People in my business frequently receive solicitations to compete for new business by responding to requests for proposal (RFPs) that range in length from a few paragraphs to a few chapters.  One hundred percent of the time, the information provided is absolutely inadequate to propose anything — except that the author engage me or one of my colleagues to have another go at it. I’m betting that my physician, attorney, financial advisor and accountant haven’t received a single RFP this year — or ever for that matter.  But if they did and they were like those I see in my profession, the one my physician would receive would tell her the symptoms, the diagnosis, the course of treatment, the prognosis and conclude by asking “What would you do, by when and for how much?”  Oh, and we need it next week. 

The RFP circulating among my colleagues at the moment, for example, asks for a “comprehensive communication plan” that “should be as complete as possible, with the year broken down into phases — with price ranges attached to each segment.” But as background, it provides nothing more than two sample messages that only a tone-deaf CEO could love because, we are lectured, “consistent messaging is a central component of successful communication campaigns."

The intellectual property I have to sell in 15-minute chunks is as informed, specialized and valuable as any other professionals’. But few of them are ever asked to give away their core competencies in a bid to win new businesses.  Among my professional colleagues, the most valuable service we have to offer is precisely the service that RFPs would have us give away: the ability to understand a client’s situation, bring education, science and experience to bear in a rigorous, thoughtful planning process, which ultimately answers the what, by when and how much questions.  And quite a few others like “Where do we stand now?”, “How will we know if we’ve succeeded?” and “What haven’t we thought of?” 

It’s easy enough to ignore these ham-handed, amateurish RFPs.  And we do.  But what is of deep concern is the fact that these RFPs-to-ignore have been written by people who are responsible for protecting the reputations, being the social conscience, engaging the employees and selling the products of the organizations they represent.  And they clearly do not know what they are doing, not even by any standard that would apply to the rawest new graduate from any of the excellent university programs that train our new professionals. 

From time to time, the subject of licensure for Public Relations practitioners burbles up in our ranks. Despite that pesky First Amendment and its protection of free speech, the idea has made it to several state legislatures in the past decade or so.  In principal I heartily agree that there needs to be a reliable method for distinguishing the charlatans and amateurs from the professionals who are educated, experienced and have committed to a code of ethical behavior.  (I have spent a good deal of my professional career holding and promoting Accreditation in Public Relations, the most viable candidate.)

Perhaps on a state-by-state basis we’ll come up with a system similar to those that license real estate agents, beauticians and psychologists, in which professional organizations certify competence, the state endorses the certification and limits the use of certain terms — such as psychologist — to those who are certified. But I’m betting that the states have some other issues on their plates at the moment that may have higher priority.  So meanwhile, the RFPs I receive will continue to go into the recycle bin.  And there are no free samples forthcoming from me and many, many of my colleagues.
 

This is the text of a one-hour online chat I had today with McAfee's tech support.  It is, unfortuantely, self explanatory.  You'll see that at the end of this unhappy hour I was sent to "Tier 2 support."  There, the problem was solved after a "mere" 25 minutes.  And this is supposed to be state of the art.

> Thank you for contacting McAfee Consumer Support. How can I help you?

Customer: I have the McAffee security suite form Comcast and I need to reinstall it on a WIN7 64-bit OS.  Comcast has switched to Norton, which I hate, and I want to stick with McAfee.  Can you tell me if my current file will install properly and where to get a proper key?

Jeethu: Hi David, this is Jeetu from McAfee Technical Support and I would be assisting you today.

Customer: OK

Jeethu: As I understand you need to reinstall McAfee . Is that right ?

Customer: The file I have BTW is DM-Setup-Serial.exe

Customer: Yes

Jeethu: David, not to worry. I will try my level best to help you.

Jeethu: David, for verification purpose, may I have your home telephone number with area code first?

Customer: You MUST be in India! :)

Customer: 610.422.0048

Customer: 610.792.3329 sorry -- this is my HOME number

Jeethu: Yes, David. I am from India.

Jeethu: How do you currently connect to the Internet? (Dial-up, DSL, Cable, or Wireless)

Customer: I could tell because of your British-isms.

