It’s every Houstonian’s worst nightmare! Tonight — Our reporter shows you: What to do if your car drives into a bayou!

It’s every Houstonian’s worst nightmare! Tonight — Our reporter shows you: How to survive a dog attack!

Is your bra giving you cancer?! Tonight — Our team investigates.

My wife and I were living in Houston at the time, and we’d watch in smug amusement (we got the Houston Chronicle and New York Times every day) at the barrage of almost incomprehensible pitfalls and tragedies that were lurking if we dared step outside the relatively safe (not counting the potential radon) confines of our apartment.

As surrealistic as it could often be, there was an underlying reality that was actually quite depressing. At the end of each broadcast, there was an almost invisible chyron saying the station was owned by none other than one of the titans of reliable, well-researched, objective, not-trying-to-grab-eyeballs-with-sensational-headlines journalism, the Washington Post Company. Other heavy hitters like the New York Times Company and the Tribune Media Company were also in the game of TV station ownership.

Fast forward 30 years. It seems that every week another news outlet is folding, and findings by the Pew Research Center for just the daily newspaper side of the equation paint a grim picture. From a height in the 1990s, circulation has dropped like hail in a Houston thunderstorm.

As everyone left in the news business ponders, and mightily struggles against, this decline, if the industry is looking for a cause, it could start by looking in the mirror. By funding an interminable ratings race fueled by upping the volume and dumbing down the content, the legacy media moguls who traded dignity for profits taught us, like Pavlov’s dog, that there was no difference between journalism and sensationalism, and that you could get your “news” for free. Sort of like owning a premium health foods market where you make most of your money selling quinoa, and giving away ice cream out the back as a nutritious alternative.

As we see every day — despite the high-quality journalism that still hangs on in all forms — what this means is less accountability from government, less civic engagement from the public, increased polarization and, in the end, a less-informed citizenry. This reality is especially acute in small markets, where state governments and city councils no longer face the scrutiny and accountability good journalism brings.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that my take is the only reason for the sharp downturn. A journalist friend of mine is quick to point out other factors like, as he puts it, “too much profit-taking by the big chains and too little reinvestment in how to deliver good journalism in a post-literate, post-credulous society.” Then there’s the advent of Craig’s List in 1995, which severely undercut classified ad sales, a major source of newspapers’ revenue. And not to think this contagion is confined to serious outlets, tabloids have also struggled to survive in the digital age.

Can anything be done? I’m an optimist, and though I don’t believe there’s a silver bullet out there, organizations like the American Journalism Project and innovative rethinking of business strategies like nonprofit models — DCist a noted exception — show promise.

Whatever the combination of solutions that, hopefully, starts to turn the tide, at the end of the day it comes down to this: Since the Great Depression, through World War II and the turbulent 1960s, Americans have never had to weather tumultuous times like the present without good journalism.  Now’s no time to find out what happens.

Got a question about PR, communications or life in general? E-mail asktheprguy@fifth-estate.com.

The post Quinoa or Ice Cream — Which did you *think* readers would choose? appeared first on Fifth Estate Communications.

Please help! I keep reading on listservs and social that it’s almost impossible to prove ROI for nonprofit communications. Now my executive director wants to know how we’re doing, and I don’t have a clue what to tell her. 

Signed, Stressing in Silver Spring

Dear Stressing,

First, take a deep breath and relax. The PR Guy is here to help.

Second, forget what you’ve heard in the past, either from the doomsayers and the head-in-the-handers or the well-intentioned but often-misguided consultants in the cottage industry of complicated PR ROI metrics. At the most fundamental level, if you’re having trouble measuring your ROI then you’re measuring the wrong thing.

Take our sibling profession … marketing. While we may scowl at the “Four Ps” and roll our eyes at the day-long packaging summits, you notice that very rarely is anyone asking about ROI. That’s because of what they measure. Back when the PR Guy was the Marketing Guy for a sports and entertainment arena, only one thing mattered: Butts in seats.

So if the Marketing Guy ran a great publicity campaign, with a pile of clips to show for the effort, there was still only one thing the promoter cared about at the end of the night: Did you make me money? If the show made the numbers, the campaign was a success. If it didn’t, the promoter would say something like, “Great. I can use those clips to feed my family until I get to work with a real marketing pro.” (Promoters can be really harsh, if a bit dramatic.)

And while lucre is not generally the end game for nonprofits, something is, and it should be spelled out clearly in the organization’s strategic plan (if it’s not, that’s a whole big other mess that you need to solve first). Which makes ROI easy: If the organization achieved the something—the clear goal laid out in the strategic plan—then the campaign worked. If the goal wasn’t met, the campaign didn’t come through.

Going this route requires a lot of trust. Maybe the goal was unrealistic. Maybe the campaign had a fundamental flaw. Either way, you shouldn’t try to hide behind a mountain of social media engagement, and the boss has to come halfway and own the management challenges. The good news for PR people is that we have the ace in the hole. Trust begins with dialogue, and dialogue is our bread and butter.

