We introduce our next guest blogger of our monthly series on the 25th of every month, in celebration of our 25th anniversary this year, Michael Pranikoff, emerging media director for PR Newswire.

Michael Pranikoff, Global Director of Emerging Media at PR Newswire, is responsible for educating PR Newswire staff and customers about the role emerging media in marketing / communications.  Michael is also involved in the development of products and services for PR Newswire in the area of emerging media.  Michael joined PR Newswire in 1998. Prior to joining PR Newswire, Michael worked for MacNeil / Lehrer Productions which produces the PBS NewsHour. Michael graduated from Syracuse University.  Michael maintains profiles across many social networks and social media outlets, connect with him at http://card.ly/MichaelPranikoff.

As I write this, I’m speeding though Germany on the high-speed ICE train from Hamburg to Berlin.   I just finished a two-day tour of speaking and throughout this time, I’ve been working on a piece about managing corporate identity in a crisis situation.

Speed has been the underlying theme to just about everything in the past few days.  The speed of our communications and the reactions to those messages are faster – and travel further — than they ever have before.

Since the 1950s, when the first press release ran across a wire service (PR Newswire – my employer), the pace of communications has been rapidly changing.  Just 20 years ago we all were just getting acquainted with email.  Today, we can’t go anywhere without it.

It’s important we listen effectively and react or communicate quickly and efficiently.  Unfortunately, that seems like an impossible thing to do for many organizations.

In my discussions around the world with communications professionals, there is always a sense of frustration at how long it takes to get a message together and push it out the door.   I’ve heard countless stories about how a news release is written, sent around for approval, and two days later it’s returned as a completely different version  with a few more messages and several hundred words longer.    If this is really the process, then how do we react in a crisis situation?

We’ve all seen examples, where it takes days for a company to react to a situation publicly.  Does this sound familiar? This just won’t do anymore.   Communications professionals today must be empowered to communicate quickly. In order to do that, we must earn the trust of the corporation.

One way to gain this trust is to design a program that makes it easy for our peers and superiors to see that we know what we are doing.  Design a flow chart that shows the steps to take when responding to something, the channels to use, and when to step back and examine further.

The best example of this that I’ve seen comes from an unlikely source – the United States Air Force.   In reality, it shouldn’t be surprising that they would come up with a process. What is more surprising is that they’ve been so public and transparent with it, and I applaud them for it.

There are still other stunning examples of companies and organizations that have been responded quickly and effectively to kill a potential crisis situation.  Last year, the Transportation Security Administration was able to thwart a potentially damaging story in a matter of hours when a mommy blogger posted a story entitled “TSA Agents Took My Son”.  In less than half a day – lightning speed for almost any organization – TSA was able to research the situation and use proper channels (in this case, their blog) to combat this false story.

As my high-speed train starts to slow down to approach Berlin, I’m reminded that while we need to quickly react and respond today, TSA shows us that it only works when the right analysis has been done.

Having a process will immensely help, and I encourage everyone to think with L.A.S.E.R precision: Listen. Analyze. Strategize. Engage. Repeat.

Special guest post by James Flanigan. James Flanigan is a business columnist for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and other publications and has covered national and international business and economics for 46 years. James’ blog and information about his current book can by found at: http://jamesflanigan.com/.

For almost half a century, I’ve experienced public relations from the other side of the table, as a business journalist. So I’m going to tell a few stories, parables if you will, with points about PR in each one.

I’ll begin with a public relations man who did his job well and helped me at the same time. I broke in as a business reporter with the New York Herald Tribune, assigned to cover the oil, chemical, pharmaceutical and tobacco industries. Jack Gillespie was public relations for Socony Mobil, as the company was then called, and he figured it would be good if a reporter covering the industry also understood it. So he set up interviews not with top executives but with working oil men who were on temporary assignment in Mobil’s New York offices. Typically, a crusty fellow, uncomfortable behind a desk, would explain the economics of exploration, say, or how natural gas occurs along with oil and can be recovered.

