Good news, we’re not laying you off…April Fools!

Happy First of April.

The newspaper business isn’t the only bad industry to work in right now, but it’s still a bad industry to work in. The Chicago Sun-Times filed for bankruptcy this week, after newspapers in Detroit, Seattle and here in Denver either folded or made severe changes to their business model. Are newspapers capable of salvage? Maybe, says Slate’s Daniel Gross, who argues that newspapers are being grossly mismanaged from a business perspective.

AIG: The PR case study continues…

The hits from AIG just keep coming. We’ve covered how criminally bad at PR many of these financial institutions have been in the last six months – so bad that they make the auto industry communications teams look like savants. But now, with news that AIG wants to move forward with paying $165 million in taxpayer money to the geniuses who gave us the credit default swap, things have gotten even worse.

At some point, this is out of PR control. Yes, the Detroit people should’ve stopped their CEOs from getting on separate private jets to ask for more money. But when your CEO insists on handing out $165 million in bonuses – when many folks in the industry are probably just happy with keeping their jobs through 2009 – how do you spin that? You’re going to lose either way. So this time, rather than blasting PR malpractice, I’ll just feel sorry for the poor saps that are forced out to defend the mostly indefensible (from a public perception perspective).

But here’s the best idea I’ve heard today: Get the bonus money back through the tax code. I knew those 3.7 million words had to come in handy at some point.

Get ready for the Energy Efficiency gold rush

The Colorado-based Rocky Mountain Institute recently released a report that rated each U.S. state on their energy efficiency progress and potential. The low-hanging fruit of energy independence, says the RMI and just about every other energy expert, is by cutting consumption through efficiency.

It’s also about to become a very big business. There’s at least $20 billion in the recently passed stimulus bill targeted at efficiency programs, and you can bet there will be plenty more government incentives where that came from. The state of Utah’s efficiency budget is about to get multplied 123 times, according to this New York Times story on the coming energy efficiency wave. Remember, this is money earmarked for projects that have hardly received anything in the past.

The key, of course, is to temper the mad rush for free money by encouraging – or requiring – efficiency programs that will show meaningful results in the long-run, rather than an indiscriminate throw-money-at-the-problem campaign.

But if you’re one of the millions of Americans currently looking for work, you may want to start with your local government’s energy office – they may soon have more money than they’ve ever had, and may need the staff to start spending it.

- Posted by Daniel Welch

Farewell to the Rocky Mountain News

After months of speculation, the E.W. Scripps Co. announced this afternoon that it would close the Rocky Mountain News. The last edition, printed tomorrow morning, will mark an abrupt end for a 150-year Colorado institution. There are some fantastic reporters at the News, and the entire staff has my best wishes for the future.

- Posted by Daniel Welch

Banking CEOs: Even worse than Detroit at PR

Previously on this blog, we expressed some incredulity at how woefully inept at public relations the CEOs of the Big Three automakers seemed to be – and how their in-house PR teams either let them down, or just didn’t have enough influence with the executive team to make a difference.

But Slate makes a good point: While the automaker CEOs are pretty terrible at PR, the banking CEOs are criminally bad. How many AIG-style retreats have to be exposed on the national news before they learn that cable TV has A LOT of time to fill – and they’re just dying for stories that stoke up populist rage (and viewership). And nothing makes people angrier than corporate jets and exotic locales – on the taxpayer dime.

After seeing a few minutes of last week’s hearings, I thought the CEOs were coached relatively well. (To paraphrase Citi’s CEO, Vikram Pandit: “We understand the new rules, and we’re ready to play by them.”)

But this is just meeting the lowest conceivable standard of success. I’m still waiting for some enterprising CEO (backed by a visionary PR team) to make himself/herself the next Lee Iacocca. Rather than just sheepishly agreeing to forego the corporate jet, come up with a big idea, brand it, market it, and make yourself the face of the new way of doing things (i.e. more innovative, less greedy, more aware of the taxpayer’s desires). It’s about risk – after helping to sink the national economy by risking too much on bad investments, now these companies are so risk-averse that they’re content to keep their heads down and stay out of the news until the storm is over.

