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!
Posts Tagged ‘transparency’
Talking About PRSA, IABC, IPR on PRConversations Blog
Monday, July 12th, 2010
CEO Transitions Need Employee Attention
Monday, June 14th, 2010When you’ve worked most of your life in big companies, as I have, it’s easy to forget that major change is a huge employee issue regardless of the size of company. Big company complexity can be daunting to contemplate, and I’ve heard people pine for smaller firms with the idea that big change would be easier. News flash: It ain’t necessarily so.
Central Federal Corp and CFBank – a four-branch bank headquartered in suburban Akron with 66 full-time employees, according to Yahoo! Finance — is going to find out how easy it will be, now that former kahuna Mark Allio stepped down. According to Crain’s Cleveland Business, Allio offered his resignation at the company’s annual meeting, and now the firm is searching for a new leader, with General Counsel Eloise Mackus steering the ship in the meantime (and “indicating interest”, per the Crain’s piece).
During any big change process — and a CEO transition is usually a big one — employees get distracted; it’s human nature. There are at least 65 people at that company wondering 1) Who’ll be the boss? 2) What will he/she change? and 3) What will it mean for me. It won’t help matters that the company’s financial performance (as with many banks) has suffered during the recession. Now the boss quits and there’s going to be a “process” to replace him.
Employees are ripe for worry, and worried employees seldom give great service, which ostensibly is the raison d’être for community banks.
The tendency of the board and leadership team is to look inward to themselves and the shareholders. Yes, they have a fiduciary responsibility to those owners, but they must not ignore their wider team. I don’t know that they have or have not — but they will need to ramp up the contact with the ordinary employees and be sure they’re equipped with the right tools to manage the customers and prospects.
Here are three “must-dos” –
1. A note to employees with a draft customer letter — explaining the change and next steps, including a basic timeline.
2. Questions-and-answers document anticipating what customers, community leaders, friends and family will want to know about the change.
3. Commitment to a weekly email note and a twice-monthly conference call for managers updating everyone on progress.
It’s not a hard thing to do at all, and following these steps can make it a whole lot easier to glide through the transition.
Big Banks Get Whipped: 2008 News Coverage
Monday, April 26th, 2010Think back two years. The financial crisis hit its gallop around this time in 2008, when the U.S. government sold Bear Stearns to JP Morgan Chase before its wrecked hull could breach and take the global economy down to Davy Jones’ Locker. But that was just the beginning of a wicked huge bear market brought on by inflated real estate prices, preposterous mortgage loans, complicated and unregulated investment vehicles, and a collapse in confidence by everyone from global investors to your local school custodian.
Those of us who watched from a courtside seat (and wished we were in the bleachers, one bank CEO said) remember it all too well.
That’s why I thought twice about hearing University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s David Remund, a doctoral student, present his paper, “Crisis of Confidence: News Coverage of America’s Largest Banks During the 2008 Financial Crisis” at the 13th Annual International PR Research Conference.
Remund did a content analysis of news releases and national and local newspaper coverage of the 10 largest American banks for the second half of 2008, looking for some kind of systemic understanding about how these banks used crisis communication techniques to spray some pain-killer on the daily parade of negative information marching down Main Street.
Two crisis communication theories applied: Image Restoration Theory, which holds that if you’re at fault, you admit it and share the steps you’re taking to address the situation and prevent it from recurring. Situational Crisis Communications Theory says that you need to show concern for people who’ve been hurt by your crisis. Remund’s hypotheses offered that banks that acknowledged the financial crisis and showed concern for consumers in their media relations efforts would enjoy a higher proportion of confidence-building news coverage as a results.
Whoops. Remund’s findings were the exact opposite, with neither hypothesis supported.
Instead, the media pretty much held that banks’ actions contributed to the financial crisis, and the quietest banks got the greater proportion of positive coverage. So, what happened?
As I wrote in my own research covering one company, the crisis had so many contributing factors, was so broad and so extensive that we got to the point where facts and data simply didn’t matter. It was a mob, running headlong down the street screaming, “Run! Run!” Everybody had to run, even as they asked what what happening. Secondly, Remund’s research drew from a rather small batch of news outlets and from only the largest banks.
Finally, by the third quarter of 2008, the news media wasn’t about to trust pretty much anything that banks had to say. Washington Mutual raised capital and swore up and down that it was solvent, even as its capital dwindled away toward federal seizure. Lehman Brothers didn’t think it had any problems in the summer and was dead by September. IndyMac, Countrywide, Wachovia, National City… all positioned themselves as in good shape — but what else could they say?
