Accentuate the Positive, 3.0

There’s an old saying in the legal profession. “When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. When the law is on your side, pound the law. And when neither is on your side, pound the table.”

As crass as that sounds, there is a large element of truth — and that is the consistent triumph of emotional massages over rational ones. It’s also why one good story can squash a statistical proof.

This came to mind in the last couple of days, as I was thinking about the impact of a very public and high-profile carjacking in downtown Birmingham. Sandra Gregory was kidnapped just outside of her loft apartment, and forced to drive to several ATMs before her rescue Wednesday afternoon.

One element that got attention was the fact that she lived in a newly rejuvenated loft community, one that is actively recruiting professionals to return to urban lifestyles. Her morning commute to the office was generally a two-block walk.

I covered the crime beat in Birmingham for several years, and know first-hand that the crime rate downtown was perhaps the lowest in the entire metro. But all it takes is one high-profile and emotional incident to enflame stereotypes and set back the image and reputation. I didn’t have time to write this yesterday, but I was curious to see who would go back and proactively offer the counter-story — placing this attack in proper context.

This time, it was a cooperative sponsored by downtown businesses that stepped up:

“We have struggled with a perception of downtown safety,” said Teresa Thorne of the City Action Partnership, or CAP security program, a city-operated service that provides escorts and vehicle assistance to residents, workers and visitors downtown. “In the past 10 years, the downtown crime statistics have dropped 59 percent.”

Teresa Thorne is a retired Birmingham Police Captain, who once ran a precinct. Her CAP unit provides escorts and additional presence in the downtown business community. While her job isn’t “PR” per se, it is her job to make people feel more at ease about the safety of that neighborhood.

Other city-promotion agencies like Operation New Birmingham are being proactive in providing the statistical proof of safety. Unfortunately, facts and stats need to be backed up with individual stories, or they will not overpower quotes like this one:

Former downtown resident Edd Dover, who until February lived in the Watts apartment building where Gregory was abducted, said CAP officers help a lot, but problems begin after 5 p.m. and continue overnight, when CAP officers are off duty.

“In that part of downtown, there’s barely any police presence,” said Dover, who said he moved out partly because of vandalism and vagrants in that apartment’s parking lot. “I’m 6 feet 5, but I was always on guard. There were people in the Dumpster when I’d go take my garbage out, and people asking me for money when I’d walk my dog at 5:30 in the morning. Everybody wants this downtown to succeed, but until they clean it up, it won’t work.”

I borrow again from Annette Simmons in The Story Factor:

“People have more facts than they will ever use. They need a new story to give those facts context.”

The book comes with my highest recommendation.

There are a lot of trophies and honors to shoot for in life. Trophies gather dust, honors can be forgotten. You make it into the language, and you’re remembered forever — when your name becomes a verb or an adjective.

Think “Ruthian” home run, “Wagnerian” epic, “Freudian” slip. Even “Goliath” is a name that came to mean something else.

Just make sure your lexical legacy is a good one. Richard Scrushy is close to that, and not in a good way.

It’s starting to show up in the coverage of the Ken Lay/Enron prosecution. Apparently, Lay is trying to reclaim a 7-figure gift to the University of Missouri. At first, he asked the money be re-allocated to churches and relief organizations responding to last year’s hurricanes. By this February, his attorney’s were back in Columbia, seeking to tap that endowment to cover legal expenses.

What interested me was the description of a strategy that involves a great deal of public pre-trial philanthropy:

“This has all the smell of a Richard Scrushy effort,” says Mizzou alum Thomas Battistoni, a New York litigator who until recently sat on an alumni board for the MU College of Arts and Science, overseers of the economics department — and hence the chair. Scrushy, the former head of HealthSouth Corp., poured over $700,000 into Birmingham, Ala., churches and ministries during his felony trial in 2004, a coincidence noted with more than a little skepticism by his prosecutors. (Scrushy was acquitted). Battistoni raises similar questions about Lay’s attempt to divert the money to charities in the fall before his trial started, but he doesn’t believe the money is “tainted” since it was donated before the shenanigans at Enron began.

