short conversation doesn’t motivate communicators to see themselves as something other than a media publicity machine, I don’t know what will.  We, alone in the organization, are well-equipped to counsel leaders on communication effectiveness.  Yet, we too often cede this skill to Human Resources (“Well, it’s really about training people, and that’s HR!”).

We are the experts at communication. We understand why dialogue and discussion among our employee base is important. We know what a good presentation is and how to help improve the level of communication in our organization.  If not us, whom? And yet, most of us would rather work with a reporter on a media story than do the hard work of remaking our organizational culture from hierarchy to high performance.  We rationalize that choice by claiming that the media story has more impact on revenue. But the jury is still out on that, except for marketing communication and product PR. I submit that we’d positively affect reputation in a measurable way if we focused more on making our leaders and their teams communicate better.

I’ve been reading the Corner Office in the Times for years. I haven’t yet seen an executive say that media relations is a core leadership function.

With advertising spending falling (or at least reclassifying from print to broadcast and Web), “getting media attention” in the right segments continues to be a critical element of PR activity. But the burgeoning social media market is threatening to change that calculus, if you believe the doyennes of blogs, Twitter and similar platforms.  And why wouldn’t it? If we were pitching Modern Bride before, why can’t we pitch Classic Bride, Becoming Mrs. Jones, or The Broke-Ass Bride?

Does a company that makes bride dresses, or wedding catering, or domestic partnership photography have the time necessary to build relationships in social media? Or do they just need a quick ad with a special phone number that offers 20 percent off, a mention in a popular blog?

How many of us will the new behemoth integrated agencies need to help facilitate these processes? Who’s going to pay us to tell them to talk to a bride blogger in Madison, Wisc.?

This is only part of the puzzle — I have written before about the lack of independent and authoritative content in new media. Unless many of us suddenly become willing to pay a subscription fee for such content, it’s going to go away.  Perhaps crowds really are wise, and not mobs. Perhaps over time, Wikipedia is more accurate than the Encyclopedia Brittanica, notwithstanding being horrifically inaccurate at the moment we need factual information, or openly manipulated.

Any of us who care about this topic will need to develop our own ability to engage in social media, build our reputation for accuracy and probity, and somehow compete with the fakers, liars, and spammers. That’s not an easy task.