David Kamerer

Associate Professor of Communication, Loyola University Chicago

To my graduating students

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graduation.jpgCongratulations! You’re almost out of here. Don’t forget a few tasks before you’re gone for good:

Thank mom, dad and all the adults who have cheered for you, paid for your car insurance, hired you, and took the time to get to know you as an adult. You can never have enough good people in your corner.
As you know, public relations is also personal relations. Collect physical addresses, emails and other points of contact. Obtain a permanent email address and share it with everyone. Buy some note cards and send some thank-you notes. Take care of your friends, and someday they’ll be the best thing: old friends.
Come to play. You’re going to need business cards, a really good resume and a portfolio (you should also have an online portfolio). You should never be without these assets. As you gain experience, update your portfolio. 
Buy a great suit, all the accessories that you need to make it work (guys, that includes a tie and dress shoes), get it tailored and have it ready. When you get the call, then you just put it on like a uniform. Easy.
If you anticipate needing a new computer, use your student status to get a discount on hardware and software. It would be a good thing if Santa brought you Adobe Creative Suite 4 (retail price is $1,400; student price is $300). You can order through the university bookstore or a third-party store like JourneyEd.
As a recent graduate, you can join PRSA at a great rate – just $60 plus local chapter dues. I strongly recommend that you join and turn out at local meetings.
I’m truly sorry there aren’t more jobs. But even so, opportunities abound. I know you’ll find and seize them.
You have accomplished a great deal; savor it. And then get to work.
All the best,
Dr. K
photo credit by M00by

Just for fun – holiday virals to share

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spector.jpgYou know Christmas is coming when your friends start sending you the latest Elf Yourself electronic greetings. According to a post at Odeo.com, this viral has been seen by 193 million visitors. Brilliant, lean in branding for Office Max, and for the cost of one TV commercial. Nice podcast about the campaign, too. 

Here are some more fun virals:
Naughty or Nice? Courtesy of the Greteman Group, a branding agency in Wichita, Kansas.
Simon Sez Santa does your bidding from keyboard commands.
Celebrity Gingerbread, Law and Order edition, from last season, at chow.com. Instructions for making ginger cookie versions of some of Hollywood’s fallen heroes (Phil Spector pictured, without gun). Delicious!
Sephora’s Mistletoe Makeover. Upload a photo of yourself and play with cosmetics. What favors you most? Is it “Smoky Sugar Plum,” “Merry Berry,” “Santa’s Little Temptress,” or “O, Tannen-Babe?”
Added on 12/17:
Ace your Face, from Ace Hardware.
Holiday Party Excuse Generator, from Enlighten, an ad agency in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Don’t tell the kids! For a modest fee, Capture the Magic will photoshop Santa into your living room for evidence of his visit. Ho, ho, ho!
Added on 12/22:

BannerBlog has archived 123 agency e-greetings from 2008. No trees were killed, just lots of hours of Flash development.
If you’ve found a good holiday viral, let me know. And happy holidays!

Links for 12-8-2008: all-Twitter edition

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I’ve posted a great deal about Twitter on this blog lately, but I do have a good reason: my students are doing a research study on how companies use Twitter to communicate with their customers. These links are to help them find their way through the front part of their paper assignment. So here’s another batch:

Niall Cook writes about good Twitter practice for corporations at The Customer Collective.
A very useful study on Twitter from H-P Labs, Social networks that matter: Twitter under the Microscope, with useful annotations from Jeremiah Owyang at Web Strategy by Jeremiah.
follow me @DavidKamerer

How to be an effective spokesperson: Jennifer Granholm

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The U.S. automakers are again asking Congress for money, and public opinion thus far has been surprisingly negative about the prospect of more loans. So it really caught my ear when I heard Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm talk about the need for the loans on the NPR program Day to Day.

Granholm put on a clinic on how to handle the spokesperson role. If you’ve ever done it, you know how hard it is. Of course she was articulate and empathetic. But more than that, she framed the issue in a way that puts Americans – not the car companies – first. I suggest you click, listen and follow along. And learn. The interview runs just under eight minutes.
Here are Granholm’s main points:
Frame it as an investment – the loan helps our economy, keeps people working, and helps the auto makers transition to a new economic environment with new (green) products.
Energy independence – the loan will help create American energy independence.
There will be blood – Granholm acknowledges that the auto industry is prepared to accept some downsizing, some loss of jobs. That takeway? The industry is sacrificing, just as all Americans are also sacrificing in this down economy.

