Teaching PR

cluetrainplus10: The 27th thesis

Today we're celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Cluetrain Manifesto by blogging about each of the 95 theses. I chose #27:

"By speaking in language that is distant, uninviting, arrogant, they build walls to keep markets at bay."

OK, let's just admit the obvious: marketers use jargon. David Meerman Scott has written about what he calls "gobbledygook" on more than one occasion. He argues that gobbledygook happens when marketers write about their products instead of writing about why their products will help buyers. Mike Ferguson points out that jargon is a crutch that "keeps you from having to develop any real content." Scott Berkun says marketers and managers use jargon because they "want to be perceived as the best and the brightest, something they know they are not." Ouch. 

In defense of the marketing and public relations people who use jargon: so does everyone else. Here's part of a list from Nick Wright, "human resources-speak" for firing someone:

career alternative enhancement program

dehiring staff

employee reduction activities

implementing a skills mix adjustment

negative employee retention

rectification of a workforce imbalance

redundancy elimination

right-sizing employment

strategic downsizing

vocation relocation policy

I'll never forget the first time I used the term "Google juice" in class, and one of the students incredulously asked, "Wait. Did you just say 'Google juice'?!" So, yeah, we all do it.

But Cluetrain is about organizations and how they interact with people. Its authors argue that instead of companies talking to markets, people should talk to people. As individuals, we already know this: one study of product descriptions on eBay (where average people instead of trained marketers write ads) showed that readability was the most important factor in making a sale. "Buyers prefer a product description where the seller sounds knowledgeable but does not use abbreviations or jargon," the study concludes.*

So that advice I've been giving my public relations students -- "write as if you're talking to people you know" -- turns out to be pretty good. But companies that empower their employees to use social media have a chance to take that advice one step further: they can actually talk to people they really do know (or at least know online).

Will they use language that is "distant, uninviting, arrogant"? Sometimes they will, because we all use jargon sometimes. But I vote we give them a chance.

*Claudia Rawlins and Pamela Johnson, "Selling on EBay," Journal of Strategic E-Commerce, 5:2 (2007). 

The Week's Best, 27 April 2009

• PR Works Podcast: How Nonprofits Use Social Media, via Rebecca Leaman
• Social Media: Plan for Your Entrance AND Your Exit, James S. Walker
• Avoid Naive Networking. Make It Count, Ron Culp
• A Dialog About the Future for Students and Employers: The Upcoming Social Workforce, Jeremiah Owyang
• Corporate Blogs and 'Tweets' Must Keep SEC in Mind, Cari Tuna (via @paulargenti); and 20 Law-Related Questions Every Blogger Should Know, Jonathan Bailey (via @kmatthews)
• Why Google Wants You to Google Yourself, Tom McNichol; and Now You Can Change What Google Says About You, Marshall Kirkpatrick
• Education: The Future of Public Relations, Kareemdz

And, although this is not PR-related, we had a tragedy in Athens this weekend that involved the university community. I'm very proud of the Red and Black's coverage. Start here.

UGA Bateman team scores an Honorable Mention

The results are in and this year's UGA team scored another Honorable Mention in the PRSSA Bateman Case Study Competition. The team's innovative "Game of Life" assembly (150 students), Web site (hundreds of hits, and an average viewing time of more than 5 minutes), and media relations (hits in more than 20 publications and a local TV program, with audiences totalling more than 320,000 people), plus lots of social networking, video viewing and one $500 scholarship awarded must've impressed the judges.

UGA teams have won 3 honorable mentions and a national championship in the last 4 years. Congratulations to Carrie Edwards, Leslie Emanuele, Erin Gentry, Stephanie Perrett, and Selena Robinson for upholding the tradition!

