Just before Christmas, we made a cross-country sojourn from our home in Pennsyl-vania to our new winter home in Arizona.  We packed our Camry with everything it could possibly fit, including our 12 ½ year-old, 120-pound Great Dane/Boxer, Buster, and Zippy, our three-year-old, 22-pound bundle of Jack Russell.  For six days, except for one day spent holed-up in an awful hotel in an even worse town because a blizzard was blocking our Westward route, we drove 500 – 600 miles a day, dutifully stopping every two hours to give everybody a break. 

It was no mean feat, especially since Buster was literally on his last legs, suffering from a progressive condition that was causing him to have difficulty supporting himself on his back legs.  But he was happy, bright-eyed, playful and hungry as a horse.  So we were happy to give him the extra space and attention he needed to make the journey with us.   

When we arrived in Arizona, he and Zippy  took to the new yard like a pair of puppies, playing with each other like nobody’s businesses, barking at all of the new sites and sounds, rolling on their backs and snuggling together on a “muttress” in the sunshine.  

Just six days into his retirement in the desert, Buster woke up in a good deal of pain.  We rushed him to the local vet to see what steps we could take to give him some relief.  Nothing could be done and we made the difficult decision to euthanize him right then.  It was a sad and difficult decision, as any animal owner knows all too well.   

But when his remains were returned to us a few days later in a neat white container, we didn’t receive them with a lump in the throat or a tear.  I was surprised, so I reflected on my reaction.  Am I really that cold and unemotional?  Or had I learned a new lesson?  It was three lessons, actually, about building effective relationships — with pets or people — that never include regrets: 

#1: Keep your agreements.  When we rescue an animal, we make a written agreement with the rescue organization to return the animal if we can’t care for it.  We make an additional agreement with our animals: we’ll take good care of you for life and make sure your life is long and happy.  You’re with us, buddy, no worries.  When Buster’s life was long but no longer happy, we kept our agreement with him, in a way that was painful for us but perfect for him.  Building effective business relationships often requires keeping your agreements, even when it hurts. 

#2: It’s not about you.  We could have used the space Buster occupied in our car to transport more “stuff” to our new digs.  And, frankly, it was no walk in the dog park hauling him in and out of the car many times each day.  But because of the pledge we had made to Buster (see #1), focusing on his well-being was our first and unselfish priority.  Any business would do well to remember that it exists because of the relationship it has with its customers and that they are #1.   

#3: Keep communicating.  Focusing on the other guy and keeping your agreements go a long way toward building relationships that are free of blame, shame, guilt, resentments and regrets and filled with trust, respect, loyalty and, yes, even love.  But that’s not enough without constant communication, which is a two-way, mutually beneficial activity.  With a dog, we listen to barks, whines, yelps, pants and quizzical looks.  We speak with gentle words, pets and scratches, healthy meals, playtimes, walks, car rides and visits to the vet.  In return, we get loyalty and unconditional love.  

In business, we listen and respond, in just as many ways, to our customers.  In my business this is called “two-way symmetrical communication.  In any business, it’s the key to building effective relationships.

I haven’t darkened the door of a barber shop in nearly four decades.  But recently my live-in barber took an extended business trip, and I found myself needing a haircut.  I live in a highly developed suburb of Philadelphia in which there is every manner of hair manipulating establishment under the sun within minutes of home.

Frankly, I didn’t know where to start. 

Figuring I’d be more comfortable at and old-fashioned barber shop rather than a “salon” or “day spa,” I turned to Google and found the most highly recommended nearby barber. 

The place was barebones and the experience was pleasant enough.  After about three minutes with the clippers, the barber pronounced me finished, took my $16 and I was on my way.  I didn’t give much thought to the process, other than to wonder to myself if the cut would “last” until my next out-of-town client trip.

For the past couple of months I have been developing a new workshop about referral marketing.  I have been immersed in that subject and looking at my own experiences with a microscope.  The common thread in the literature about building a referral-based business is that you must first be referral-worthy (with apologies to Elaine Benis of Seinfeld fame.)  To build a business by referral, you have to give your customers an outstanding experience, every time, repeatedly and sustainably.  When you wow your customers, they come back.  They give you more business.  And they recommend you to others because, among other benefits, it makes then look good and feel good.   

