The Wax Blog

I  had coffee with a fairly new client today. We had a great talk that included his experiences with a previous PR firm. Although he spent thousands of dollars he didn’t get his expectations met. And so at the end of the contract he was discouraged and the PR firm had a dent in their reputation. Now it’s up to me to redeem his belief in our industry. You know what? I may not do that much differently from the old firm except that I refuse to ‘do the dance.’ Here’s what I mean.

PR is a squishy, unpredictable business. You can make a quick phone call one day and land a huge fish or you can spend three months sending elegant pitches, following up on time, and get nothing. Most business owners know that but you can’t help worrying when those placements aren’t coming in…after all it’s your money. Here’s where the problem starts. Many PR firms decide what they need to do at this point is make you feel good. They come in with some great charts, reports on the flurry of activity that’s going on, hints at big things that may happen….you know…it’s THE DANCE. You feel really good after the meeting but then a week later nothing’s changed and you worry again. And worse, you start to feel like a nag for asking all the time.

I’m telling you, trust your gut. This isn’t rocket science and it’s really easy to see if things aren’t going well. If your PR person is good, they’ll be knocking at your door looking for new angles or trying to expand the media list, or even trying new channels. If things aren’t working, they’ll tell you and ask for your help to find more interesting hooks.

If they’re not so good, or a traditional firm that’s just interested in adding up retainers each month they’ll do the dance. So when your meetings start to look something like this…

it’s probably time to look elsewhere.

A decade ago I sat in meeting after meeting in Silicon Valley hearing about the new economy and how the ‘old school’ IT companies were dead. It’s so funny to me now, listening to all the social media experts and Web 2.0 pundits say that ‘traditional PR is dead.’ I venture to say that lazy people hope by saying traditional PR is dead, maybe they can make it so. After all it’s a whole lot easier to sit in your jammies and tweet and facebook the night away than it is to call Patty Neger at Good Morning America to find out if she likes the latest book you’ve sent her. Believe me, I would much rather be trading snarky barbs with folks like @CLE84 than getting rejected for yet another story idea by a crusty print reporter. (more…)

In honor of being incredibly lazy this week, here’s one of my fave 2009 posts – the last Friday of every month I’ll throw a repeat of one of the more popular posts, just in case you missed it!

A product, service or book is probably the greatest thing in the world – to its creator. But when an editor or producers says “pass” it’s the publicist who has to tell the client. Sometimes ZERO  media are interested. And for anyone who has written a book, started a business or provided a service, that can be a pretty personally hurtful message no matter how carefully it’s couched. For me, it’s the equivalent of having to tell clients “your baby is ugly” 95% of the time, without hurting their feelings. Nearly impossible. (more…)

Because I’ve worked with a pretty wide range of celebrities – from Ralph Nader to Bode Miller -people sometimes call to find out how much it would cost for a celebrity to attend their event, endorse their product or contribute to their non-profit cause.   No matter HOW GREAT your product is, or how important your cause, stars generally don’t do anything for free unless its for their own foundation (or for George Clooney). The good news is that almost any celebrity can  be booked if you have enough money. Here are a few tips for figuring out how to find someone, how much they cost and what the process might be like.

First, find out who reps the star. The easiest way is to buy a subscription to Who Represents an online listing of virtually every celebrity’s agent, publicist and manager.  Although some people like to go through managers first, I always call the agent. Agents are usually straightforward, no BS types who will give you prices and explain the ins and outs of back-end deals and endorsements. (more…)

100 million years ago I worked as an executive at a publicly held tech firm. We knew that in order to bury bad news (ie a poor quarter) we would send the release out at 4 pm on Friday. By the time Monday rolled around there would be two to three more days of news covering ours.   Now more companies have become much more ingenious ways at burying their bad news – rather than addressing it properly. (For more on that, read my post on  “Crisis Communications in a 2.0 World“)

Wondering how they do it? Here are just a few methods I’ve seen. Comment with more examples, please!

1) Flood the Internet with alternative messaging. Piling on the social media releases, blogs and Twitter posts can help bury a negative opinion or story quickly by using SEO. Studies show about 60% of Internet users click on a result in the first page. Keeping that page inundated with positive information – particularly if it appears to come from sources that are not your own – can easily bury negative opinions. I agree with the Online Marketing Blog, though, that using this to address a real crisis is not a long-term fix.

2) Bury it on a holiday. At the end of 2009, a story came out about Goldman Sachs selling mortgaged-based CDO’s to clients and at the same time  selling the securities short themselves. Goldman Sachs supposedly made it quite hard for reporters to reach executives for comment and further blocked the story so that it came out Christmas Eve in the New York Times. Thereafter it’s received little press.

