Monday Morning Media Minute

President-elect Obama is playing to the middle so far.  And it’s a good lesson for the rest of us.

In almost any situation calling for you to communicate with the public, a certain number of people will support you no matter what, a certain number will oppose you no matter what and the vast majority will be somewhere in the middle.

The folks in the middle are the ones you’re trying to reach because they’re the ones you need to convince.  All too often, people waste way too much time trying to convince the inconvincible or preaching to the already converted.

People who will support you no matter what need to hear from you enough to be able to argue your case for you.  So, don’t ignore them.  But don’t make them the focus of your communication efforts — unless you’re counting on them to be major advocates for your cause.  If you’re counting on strong advocacy from them, then step up the attention you pay to them.

Ignore the inconvincible.  They won’t support you.  So, don’t waste your time trying to change their minds.  One important caveat:  Sometimes opponents look like they’re inconvincible when, in fact, they can be persuaded to move to your side.  How can you tell?  Listen to your opponents.  If they’re asking for something you can agree to, then it’s worth exploring whether accommodating what they want will bring them over to your side.  The inconvincible will always find a new objection if you answer one of their demands.  If that happens, move on.

That’s my two cents’ worth.  What’s yours?

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The Monday Morning Media Minute is now available as an eBook.  My new eStore features five eBooks based on the Media Minute.  To check them out, visit my eStore and buy early and often.  The eBooks come as PDF files.  You don’t need special eBook software to read them.

I stumbled across this item last week in the Los Angeles Times: “Leaders of the campaign against Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in California, raised nearly $40 million and ran a careful, disciplined campaign with messages tested by focus groups and with only a few people authorized to speak to the media. They lost.”

The failure of the “professional” campaign has led more vocal opponents of the gay-marriage to take up the battle on their own with rowdier, noisier and more emotional efforts that include street demonstrations and other tactics reminiscent of the civil rights and antiwar campaigns of the 1960s and1970s.

Whether you think that’s a good idea or not will depend at least in part how you feel about Proposition 8 and other proposals like it.

Regardless of how you feel about this specific issue, it’s a good reminder for PR professionals that doing things by the book isn’t always enough to win – or enough to maintain a united front when you have supporters who feel strongly about your issue.

President-elect Obama will face a similar challenge when he takes office. Some Democrats in Congress already are talking about pushing their own proposals for things like health care without waiting to take their lead from the White House.

It’s a frequent problem for PR professionals. We work in a profession where the shortest distance between two points isn’t always a straight line.

I’m a strong proponent of having a clear message and sticking to it. But it’s important to give your supporters a chance to be involved — even if they aren’t on exactly the same page as you.

If you can’t keep everyone on the same page, control what you can. But be willing to let go of the need to control every message and every action by every supporter. There are many paths to building support for an idea or cause. The important thing is getting the result you want, not controlling the path people use to get there.

That’s my two cents’ worth. What’s yours?

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The Monday Morning Media Minute is now available as an eBook. My new eStore features five eBooks based on the Media Minute. To check them out, visit my eStore and buy early and often. The eBooks come as PDF files. You don’t need special eBook software to read them.

Joe the Plumber and Colin the General both made political splashes during the past week.

When all’s said and done, the general’s a better spokesperson for his candidate than the plumber because his message is more consistent with the messages of his candidate.

Just because of who he is, Powell’s endorsement supports Obama on key themes of the campaign — that he’s ready to be commander-in-chief and that he isn’t a terrorist or a pal of terrorists.  Joe the Plumber’s credentials supporting the idea that McCain’s tax plan helps small businesses and Obama’s doesn’t is a little more suspect because Joe the Plumber’s identity is more suspect.

And every reason Powell gave for endorsing Obama reinforced one of Obama’s campaign messages.  Joe the Plumber wasn’t as clearly on message for McCain.

Politics aside, the general and the plumber are good examples of the strengths and weaknesses of third-party advocates.

