StevenSilvers.com

Ten billion Tweets means what, exactly?

Most of my clients and colleagues acknowledge the expanding value of social media.  But they still don’t know what to make of Twitter.

Blogs, online communities and forums are relatively easy for them to comprehend as strategic communications tools.  But the incessantly babbling Twitter, with its Gnostic lingo of hashtags and retweeting and @replies, is not. 

So what are we to make of the fact that Twitter has reached 10 billion tweets?  Maybe a lot.  But maybe a lot of nothing.

Consider this unscientific illustration of Twitter’s contribution to productivity.  If each Tweet took on average only ten seconds to be posted and read, then Twitter would already account for almost 28 million manhours.  That’s an average year’s work for 15,414 Americans. 

What value has come of all this effort is debatable, especially when you consider that 40 percent of Twitter posts are what one study called “pointless babble.”  Probably just as many posts are babble that makes a point. 

Twitter also suffers from a growing spam and phishing infestation. A study by online security firm Barracuda Networks estimates that only 21 percent of Twitter users are genuine.

Nobody denies Twitter’s ability to spread the word.  But for many otherwise Internet-savvy communications executives, it’s still far from clear how to most effectively anticipate, respond to and leverage a free online messaging service that by design is a magnet for the world’s clutter.

Also see:

CEOs won't say Twitter and other contradictions about the hottest social media thing since the one before it

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(Above) Social media consultant Muhammad Saleem created this excellent graphic illustrating Twitter’s path to 10 billion tweets and what’s been shown true along the way.

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Toyota and Tiger: Brands never really get fixed

Pundits and news media are debating whether Toyota or Tiger Woods will bounce back more quickly from their respective scandals.

But it’s wrong to think a celebrity brand returns to where it was before the stuff hit the fan. There’s no repairing a brand image that has been demolished by bad behavior. There’s only repositioning a brand to succeed in spite of it.

Toyota and Tiger will never be the personas they were before.  That’s not to say they won’t again dominate their markets.  They might.  But they’ll do so on different terms, from a new starting line.  Consumers and the institutions that influence them will align their affinity in context to what went down and how it impacted them.  They may feel totally jaded or think the whole thing is overblown.  But they’ll definitely consider it. 

The 24-7 news cycle and the Internet’s indefinite shelf life means that scandal will be part of the Toyota and Tiger consciousness for a very long time.   Even if there were no more nasty headlines to come – don’t bet on it -- it could be a generation before the smoke clears.

For high-profile brands embroiled in controversies of their own making, it’s an important distinction:  Even the best-spun apologies and damage control aren’t the end of the matter. They’re the beginning.
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Reporters becoming PR people: Why it works. Why it doesn't.

More than a year ago I suggested that unemployed journalists will take many of the jobs that would have gone to communicators without newsroom experience.

That was an understatement.

In less than ten years, the nation’s news business has lost more than 14,000 jobs, some 25 percent of the entire industry.  Things have yet to hit bottom, especially for newspapers and magazines.

The result, as the Atlantic’s Jeffery Goldberg calls it, is the The Great Journalism Exodus.  Every PR agency, communications department and public affairs office in the country is hearing from reporters who are either unemployed or desperate to get out.  

Goldberg wonders if all these hacks make good flacks, but the volume of job candidates makes this a non-issue.  Many reporters don’t transition from the newsroom because they can't let go of their often sanctimonious cynicism about the business world.  But just as many are damn good at it.  They write better, learn faster and have better connections.  That’s why they’re getting so many of the good jobs.

What's important is how this hacks-to-flacks migration represents a tectonic shift in the relationship between sponsored message and third-party credibility.  For every public affairs officer and publicist with newsroom experience, there are many times that number of news beats and media outlets that simply no longer exist. 

The changing landscape means the best communications people will be those with skills far deeper than writing press releases and pitching stories.  They’ll need to know research, integrated marketing, community engagement, public affairs, issues management and yes, blogging and social media.

It’s worth keeping in mind whether you’re hiring a flack or a hack.  Or one in the same.
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Health care reform: Blaming bad communications doesn't fix bad attitudes

In the spin following the GOP’s game-changing Senate win in Massachusetts, the White House defended its beleaguered health care legislation with an old standard: What we have here is a failure to communicate.

"We lost some of that sense,” President Obama told ABC News, “…of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values.”

That talking point has been played down since then.  Good thing, too.  Because it’s terrible PR.

Think of health care reform as a high-profile but controversial consumer product being introduced into a marketplace of extreme fans and critics (like New Coke or Windows Vista).  Blaming a flat-out rejection on poor communications might seem a safe strategy. You hold yourself accountable but without faulting your intentions.