Customer: Cable

Jeethu: Thank you for all the information, David.

Jeethu: David, I am happy to assist you with this issue. In order to assist you better, I need to gather some basic technical information about your computer. I will send you a pop-up, please click on 'OK' to provide me the information.

Customer: OK

> representative Jeethu has requested system information from customer Customer.

> customer Customer has sent system information to representative Jeethu.

Jeethu: Thank you for providing system information, David.

Jeethu: David, we would like to offer you a free remote session in order to assist you better with the issue. May I go ahead and take a remote access to your system in order to resolve the issue?

Customer: You're welcome

Customer: Sure.  But I'm competent to download and install a file myself, if that's the plan.

Customer: RU still there?

Jeethu:  David, I just want to  check if any other software will block the installation.

Customer: OK.  Or tell me what you need and I'll get it for you.

Customer: Do you need me to go to a URL and enter a code to get started?

Jeethu:  David, have you removed norton from your computer ?

Customer: Yes.

Jeethu: I was unable to locate your account with the e-mail address you had provided. Is there an alternate E-mail address, with which you might have registered your McAfee account?

Customer: davidkirk@theprguy.com is the only one I use regularly.  Perhaps it is my Comcast address, davidkirk@comcast.net

Customer: Hello?

Jeethu:  David, now you may go to the website us.mcAfee.com and enter the Email Id  davidkirk@comcast.net and start installation.

Customer: OK.  Standby

Customer: What password should I use?

Jeethu: The password of this email Id davidkirk@comcast.net

Customer: I do not have a record of it.  Do you?

Jeethu: David , You may click forgot password under the login and you will get the password to your email.

Customer: OK.  I am waiting for that to arrive.

Customer: Still waiting.

Jeethu:  David, did you enter the email Id in the forgot password box?

Customer: ... and waiting

Customer: Yes

Customer: Can I simply download a trial version and receive the key from you?

Jeethu:  David, you already have a valid account with McAfee. It would be great if you install from your account.

Customer: Jeethu,  This call has now taken 25 minutes for what should be a an incredibly simple operation.  I need to get this done as I have client work to accomplish. Can't you figure out a faster way?

Customer: For example,, can I use the installation file I already have?

Customer: Will it work on a 65 bit machine?

Customer: Sorry 64 bit

Jeethu: This could have been done in an easier way if you would have remembered the password ,David. Please check for your password and try installing later. Is that fine with you?

Customer: No.  I have checked for my password and I do not have it.  Your system is not sending me a confirmation, although it has already sent me a notice of the service ticket that you and I are on right now.  I don't need your admonishment, I need your help.  So how do we get this done? 

Jeethu: David, we would like to offer you a free remote session in order to assist you better with the issue. May I go ahead and take a remote access to your system in order to resolve the issue?

Customer: Yes.

Jeethu: Now, you’ll be getting a prompt to give permission to access your computer, so in order to proceed with remote session in a faster way, please choose the option "Full Access to keyboard and Mouse".

> representative Jeethu asked to share the customer's screen.

> customer Customer accepted request to share screen.

Customer: OK.  What now?

Jeethu:  David,please check your junk email.

Customer: There.  Do you see it?

> Clipboard sent by Customer accepted by Jeethu.

> Clipboard sent by Customer accepted by Jeethu.

Jeethu:  David, you will only receive the mail in this email id

davidkirk@comcast.net

Customer: ALL OF MY EMAIL IS FORWARED TO THIS ACCOUNT. THIS IS THE ONLY PLACE I NEED TO GO FOR EMAIL.

Customer: IF WILL LOOK AT MY COMCAST ACCOUNT YOU WILL SEE THAT I HAVE NO EMAIL THERE AT ALL

Customer: Why did you set up this session?  Are you going to solve this problem or not?

Jeethu:  David,but you have registered the account  with the other email Id . This is why you are receiving in this mail Id

Customer: I understand that.  I am telling you that my mail for davidkirk@comcast.net is forwarded to my spamarrest account. 

Customer: What is so hard to understand here?

Customer: Are you going to install the software or continue to harass me?

> Clipboard sent by Customer accepted by Jeethu.