3) Make it impossible to fact-check the article. Although bloggers can write pretty much whatever they want, traditional media still needs to check facts in order to run with a story. Keeping CBS or as in Goldman Sachs “allegedly” keeping the New York Times from verifying aspects of a story can bury it too.

4) Divert the issue.  Although most of the messaging surrounding the Toyota recall focuses on sticky floor mats, the real problem may be the pedal or as Steve Wozniak asserts, it could be a computer glitch. (If you haven’t heard, the Woz ’s Prius gets stuck at 97mph while in cruise control) Although Toyota states there “may” be a problem with the pedal in its latest update, much of what we’ve seen in our media is concerning the floor mats. The Woz asserts its a software problem, not a pedal or mat issue. Since the main issue is sudden acceleration – something we haven’t seen in any of Toyota’s messaging – this is probably a good example of a diversion tactic.

5) Lie. It almost worked for Martha and it definitely worked for OJ.

Bottom line is that the organizations with true investigative journalists are dwindling. TV and print media no longer has the budget to spend months on uncovering stories ala Watergate. Companies have learned the game and crisis communications firms have become much more adept at the spin.  And that could be a very bad thing for us.

Toyota announced a recall of more than 3.8 million vehicles last week and today announced it was halting production on eight models.  Ah, responsible Toyota, right? Think again. This is a great example of how a powerful public relations teams, with the weight of advertising dollars behind them, are able to smother news that the public really needs to know. Toyota’s PR department has been pumping out misinformation on this issue for months now and it makes me ashamed of my profession. In December, the Los Angeles Times reported that Toyota had been covering up these problems way back to 2003.

The issue is that the accelerator on these models can stick. Here’s a bit of background on this stuck accelerator…the problem has been apparent to Toyota since 2007, according to USA Today and other publications. Toyota issued a statement yesterday that said the problem had not resulted in any deaths. Yet tell that to the family of highway patrolman Mark Saylor, killed with his family last August after his accelerator stuck on his loaner Lexus. That story was all over the news, as were four other incidents resulting in deaths. Even yet, in November of 2009 Toyota issued statements that blamed the problem on bad floor mats.

But we really aren’t hearing about that too much until this week when national TV news picked it up- could it be because network news relies so heavily (or did) on car manufacturing advertising? It’s not a stretch. Back in 1993 a Dateline producer rigged a Pinto to explode for a segment. Well, that’s been happening for a long time according to Walter Olson and the National Review. It’s part of the ‘magic of TV’. But with the Pinto, unfortunately GM decided to pull its weight with NBC. The producer was exposed and fired for something the rest of his colleagues had done for years.

I’ve only had to lie like this once for a client.  I felt like crap and I’ll never do it again. Somebody needs to blow the whistle over at Toyota and it should be one of us flacks that does it. I realize that it’s the corporation’s responsibility to be honest, but in this case the messenger should bear a great deal of the blame as well. And that’s usually the public relations department.

Comments? Do you think Toyota covered this up?

Since I’m working the Minneapolis Boat Show this week I thought it would be appropriate to share my top tips for getting great public relations for any event. Although they all might not be as big as this one, events work well for traditional broadcast and print pitches. But there’s definitely a trick to it – here are some things that work for me. (more…)

Watching the Golden Globes last night and hearing all the references to Haiti made several questions come to  mind. Were they really “sad” to be there chugging champagne and getting awards? Did they really (like director Lee Daniels of Precious) think their work was suddenly ‘unimportant’? Or were most of them spewing talking points from their publicists so they didn’t look selfish in the light of a disaster? (more…)

John Wooden, the greatest coach of all time

A couple years ago I started a coaching service called Waxcoach – it was a fun and inexpensive way to help small business owners, authors and entrepreneurs learn the basics of PR and tactics for doing it themselves. And then I got REALLY busy working on some high profile campaigns like Dan Buettner’s The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest , Yale University’s Weight Bias Campaign and others.

Time’s a bit more manageable now and I’m really excited to announce that I’m doing one on one coaching again. Here’s the scoop – it’s pretty affordable, you just buy a package of hours – minimum of 10 at $125 per hour. Folks who read this blog also get a 30 minute phone consultation totally free. (more…)

There are so many books out there for business owners on how to do your own marketing and/or public relations. Frankly most of them say the same thing – know the reporter, don’t be too salesy, etc. Here are my top five picks – not only are these books current, they go into real tactics that you can use right away. I think if you read these books, whether you’re a  small business owner, author, entrepreneur…. you can  start promoting or upgrade what you’re already doing and get some results fast.

1. Obviously social media  is one of the best (and cost-effective) ways to promote your business, service, book, whatever.  The definitive manual (and New York Times bestseller) on the subject is Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. Smith and Brogan describe not only HOW to use social media, but WHY you want to use it and most importantly, how to measure your success.  The book covers the basics of social media so a newbie can learn but also dives into the more sophisticated aspects of the medium (more…)