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If you are not aggressively monitoring your own and your organization’s online presence, you are not only missing big-time opportunities, you are also potentially enabling damage toward reputations that might otherwise be avoided.

Here’s why: What is said about you online is more critical now than ever before because with social media it is far easier for anyone to attack you anonymously and even impersonate you without your consent. Anonymous attacks are commonplace on news sites because news media outlets take laissez faire approaches to anonymous reader comments in order to gain more online advertising revenue.

Impersonations are happening all over the Internet and on Twitter in particular to the point that one led to a high-profile lawsuit recently and the emergence of a new feature on Twitter: verified accounts. Examples of fake Twitter accounts: here, here and here. See what happened to U.S. Representative Dean Heller (R-Nev.) this past week. A Reno blogger for months was tweeting as if he were Heller and few knew it was occurring. The fake Heller garnered more than 500 followers. Heller’s communications personnel should have been all over this from the beginning.

Prior to social media, online mock sites were common but far more intensive to execute. A Twitter account takes seconds to create and followers will arrive within moments.

This is why it is important for people, especially those in the public eye, to monitor online content. I add strategic, relevant keywords to Google Alerts and the alerts are sent to me daily. I also use my RSS feed in the same manner. I know within moments or hours when certain terms show up in Twitter, on various websites and I even receive updates written by certain contributors to news sites and blogs.

When something libelous or illegal appears — for the record, criticism or harsh opinions are neither, and if something is true, it is not defamation and therefore perfectly appropriate to be published — or somebody takes your work and uses it for their own purposes without appropriate attribution, you have an option to take action.

This is where take-down notices come in. These are often sent by legal personnel and have a threatening tone, which is why such notices should be vetted by public relations personnel rather than the other way around. I know of a number of experiences where people requested take-downs or sent cease and desist letters that did so with such antagonism, it only exacerbated their problems unnecessarily.

Here is a simple, and to me an obvious, way to avoid escalating the situation – and paying attorney fees.

Last week one of my blog’s posts was swiped and republished on what appeared to be a spam blog, a subaccount of a larger series of blogs under one domain. I quickly did a database search for the site’s owner and sent him the following email. I have added my comments as to why I wrote it the way I did. His response and the outcome are outlined below.

Dear (name of site owner):

I respectfully request that these two posts either be removed from this site or proper credit and link-backs be given to the original source: my blog (http://thegoodthebadthespin.com/2009/06/18/sotomayor-and-sexism-npr-gets-it-right/).

[Two links to the plagiarised content were inserted here.]

Note two points: one, I presented options for a resolution, but I kept them to a minimum. Also, I outlined the problem and the resolution in just one sentence.

It is clear that the writing was taken directly off of my site with only minor (and perhaps automated) rewrites. It clearly states that the material on my site is copyrighted, just like [your own sites] are. While I am happy to have my material appear elsewhere, common etiquette suggests that at the least a link and credit be given to the original source.

I point here to the fact that both of our sites have appropriate copyright information as well as imply the obvious: 1. It’s not that big of a deal to me that my material appears elsewhere, but that 2. I am asking for credit and a link.

[Your site] appears to be an incredibly valuable resource, one that I would be happy to promote in any other instance.

This is one of the most important parts of the email – genuinely validating the site owner’s own work. This appeals, hopefully, to a mutual sense of purpose in what we both do.

I appreciate in advance your immediate attention to this matter.

Nothing gets to me more than messages that ask for something but do not put into the request a time element. Also, this statement is written in an active voice, is firm but does not come across as too demanding.

Respectfully,

Bob Conrad
(775) 636.7959
www.conradcommunications.com

An important point with this notice is not what’s here but what’s not. Nowhere do I make a threat, nowhere do I have an antagonistic or even boastful tone, nor do I attempt to force the person to do anything. My language is generally neutral instead of negative. Instead, I (hopefully) calmly outline the problem and offer choices for solutions.

Now, had I been ignored, or treated poorly in return, there’s plenty of other options to entertain, including playing hardball. That wasn’t necessary because here was the result: The site owner replied within hours (he’s across the globe), acknowledged the site was a spam subaccount and wrote this:

Thanks for being more polite than many!

Contrast this situation to what Tim Ferriss faced with his book, The Four Hour Work Week, and a message sent by, you guessed it, an attorney.

Strategic reputation management requires two things: 1. technical know-how (being on the cutting edge of technology to know where problems can arise), and 2. strategic messaging. Tone, style and choice of words can make a problem better or worse. Too often people without either of these skills enter into zones where they ignorantly act on impulse and with knee jerk reactions.  Such approaches, absent experienced council, almost certainly lead to more trouble.