Customer: Look at the screen.  This is the McAfee installation file I have.  Can we use it?

> Clipboard sent by Customer accepted by Jeethu.

Customer: Hello?

> Clipboard sent by Customer accepted by Jeethu.

Jeethu:  David, do you remember the start date of the product?

Customer: I can get the date of the file I have.

Jeethu: Not that the date which you got the McAfee product through Comcast.

Customer: Looks like October 8, 2009

Customer: The info you see on the screen is all I have.

> Clipboard sent by Customer accepted by Jeethu.

Customer: C'mon Jeethu

Customer: Do you need to do anything with screen sharing?

Customer: Are you planning to take any actions?

Customer: Hello????

Jeethu: Please login the comcast site.

Customer: I'm logged in already

Customer: I've already been this route.  There is no place to download the latest McAfee file.

Jeethu: Can you just use the same password to login here which you used to login the Comcast site?

> Clipboard sent by Jeethu accepted by Customer.

Customer: I DID THAT ALREADY MANY TIMES AND I HAVE ONLY ONE MORE TRY BEFORE I AM LOCKED OUT!

Customer: DID YOU SEE THAT?

Jeethu:  David, to help you better I will now transfer the chat to our tier 2 team .

Jeethu: In case the session gets disconnected, we will try to contact you back. To ensure that we will be able to contact you, could you please provide me the following details.

1. The Telephone number at which you will be available:

2. Additional phone number, if any:

3. Primary & secondary e-mail addresses:

4. Convenient time for you to get a call back:

5. The time zone at your place:

Customer: Fine.  And I will transfer this entire conversation to my blog.

> Clipboard sent by Customer accepted by Jeethu.

Customer: 610.422.0048

Customer: 610.457.0010

Customer: davidkirk@theprguy.com

Customer: davidkirk@comcast.net

Customer: US business hours

Customer: Eastern US

Customer: Time: 1:01.:24.  Unbelievable

 

Corporate cultures are all very different and make all the difference in customers’ experience and loyalty. About 1.3 miles from our front door, a new mixed-use, “Town Center” has opened its first few stores. My partner and I are at the grocery store and the gym just about every day now. There couldn’t be a wider gap between their corporate cultures.

The grocery store, Wegman’s, is renowned for its fair treatment of its employees. They’re well paid, have excellent benefits and receive in-depth training in their specific specialties. The people behind the cheese counter, for example, all have been to multiple cheese-making regions and countries, at company expense, to learn the fineries of fromage. Tipping is not allowed in its pub. There’s a cadre of “Helping Hands” by the checkouts. I stopped by one morning to pick up sandwiches for a client meeting and discovered that the kitchen wouldn’t begin to make the ones I coveted until hours later. I explained my dilemma to a counter person, who brought out the executive chef. Not only did the chef drop everything and make those three sandwiches, she insisted on reviewing my “luncheon menu” to be sure I had a salt, a sweet and a fruit. Then she took the grapes I had selected for my "fruit course" into the kitchen, washed and towel-dried them.

I started in the PR business when the height of communication technology was the IBM Selectric typewriter with, omigosh, correction tape built right in! I remember gathering with my colleagues around a different mechanical behemoth, agog that we were now able to send documents to clients electronically, over the telephone! It required encasing a single page in a plastic sleeve and clamping it to a rotating drum. Then in only 30 minutes of so, that whole page would someone appear magically on a matching machine anywhere in the world. My first cell phone had a 15-pound shoulder-mounted battery pack. So when the Philadelphia Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America asked me in October to join several other "seasoned" practitioners on a panel about the future of PR, I felt better prepared to discuss the past. I had to give some thought to the future regarding my assigned topic, the future of PR research. In my blog this month, I reprise my conversation with a roomful of my peers on a subject of intense concern among public relations practitioners. Summary: the past is prologue to the future.

