A Way Forward for Public Relations Speech to PRSSA in Salt Lake City,…

A Way Forward for Public Relations

Speech to PRSSA in Salt Lake City, November 11, 2006

Good morning to all of you.

I am pleased to be here to provide you with my view of a
way forward for public relations. Our profession can be the
communications discipline of choice in the 21st century. In
order to achieve that lofty objective, we will have to work
together to change the ingrained bias against PR. We are a
vital senior management discipline that can assure
organizations the license to operate with the enthusiastic
participation of their critical stakeholders. The best PR
campaigns are based on truth and transparency in the
pursuit of the public good, not on spin.

I will describe the operating environment for the PR
practitioner. You will enter a world that will be profoundly
different than the one faced by students just a few years
ago. The mass market paradigm that has defined how
people receive messages of all kinds since World War II, is
crumbling. That era was defined by the pyramid of
influence in which elites such as financial analysts,
regulators and business media received complex messages.
The CEO was the sole face of the company appearing
infrequently and using, tightly scripted messages.
Advertising, which was the primary way to reach mass
audience, was simplistic and image-focused not the fact-
oriented.
It was a time of trust in institutions; government was
effective, business was in the ascendant. The mainstream
media was believed by most people. For years, opinion
polls rated Walter Cronkite, the legendary anchor of the
CBS Evening News, as "The Most Trusted Man in
America." He would famously conclude his nightly
newscasts with the statement, "That's the way it is on" and
would then simply tack on the date. There were relatively
few media, both print and broadcast. Three ads in prime-
time TV reached 95% of US women in 1967.

What we have now is the evolution of a horizontal axis of
communications that complements the traditional top down
vertical axis. We are witnessing the democratization of
information. There is no longer a single source everyone
agrees is always accurate. The sweet spot for companies is
the intersection of vertical and horizontal, the controlled,
top-down and the spontaneous peer-to-peer discussion.
How and why is this happening?

Since the new millennium, we have seen major declines in
confidence in business, government and the media.
Corporate scandals involving Vivendi, Enron, Global
Crossing, and United Healthcare have sapped the reservoir
of goodwill built in the happier decade of the 1990s when
CEOs were rock stars. The US Government has lost
respect, through the failure to find weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq and its botched efforts to cope with the
devastating consequences of Hurricane Katrina. The media
has been criticized on quality, including the 60 Minutes
report on President Bush's National Guard service and the
Jayson Blair scandal at the New York Times. The
dispersion of media is so profound that by the year 2000 it
required 50 ads on national TV to reach the same 95% of
women.

The Me2 Revolution, the reliance on peers in a personal
web of trust, means that we are in the midst of a continuous
conversation. The confident consumer is determined to co-
create brands and to have his voice heard. Edelman's Trust
Barometer 2006 showed that the most credible source of
information in the US was a "person like myself" at 68%,
up from 22% in 2003, far outpacing a CEO at 28%.The
continued roll-out of broadband high speed connections
makes this revolution possible.

The empowered employee is another new activist group.
Employees can be a powerful force, when asked for their
views and given information before it is released by the
corporation to the general public. Some companies, such as
Microsoft, have welcomed this development by
encouraging employees to blog--at last count the company
has 5,000 bloggers. Companies that fail to adapt will find
that the vacuum will be filled by renegade content, such as
the immortal "DeltaSucks.com" on problems at the airline
or the Vault.com, repository of company horror stories.

The trust void has been filled in part by non governmental
organizations such as Greenpeace, Amnesty International
and Doctors Without Borders. These watchdog groups are
perceived to be selfless crusaders for good. They are
credible sources on human rights, environment and other
social issues. They utilize the free media and peer-to-peer
communications as their key weapons. They operate in a
supra-national frame. The NGO sector is now highest
ranked in trust in almost all of the 11 countries covered by
the Edelman Trust Barometer and NGO brands exceed
corporate brands in trust in Europe.