It’s not that your product’s bad. It’s the stupid packaging.

Except a lot of people will instead think you’re saying, “It’s the packaging, stupid.”

Your competitors will do everything they can to promote that interpretation.  As MSNBC points out, administration opponents are literally institutionalizing the word “arrogance” in reference to what Massachusetts voters were complaining about and how the White House has responded to it.

At the core of almost every public’s fear and loathing are legitimate issues.  You may think your smarts in creating a value-added product trumps all that.  They don’t. 

You can’t win people who think you’re dismissing them.  Even if you suspect they don’t have a clue what you’re really selling.
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What Tiger Woods and other scandals really tell us about crisis management

PR and media types over-analyze the Tiger Woods mess.  There are only a couple of lessons here.  But they’re big ones.

Here’s the first: The threat of discovery doesn’t stop some people from behaving badly.

Tiger’s melt-down isn't the failure of a crisis plan. There wasn’t one. None of Tiger Inc.'s image handlers prepared memos outlining what to do if it came out that Mr. Woods enjoyed extramarital affairs like some people collect snow globes.  Damage control strategies started after the truth.  Not before.

Today’s Internet-driven reality TV culture means we’re following scandals more than ever.  We’re very familiar with the “PR angle” of every story.  This has created a belief that PR is the end result of itself.  We assume that image is a universally valued currency to be saved or squandered.  But this confuses how we rationalize self-destructive behavior by prominent people.

Take for example a recent Harvard Business Review article on responding to scandals.  In it two researchers argue that Chinese executives who added melamine to milk sold in the U.S. might have acted differently had they only anticipated people's emotional reaction people to media coverage about dead infants.

The world doesn’t work that way.  Businessmen who poison food to increase profits are criminals.  And criminals are psychopaths that by definition don’t care what happens to others. They’re bad people, not bad public relations planners.

True story.  Many years ago I was in my hotel room watching the local news when suddenly the TV showed a mug shot of my client.  The government official at the center of our at-risk youth campaign had been arrested for soliciting a teenage prostitute. 

We had nothing prepared for this.  What we did have, however, was an appreciation of how things would get worse if people thought we were treating the scandal as primarily a PR problem to be resolved with spin and posturing.  That got us through it.

In the same way, Tiger’s self-destruction also reminds us of the second lesson: That effective crisis planning is having the ability to respond to situations nobody sees coming. 

In the real world, that has to include people in charge being caught doing very bad things.

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Getting caught is the new transparency and other realities of the coming year

Five truths for 2010:

The age of transparency is mostly about getting caught.

Ten years into the new media era, the institutions we love to hate – government, banks, big business, media – aren’t any more willing to tell us what they’d rather keep to themselves. The constant outing of reality TV frauds, tax-supported executive bonuses, front groups and scumbag celebrities is still a function of how Americans use the Internet to inform and entertain themselves.  Not the other way around.

Social media is getting less social.

Over time, millions of people will stop using social media sites because 1) their bosses lock them out during working hours, 2) they tire of all the commercial clutter or 3) they learn how those revenue-hungry companies are sharing their profiles, posts and friends lists.

The Rocky Mountain News is still dead.

For all the outraged hang-wringing and new ventures, media consumers in Denver and many other American cities are still only willing to support one local daily newspaper.  Barely.

Journalism, however, isn’t dead.  It’s just changing.

So-called “advocacy” media will flourish as more formerly ad-supported news outlets – or individual journalists and commentators -- become funded by interest groups, politically leaning foundations, single corporations and even government.  Whether you think it’s biased or not will depend on your point of view.

No company will ever hide its identity again.  Har.  Kidding.

Getting nabbed isn’t as certain as, say, driving through a DWI checkpoint with an open bottle of cream de menthe in your lap.  But some well-known brand out there is going to have a major PR problem when it draws the first high-profile enforcement of the Federal Trade Commission’s new transparency in marketing rules.
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The worst response is no response

Here’s a common crisis communications question: Isn’t it best for a company to stave off reporters until all the facts are known and there’s “good news” to tell?

Rarely.

Stonewalling is usually as effective in holding off media coverage as pushing water uphill with a fork.  Not only do your pants get wet but you look like a idiot.

News is going to happen with you or without you.  It doesn’t matter if don’t have all the facts. 

Executives and lawyers sometimes forget that news isn’t a conclusion.  It’s a consumer product. It gets packaged to last as long on the shelf as possible. One headline follows another as new information is confirmed or disputed, as ramifications and fall-out are analyzed.

Media don’t have to get it all or even get it right. That’s why there’s another newspaper tomorrow. Or another web update in ten minutes.

Your response becomes an aspect of any ongoing crisis or controversy story. Sometimes it becomes the story.