Gillespie didn’t gild the lily; there was seldom a direct connection to a story about Mobil, but there was an indirect one in that industry stories were at least knowledgeable. In any event, no story comes from a single source and critical comment is always available–in those days it was from upstarts like Occidental Petroleum or ENI, the Italian state oil company, which were shaking up the solid front of the major oil corporations.      A contrast is a story about British Petroleum, which has run into horrendous public relations trouble currently. In the late 1990s, after BP had acquired Amoco and was preparing to buy Arco, I interviewed its chief executive John Browne, later Lord Browne. Browne, to be sure, had intelligent perspective about the industry, but he was already preaching the company’s “beyond petroleum” environmental message.  I wrote a column in the Los Angeles Times after that interview but in subsequent meetings it seemed to a skeptical reporter that image building grew into hype. I didn’t write and declined later offers of interviews because reporting is not stenography and interviews, even with CEOs, do not necessarily a story make. The point is that business is a human story and the most important quality a company can convey in any PR campaign is integrity.

So, I’ll tell one more story about an executive and the late, great business editor James W. Michaels of Forbes Magazine. Each year at Forbes, staff writers had to contact CEOs to compile information for the Jan. 1 industrial rankings. It was tedious work, often to get a boilerplate quote from the CEO. But I called Nathan Cummings, the founder of Consolidated Foods (later Sara Lee Corp.) and he was delightful and informative about the industry and the company. So I asked Michaels why if this guy is so informative, are others dull and evasive? And Jim explained: “Nate owns the company” (which was nonetheless public). “The other people are just hired hands, afraid if they say something in Forbes, they’ll lose their job or be in hot water at the country club.” In PR terms, that tells you not only what you want in a client but what to understand about editors.

Following is the next video in a series celebrating The Pollack PR Marketing Group’s 25th Anniversary:

Following is the next video in a series celebrating The Pollack PR Marketing Group’s 25th Anniversary:

We introduce our sixth guest blogger of our monthly series on the 25th of every month, in celebration of our 25th anniversary this year, Paul Holmes, the highly regarded PR industry analyst.

Paul Holmes is editor and publisher of The Holmes Report, which provides knowledge and insight to public relations professionals, and manages the SABRE Awards, recognizing Superior Achievement in Branding & Reputation.

I just returned from Barcelona, where more than 200 PR practitioners and evaluation experts gathered to pass the “Barcelona declaration” of research principles, an attempt to set global standards for the measurement of PR.

The principles are much needed. My publication runs the SABRE Awards competition in North America, EMEA and Asia, and so I see something like 3,000 PR campaign summaries a year, and measurement is far from standardized. I see everything from clip counts to advertising value equivalency (roundly condemned by the Barcelona delegates), while relatively few seek to link PR to business results.

I have long believed that public relations is about what the words say it is about: building, maintaining and leveraging relationships between an organization and its publics. As a result, I believe the best measure of success is the impact a campaign has on relationships.

The past few years have seen the emergence of new evidence suggesting a strong correlation between an organization’s relationships and business performance. Specifically, Bain & Company’s Fred Reichheld has looked at the connection between advocacy (the likelihood that someone will recommend a company to a friend or colleague) and performance, and found that advocacy (or what he calls net promoter score: the number of advocates minus the number of detractors) is a strong predictor of future success.

This ought to be great news for the profession, because I believe PR is uniquely positioned to create brand advocates. It is hard for me to imagine an ad campaign that would make me more likely to recommend a product to others, but there are plenty of PR campaigns that have done this: communicating a commitment to CSR, linking products with causes, special events that touch people directly. (It’s also easy to imagine PR failures that create brand detractors: BP being the most obvious recent example.)

There are two obstacles to progress on evaluation, however: agencies and clients: agencies, because they all want a proprietary measurement tool that differentiates them from competitors, at a time when we badly need an industry standard; clients, because they remain fixated on traditional reach and frequency measures at a time when social media are demonstrating that engagement and advocacy are what really matters.

As an industry, we need to develop a standard and sell it to clients if we are going to take advantage of the opportunity for leadership offered by this new social media age.

The next video by The Pollack PR Marketing Group as part of our monthly 25th anniversary celebration:

We introduce our fifth guest blogger of our monthly series on the 25th of every month, in celebration of our 25th anniversary this year, Kathleen Kaufman, published author and educator.

Kathleen Kaufman is the author of environmental fiction and an inner city educator. She is well known in the social media community as a Facebook influencer and entertaining blogger. She can be found on her publisher’s website, The Way Things Are Publications, on Facebook and on her website.

Facebook marketing is a dirty word. No one wants to feel like they’re friends with a person who is trying to sell them a product, be it a book or a copyedit.  The most successful Facebookers, the ones who have converted their page into actualized business, are not marketing, rather they are participating.   It’s not as easy as it sounds; for one, you have to mean it.  The simple act of being genuine on Facebook is easier said than done.

