the ever curious PR guy

Paul Argenti bully on PR

Really great "On the Case With..." PRSA profile with Paul Argenti. He has great fundamental lessons to think about. More PRSA profiles HERE.

Name:  Paul Argenti

Childhood ambition:
To be a heart surgeon — I was pre-med until junior year in college

Current livelihood:
Professor of corporate communication at the Tuck School of Business

What changed (i.e., how you became interested in public relations):
I couldn’t stand the sight of blood! I changed my college major at Columbia University from biology to English and went into a Ph.D. program at Brandeis University to become an English professor. Jobs for English professors were hard to come by in the late 1970s — I was blessed to find a two-year appointment teaching “Written and Oral Communication” at the Harvard Business School. I needed more education in business, and went back to Columbia to get my M.B.A. in marketing. The two combined made for a good foundation to start my career.

First public relations job:
Assistant professor of communication at the Tuck School

What you know now that you wish you’d known then:
How fast time goes by — the secret of life is learning to enjoy the passage of time

Best piece of advice you’ve ever received:
My mentor in graduate school told me to forget about being an English professor — that was definitely the right choice for me.

Greatest professional accomplishment:
Getting a Fulbright Scholarship early in my career and my textbook, “Corporate Communication” — out in its sixth edition next year

If you weren’t in public relations, you would be:
A jazz pianist — I love music

Desired legacy:
That I helped my students think about changing the world rather than moving another widget out the door

Make a “business case” for public relations:
Communication is the only way to execute strategy. You can’t execute it if you can’t communicate it. If more senior executives thought about that, then they might do things differently.

via www.prsa.org

 

What if theater was the only medium for PR?

via www.usatoday.com

This book is next in my reading list. Great review HERE.

I like it when the review outlines author Roger Parry' 16 main media types: theater, books, pictures, posters, postal systems, newspapers, magazines, comics, telegraph, telephone, recorded sound, radio, cinema, television, video games and the Web.

Exercise: let's pretend we are public relations professionals in a world of theater only. How would we leverage theater to do our work?

 

Re-imagining the public relations profession, four principles by Richard Edelman

Richard Edelman delivered a really inspiring speech at the Institute for Public Relations' Annual Distinguished Lecture and Awards Dinner on the need to clearly define the public relations profession around 4 key principles: Drive the operating strategy; practice radical transparency; take full advantage of democratized media; and attract and develop talent with broad skills. The speech is available for download here.

Here are some lines I found myself underlining when I read the speech:

• Quoting Peggy Noonan: "Here is the fact of the age ... People believe nothing. They believe everything is spin and lies. When people believe nothing, they believe everything."
• "In this age of complexity, public relations can guide business better than any other discipline."
• Quoting Bill Nielsen: "We need to define the character of PR around agreed values and responsibilities. If we don't do this, others will continue to define PR for us, miscast what we do and encroach our space."
• "Public engagement reflects the evolution of business as a positive force in society and calls for business to participate meaningfully in the continiuous global conversation ... Public engagement is policy and communication unified to realize the full aspiration of PR."
• "We must aim to make public engagement the standard of our industrty."
• A call to action: "For the balance of the decade, our goal will be to elevate public relations as a management discipline that sits as a full partner aside finance, operations, legal, marketing and strategic leaders in the C-Suite. We need to offer coherent strategy born of research and agile execution of creative that we lead."

 

Prophet’s 2010-2011 U.S. Reputation Study and thoughts on energy

via www.prophet.com

By way of a recent post from the Institute for Public Relations ("Where Should PR Sit in an Organization"), I learned about Prophet's US Reputation Study, which can be viewed HERE. PDF version of the study HERE.

I liked one of the study's takeaway points:

"As developments over the last two years have reinforced, reputation drivers are influenced by macro-economic forces and industry-specific factors. This makes it critical to be mindful of these circumstances in managing a reputation program. While half of the leading reputation drivers were consistent across 2009 and 2010, those that changed centered on the “macro” forces that impact all industries (e.g., pacesetter attributes like openness and behaving in an ethical manner)."

I think reputational drivers in the energy industry are heavily influenced by macro-economic forces and industry-specific factors, and I think most people realize this. However, I find mostly that how one defines "industry" ends up affecting whether one succeeds in navigating this reputational challenge.

For example, one can view the oil & gas industry as separate from the clean energy industry, and I think most companies operating in either camp insulate themselves as such, which may make sense from a purely "operational" perspective. However, this does not make sense at all from a reputational perspective if one thinks about what stakeholders expect, which is for pretty much every sector of the energy industry to be "clean" and working toward full sustainability from energy production and delivery (and "usage" too for those companies working in this emerging area of the energy business value chain).

This expectation may be unreasonable (one may think our energy system will not be fully "clean" for some time). However, if a company completely ignroes this stakeholder expectation and does not manage it in a strategic way, chances are the company may not survive in the future.

Thus in the end, in looking at industry-specific reputational factors, I think you have to cast a much wider net in your thinking about "industry."

 

Corporate reputation lesson from 1800's wild west saloon

Note the letters are made from snake rattles.

