KDPaine's PR Measurement Blog

Cingular is the worse cell phone service in history

I'm an early adopter, and got my first cell phone more than a decade ago, so I've had my experience with cell phone service. Over the years I've had Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and now Cingular and I have to say that to say that of all of them Cingular is by far the worst. I know that all of them suck at some point, but Cingular's idea of customer service is somewhere below that of Abu Graib prison guards.

When I first signed up to get my wonderful HP iPAQ 6515 ready to accept email, they only signed me up for a limited data transfer account. So they then proceeded to bill me $500 for voice calls. THEN, because they didn' t bother to let me know that I would be charged extra if I went over a certain amount of data transfer, I was charged another $600 for dowloading email spam. After we sorted that out, they cancelled my account and charged me $150 for the priviledge! I called to get that reversed and the email still didn't work.  After three months and about two hours on the phone, we may have finally gotten the phone working. I wish HP would go back to selling T-mobile phones!   

We have become the content providers

Good Morning Silicon Valley is one of my favorite news feeds, and today was a perfect reason why. . They provided a really interesting perspective on what the latest Pew Internet study is telling us, and what the true Internet reality is -- a world entirely populated by individual "content providers."  Which makes for an interesting measurement challenge. If the reason for doing something is just to express yourself, what's the measure of success -- the act of expression, or the publics response? 

How about the anti-Anvil award?

This is the time of year when everyone is madly filling out forms to compete for PR's most coveted prizes -- the Gold, Silver and Bronze Anvil, the Gold Quills, the Sabres, etc etc. all allegedly awarding the best that PR and communications has to offer.  Never mind that most of the entries can't/don't/won't  complete an entry form that actually ties results back to their objectives.  But setting aside that glaring contradiction, I think its time to supplement the carrot with a big stick.

Why not the "worst of PR" award? Give big black marks to  those organizations that have done more harm to the reputation of the industry. OK, you might have to put my former dance partner (yes he and I went to the Grosvenor Ball together back in 1970!) author Christopher Buckley at the top of the list for "Thank you for smoking" (It may not do our industry any good, but its a wonderful book.)

It's either to find other nominees. Just think of all the news you've heard recently that makes you cringe ---the Armstrong Williams scandal -- okay all the "Fake News VNR stuff"   the recently convicted Douglas  Dowie, former Fleishman exec in LA, etc etc. The list is much longer than I want it to be. 

But our personal winners are:

In third place, for best un-supporting role:  Strauss Radio Strategies, the agency for General Motors  who attempted to bribe former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich to say nice things about the recently announced employee buy out offer.

In second place for greatest damage to a country's image and credibility: The Lincoln Group for planting fake news in Iraq and attempting to undermine one of the most fundamental principles of democracy, a free and independent media.

The all time best destroyer of PR image and credibility: Walmart and its PR firm that is attempting to flood the blogosophere with "astroturf" by sending scripts to bloggers.  In the past Walmart has just damaged its own image, but its current clumsy moves to generate good will for itself have only convinced more people that PR is nothing much of a bunch of manipulative hacks. All their efforts seem to backfire and not only harm its image, but the image of the industry as a whole.

Anyone have additional nominees?

Is it really so obvious?

what does it say when a client sends you this link to Bloggers Anonymous -- is my addiction so obvious already? Do you think its affecting my work. Wait a minute -- it IS my work.. isn't it. I'm so confused

There's something in the air up here

Not sure what it is about the air up here, but there's more creativity floating around up here among our northerly neighbors than I've seen in a long time. I've already mentioned the incredibly powerful and creative (and result-producing) work that Extreme Group is doing, but I'd just retrieved my socks when they were knocked off again. First,  the afternoon of the 20/20 Visionary conference was devoted to a very challenging case study in which all participants were given a challenging semi-fictitious scenario around which they had to create a communications plan and key messages.  Each participant was  assigned to a table that represented one group of stakeholders and told to come up with a strategy plus positioning and talking points. Then each group was interviewed by a TV reporter. The conclusion was a video of those interviews. It was a great exercise, and a far cry from the usual boring PowerPoint presentations that normally fill up an afternoon.
The evening was devoted to the Pinnacle Awards -- the local version of Gold Quill. Once again the creativity was amazing. Rather than the usual slides of the winners, a local communications class created a video scenario. It all started with a Mission Impossible style opening in which the judges were assigned the task of getting the Pinnacle statue to the awards dinner. The camera followed the judges around St. Johns doing various surreptitious things until they arrived at the actual banquet. For each award category, they ambushed the recipient and told them they'd won and filmed the reaction plus a short explanation of the program. It was funny, real and even though I knew almost none of the participants or programs, kept me riveted to the end. For all of you out there putting on conferences and awards program (PR News, IPR, PR Week, are you listening?) you should spend a week breathing the St. Johns air. You'd come back with a bunch of great new ideas.