The adjective “Scrushyesque” has only appeared once before this post, in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, used by former federal prosecutor Jacob Frenkel to describe the effect of home-court advantage on fraud cases:

Frenkel said it’s too early to know if the government was smart in bringing the (Ken Lay) trial to Houston, where there has been a huge loss of jobs. “It’s a different jury pool, different facts, a different city. There’s no way of knowing if the verdict is going to be Scrushyesque.”

Reputation management is all about protecting your name and your brand. And if it’s your name on the line, there is no reset button to switch to change it, a move Scrushy’s old company is considering.

Don’t think I’m spiraling down for another funk.

I’m headed to Atlanta for most of the week, to help with this year’s Red Cross Hurricane Communicator Conference. I’ll be doing some training, and presenting information about the Birmingham Chapter’s Alert System.

The goal is to get everyone up to speed and ready to handle communications for what shapes up to be a busy Gulf/Atlantic hurricane season.

I’ll blog as I can, but if I don’t — no big deal. And thanks for sticking around.

Boy, did I ever forget the punchline. It’s not that information-seekers are so fond to “transparency” or even “opacity.” They just abhor “translucence.”

Each extreme along that continuum plays an important role. Those who are stuck in between are of no use to consumers, who either wonder about a real agenda, or choose some other means of validation that carries more objective weight.

Duh. That’s what I get for posting so late.

I didn’t sign up to become an expert on RSS implementations. I just know a lot of people who can use it, and know even less than I do. So I do what I can.

Today, that meant leading about a couple dozen American Red Cross chapter communicators through an ad-hoc teleconference about the Alert System we put together in Birmingham. Not having a budget for a real Webex, I made a 50-page “slideshow” made up of relevant screen captures. Arg. (I felt like “Mr. Filmstrip,” telling everyone to click “next“.)

I hope I did enough explaining to get them interested, and not so much to scare them out of it. These PR folks are scattered across most of the Western U.S., minus California and Hawaii — and a great deal of land to cover. Any tech tool to push critical information out more quickly can make a big difference.

Anyway — as to the shameless part. As part of my evolution from “media relations guy” to “real PR guy,” I’ve been doing the metric thing. In this case, I’ve been counting the number of downloads from various outlets. For instance, if you download the customized RSS reader from our chapter website, you trigger a counter. If you download it from the Alert Page itself, it triggers another counter. That way, I can keep a log of where the real traffic is, and where to focus the interest. (And I can have a neat little project for my APR certification process, whenever that might be.)

So far, here are some key stats to date:

• Downloads from chapter website: 303
• Downloads from direct e-vites: 29
• Downloads from March newsletter: 8
• Downloads from April newsletter: 20
• Downloads from this blog: 91

We didn’t get much in the way of local media on this until after the April e-mail, so we’ll see how much steam this generates going into the May newsletter.

Well, it’s down to two on American Idol. And for the third time in four years, Birmingham has one of the finalists. (Four if you count Diana Degarmo, who was born here but raised elsewhere.)

For the past few weeks, there have been a slew of articles and blogs and broadcast pieces about why “the south” does so well in the world’s most-hyped karaoke contest. Some account for the Birmingham success with the “church factor,” some with other cultural and anthropological underpinnings. Jake Tapper at ABC did a piece looking at Idol votes through a political lens.

So far, nobody has it right, and we see such mind-numbing stereotypes as this:

“Perhaps most intriguing, as the fifth season continues, is to consider how much more talent remains out there in the hill towns and dust buckets of the South, and will rarely be heard past the local 4-H show, halftime at the high school football game, or at Sunday church.”

Amateur anthropology aside, there are a couple of important factors that get overlooked… a major key and a minor key, if you will.

Minor key: The South still has an underdog mentality.