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Empathy – she shows acknowledges the pain caused by the transition in the auto industry. Many of the soon-to-be unemployed are Michigan residents.
Hang the problem on someone else – in this case, the financial industry, whose careless investments in housing have crashed, taking down the entire American economy. “We’re victims, too.”
Acknowledge past mistakes – shows humility, that the industry is capable of recognizing and learning from past mistakes.
Dire consequences – without the loan, it’s “game over” for Detroit, says Granholm. It will also bring up to three million lost jobs on the industry. Again, mostly in Michigan.
Reiterate the key point – It’s a loan, not a giveaway. Again, in contrast with the financial industry. She also brought up the case of Chrysler in the 1980s, which repaid its loan in full and with $300 million in interest to U.S. taxpayers. 
Granholm is better suited to taking the case of the auto industry to the hill because:
  • she’s smart, well informed and articulate
  • she’s not from within the auto industry (for example, doesn’t go to meetings by private jet)
  • is able to tell the bigger story
There are many reasons to take issue with loaning more than $35 billion to the U.S. auto industry. Kudos to Jennifer Granholm for effectively representing why the loans would be good for America.

You never forget your first time, and yet more Twitter links

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Remember when you were young and full of innocence? You know, about a thousand tweets ago?
If you’d like to recapture that special first time, check out MyTweet16, which will show the first 16 tweets of any person you care to stalk investigate learn about. You know, how they tweeted “back in the day.” Sometime in September or October, most likely (Twitter has grown that fast).
The open API that Twitter runs on is sparking lots of innovation and reinvention, always a good thing with new media. Everyone can get their hands on a piece of the Twitter experience. Here are some more Twitter tweaks:

TweetTrak – service that tracks keywords on Twitter, sending you a direct message when your term appears.

FriendorFollow – Who are you following? Who is following you? This service helps you manage the reciprocity of your Twitter follows/followers from three easy-to-understand windows. Worth a look every so often to keep your Twitterverse in balance.
Mr. Tweet – your Twitter valet service. Follow Mr. Tweet (for some reason I can’t stop thinking about Homer Simpson as “Mr. Plow”) and Mr. Tweet will suggest people who should be in your network.
Twitbacks – free custom Twitter background themes. (or you could go old school and wrangle the pixels yourself; I suggest creating an image 2048 pixels wide by 1707 pixels high at 72 ppi; save out the finished art as a .jpg. And please, make it pretty).
Also, very much worth a read: Why I love Twitter, by Tim O’Reilly (yes, THAT O’Reilly).
Thanks to Kevin Dugan at Strategic Public Relations for some of these links.

The Motrin ad: a useful takeaway

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Last week, an ad for Motrin pain reliever targeting mothers created a firememe. Adage.com documents how the fire started, with some alpha bloggers posting and then taking the story to Twitter, where it lit up the service on Saturday and Sunday. You can also use search.twitter.com to view the activity on Twitter. Here’s a nice graph of the chatter, courtesy of the Jeremiah Owyang. 