Right now, almost no one in our society is as reviled as banking executives. And to date, the CEOs are their PR teams have done little but play prevent defense in trying to change that.

Crisis PR – enough work to keep you busy

Staying in sporting world after the last post, it occurred to me this morning that the two biggest sports stories since the Super Bowl are crisis-PR rainmakers:

• New York Yankee Alex Rodriguez admitting he used steroids from 2001 to 2003, after Sports Illustrated reported over the weekend that Rodriguez had tailed a drug test several years ago.
• A picture coming to light of Michael Phelps smoking marijuana, which got Phelps banned from swimming competition for three months, cost him an endorsement deal with Kellogg’s and made him the butt of jokes from Saturday Night Live to Letterman.

To be certain, both Rodriguez and Phelps had publicity people working overtime in the last week trying to minimize the damage. How did they do?

The easier case is probably Phelps. His actual penalties are a slap on the wrist – quick: name a meaningful swimming competition in the next three months. More than anything, this gives NBC the change to worship him a bit more, should he decide to compete in 2012, with a redemptive, back-from-hard-times story (cue the schmaltzy music now). And Kellogg’s probably got a great deal for dropping him: They sold all kinds of cereal to kids when Phelps was a hot name, and now they don’t have to pay him anymore when people care less about a swimmer (which will continue for the next three years). And they get to claim the moral high ground for providing a good example to kids (pay no mind to the sugary cereals we’re advertising during cartoons on Saturday morning, however). More than likely, Phelps will apologize to the children, be more discreet about partying with playmates, and return to glory by bagging some more gold in four years.

We won’t know how Rodriguez’s image people did for years – maybe even for decades. Will he ever be in the Hall of Fame, considering Mark McGwire hasn’t even come close since becoming eligible for the ballot? Like Barry Bonds, Rodriguez already had image problems (i.e., most people hated him already). If he were as well liked as Phelps (and had an entire network like NBC invested in building up his image to make millions for themselves), would he be in the same predicament?

One positive for Rodriguez: More than likely, it was a good move for him to admit it – and fast. The evidence was pretty strong against him, and he risked becoming Barry Bonds II without an act of contrition. Yes, he’ll always have an asterisk beside him for the rest of his career, but there are other players in the league with the same Scarlet Letter.

Free publicity 101: Get banned from the Super Bowl

While I watch the Super Bowl each year, I can’t help but analyze the business decisions that go into the commercials – both in buying the airtime, and in developing the actual advertisement. Often, my reactions are to shake my head (”They just spent $3 million on that??”), but generally I conclude that – even if a commercial seems like a complete waste of money – most of the companies big enough to run ads during the game have teams of people analyzing the ROI.

But, for all the low-brow, gimmicky stunts GoDaddy.com gives us each year (this year it was Danica Patrick playing Suggestive Female #1), the company may have precipitated a trend: Get yourself banned (as GoDaddy claims it was pretty much every year), save the money on the airtime, and get tons of free publicity for the ad instead. This year, it was PETA’s ad about the superior intimate lives of vegetarians. Besides running on cable news networks and all over the Internet, they got an extended spot on The View – not exactly the Super Bowl, but still a pretty highly watched show.

So, advertisers beware: In a couple of years, people are going to be trying to get banned from the Super Bowl so often, it will be white noise. Next year might be your only shot at it, so start thinking about how to put together the raciest, most provocative ad you can muster.

Steve Jobs, you are our only hope…

What’s with the crying out for Steve Jobs in all these struggling industries? First, Tom Friedman makes the point (and it’s a good one) that U.S. car companies haven’t put enough stock in innovation – and that Steve Jobs should come in, shake everything up and create an iCar.

Now, the New York Times has a piece arguing that Jobs (or someone like him) should save the newspaper industry with a news subscription-based business model like iTunes. Reporter David Carr makes a good point: The music industry didn’t like iTunes at first, until they realized it was their best chance at getting anyone to pay for the music they made. Then they signed on as a smaller and humbler lot.

