Delivering bad news

November 11, 2010 · Posted in Education, Media Relations, PR, Social Media · Comment 

What happens when you need to deliver bad news? How are people going to receive it?

Back when I was in my early twenties, I had to deliver some bad news to a friend about someone he had trusted who did not deserve that trust at all and in fact had been actively misleading him. Not only that, but, serendipitously,  I found out about the situation and found him and delivered that news to him just as he was going to visit this other person. His response to me was: I’m so glad it was you. If it had been somebody else, I’m not sure I would have really believed it.

No organization never has to deliver bad news. So when that time comes, are the people who you have to deliver the bad news to going to react the way my friend did? Have you (and here I’m especially talking mainly about higher ed communicators) developed that level of trust with reporters, alumni, faculty, staff, donors, legislators and neighbors so that when you do deliver the bad news it is believed? Have you developed a style and personality that’s suitable to that kind of communications situation? Are you going to be received with patience and trust? Or are you going to be met with suspicion, outrage, impatience or scorn?

There are many reasons to engage in transparent, responsive, patient, relevant, authentic media and public relations (including social media outreach). Being able to deliver bad news in a way that doesn’t weaken you and your organization is yet another one.

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The basics require the right technique

October 25, 2010 · Posted in Media Relations, PR, Social Media · Comment 

It is only in the past year that I have been able to truly fry an egg, bake a potato and make an omelet that is consistently, almost perfectly done. A big reason is that for so long I was using the wrong technique. For example, I always wrapped potatoes in foil before baking them. That doesn’t bake them — it steams them. Once I read (in a Cooks Illustrated recipe for twice-baked potatoes) that it’s better to rub them with a light coating of vegetable oil and bake them in their jackets, I knew the right technique and the difference was remarkable — the skins crisp and brown, the inside fluffy.

With frying an egg and making an omelet it was both a matter of  knowing the right techniques AND practicing those techniques enough to get them down. In particular, I had to learn to: use the right amount of butter or oil; get the pan the right initial temperature; allow for the additional cooking will take place after plating; not be afraid of taking the pan off the heat;  season generously but not go overboard; and maneuver the egg (or beaten eggs for an omelet) in the pan.

For so many years I had done these basic cooking tasks without the proper technique. The result had been rubbery eggs, omelets that were more like scrambled egg patties, and baked potatoes that had tough skins and mealy odd-tasting insides.

The analogy to higher ed marketing and public relations should be obvious: the basics are important, but even more important is to know how to execute the basics with the right technique and to get enough practice with the right technique.

And here’s the tricky thing with the right technique: you not only have to know how to do it mechanically, but you also have to understand the philosophies behind it because even though it may outwardly look the same, every time you execute there are small variations in the variables involved that if not accounted for can keep you from the perfect execution.

That’s why even though pitching reporters and bloggers may be one of the basics of media relations, it doesn’t work to blast out the same pitch to every person on the list. If you really want to do it right, you need to account for the extra variables. The same is true for a Twitter account or Facebook page — certain basic best practices are important, but it’s the simple variations in response to your audiences that really make the difference (and I admit that this is not something that I myself have truly mastered — in fact, all too often I find myself lapsing in to the lazy rendition of the basics).

But here’s the thing: once you have mastered the right techniques for the basic tactics/tasks, they become incredibly interesting in the execution because you are attuned to the variations/variables.  In addition, they can be safely, productively experimented with. That’s the fun of true craftsmanship.

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A method for composing stories/pitches/releases (or: throwing off the shackles of Microsoft Word)

April 2, 2009 · Posted in Media Relations, PR, Social Media, Technology · 1 Comment 

A few weeks ago I realized that the current system our office had for information management for our stories, pitches, news releases, event announcements, etc. just wasn’t working. I was tired of formatting issues cropping up as I moved content between platforms. I was worried about how much was stored in the e-mail in-boxes of me and my co-workers rather than on our share drive. And I was beginning to understand that engagement with social media — even on a straitlaced, low-frequency scale (which I’m not necessarily happy about, but we’re doing the best we can with a small shop) — meant that viewing content as A News Release or A Magazine Story wasn’t going to work.

