The Dilbert column mocking PR counselors is a crisis for PR. Comment should
be forthcoming from the Council of PR Firms headed by Marcia Silverman of Ogilvy
PR Worldwide, the PRSA Counselors Academy headed by Roy Vaughn of Katcher Vaughn
& Bailey PR, Nashville, and PRSA itself.
The week-long cartoon series,
with a potential audience of 150 million in 65 countries, is but the latest in
a series of attacks on PR.
Previous strikes include those in the New
York Times (Frank
Rich, 7/13/06 depicting PR as press-avoiding and lacking in substance, and
Tim O'Brien's "Spinning
Frenzy" piece 2/13/05); Der Spiegel (8/7/2006
"Masters of Deception), and Financial Times (corporate
stonewalling, 2/20/06).
Dilbert
writes about office life and attracts a business audience. He often bases his
columns on real life experiences he has had. In Dilbert's view, PR people make
up stories to get ink, ply reporters with drinks, boss them around, and have the
power to "grossly inflate" a stock price.
The PR counselor
in the cartoon strip urges his client to be bold like Richard Branson, head of
the $7.2B Virgin empire. "Do something in a way that has never been done
before," he advises. The message
that PR needs to put out is that there are abuses but "real"
PR stands for openness, responsiveness to the press, and accuracy in financial
reporting. It is a force for the education of the public and not its manipulation.
The group that should mostly be doing this, the 22,000-member PRSA,
practices none of the above. Its PR is in meltdown.
Chair Rhoda Weiss
on Feb. 22 belatedly announced she was available to the press to comment on the
Jet Blue air terminal snafu that took place in the previous week. Her initial
advice was that every organization must have "an adequate crisis plan."
Cedric
Bess, PR manager of PRSA |
Where
is the crisis plan at PRSA? The Dilbert strip that ran last week was a
crisis but PR manager Cedric Bess was on vacation Thursday and Friday and not
returning until Tuesday of this week. In the week before, VP-PR Janet Troy was
off the entire week "with no access to e-mail." We think that the two
PR staffers taking vacations like this in the first five weeks of president Bill
Murray's new job at PRSA was a sign of disrespect for Murray. Since he lacks PR
or press relations experience, he is especially in need of it at the beginning
of his reign. Troy and Bess carry out
numerous forms of stonewalling and information blockage not only of us
but members. Currently, they won't release the transcript of the 2006 Assembly
although a member has asked for it. A lawsuit seems to be the only way to pry
this out of national. They also won't release the chapter speaking schedule of
Weiss. At the 2006 Assembly, when we walked up the aisle to take a picture of
the board as had been allowed in previous Assemblies, Troy ran after us and made
us leave the sacred Assembly area.
This impressed leadership but at
what cost to her professional reputation? We
believe Troy and Bess went to leaders in 2004 and said that if they were
to continue to do this dirty work they wanted more money. Media relations salaries/fringes
soared 87% to $244,158 in 2005, up $113,402 from 2004. The salaries in 2006 won't
be revealed for several months.
Libby
Roberge, former head of PR for PRSA |
The cost
of PRSA's PR, which includes a lot of stonewalling and very little promotion of
PRSA such as its 60th anniversary this year, went from $35,846 in 2000 to $360,860
in 2005 (not counting about $60K in administration).
Included in the
sum is $34,481 for "marketing" when in the three previous years "marketing"
in media relations averaged $4,500. We would like to know what "marketing"
is and also why $43,113 in "professional fees" was spent on "media
relations." Slashed, meanwhile, were APR, from $566,454 in 2000 to $152,159
in 2005 and ethics, from $104,108 in 2000 to $6,741 in 2005.
Both Troy
and Bess were particularly exposed to the press in 2006 because CEO
Cheryl Procter-Rogers stopped talking to us on any subject after 3/20/06.
Weiss is following the same policy. Two previous PR directors of PRSA quit suddenly,
we believe, because they were fed up with doing PR dirty work and feared for their
reputations.
Steve Erickson
quit in 1996 just before the annual conference and Richard
George quit in 1999 just before that year's conference. They ditched PRSA
when they were most needed, as if in revenge.
Libby
Roberge was hired for PR in 2001 and quit in 2003 after having a baby.
She was the best in our view, distributing 150 copies of the members' directory
to the press, providing us with chapter member counts, renewal rate of members,
new and lapsed member totals, etc.
Janet
Troy, VP of PR for PRSA |
Troy, hired in 2004
and not a member of PRSA, told
the Bergen Record 7/27/04 she was "clueless" about PRSA and
"flabbergasted" that such an organization existed. Bess, a 1999 college
graduate, has spent almost his entire career at PRSA.
Murray is learning
about PRSA but actually he had months to know its problems.
He should
not have joined without promises from leadership that it would institute some
reforms such as hiring an on-staff CPA, ending APR-only leadership, providing
financials timely and accurately to members, providing Assembly transcripts to
members, and ending the BurrellesLuce ad exclusive on the PRSSA website (BurrellesLuce
says it does not want this exclusive).
Murray should reveal his salary
at PRSA, as required by law, including any signing bonus and housing allowance
since he has moved here from the West Coast. The cost of the recruiter should
also be revealed. All these costs were reported when Ray Gaulke joined PRSA as
COO in 1993.
As required by law, Murray's salary at the Motion Picture
Assn. in 2004 was reported as $385,720 with $220,425 in pension and deferred compensation.
The
salary of Jack Valenti, who retired in 2004, was reported as $2,314,122 and pension/deferred
compensation as $8,715,932.
Salaries/benefits of the three other top-paid
officers at MPA were also reported. Association staff, according to Federal law,
are not supposed to hide their salaries from the members of their groups.
Murray
could practice good "PR" by revealing his salary and other costs of
his employment. This revelation could be stalled until Nov. 15, 2008, the final
deadline for PRSA's 2007 IRS report, if he and PRSA so desire.
This
delayed reporting has been the practice of PRSA in recent years, just one of many
ways in which key information is kept from the members. The
resignation
of Nancy Humphries as president
of the National Investor Relations Institute after seven months is an indication
of change going on at NIRI. Some leaders want IR people to be closer to the overall
PR community and financial press. There has been great concentration on Wall Street
and numbers in recent years when critics have been saying that intangibles greatly
impact stock prices. The February Harvard Business Review said that 70-80% of
a stock price depends on factors like brand equity, corporate reputation, intellectual
capital, etc. With elected leaders
of PRSA being mostly silent in recent years, counselor James Lukaszewski
has emerged as the most visible and quoted PRSA leader. He is featured in 16 seminars
and webinars of PRSA in the six months to March 31 and is a member of the Ethics
Board.
He told the Canadian Broadcast Corp. Radio series on "A
Century of Spin" that truth is "15% facts and 85% perception."
Every person has a different perception of truth, he said, and the PR person's
job is to "lay out as best he can the facts of the matter from the perspective
he is representing. |