The benefits of using third-party advocates is well known to PR professionals.  But they can be hard to keep on message — your message, at least — because they have own messages, their own identity and their own strengths and weaknesses.

So, use third-party advocates when you can.  But make sure they’ll support your message, not interfere with it.

That’s my two cents’ worth.  What’s yours?

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The Monday Morning Media Minute is now available as an eBook.  My eStore features five eBooks based on the Media Minute.  To check them out, visit my eStore and buy early and often.  The eBooks come as PDF files.  You don’t need special eBook software to read them.

With politics and the financial mess getting wall-to-wall coverage, it seems like there isn’t much other news these days.

And that means it’s time to lay low for a while if you have a story that will get drowned out by them.

That doesn’t mean you can’t tell any other story, of course.  But it does mean you may be better off putting some stories on the shelf for a while — until there’s less competition.

The political news will die down after the election.  The financial mess?  That may take a little longer.

In the meantime, you may want to consider holding on to stories that can wait to be pitched.

That’s my two cents’ worth.  What’s yours?

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The Monday Morning Media Minute is now available as an eBook.  My eStore features five eBooks based on the Media Minute.  To check them out, visit my eStore and buy early and often.  The eBooks come as PDF files.  You don’t need special eBook software to read them.

Rosanne Gain of Colorado Springs sent me a link to a blog entry last week encouraging speakers not to emulate Barack Obama.  Not because he’s a bad speaker.  But because he’s good enough to get away with things the rest of us shouldn’t do.

“If Barack Obama is indeed elected President, he will turn out to be one of the most articulate Presidents ever,” says Blogger Jon Greer.

But, Greer notes: “Since he’s so articulate, he can get away with things other speakers can’t and shouldn’t try.”

That’s good advice when it comes to working with reporters, too.  Some people are better at pitching stories and doing interviews than others.  If you have a choice, pick the person who will do the best job of telling your story.  Sometimes that’s the CEO or the executive in charge of whatever your story is about.  But not always.

That’s my two cents’ worth.  What’s yours?

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The Monday Morning Media Minute is now available as an eBook.  My eStore features five eBooks based on the Media Minute.  To check them out, visit my eStore and buy early and often.  The eBooks come as PDF files.  You don’t need special eBook software to read them.

Remember Sarah Palin?  The one running for vice president.

After delivering an acceptance speech that turned her into something of a political rock star, Palin’s largely disappeared from public and media view.  And the few interviews she’s done have been – to put it kindly – less than rousing successes.

From outside, it looks like the McCain campaign has put their VP candidate under wraps because they’re afraid she’s not ready to handle questions from the media.  Understandable at first since she hasn’t been on the national political stage before.  But at some point it becomes an issue.

I’ll leave it to you to make up your own mind about Palin and whether she should be talking more often to reporters.

But the media fortress that’s been built around her reminds me of a problem I see too often within companies and agencies who see themselves as besieged by a hostile media.  They simply quit talking to reporters except when they feel they have no choice.  And they go into the few interviews they do with a chip on their shoulder, assuming the reporter’s only there to do them harm.

The problem with this kind fortress mentality is that it fosters the kind of negative coverage it’s designed to protect against.

Some reporters do practice gotcha journalism.  Most don’t.  But reporters are human.  And, like all of us, they draw conclusions about the people they come in touch with based on how those people react around them.

Most of us assume that people who are constantly on the defensive have something to hide.  Reporters do, too.  And they’ll reflect that in the stories they write.  Most of us assume that people who defend the indefensible or say things that are misleading or untrue are untrustworthy.  Reporters do, too.  And they’ll reflect that in the stories they write.  And that’s the very behavior that seems to go with a fortress mentality when it comes to dealing with the media.

You don’t have to answer every question a reporter asks – or even agree to every interview.  But if you’re too evasive at some point it becomes an issue.  And if you have a chip on your shoulder every time you do an interview because you assume the reporter’s only out to “get” you, you’re not going to like most of the stories written about you.