The media business is being drastically reshaped. The past
five years have seen an acceleration of the movement away
from traditional platforms such as television networks and
newspapers toward Internet based alternatives including
social networks and web portals that act as aggregators of
content. Subscription based media, such as cable TV or
higher end online subscription options such as the
NYTimes Select, is expected to continue its rapid growth of
9% per year, while advertising supported media is to
decline at 3% per year.

The significance of this change is enormous. The greatest
reckoning will come for media where the number of viewer
and reader hours is substantially less than amount of
advertising dollars currently being spent there, specifically
in newspapers and broadcast networks.

What's changed for newspapers? Classified advertising for
jobs has moved on-line, while traditional advertisers such
as airlines and retailers have been reduced in number by
mergers. The advertising subsidy that existed for
accountability news has been yanked away. A newspaper
on-line ad costs only 1/7 of an ad in the printed copy. One
simple explanation for the price discrepancy is that the
average reader of the New York Times print edition spends
35 minutes reading the paper; the average reader of
NYTimes.com spends only 8.5 minutes on the site.

Why does this matter? Newspapers have been the primary
provider of "accountability news" on politics and business.
This has been the key "news hole" for PR professionals.
Alex Jones, dean of the Shorenstein Center at the Kennedy
School at Harvard, notes that today there are only three
great newspapers in the United States. They are Wall Street
Journal, New York Times and The Washington Post. This
is down from 20 in 1980. The Philadelphia Inquirer had
500 reporters in 2000. That paper will have 300 reporters
by the end of this year. This will force it to concentrate on
only four areas: business, sports, metro, and lifestyle.

The newspaper industry is not standing still. The Wall
Street Journal has launched a Saturday edition, which is
focused on lifestyle and fashion to attract a different sort of
advertiser and to retain readers in their leisure time. It is
asking its print reporters to multi-task by writing stories
throughout the day for the on-line offering and foreign
editions, including video content. The New York Times has
started several magazines, to subsidize its core news
coverage. Its Style Magazine features a perfume critic,
Chandler Burr, whose column is named Scent Strip

The business and news magazines are in the midst of
similar wrenching change. The number of ad pages in the
top three business magazines, Business Week, Forbes and
Fortune, is exactly half of what it was in year 2000 while
Time Magazine advertising in 2006 is down 15% from
2005. The problem lies in how to make a weekly relevant
to an audience demanding immediacy and participation.
One solution is to reshape the weekly magazine, from a
broad world view to a collection of vertical silos with deep
knowledge and to offer an online version updated
constantly. Forbes.com has opened up its once "walled
garden" to include stories from 125 different sources
including wire services and other web sites in order to
create deep knowledge in a few vertical markets such as
technology and financial services. Newsweek now is
sharing its content with Facebook, the social networking
site, in an effort to reach a younger demographic.
BusinessWeek now places 46% of its total content
exclusively on line versus 33% in 2005.

Similar change is underway in the broadcast TV business.
NBC is cutting its news division team by 5% and network
news viewership has been cut in half during the past 15
years, from 60 million from 30 million. The average age of
a viewer of national evening news broadcasts is about 60
years old. TV is now the fourth most popular activity for
teens, behind being on-line, being with friends and going to
the movies. To reach younger viewers, ABC News is
repurposing its content; 300,000 people download the ABC
Nightly News via i-Tunes each week.

The success of Fox News Channel has made a strong
business case for ideologically driven news coverage. The
assumption is that the politically like-minded viewers will
be drawn to a channel that endlessly espouses their views.
This is a move away from objectivity, the journalistic
standard for the past century.

The cable TV brands have done a better job of
accommodating this new reality. The top two web sites for
news are ESPN.com and CNN.com. However, CNN's
ratings are at their lowest point since 1990. Its leading
anchor personality, Lou Dobbs, has adopted a sharp
populist tone, blasting US companies that outsource jobs.
MTV, with 90 million viewers each week, is now seeking
to grow by providing content on cell phones and other
mobile devices. There is a merging of news and
entertainment; witness the phenomenal success of The
Colbert Report and The Daily Show.

Trade media or B-to-B media is still demonstrating relative
health according to a report compiled by Veronis Suhler, an
investment bank focusing on media. Driven by online, B-
to-B media spending is expected to increase 6.3 percent in
2006. To compete with blogs, trade media such as IDG are
offering video as well as print interviews. They are hosting
conferences as an additional revenue source.