I am certainly not an expert on how to juggle professionalism and sincerity in a virtual world, but I have learned a few lessons along the way as to what not to do.

1.  Mass Emails: I currently have approximately seventy-three messages waiting for me on my page.  I have no intention of reading them, for the most part, because they are all invites to ‘The Best Opening Night Of The Best Play Ever!’ or ‘Open Mic Night At The Improv!”   Thus, most of them are for events that are in Boston, Chicago, or New York.  It becomes painfully obvious that the sender has no idea that I live in Los Angeles, and even more painfully obvious that I am just a number, a member of their growing horde, an inadvertent member of a fan club.

We introduce our fourth guest blogger of our monthly series on the 25th of every month, in celebration of our 25th anniversary this year, Tom Searcy, who helps companies in finding business solutions.

Tom Searcy, co-author of  “Whale Hunting: How to Land Big Sales and Transform Your Company”, author of “RFPs Suck!” and founder of Hunt Big Sales, is a sought after business solutions expert for small to mid-sized companies.  Follow Tom’s thought leadership through his blog: www.huntingbigsales.com or access his resources at www.huntbigsales.com.

I remember watching a documentary on nudists when I was of an age that I couldn’t yet buy my own “nudist” magazines at the drugstore…the ones with the brown wrappers…if they even bothered wrapping them. The documentary talked about the “freedom of nudity”, its “natural state” and “the beauty of the human form.” It was confusing as hell to me- because the human form, at least the ones at the colony, were not beautiful. Even at distance and with discreetly placed black-box-blockouts, these were some pretty unattractive people. Their nudity not only put me in a position to look at things I didn’t want too, but it answered questions about people, (surgery scars, stretch marks, the body’s response to gravity over time for example), that I was not asking.

The documentary was about a microscopic sliver of the population who had made a distinct choice. But we are all living naked now. You, me, our companies, our children. We are all naked. And we will be beyond naked very soon- (BTW, I don’t know what “beyond naked” means but I think it involves Flickr™ photos of our last set of x-rays and dental records). Are you ready to live naked?

YouTube™, Flickr™, Digg™, Twitter™, Facebook™, LinkedIn™ and the rest of the usual suspects of the social media revolution are creating a naked world. Every customer experience, every shipped product and online FAQ answer, each touchpoint in the chain of your business is open for scrutiny and discussion. You may be aware of this, which puts you ahead of the huge brands out there being lampooned every day in painful and direct ways. But what is your strategy?

I work with small to mid-sized companies who are trying to grow quickly. One of the things that we work on is their market image. One of the nice things about everyone being naked is that it’s easier to do the necessary research on a prospect company before you see them. But…It works in reverse…(sometimes when I work with companies they forget this part).

Here’s what I tell my small to mid-sized companies:

• Control – You don’t have it any more, so take a deep breath and stand tall, proud and naked. You can control your integrity and your authenticity. Focus on that. Don’t focus on the buttoning-down of over point of entry and exit to your perceived brand machine. That’s like trying to grab the wind with a sack.
• It’s Never Fair – Of course attacks are unfair. No one is trying to provide a ‘fair and balanced’ story, as if there ever is one. Don’t waste time trying to make their attacks ‘fair’ by offering your point-by-point answers. The bell has rung- you are not going to un-ring it. You can just respond.
• Fast and Good – A quick response that is reasonable is much better than a slow response that is perfect. Do you see Toyota out there floundering with the slow and perfect story? That’s because slow in the naked world is by definition imperfect.
• Find Your Voice – As a writer and speaker, I go through a number of exercises to make certain I am writing in my voice. Not what I think to be the “professional and homogenized” voice. In the heralded brands around the world, one of the key elements to the rankings is their consistency and authenticity of their voice. You need to make certain that the voice is an authentic voice.
• Be 3-D – All the movies are going 3-dimensional for the same reason; the audience expects a different experience. You have to be multi-dimensional in your market message. A website with a never-changing brochure of product/service lists doesn’t cut it. Customers want the multi-dimensional experience. Give it to them. Videos, photos, blogs and ever-changing content.
• Thousand Points of Light – Your brand is no longer just the crafted message of your marketing firm. The touchpoints are now your brand- employees, customers, vendors and competitors. You have to be out there knowing what is being said. You can’t survey once a quarter and keep track of the voices. This has to be a daily part of someone’s role. Key word searches and tracking make it easier- but it has to be done constantly.