Talking to reporters is different than talking to your neighbor.  You need to understand how to tell your story effectively and stay on message.  That’s one reason why good media training is so important.

But if you know the rules of engagement, have a solid story to tell and tell it clearly you’ll do just fine most of the time.  Or at least that’s been my experience.

That’s my two cents’ worth.  What’s yours?

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The Monday Morning Media Minute is now available as an eBook.  My eStore features five eBooks based on the Media Minute.  To check them out, visit my eStore and buy early and often.  The eBooks come as PDF files.  You don’t need special eBook software to read them.

How does your story benefit me?  That’s always an important question.  It’s especially important if you’re trying to do something controversial.  A lot of things are controversial.

Colorado’s casinos are asking voters to let them raise their stakes to $100 a bet – a big jump from the current maximum of $5.

Colorado agreed nearly 20 years ago to let three old mining towns – Central City, Black Hawk and Cripple Creek – open small-stakes casinos.  Since then, a number of towns have tried to win approval for similar proposals.  They’ve all lost.

So, the casino owners knew they had a losing hand without a good reason for voters to let them raise their stakes.

Their answer?  A ballot proposal, known as Amendment 50, directing that a major portion of the additional taxes they’ll pay on their increased revenue go to the state’s community colleges.  In fact, the campaign for the proposal calls itself Coloradans for Community Colleges.

How effective is their tactic?  We’ll know for sure on November 4.  But I’ve already had two friends who don’t give a rip about gambling urge me to vote for the ballot proposal because it’ll help community colleges – something both of them care a lot about.

Any PR professional worth his or her salt knows about using third-party advocates to help tell your story.  But the backers of Amendment 50 have taken it a step further.  They’ve given people who would otherwise vote against their proposal a reason to vote for it.

The strategy’s a good one.  And one that doesn’t get used often enough.  Do you have a controversial idea you want to sell?  Figure out everyone who can impact the outcome.  Then give as many of them as possible a reason to support you by giving them a stake in you winning approval for your proposal.

That’s my two cents’ worth.  What’s yours?

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The Monday Morning Media Minute is now available as an eBook.  My eStore features five eBooks based on the Media Minute.  To check them out, visit my eStore and buy early and often.  The eBooks come as PDF files.  You don’t need special eBook software to read them.

What do car leases and winemaking franchises have in common?

They’re featured on the front page of the business section of Sunday’s Denver Post.  And they’re good examples of trend stories — a great way to make news that often gets overlooked by people looking for ways to get attention for their story.

According to the Post, car leases are becoming harder to get and more expensive.  And it says winemaking franchises are a “fast-growing industry trend” that’s started to take hold in Colorado.

An editor once told me his newspaper loves trends and added, only half jokingly, “a trend is anything with at least three plot points.”  My experience is that most news organizations love trends.  They love them even more if you can help them tell their audience how to take advantage of it or avoid being hurt by it.

One nice thing about many trend stories is that you can use data your organization has that no one else can duplicate.

An example I often quote in workshops is State Farm, which gets huge news coverage every year with its list of the 10 most dangerous intersections in the United States.  They”re almost guaranteed coverage in every city with an intersection on the list.  And they localize the story even further by releasing lists of the 10 most dangerous intersections in individual states.  They’re also virtually guaranteed coverage in every city with an intersection on those lists — which translates into stories all over the country.  Information for the releases comes entirely from claims filed by the State Farm clients.

And someone from State Farm often gets quoted giving advice for how to avoid accidents.

What trends are there in your industry that you can turn into a story?

That’s my two cents’ worth.  What’s yours?

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The Monday Morning Media Minute is now available as an eBook.  My eStore features five eBooks based on the Media Minute.  To check them out, visit my eStore and buy early and often.  The eBooks come as PDF files.  You don’t need special eBook software to read them.

By now, most of us know who Michael Phelps is.  But what about Jason Lezak, Peter Vanderkaay and Ryan Lochte?

Among them, Lezak, Vanderkaay and Lochte won five gold and four bronze medals at the Beijing Olympics.  But most of us wouldn’t recognize their names.