As hair is wont to grow, I needed another haircut yesterday.  I spotted a new place on the way to the gym, SportsClips, and stopped in.  I was greeted graciously at the door.  As soon as we established that I was a first-time customer, I qualified for the super-duper treatment (shampoo, haircut, steaming towel and shoulder massage) at the price of the basic haircut.  I’m not sure what the barber found to do up there, but she labored over my locks for 15 minutes with three kinds of clippers and scissors-over-comb.  The warm shampoo, hot towel and shoulder massage were a great bonus.  Then she spotted something she wanted to “refine” in my coif.  When I checked out, she gave me her card, a loyalty card, four coupons and the link to a satisfaction survey, which led to another dollars-off coupon.  And I can stop in any time for a free neck trim. 

I was surprised and delighted.  The experience was so well planned and executed that I now plan to start going to the barber again, not just any barber, but this one.  I am now a loyal customer of SportsClips.  I recommend it to you enthusiastically.  Remember now, that for all intents and purposes, I am as bald as an egg that occasionally sprouts fuzz.  But because of one experience with a referral-worthy business, in a service category that I don’t really need, I have changed a 40-year-old habit.  And I’m telling you about it.

Is your business referral-worthy?  Have you wowed a customer recently?  If you're not certain, maybe it’s time for a haircut.

For the past two weeks, I’ve been working from the new Western office of thePRguy in Chandler, Arizona.  We have family nearby and it’s been a real treat spending time with them. Last evening, I was given bedtime storytelling privileges with my nine year-old niece, Emily. She selected a book about Pablo Picasso, from a series about individual artists. That was my first surprise. 
 
About three pages in, she interrupted me with, “That’s a simile.” (I don’t know about you but I struggled until, well, yesterday to nail the difference between a simile and a metaphor.) So I asked her, “What’s onomatopoeia?” She shot back with, “That’s a word that imitates a sound, like buzz or snap or meow.” A moment later she chirped, “That phrase used alliteration.”  She then shared the mnemonic device she uses to remember her figures of speech. 
 
You could have knocked me over with a feather. (I bet Emily knows that’s an idiom.) And that’s not a hyperbole. I thought that the craft of writing was on its last legs. There’s plenty of evidence for that point of view in the daily barrage of emails, websites, ads, blogs, and TV shows — even in state slogans. (You’ve got a friend in Pennsylvania. Seriously?)  And I can’t tell you how many emails I receive from PR students seeking my “career advise.”
 
As much as I dreaded it at the time, I am forever grateful that the good sisters taught me the fine art of diagramming a sentence and drilled me on tense, person, word classes and poetry meters.   The 12 years I spent studying Latin gave me precious tools, too. I’ve used these tools to build a career.
 
For years I’ve been concerned about the receding heir line (pun intended) for the next generation of people who will wield the words that will inform, entertain, motivate and inspire us. Emily has given me hope that there’s a Future Perfect ahead.

Osama Bin Laden is history.  That’s a fact you could not have missed even if you lived, as he was presumed to, in a cave.  Whether you witnessed our national chest-thumping with bemusement and embarrassment or you participated enthusiastically in a flag-waving-USA-shouting-we-got-him-at-last street party, this particular perpetrator of mass murder is gone. 

The information he left behind showed him to be a venal hypocrite, dying his beard to record rants to his followers and flipping channels to get a glimpse of himself.  Someone was actually in charge of delivering the quintessentially American Coca-Cola to his million-dollar compound!  (Note to every CEO on the planet:  walking the talk builds credibility.)  

Amid the 24/7 news reporting, which still consumes more airtime than the unfolding disaster along the Mighty Mississippi, you may have missed one small detail that every professional communicator and corporate executive should note:   Sohaib Athar, “an IT consultant taking a break from the rat-race by hiding in the mountains,” live Tweeted the helicopter flyovers and explosions that were part of the raid on Bin Laden’s hideout.  He was none too pleased with the ruckus, writing  in one Tweet, “I guess Abbottabad is going to get as crowded as the Lahore I left behind for some peace and quiet.  *sigh*”

By now, every person in business who has a heartbeat recognizes that social media such as Twitter have permanently changed the very nature of communication.   To many, the unfolding Arab Spring is also known as the Twitter Revolution.  Yet in an ongoing (and decidedly not scientific) poll on my website,  fewer than one-half of those responding say that their organizations use Twitter as part of their planned communication activities. 