The Week's Best, 20 April 2009

• Publicity and Journalism Career Moves, Richard Grove
• The Personality Project: Women of Personality, Rohit Bhargava and 100 Must-Read Blogs...By Women!, Adam Toren
• How to Prepare for PR in College, Part 1, Nick Lucido
• How to Nail an Interview (videos), Steinar Skipsness (via @ProfChristineS)
• Ashton Kutcher and Evan Williams Talk Twitter with Oprah (video), Adam Ostrow (via @JDEbberly)
• Video Prank at Domino's Taints Brand, Stephanie Clifford
• Fan Communities, Online Content, and the Definition of Plagiarism, Kat French

Grady alum guest post: Working in corporate communications

My third guest post from a Grady alum comes from Amy Mengel, a 2003 graduate who worked at Lockheed Martin after graduation and is now at Latham International. Amy offered to explain how the public relations function interacts with other departments in a corporation, and I thought it was a great idea. Here's Amy's post:

Many PR students begin their careers with a PR agency and so most of their co-workers are also communications professionals. That’s not the case in a corporate communications role, and sometimes you can be the only communications person in your organization. In order to be successful, you need to develop positive working relationships with employees from a variety of other functions—and many of them will have absolutely no idea what you do or why you’re there. So you’ll need to show them how communications can be valuable. Here are just a few of the functions you’ll need to work with in a corporate communications role:

Human Resources
If you’re in an internal communications role, expect to be tied at the hip to the HR team. Not only will you be the department’s channel to employees to communicate company policies and benefits information, but you’re also likely to partner with them on internal events like employee awards banquets, new employee orientation, and professional development sessions. You’ll work especially closely with HR during tough times, like communicating to employees about layoffs or divestitures. Human Resources professionals are focused building a talented, capable workforce for your organization and equipping them with tools and resources to make them successful. That means you, too. As a communicator, make sure that you take advantage of what your organization’s HR department offers: training, feedback, support. Building close working relationships with HR professionals can make it much easier for you to not only get your job done, but also grow and advance in your career.

Legal
You’ve written a case study about your company’s new product launch. It goes to legal for review, and when it comes back it bears little or no resemblance to what you submitted. They’ve added three paragraphs of disclaimers at the end and slashed every adjective you used to describe the product’s features. Sometimes nothing can be more frustrating than working with the legal department, but they’re there for a reason. Companies can get into serious hot water based on something as simple as the wording of product claims. Corporate lawyers are looking to mitigate risk for a company, which can result in some pretty strict guidelines around branding, product claims or statements made to employees. But for the most part, lawyers are good writers and good at parsing abstract information, like legal regulations, into actionable plans. 

Operations Management
The operations team of an organization is who actually gets your organization’s product or service produced, packaged and out the door. You’ll work with them to get the pulse of what’s happening in the organization. You may collaborate with them on projects to help make an operation leaner and more efficient. You’ll probably coach managers on how to improve communication, face-to-face and written, with the employees in their unit. You might work closely with management executives to write business updates that get published to a company intranet or industry trade journal. You could end up drafting talking points for managers to share with employees on a variety of issues. Operations managers can have a variety of backgrounds, everything from engineering to business to arts and humanities. You’ll need to get to know the managers within your organization to figure out how you can be most valuable to them. 

Sales & Marketing
If you’re in a marketing communications role you’ll constantly be connected with the sales and marketing function, and they are often a fun and creative bunch. You’ll work with them to understand your company’s product offerings and develop a communications strategy that touches customers—be it through direct channels, media placements, or industry positioning. You’ll probably collaborate with sales and marketing on new product launches by developing creative marketing copy and case studies for sales literature. You might partner with them to design and develop an interactive trade-show booth and produce video, webinars or presentations for the show. Measurement is extremely important to the sales and marketing function, so you’ll need to make sure that you have metrics in place to judge the success of your communications efforts. The ultimate goal of this department is an increase in revenue, so make sure that your activities are designed to not only raise awareness of your organization’s product or service, but also to drive action and sales.

