On a day to day basis, the job can be a slog.  It’s pretty relentless.  On some days, almost every PR pro I know has looked longingly at the guy watering the plants (or mowing the lawn or delivering the packages) and naively thought, “I wish I had that dude’s problems instead of mine.”  You wonder what it’s all about.

For me, one of the rewards is cultivating the talents of the next generation.  It sounds particularly old-fogeyish for a 41–year-old to say but hey, I’ve been in this racket for almost 20 years.  You see things.  You cultivate people.

We got this note from a former employee, Chris Lynn, yesterday:

I’m on a particularly weird (and natural) high today: The Austin Chronicle, Austin’s largest and oldest weekly, named me Best Local Blogger and my site, Republic of Austin, Best Local Blog (tying with the Austinist). See my post here.

You guys are the ones that started me on this mad journey, and I thank you so much for all the encouragement and mentoring you gave me along the way. Before I came to SHIFT, I was at a particularly low point in my life. I now feel like anything is possible. Thank you for challenging me to always be better and helping me realize my own power and potential. It will always be appreciated.

And now I’m misty-eyed in the middle of a coffee shop

THAT’s the reward.

Congrats, Chris!

I honestly hadn’t heard much hubbub about the August 21 New York Times feature on the year’s biggest PR fiascoes (“In Case of Emergency: What Not to Do”), until I read last week’s editorial in PRWeek, “NYT falls short again in its portrayal of PR” (sub reqd).

(The) article seemed to suggest that the “PR missteps” were what led to the problems at BP, Toyota, and Goldman Sachs, and this is simply a naive way of thinking.

In each of these cases, the true problem was caused by a fundamental business—or safety—issue. Ask any crisis communications or reputation management expert and they will tell you BP could not even think about working on its reputation until it stopped the oil leak.

The two most-frequently used sobriquets to describe PR pros are “spin doctors” and “flacks.”  For all the mainstream media get wrong about their understanding of Public Relations, its remarkable that these two nicknames aptly describe the best and worst of the profession.

It’s true that there are far too many FLACKS in the PR trade.  My definition of a flack is a PR spammer: someone who pitches indiscriminately, with no regard for the media’s expertise, interests or contact preferences.

“The flack” is how 99% of PR professionals are viewed.  The reality IMHO is that it’s closer to 50% — still too many, by about 49%.  The good news is that PR pros ARE getting better at this whole “media relations” thing, since it’s now, thankfully, so easy for genuine flacks to be outed by their frustrated “targets.”

A SPIN DOCTOR is a PR pro who can presumably make a silk purse from a sow’s ear.  And while it’s true that there are some exceptional examples of this in the history of communications, the NYT piece demonstrates that sometimes the “doctor” will lose their patient, if they’re too far gone for succor.

The PR pro can only EVER be as good as their client. An evil and/or dysfunctional and/or walled-off client can’t rely on a “spin doctor” to save them.

In my experience, PR pros facing a communications crisis often shine brightest when they convince their anxious clients to simply DO THE RIGHT THING.  “Get in front of this, tell the truth, and work your ass off to fix the problem.”

That “truth” strategy only works when the truth is that the problem was unintentional and has not been purposefully hidden to-date.  As one PR pro noted in the NYT piece:

(Swift) disclosure (does not) provide inoculation against all ugly realities. When the facts are horrible … the best P.R. fix may simply be to absorb the pounding and get back to business, while eschewing the sort of foolish communications gimmicks that can make things worse.

A good spin doctor can’t work miracles, but they can surmise the right approach, i.e., whether to open-up or bunker-down. In all cases it’s still up to the client to take their medicine, to revive their reputation.

And that’s the fundamental disconnect in the NYT article.  As my Twitter friend @kurt_foeller noted, “where the NYT fell short was in understanding how BP (and Toyota and Goldman Sach’s) top management made solid PR strategy and execution impossible.”

From WIRED Magazine’s controversial article, “The Web is Dead, Long Live the Internet” came this set of factoids:

The story of industrial revolutions, after all, is a story of battles over control. A technology is invented, it spreads, a thousand flowers bloom, and then someone finds a way to own it, locking out others. It happens every time.

Take railroads. Uniform and open gauge standards helped the industry boom and created an explosion of competitors — in 1920, there were 186 major railroads in the US. But eventually the strongest of them rolled up the others, and today there are just seven — a regulated oligopoly.

Or telephones. The invention of the switchboard was another open standard that allowed networks to interconnect. After telephone patents held by AT&T’s parent company expired in 1894, more than 6,000 independent phone companies sprouted up. But by 1939, AT&T controlled nearly all of the US’s long-distance lines and some four-fifths of its telephones.

Or electricity. In the early 1900s, after the standardization to alternating current distribution, hundreds of small electric utilities were consolidated into huge holding companies. By the late 1920s, the 16 largest of those commanded more than 75 percent of the electricity generated in the US.

Indeed, there has hardly ever been a fortune created without a monopoly of some sort, or at least an oligopoly. This is the natural path of industrialization: invention, propagation, adoption, control.

We vaguely knew all of this from High School History, but too easily forget: at some level we are simply living through just-another business cycle.