Lezak’s come-from-behind anchor leg in the men’s 400-meter freestyle relay “saved” one of the eight gold medals Phelps took home from China.  Lochte won individual gold and bronze medals in races that were just 27 minutes apart.

And who can forget Phelps’ amazing finish in the 100-meter butterfly where he beat out Serbia’s Milorad Cavic by one one-hundredth of a second – less time that it took me to type any single character in this Media Minute.

Cavic appeared to have the race won.  But he eased into the finish while Phelps made one last lunge to win.  Seven golds and one silver, impressive as that would have been, isn’t the same as eight golds.  Cavic will always be known, to the degree he’s known at all, as the swimmer who almost beat Phelps.

What’s my point?

Just over 300 gold medals were awarded during the 16 days of the Beijing Olympics.  Some reporters received that many story pitches over those same 16 days.

Most Olympic athletes go home without a gold medal — or any medal at all.  Most news releases end up in the junk pile of the Recycle Bins of newsroom computers.

Getting your story told is the equivalent of winning a gold medal — or at least a bronze.  Getting it widely noticed takes the equivalent of Michael Phelps’ eight golds.

Phelps won his eight gold medals in part because he’s a phenomenal athlete.  You need a good story to get the media to tell yours.

But Phelps also won at least two of his gold medals — the butterfly race against Cavic and the relay Lezak came from behind to win — because Phelps and his teammates wanted to win just a little bit more than their competitors.  Reporters pass up a lot of good stories for other stories that are just a little bit better — or the person pitching them tried just a little harder.

I see a lot of news releases that someone decided were “good enough” to send to the media.  But good enough isn’t always good enough if you want your story to be heard, understood and remembered.

That’s my two cents’ worth.  What’s yours?

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The Monday Morning Media Minute is now available as an eBook.  My eStore features five eBooks based on the Media Minute.  To check them out, visit my eStore and buy early and often.  The eBooks come as PDF files.  You don’t need special eBook software to read them

Are you passing up opportunities to tell your story because you’re afraid the positive story you want to tell will turn negative?

Any story, no matter how positive, can go into the ditch. So, it’s important to consider the potential negative consequences before pitching a story to the media. But don’t be so afraid of the negatives that you don’t tell your story — because if you don’t tell your story no one else will.

There are times when the risks of ending up with a negative story are high enough to skip the pitch.  But my experience is that clients often talk themselves out of telling their story because of what I call the what-if-the-sun-rises-in-the-west syndrome.  They talk themselves out of telling their story by “what iffing” it to death.  In fact, sometimes it seems like the more potential a story has for making a big impact the more likely it is that someone will argue against telling it.

And the “negatives” can be self-fulfilling.  We once succeeded after several weeks of hard work in selling a reporter on writing a major story that got excellent placement, with a headline and lead that were perfect.  As I was enjoying the article, my phone rang.  It was our client, upset because there was a minor factual error deep into the story — something that didn’t really matter.  He wanted me to call the reporter and demand a correction.  He was so focused on the factual mistake that he totally lost sight of the fact that the story was a huge plus.  All he could see was the mistake that no one but us would even notice.

With that experience (and others like it) in mind, I’d love to know whether the leaders of China feel good about the news coverage of the current Olympics.  They should.  But I’m willing to bet that somewhere in Beijing at least a few Chinese leaders are fretting about the negative publicity that’s gone along with all the good.  And, if I’m right, they have no idea just how positive the Olympics coverage has been.

Nobody will tell your story if you don’t.  More often than not, you can’t tell it without taking a few hits with it.  The question is:  Do the positives outweigh the negatives.  If so, that’s a win.

That’s my two cents’ worth.  What’s yours?

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The Monday Morning Media Minute is now available as an eBook.  My eStore features five eBooks based on the Media Minute.  To check them out, visit my eStore and buy early and often.  The eBooks come as PDF files.  You don’t need special eBook software to read them.