A Summary of the Undercover Food Lion Story

The University of Nevada’s “J-week,” a series of cutting-edge journalism events running this week, is just about over. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend two lectures yesterday.

Lynne Dale, former reporter and producer from ABC’s Primetime Live, gave a tell-all account of going undercover at Food Lion grocery stores in the early 1990s. In her presentation, she outlined how ABC began receiving complaints about employee mistreatment and poor handling of meat products at various grocery stores in the chain.

Dale ultimately went undercover for two weeks with a hidden video camera and documented employees engaged in unsanitary meat handling and repackaging of out-of-date meat. The crux of the investigation, she said, was that Food Lion employees were systematically pressured to maintain a certain level of profit and performance. If unattainable, the employees were fired.

So, despite printed company policies and what appeared to be a lack of appropriate training in safe food handling procedures, employees maximized profits with purposeful repackaging and recycling old meat into new products, such as sausage.

From a journalistic point of few, the story was a slam-dunk.

“I was very single-minded,” Dale said. “Document it, prove it.”

Legally, however, the story became a battleground as Food Lion took ABC to court, not for libel but for Dale’s hidden documentation (fraud), trespass and breach of duty of loyalty.

Tellingly, Dale admitted, Food Lion fought its battle against ABC in the press. ABC took the legal high road and ignored its own public relations by staying mute about the accusations and case, which dragged on for years.

The result: “ABC lost in the court of public opinion,” Dale said.

Legally, ABC ultimately “won.” While Food Lion won the case on some technicalities and was awarded nominal damages, the victory was questionable. Perhaps most notably, the case had legal implications for undercover stories of this sort for years to come. Food Lion now has the authority to prevent undercover videotaping at its stores.

So too does ABC. During the Q-and-A portion of the presentation, one question I posed was: “If someone were to go undercover with a hidden video camera into the Primetime Live newsroom, what might we see?”

Dale’s response was adequate – that the newsroom has built-in accountability for fairness with attorneys and others to evaluate story balance. Her reply also fell flat because she failed to admit that ABC, like any other business, will inherently have internal problems.

There’s no organization on the planet that doesn’t have some element of dysfunction, disgruntled employees, people jockeying for higher positions, backstabbing and so on.

In the audience was Gene Grabowski of Levick Strategic Communications, who is a crisis communications consultant (and who gave a stellar presentation after Dale’s). He pointed out that ABC has a “no videotaping” policy at its gate.

“You mean ABC’s newsroom isn’t transparent?” I asked him.

“Of course not,” he replied with a smile.

Most importantly, though, I asked Dale, if, at any point, Food Lion apologized and vowed to tighten up procedures.

The answer, sadly, was no.

The (failed) Mojave Experiment, a screen shot

I have, mostly by default, been a Microsoft software user since 1989. Despite advances through these nearly 20 years, I’ve never quite been wowed by much of what Microsoft produces.

In contrast, Adobe’s products, particularly Photoshop and InDesign, are exceedingly useful tools with myriad creative possibilities. One can make a life time’s worth of effort simply using and learning either of these two pieces of software.

Microsoft has always been regarded as basically just being there. Needed, but not necessarily wanted or even appreciated. Microsoft’s success has been in market dominance, not necessarily superior products.

Sure Word is a fairly good package, even if it’s way too full of features 95 percent of us will never use. Excel’s not bad (but I’m still sticking with SPSS to run my stats). PowerPoint is atrocious and always has been. Its auto-functions are deplorable, counterintuitive and messy. And Internet Explorer is simply a nuisance in light of Mozilla’s Firefox browser, and now, Google’s Chrome, both of which are superior products.

Microsoft, unwittingly perhaps, opened the floodgates to software innovation elsewhere by its lack of authentic vision geared toward concern for the end user. I’m a huge advocate of Google’s fairly easy-to-use – free! — online software, particularly Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Reader and iGoogle. I’m close to doing much of my daily business all online, eliminating more and more the need for desktop-based software (admittedly, I’m typing this in Word now, however).

It’s no secret that Microsoft as a software developer is behind the curve. The reasons are many, and one blogger cleverly published insider documents that hint at Microsoft’s dysfunctional culture, tellingly illuminating how Microsoft’s success has the company in disarray.

And now Microsoft is adding salt on widespread wounds by deliberately advertising the supposed hidden virtues of its problem-plagued Vista operating system. These ads, dubbed the “Mojave Experiment,” are misleading.

This blogger explains how. Such ‘research’ would likely never pass the muster of peer-review – it’s almost insulting to even think of these ads in terms related to science — but it’s important to note Microsoft’s attempts at ‘science’ are dishonest at best.