We PR people are always recommending the most transparent approach — the article of crisis communication faith seems to be , “Tell it first, tell it fast and tell it all.” Aside from a recent study, all the literature calls for that type of approach. I believe it’s far more situational — once you’re in a systemic crisis that reaches past you and your world, your ability to affect its course gets a lot more difficult. Sometimes, you just have to wait it out.
The Remund study reveals more about the limits of crisis communication, than about bank public relations in a crisis.
Transparency: Always Best?
Monday, April 12th, 2010It’s become almost a cliche. The conventional wisdom is that organizational communication requires “transparency through every aspect of corporate communications,” as Brigham Young University’s Dr. Brad Rawlins wrote in 2008. Openness, authenticity, successes and failures, ongoing discussion and abandoning the drive to maintain a perfect corporate image. Dr. Brad’s colleagues at BYU, Dr. Rob Wakefield and Susan Walton looked into this assumption and found it wanting, according to their presentation at the 13th International Public Relations Research Conference in Miami in March.
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:
- 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
- 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:
- Translucency is a commitment to communication to your stakeholders — not an advance commitment to what that communication will contain.
- Translucency occurs when credibility as already been established.
- Translucency might be most effective when there is reason to believe that an organization’s arguments and data are rock-solid, but not persuasive.
- 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.
Amazon’s Recovery from Kindle Content Deletion Crisis Evaluated
Wednesday, March 24th, 2010In the middle of 2009, owners of e-reader Kindle got a nasty surprise when Amazon snatched back e-books that it turned out were supplied illegally. Amazon’s supplier didn’t have the rights to distribute the content, so Amazon accessed Kindles and deleted it.
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.
Employee Engagement: HR Claptrap, or Communication Result?
Monday, January 25th, 2010Today’s #icchat, moderated by @susancerulla and featuring @lindabeth on Twitter spilled over for an hour or so, at least for a few internal communication experts. @mklein818, @wedge and @danasml had a Tweet-convo that featured Mike’s opposition to engagement as an appropriate focus for internal communicators. He and Dana went back and forth a while defining the term (and disagreeing), and Mike averred:
“Why ‘m critical about ‘engagement’ stuff –one-size-fits-all approaches dominate and many employees don’t need to sing comp song”
I think this is the crux of the argument. The Gallup Organization has been doing engagement research for a very long time, and it’s Q12 system includes, “I have a best friend at work.” In their defense, they have tons and tons of data that support the idea that social matters are a huge part of employee satisfaction. But to me, in the modern age, this is irrelevant.
The engagement infrastructure wants to systematize employee sat, distill organizational behaviors to a checklist of things to do and declare victory. But we know that different employees are motivated by different things. If we focus on productivity as a function of satisfaction (positing that productive employees are more into their organizations than unproductive ones), does individual happiness at work count?
I know that if we help our employees better understand our business, competitors, processes and strategy, they ought to be better at their jobs. Workers need to have the information they need to do their jobs. I know that providing information in a way that’s valuable and resonates with workers is critical to that process of building understanding. And I know that workers who have a clear understanding of how what they do every day fits into the organizations objectives tend to be more knowledgeable about the business and better at their jobs.
So, do they need to “sing the company song,” as one of Mike’s tweets read?
No, they don’t. Look, employee happiness is too dependent on factors outside of my control. I need respect and involvement. The #icchat today was on how to make employees ambassadors, and the central thought was that it’s a fairly organic process that requires organizations (especially leaders) to walk their talk. You can’t create raving fans among employees by starting an ambassador program, for gosh sakes. It will be the rare organization who’s ready to ask their employees to step up. But, if there is a sense of shared sacrifice (that is real), shared purpose, shared potential success — you’re in the game.
The term “engagement” has been abased, turned into a supposed cure-all for corporate cancer. It isn’t. If an organization isn’t transparent with employees, treats them like children, doesn’t give them the responsibility and accountability they need to be successful, loads them with useless trivia and then asks them to be influencers in their personal orbits, that organization deserves scorn.
There’s going to be more on this topic, that’s for sure. To take part in the discussion, join @susancerulla, @lindabeth and me each Monday at 1 p.m. Central/ 12 noon Eastern U.S. time. Oh, and read today’s Tweet Stream too.