To not participate in negative news is death by a thousand paper cuts.  You force reporters to discover information, opinions and perspectives that will be rushed out, regardless of whatever contentions you have about accuracy or context.  You likely just prolong and make more convoluted the bad publicity you’re trying to avoid.

Does that mean you have answers to every question?  Of course not.  But there’s a huge difference between hiding from the press and making a sincere effort to explain why you can’t answer a specific question, or why it isn’t appropriate for the CEO to be interviewed now.  (But don’t say that “lawyers” won’t let you talk about things you’d otherwise be eager to explain. This will come back to bite you.)

Engaging the news media during an emerging PR crisis or controversy – including to respectfully decline comment – builds a foundation of credibility, even if you screwed up. You are acknowledging the legitimacy of the story and the media’s job. And that might buy you some breathing room to produce facts as quick as you confirm them, or at least be given the opportunity to respond to information and opinion before it’s rushed out there.

Good news or bad news, the rule is the same.  Say only what you know to be true.  But say it. 

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The State of Colorado says you should gamble because your life is pathetic.

The latest TV ad for Colorado Lottery drops the pretense of fun in favor of selling hope.

As in, you’re hopelessly stuck in your pointless little existence unless you “Break free” by winning Powerball. 

The “Don’t Forget to Play” tag adds to the loathing, implying that if you don’t win it’s because you screwed up.

The ad follows a sad-looking white-collar worker trudging through another dreary day, a huge chain shackled to his ankle.  Before eating his little peanut butter sandwich alone he buys a Powerball ticket.  That night a big red ball falls from the sky onto his little weed-infested lawn, breaking him free.  He smiles.

Hey.  Loser.  Don’t forget to play.

We all benefit from lottery revenues.  But it’s cruel for a state with as much recession-induced bleakness as Colorado to tell working people that gambling on a multi-million-to-one shot is their way out of it.
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Associated Press story says media hoaxes work

AP television writer David Bauder expands on the “frightening message” that media hoaxes like Balloon Boy and the fake press conference in which activists reversed the U.S. Chamber’s position on global warming are increasingly successful publicity tools.

At least, we think it’s AP television writer David Bauder.
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How breaking news becomes grist for the pop culture mill in only three days

The Balloon Boy hubbub proves a rule that companies in crisis should keep in mind: News is entertainment at the  speed of the Internet.

Here’s how it happens:

The incident goes live. In this case, Balloon Boy’s parents called the TV stations.

The incident becomes breaking news. A herd mentality takes over competing media outlets. Nobody wants to miss the shot that everybody else has. Time elapsed: About half an hour.

Breaking news becomes a national story. Local coverage feeds into national outlets, and everything feeds into the Internet. Live event coverage goes viral. News links and commentary fly around email, Facebook and Twitter. People at work see headlines on the little TVs in the elevators. Time elapsed: About an hour.

The story becomes a controversy. News reports contradict earlier reports, creating scandal. Questions, rumors and speculation become a constant din interspersed with breaking news updates of even the most minuscule facts. Talking heads on cable and radio blame liberals or conservatives for allowing things like this to happen. Internet coverage and chatter multiplies a thousand-fold. Time elapsed: Three to four hours.

The controversy becomes pop culture. The people who started it get interviewed on Larry King. Leno and Letterman make jokes that night. Saturday Night Live refers to it in a promo for this week’s show. Three times the number of media outlets show up the next day, and so do dozens of other people from all over. Some bring alcohol, others bring hand-made posters. Internet coverage and chatter multiplies several thousand-fold. Supermarket tabloids do cover stories. Time elapsed: One to two days.

Pop culture becomes the story. Media coverage and Internet chatter is the same as follows a popular reality TV show. People take sides with and against victims, villains and heroes. Everyone becomes a celebrity. Journalists – many of them ticked off for being played -- investigate school transcripts, arrest records and anonymous tips. Web sites pop up.  Talk shows devote whole hours. Authorities launch formal investigations. Politicians express concern. Somebody announces a book.

Media critics blame the news media. News media blame consumers. Consumers find Balloon Boy Halloween costumes on the Internet.

Total time elapsed: About 72 hours, give or take.

(Photo: The New York Post reported that an online gaming company in San Francisco put “Balloon Boy Game” on the Internet in only about six hours after the news story went national.)
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• The Harvard Crimson:  Sailing away with Balloon Boy
• American Chronicle  |  The "Balloon Boy" and the White House:  Good lessons for not mixing "news" and entertainment
• Philadelphia Inquirer  |  Mr. and Mrs. Balloon Boy did it because we will watch
• Washington Post  |  Balloon Boy, media stunts, dream up your own