Commentary

Spin This!

Reports from the U.K. indicate that Britain's military defense chiefs are spending millions of pounds on more than 1,000 spin doctors to improve the public image of the armed forces. But they have no idea who these PRs are or whether they are having an impact. The admission was made in a report called "The Defense Communications Strategy," which also marks the government's first official acknowledgment that (surprise!) there is little or no British public support for the war in Iraq.

First, it is easier to keep Lindsay Lohan on the wagon than it is to get 1,000 PR people to all pull in the same direction. Secondly, even the best that PR has to offer can't sell the public on what was clearly a bad idea to begin with--and it's only gone from bad to worse. But this is not an uncommon view of what PR is supposed to do--turn sow ears into silk purses, by any means necessary.

As the tobacco industry so strikingly illustrated, you can fool some of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time. At the end of the day, if you produce a substandard product (or worst still, one that will eventually kill your customers) or are dishonest or screw the consumer on service, the day will come when your corporate head will rest atop a petard in the village square--with reporters holding up the stake.

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Thanks to the Internet, they will get lots of help knowing whose head to sever. All sorts of insiders and malcontents and informed competitors will pull back the onion without the usual "going through channels" where reporters get "spun."

The only way companies (and personalities) had to control what was written about them was to utterly control all access and information available to the press. (And have total control over who their employees were whispering to, which they most often didn't have.) That illusion of control has been greatly eroded in the Web 2.0 world.

No one hates the term "spin control" more than good PR people. This implies that they have the power, ability and information to control how a reporter plays a story. But the vast majority of mature reporters can smell a spin a mile away and take into account that PR people are paid to put their client company's best foot forward--even if the body itself is riddled with cancer.

The better PR folks view their role as conduits of accurate information so reporters get what they need for stories to be right. Even if that means confirming bad news about the company. Not trying to "manage" the direction of stories gains a certain amount of trust with reporters and wins the chance to react if a negative story is being written about your company. Good PR people are good sources of information about their companies and their industries, not "spin doctors."

I once had a guy who was about to hire me ask: "Why would anybody want to be in PR?" Not an unreasonable question, since it is a business filled with charlatans, morons and some of the laziest people in the workforce. Ask the nearest reporter, he or she will fall over themselves rushing to tell you what they don't like about PR people--even if they would be hard-pressed to file without them.

Most people prefer to have careers where if they put X amount of effort into a project they get X return on their work. But in PR, it is not uncommon to put XXX into a project to see X or nothing come back in return--regardless of the quality of your effort. To be fair, many related jobs like sales can have a similarly low hit rate. The flip side is that you can give a reporter the right idea on the right day, and the result might be a story that adds profound value to your company.

PR is more than just press interviews. If done right, PR can, over the course of time, position a company very favorably with potential clients, potential investors and potential merger partners. But not if the company is little more than smoke and mirrors. And when the day comes that is revealed to the world, you will have the PR people shot at sunrise. But the gun will be pointed in the wrong direction.

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