Here’s the solution I came up with the help of one of my co-workers:

  1. Everything is now a story — we don’t think of content by what platform it’s going to be featured on/in.
  2. Any story, no matter how big or small or important or whatever other adjective you want to apply to it, gets a text file created about it (in Notepad) as soon as we know about it. This text file is placed in a Stories folder on our department’s shared rive. The filename consists of a status tag, key words, and a month. The status tags are a = active, t = tickler, z = archived e.g. a_NewStoryMethod_April09.txt. The idea here is that stories with the same status will group together.
  3. The text file is set up with three basic areas separated by a few hyphens as a visual divider. The areas are: Publishing , Story and Source.
    • In the Publishing area we list the platforms we think this story should be published too. This includes News release, Web site, faculty/staff newsletter, student newsletter, alumni newsletter, alumni magazine, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and more. When we publish to those areas, it gets noted next to the platform. Sometimes that’s a date and URL. Sometimes it’s just a date posted. Sometimes it’s a reference to an edition. Whatever makes sense so we can look it up later if we need to. If we’re sure this story isn’t going to be represented in one of those areas, that tag gets deleted.
    • In the Story area we have a bunch of different content fields. How many all depends on the story, but the possible fields so far are: Photos, Video, Headline, Subhed, Excerpt/Summary (1-2 paragraphs), Story (with a lead paragraph and as many paragraphs as the story demands — in some cases this may be Bullet Points or the Who/What/When/Where of an event listing rather than Story), Quotes (with notations about approvals or needs), and Boilerplate. For photos or video we copy and paste the file path to where those photos or videos are located. And these fields change depending on the nature of the story. Basically we dump them all in the template and then remove when we’re sure we don’t have to worry about that field.
    • In the Source area we dump everything that we get as raw sources — the text of e-mails, resumes, the results of Q&As, transcripts of tape-recorded interviews — with a note on where that info came from.
  4. Obviously this is just the source product. If we need to create a formal news release in Microsoft Word complete with letterhead then we do that and it’s housed in the News Releases folder just like ones created before this new system. And created isn’t the right word — it’s assembled from the pieces — the quotes, the explanatory paragraphs, the lead, the boilerplate. And for our alumni magazine, we’ll use this as a source and plug in quotes, but probably rewrite the lead and headline so it’s more feature-like. In addition, for pitching the media, I may rewrite the excerpt/summary to make it more relevant to the targeted publication. And when translating the headline for posting to Twitter, I may make it more colloquial. But the point is this the story source from whence all other pitches, stories, news briefs, releases, Flickr set summaries, etc. etc. flow.
  5. This could all change and we could ditch the system next week and it really only works well if everybody who is generating and disseminating content buys in to it. One cool thing is that it allows me to outsource some of dissemination work to a co-worker. And conversely, if a co-worker has a Story that was featured in, say, the faculty/staff newsletter and we decide to elevate it to the alumni magazine or a pitch, I know where to go first to get up to speed on what info we already have.

Hopefully my explanation is fairly clear. If not, I’ve uploaded a sample content_template that may help.

We’ve used this process for three stories so far, and so far I think it’s fantastic. I love not having to worry about formatting issues when I copy and paste*. I like that when I go to post an affiliated Flickr set or a Facebook note, I can pick and choose the language and details I want to add (and then modify if needed for tone and length). I find it soothing to not compose in Word.

Now there are a couple of downsides to this method. First, there’s no spellcheck**. Second, you have to remember to turn off word wrap when you copy and paste from Notepad — otherwise you end up with weird line breaks. I’d love to use Gedit (which I use at home on my Ubuntu box), but we’re a Windows XP shop at work. At some point, I’ll check out other text editors for Windows (anybody have suggestions?). But for now, Notepad is working just fine. It’s pretty sweet how quickly files open and save and close — and how small they are even if I’ve dumped several pages of stuff in to the Source section.

Keep in mind that there’s only four of us in our department, and we don’t publish a ton of content so this may not work for other college pr and marketing offices, but so far it has been a very positive change. And really, the key message of this post is not the method, but rather this: with a million places to publish, you better have some way of storing all the bits and pieces of content you need to tell your stories. And e-mail isn’t it. And a formal news release archive with nicely formatted MS Word docs isn’t it, either.

* Seriously — have you ever seen the crazy html code that MS Word creates when you try to copy and paste in to a CMS like Dreamweaver, WordPress or an e-newsletter service? Or even just in to an e-mail. It’s so annoying.

** I believe there are text editors with spellcheck. I’m looking into it and will post a comment if I find anything interesting to report.

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