If you know anything about college football, you know that the SEC takes it more seriously than anyone else. Lives revolve around football season. To know why, you have to go back 80 years to the Rose Bowl. Southern football teams were often disregarded and ignored by the pundits and voters in the northeast. That is, until the University of Alabama finally broke through with an actual invitation to the Rose Bowl, where it upset a highly regarded Washington team. That was a milestone achievement in Southern pride — and that’s why college sports get royal treatment, befitting the first arena where the region levelled the post-Reconstruction playing field.

Take it to the bank — Southerners are competitive in everything else, too. (And they also keep score on who “gets it” from the outside. I’m sure there is a lot of grumbling over the fact that Tapper included Oklahoma and Texas as part of “Dixie.”)

Major key: Ratings, ratings, ratings.

Lost in all of the analysis is the fact that Birmingham has the highest-rated Fox affiliate in the country. WBRC was a powerhouse long before Rupert Murdoch purchased it in 1996. Nearly ten years later, it remains locked in a close battle for number one in each newscast, each sweeps period being a tossup. Outsiders will claim that Idol props up Fox-6, but it’s really the other way around. WBRC has been savvy and effective in promoting and hyping American Idol, and has the viewership to make a difference.

The point? You can spend a lot of time musing, pondering, and cogitating about a situation that you can’t explain — but often the answer is simpler than we think.

It looks like several years of bad press might force a name change at HealthSouth.

CEO Jay Grinney toldd analysts yesterday that a new name might be in HealthSouth’s future, to separate it from its past.

“We are evaluating if a name change is warranted, given the extent to which our name has been tarnished.”

With founder and former CEO Richard Scrushy still fighting legal troubles in advance of civil lawsuits, keeping the HealthSouth name out of negative articles is beyond impossible.

Of course, it might also have something to do with bigger-than-expected first-quarter losses.

Either way, you know you’ve hit a milestone in reputation management when it’s easier to scrap the brand with more than two decades of investment and start completely over. That’s also not to say that the name change will stick. Monsanto tried it years ago, and a lot of people still use that name instead of the newer “Solutia.”

Any suggestions for a new name?

I now know what I need to get out of my funk.

Based on the advice given by this psychic, I need to change my number:

If you think there’s something different about the address above the entrance of KRON television headquarters, the fortresslike building at 1001 Van Ness Avenue, you’re right. The number 552 has been added.

The reason?

A station exec’s astrologer advised that 1001 was a bad number for business.

And business at San Francisco’s venerable Channel 4 hasn’t been good lately. Advertising is down, its entertainment and local news shows lag in the ratings, and parent company Young Broadcasting, which spent $825 million to buy KRON in 2000, is swimming in red ink.

So the station’s honchos turned to East Bay astro-numerologist Jesse Kalsi to provide a “patch,” which is numerology lingo for fixing a bad number. Now, what you see over the door is 1001552.

“Obviously, there are skeptics who think it’s a bunch of hooey, but I can tell you things seem to have improved since the change,” says KRON Programming Director Pat Patton, who says he brought in the psychic with the approval of station management.

So everyone, be prepared for the launch of “Accentuate the Positive, 2.0552!”

Just as soon as I feel like writing anything.

I have the funk.

I’ve been extremely busy lately, and pulled in a number of directions. Haven’t really had time to look for things to write about.

And that’s okay.

I think I’ve set a fairly clear standard for this forum, in terms of keeping focus on a tiny realm within communications. I am interested in a whole host of things, and from time to time I must resist the urge to write about things here that are outside the scope.

If it makes anyone feel any better, I have written some rather long comments lately. Over here, I weighed in on a debate about whether Public Relations bloggers need to appoint a Gestapo for quality control. The discussion spilled over to here, and then to here.

I guess my biggest funk right now is the realization that I might be a better commenter than agitator.

Also — big decisions may be looming on the horizon. Didn’t mean to bury the lead, but an encouraging word or two might help.