On this blog-site, you can read past entries to see what it is like to live naked. Noemi’s blogs provide examples of how ugly in can look when big companies try to hide. This is especially true for those companies who have not yet realized that the emperor not only isn’t wearing clothes, but his wardrobe has been shredded. But the question for you should be “What is my strategy for living naked?”

When thinking through your strategy, include these questions:

1. On a simple Google search of my company’s name and my name, what comes up and in what order? Is it what I want to come up? How can I change it?
2. How do we tell our story to the world at the level of customer, employee and supplier? How is the world telling our story to us in the naked world at the level of customer, employee and supplier? What does it mean about us if no one is telling our story?
3. Who are the examples of companies, regardless of industry, that we look up too in the naked world? What can we learn from them?

Fortunately for me, living in a naked world requires neither diet, nor exercise nor surgery. But it does require confidence and a strategy. What’s yours?

The next video by The Pollack PR Marketing Group as part of our monthly 25th anniversary celebration:

We introduce our third guest blogger of our monthly series on the 25th of every month, in celebration of our 25th anniversary, Jay Baer,  who writes in the below blog, on forward thinking social media programs and their composition.

Jay Baer is one of the world’s most popular social media strategy consultants and bloggers. His Convince & Convert social media blog is consistently ranked among the top business blogs, and he speaks to tens of thousands of marketers annually at conferences and conventions. Founder of five companies, he’s a digital marketing pioneer that started online in 1994. He’s worked with more than 700 brands since then, including 25 of the Fortune 1000 (Nike, Pepsi, Sony, Cadbury, Conoco/Phillips, Procter & Gamble). He’s a tequila-loving forest dweller with a passion for tequila, and spreads his “strategy first, then tactics” message like a digital dandelion.

I’m sitting in a restaurant in Cincinnati last night, surrounded by televisions with the sound turned down. The bartender approaches, and asks if I’d like to hear the TV. I say “sure” expecting him to saunter over to a monitor, and turn up the volume. Instead, he reaches under the bar, and pulls out a Soundog unit.

The Soundog is an ingenious device – a small, personal speaker with switching capabilities, enabling me to listen to whichever game I prefer without bothering nearby patrons.

Happily using this handy new technology, I was struck by its utter usefulness and the fact that it neatly addressed a common (although perhaps not world-changing) problem.

Why can’t your social media program do that?

The difference between “selling” and “helping” is only two letters, but the gap is in reality, much larger.

The best – and most effective – social media programs aren’t based on promotions and message distribution. Instead, they revolve around removing friction and uncertainty for potential or current customers.

Nationwide Insurance has a terrific iPhone app that allows you to document a vehicle crash in real-time, including photos, collection of the other drivers’ insurance information, and other key details. They aren’t trying to sell you more insurance – at least not at that point – they are being helpful.

Geek Squad makes its living providing technology configuration and repair services, via BestBuy stores everywhere. But yet Geek Squad has a YouTube channel that includes hundreds of videos showing people how to do it themselves. They aren’t trying to sell you services – at least not at that point – they are being helpful.

Geek Squad Founder Robert Stephens was asked about the contradiction of a services company providing helpful videos at a conference where I spoke. He said that the reality is, their best customers are those that can do some of it themselves. If they can assist them initially, they’ll appreciate it and turn to the when they need more help.

That’s understanding the difference between selling and helping. That’s understanding that social media success is a long putt, not a tap-in. That’s measuring results on an annual basis, not a weekly basis.

That’s what you should be doing.

Start today by conducting a Helpfulness Audit for your company. Talk to your customer service department, or survey your customers and document the top 10 problems that customers have with your product or service. Then, strategize ways you could make those problems disappear by providing better content (as with Geek Squad), faster response (as with Nationwide), or better access to help (as many companies are doing by launching online customer support communities using Get Satisfaction or other systems).

Our agency opened its doors on March 25^th 1985. It’s been a quarter of a century, today. It’s our day…

We are privileged to have been a witness to some of the most accelerated changes in history — moments that occurred from 1985, the year of our founding, to today — moments in time that have impacted not only history, but the PR consciousness and subsequently changed the ‘way it was’ from that ‘moment’ forward.  Recognizing this, we set out to put it all into some perspective to crystallize these impactful moments.

Our choice of 25 PR Defining Moments, over our 25 years, is capsulated in the video below.