Bottom line? When communications plans walk in lockstep with overall strategic plans, the results actually do speak for themselves.

The post The True Measure of ROI appeared first on Fifth Estate Communications.

Are you and your profession happy that the truth is finally dead?

Signed, Wondering in Northwest

Dear Wondering,

Although these are surely depressing times, the PR Guy takes some solace in believing the truth isn’t dead. It’s just buried.

It used to get buried under an avalanche of accuracy. Back in the days when the more-or-less objective mainstream media had a more-or-less  lock on the news business, PR people would get frustrated with the necessary focus on accuracy that journalists bring to their work. That is to say, we’d often read the very accurate statement that there are those who believe the world is flat. (There’s a whole documentary on it!) The TRUTH, as we PR people like to point out, is that the world is more-or-less spherical, a big ball hanging out in space going around the sun every 365 and 1/4 days.

Back then, it wasn’t uncommon at all for the truth to break through the accuracy and win the day.

Today the truth is buried under an avalanche of information, a huge portion of which is of suspect provenance generated by an amorphous, self-reinforcing Lie Machine. Accuracy can barely poke it’s head out, so the truth struggles to get even the slightest purchase.

The solution? More truth. Fighting the Lie Machine is a fool’s errand. It’s too big, too fluid, and way too capable of co-opting everything that’s thrown at it. Instead, we need to flood the market — in a smart and targeted way — with more truth more often in ways that people can more easily digest.

It’s like they used to say on the X-Files: “The truth is out there.” Our job is to help uncover it.

Got a question? E-mail asktheprguy@fifth-estate.com.

The post The Truth is Out There appeared first on Fifth Estate Communications.

While applying for PR internships, would you have any suggestions beyond barraging different firms with resumes/letters of interest? A way to make it more personal without it looking either A) desperate or B) like a match.com application?

Signed, Don’t Want to Be “Match.com”

PR Guy once applied for a series of jobs in his younger days by putting the herb catnip in a small plastic bag and taping it to a piece of paper laid out to look like a PSA that read “DON’T BE A DOPE. HIRE PR GUY.” (Not his real name.)

PR Guy’s belief at the time was that the trick to getting a job was getting “noticed.” Meanwhile, Ms. PR Guy (back then just Ms. Editor Girl) tried to be supportive yet shared in her gentle way that people get “noticed” for all sorts of reasons. Like, say, having a piece of spinach stuck in your teeth or wearing plaid pants to a funeral.

(When PR Guy finally did get a new job, he asked his new employer what they had thought of his stunt. “We sort of thought you must be a fool,” or something along these lines, “but we liked you when we met you.”)

The point being that — believe it or not — what people really want to know about a potential intern is who you are and why you’d make a good fit. The way to do that is to be yourself (your professional self, not your Facebook self; and absolutely your “I’ve learned everything I can about you and can tell you why I’m a good fit” self).

Perhaps start with the question, “Why do I really want to work there?” And then be sure you can answer, “Why am I the best person they can hire?”

And for the record, there was no “match.com” in PR Guy’s day. We had to do things the old-fashioned way. But that’s a topic for another column.

The post I Don’t Want to Look Desperate … But I Do Want an Internship appeared first on Fifth Estate Communications.

Why are nonprofit executive directors (not all, but a lot) so reluctant to call reporters up on the phone? They ask foundations and individuals for millions of dollars without blinking, but the thought of calling a prominent columnist or key reporter about a story idea turns them to mush. Is that why they hire PR people?
Signed, Dupont Circle Girl

Dear Dupont Circle Girl,

As to the first part of your question, Executive Directors tend to think the same about reporters as PR people do about grantmakers or teenage boys do about teenage girls or, alas, too many Americans think of elected officials. Which is to say the difference of roles in the relationship — coupled with the fear of the unknown — creates a false perception of power differential. Better to have Susie tell Kenisha that Jack likes Jane then run the risk of rejection and crushing public humiliation.

Of course, the world would work much better if people did not create Rube Goldberg-style contraptions to manage personal and professional relationships, but then what would advice columnists do for a living?

As to why EDs hire PR people, it’s because communicators play a vital link in the strategic organizational hierarchy. While we’re constantly reminded that what we do is not brain surgery, the PR Guy would no sooner like to see the average surgeon try and develop an effective message than he would trust invasive cranial intervention to himself, or any of his PRSA buds (no offense, PRSA buds).

Unfortunately, far too few Executive Directors know this. And instead believe they hire PR people to put out press releases on information that is not newsworthy and pitch the wrong reporters with the wrong story for the wrong reason.

Is there hope? There’s always hope. But that’s the topic of another column.

The post Why Can’t the Boss Call a Dang Reporter? appeared first on Fifth Estate Communications.