But come on, people – Steve Jobs can only save one industry at a time. But Carr is right in this point: If the news business is going to survive, it’s going to have to win the PR battle over paying. The music industry lost it by suing people who downloaded music illegally. Jobs won it by giving people a business model so smart (and so image-enhancing), they’d gladly pay for what they may otherwise be able to get for free.

A lot of people get it: We will not be able to both have a healthy news business in this country, and to have it all available for free. I don’t think the general public understands that – yet. So the reporter is right that, yes, we need a successful business model. But that needs to be paired with the world’s smartest PR campaign to convince people that – just like putting music in your status-symbol iPhone – it’s cool to pay for something you might be able to get for free.

– Posted by Daniel Welch

People don’t trust corporate blogs. So make yours un-corporate.

Forrester has a report out on corporate blogs with findings that most people probably knew deep down: Most people do not trust corporate blogs – certainly not as much as they trust most other media sources (see table below).

So what to do about this? Forrester notes that they’re not advising companies to stop blogging altogether. Far from it, actually.

The takeaway here for businesses is that the blogs that work are not “corporate-y,” in the pejorative sense. Blogs that are simply regurgitations of press releases will be seen as, well, just that.

The most successful company blogs are ones that – most importantly – give readers something of value. Next, a common trait is that they have a more personal touch than a collection of press releases.  If they can be funny, edgy or irreverent, that’s all the better – although that won’t work for many companies.

If your company doesn’t have a blog, you should consider starting one. But before you do, think about what it will look like. If you can commit to making it interesting and valuable to your audience, you probably should. If you can’t, you might consider not putting it on your 2009 resolutions.

Some Public Relations Campaigns Fail Because They Work Too Well. Just Ask Dr Pepper.

Well, it’s official: the U.S. is in a recession. And as the economy continues to contract and marketing budgets grow tighter, many companies are looking at alternative public relations strategies such as social media and guerrilla campaigns. These strategies are alluring because they often are more cost-effective than traditional media-relations campaigns, and they have the potential, no matter how slight, of being game-changers.  

Unfortunately, some clients, eager to grow their brand awareness or enter discussions relevant to their customers, look for that silver bullet guerrilla campaign without recognizing that success could ultimately be the biggest failure. Dr Pepper reminded us of that this week.

The band Guns N’ Roses famously has been working on its latest album, Chinese Democracy, for 14 years. Eager to tap into the band’s fan base, Dr Pepper last March announced a guerrilla marketing campaign that would give a free Dr Pepper to “everyone in America” if the band released the album in 2008. That part of the campaign was successful – the media coverage was significant. 

Unfortunately, as it turned out, Guns N’ Roses finally finished the album and released it last week. Dr Pepper, suddenly eager to limit its financial exposure, announced that people who wanted their free sodas would have to download a coupon from the company’s Web site during a 24-hour window it established. You can imagine the result. Servers were overloaded and crashed, fans were furious and some blamed the band, and Guns N’ Roses threatened to sue Dr Pepper if the issue wasn’t made right immediately. 

Dr Pepper had developed a breakthrough guerrilla campaign, but then managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Instead of accepting the fiduciary responsibility of the guerrilla campaign, it tried to cheapskate itself through it, and in the end turned itself into the bad guy. 

The lesson is clear: guerrilla campaigns can burn you because they don’t work, and they can burn you because they work too well. And just because it doesn’t cost anything to make the announcement doesn’t mean it doesn’t cost anything to follow through. And the success of these types of campaigns will be determined by the follow-through. 

– Posted by Jeremy Story

Big 3 PR teams, give me a break!

I don’t pretend to know what the best answer is for Detroit’s conundrum. Knowing the course of action that will give the best result in 2, 10, and 50 years is different than having some strong political beliefs for or against the bailout – and Lord knows we have no shortage of strong political beliefs. There’s a difference between ardently believing in your position and being certain that it’s the best course of action (but, as I write on my other blog, www.coloradoalternativeenergy.com, you should watch Who Killed the Electric Car? and research both sides of history to determine for yourself if past will indeed be prologue).