This blogger asks several on-point questions in response to the Mojave Experiment ads:

• The “Mojave Experiment” involved 120 people. But the Web site shows 55 people saying nice things about Vista. What did the other 65 people think?
• Most or all “Mojave Experiment” videos posted to date feature an expert or marketing person showing neato features to someone. If Vista is so great, why didn’t you let people touch the computers?
• When people were initially asked their opinion of Vista, was it clear yet that Microsoft was doing the focus groups? How about when asked the second time? (I’ve personally developed and conducted many focus groups, and once you tell who is sponsoring it, everybody gets very complimentary about that company’s products.)
• Did the Mac, Linux, Windows XP and Windows 2000 users run out and buy Vista? If so, what do they think now? How about some follow-up?
• Will you make all video footage available (not just the favorable bits), at least to the press? How about just me?
• How is getting people to respond to controlled demos superior to surveys of people who actually use Vista?

The ultimate irony is that when I went to the Mojave Experiment Web site to review it for this post, I got a message that the site couldn’t be view in my browser: Google Chrome.

Did I download the new Microsoft software to gain access or click through to the “non-Silverlight” version after the annoying pop-up?

Hell no.

At the end of a Sunday, the last thing I expect to find in my inbox is an email labeled “urgent news” from the Public Relations Society of America. The exact subject line: “Urgent News from PRSA: Response to CBS Story Challenging Public Relations.”

Oh goody, I thought, PRSA is growing a pair. This should be fun.

Then I read the missive. First, it wasn’t a story as the subject line enticed us to believe. The beginning line of the email tells us that in fact PRSA fired off a letter in response to a CBS commentary, “in which legal analyst Andrew Cohen challenged the integrity of the public relations profession.”

Small problem, right away: We are the cogs of an industry that desperately needs challenging. We are our own best critics, ever ready not to say anything bad about one another. We don’t call one another out for unethical practices, spin-doctoring, spamming reporters, irrelevant story pitches or just plain ineptitude.

Here’s what Cohen said:

“Show me a PR person who is ‘accurate’ and ‘truthful,’ and I’ll show you a PR person who is unemployed.

“The reason companies or governments hire oodles of PR people is because PR people are trained to be slickly untruthful or half-truthful. Misinformation and disinformation are the coin of the realm, and it has nothing to do with being a Democrat or a Republican.”

PRSA’s response is stunningly limp. Some examples:

“Contrary to baseless assertions…,” “Curiously, you also assert that lying is no big deal. To the public relations professional, that is far from the truth.” “Building upon a foundation of integrity, implementation of those professional skills can also yield some very positive and powerful outcomes.”

PRSA’s first error is its knee-jerk response. Those of us in government communications are used to “baseless assertions,” many of which are best ignored. Especially those that paint such an intentionally goading, broad stroke. Especially those that are deliberately crafted as ratings- and hit-seeking commentary. PRSA would have better served its members by commenting on the matter at hand–”this past week’s revelations that former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan lied to the American people about certain vital policy decisions within the Bush Administration.” PRSA didn’t a give a hint of a word in its correspondence about this major, ongoing grievance committed too often by political machines. 

PRSA’s second error is to draft a lengthy, meager response. If you’re going to go for the balls, the writing should reflect such intentions. Instead, PRSA’s tone is defensive, vaguely sarcastic and full of unnecessary and hollow counter examples of how ethical PR people supposedly are.

PRSA’s third error is in its targeting. PRSA encouraged members to post responses below the original column. This led to embarrassing defenses by and of PR people. Technical glitches, or user errors, led to multiple posts by the same author, which adds to a perception of PR ineptitude.

Results so far of PRSA’s tactics are questionable. No real news has been generated, ridicule has been crafted and Cohen drafted a response today to counter the negative posts he was receiving–in other words, he gets more time in the spotlight for himself. Although he back peddles and apologizes in his new comment, which is twice as long as the original, here’s his final jab:

“I’m sorry I compared your PR association to the Burglars’ Association of America. That wasn’t nice. But of course there is no Burglars’ Association of America. At least my animal analogies worked, though, right?”

Mission accomplished. Thanks, PRSA.

I’m no Buddha*

The amount of perfection expected for people is unrealistic and often contradictory. The world’s noted scandals are often the results of character flaws of familial, biological and sociocultural origins, of which most of us possess.

Yet the bar is raised particularly high for public figures. It’s at the point of being unrealistic, so much so that I get a sense of cynical, voyeuristic enjoyment from the Peter Dohertys and Dennis Rodmans of the world. People like them, who relish in their careless, destructive behaviors, are refreshingly honest even while being distasteful to some.

