One Man's PR Nightmare...

As Jason Linkins over at the Huffington Post almost gleefully points out, there's been a lot of rubbernecking on the web in the last few days about the tense exchange between Laguna Honda Hospital and Rehabilitation Center spokesperson Marc Slavin and Bay Area ABC News reporter Dan Noyes. In case you haven't seen the video, it's below.

I received a link to the video from friends and colleagues in PR via 3 different sources yesterday: it was shared on Facebook, discussed in a LinkedIn group I belong to and emailed to me and many of my PR colleagues in a group email.

I should give full disclosure that I have worked with Mr. Slavin in the past as part of a communications task force for Laguna Honda's soon to be open new hospital building; I always found him to be extremely respectful and professional. Was Mr. Noyes aggressive? Undoubtably. Was Laguna Honda administrator Ms. Hirose flustered and unprepared? Yes. Could Mr. Slavin have handled this situation with Mr. Noyes differently? I'm sure. In fact I'd bet that he has probably replayed this incident over and over again (if not in his head, on his computer screen) wishing for a different outcome.

We all have days or situations that are better than others and that we wish we could do over or forget about completely. (I'll leave specific commentary about what Mr. Slavin did, and the debate on how he could have handled such a situation differently, to the millions of people who are discussing, commenting and dissing on what Gawker called the best local news video this year.) Point being, when we have these types of situations, we have to deal with the consequences. Unfortunately for Mr. Slavin, his bad day quickly became that much more public thanks to social media sharing tools such as Youtube, Digg, Twitter and Facebook, (to name a few), that spread this video across the web like wildfire, only amplifying those consequences.

The Huffington Post, like many other news outlets, helpfully displayed some other places on the web, including twitter that this story was getting play.

and provided the requisite social media tools to share the video.

Note that there were 536 comments on the video on the Huffington Post website alone. 321 people tweeted about it, their followers retweeted and so on, ad infinitum. (Guy Kawasaki, who has almost a quarter of a million followers, tweeted this story. Imagine his reach!) A quick google search for it produced more than 37,000 results–many in languages I couldn't understand.

Painfully, Mr. Slavin can not only replay the video but spend countless hours scouring the web to see comments people have made– about him personally, his professional demeanour and the organization he was representing. He is now an integral part of the new story and as a result has spent many hours I'm sure he didn't account for answering inquiries from all fronts about the incident. This video is a great example of how quickly content can go viral and create bad PR for an individual or organization.

So what's the takeaway here? Being on the front lines, sometimes in tense situations, is nothing new for PR professionals. We know this and develop thicker skins the further we advance in our careers. What is a fairly new development is how social media adds yet one more layer (or many, depending on how you look at it) to managing an organization's public image and can make our jobs (and us) even more visibly and inextricably linked to that image. Is this being talked about when we train up and coming PR professionals? How about when we do speaker training and crisis communications? Prior to the advent of web 2.0, this video would have aired on TV in the original newscast and been posted on the ABC 7 website. Some people would have emailed it to their friends but it most likely would not have gained enough strength to become the tsunami it did in such a short time.

The fact that our words and actions can infect the web like this, doing damage to companys we represent and to our own reputations is something we should all be acutely aware of.

Is Rush Limbaugh Helping The Sierra Club? A Marketing Case Study

Last Monday, Rush Limbaugh was discussing the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and asked his listeners "When do we ask the Sierra Club to pick up the tab for this leak?", blaming what he called "the greeniacs" for driving oil drilling offshore. I wasn't there, but I'm betting that when they got wind of what Mr. Limbaugh said, there were some pretty happy marketing communications strategists at The Sierra Club.

Agree with his positions or not, no-one would argue that when Mr. Limbaugh speaks on a topic he draws lots of attention to it. The Sierra Club's marketing communications team has attempted to turn what could have been a piece of negative publicity strategically to their advantage and used it to raise awareness of the organization's efforts to promote clean energy solutions and put an end to offshore drilling. The fundraising campaign they've created is slightly wicked: give $10 to the Sierra Club in Mr. Limbaugh's name and get the opportunity to send him the finger, um, a personal message, with the donation. And the hook? Help Rush become the Sierra Club's top fundraiser. Nicely played.