It's time for equal protection for LGBT people in all matters governed by civil law in all 50 states. It's easy to see why my 9th great-grandfather took-up on Billy Penn's offer to settle near here around 1711; this part of the country has the same rolling landscape and changing seasons that were so familiar to him and other German/Swiss settlers in Pennsylvania. It's especially beautiful here this time of year, as summer gently yields to fall, "The Wood Man" delivers a full cord of Cyprus and I can cut-back on lawn-mowing chores.<

Using social media is key to effective issues management. I used the recent holiday weekend to labor over long put-off chores around the house. These included tackling that eye-level stack of boxes that contain the paper record my career since 1976. (My grand scheme is to digitize anything of enduring importance and take advantage of my financial adviser's annual Shredder Day at the end of this month.) When I came across my well-worn presentation, How to Manage Issues before They Manage You: the Lifecycle of an Issue, I marveled at the key change that has occurred since the early 90's when I first began delivering this talk: the speed with which issues emerge and turn into full-blown crises. Then, I'd say that an issue can go from emergence to emergency in a matter of months. Today, the same cycle occurs in hours.

It all changed in 1992 when the U.S. government began pulling out of network management and allowed commercial entities to provide Internet access to the rest of us. At one time, corporate executives and managers charged with issues management could build their opinion-leader networks and databases, and prepare their position papers and communication plans in a timeframe that now seems leisurely. Today, that pace would be deadly. When I started delivering that talk, I would shock the audience members into realizing how behind the times they were by describing how I developed the lifecycle of an issue charts in one program and then converted it into another! Those were the days in which executives wrote on yellow legal pads and had secretaries who "typed it up."

Today, while some companies are still struggling with whether or not to blog, micro blogging has eclipsed blogging to become a critical tool in both issues and crisis management, not to mention marketing. While some PR folks are debating over the perfect CEO quote for a good-news release that will start with "We are pleased …," others have come to realize that news releases are fast becoming a search engine optimization tool, not a reliable method for attracting news or blog coverage.

As I say in every presentation to peers of my generation of college-educated communication professionals, we have to break the habit of "writing it up and sending it out" en masse, on paper. Along with the crazy idea that there is such a thing as "the general public" that needs to be "educated," this kind of thinking and behavior and dinosaurs have much in common.

Take a look at the requirements and baked-in assumptions of a PR course at Georgia Southern University. Here's the age-old assignment to interview a professional in the business — "and then write about it at your blog." Or this one, "Creating a profile in LinkedIn is a requirement in my PR Practicum class and is recommended for ALL my PR students." Or read this advice from the Philadelphia Inquirer's OpEd page on how to communicate with college freshman: "warm up your thumbs and start texting." Or ponder the fact that, in May, America's paper of record, the New York Times, appointed a social media editor, whose first acts included a 100-character introductory Tweet. The newspaper's Twitter feed (@nytimes) now was 1.7 million followers.

If you're a professional communicator and you want to provide wise and useful counsel to your employer or clients, you simply can't afford to be heard in public saying any these phrases:

 I just don't get Twitter. Who wants to hear about what people had for lunch?"
"There's no good reason for our organization to have a Facebook page."
"I don't participate in social networks because our IT department has all of that stuff blocked."
"Video, schmideo. YouTube is for stupid pet tricks."

Any organization can be damaged by a poorly managed issue that explodes, in minutes or hours into a full-blown crisis. Don't be caught with your Tweets down.

When Nathan Detroit's relationship with Miss Adelaide's starts to fall apart in the Broadway chestnut, Guys&Dolls, they resort to threats of lawsuits. That doesn't seem so remarkable to American audiences. But try to explain to Europeans how a litigious society like ours works and they're left mystified. I recently had occasion to speak with the CEO of a startup company in Germany that is planning to open an American HQ. As I learned more about his plans, it was patently clear to me as a born-and-bred American that his first purchase needed to be a Directors and Officers insurance policy. He couldn't get his mind around the concept and asked me, "Who would sue whom for what reason?" The answer, of course, was "anyone, anyone else, anything." So I did my best to explain it to him in an E-mail. Here's how I explained it::