For all of you who take the time to find this nobody’s little corner of the intarwebs, thanks — and keep checking. Funks don’t last forever.

While assisting the national media in central Tennessee this past weekend, I was also paired up with a volunteer photographer from the American Red Cross.

Marty Robey is a talented guy, and it’s obvious he loves what he does.

At an aid station in a northern Nashville suburb, he found a woman with an amazing story. I spoke with her late last night, and we should have the story posted on the Red Cross News Page later today.

I’ll be on the road in a couple of hours, headed back home after a weekend of media wrangling in Tennessee. It was a decent experience, and I got national hits on Fox News Channel, Fox News Radio, and MSNBC. During the calldowns, I did observe a factor that I’d never thought much about.

One of the advantages I bring to my job is my past experience in television news. There’s a lot to be said for knowing what the reporters, producers, and decision-makers want before they want it. Whether you are with the Red Cross or any enterprise, the gatekeepers of the media are more inclined to use what you offer if it comes in the right time, the right format, and the right content.

As I was cycling through the national media list, I sensed something other than waning interest in the relief effort in Tennessee. It was more of a hesitance, or a reluctance to commit. And I think it firmly had to do with the weekend.

For all of the talk of the 24-hour news cycle being “dead,” there certainly remains a strong 7-day cycle. A lot of old-school PR advice was centered around the notion of when to release the bad news for the minimum impact. As I’ve noted before, some specialized beats are too savvy for this practice, and it ought to be re-examined.

Don’t let that wipe out the distinction between weekdays and weekends, and I’m not talking about the consumer level. If you are a journalist, you work and struggle to get a shift with more normal hours. In television, the young up-and-comers would still want the weeknights for “facetime,” but the older established ones wanted “dayside” so they could see their kids. (The few who had families, anyway.)

The same is true for editors, assigment managers, and producers. The ones working the weekend shifts don’t have the seniority and the status as their weekday counterparts. And here is where human psychology comes in:

• You are a weekend manager.
• Sources and contacts are calling in, pitching stories.
• It’s Sunday.
• There are a few good leads out there, but nothing that is a total no-brainer.
• Tomorrow, you will see your weekday counterpart who has an agenda lined up.

Now, are you the least bit intimidated that your decision to keep a crew on scene might be second-guessed? Are you at all worried about making the justification for continuing coverage? Are the “Monday morning quarterbacks” a territorial bunch, who resent not having all their resources ready and able to deploy?

Don’t assume that the weekend managers have their own discrete resources to draw from. Correspondents and field producers don’t necessarily clock in the same shift every week, and their schedules run the gamut.

I build toward this point: All things being equal, do you stand a better chance pitching for more coverage on a Wednesday than on a Sunday? I say the answer is yes.

There are a whole host of insights you can have into the news business, and those thoughts can greatly enhance your ability to promote your message through the media. But first, you have to buy into the notion that “the media” are really just people first, and susceptible to the same emotions, foibles, and irrational impulses that the rest of us are.

It’s been a while since we’ve done news “From the Front.”

The Birmingham area was spared most of the bad damage, but there was significant trauma and casualties as the storm hit north of Nashville.

I’m being deployed to just north of Nashville, around the Gallatin, Tennessee area. I’ll be assisting the national media that is assembling, and probably fulfill a lot of interview requests. I’m packing now, and ought to be on the road just after lunch.

This will likely knock me off the blogging trail until about Wednesday or so. I’ll add as I have the time and web access.

If you are inclined to be the praying sort, remember me, but moreso remember those who lost loved ones or will be starting completely from scratch.

If you want to help financially, the Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund is a good place to start.

Here at Positive Position Media Consulting, let me unequivocally state that NOBODY! does better public relations. NOBODY!

I truly mean that — and let me explain.

In the last couple of years since making the jump from television news to public relations and media training, I’m glad to say that I’ve learned a lot from some people who blog about their business. Many are in the blogrolls to the right, some of them comment here, and a few of them have been mentors whether they knew it or not.