Or is it?

Here's what the Sierra Club marketing communications did to bring the strategy to life:

1. Cut through the inbox clutter.
The subject line: "Why Rush Limbaugh Deserves a Free Backpack" is a great way to get a Sierra Club constituent to open an e-mail. This was permission-based e-mail marketing so recipients had already given a vote of confidence that this e-mail content was valuable to them. On top of that, it's fair to assume that Sierra Club supporters disagree with Mr. Limbaugh's position and perhaps even that they don't like him very much. What could he have possibly done? they ask. By lampooning Mr. Limbaugh with this subject line the copywriter entices them to open the e-mail.

2.  Engage with good copywriting and a strong call to action.
Once they open the e-mail they then learn that Rush has been so good at helping to raise money for the Sierra Club that he deserves a free backpack. This engaging copy ties in beautifully to the call to action. (I wonder if they'll stuff the backpack with all the messages from donors?) The ask is a realizable target - for anyone who feels so inclined, ten bucks, or the price of a movie ticket to stick it to Rush Limbaugh is easily manageable.

4. Socialize it.
Each little blurb in the newsletter allows for socialization and integration of the message through other outposts such as Facebook and Twitter. The convergence of e-mail marketing with social media marketing is opening up exciting new opportunities. Social media complements other tactics such as e-mail and The Sierra Club team is empowering its constituents to reach out to their tribes to connect the Sierra Club with new fans and followers. It's a smart way to use e-mail marketing to complement other tactics and turn those casual connections into meaningful customer relationships.

5. Make it easy to give money.
When you click through from the newsletter, you arrive at this landing page:






















It's clean and well laid out and the embedded video of Mr. Limbaugh is the perfect touch.

6. Make the ask everywhere.
The home page of the Sierra Club. Enough said.

7. Make the ask more than once.
Then, two days later, a follow-up e-mail from the Sierra Club Executive Director, Michael Brune.

Remember, The Sierra Club isn't trying to convince people who agree with Rush Limbaugh that he's wrong. They're talking to the people who've already bought in that he's wrong. On paper, it's a fundamentally sound strategy and the marketing tools are being used effectively and judiciously to implement that strategy. So what could possibly go awry? Here's a few things I noticed:

1. Consistent and clear messaging is key.
I saw a big disconnect between the copywriting on the Sierra Club Facebook page and everywhere else. The info blurb, (it's on the left hand side of the page) usually gives some information about an organization. Instead it says: "On May 17, Rush Limbaugh asked his listeners "When do we ask the Sierra Club to pick up the tab for this leak?" That seems appropriate, so help us raise the money to foot the bill."

This makes it sound like the Sierra Club not only agrees with Rush Limbaugh but is trying to raise money to pay to clean up the oil spill. If you click through from this, the copy clearly states: "You and Rush will have the satisfaction of knowing your contribution will support Sierra Club's efforts to promote clean energy solutions and put an end to offshore drilling." Unfortunately, the copy as it's written will prevent some people from clicking on that link as they are put-off right away by the idea of paying for the spill.

Similarly, on the wall post about this topic it says: "Rush Limbaugh wants the Sierra Club to pay for BP's negligence, help us raise the money!" and "Donate $10 today and we'll send a card to Rush Limbaugh telling him that your donation was made in his honor!" Again, this sends the message that the Sierra Club is raising money to pay for the oil spill and that all donations will somehow be credited to Mr. Limbaugh.

 









2. Using reverse psychology is risky - it can backfire.
Some people dislike Mr. Limbaugh so much they wont give money to anything that has his name attached to it, even if it is to advance a cause they believe in. There has been much debate in liberal circles about whether democrats are giving Mr. Limbaugh more power by talking about him and should just ignore him instead. 