Long story short, the ad came down and McNeil Consumer Healthcare apologized.
I won’t spend much time on the controversy. My guess is that the agency on the Motrin account, Ajax, didn’t do any research. I showed the ad to a roomful of college students unfamiliar with the controversy, and they identified five copy points that marginalized the first-person mom of the narrative. Not exactly a smart strategy.
Were the mommys who criticized the ad out of line? It doesn’t matter. They did it because they hated the ad and had the tools to complain and effect change. 
That’s life today. And that’s the lesson of this post.
On Monday morning, after a weekend of anti-Motrin chatter, I did a Google search and found no evidence of it. (regretfully, I didn’t do a screen grab). On Tuesday morning, there were a couple of references, from “news” at the top and from blogs on the bottom. That’s all. If you were a McNeil executive and did this, you would be blissfully unaware of any unhappy customers.
If this is all you do for personal or brand surveillance, it’s not enough. There’s a wall that separates traditional Internet use and social media use, and it used to be that most people stayed on the traditional side. Today, there’s a mass audience on the social side. So you need to monitor both – one more slow moving, the other, lighting fast.
Here are some basic suggestions:
  • If you’re not currently using RSS to monitor the blogosphere, you need to. Stat.
  • Ditto, RSS for monitoring searches from Google, Google blogs and other relevant search engines.
  • You should monitor Backtype for blog comments.
  • You should monitor Technorati.
  • And for heaven’s sake, get on Twitter, participate, and learn about his unique culture.
Two more points. Your brand needs a “safety valve” for disgruntled stakeholders (why is no one “gruntled” these days?). If you have a social media presence, they can bring their comments to you, where you can participate, listen, act on suggestions and defuse the controversy. Note: it’s also good to hear from happy stakeholders. Here are some websites where smart companies facilitate communication with their customers:
If you can’t create a site like these, don’t worry. A well-written blog – one written by a real human in a real voice – should serve you well. Once you’ve created the blog, feed it, create relationships and participate in the social chatter. 
Second, you need to monitor your reputation 24/7/365. The Internet never sleeps. Accept it and adapt. If people are mad at you, you don’t want to give them a four hour head start.
Social media are at a tipping point. Moving forward, you can’t afford to not be in the game. You can’t afford to not have a plan. Staying out? That can give you one big headache.
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What listening tools and strategies do you recommend?

PR needed here: Detroit automakers

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It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that the heads of the Big Three automakers flew to Washington on three private jets to beg for $25 billion in bailout money. A sensible person would ask: is this on message? Don’t people judge you by your actions? Would it be so bad to fly commercial? At least couldn’t they jet-pool?
Don’t these CEOs have counselors on staff to avoid disasters like this?
But this is the the U.S. auto industry we’re talking about. These guys have built their careers running once-great marques into the ground.

Worth noting: AIG is set to receive $150 billion in bailout money, and there’s not too much public discussion about it. But when the big three automakers came to Capitol Hill to ask for $25 billion, there was plenty.

It’s hard to understand things like investments and insurance. But almost everyone owns a car. We all have long-standing relationships with automobile brands. We all know something about the auto business. For example, I know that I just replaced the transmission on my daughter’s U.S.-made 2003 Ford Focus, conveniently just a few hundred miles out of warranty and a relatively young car at 61,000 miles. I know it cost me more than $2,000 to keep this economy car on the road for a while longer.

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And here’s what else I know: American cars are not the best. If you want the best, the market can easily sort that out for you. Just look and see what five-year-old cars are worth. According to a current study released by Automotive Lease Guide, the cars that hold their value best are made by Honda, Subaru, Volkswagen and Toyota. The worst? The LIncoln Town Car and the Chevrolet Uplander.
An anecdote to illustrate the above point. Chevy’s new Malibu has received very positive reviews. I mentioned it to a friend who was considering a Camry. His response? “Yeah, that might be a good car to pick up off-lease.” Translation: if I buy one new I’ll get hosed. But if I wait and buy it used, I can pick it up at a heavily depreciated price. At that point, I might take a chance on it.

The Wall St. Journal recently noted that the U.S. automakers just can’t catch the leaders. It cited the Honda Civic; the car costs several thousand dollars more than the Chevy Cobalt, and still sells in far greater numbers. But after a few years, more than the initial price difference is recouped in the residual value of the car. Bonus: this comparison does not factor in the Honda’s superior reliability and driving experience.
Here’s how the American car makers have lost our share-of-mind: they fought against CAFE mileage standards. They did this while drunk on SUV profits, which disappeared rapidly when gas prices took another hike. Faced with almost no strategy for making fuel-efficient vehicles, they have latched onto flex-fuel vehicles. But ethanol is a loser technology, and everyone, except for corn farmers, knows it. And I’m sick of hearing about the Chevrolet Volt. How long before GM gets this potential game-changer to market?
And the most egregious tactic of all? The job bank. As of 2005, more than 12,000 autoworkers were paid autoworker wages to show up at an abandoned K-Mart, to work crossword puzzles, read the newspaper or watch TV. It’s a legacy of a 1984 concession the automakers made to auto workers. As their market share grew smaller, the auto companies were forced to keep workers they didn’t need on the payroll. 
This is part of why Mitt Romney – the son of former American Motors CEO and Michigan governor George Romney – wrote in the New York Times, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.“
Meanwhile, there are lots of good American cars to buy: a Honda, made in Maryville, Ohio. Or a Subaru, made in Lafayette, Indiana.
The PR lesson in all of this? You can’t build good PR – in this case, consensus that the U.S. auto companies are deserving of a massive subsidy – on poor performance. These companies have failed to show that their business model has a chance to succeed. They’ve showed no humility. Their argument is basically that they’re too big to fail.
But fail they will. And guess what? People will still need and buy cars. They just won’t be buying those cars.
There’s no helping a CEO begging for a $25 billion bailout who shows up in a private jet. The $25 billion, by the way, is to be paid by hard-working Americans who do not participate in the job bank. Americans who won’t get a bailout of their own. Some of whom may be paying for a recent transmission job.