I heard at the Communications Network conference in Philadelphia you got into it with some folks about the use of the word “branding” when it comes to foundation communications. I guess I have two questions: Are you a stuck-in-the-80s pitch-and-spin-guy who’s just not caught up with the times, or do you really think this actually matters in the day-to-day life of communicators?
Signed, Flummoxed in Philly

Dear Flummoxed,

Back in the Old West, folks used to say, “It’s OK to call you horse a dog, but don’t get all ornery when people keep asking why your dog don’t bark” (or something like that; PR Guy vaguely recalls it from an episode of Deadwood). Language matters, and language about ideas matters the most. The problem with public interest “branding” is the simple fact that branding is actually pretty much the very opposite of what most foundations, nonprofits, political parties and the like are trying to accomplish.

Here’s why: Brands exclude. Promises invite.

The reason you used to stick a hot iron — your “brand” — on the hind quarters of some poor cow was so that people knew it was yours. And back in the day, the synergy between the quality of your cattle and the measure of your reputation pretty much told people everything they needed to know about you. Were you the rancher who had all the sickly cattle … or did people want to buy from the Lazy Bar S because they knew you were an honest broker of cows (or steers, or whatever they called them back then)?

The point is the same goes today. If it’s YOUR restaurant, YOUR toy store, YOUR cattle, YOU get to own and steward the brand however you like. You of course can’t control all the variables, but you do get to call all the shots. If it’s not yours … say if you’re a non-profit, or a political party, or a foundation … then it’s not yours, and you can’t brand it. You can closely guard its reputation; you should absolutely nurture its visual and public identity; you by all means want to create and work to maintain a personality; but you cannot brand it.

The best you can do is make a promise, and hope to live up to it.

But seriously, one may still ask, the qualities are identical so does it actually matter what we call it? PR Guy’s answer is yes, if for no other reason than this. A brand and a promise start and end in very different places — “Mine” vs. “Ours.”

Got a question? E-mail asktheprguy@fifth-estate.com.

The post Brand again? appeared first on Fifth Estate Communications.

OK … so those Star Wars people can MARKET. (Woot to the box office receipts and all that.) But here’s the thing: “The Force Awakens” picks up where the rest of the franchise left off (twice) with an ascendant fascist state-like actor trying its best to stomp out a ragtag band of free-wheeling resistance fighters and in the bargain no small amount of unregulated commerce. Sort of like happens in a lot of movies these days (think Hunger Games, et. al.).

The PR Guy is just old enough to remember a Hollywood where the bad guys yanking the levers of power were quite different. Think dystopian/chaotic futures painted in films like Silent Running (1972), Soylent Green (1973), and Rollerball (the real one; 1975). In these Aquarius-era classics we find the suffocating force of the establishment coming not from a power-hungry state, but from a global corporate structure now calling the shots.

So what? So regardless of whether one thinks it a good thing or a bad one, the steep decline in deep (or even just paranoid) suspicion of corporate power in major motion pictures over the past four decades has coincided remarkably with the growing corporatization of Hollywood, which itself tracks pretty closely with a receding public trust in government. And here we sit in Election Year 2016 on Planet America facing the real possibility of an anti-government billionaire (or just an anti-government millionaire) actually running the country. Now the PR Guy’s the first to say that correlation is not causation. But it does make one wonder. Like we say around the office, “Seize the story, drive the solution.”

The post The Force Awakens appeared first on Fifth Estate Communications.

I’m in a jam. How can I communicate the need for sustainable practices that protect the environment while saving people money when oil is practically free these days by historic standards?

Worried in Wichita

Dear Worried,

First off, STOP TALKING ABOUT HOW THE POINT OF ACTING SUSTAINABLY IS ALL ABOUT SAVING MONEY!!! Sorry. Had to get that out. Deep breath.

OK, so there’s a saying in Kentucky: “You can’t hang your hat on a cat’s tail.” Or maybe that was from Dazed and Confused. Either way, the point is that while the good old days of cripplingly high energy prices and global economic meltdown are sure to come back, those of us in the sustainability business (i.e., all of us) need to take this time of (relatively) low prices and (moderate) economic stability to rethink what it is we’re actually trying to encourage people to do.

Which is NOT to save, or make, money. Sustainability is all about recognizing the downstream impacts of virtually every decision we make from the time we wake up in the morning to the time we go to bed. The real question we want to be asking is, How do we design our communities and live our lives in ways that give future generations a fighting chance of inhabiting more or less the same planet we all grew up on?

The PR Guy has the good fortune of working with clients who recognize that some of the sustainable decisions we make today will cost us less money than we’d otherwise spend, and some will cost more. Regardless, there shouldn’t be any daylight between promoting your sustainability work and communicating your core messages.

Organizations poised for long term success know the difference between the cost of a one-off feel-good program and a true and lasting organizational investment. The former can get you some good press and happy tweets. But the latter is all about developing sustainable initiatives and nurturing sustainable practices that align with you and your members’ values, are driven by your unique areas of potential impact, and have a demonstrable, enduring, positive effect on the lives of people and our planet.

The post Sustainability — What are we really trying to save? appeared first on Fifth Estate Communications.