 

The story is financial hacking, not the company

The important issue is recognizing that Wall Street is no longer what it was designed to be.  Wall Street was designed to be a market to which companies provide securities (stocks/bonds), from which they received capital that would help them start/grow/sell businesses. Investors made their money by recognizing value where others did not, or by simply committing to a company and growing with it as a shareholder, receiving dividends or appreciation in their holdings.  What percentage of the market is driven by investors these days ?

via blogmaverick.com

This post HERE by Mark Cuban finally helped me understand why I have been so uninspired by business stories and business news, and why it has become very difficult to get great company stories in the news and public discussion.

That's because the discussion is so much around the macro issues (problems, mainly) that come about because of the super complex trading schemes and products designed to win the stock market game. So the stories end up being not about single companies that are kicking butt and taking names, but instead about the issues that end up affecting ALL companies. Hardly the kinds of stories that real people can listen to and be inspired to create and grow businesses.

 

You can't buy creativity, you have to inspire it

Of course companies need to pay people well. If they don't, compensation becomes a bone of contention, and a distraction from their work. But if you really want outstanding creative performance, you need people to focus on intrinsic motivations - factors inherent in the work itself. Things like challenge, interest, learning, meaning, freedom, and creative flow. They are what really motivates creative people - and the research demonstrates a strong link between levels of intrinsic motivation and creativity.

via the99percent.com

Great article HERE on the realities of working with creatives (of all types, not just "artsy") and how to motivate them to do great work.

I am a big believer in inspiration as a driver of good work. Sharing inspiration with a team is not easy to do, and frankly many in the corporate world seem to consider it kind of wimpy, or at least consider it difficult to get "inspirational." I once was laughed at during a meeting when a manager asked me what I wanted to get out of a meeting addressing a reorganization and the challenge of doing your work while your position is under review.

"I hope to get inspired," I answered. They laughed.

 

Communications key to energy company survival

Whether you’re a multi-national oil and gas company, a power utility, a wind energy operator or an offshore tidal wave energy start-up – any company that produces energy – at some point you’ll be confronted with the realization recently experienced by Mark Miller.

Mark Miller is CEO of UK-based Cuadrilla Resources, an exploration and production company specializing in unconventional oil and gas. One day recently Cuadrilla was working the UK’s only shale gas drilling project, when suddenly the British Geological Survey alerted Cuadrilla that a 1.5-magnitude quake within approximately 1 mile of the drilling site had been detected (an earthquake of magnitude 1 is described by the British Geological Survey as "not felt - detected by seismic instruments only," while magnitude 2 is "felt by very few people").

The British Geological Survey suggested the earthquake was caused by Cuadrilla’s use of hydraulic fracturing to drill the deep, gas-bearing rock. Although no direct connection between the earthquake and the use of hydraulic fracturing has been proved, Cuadrilla’s project is on hold until the company can convince regulators that it can continue to drill safely.

Following up on Cuadrilla’s efforts to straighten out the situation, The Wall Street Journal recently reported:

"Meanwhile, Mr. Miller began a series of public meetings to try to calm local jitters. The Cuadrilla CEO says he didn’t expect to be quite so much in the public eye. 'I thought it would all be about well design and raising finance,' he says. 'Sometimes you feel like you’re a spokesman for the global oil and gas industry.' "

The old-school energy industry mentality is: bring the financial, operational and technical means to deliver your business. You win if you watch the cost and produce a greater surplus of revenues. Communicate externally only when you really have to, mostly when a crisis occurs.

The new-school energy industry mentality is: Instill confidence that you can deliver your business by productively dealing with the myriad people who are interested in you, like customers, employees, suppliers, partners, the government, local communities, the energy talking heads and social media chatterers, and the general public. This requires a lot of communications and the skill set to manage, but it is a change in what value means for any energy company.

 

Reputations are built on doing

"You can't build a reputation on what you're going to do." - Henry Ford

I would expand on Mr. Ford's quote by saying that "you can't build a reputation by talking about what you're going to do." This applies to both people and organizations and companies.

Another one would be "it is pretty hard to build a reputation by talking about what you're doing (assuming you started doing the thing)." You have to find a really good and creative way to share your doings. Lots of organizations do great things but don't share them and no one notices. Sharing does not equal simply communicating.

... 

 

Algorithms in communications and public relations

Think of communications as algorithms, a collection of proven plans or instructions to help get you from point A to point B.

Say your organization is having an image problem around a specific issue. You hire a professional communicator or public relations expert to come up with an "algorithm" -- a plan, a solution, an idea --  that takes specific variables and formulas as given realities and then goes to work.

It used to be that the notion of an algorithm was around speed and efficiency to get around a mathematical task or problem. Like, say, sorting numbers in a particular order in less than a nanosecond, like this sorting algorithm at work:

So, look at our world today, and the digitization of our "social" life (think Facebook, Google, etc.). No longer is digital helping us crunch the numbers, it is now an intermediary between our own selves. 

As our social lives continue to depend more and more on machines run by algorithms, how are the algorithms assuming what you and I are all about? How are the machines figuring out how we need to be communicated to or with? What biases do they think we have and prefer? How do they help us, or not help us, unlearn biases? What is the overall purpose of specific "social" algorithms?

I don't know the answer, but this video made me think of that.