PR needed here: AIG

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And I agree.

AIG.pngFirst, some background. In September, the Treasury promised insurance giant AIG some $85 billion in credit to keep the company afloat. In October, AIG got another $38 billion. By Monday, that may increase by another $40 billion. Total tab to you and me: $150 billion.

So what has this “confederacy of dunces” (Holtz’s words) done with our money?
The company put the former head of its financial products unit, Joseph J. Cassano, on retainer. His salary? One million dollars a month. Former CEO Martin J. Sullivan, who ran the company into the ground, got a $5 million “performance bonus.”
In October, just days after receiving the first bailout, the company spent $443,000 on an executive retreat in Half Moon Bay, California. Reaction to this event has been negative. And bipartisan. Barack Obama said the executives should be fired. George W. Bush’s press secretary, Dana Perino, said AIG’s behavior was “pretty despicable.”
And now, ABC News’ Brian Ross reports another lavish AIG resort getaway in Phoenix, this time only about one-third of a million dollars’ worth. The most damning thing Ross presents is that the hotel staff was instructed to keep the so-called educational seminar quiet. No “Welcome AIG” signs here. The ostensible goal: to keep AIG out of the news.

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The key values that need to be addressed here are honesty and transparency. If AIG is going to be a quasi-public company, it needs to do business in an honest manner. You don’t need to be a genius to know this: good performance begats good PR. It’s easy to tell your story when you’ve nothing to hide.
If you’re going to sell high-end financial products to financial analysts, a luxury resort may be in order. But lying about it – failing to disclose publicly that it’s your event – is wrong. It breeds mistrust. It hurts the company, both long-  and short-term.
AIG needs to entirely reboot its communications process. 
The company needs to operate in the sunshine. The company should hire – at the highest level – an ombudsman to represent its public ownership. This person would have to train the executives to operate under this new paradigm, and should have unfettered access to daily activities. This new approach would have to be practiced at every level of the company.
The company should publish its aggressive plans to pay back our $150 billion. It needs to proactively tell the story of its good stewardship of our money. It needs to show gratitude.
All across America, people are losing their jobs and companies are closing their doors. We’re hurting. AIG needs to hurt, too. Its guests may enjoy the resort, but AIG employees need to sleep at the Ramada. Salaries need to be reined in and made public. Bonuses, which may be necessary to attract some top talent, need to be linked to actual long-term high performance, and they need to be deferred.
AIG has created a big hole to climb out of. We’re provided a ladder. We should be cheering for their success. It’s not such a far-fetched concept. 
Remember when Lee Iacocca became the voice of Chrysler after receiving a Federal bailout?
He gave a bravura performance as the conscience, the brains, the drive of the New Chrysler.
AIG needs its own Iacocca: someone to to talk to us, reassure us, and show the company’s relentless effort to repay us for our faith in the company. This individual should probably be an outsider, someone with a stellar reputation, probably from a service industry. Perhaps a respected legislator or judge. 
The message needs to be, “no more business as usual at AIG. We’re a new company with a new set of rules, and all that bad behavior is in the past.” 
And then they have to do the work.
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How can AIG mend its image? What can the company do to better tell its story?
Resources for discussion:
AIG website (includes video links of CEO Edward Liddy and a statement on the meeting in Phoenix)