PR War Stories (an editorial work in progress)

AFTERWORD:

About the Author (or, “Why should I care what this bozo thinks about PR?”)

This may run a bit long, but I assume you’ve already read the book.  If you’re still with me, I ask you to indulge me for a few moments (and a few pages), or at least quickly read down through the bullet-points below.  After all, now that you know Everything You’ll Ever Need To Know About No-Bull PR, don’t you want to know why on earth you should have paid attention to me through all these pages?

If you need a short answer, it’s this:

I love PR and I’ve been doing it (pretty well, I hope) for almost 30 years.  I started out to be a writer, but found that I also liked helping people solve problems – and that’s an important part of PR.  So I got into PR – and stayed there.  Along the way, I became the:

·        Youngest person (to that time) to have ever been accredited by the Public Relations Society of America

·        First person to earn a Fellowship from the American Society for Hospital Marketing and Public Relations

·        Only person to win (to that time) four consecutive annual MacEachern Awards for excellence in healthcare PR

·        The first keynoter at a major graduate business school’s “How to Market on the Internet” summer program, describing how PR can generate measurable return-on-investment for online businesses

I’ve also won – in 2001 – PRSA’s signal honor, the Silver Anvil, as well as two ADDYs. 

In addition, I’ve had the opportunity to write and have published eight previous books on public relations, marketing and advertising; and I’ve taught PR, “marcom” (see below) and written communications at three colleges and universities.

In my career, I’ve been fortunate enough to have done a lot of interesting things, and a few important ones. 

• I have been a speechwriter for two state Governors and I have handled campaign PR for Congressmen and a (sadly) at the state level for one successful and one unsuccessful Presidential candidate (the good guy lost – the one who won, I came to wish he’d lost). 

• I’ve done PR for colleges and hospitals and a great zoo (Riverbanks, in Columbia, South Carolina), as well as for trade associations and Fortune 500 for-profit corporations. 

• I’ve done investor relations-related PR for high-tech and dot.com start-ups including HealthWorld Online, as well as for other service-oriented businesses. 

• My clients have included a lot of non-profit groups, many of them in healthcare or drug prevention. 

• I’ve had the opportunity to testify before Congress (twice) and to meet with Cabinet-level government leaders in Washington as a consultant or advisor.

• I’ve even been called as an expert witness in a couple of legal cases, where I discovered that lawyers aren’t smarter – they just dress better.  And generally make more money.

As a PR consultant, I’ve worked with a lot of unusual clients, including:

·        A rocket fuel maker transitioning to manufacturing propellant for auto air bags

·        Lots of “dot.commies” (my wife’s incredibly on-target phrase), including several of the proverbial 23-year-old CEOs who really do work 24/7 – and expect us to match them – one, just shy of 24, was on his second successful start-up

·        A wacko visionary environmentalist with a sheer-genius plan to turn water into hydrogen fuel to replace gasoline, using solar power (the idea is exceptionally sound … one of these days, somebody with money and power will wake up to that and get moving and save the planet)

·        Concrete makers (PR for concrete?)

·        Authors and publishers

·        Millionaires who got that way by not paying their bills

·        An incredibly gifted in-vitro fertilization specialist physician (perhaps the best in the world) who was having trouble getting patients in red-neck middle America because he was an Arab and there was a war (the Gulf War) on at the time

·        Power boat racers, a NASCAR-affiliated facility and, indirectly, for Mike Tyson (who never paid – but who am I to go asking?)

·        The international bus company that provided employee and competitor transportation at the Atlanta Olympics

·        A craftsman who hand-made custom in-fireplace home heaters that let you enjoy the beauty of wood fires while warming your house

·        A gifted oncology surgeon who’s idea of PR was playing golf with other doctors

·        A multi-million dollar state-wide slot machine game – MegaBucks

·        Several different anti-aging specialists

And those are just the ones I can talk about …

I’ve conducted one-on-one and small-group classes for doctors wanting to know how to pretend like they have a personal interest in their patients, and for ad sales reps who wanted to know how to keep hospital clients (the answer – deliver measurable results instead of pushing worthless “deals”).

I even had an agency that, for two years, primarily did PR for other PR agencies that were too busy to do PR for themselves.

In short, I’ve been there and done that in PR for a long time.  So, if you want a comfort level that I have credentials enough to know what I’m talking about, you have that now.  With that off your mind, you can put this book down – then rush out to tell everybody you know how great it is – and why they should buy it and read it and recommend it to everybody they know.  Hey, I’d do the same for you … no-bull!

However, if you want to know some of the rest, read on …

More About the Author (as if it could possibly matter) and Public Relations

I got into PR by a fluke.  My major in college required a foreign language, and at mid-term, I had a 42 average in French – this was with real study time and the regular help of a remarkable tutor.  I knew I wasn’t going to cut it – and I knew I’d have to change majors to get out of taking it (again and again).