Consumer magazines appear immune from the inexorable
decline in traditional media. Specialist publications in
categories such as food, fitness, travel and leisure,
gardening and fashion are thick with advertising. Many of
the consumer magazines have developed companion web
sites which extend the mainstream media experience via
photos, video and podcasts. The Conde Nast company is
launching destination sites, such as Epicurious and
Lipstick, which attract their own audience through
exclusive content.

The social media brands are experiencing rapid growth,
lead by MySpace and YouTube. These brands are premised
on consumer generated content, often humorous and of low
production quality but regarded as genuine and credible. A
study by Yahoo indicates that one person will create
content, 10 will repurpose it and 90 will view it. There has
even been a movement recently towards social networking
sites that are devoted to specific ethnic niches like African-
Americans, Asians and Latinos. Stories on news website
DIGG.com are ranked by users, whose votes determine the
value of the news. Web portals are fighting to keep eyeballs
by creating online reality shows games like "Gold Rush,"
with game clues posted on other Time Warner sites such as
Mapquest.com and PeopleMagazine.com.

There are now more than 60 million weblogs, or blogs for
short, are often premised on expert knowledge of a specific
category and they reflect the personal views of the writer.
The most recent study of the blogosphere by Edelman and
Technorati shows that in the US, 34 of the top 100 blogs
are focused on technology and political topics and tend to
link to other A-List bloggers. This is in contrast to the
experience in Italy and France where blogs tend to be
personal journals, often linking to mainstream media. In the
Japanese blogosphere, celebrity and tech blogs are often the
most popular. In some markets, such as China, bulletin
boards are the most important place for conversation. One
hundred and ten million Chinese actively post to message
boards.

Some of the most popular blogs are providing the type of
industry coverage and analysis that had been previously
offered by trade and enthusiast media. A blog called
Techcrunch has covered the ups and downs of all of the
new tech start-ups. Techcrunch not only provides keen
analysis of all things Web 2.0, it breaks hard news. A few
weeks ago Techcrunch was the first information source to
publish that Google was in talks to buy YouTube a few
days before the deal. Blogs are now an on-ramp to the
mainstream media.

Here are a few conclusions about the evolution of media,
each of which has profound implications for how you will
practice public relations:

First, there is a dispersion of authority. No longer are
nightly newscasts a touchstone for the nation. Many people
do not believe a story the first time they see it. They require
repetition in order to believe.

Second, there is increasing convergence, so that ESPN is
now also ESPN.com and ESPN news alerts on cell. News is
repurposed across platforms. News therefore requires
pictures and video, not just words.

Third, consumer generated content is not a fad, nor is it
simply event driven such as in the London bombings of last
summer. Richard Sambrook, director of the BBC's global
news division, says the audience is on the field and wants
to play in the game.

Fourth, there is more opinion and less objectivity. There is
more celebrity and local news, less global and
accountability news.

Fifth, there is more subject specificity, and less general
knowledge. It is a time of rich vertical content

Sixth, despite the proliferation of media options during the
past decade some are just tuning out. Twenty-five percent
of Americans with a high school diploma receive no news
from any information source each day. We are getting to
the point of the information "haves" and "have nots" based
in part on ability to pay.

Given this fast-changing environment in which you will
practice public relations, I would like to give you some
specific advice about your course of study while you are
still in school. You will need to have a broad base of
knowledge. You will have to be able to quickly to grasp
and communicate an ever more complex set of facts in a
knowledgeable manner.

You will be working in a more global world. The ability to
speak a second language fluently and understand other
cultures will be a requirement. Therefore, I would
recommend that you take a foreign language and achieve
fluency. English alone is not sufficient for the PR leaders of
tomorrow. I would also consider living abroad for a
semester to get a sense of how another culture lives.

I would suggest that you take two or three engineering and
sciences courses, so that you can understand and explain
technological advances You will be asked to explain
cutting edge developments in areas like biotechnology and
nanotechnology. Others of you may be called upon to lead
the discussions of privacy rights versus the capabilities of
next generation communications technologies.