But this much I know: The PR folks at the Big 3 are not doing their jobs. I feel like Keith Olbermann, but indulge me this “Special Comment”:

Communications teams of the Big 3, today was one of the most important days in your company’s history. Your CEOs testified before Congress begging for $25 billion in taxpayer money to keep your company afloat. Legislators on both sides of the aisle are under major pressure to turn you down or face angry constituents who wonder why you kept making F-150s when Toyota undressed you with its Prius. Your companies have fought fuel-efficiency standards and dragged your feet until they were stuck in quicksand. You asked for money to innovate(!!).

Granted, most of this is probably not your fault. But – inexplicably – YOU LET YOUR CEOS FLY THEIR PRIVATE JETS TO CONGRESS TODAY.

Did you not consider that this might reach the public’s attention, and that the public might find it…bothersome?? Did you not see the public fallout over AIG’s lavish retreats? With the growing outrage over CEO pay, you let your CEOs reinforce the message to the American people that they just don’t get it.

GM’s CEO, Richard Wagoner, was quoted on camera today saying he had to take the corporate jet because he came straight from other meetings in Detroit. You should have told him he needs to cancel those other meetings, go to Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County airport, buy a round-trip ticket to Reagan, and pay for a cab with cash. Sure, some people would have derided this as a hokey stunt. But you could live with that. It’s like when presidents visit disaster zones wearing jeans and shirts with their sleeves rolled up. They’re not going to fill sandbags – but they feel your pain. The one thing they wouldn’t be able to say about you? They couldn’t say that you didn’t get it, that you didn’t understand the hypocrisy of asking for taxpayer bailouts while taking in $14 million last year (as Wagoner did) and hopskotching the globe on a private jet.

A lot of people believe that the Big 3 find themselves in this predicament because they’re poorly run. Today, the communications teams of these companies did nothing to dispel that notion.

- Posted by Daniel Welch

The growing greenwash backlash

This month, England’s advertising regulatory body forced Lexus to pull an ad it said made false claims about the car’s environmental impact. In the ad, Lexus claimed that the car (the RX 400h) was “perfect for today’s  climate.” The issue, according to the regulators, was that the ad “was likely to reinforce the impression that the car caused little or no harm to the environment and was unlikely to clarify for readers that the headline claim was intended to refer to the economy as well as the environment.”

Environmental marketing firm TerraChoice lists six sins of greenwashing. The most common of these is a “hidden trade-off” – claiming something is green in one way, while neglecting to mention other, less-friendly effects. Above, Lexus was charged with committing the sin of vagueness.

Consumers are rapidly becoming more savvy about greenwashing – one TerraChoice survey found greenwashing in 99 percent of products. And while consumers can file complaints with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the agency hasn’t taken significant action on a greenwash advertisement in eight years.

With the expected push toward green energy and general green-ward tilt expected from the Obama Administration, we can expect some sort of government attention – particularly as eco-savvy consumers grow more numerous and more vocal. What this government intervention will comprise, however, is at this point hard to read – yet forward-thinking companies will keep an eye on the changing landscape.

- Posted by Daniel Welch

CNN ‘iReporter’ Program Puts Profits Before Accuracy

It’s not easy being a journalist these days. In a little more than a generation, we have seen journalism evolve from Woodward and Bernstein to TMZ.com, and respectable journalists are having to fight harder and harder to keep legitimate news on the figurative and literal front pages.

As if that weren’t bad enough, media outlets are suffering from an extraordinarily weak economy that is depressing advertising sales. The result is that media companies are shedding jobs at an alarming rate, and many journalists with highly focused areas of expertise (especially in technology) are taking their efforts online as bloggers. Think Om Malik, Tom Foremski and Dan Gillmor.

The corollary to that, though, is a new breed of “journalist” employed by media companies – The Web 2.0 journalist. These journalists meet the basic needs of media companies – they are ubiquitous, so they can cover everything, and they are free, which fits the new media business model.

