Monthly Archives: June 2010

Wine, Roses, and Oil: PR and the Truth

Posted on by
1

Days of Wine and RosesLast night I happened to watch  Days of Wine and Roses, a Jack Lemmon-Lee Remick movie from 1962 that, perhaps because of the overexposed theme song, I had resisted for years.

My mistake.  It is a powerful, compelling story of an alcoholic couple whose refusal to acknowledge their alcoholism destroys their relationship. For a movie made nearly 50 years ago, it remains remarkably relevant, not just for its treatment of addiction, but also, surprisingly, for its critique of corporate marketing and PR.

It’s no coincidence that Jack Lemmon’s character works in public relations. In his career, as in his personal life, he papers over the ugly truth until it’s too late. The parallel becomes clear when Lee Remick takes Lemmon to introduce him to her father, played by Charles Bickford. When Bickford asks what Lemmon does for a living, things go rapidly downhill.  Watching the exchange, it’s hard not to think of British Petroleum’s disastrous handling of the Gulf oil spill.

Charles Bickford: What kind of work you do?

Jack Lemmon: Um, uh, public relations.

CB: Public relations?

Lee Remick: Uh, you know, Daddy, um, well, uh, it’s hard to explain.

JL: Well, err, I, I suppose you might say my job is, uh, to sort of help my client, uh, create a public image, uh, by—well, for an example, um, let’s say my client—Corporation X!—uh, does some good. Or something of, uh, benefit to the public, or something that could conceivably be conceived as, uh …. benefit to the uh… Well, my job is to see that the public, uh, knows it.

CB: And what if this X Corporation does something bad?

JL: Well . . . . [chuckles nervously] Well, theoretically they don’t . . . um, theoretically. Well, uh, part of my job is to, uh, help my client to, um, to think of ways to operate, uh, in a way that the public would, you know, approve.

CB: But if your X Corporation makes a mistake, and the thing turns out bad?

JL: Well, uh, haha! I guess I try to make it look not quite so bad. [chuckles nervously]  Well, there’s more to it than that, sir, actually—

LR: It’s terrifically complicated, Daddy.

CB: I don’t understand that kind of work.

The movie holds out hope for alcoholics through the intercession of Alcoholics Anonymous. It offers no similar shot at redemption for corporate PR. This was, after all, the 1960s, the zenith of corporate marketing and advertising (think Mad Men). PR was about controlling the message, not addressing the truth.

Now, though, in the era of social media and content marketing, corporate communications is increasingly less about “control over your messaging,” as Frank Reed put it recently, and more about “telling the truth and being accountable.”

As the movie shows, and as, one hopes, corporations are learning, the failure to face up to the truth and acknowledge your mistakes only compounds and delays your day of reckoning.

Ethics: Transparency Is Not All

Posted on by
1

In a comment today on a recent B2B Memes blog post, “Content Marketing’s PR Problem,”  a reader by the dubious name of Ant Miles raises an interesting point about content marketing and journalism. As Miles notes, journalism is often biased in hidden ways by PR and marketing. In content marketing, that bias tends to be more transparent. So in the latter case, “cynical audiences will see overly biased content for what it is—PR by another name—and treat it as such.”

In this view, transparency is not in itself a guarantee of ethical content.  Rather, by disclosing the potential for conflict, it raises the bar for content creators. And by giving readers a reason to distrust them, it requires them to work that much harder to produce ethical content that will earn back that trust. As Miles puts it, “the art to great content marketing must then be, through the very act of providing neutral, targeted content . . . to position the company as a trusted information source for the future, to earn the respect of the audience through truthful content.”

What interests me in this comment is the way transparency, volitional or not, is viewed as the starting point of ethical content, not the end point. That distinction isn’t always clear.

Not much has been written yet on ethics in content marketing, but what has focuses largely on transparency. For Rex Hammock, for instance, transparency is the only constant of ethics:

“Transparency—a clear explanation of the sponsorships and relationships involved in the development and presentation of any media—is the foundation (or high ground) that must be adhered to whenever determining whether or not something is ethical. Frankly, beyond that, ethical standards are a negotiation between media creator and media receiver.”

To old-media minds, the idea that ethical standards are negotiable is offensive. Content creators, they would say, should not shirk their ethical responsibility by transferring it to the reader.

From the new-media perspective, however, that is a paternalistic argument aimed at maintaining control of the medium. The interactivity inherent in conversational media means the reader is not simply a passive recipient of information, but shares ethical responsibility.

While I agree with the new-media perspective as Hammock expresses it, there’s a danger to it. It’s too easy to leap to the conclusion that you don’t need anything more than transparency to guarantee ethical content.

As Mitch Joel says, and as I think Hammock would agree, it’s not true that you can do whatever it takes to get your point across as long as you are transparent about your intent:

“That is, simply, not the case. All cannot be forgiven by just waving your hand over a piece of advertising posed as real content and saying, “paid,” “sponsored” or “advertising” on it.”

Without specifying what it takes to get there, Joel says that credibility is the ultimate goal, and that’s much harder to achieve than transparency. As he puts it, “if you can build your brand by starting off with a foundation of transparency and then think about what you can do to create those real interactions between real human beings—understanding that this is a long road—you are well on your way.”

We might say then that transparency is the foundation of ethical content, but there must be a superstructure of walls and roof beams as well. Building that superstructure involves a lot of work and interaction with the audience.

