RHetoric

The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz has written a revealing column on the machinations he and his fellow reporters must go through to cause their articles to show up in Google search results.  We go through a similar process when we write press releases, and it can challenge a copywriter’s sensibilities.

Unfortunately for the Post, it also challenges journalistic sensibilities.  As Kurtz points out, Google trending is telling him his stories will be better read if he makes reference to Sarah Palin, Tiger Woods’s ex-wife, and Lady Gaga, all in the same story.  Not exactly Kurtz’s beat!

How does this apply to public relations firms serving businesses?

Used to be, the people we wanted to reach were unwittingly exposed to a wide variety of subjects.  The daily newspaper, trade journal, or evening news supplied a global sampling of the state of affairs, sparking new ideas and new interests. A mile wide and an inch deep.

Today, these same people hand-pick blogs and Twitter feeds and e-newsletters that cover not just their industries but sometimes their distinct job functions in their industries.  Their information consumption is highly specialized - a mile deep and an inch wide. So how do new ideas, one or two standard deviations from a reader’s core interest, break through?

The answer is relevance, and Google serves a useful public service here.  Its algorithms, hated by many, actually create a road map for businesses to make their ideas and innovations relevant to target audiences who have chosen to specialize.

If we want hospital IT managers to pay attention to our client’s HIE (health information exchange) solution, and we know that hospital IT managers are busy doing searches on terms like “meaningful use rules,” then we had better be using those terms in our press releases, and posting them on wire services that are crawled by search engines!

It’s one thing for a press release to be read by a journalist - but if it can be read by a prospective customer, even better.

Now, one can get a lot more sophisticated than keyword selection. The point, however, is that Google is not causing people to specialize, it is that they are choosing to.  So marketing and PR professionals must tweak their content to be relevant to the specialized interest, and the keyword is one way to do it.

There are other ways too, some of them gimmicks designed to game the algorithms.  We’ve seen content farms where kids are paid by the word to scrape copyrighted news articles, pepper them with references to the corporations that are paying them, and repost them - all to fool search engines into ranking those corporations higher.  We’ve seen cases where well meaning bloggers are duped into hosting linkbacks to other sites, to juice the other sites’ search engine results.

Ever do a search and end up on a page where the content seems relevant but just doesn’t seem to make sense?  Someone is getting paid to waste your time on purpose, to register another tick in their statistics.

For those of us in business-focused PR and marketing, we don’t have to resort to dropping Lady Gaga into our press release headlines to garner readership.  It would boost the numbers, but not of the right kind.  Rather, we have to be mindful of the fact that our target readership has chosen to specialize, and so as writers we must tap the language of their specialty to relate.  That is where Google’s algorithms can help us make the link.

Now I am going to go monitor my web stats to watch my online popularity explode as a result of this keyword mention of Lady Gaga.

Today McChrystal resigned – a PR disaster. What I don’t mean is Children’s and Infant’s Tylenol pulled from shelves, Lenovo computer batteries exploding on planes and Wal-Mart fake blog controversies – PR nightmares for the companies and their PR firms: Burson-Marstellar, Ogilvy and Edelman. What I do mean literally is that poor PR in this case has generated life altering consequences for McChrystal and his team of media-naïve cronies. The lesson here: even the worst PR people can teach us something. Or, at least serve as good reminders for best practices (based on what *not* to do).  

From the beginning this plan had crisis written all over it. Ill-fated access to high level executives with no clear and strategic objective = a mess.

Then what have we learned?

• Have an idea of what you’d like to accomplish. Rolling Stone says we’d like to interview you – sexy no doubt. But if you can’t answer the question: what’s in it for me and for the U.S. Army, maybe you have no business pursuing the opportunity. What was the goal of this meeting if not suicide?
• Know your spokesperon. Perhaps better attention to McChrystal’s general tone and tenor could have helped. Someone loaded with personality problems may not be the best interviewee. Just sayin’.
• Don’t overwhelm an interview. The last thing anyone and in this case the U.S. Army needs is fraternizing and a load of testosterone to encourage foul play and take you off message. Jay-Z said it best people: “Stick 2 the Script!”
• Understand reporters have an agenda too. They aren’t your friends. They’re doing their job – and in this particular case, doing it well. Who’s a hero at Rolling Stone?  Michael Hastings.

If Duncan Boothby’s (PR representative for McChrystal) objective of this fiasco was anything other than to help Rolling Stone sell millions of copies of its magazines… it is unclear.  

BP’s PR problem isn’t a PR problem… it’s an unstoppable gushing well problem. However that hasn’t stopped some crisis PR “experts” from rushing to the media to offer their opinions on what BP should be doing differently to enhance its image. Hey, it’s good exposure for the PR experts, I’ll give them that.

But frankly the image problem is the effect; while the cause is the non-stop, gusher under the Gulf. Until that hole is plugged, no amount of PR advice can really plug BP’s PR nightmare.

PR professionals commenting on this crisis should first acknowledge this is the underlying cause of BP’s PR problem, then dispense advice in this context.  If they did, they would be doing a much needed service for the entire PR industry, which sometimes gets a bad rap for vacuous spin.

So now for the two-bit PR advice to BP.  First, plug the well - obviously.  But in the meantime, have a script.  Sending the CEO or chairman in front of the cameras in the middle of a crisis without a carefully prepared and vetted script is madness.  Had the CEO said, “I want my life back” in a media training session first, the comment would have never made it to prime time.  Likewise, BP’s chairman should have memorized a carefully crafted script before walking out of a White House meeting and talking to the press corps - a script that would not have referred to Gulf residents as “small.”

It’s a good lesson for anyone in corporate America.  When a crisis hits, it is absolutely critical to prepare before stepping in front of the camera.  A single unintentional comment can throw off all good intentions.  And all good intentions are meaningless if the underlying problem - in this case the blown well - are unresolved.