Unfortunately, they are not necessarily accountable, as CNN found out this month when one of its “iReporters” created a mini-panic on Wall Street by reporting that Apple CEO Steve Jobs had suffered a heart attack. Apple shares quickly dropped 9.5 percent before Apple was able to refute the story and CNN pulled it. Experts speculate that the iReporter held a short position in Apple stock, and wanted to ensure he or she made money by having the stock drop in value.

In a different era, this kind of gaffe would immediately result in the termination of the iReporter program, which allows nearly anyone to create and post “news reports” that appear on the CNN.com homepage. Instead, CNN was quick to minimize the story, and keep its iReporter program alive.

In it’s less-than-balanced self-coverage of the incident, CNN quoted CUNY journalism professor Jeff Jarvis: “It’s a mistake to say this indicates some type of larger problem. People start rumors on Wall Street all the time. Anyone with any sanity would have said ‘I’m going to check that out’, not ‘I’m going to sell all my stock’.”

And many would have, if they had realized at the time that CNN wasn’t a name they could trust. Clearly, in today’s media environment, CNN has put profits over accuracy.

– Posted by Jeremy Story

Going back in time

This is one of the cooler things I’ve seen in a long time. To celebrate its 10th anniversary, Google linked its oldest available search index, from January 2001.

Type in “Barack Obama,” and you get information about a state senator from Illinois. “Sarah Palin” results in … nothing. The same with “9/11 terrorist attacks.” “Hurricane Katrina” was just a short-lived tropical storm in 1999 before the next iteration devastated the Gulf Coast.

The list goes on and on. You could easily waste an hour here, and it’s a weird feeling – almost as if you’re wandering through an alternative universe in which the last 7.5 years didn’t happen. Sort of like Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future. (”Ronald Reagan is president.” “Ronald Reagan – the actor??”)

It’s a world before Hannah Montana, the iPod, the last two Star Wars movies, Sarbanes-Oxley, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the Iraq War, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, Facebook, Kevin Federline, when you could meet people at the gate in the airport and buy a gallon of gas on Memorial Day weekend for $1.70. Think of how inconceivable it would have been at the time to think that in the next several years, passenger airliners would take down the Twin Towers, we would be engaged in two wars, a hurricane would wipe out one-third of a major U.S. city, and Arnold Schwarzenegger would be the governor of California.

Along for the ride

If you think of the top storylines surrounding the situation in the financial markets in the last two weeks, the ones that come most readily to mind are likely:

1. Is John McCain a hero, a patriot, a fool or a showboat for suspending his campaign?
2. Will the debate take place?
3. Why should we bail out the people who got us into this mess in the first place?
4. If we don’t bail them out, what will happen to the rest of our economy?
5. Does Sarah Palin understand what’s going on?
6. Can Joe Biden keep his foot out of his mouth?
7. Is it hypocritical McCain is now so strongly for regulation, after being against it virtually his entire political career?
8. Should Obama have suspended his campaign as well?

I have to say, this has been one of the more fascinating weeks to be a media observer in recent memory. Now, this should not be mistaken for any enjoyment in the real-life stress and misery many people are feeling (and increasingly will feel) as a result of the financial markets – yet, these stories are generally buried by the eight angles above. But the combination of misinformation, hyperbole and a generally poor grasp of the issue make for a wild week of news.

Jon Stewart had a great bit on The Daily Show this week spotlighting the dramatic words (”apocalypse,” “meltdown,” “hurricane”) broadcast types like to throw out there to show their audience JUST HOW BIG A PROBLEM THIS SITUATION REALLY IS!!!!!!

But it goes further than that. Many of these financial instruments are so complex, it’s virtually impossible for a journalism grad (or most other grads, for that matter) to grasp anything more than a general definition and understanding of them – “credit default swaps” are far beyond the wheelhouse of all but a very tiny number of Americans, and it’s clear that very, very few of these Americans are in the news business. (And it doesn’t take a scholar to note that the people who invented these instruments likely had an insufficient understanding of their disastrous consequences.)