Finance
If you work for a public company, you’ll be working closely with the finance department to release quarterly earnings statements, develop the annual report, schedule analyst briefings and create communications plans for events like mergers, acquisitions, divestitures and spin-offs. Most finance professionals I’ve worked with are good thinkers and very analytical. They are more comfortable with numbers, spreadsheets and bar charts than words, so often you may find yourself needing to soften or spice up their message. If you don’t work directly with finance in an investor/analyst relations role, you’ll most certainly butt heads with finance when you go over budget on your trade show booth or spend too much on printed materials. In today’s economy, finance departments are keeping tighter-than-ever reigns on spending. The fastest way to create enemies in finance is to blow your budget. Make a budget before you start on an event or communications project and do everything in your power to stay within those parameters. If you might overspend, make sure it’s not a surprise to the finance team at the end of the quarter – let them know where you stand, why you’re over, and where else you can make cuts to even things out.

So that’s a quick rundown of just a few functions that you’ll need to get used to working with if you should find yourself in a corporate communications role (I won’t even get started on IT… working with them could be a post in itself!). The key thing to remember is that you’ll be representing the communications function to these co-workers – so make sure that you show them how valuable our work can be to helping each of these groups meet their goals and enhance your organization.

A student project with real impact: TOMS Shoes campaign

 

Photo courtesy of Lindsey Lamphere

Got an e-mail pitch from UGA student Paige Thompson yesterday about her PR Campaigns team's project (taught by Kaye Sweetser): promoting TOMS Shoes and especially the "One Day Without Shoes" national event tomorrow (April 16). It seems like every day I hear something or other about TOMS Shoes, but I didn't really get it until I looked at the TOMS at UGA Flickr photostream. Now I get it.

TOMS donates one pair of shoes to a child in need for each pair of shoes sold. In just a few years they've donated more than 100,000 pairs. For "One Day Without Shoes," TOMS at UGA is sponsoring a "bare your soles" event at Brumby Beach tomorrow from noon to 6 p.m., where students can jump barefoot on a moonwalk, listen to live music, and walk barefoot to Bolton dining hall in honor of those who go shoeless because they have no choice -- more than 40% of the world, according to Paige's pitch.

I'm a sucker for little kids, and the child in Lindsey's photo won me over. I love seeing a PR Campaigns class work on a project that has not just measurable effects, but real impact on people's lives.

.

The Week's Best, 13 April 2009

• Five Pieces of Advice a PR Grad Must Consider in Today's Job Market, Katherine Strate
• 27 Must Read Tips and Tutorials for Bloggers, Darren Rowse
• Top 5 Most Annoying Things about Social Media in 2009 (So Far), Melanie Seasons
• Is Separating Social and Mainstream Media in Education a Good Idea? Let's Discuss..., Toni Muzi Falconi
• Effective Social Network and Micro-Blog Management (white paper), Burrelles-Luce (via Steven Silvers)
• Coca-Cola: Real Thing or Myth?, Urs E. Gattiker
• Tight on Resources? Deputize Your Brand's Fans, Amy Mengel
• How NATO Wants to Reach the Younger Generation, Fanny Hickish

Grady alum guest post: Don't be a dinosaur

This week's guest post comes from a 1982 Grady grad, Cindy Foster Grace (a.k.a., the one who started it all -- thanks to Cindy for suggesting the alumni posts). Here's her post:

 

On Not Becoming An IBM Selectric. The Tale Of A Would-Be Dinosaur.

Recently, I realized that I could become a dinosaur at the tender age of 49. Things in my field of expertise have changed so radically that it is difficult at times not to feel out of touch.

I suppose I could blame the computer, but it's really not that simple. See, when I graduated

from UGA's School of Journalism in 1982 we had limited media options for marketing and advertising. Things were simple and I understood how they worked (for the most part).