The common theme, especially lately, has been transparency. PR takes its shots from journalists and the public at large as being some type of sleazy enterprise. The reputation is one of spin, hidden agendas, manpulation, and massaging the messaging. The clarion call for “transparency” is the removal of any practice that is under the table or sneaky. Here are several posts that follow that theme.

---

For a moment though let’s look at the other aspect of “transparency,” from the perspective of the client. There are a lot of really clever ads that run in the Super Bowl every year, where you laugh your butt off but can’t remember the sponsor. The medium overpowers the message, to the point that you congratulate the cleverness of the creator and ignore the product.

Good PR is “transparent” to the point where you don’t realize there was any PR involved. You are literally hiding in plain sight. No one complains about your slick manipulations, because they are all too busy feeling good about your client. And if someone asks, there’s the entire record on the record about your involvement.

So you see — NOBODY! does better PR than I do.

This notion started swimming around my head when I got caught up in the brou-ha-ha started by David Murray in the Journal of Employee Communication Management:

There’s this guy named Allan Jenkins. Chances are, you’ve never heard of him.

Well, he’s a communication consultant with a blog. (Which is like saying he’s a dog with a tail.)

One day I was reading his stupidly-named blog, “Desirable Roasted Coffee.” I read his blog a lot, despite the fact that Jenkins is pretty much a nobody in the communication business.

Well, if Allan is a NOBODY! in this profession, then how can I not aspire to the same level?

---

Fortunately, I got in on the ground floor of a movement. A bunch of public relations NOBODIES are organizing and proud. We have our own platform for change. We have a merchandising/charity arm. We have plans for a podcast. We have a bunch of silly hats, and a logo that speaks volumes. “IAN” – the International Association of Nobodies. (It also would stand for “I Am Nobody” on the individual level, if any of us stood out enough to count.)

If being a NOBODY! means:

• My clients come first
• My results are more important than my popularity
• I remain approachable and grounded
• I still write with the same passion for dozens that I did for digits
• I can continue to afford my bandwidth

…then sign me up.

Oh wait, they did!

Now, if you’ll excuse me. I’m going out into the world to be a NOBODY! today!

A guy can dream, can’t he?

Enjoy my handiwork, or make you own.

(Note to self: get off your butt, and get the seminars on tape and into the online store.)

I’ve been quiet for a few days, working on a number of projects. Let’s just say that it stands to be a busy summer.

I might as well unveil the curtain on a project I’ve now ushered into public use.

It’s a custom-branded RSS reader, which comes pre-loaded with links to our local Community Alert pages for the American Red Cross in Birmingham and the local EMA.

Since the vast majority of internet users know how about aggregators or how to manually add feeds, this installer package has a great potential for our Red Cross chapter. In fact, the whole thing is designed to be seamless enough that the average user might still not understand what RSS is.

We’ve rolled it out locally, and I am tracking the number of downloads through various venues. It’s primarily targeted for the media, and will be a great asset the next time we have a huge disaster response. But since all of the information is public, we’re also pushing it to local municipalities, our board, and anyone else who has a vested interest in knowing about pending emergencies.

In order to make this work, we had to find the right piece of software — and being a non-profit, we had to make it affordable. Our RSS reader had to have some key features:

• Free to use and distribute
• Included a “pop-up” notification
• Customizable with our logo and branding
• Adware and spyware free
• Short refresh cycle

We were lucky to find just such a program, called Newsplorer. The developer was very kind to set us up with some technical assistance and a customized installer package.

That pop-up notifier was so critical. In a newsroom environment, you can’t expect people to manually refresh their feedlist (assuming they had one.) Otherwise, you could just ask them to manually refresh the old-fashioned newsroom page. With the system-tray pop, and an option to check the feed every minute, we now had a system capable of generating dozens of alerts per day, if events and emergencies warrant it.

Download it and give it a whirl. If you don’t see anything for awhile, that means that nothing bad is happening!