Imagethief

Month: May 2011

  • Four lessons from the Burson-Facebook fiasco

    I’m ridiculously late to this, as usual, but people keep asking me about the Burson-Facebook thing because of my years at Burson, so I thought I’d post the gist of the response I’ve been giving. If you’re not familiar with the story of Burson’s ill-fated project stirring up FUD about Google on behalf of Facebook, you can read about it here.

    But first, some housekeeping. I worked for Burson-Marsteller for six years, all here in China. It was a great experience. Much of what I know about PR and virtually all of what I know about doing PR in China I learned at Burson. I still use Burson-Marsteller China as an agency, and hold the people there in the highest regard. All agencies make mistakes. No one in PR wants to damage the reputation of a client, or their own agency. When it happens, we try to learn from it.

    I don’t know what the chain of events involved in the Burson-Facebook project was, and I don’t know any of the people involved. I have no inside track. But as an industry observer, and in the spirit of learning from the situation, here are four lessons to take from this episode:

    If it will embarrass you to have a pitch go public, it’s a bad pitch

    The art of selling stories or viewpoints to journalists, bloggers or the public is a pitch. In writing or verbally, a pitch should stand alone as something you’d be comfortable going public on its own. If a pitch doesn’t pass that test, and its public release would embarrass you, your agency or your client, it’s a bad pitch. Any pitch that doesn’t identify the interest behind it is by definition a bad pitch, because lack of disclosure in a pitch suggests that someone would be embarrassed to be connected with it.  Rethink the strategy. Yes, this tars a whole branch of political PR based on anonymous leaks. So be it.

    There’s nothing wrong with criticizing a rival…transparently

    It’s silly to pretend that slamming competitors isn’t part of PR. In the industry it’s called “depositioning”, a sanitized word that suggests some lingering discomfort. Outside it might be called smearing or, for those in the tech industry, FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt). So what’s the difference between a smear and a legit piece of competitive PR? Transparency, for one thing. There is nothing wrong with criticizing a rival (or a client’s rival) or pointing journalists at their shortcomings. But you’d better be prepared to stand behind your claims, and that means being well researched and transparent.

    PR instincts and journalism instincts are not the same

    PR agencies hire a lot of ex-journalists for their story instincts and their usefulness in media relations due to their contacts and credibility with other journalists (more on this below). But the fit isn’t always natural. Someone senior from a global agency other than Burson told me recently that they have about a ten percent long-term stick-rate from their senior journalist hires in the US. I’m not surprised.

    One problem is that although they overlap, journalist instincts and PR instincts are not the same. Oversimplified, journalistic instincts emphasize spotting and piecing together stories while PR instincts often emphasize identifying and managing risks. We spend as many years and as much work developing our instincts as journalists spend developing theirs. Any crossover in either direction means a learning curve. The risk that should have been spotted in this particular case was that the backstory of the pitch –an anonymous client paying a major PR firm to slam Google on privacy– was more interesting than the pitch itself.

    Set a thief to catch a thief

    Despite the blurring of the line between mainstream media and blogging, journalists and bloggers are different. If you send a bad pitch to a mainstream journalist, generally it just dies (perhaps along with some of your credibility). If you send a bad pitch to a blogger, there’s every chance it’s going to published and ridiculed. Welcome to blogging. This isn’t 2003, and everyone should be up on this. I understand hiring mainstream journalists to pitch other mainstream journalists, but it seems to me that the PR industry has been slow to embrace using bloggers the same way. As a blogging PR person I don’t think bloggers are particularly more resistant to working in PR, but I definitely think they respond to PR differently than mainstream journalists. And that’s definitely true for tech bloggers.

    Thoughts? Feel free to argue with me.

    See also:

    Lou Hoffman’s “Ishmael’s Corner”: More to the Facebook PR campaign against Google story

  • What I learned when I shaved my head

    I had a good run. I got more than forty years out of it. But I had to face the fact that my hair was in retreat and there was no going back. In fact, the front had already been beginning to thin as far back as 1999, when I (perhaps belatedly) cut off my long hair after sweating it out in Singapore for four years. Long hair in the tropics is, not to put too fine a point on it, stupid.

    It was a slow retreat and I was able nurse fantasies of a front-loaded hairline for a few more years. But the last couple of years it seemed the pace was accelerating and back was also beginning to feel more fuzzy than full. I’m not into the male pattern baldness look, so after two years of cutting my hair progressively more severely and mumbling about going all the way, I finally did. As a public service to others blessed the with consequences of a surfeit of testosterone (or just plain bad genetic luck), here are the five most important things I learned when I shaved my head.

    My skull is  weird

    Seriously. There are all sorts of little divots, traps and undulations, like a challenging golf course. Except round. The back of my skull is kind of flat. Is this true for everyone, or am I some kind of phrenological freakshow? The practical consequence of this is that it’s almost impossible to shave myself to completion because there always spots that I miss. And, of course, I can’t see most of it. Mrs. Imagethief has to help with skull cleanup to ensure I don’t wind up with some bizarre, postapocalyptic style involving little tufts of hair out of an otherwise glossy pate.

    Gillette should send me a dividend

    We have a baby hair trimmer that I’ve used to buzz my head, but it’s designed for, well, babies and tends to choke on the thicker patches. It also doesn’t get all the way down. So I finish with a wet shave. I never really thought about it, but my head is damn big, and the parts of my face I’ve shaved for years seem to account for something like ten percent of the overall surface area. Like Australia on a globe. Or at least that’s what it feels like. The result is that I go through blades at a terrifying rate, which is worrying because as anyone who shaves knows, Gillette charges for blades like they’re milled out of platinum. I guess I could go generic on the blades, but, dude, this is my HEAD we’re talking about. You don’t want to walk into the office with your skull all covered in little, bloody bits of toilet paper. People will talk.

    I am the human velcro

    Even a hot, wet skull-shave leaves my scalp with the texture of sharkskin. Rub it one direction and its frictionless and smooth like a sphere of Teflon. Rub it in the other direction and it will peel the skin off your hands like a belt sander. The result is that my head snags on shirts, pillows, car headrests, and pretty much anything covered with fabric. It also collects cat hair, Beijing’s endemic poplar fuzz, and any other loose detritus it comes in contact with. I’m going to have to start carrying one of those sticky lint-rollers for my head and giving myself a quick going over before meetings.

    My hair is fighting back

    After years of what looked like slow surrender, the prospect of extinction has encouraged my hair to fight a valiant rearguard action. I mean, this stuff grows back instantly. I ruin yet another ten dollar chromium uber-blade on Sunday evening, and by Monday morning my hair is already sprouting again. By midweek it’s walking tall, like Buford freaking Pusser. Where was all this vigor when I actually wanted it? I know, I know. Five o’clock shadow and all. But still, it seems like a cruel joke.

    I still don’t look like Vin Diesel

    I mean, what’s the deal with that? Where are the chicks with the head fetishes?

    Anyway, it’s refreshingly cool in summer. Try it out.

    Then: Singapore, 1995.
    Then: Singapore, 1995.
    Now: Beijing, 2011.
    Now: Beijing, 2011.