Not giving a shit, when compared with the uppity expectations placed on many public figures, or just about anyone who screws up and is publicly exposed for it, is a healthy perspective. Suspending judgment of others is even healthier because the levels of expectation we place upon one another is, on some level, dependant upon our own mistakes and misjudgments.

That being the case, the celebration of our current, past and future misdeeds is even more critical in light of what I see as misguided attempts at trying to erase past negativity. The Search Engine Optimization movement, especially when used to manage online reputations, comes close to avoiding real issues even though SEO tactics are currently en vogue. There are books-galore being published about the topic.

The problem is that the bury-the-negative-search-rankings approach does not work for three reasons:

• First, it doesn’t address pre-emptive visions that guide not getting into trouble in the first place.
• Second, one of the leading firms that specializes in online-reputation management has the honor of having a number-two search ranking being a site devoted to criticizing the firm.
• Third, if an organization or person truly screws up, it is basic public relations to acknowledge fuck-ups, not try to bury them. Fuck-ups are opportunities to shine, not things of which to be ashamed.

There are many kinds of heroes. Some of my favorites are the Eliot Spitzer- and Marion Jones-types, who come out and admit their wrongs. When they go down in flames, they do so with a sense of humility they perhaps have never before experienced. This takes more strength, conviction and honor than winning in life, casting stones or being a sideline critic.

*For the record: Like most folks, I have my share of faults. I back-peddle, flip-flop and I contradict myself. I tend to speak off the cuff and occasionally my mouth gets me into trouble. However, I hopefully better recognize when I screw up, openly acknowledge it and do something about it if it is too serious. Having a wonderful wife helps.

 

In the late 1990s, President Bill Clinton was accused of selling burial plots at Arlington National Cemetery. The scandal made front page news all over the country. The problem: none of it was true. Lanny Davis, Clinton’s former special counsel, explains why this happened in part two of this exclusive interview for The Good, The Bad, The Spin.

* * *

LANNY DAVIS is former special counsel to President Bill Clinton. While in the White House from 1996 through 1998, Davis was assigned the difficult tasks of handling negative allegations against the President. He had to seemingly work against the formal machinations of the White House in order to give the President credibility in the face of, at times, bizarre allegations of impropriety. His experience is chronicled in his 2003 book, Truth To Tell: Tell It Early, Tell It All, Tell It Yourself: Notes from My White House Education.

Truth To Tell presents an inside view of media relations at the highest political level and soundly presents the story behind the stories. Davis’ latest book, Scandal: How “Gotcha” Politics Is Destroying America, sets America’s scandal culture in a much broader context by presenting the history of American political scandals through today’s 24-7 news cycle and the resulting extreme partisanship we see today. In the end, Davis presents a voice for commonality among political views. He now works as a litigator focusing on crisis management in Washington, D.C.

This is the second installment in a multi-part interview with Davis about crises and media relations. The first is posted here. Please check back for future installments. Better yet, click the Subscribe link at right to get new posts by email or into your feed reader.

Has today’s scandal-laden culture influenced newsroom ethics as you see it?

LANNY DAVIS: It goes back to Federalism and the Jeffersonians, which I start my book out with. There always has been scandal and there has always been journalism that isn’t fact-based but is more innuendo-based. There’s nothing really new here. What happened since Watergate is the invention of the Internet, the 24-7 news cycle and hyper-partisanship that really makes the Federalists and the Jeffersonians look tame.

You put those three things together and throw into the cauldron the independent counsel statute, which thankfully is no longer with us, and you have the most destructive and powerful scandal machine operating all at once, altogether during the Clinton years. But it’s just a difference by degree. It’s pretty common for this kind of scandal-mongering to go on in American politics since Hamilton and Jefferson hated each other so much.

The recent trend is to counter allegations within scandals is for a person or organization to post their side of the story on their own Web site. Some recent examples are the Transportation Security Administration and General Motors. It seems to me some of these tactics are seen with mixed success. It appears that those who respond quickly and aggressively to allegations either tend to kill or minimize inaccurate and damaging claims. Obviously the Internet has helped organizations to be more transparent and be quicker to publicly respond under the organization’s own rules—not the news media’s.

LD: There’s no doubt that there’s a great plus and a great minus to Internet and to the blogosphere, but I fear the great minus is being underappreciated.

The great plus is the democratization of information. The monopoly held by a few networks and a few editors–literally probably a dozen people up until the 1990s–controlled the agenda of news. For example, the New York Times front-page editor, deciding what to put on the front page, may have been the second most powerful person in the country because, based on that decision, every major network would decide what stories to lead with.