Not employing social media as part of an organization’s ongoing relationship building is almost a forgivable sin, compared with using these powerful tools clumsily or without purpose.  Not a day goes by that I don’t encounter a company that is ready to start Tweeting away with no objective in mind, in ways that offend the very communities they hope to enfranchise.  

Here’s an example I use in many of my training programs.  Every gym has a culture of its own, with social behavioral norms that are different from place to place.  Is it cool to drop your dumbells with a thud, or not?  Is grunting a sign of hard work or bad manners?  Do people “doing a circuit,” take priority over users of one machine in the circuit?  Do you wipe down your treadmill with sanitary wipes or not?  When is it OK to refuse a request to “work in?”  Yet when the folks that gym rats call “The New Year’s Resolutionaries” appear in early January for their fleeting  stays, most never bother to learn the cultural norms of the gym and blunder about making everyone else crazy.

The current issue of my Update newsletter includes links to several sets of homespun advice on the subject of social media norms.  If you have a role in your organization’s social media planning and execution,  consider reviewing them before you … ahem … work out the details of your social media program.

The mid-term election cycle that we have just survived could not have been uglier.  As a communicator, I studied the foulest crop of television ads I can recall, so horrified that I simply could not not look.  Christine O’Donnell was or wasn’t a witch. (But she’s “you,” for sure.)  Carly Fiorina depicted her opponent as an evil blimp.  Scores of candidates simply lied about the facts.  The offices of President of the United States and the Speaker of the House of Representatives were demeaned by reference only to the last names of their current holders, as if association with an Obama or a Pelosi were akin to a conviction for murder. By some estimates, $3 billion dollars were spent by Democratic and Republic candidates to lie about, debase and vilify their opponents.  Unfortunately, this bumper crop of rotten fruit was produced by some very talented communication professionals, who knew exactly what they were doing.  Polls, like this one, consistently say that viewers hate negative political advertising.  But, for the most, it works.  A couple of writers’ “lessons learned” pieces strike me as particularly useful for communication professionals.  So rather than reinvent their wheels, I’ll simply point you to them.  They’re thoughtful and thought-provoking and worth a few moments of your time.  Unlike most political commercials.

 Communication Lessons from the U.S. Election Trenches
10 lessons Democrats can learn from this year’s midterms, Part 1
10 lessons Democrats can learn from this year's midterms – Part 2
5 (non-political) PR lessons from the midterm elections

On January 22, 1987, R. “Budd” Dwyer, who was the Treasurer of Pennsylvania, committed suicide by shooting himself in the mouth with a revolver during a televised press conference at his office in Harrisburg.   At the time, my office was one floor above the newsroom of Fox-29 in Philadelphia; I was a close friend of the assignment editor of the station.  So the next day I asked her about the process she and her colleagues at 29 (and every other news organization in the nation) went through when deciding what — and what not — to air.  

The entire suicide was captured on tape and any news organization could have shown it in all of its horror.  Only one station in Philadelphia showed it, exactly once.  It stopped doing so after a flood of outraged phone calls demanded it.   Thankfully, virtually every news organization in the nation decided that the visual was entirely too graphic a depiction of one man’s anguish to be shown publicly. 

I mourn for the days when professional journalists made thoughtful choices like that one.  Yes, we do live in an age when anyone with enough hatred to spew can start viral trouble with a Facebook posting, a Tweet, a cell phone photo or an upload to YouTube.   But major news media still must conspire for such a virus to spread.   And, too infrequently, they act as disease carriers.

Pastor Terry Jones, the pistol-packing fan of Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, who sent his 10 and 15 year-old children to school wearing “Islam is of the Devil” T-shirts, drew the attention of the White, House, The Pentagon, The Vatican and practically every other news organization and blogger in the world with his threat to make good on “International Burn a Koran Day.”  He started with a Facebook posting.  Nancy Gibbs, a TIME columnist wrote that it quickly became “a media circus, but it was the kind in which the clowns attacked the children and everyone walking the tightrope looked down and couldn’t see any net.”