It’s almost sad.  I’m fond of saying that Social Media represents the most fundamental change in human communications since the Gutenberg Printing Press — and I still feel that way — but the cynical businessperson in me also recognizes that where Opportunity exists, opportunists will rush headlong.

We already know that companies like Apple and Google and Facebook are dominating their niches.  But when it comes to Social Media Marketing providers — whether in the fields of monitoring, PR, advertising, customer response, etc. — we are still very early in the process of figuring out the long-term winners & losers.  As Jay Baer recently noted:

Agencies realize how hot social media is, and they are scrambling to add social media expertise (real or imagined) to their services mix. In fact, a search for “social media agencies” on Google yields more than 41 MILLION matching Web pages. Sifting through that pile to separate the experts from the pretenders is a near impossibility.

What’s your take?  Which Social Media Marketing vendors and agencies will be thriving 5 years from now?  Who will be gone from the scene?  If you care to make any predictions, share them with me in the comments!

According to a recent report by the Keller Faye Group, less than 10% of word of mouth conversations happen online.

Think about that for a second. We spend an inordinate amount of time fretting about Social Media Marketing, which is — let’s face it — largely an online phenomenon.  We perform blogger monitoring/outreach, Twitter monitoring/outreach, Facebook and LinkedIn and Yahoo Answers monitoring/outreach … It all feels right.  We can measure the clicks.

Yet according to the research, which dates back to 2006, “online” is NOT where consumers are talking about brands.

90% of all conversations Americans have about products/services and brands taking place offline is a startling statistic.  The important implication for marketers is that brands cannot ignore the offline conversations people are having.  Brands cannot rely solely on online social media marketing to spark conversations.  It’s another opportunity, not the only opportunity.

What does this mean to the modern marketer, who may still be rubbing the Social Media faery dust from their weary eyes?  What makes up the OTHER 90% of the word-of-mouth opportunity?

It’s not hard to figure out.  It’s what you USED to care about: traditional media relations, direct and online mail campaigns, advertising, events, guerilla marketing, etc.

Some Social Media Marketeing zealots would have marketers believe that the online opportunity represents the New Normal.  More rational and experienced marketers understand that Social Media Marketing was only ever meant to be ADDITIVE, not a REPLACEMENT for their “traditional” approaches.

(An exciting and compelling, even transformative addition — but an addition nonetheless.)

Think about some of the brands you respect most online.  Now recount to yourself how much of their marketing you might notice in the offline world.

Chances are they are working their asses off in what they rightfully view as a “multichannel” world.

I know you visit this blog to hear about thoughts & strategies re: Social Media Marketing and Public Relations.  And that’s what you get 99% of the time.  So I hope you’ll forgive me when, 1% of the time, I make this blog personal.

A few years ago I told you about my wife, on the eve of her graduation from nursing school (by the way, if you know anyone hiring nurses in the Bay Area, please let me know).  Today I’d like to take a moment to tell you about our son Luke, who leaves for college this week.

Luke is not perfect.  His room is in a constant state of disrepair.  He couldn’t find a household chore we didn’t point him toward.  He’s been known to take out his teenage angst on the occassional closet door.  His dedication to scholarship has been spotty.  That’s how he is typical.

This post is about how he is not typical.

Last year Luke traveled to Thailand during his summer vacation to serve the poor.  Yes, we pushed him to do some community service, but to his credit he dove in — and upon his return spoke poignantly of the poverty he witnessed.  He was impressed by the guileless joy of the Thai schoolchildren and described living conditions so impovershed that it made us gasp.  And because he was 17–years-old, and apparently bulletproof, Luke also found a way to break away from his group and party pretty hard in Bangkok.  Bangkok!  One night in Bangkok will make a grown man crumble (or so they say).  Our boy emerged grinning from the adventure.

This past Summer, he traveled alone to an orientation program at his college.  We arranged for a ride to the airport, etc., but he was largely on his own.  Despite umpteen reminders, Luke forgot his wallet with his I.D. and money.  That’s another example of how he is typical.

How he is not typical?  He cadged his way past the gate agent and the TSA agents in the Security line — without a scrap of I.D.  Luke didn’t call to let us know about this misadventure until he was boarding the plane.  “I talked ‘em out of charging me that new baggage fee, too, Dad,” he gloated.  (We fedexed his I.D. and $$.)

Upon his return from that same orientation program, his connection was delayed and Luke was going to be stranded overnight at JFK.  I started to panick; I was googling, “best terminal to sleep in when stranded at JFK.” But our atypical son never lost his cool: he called me up from a nearby flea-bitten hotel; he “would have called sooner, sorry,” but he’d been arranging for some Chinese take-out to arrive at the hotel.  The man had his priorities straight: shelter, food, and “reassure Mom & Dad,” in that order.

They say that a parent’s job is to give their children “roots & wings.”  A stable home life that instills decent values, and a sense of confidence that will allow them to handle Fate’s slings & arrows.  As our boy joins the ranks of the Class of 2014 this week, it will be with tears of pride that we watch him take wing.  Something tells me he’s going to be just fine.

Good luck, son.  Make good choices.  We love you!