3. Social Media is about listening.
There were more than 110 comments on the above wall post and by my quick count, more of them were negative or neutral in regards to this campaign than supportive. It wasn't a terribly large sampling size, although some would argue that any post that incites more than 100 people to write something is worth paying attention to.

As marketers we must never forget that negative perceptions can be stickier than positive perceptions. Remember the old adage, when people love something, they tell 1 person, when they hate something, they tell 10? Hate something on Facebook and the whole world is listening.

Noticeably absent is a response, new comment or wall post from someone at the Sierra Club. Is it because more than 150 people have clicked on the "like" button already? It's important to think of Facebook as a strategic listening outpost and as such it's a garden that needs daily tending. From a customer service perspective, it would be helpful to respond to the naysayers and to provide clarification for those who, gasp! don't get, what the Sierra Club's intentions are.

Facebook is also wonderful in that it's a place where you can run tests to see what works and doesn't work. Given the subject matter, his post would have been a perfect opportunity for the Sierra Club team to set up A/B experiments to test the efficacy of various post content (photo of Mr. Limbaugh versus no photo of Mr. Limbaugh, for example) and with a combination of quantitative metrics culled from Facebook's metrics tool Insights, and what people are saying on the page, to glean some deep insights.

As a result of all of this effort (and my hat goes off to the team for being so nimble and proactive in the last week or so) the Sierra Club has reported a spike in website visitations and giving to the tune of more than $50,000 already. How much of this is marketing spin or a direct result of the Rush Limbaugh campaign is anyone's guess. I'll be tracking their efforts with interest and will try to obtain some Sierra Club statistics on giving and visitations to their website and various social media outposts in the coming weeks.

In any event, many non-profit organizations would do well to take a page from the Sierra Club's playbook and be half as coordinated in the execution of their marketing communications strategies.

What Can Your Older Members Do To Support You In Addition To Donating Money?

One of the questions I am often asked by non-profits when we're discussing membership engagement beyond donating money is how to reach out to members (typically older) who they think are not using tools like Facebook and Twitter. Since the Facebook 55+ audience grew a whopping 922.7% in 2009 (source: 2010 istrategylabs report), I answer that it's becoming more and more likely that older members will have a Facebook account. Twitter? Maybe not so much. Why and how non-profits should gather accurate data on their constituents and not rely on anecdotal evidence is a whole separate conversation (and a different blog post).

For the sake of this discussion, let's assume your members don't have a Facebook account. Three-quarters of the United States population is using the internet and, according to this AARP article, a recent survey indicates that senior citizens in the U.S. regularly go online for a variety of reasons, including using email, and reading news. So it's fairly safe to assume they are surfing the web at some point during their day or week. Encourage them to use some of this time to spread the word about your work. It's a way to make change that doesn’t cost any money at all. Here's two ways to do it that are quick, easy and free, yet cumulatively can make a big impact.

1. Comment on newspaper stories
Even if Twitter and Facebook is lost on them, many of your members get their news on the web from online newspapers, websites and blogs. The internet was born as an interactive medium and has facilitated chats, discussion groups and blogs for years. Recently, the largest newspaper sites have enabled readers to comment directly on their stories.

Whenever they read a mission-related article in any of the major local, regional or national newspapers online, your members can take some time to comment on the article in the "comments section" (usually found below the article). Depending on the publication, they may have to create an account to do so. While commenting, they should always paste in your organization's website address as part of the comments and let people know why they should be aware of, and support your organization.

How It Helps

• It lets the publisher/writer know real people, like your members, read the story and that the issue is an important one.
• It adds dimension to the story and creates further discussion.
• It drives traffic to your organization's website and eventually other media outposts to produce more page views and ultimately more members.
• It shows the world that your organization's membership is active and engaged in the issues.

Be sure to warn your members, comments are not always pretty. In fact, for many stories about politically charged issues, it can sometimes get downright ugly. But it can also be constructive and energize your most passionate members to enjoy a level of engagement with the issues and others who hold opposing views they may never have had before.

Once they’ve commented, it's important that they check back on the story for additional comments from others. As in any conversation, once they’ve stated their point, someone may respond to their comment and they might feel the need to reply.