About 1985, we got our first computers at the advertising agency I worked for. In essence, these computers served a word processing function. Our biggest choice was whether or not to have the type appear as lime green or magenta on a black screen and floppy discs really were big and floppy. Don't get me wrong, this was HUGE in that you could save your work. This was a major time-saving breakthrough. Previously, if a presentation had to be reworked or rewritten, you had to start from scratch at the old IBM Selectric typewriter working until 3 am when your eyes became bleary and the bottle of WhiteOut started to get gummy. You'd pass out face down in a Domino's box of cold half-eaten pepperoni pizza only to rise stiff and crabby to start working again at 8 a.m. when the rest of the staff started to show up at the office.

We purchased our first home computer roughly 15 years ago. It was a Gateway with a whopping Pentium 75 and a 14400 modem. We got an internet account, but between you and me, the Internet was pretty lame for those first couple of years. I mostly used it to help Dad with his genealogical research and even then, there wasn't much out there.

 

In the past 10 years, things have changed at warp speed. Technology has exploded and with it, all these new venues for marketing and advertising have opened up. We've gone from broadcast radio and television to streaming real-time broadcasts on the internet, podcasts, social  networking media, viral marketing etc...etc. And it seems to me the possibilities for  communicating are endless so therefore, there is no end in sight to the things I need to learn to stay relevant in my field.

Sure words haven't changed much and writing per se hasn't changed. But the places where writing happens and the audiences you write to have changed enormously and I find myself looking up terms I'm not familiar with on a daily basis just trying to keep up with all the places and ways writing, marketing and advertising take place. In fact, what I consider my "field of expertise," the advertorial piece, is something that is a fairly new phenomenon. I don't remember addressing it at all in my journalism classes, but it is a format I've taken to with alacrity. Being wordy myself, I like having the option of writing in a magazine article format with a marketing slant. But, still this method of advertising and marketing isn't something I've studied formally.

Honestly, in 1982, who would have thought we’d be on the brink of the extinction of the urban newspaper due to increased internet use and falling circulation? Who dreamed of a blogosphere where any self-appointed writer could jump on and churn out opinions without benefit of an editor or apparently even without a copy of the AP Stylebook in one hand and Strunk and White’s Elements of Style in the other? Back then, it was inconceivable that terms like LOL and IDK would become part of the common vernacular.

Of course, that’s all changed and I’ve had to change too. I entered the field of journalism because I viewed it as an occupation where I would continually be exposed to new ideas and new information. I assumed this learning would take the form of investigating the subjects of the various assignments I would handle. I had no idea that staying abreast of the basics in this industry would be a part of this learning process as well.

Graduation is not the end of the journey to learn, it is merely the beginning. Keep your head up. Pay attention to what is going on. Perhaps return to school for a little more formal education (I’m contemplating this option) But know, that after more than two decades, I have discovered that a keen eye on trends can keep you relevant. Otherwise, you’ll become an IBM Selectric…I mean…dinosaur.

The Week's Best, 6 April 2009

• Graduation Is Approaching -- Still Looking for a Job?, Allie Osmar and Five Things I'd Do If I Were Graduating in May, David Griner
• Lessons Learned from an April Fool's Prank, Rashmi Sinha (via @BarbaraNixon)
• Why Are All PR Objectives Objectionable?, Tom Hagley
• Stop Writing About Social Media to Be a Successful Blogger, Rebecca Thorman (via @BillSledzik)
• Bloggers In Handcuffs? U.S. FTC Proposes Legislation on Product Testimonials, David Meerman Scott
• The World's Most Innovative Companies, Fast Company (via @trevoryoung)
• April 7 Is #PSATuesday -- Win My Money For Your Favorite Cause, Bill Handy
• Gomes Offers Advice to Students -- And the Rest of Us (video), Bill Sledzik
• What Are Your PR "Must-Reads"?, Arik Hanson (via @TomOKeefe1)

Grady alum guest post: Scoring an Internship Interview

During April, I'm featuring guest posts from Grady College alumni. First up: Lelia Howze King, a 2006 Grady grad, who knows a thing or two about internships. Not only did she win the 2006 MS&L Atlanta internship challenge, but she reviewed applications for subsequent challenges. Here's her post:

 

A reputable internship is the best foot in the door to agency life – it gives you a chance to prove yourself to some top PR pros, who will often become your best resource for recommendations for entry-level work. But how do you score an invitation to interview with an agency? As someone who has reviewed many internship applications for agency internships (and been an intern myself!), I would like to share with you a little secret: It is easy to tell within a few seconds of reviewing an application whether or not someone is going to be a star intern. How do you make sure you stand out from the crowd?