But what do I know? I’m one of the 99.99 percent of Americans along for the ride, forced to take the experts at their word and wondering what will happen next.

In case this is goodbye…

The European Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be started tomorrow at about 1:30 a.m. Denver time. Physicists underneath the French-Swiss border will shoot tiny particles at very high speeds and watch them bang into each other. It is hoped that this new experiment won’t create a black hole of some sort and have Western Europe vanish into a parallel universe. The good news, of course, is that if this happens, it will probably be so quick that we won’t know about it.

We’re all very excited about finding the Higgs boson, and perhaps a Standard Model that would answer pretty much every scientific question in the universe. But at $8 billion, the LHC better find some pretty amazing and wacky stuff.

The LHC renders FermiLab in Illinois even more impotent. FermiLab was responsible for making some great discoveries a few decades ago, but hasn’t made a big finding since the first Clinton administration. That hasn’t stopped Congress from getting confused about whether or not these experiments will protect us from the Global War on Terror, however, and throwing hundreds of millions of dollars each year to keep the lights on and physicists employed.

But let’s be positive today, since who knows what will happen tomorrow? It might be a good idea to call your mother this evening, just in case.

- Posted by Daniel Welch

Sign of the times

Google “gas prices” and undoubtedly hundreds of articles in the last day will pop up. Politicians pandering about Americans who are having to make sacrifices because of the high cost of fuel, Americans complaining about having to make sacrifices because of the high cost of fuel, etc.

While times are undoubtedly tough for a large percentage of Americans, apparently that has not slowed the sale of televisions, which are up across the board. Sign that consumer spending is not yet shaken, or sign that Americans would rather stop driving than give up their TVs?

- Posted by Daniel Welch

What McCain and Obama do on long plane rides

Well, I’m not smart enough to solve the world’s energy crisis. At least that’s what I learned from Chevron’s simulation game, “Energyville,” also known as, “So, Wise Guy, If You’re So Smart, Let’s See You Figure it Out.”

Reminiscent of the urban-planning game SimCity, Energyville challenges users to balance environmental, economic and safety considerations and create a harmonious society of 3.9 million citizens, where everyone has the affordable power they need and the skies are blue all the time.

Despite all the talk (both in business and in politics) of the need to weigh our energy options against each other, I’d guess that a huge percentage of Americans are woefully undereducated on the costs and benefits of these choices – with the current debate over offshore drilling as a good example. Kudos to Chevron for creating a way to engage the public without making it so shamelessly transparent in its presentation of facts that people view it as a propaganda piece.

(By way of the Denver Post)

- Posted by Daniel Welch

Google unveils Insights for Search

Google Trends has long been a powerful tool for those of the marketing persuasion, allowing you to analyze how often certain search terms are entered into Google’s massive database. For instance, this morning’s hottest search terms include “Paris Hilton commercial” (made in response to John McCain’s campaign ad), and “Mauritania” (where a military coup apparently ousted the country’s leadership).

Today, the company unveiled an extension of that program, called Insights for Search, which allows users to parse the data into more specific categories – including geography, seasonality or word usage.

- Posted by Daniel Welch

Technology raises person-avoidance to new heights

When I was in college, we were able to leave something called a “silent message” on dorm phones. You could call another number on the campus system, but rather than having to talk with the other person, you could elect to leave a silent message, which would activate the blinking orange light signifying a voicemail on their phone. It was good for late-night pranks, non-urgent questions, or those moments when you hope the other person doesn’t pick up because you’d prefer to leave a voicemail.

I always thought text messages were kind of funny in this way – while there’s a time and place where they’re convenient, often texts seem to be excuses to avoid calling (it takes less time to speak a sentence than text it).

Now, it turns out that there is a service that can help you avoid all this awkwardness of actually talking to another person: a service that allows you to jump directly to the recipient’s voice mail.

Thank you, technology. Next, please make all conversations of every type completely unnecessary.

- Posted by Daniel Welch