Take business courses outside of marketing and PR. Try to
become familiar with the very basics of accounting and
finance, so that you are taken seriously when you meet with
senior level executives in the C-suite. You will need to
provide investors, politicians and NGOs with a rationale for
business decisions.

There has never been a more important moment for public
relations. When I began my career, we were often
dismissed as publicists. Market forces have given us an
unprecedented opportunity to move our profession forward
to a position of primacy among communications
disciplines. We are ideally suited to a world that is
premised upon dialogue, credible sources and relationship
building.

Here are a few ideas for PR in the 21st Century:

First, embrace the Me2Revolution, the peer­to-peer
horizontal communication that is premised on a rich
dialogue. Companies have to give up the usual comfort of
the "message triangle," highly scripted remarks designed to
give executives control of the narrative. In the new world,
sole reliance on top down delivery of messages by the
CEO, followed by simplistic advertising to the mass
audience will lead to diminished credibility. While we
continue to pursue stories in mainstream media, we should
also have relationships with bloggers and enter
conversations on message boards.

Second, adopt a big idea that becomes the narrative for the
brand or company. One example is Dove's Campaign for
Real Beauty, which reconsiders female self-image by using
real women as the models.

Third, recognize that the new credible source of
information about a company is the employee. Consider an
"inside-out" paradigm for releasing important news--tell
your employees first, then let them talk to friends and
family.

Fourth, speak with your passionate consumers, the self-
appointed experts who enter chat rooms and write blogs.
Invite them in as co-creators of your brand future. Adopt
the paradox of transparency, in which companies reveal
what they learn in scientific trials as soon as possible,
instead of keeping everything close to the vest. The new
model is a "pro-sumer" who produces and consumes,
where cumulative personal experiences are the wisdom of
the crowd. The Starbucks "Cheer Pass" is an example of a
consumer promotion that works in both real and virtual
worlds.

Fifth, engage your critics. Come to a place of mutual
advantage with civil society. Note the experience of GE.
CEO Jeff Immelt decided that GE would offer an array of
environmentally friendly products at a premium price, so
that environmentalism went beyond philanthropy to being
smart business. To forge this offering, GE partnered with
the World Resources Institute, a Washington based NGO.
Its Eco-Imagination program helped GE instill pride in its
work force, empower its sales force to seek new customers
and improve relations with regulators and elected officials.

Sixth, offer true depth of content. Your company is most
credible if it allows stakeholders to access easily both
positive and negative views. You must always offer a
reliable source of data in a contentious communications
context, such as LowerManhattan.info, which gives
information about the rebuilding of downtown Manhattan
post 9-11. You need to offer depth of content, replete with
links to independent sources of information, video and
photographic supporting materials

Seventh and most important is a new level of expectation of
you as a professional practitioner. Public relations must
move beyond the stereotypes of spin, artifice and half-
truths. The best practice must be adoption of complete
transparency: who you are, why you are advocating a
position and the company funding your work. You must
commit to credible advocacy, in which you immediately
update content based on latest knowledge. Listen to the
broad range of stakeholders, then return for feedback
consistently. If you make a mistake, acknowledge it. Aim
for a journalistic level of accuracy because our material is
now often used as primary source data, not just as the basis
of proposing stories to journalists. Apply "The Page
Principles," which were written by one of the founders of
our profession Arthur Page, the former PR chief at AT&T.
My favorites are "tell the truth," and "prove it with action."

I pose these questions to you, the future leaders of the
profession. Can we facilitate an open exchange of ideas that
is so central to a democratic society? Can we put aside
short term gains from attack style PR in favor of a real
debate on issues? Can we get beyond an American-centric
view of the PR business? Can we give up control of
message?

In a world in which information is easy to access but true
knowledge is hard to achieve, our profession must strive
for deep relationships with stakeholders based on trust. We
do this by involving them, by offering them a voice in the
outcome and by allowing them to examine a complete set
of facts. The Me2Revolution is a responsibility, not just an
opportunity, for public relations. Go out and make it
happen!