2. Pass it on.
Encourage your members to send URLs of articles they're reading and commenting on to their friends and colleagues so that they can add their comments to the article too. 

Here's a few tips for the best way for them to do this: 

1. They should send the email to themselves only and blindcopy their friends so they're not giving out friends’ email addresses without their consent.
2. Send only URLs – no attachments– so people don't feel they are being spammed. Plus, it’s easier to read an email and click on a link from a smart phone than open an attachment.

How It Helps

• It creates a groundswell of opinion and support. Elected officials and large corporations typically invest a lot of time and money in their “spin machines” and have the lobbying power and access to the halls of power that a small non-profit will never be able to match. Encouraging members to voice their opinion lets those who are monitoring the stories (such as elected officials’ staffers who like to take the citizenry's pulse on many issues, and the PR professionals on corporations payrolls)know the public is aware of and cares about the issues.
• It improves SEO for your organization as comments that show up in search engine results.

It's good practice to encourage all of your members, regardless of their level of internet savvy to engage in this kind of viral activity.

Image Source

Guidelines For Writing Non-Profit Board Of Director Bios

Written well, bios make a targeted, persuasive argument about what to think about someone without being unsupported self-praise or too salesy. Sometimes I write bios from scratch for people. When that's the case, I keep the finished bio to one page or less and write the biography in the third person. Mostly though I have to take disparate bios and rework them to create consistency in length, tone and voice.

In either case, I always ask people to make sure their bios contain these essential elements:
 
Description of their business in brief.
Not only do website visitors want to know what people do, they also want to know who people have worked with. I ask them to include a sentence or two about their business niche (or niches) as well as the types of clients they serve. Sometimes a modified version of their 30-second elevator pitch works perfectly.
 
A list of any awards they have received.
 
Names of the organizations, clubs, or associations to which they belong.
 
Any professional certifications and designations they hold.
I have them make sure they write out their names in full, rather than use abbreviations. Not everyone might know what an acronym stands for and in a different discipline, it might represent something else. If they no longer hold a particular designation, but it has played a major role in who they are and what they do, I make a reference to it. I don't include abbreviations of college degrees, like MBAs as it looks unprofessional. The only exception to this would be for a Ph.D. designation.
 
Places they've been published.
Self-published or not, their works add to their level of professionalism and credibility. If they've written any articles, books, e-courses or e-books I showcase them.
 
Media mentions.
Have they been a guest on talk radio or television? Were they or their business featured or even mentioned in a newspaper article? If so, I include it. Again, these types of "mentions" add to their credibility and presence.
 
A sentence or two at the end about their personal passions and their relationship to the organization.
This may or not make it into the final bio, depending on the organization, but it's always useful to have on hand.
 
Two headshots.
One professional, and one casual (which should still be a headshot and be a good picture). I ask them to make sure the headshots are as hi-res as possible.

Am I missing anything?

Printing Press Check Part 4

This post is the final installment of a story. Read the previous installment or start at the beginning.

The question I’m always asked when I tell the story about outsourcing a print job to Seoul is “would you use those guys again?” Depends on the project. Someone would have to go there and physically stand around to make sure they printed to my standards. Keeping them on track would require someone’s presence as a physical reminder. And I’d want Captain as my onsite project manager and the brilliant night shift man, whose name I found out was Mr. An, to be running the printing machine. (They saved the book in my mind and restored my faith that printing there wasn’t such a disastrous idea.) Even with all of that, given the language barrier and cultural differences, it would still be a struggle.

On paper, the cost saving was unbeatable. The book would have been expensive to produce in the US - $50,000 more expensive. It cost less than $5000 to send me there – a negligible cost, given the overall savings. Time lost from the office doing what I needed to do, and the time it took me to recover from the trip was a mitigating factor though. It's difficult to know if that pricing would bear out in subsequent projects. Young was gracious and accommodating regarding everything extra I made them do but he had to buy more paper because they used up what they had earmarked for the book and took a hit for that. Taking into account that new clients typically impact margins at first he may still have charged me more if he had known how exacting I was going to be about everything.