Fred Phelps, the loony hatemonger and disbarred attorney, whose family/congregation pickets military funerals at which his grandchildren wield “God Hates Fags” signs, has achieved an all-too large bully pulpit.   Phelps said that fellow-pastor Jones had caved under pressure from “sissy brats” and complained that nobody paid attention to him when he actually burned a Koran two years ago.

Sarah Palin (I’ll reserve my adjectives) hijacked the healthcare reform debate with a single Facebook posting about “death panels.”   This patently false sound-bite was echoed by “conservative media” (isn’t that an oxymoron?) until it had to be dignified with a response.

There’s an ongoing debate in public relations circles about licensing public relations.  Doing so, proponents say, would weed out the embarrassing charlatans, publicists and party planners who so frequently embarrass our profession.  But there’s that pesky little issue called the First Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits any law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.  Free speech, it seems, cannot be licensed exclusively to the competent or the good.  Nor can the press be muzzled; to paraphrase a Supreme Court ruling, “we have opted for a free press rather than a fair debate.”  Fair enough. 

But a free press is allowed to muzzle itself while serving its constitutionally protected role, without doing damage to a full and free public debate or its own practical need to sell content.  Twenty-four years ago, the community of journalists came to the conclusion that pictures of a brain-splattered wall would not illuminate the story of Budd Dwyer’s life and death.  I wish that choices like that were made much more frequently in newsrooms.  The rebuttal that media have an obligation to cover controversial stories, as Gibbs wrote, “… can become a lazy defense to avoid exercising judgment.  The right to speak does not include a right to be heard … saying that a single provocateur will set back world peace accords him way too much power, like indulging a toddler who’s playing with matches.”   It’s time for news media to stop shouting “fire” in a crowded theater. 
 

 
It’s long been my pet peeve that, when organizations behave egregiously, they are said to have “a public relations problem.” Yet when they behave in exemplary ways, their actions are “merely public relations.”  Thank god for the Catholic Church, which in recent weeks has demonstrated abundantly that “vile” behavior is simply that, not simply a failure to communicate.
 
To anyone who is following the Vatican’s blundered cover-up of systematic child rape within its clerical ranks (as Catholic author Andrew Sullivan characterizes the issue) and its tone-deaf response when caught with its collective cassock down, it’s clear that this 2,010 year-old institution has not caught up with modern crisis communication techniques, to say the most. You’d think that an institution that has institutionalized confession and forgiveness would have figured out by now that “mea culpa” is a lot more powerful than attacking the victims. 
 
Yet that is exactly how the Vatican has responded. At Easter mass in St. Peter’s Square, the Pope hugged the dean of the College of Cardinals, who broke all traditions and inserted a “welcome” into the mass in defense of the Pope, calling charges against him “petty gossip,” part of a “vile” smear campaign orchestrated by biased media intent on weakening the papacy’s moral authority. 
 
Many of my friends and colleagues know that I once spent a good deal of time and energy as a graduate seminar leader for Werner Erhard’s est training. (The work he began continues via today’s Landmark Education.) I remember being at an event that Erhard conducted at which someone asked why he had chosen to incorporate his organization as a for-profit rather than a not-for-profit entity. 
 
He replied that for-profit organizations have the benefit of direct and immediate feedback from the marketplace. If they’re doing something of value, they survive. If not, they don’t. Since he wanted to provide value, Erhard said he wanted evidence for that. Not-for-profit organizations, he said, tend to lose sight of their missions and turn their attention to survival of the organization. Without the feedback of the marketplace, they tend to survive by focusing on survival. As a fully recovered former Catholic, forgive me if I shout “Bingo!”
 
There is a PR person working in the Vatican, believe it or not; Father Federico Lombardi, an Italian Jesuit, is the Vatican spokesperson. In an interview with Time, he pointed to the “speed and vastness as well as the expectations for response” from media and that “we have been late in learning this within certain ecclesiastical quarters.” Though some news reports about the situation have had “problems,” he’s clear that “we shouldn’t see it as a conspiracy or part of some calculated attack.”
 
So why is Lombardi’s advice not being taken? He reports to the Vatican’s Secretary of State, the #2 man who is, as Time reports, “an exponent of the conspiracy-against-the-Pope perspective on the crisis.” No, indeed, the Vatican does not “have a PR problem.”