 

1. Unique Position – As PR professionals, we constantly think about how to best position our clients with the audiences that care about them. It is no different for internship applicants. The applicants who clearly put thought into how to position themselves – almost as if they thought of themselves as a “brand” – are memorable. Think about what qualities or experiences make you unique, and what you bring to the table that others don’t. Are you an expert in something other than PR, such as fundraising or sports? Do you have a dual degree in art history? There really is no formula that decides who gets an internship and who doesn’t, so just be yourself! We want to work with people that we think we can learn from and who will come to the table with new ideas and a fresh perspective.
2. Audience Aware – As mentioned, stand-out applicants make it obvious that they have thought about their audience when filling out applications. Who are you speaking to in this application? The answers that you provide need to be relevant in some way to the job that you want.  While it is great to know that you would love to work for Chanel, Jennifer Aniston or the Atlanta Braves, that type of work is not necessarily what the agency does. With a little research, you can easily demonstrate where you think you could fit in at a company, which makes it easier for employees to envision working with you as well. Keep it professional – no need to reveal extremely personal information!
3. Social Media Status – It takes more than saying that you have knowledge about social media – we want to see what you are doing online! A few applicants really demonstrate how they are using social media tools to their advantage. When we found these applicants on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn (if you don’t know that potential employers do check these sites, here is your reality check), they demonstrated their expertise not only in using those tools, but also in how to promote themselves and their “brands” online. How did they do it? They were easy to find online, and used the sites to post news stories of interest, write insightful blog postings, and demonstrate their Web skills. Think of social media as a huge addition to your application – where there are no rules and no barriers.
4. Solid Writing – It’s very basic. Read over your application, have at least two friends read it over, and your mom, and maybe an unbiased classmate. Incorrect spelling and grammar misuse make you look sloppy! It’s the easiest thing you can to make yourself look good.  Please don’t rely on spell check. We work in communications, and all of us write communications materials daily. Even e-mails need to be professional.

Listening to Women's Voices

One of the benefits of working in a university community is that there are so many opportunities for personal and cultural enrichment -- guest lectures, concerts and plays, and the like. Now in only its third year, Grady's Women's Voices event is fast becoming one of my favorites. Every year the diversity committee puts two women on a stage, allowing them talk about their careers and lives, and their friendship with each other.

This year the speakers were Moni Basu and Teresa Weaver, who for a while both worked at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Moni as an international correspondent and Teresa as book editor. Their conversation was so interesting that I didn't take notes, I just listened.

I did ask a question: "Can you tell us the single best story you've done in your career?" Moni identified her Iraq war coverage generally, and then pointed specifically to a story with an Athens connection. She worked for weeks as an embedded reporter to get into the good graces of a particular sargeant, who finally talked with her and shared his letters to his daughter, who lives here in Athens. Teresa particularly recalled interviewing Toni Morrison at a cafe in New York -- she'd been scheduled for an hour but Toni stayed for two-and-a-half just because they were so involved in the conversation -- and a story about a writer who ran for governor in West Virginia in order to take on the mining companies for blowing the tops of mountains to get at the coal. At one point, she recalled, they were sneaking around a cemetary in the middle of the night to try to get pictures because the mining company wouldn't let them in.

The great thing about these conversations is that you get to see the real person, not the prepared speech or the droning lecture. Their passion for getting the story, and getting it right, shines.