Those decisions by the networks were made by a handful of people. There were no cable competitors. There were just three or four network newscasts, and that’s the way people got their information every night. So if you look at a very elite and very powerful, small group of people making decisions setting news agendas, versus now which is if not chaos at least anarchy in the good sense of where information can be gotten from and who’s making decisions as to what is on the agenda, it is now a much broader, more democratic process. That’s all for the good.

What about the negative?

The negative is very understated because there’s such a bias in favor of all those positive words I just used. What’s unbelievably dangerous is the acceptance of garbage, innuendo, vicious, personal attacks and most importantly, journalism cloaked as journalism that is in fact nothing more than innuendo dressed up as journalism posted on some Web site or blog. People don’t note the difference between someone posting on a blog site versus somebody who has adult supervision and has to have facts to support what they write. That’s what most editors in most major newspapers require. We’ve lost some of that. Admittedly, facts are no longer the test of what gets published, but at least that’s a Columbia journalism goal.

It’s very, very dangerous. People believe what they read on the Web and on these blog sites. They think they are facts because they are repeated so often. The Googlization of the search engine culture that we’re in means that you go searching for a term, you pick up 28 different mentions of a particular, asserted fact, it looks true and you believe it. It gains conventional truth by repetition, when in fact it’s completely false or completely made up or a character assassination that can be repeated on Youtube 2 million times. I call it a new form of McCarthyism that is now more virulent on the left than it is on the right, which I used to think was not possible. I write about it in my book, whether it’s left or right, it’s very, very dangerous as the dominant form of the political dialogue on the blogosphere.

The rule of journalism used to be that you don’t write anything other than verified facts. It’s not a fact because somebody else said it. At the Clinton Whitehouse, I’d have reporters telling me, “Well, I can write this because it’s out there.” Starting with Watergate, the school of Columbia and Northwestern kind of journalism, where you only write facts, was already in decline. An example: The Arlington Cemetery story got picked up and written on the front page of every major newspaper in the United States. The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times … everyone of them would say they followed Northwestern-Columbia rules. When I asked them, “But have you verified that Clinton sold burial sites at Arlington?” They said they verified it. In fact, documents were repeated all over the place. “But have you verified it?” I asked. “Well, no, but it’s already out there.”

The blogosphere’s really taken it one step further. It doesn’t even have to be out there. It can be invented, it gets picked up on Google and it gets repeated, whether its Rush Limbaugh or the Daily Kos. Same thing. It doesn’t matter whether it’s true.

So the democratization of information, which sounded like such a great thing when I talked about how positive the Internet is, I think has humongous dangers going right back to Joseph McCarthy in the ’50s, who could ruin lives just by headline.

“The main message of (Ian) Parker’s piece could of course have been that fieldwork is no picnic, but instead he went for profound revelation: bonobos are not nearly as nice and sexual as they have been made out to be. Given that the bonobo’s reputation has been a thorn in the side of homophobes as well as Hobbesians, the right-wing media jumped with delight. The bonobo ‘myth’ could finally be put to rest. Parker’s piece was gleefully picked up by The Wall Street Journal and Dinesh D’Souza (yes, the same one who blamed 9/11 on the left), who accused ‘liberals’ of having fashioned the bonobo into their mascot. D’Souza urged them to stick with the donkey.”

At the end of the day, this issue is essentially about the common discomfort–on both sides of the political spectrum–with comparing humans to primates. It’s the worst kind of human exceptionalism because it ignores one simple point: We are primates. One kind of many.

Of course, it’s not just journalists who have trouble with science. So do scientists.

Jim Horton at Online Public Relations Thoughts discusses a social scientist whose data indicate that diversity within communities lowers civic participation. The problem: the scientist doesn’t like what the data say, a conundrum among scientists who seek to confirm their own views through research and are therefore exhibiting confirmation bias. The very nature of a null hypothesis versus the alternate hypothesis is that the data either show there is a statistically significant difference, or there is not. Morals, assumptions and ingrained beliefs should be put aside. It’s the beauty of research and how many startling discoveries are made unintentionally.

Horton, in one of the better PR blog posts I’ve seen on the Internet, goes one step further in extending the problem of confirmation bias by addressing the issue within public relations. He writes:

“As middle persons between organizations and audiences, we must first look hard at what is there before we attempt to persuade anyone of anything. It may be, and often is, that the ‘public’ is nowhere near where we or an organization thinks it to be. Our job is to tell the organization what is and not what the organization wants to hear. It takes skill to do that–and courage. It is easier to duck issues and mouth a party line, but it is also ineffective and wrong.

“Public relations is a difficult business when done right. It is as difficult as the job of a social scientist.”