This guy gives great metrics!

Like many of my colleagues on the speaking circuit, I've learned not to expect any major new revelations from your average conference (with the exception of the IPRRC and Measurement Summit of course). However, the IABC conference in St. Johns featured two speakers that knocked my socks off. The first was Andrew Doyle -- the guy I kept throwing in the river in the middle of his speech -- Once I started paying attention, I was riveted. Talk about great metrics. For their anti-smoking campaign, he could care less about the fact that the campaign was a semi-finalist at Cannes. He wasn't even satisfied with reporting an 18% increase in awareness. He showed that the people who were aware of the campaign were more than twice as likely to attempt to quit smoking and that overall smoking rates declined.
For a workplace safety campaign, he could point to a 10% decline in accidents among young people and 43 fewer deaths.
His whole spiel was about being consistent in your actions and deeds, listening to the customer, and measuring real change, not just how many eyeballs you reached. No wonder he's been named a "SuperStar" by his Alma mater.
He really gets communications in the 21st century.
And if Andrew gets integrated communications, Hill & Knowlton's Jo-Ann Polak gets crisis communications. The big aha for most of the audience was that media is only 15% of a crisis and everything else (the bottom of the iceberg) is 85% and that's all about relationships and conversations.

And another great measurement tip

This one comes from Kelly Conroy, Sr. Communications Specialist at Westinghouse Electric Company's Specialy Metals Plant in Blairsville, PA. In order to test employee knowledge of policies and messages, she developed a version of  "Who wants to be a millionaire" that they play at employee gatherings. A summer intern Jane Mulvihill developed it in Powerpoint. Kelly develops the questions based on whatever the initiative is that they want to test. The Powerpoint presentation mimics the TV shows graphics and music and participants are selected based on their ability to answer a qualifying question. They use it with management, regional employees engineers, and Kelly reports that "it works quite well with any audience."  The point is that rather than another boring emplyee survey, do something that both measures effectiveness AND engages employees. 

Another potentially interesting 21st century PR tool

Shift Communications -- a midsized PR agency based in Massachusetts -- is offering -- for free to all -- an intersting template for releasing your news to "social media."  Not sure that any press release is appropriate in most cases -- haven't we declared the release dead over and over? but at the very least, for those of us who still cling to analog cameras, tube radios and $2 gasoline, I would argue that its a much-needed substitute for just about all press releases. Not that different from what many have been doing, but a HUGE advance from the way things used to be done. I'm curious as to what those on the receiving end will think..

When research is really money wasted

Today's New York Times reports on the results of a Defense Department is a classic example of  money wasted on research. Does it really take the thousands of dollars and hours I'm sure the DOD spent to figure out that paying Iraqi journalists to produce positive stories is a bad idea? That it might possibly destroy our credibility? This is the equivalent of Shel Israel asking  "do you need to measure the ROI of your pants?" 

Cool way to engage visitors

I'm up at the IABC 20/20 vision conference in St. Johns Newfoundland listening to Andrew Doyle from the Extreme Group in Halifax talk about "social marketing."   Lesson number one: Canadians use different words than we do. I of course thought social marketing would talk about blogs, and conversations. Actually he's giving a very interesting talk about how to as he put it "knock on people's door, come into the living room and tell them how they should behave."  He works with many of the big government agencies on campaigns to change people's behaviors -- stop smoking, get healthy, etc etc.  What's cool is that he is very committed to benchmarking and measuring results, specifically by monitoring behavior. (no column inches  or AVEs even mentioned at this conference, YAY!) His other point is that social marketing isn't that different from any other form of marketing -- you need to be consistent, act before you speak, tell good stories engage the audience and entertain.
His agency is one of the fastest growing most successful in Atlantic Canada and its easy to see why. They really get it. They just moved their office and have a very cool game on their website in which you "help their employees move." Its one of those perfectly simple engaging things that totally absorb us. So I might have gotten a little more out of his speech, had I not just spent the past ten minutes throwing their employees across the river. There was a strange moment when it came to moving the speaker and realizing that I'd drowned him, smashed him into a wall and hit him out of the ballpark while he covered the last three slides.