Day shift man came back on the next to final morning. By then I was beyond tired and had little patience for his attitude. He was a nice enough guy, but he just wasn’t used to doing that level of quality and it wasn’t sitting well with him that I was pushing him. Try as I might, I couldn’t get him to push the color the way I knew it could be. Fortunately, he worked slower than night shift guy and serendipitously, his assistant didn’t show up to work so he was left cleaning the rollers and making new plates. This grunt work killed the project schedule, but it saved the quality of my book.

At 7:30 PM Mr. An was safely back in the helm with trusty Captain at his side. Just twelve or so more hours and the book would be completely printed. By 8:45AM on day three the book was almost done. We were printing the cover and one of the bearings broke so we had to stop the presses. Mr. An went home and I was stuck with dayshift man again. (Never did get his name.) Thankfully, Mr. An had mostly color matched the cover before he left so I thought we were in good shape. But I felt some tension returning to my shoulders because the cover was in someone’s hands that I didn’t trust and it was the first thing that everyone would see.

Twenty minutes into the shift day shift man was up to his old tricks again, saying he couldn’t get the cover right. From the looks of the hand signals, he was feeding the same old excuses to Captain about why it wouldn’t work and by then I was just mad and tired of being there. If someone gives me a deliverable and it's not that great but I truly get that they’ve done as much as they absolutely can given their skills, or the time and/or budget constraints of the project then I’m fine with it. It is what it is. But I have little patience for getting something from someone that they know could be better and they are just hoping I’ll accept it or not notice.

Day shift man and Young, who had just shown up, were waiting me out to see what my next move was. Captain just stared at the proofs intently. I could understand that Young was motivated by his bottom line but I held firm. We were printing the covers ‘two-up’ on a sheet and couldn’t keep the color consistent through both, so they decided to remake the plates and print it ‘one-up.’ It dawned on me that this had to be a lack of skill thing on day shift man’s part because it would take twice as much paper and new plates to print this way. Cha-ching. Young must have been really happy with me. Or wishing Mr. An wasn’t sleeping peacefully at home.

After five minutes and much discussion later, Young told me they would just print the covers “two-up” as planned, but print twice as many and use the darker version. Apparently, we were getting kicked off-press as there were other jobs stacked up behind us. Times up. Game over. Fine, but how would I know they’d be using the right version of the cover? I might have to stand there and mark up every sheet (6500 times!) to choose the one they should use.

One hour later, we were into the lunch break, which for hardworking Koreans is a sacred time not to be messed with. Day shift man still hadn’t nailed the color on the cover. Captain actually pulled me outside and told me in his broken English that for every problem he told day shift man to solve, another one cropped up. We burned through 2,000 or so sheets of paper trying to get it right. Captain told me that we should leave now and let day shift man eat his lunch, which I didn’t argue with because I had an uncomfortable feeling that I’d outstayed my welcome. I wasn’t sure what would happen next but he told me he’d come get me and we’d do the cover again tomorrow. Sigh. I was afraid this would happen. At least Captain wasn’t making me settle for something that he knew wasn’t right. He and Mr. An were consummate professionals to the end. Once the printing was done, and I didn’t have to stand vigil at the press, the plan was to come back to the shop periodically to see the coating, binding and stamping process. Unfortunately that never happened due to scheduling constraints. When I received the first sample box of bound books about one week later, I'm happy to report that they looked beautiful. It took another six weeks or so to get the rest.

Would I travel overseas and go through long hours and tough conditions again to get a cost-effective, quality product at the end of it if a client wanted me to? Definitely. With those guys? I've learned over the years never to say never. But a relationship with any printer is trust-based. Good printers will get to know your profile and what you are looking for. Conversely, you’ll know their print style and how they approach their work. It takes time, doing several projects together to build up that trust. If it was a high stakes project, the client and I would have to weigh carefully whether it might produce a better outcome to go with a trusted American printer that I already have relationships with.