Force For Good Communications

Own up to your company identity when joining in an on-line conversation

For public relations people looking to stick your toes in the ocean of consumer-generated media: remember that participating in the blogosphere requires full disclosure.

An active chatboard, blog or Twitter discussion centered around your product or company, or at least your industry, might benefit from the perspective of someone knowledgeable. Chances are good you have something meaningful to add to the conversation. But tread lightly, introducing yourself candidly as a spokesperson for your company. Don't get argumentative and certainly don't belittle those who you don't agree with.

In other words, don't follow the example of Raymond Ridder, PR Director for the Golden State Warriors, who anonymously posted pro-management comments on a chatboard that had gone negative on those running the Warriors.

Ridder follows in the disgraced footsteps on Whole Foods CEO John Mackey and the "Wal-Marting Across America" floggers. Being outed as an insider posing as an outsider leads to instant vilification -- as identity transparency is a crucial expectation of ethical behavior in an on-line community.

Ridder threw ethics out the window when he noticed Warriors fan site WarriorWorld.net going starkly negative after a management conference call. So he logged onto the site as "FlunksterDude" and tried to steer things to the positive. Check out this story on CNET to understand why that didn't work.

Ridder is taking full responsibility for his actions. But he doesn't yet understand that he did anything wrong. This well-stated excerpt from fansite SportsRubbish makes clear what was wrong -- and what the implications are for the PR community:

There unfortunately are plenty of P.R. “professionals” who think it is perfectly acceptable to pose as a regular fan to get their message out. Keep this in mind any time you read, well, anything online. If something is too positive or too negative, it quite possibly could either be that company or a rival making that post.

There is nothing wrong with team executives interacting with fans and taking the pulse of fan sentiment. If they do want to post on a team message board like Warriors World, they should just be up front about it, rather then attempting to hide behind anonymity.

- Jon Harmon

 

Too much transparency can be a bad thing

When is too much of a good thing no longer good?

Transparency clearly is a communications virtue. So is reader/user participation. There is great power in providing an audience with clear insights into difficult issues, as well as in encouraging audience participation in finding solutions and in guiding content development. These actions foster audience engagement which greatly improves both acceptance of the message as well as the quality of the message itself as we tap into the collective wisdom of the audience at large.

But that doesn't mean that more transparency is always better.

The Chicago Tribune recently launched an ill-fated project to solicit responses from subscribers to sketches of stories as reporters were still fleshing out story details. The idea was to tap into the power of open-sourcing for additional leads as well as to grow reader appetite for an upcoming story or series.

But soon after the experiment was kicked off, dozens of reporters signed a letter to the Tribune's editor, Gerould Kern, urging him to pull the plug on the idea. They were concerned that teasing stories before all the facts were in might, in fact, recklessly spread ill-founded rumors.

"We stopped this," Kern was quoted in a susequent Tribune story. "To prematurely disseminate information about stories in progress compromises reporting (including) potential legal issues, fairness, accuracy and completeness."

The project also raised the specter of news judgments being made by opinion poll, an abdication of editors' responsibility. "Journalists make decisions about news play. We're not taking a marketing survey ... and saying 'OK, this goes on Page One,'" Kern said.

It's safe to say that few corporate communications functions are likely to tilt so far in favor of transparency to require a corrective reaction. Most companies could continue to benefit from far more openness in their communications. And open-sourcing for idea-generation and best-practice sharing can greatly enhance the power of company intranets. But it is also useful for us advocates of transparency to take note of the danger of going too far, too fast.

- Jon Harmon

Swine flu takes a bite out of pork industry: perception, reality and "efficient markets" myth

The pork industry is desperate for politicians and the media to quit referencing "swine flu." But A-H1N1 doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, does it?

The World Health Organization, the Food Standards Agency and other authoritative agencies the world over continue to tell the public that this strain of flu is not spread by the consumption of infected pork. But pork sales, and the stock prices of pork sellers such as Smithfield Foods, are down sharply.

It's not hard to see why the public isn't taking any chances with the "other white meat." The media has, of course, clamped onto the storyline of the swine flu outbreak as a deadly menace of potentially Biblical proportions, often invoking the memory of the global flu pandemic of 1918 that killed tens of millions worldwide. Of course, medicine has advanced a bit since then..

(Meanwhile, countries such as Russia and China, have used the scare to enact protectionist trade barriers to North American pork exports. Never let a good crisis go to waste, eh comrade?)

So while the reality is that pork is safe, the widespread perception is that pork is best avoided, at least until the flu scare passes. This is not a trivial distinction. Perception drives consumer behavior.

There are still those on Wall Street (and perhaps your IR department?) who cling to the notion of the "efficient market." Press coverage, good or bad, according to this theory does not affect stock prices because the stock market is super-efficient at sorting through hype and nonsense, driven only by the facts, ma'am. Proponents of the efficient market theory look down their noses on media relations practitioners' quaint fascination with positive story placement and the moderation of negative stories. "It doesn't matter," the old-school IR types sneer, "the market is efficient."

Even if you still believe that Wall Street is all-knowing (an absurdity in post-meltdown 2009, if you ask me), you still have to concede that financial markets must respond to changes in consumer demand. Consumers are bombarded with far more information than they can process so they often make decisions based on superficial impressions and perceptions. Perceptions drive consumer behavior.

So yes, it's incredibly important that a corporation's messages be succinct, clear and memorable. That's true when you are brand-building and it's even more true when you are defending a brand in a time of crisis.

- Jon Harmon