A Manager Who Can’t Communicate Can’t Lead
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009“As soon as you move one step up from the bottom, your effectiveness depends on your ability to reach others through the spoken and written word.” It’s been years since Peter Drucker offered that bon mot, but it certainly seems to be truth. The New York Times’ Corner Office feature, which runs Sundays on page two of the Business section, talks to business leaders of all stripe, and each of them has something to say about the importance of communication to their business style.
Dec. 6, Joseph J. Plumeri, Chairman and CEO of Willis Group Holdings (the insurance broker whose name now graces the former Sears Tower in Chicago), was Corner Office’s subject. He said:
I spend 25 percent to 30 percent of my time calling my associates — whether they had a family problem or pulled off a great deal and brought in a new client, or saved a client. Two-minute phone call, or handwritten note. I can’t begin to tell you how important that stuff is. E-mails are easy, but sometimes they get in the way of really feeling how somebody feels about your effort.
Is it time consuming? Yes. But that’s what you’ve got to do…
Plumeri goes on to say that helping people understand and believe in the choices the company makes is essential to realizing business vision.
On Dec. 13, Nancy McKinstry, CEO of Wolters Kluwer, a Netherlands-based information services company, says “Every culture is very different in how people make decisions” as she relates how her leadership style changed over time according to the communication styles of her team.
In the Netherlands, where our company is based, people really want to be heard early in the process. So if you just go to someone and say, “I want you to go take this product and enter this new market,” most likely the first response they’ll say is, “No, and let me tell you how that won’t work.” What they really want to say is, “I’m not going to commit yet to that objective until we have a chance to really sit down and explore how we’re going to do that, what your expectations are, and how we measure success.”
Then, when I work with my Italian colleagues and the Spaniard colleagues, what you find is they can’t always tell you how they’re going to get something accomplished, but they manage to get it done.
Shocking news, really, that one’s leadership team expects to have a clear strategy in place before acting, and wants the freedom to choose how to accomplish the goals they’re responsible for.
What concerns me is how few middle managers (or even executive managers) have undertaken the sort of self-examination that both McKinstry and Plumeri evidently have. In 20 years, I’ve met only a handful who embrace the power of participative communication. By the way, they’re the leaders who typically win in the marketplace.
Why don’t more organizations evaluate the communication strength of their leaders? One reason is the perception that you can’t hold people accountable for “soft” skills. Yet, we know that there are very strong correlations between effective communication behavior and employee understanding and comprehension. So, if we want an informed, educated workforce which understands the business and their role in it, their managers will need to be the ones providing context and leadership.
Therefore, let’s evaluate communication skills among managers and come up with ways of helping those managers improve and thrive. It’s not too difficult a concept.
Discussions you should read
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009Several good ones:
Rich Becker — great discussion in the comments on social media concepts…
Brian Solis — Do we need to redefine “influencers?”
Chuck Hemann — What impact on social media use/adoption does organizational culture have ?
Paul Seaman — The Excellence theory says PR is about fostering relationships. Paul disagrees.
Ethics in PR: The Social Media Question
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009In the political firestorm that engulfs the United States, one side claims the other has no principles, whilst the other claims their opponents show a slavish devotion to ossified beliefs that make no sense in modern America. Moral relativism, one side’s rhetoric goes, has brought our society to the brink of destruction. Outmoded thinking, the other side’s speaking points read, has made our country a cruel, Darwinist dystopia, where “survival of the fittest” is played out in policy. For some reason, the ongoing debate of tea parties and new Fascism makes me think about public relations.
The collapse of centralization of news and the growth of social media is fueling a similar decamping in our profession. On one side, those who believe that social media is an incarnation of evil, bent on destroying the concept of objectivity and authoritative sources, not to mention the homicide of the public relations industry. On another side (there are more than two), those who see social media as the democratization of information and the dissolution of concentrated media power, elevating ordinary people and adding to the diversity of voices in the media mix.
The ethical questions percolating for me these days relate to our role as PR people in participating in social media. In the sense of the “Excellence Theory,” social media should represent the triumph of two-way, symmetrical communication; active engagement of organizations and their stakeholders, seeking mutual benefit. But it seems to me that organizational participation in social media is still largely an asymmetrical game of persuasion, of message sending rather than dialogue. Marketers dominate the conversation online, devaluing PR objectives regarding reputation in favor of metrics focusing on revenue generation. Organizations continue to struggle to find applications for social media inside the enterprise (speaking broadly here; fully aware there are exceptions), as despite efforts to embrace openness and multi-directional communication, command and control is difficult to release.