We sought out ideas for our list from our colleagues, PR professionals and journalists, asking them to submit their ideas.  The criteria for inclusion was that the ‘moment in time’ over the last quarter of a century, had to have found its place in history or altered the way we live our lives, and also had to have impacted change within the context of public relations.  The ‘moments’ submitted could have influenced a lifestyle change, unfurled a technology that would change the way we lead our everyday lives, spotlighted a news happening through an inadvertent camera shot, or changed a political order or the societal landscape.

What we got was astounding, way more than 25…

So we chose our moments, from the many, and listed them in random order, so that we would be free to include ‘moments’ that fit our criteria, rather than be limited to the year in which they occurred.

If you wish, please let us know about ‘your moment’ that is not on our list via: Twitter @PollackPRMktg with a #25PR hashtag, comment on the blog, or email to info@ppmgcorp.com.

• Exxon Valdez Oil Spill
• The Televised Car Chase
• September 11, 2001
• The Cola Wars of the 1980s
• US Airways Flight 1549
• Fall of the Berlin Wall
• War Time Coverage
• Demi Moore’s Cover for Vanity Fair
• Real-Time Communication
• Barack Obama’s Social Media Election Campaign of 2008
• Dan Rather Exits As News Anchor
• First Dot Com Web Domain
• Debut of Roger & Me
• Gen-Y Changes the Playing Field
• Demise of Seattle News Institution
• The Rise of Pundits
• The Oprah “Effect”
• Reality Television
• Mosaic Browser Introduction
• Entertainment As News
• Product Craze
• Death of Princess Diana Media Implications
• Faux News Scandal
• First Blog Post
• You!

First aired on September 8, 1986, nationally syndicated talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show (O) became a PR phenomenon, granting anyone who appears on it, instant fame and notoriety. It became known for its “Oprah Effect,” since it could turn the everyday into overnight sensations.

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Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore marked a moment in time where filmmakers leveraged the power of film to expose political, economic and social injustices in American society. Accountability became an inevitability for corporations and government.

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Princess Diana’s death put the news media on trial as many blamed them for creating the market and incentive that led to her death. Amidst the wall-to-wall coverage, media was put in the dichotomous position of reporting a story of which they had to become a part.

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First to register in 1985, was Symbolics, Inc. By 1997, there were 1,000,000 .coms. Still widely used, its speedy early adoption ushered in an era of instant global communications, catapulting the Information Age.

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The world’s largest soda brands face off in a battle for market share and brand loyalty dividing the country into two distinct groups of rival soda drinkers. The cola wars brought consumer engagement to a new level as brand choice was viewed as a lifestyle decision.

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Live car chases would become an international phenomenon after the slow-speed chase of OJ Simpson in 1994, which captivated national viewers. But over the next decade, declining viewer interest resulted in decreased coverage of car chases by local news.

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The Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 is a textbook example of a major PR crisis communication failure. With no effective systems in place to respond responsibly in the face of the environmental disaster that ensued, Exxon’s delayed response damaged their reputation for years to come.

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The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 not only paved the way for German re-unification, but also broke the devastating communication barrier that had been in place since 1961 and led the way for what would soon be the opening up of communications with the entire Eastern bloc.

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Dan Rather, anchor of the CBS Evening News for 24 years, steps down after his report about President Bush’s National Guard service proved to be falsified and erroneous. The network’s failure to verify documents damaged his journalistic credibility.

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The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 not only paved the way for German re-unification, but also broke the devastating communication barrier that had been in place since 1961 and led the way for what would soon be the opening up of communications with the entire Eastern bloc.

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"Weblog," was first coined by Jorn Barger on December 17, 1997, and named two years later, as "blog," by Peter Merholz. The form led the way for corporations, individuals and organizations to become content creators and initiated the era of consumer generated media.

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The most devastating attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor, created a massive, immediate, public demand for ‘real time information’ never before seen by modern news organization, triggering the news ticker as a supplement to the on-air broadcast. Social media would eventually fill the ‘real time’ news void.

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An FCC investigation that revealed widespread use of sponsored news segments by broadcast stations nationwide, implicated some corporations, PR firms and even the Bush Administration as culprits in distributing packaged new segments as legitimate news, tightening standards and mandates for full disclosure.

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Time magazine’s choice for Person of the Year in 2006 was – YOU, acknowledging the millions of anonymous contributors of user-generated online content, which marked a shift in how we communicate -- a turning point in what was viewed as trusted information from trusted sources -- our friends, family and influencers.

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