Expressions That Make My Blood Boil

Finishing up a call with AT&T wireless, the call center rep summarized my transaction by saying that she had "educated" me about several topics. I know she was saying what her script required, but it made my blood boil. Public Relations programs, too, often set out to "educate the public." Why does this phrase send me running for the blood pressure cuff? Because it demonstrates sloppy thinking and arrogance of the highest order. First, there is no such thing as "the public," one great huddled mass yearning to be set free by our corporate wisdom. Any professional communicator knows that audience segmentation is one of the first steps in planning a communication program. But worse is the unspoken message of these would-be "educators." What they're really saying is "If only those uninformed and ill-informed fools hear our message, then surely they'll support our issues and buy our products." A statement like that is not only arrogant, but it also belies a fundamental misunderstanding of how ideas are bought and sold in the marketplace.<

PR Pros must embrace social media. This blog is a supplement to my June 2009
Update newsletter, which is devoted to social media. Since "old fashioned"
E-mail newsletters don't allow the space for much storytelling, I'm telling a
few here to make the point that even old dogs like me can learn new tricks and
to share some insights into how I learned them.

For example, I have been doing some very intensive research on Web-site
structures and optimization recently. In the process, I acquired an analytic
tool that allowed me to study several of my own Web sites to learn how I could
improve their Google search rankings. I was, frankly, surprised to see how
highly the Google search algorithm favors incoming links from social networks
such as Facebook and LinkedIn and to links with sites like YouTube and Google
Video. So I made some very minor changes to the sites including improving my
links to and from social networks. In the past month, I've increased traffic to
my corporate Web site by 15.18% and to one of my other sites by 34.89%.

Another: On Saturday of Memorial Day Weekend, we hosted our best friends for
a small gathering, which included the 17 year-old son of one couple. He
dutifully appeared and had his burgers but was eager to be with his friends. So
mom soon took him home and returned. As we were all engaged in rousing games of
Croquet and Dominos, mom silently kept in touch as her son asked permission to
change locations through text messages. (Why didn't he just pick up the phone
and call? Because kids don't want their peers to know that they're talking to
"the 'rents.")

And yet another: last week, I had marked my calendar for 1:00 on May 26,
2009, when the California Supreme Court was to announce its ruling on
Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative that amended the state
constitution to take away the right of same-sex couples to marry. It was a much
anticipated ruling that, sadly, allowed the constitutional amendment to stand
while, happily but incomprehensively, also allowed to stand the marriages of the
18,000 same-sex couples who had married after the Supreme Court initially ruled
that the majority does not have the right to deny the rights of a minority.

I was hovering over Google News and, shortly after 1:00, read the first
reports in national and international press. But then I went to Twitter I was
mesmerized by the feed from one guy who was reporting, minute by minute, how
street protests in San Jose were forming, how the police were massing in
response, how the crowd was reacting and feeling, what they were chanting, what
their signs said and what happened when arrests began. The carefully edited and
crafted news reports I read conveyed nothing compared with the raw emotion of a
guy protesting in the streets for his civil right. Imagine if, twenty years ago,
the students massed in Tiananmen Square had the same technology available to
them. We'd be remembering a very different set of events.

In my June newsletter, I promised bonus links to more great items about
social media. Here they are:

Like Lambs to the Slaughter: Why the FaceBook "Whopper Sacrifice" Was So
Murderously Successful

Social Media Can Boost Trust

Social media optimization (SMO) is gaining momentum in SEO Consulting

Most Web Video Is Unwatchable: Follow These PR Best Practices to Make Sure Yours
Gets Seen. Seven questions to ask.

Companies are scrambling to silence errant messages while exploiting social
networks.

Attention, K-mart (and Sears) shoppers: Your sites are ready.

Octomom's PR firm's resignation points out the need to reform public discourse:I was not surprised to read that the PR firm representing the California mother of octuplets had resigned because of numerous death threats the principals had received.  I've had similar, though not life-threatening, experiences in my own career and walking away has been a tempting option. On several occasions, opponents of clients I have represented have drawn my firm into the battle as "evidence" that my clients were guilty as they charge because they had engaged a PR firm aka "a spin doctor."  (Using the word "spin" to describe the work of a legitimate public relations professional is akin to calling an accountant a "lying bean counter.") So when I read that my friend of some 20 years, Joann Killeen, was the target of these threats, my interest in learning more about the new mother of 14 children grew.