The dilemma for practitioners is especially acute for agencies and suppliers, and the ad value equivalency debate is an example. AVE has been discredited for years, but is still in common use because many clients demand it. They understand it, and AVE provides a shorthand description that they find useful. The Institute for PR Measurement Commission recently condemned the practice, with one member writing that just because something is popular doesn’t mean it’s right. When a client pays an agency and asks for AVE, we should say “no,” goes that argument. But the fear is that, “If I don’t give them AVE, they’ll go find someone who will.”
On the social media side, should all organizations use social media? What is our ethical responsibility here? I’d be hard pressed to say that everyone should embrace social media. I cannot make that claim, that is, if I care about giving good advice to my client. It’s not much different than telling a client reflexively that they need an intranet, or a newsletter, or a video. I need to understand the client’s objectives before I jump to tactics.
That doesn’t even address the more serious ethical challenges represented by social media.
Look at the Astroturfing issues, from fake blogs to agency staff commenting on client products. Is the free market of ideas and caveat emptor sufficient to rein in those who have no compunction about engaging in such tactics?
I have always been an idealist with respect to media, seeing the years between Edward R. Murrow and Watergate as the pinnacle of journalism, heroic reporters, courageous editors and committed publishers digging for The Truth, all with peerless ethical grounding. The disappearance of even the pretext of objectivity in journalism (reaching its zenith — or nadir — with MSNBC/Fox News/The Washington Post/New York Times) has disgusted me, even as I admit that objectivity was a goal, not a reality according to my own journalism professors. We could aspire to objectivity and embrace fairness, something few media outlets now even attempt, at least by my crude measure.
Certainly the outright failure of the trust equation (media, government, business all suffer), should be laid bare here. One must evaluate the media’s biases and objectives, and caveat emptor reigns there, as well.
People determined to do wrong will find a way if their personal ethical compass permits. Maybe that’s the scariest part of all of this. We’re relying on individuals to manage their own ethics in a time when ethics are subjective, not objective, and right and wrong are relative concepts.
Thinking Theoretically About Social Media
Monday, October 12th, 2009One terrific side benefit of teaching PR Theory and Ethical Practice at Kent State University this fall has been reading a whole lot of interesting work from outstanding PR scholars. William Kennan and Vince Hazleton of Radford University contributed a chapter on internal PR that got me pondering certain aspects of the Social Capital Theory as it might apply to social media.
Two items in particular in their discussion stood out. 1) The existence of a network of connections and its effect on relationships and related outcomes; and 2) Identification, the extent to which people see themselves as connected to others.
The network, the opportunity to send and receive messages that contribute to the creation, maintenance and expenditure of social capital, is a pretty obvious bridge to social media. A fair number of people think that the network is the outcome of social media use, rather than a tool for some other purpose. But let’s stay on target (we could amble down that path for hours…). My own use of social media has focused on this purpose — expand the network and see what effect it has on my ability to forge a new business. The social capital theory indicates that the network itself takes on a role apart from its human factors; that the existence of the network influences relationships and relationship outcomes.
We can see this effect in action when members of one person’s network interact with each other and cross into other networks — not for the specific purpose of dialogue toward an outcome, but merely for the sake of discourse. That discourse creates additional meaning — leading to different understandings among network members.
Secondly, identification might originate with some kind of common interest or purpose, either large or small depending on the specific subject. The organization typically wants its employees to identify strongly with the organization, to feel strongly connected to it — that’s the heart of much employee engagement activity. Social media users appear to identify with other users — being “in the club” commenting on Twitter gives the users a sense of belonging that they find important or pleasurable. That may be one reason, as Mark Schaefer observed, there seems to be cronyism among the social media mavens. Heck, there seems to be cronyism among users of social media in general.
This all leads me to reinforced suspicion about whether social media can replace mainstream media. With a tendency to see social media use as a measure of self-worth (and therefore to see people who don’t use social media as somehow inferior — “they don’t get it!”), the ability of social media to adopt a third-party objective perspective is compromised. We can debate whether any media can be objective — if you have a strong perspective, people will know where you stand, rather than guessing about it — but making caveat emptor work requires some amount of transparency.
Authenticity can’t be a mask, it needs to be real and grounded in personal ethics so that one can judge the source and properly execute “buyer beware.” Otherwise, the identification among members of the network becomes more important than being honest.