Whether the architecture is always negotiable or involves some other constant principles is up for debate.  But this much is clear: Transparency is not all.

Advice to the Re-Employed: Think Freelance

Posted on by
1

Imagine for a moment (and this may not be a stretch for many readers) that you’ve been self-employed for a year or so after a layoff put you out on the streets. You’ve put a decent freelance or consulting career together, gotten hip to the value of personal branding, and learned or relearned the enormous value of autonomy in your work life.

Now, though, you’ve had a tempting job offer you’d be crazy not to take, so you do.

Do you stop thinking like a freelancer and start acting like an employee? Twenty years ago, your answer probably would have been yes. Certainly that would have been your new employer’s expectation.

Today, though, there’s a good chance you would take your free-agent mentality into your new job, and with your new boss’s blessing.

Two blog posts today brought this to mind, one from the employee’s point of view, the other from management’s.

Seth Godin’s challenge to the employed is not to realize that you work for yourself—which you should know by now—but to start acting like it. As he reminds us, “the idea that you are a faceless cog in a benevolent system that cares about you and can’t tell particularly whether you are worth a day’s pay or not, is, like it or not, over.”

And Dan Pink, in a fantastic animated presentation highlighted today by Adam Tinworth, tells management that what motivates employees isn’t money, but three key personal factors: mastery, autonomy, and purpose. As he shows, the self-directed employee is the most productive and creative.

So if you find yourself in this scenario, think of your new job as an extended self-employment gig. In both good ways and bad, that may be exactly what your new employer is expecting.

The Great Ghost-Blogging Debate

Posted on by
4

As he does so often and so well, Mark Schaeffer has sparked yet another fascinating debate on his blog today. Reviving a topic addressed last March by Jon Buscall and Mitch Joel, he argues against their position that CEOs should not use ghost writers for their blogs. While Schaeffer agrees with them in theory, in practice, he says, “ghost blogging” is routine. It’s a waste of energy, he concludes, to argue against it. Instead, the focus should be on improving ghost blogging, not deprecating it.

It may be true that it’s pointless to fight this trend, but the debate, to my mind, should be over whether it really works. It’s probably too early to say, but I’m inclined to bet that in the huge majority of cases, ghost writing and social media are fundamentally incompatible.

A lot depends, of course, on the extent and nature of the ghost writing. If it consists mostly of brainstorming, outlining, or light editing services, that’s helping the writer find his or her voice, not faking it. But let’s assume we’re talking about something closer to the extreme of a CEO who says “Here’s my idea. Write something.”

As Schaeffer notes, that’s not so different from the way many CEOs produce their speeches, annual-report letters, and autobiographies. So why, he asks, “do so many people seem to want to put blogs in a different class of writing?”

Curiously, though, his following sentence seems to do just that:  “In the world of corporate communications it could be argued that blogs are even less important and critical than a major speech or a document being submitted to the SEC.”

Well, yes, precisely. Blogs are less critical, because they constitute a different class of discourse. Most people do not expect blogs to be carefully articulated legal documents or corporate position statements. Rather, they expect some personal reflection, an unvarnished and informal expression of an idea. A blog should be driven by passion and conviction, not precise phrasing or good grammar.

If a CEO doesn’t care enough to write his or her own blog, why pretend to? Maybe, just maybe, a blog isn’t a good idea for most CEOs.  There’s a reason that the Fake Steve Jobs has a blog and the real one doesn’t.

So for me, it’s not a question of whether CEOs have the right to use ghost writers. Nor do I think writers should feel tainted by ghosting. In the end, what matters is whether ghost blogging is effective. Without the commitment to blogging that writing it yourself represents, the answer will almost always be no.

The Coming Content Marketing-Publishing Continuum

Posted on by
6

Writing on Foliomag.com earlier this month, blogger Josh Gordon spun a comment heard at the Folio: show into a bullish prediction for print magazines. Although the grounds for his optimism might be questioned, I’ll leave that to prophet of print doom Private Frazer and others. What interested me most in Gordon’s premise was a point he didn’t follow up—the potential convergence, whether in print or online, of traditional publishing and content marketing.

The comment that keyed Gordon’s column came from Kerry Smith, CEO of Red 7 Media (publisher of Folio:, by the way). As reported by Gordon, Smith said that even as direct revenue from print is declining, the medium is becoming more valuable. The reason for this, he said, is that “his magazines are most often the first point of contact leading to the sale of all the other services he is now selling.”

Gordon went on to observe that “today, publishers of all kinds are using the presence they have in their markets to start related businesses.”  That is to say, publishers are becoming content marketers.

As Gordon pointed out, this is not a new trend. But what was once, for most magazines, a tiny ancillary-revenue slice is now making up an ever-growing share of the total pie.

Now let’s suppose that as this trend develops among traditional publishers, a reverse trend takes root among content marketers. As the media content marketers produce get more and more sophisticated, advertising and even paid subscriptions will likely become viable revenue streams.

It isn’t difficult to imagine a future in which instead of a sharp distinction between content marketing and publishing there is a continuum.

On one end is the pure publishing model, in which all revenues come from advertising and subscriptions.

On the other is pure content marketing, where the money is entirely in sales of products and services.

In between is the increasingly crowded spectrum of publishers selling products and content marketers selling advertising and subscriptions.

It’s trendy for content marketers to say that we’re all publishers. Soon it may be just as hip for publishers to declare that we’re all content marketers.