The only major at the University of Georgia in 1969 that didn’t require a foreign language was Journalism, which included Public Relations.  Since I knew reporters didn’t make bupkus, I decided to major in PR, and switched from Political Science to PR in a heartbeat.  It didn’t really matter – my major goal was to get out from under French, and to do that, I didn’t much care where I wound up.  Besides, I was planning to go to Law School, so my undergraduate major seemed like a minor issue.

Then I discovered two things:

1.       I really liked PR – a lot

2.       I had a conscience that didn’t seem to want to live with the idea of me being a lawyer, regardless of salary

Actually, that sounds like a slam against lawyers; it’s not meant to be – at least not this time.  In high school and college, I’d been a high-ranked debater, and I knew how much I loved to win.  In school, winning or losing didn’t count, except for points and trophies.  But I was afraid (rightly so, I think) that I’d take that same competitive drive into the practice of law – and all the world needs is one more lawyer for whom winning was more important than truth or justice.  I decided there was a real risk there, one I chose not to take.

OK, so I got my degree in PR.  I graduated in a recession, at a time when 80% of my graduating class of PR majors at the University of Georgia’s Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communications (a fancy name for a trade school, isn’t it?) took jobs as flight attendants for Delta.  Somehow, that didn’t appeal to me, so I held out (i.e., I enrolled in graduate school so when potential employers asked, I could say I was in graduate school instead of saying “I’m unemployed” – I thought it sounded better, one of my first forays into “positioning”).  Luck, perseverance and a guardian angel helped me land my first PR job, and I’ve never looked back.

However, when I found out that my first job had in mind a five-year on-the-job training program before I could move up (this was a very conservative, traditional insurance company), I decided to move on.  Over the next dozen years, I changed jobs and zip codes several times, climbing the ladder from Editor to VP/PR.  I kept going with that until, with the encouragement of a company-wide surprise layoff and three whole weeks of severance pay in my pocket, I decided to make the switch from “client-side” to “agency-side.” 

I did this by launching the first of what has become, over the past 15 years, several different agencies (at least in name).  The first was a great learning experience (i.e., it only cost me $35,000).  The agencies since then (Barnett Associates, which became Barnett Communications and later Barnett Marketing Communications, along with affiliations with Notch/Bradley, Weddle/Caldwell (now DW&A), LB&M and UpStart Communications) have been more successful.

In all of those agencies – those I owned and those I worked for (or with) I have at different times focused on healthcare and drug-prevention clients and high-tech.  But I’ve had lots of experience with non-profit association and foundation clients; with IPO-bound and publicly-traded investor-relations clients; with literary (author/publisher) clients; with product-line packaging/positioning and promotion clients; and most recently, with website/Internet clients, including dot.coms, software developers and other high-tech clients.

 With all of these clients I have focused on PR while blending in marketing principles.  However, while I’ve won a couple of ADDYs and have done graduate work in advertising (hell – I even wrote a book on advertising in 1987), I have generally tended to leave advertising to others.  I could get arrogant and say “any idiot can buy an ad, but it takes intelligence to create and place effective PR,” but … well, actually, that works – let’s just leave it at that.

While I was doing all this, I found the time to teach courses at University of Nevada-Las Vegas, at Middle Tennessee State University and at the Community College of Southern Nevada; and to author eight published books on PR, marketing and advertising.  I’ve spoken at national and regional PR conferences, have worked closely with PRSA’s student organization (PRSSA), and have done other interesting things that sound a lot better than they pay.

In doing all this, I have learned a few things about being on the client side and being on the agency side.  On the client side, the greatest challenge is to maintain a detached perspective.  Any PR practitioner who’s too close to a client or employer loses something – an outsider’s view of the inside – that seems to be vital to effective PR.  This is especially true in crisis situations, where being too much an insider can create “blinders” that limit clear vision and inhibit effective PR.  The greatest benefit is the sense of security (plus regular paychecks, benefits and a certain status that goes with organizations and titles).

On the agency side, the greatest business challenge is to find both the time and focus to serve the clients you have – and to attract the clients you’ll need for the future.  These take different kinds of mindsets, and many find it hard to make the moment-by-moment transitions necessary to be effective.  From a PR perspective, the greatest agency-side challenge is to be close enough to the client to represent them well – just the opposite of the greatest challenge for client-side PR people.  There’s a reason for that.

On the client side, you get title, an office, a sense of security and maybe some benefits.  However, on the Agency side, you tend to trade the appearance of security for the reality of constant change and stimulation.  When you’re juggling four or fourteen clients, it’s hard to get bored or in a rut.  For those who thrive on over-stimulation, high stress and long hours, this is an excellent career path.  For the rest of us, well, it’s something to learn to cope with.

There’s a lot more I could say about PR and my background – information that might give you greater confidence in the value of the answers I offer on what constitutes No-Bull PR.  But just between you and me, I suspect that you came here to get answers, not to read about the answer-man … and since you’ve already done that, I guess it’s time to close the book – or give it to someone you want to help succeed in the challenging field of No-Bull Public Relations.

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