PR 101

By now U.S. Representative Anthony Weiner, D-NY, has been slapped around by everyone from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to Jon Stewart. I am not going to pile on because frankly there is nothing else to say about Wiener himself. However, he does offer a huge object lesson to the rest of us about the dark side of social media.

Here’s the first thing that we all should remember – social media doesn’t kill careers, people using social media kill careers. Oh and you can add companies into that also. Social media can also wound them pretty severely.

You must be a monk living in a Nepalese cave if you don’t know what Wiener did. According to ABC News Weiner admitted Monday he had “engaged in ‘several inappropriate’ electronic relationships with six women over three years, and that he publicly lied about a photo of himself sent over Twitter to a college student in Seattle over a week ago.”

The overall lesson in all of this is think before you do anything on the Internet. I am not sure why it is, but many people do not consider the consequences of their actions when posting on the web. I mean does anyone think a sitting US Representative would post a picture of his junk on his office wall? Of course not. Yet when people get on the Internet, they seem to think that the same rules don’t apply. They don’t ask that question I always urge clients to ask before doing anything – “what if … ?”

I don’t get it. Research indicates the average post initially reaches approximately 150 people. If each of those 150 people sends out the same post and it reaches another 150 people each, over 22,000 people will see it and so on. You see how fast something goes viral.

So why do Weiner and others do inappropriate things on the web? I think it is because they don’t understand the power of the Internet. A lot of people don’t get it. They think they are somehow anonymous when they post. Well, they aren’t.

Here’s the second lesson to be learned from this: “three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.” That is one of my favorite Ben Franklin quotes. I use it when I discuss crisis communications.

Weiner has been touted as one of the more Social Media savvy members of Congress. Yeah, and I am scheduled to perform brain surgery tomorrow. Did he honestly think that those pictures would stay private?

It is hard to believe that anyone doesn’t know that once you enter the Social Media realm, privacy is surrendered. Anything you put on the Internet is accessible to anyone who wants to see it. If it is something salacious or embarrassing that pretty much guarantees it will go viral. We humans seem to revel in spreading that around. We really like it when it happens to someone who we feel thinks they are smarter than us.

There is the third lesson to come out of this. This is one is about crisis communications. In today’s Internet-based world, you have about an hour or so to respond to a crisis. You cannot wait more than that to formulate a response to whatever happens. In fact, if you decide to do something stupid like tweet pictures of your body parts to college student females, you had better have your story all set to go before you tweet.

Seriously, companies today have about an hour today to put out the fire. That’s why I always urge clients to have a crisis communications plan in place. They need to be monitoring Social Media 24 hours a day, seven days a week to catch those small fires. Wait any longer than that and it’s too late.

If Weiner had come out right away and said, “yes, it’s me. It was a stupid thing to do and I am sorry I did it” the story would have flared and died. Instead, he waited way too long to respond.

As my father used to say: “there is no sense in being stupid unless you show people how stupid you are.” We Coles are sarcastic people. What the Internet has done is expand the opportunities to demonstrate that stupidity.

I handle the airline reservations for my in-laws. They are going on a trip soon so I printed out their itinerary for them for planning purposes. They are flying on two airlines – Delta and AirTran. The Delta itinerary was five pages long. Besides the basic information about flight times, it contained pages and pages of redundant information. In contrast, the AirTran itinerary was 1.5 pages long. It contained only the needed flight details.

Bloggers note: AirTran has been acquired by Southwest Airlines. It will soon be absorbed into the Southwest network.

As I watched the Delta and AirTran pages stream out of the printer, it made me think about marketing campaigns that do essentially the same thing the two airlines did.

A lot of campaigns are just too complicated, complex, and confusing. It’s the old saw about too many cooks. Too many executives, both at the client and the agency, with different views have had to sign off on the campaign. Before each of them gives their approval, they insist on adding in what they think is important. By trying to everything to everyone, the marketing campaign ends meaning nothing to anyone.

My question always is when I see one of these campaigns, wasn’t somebody paying attention. I always think back to what Kevin Brandt, a senior executive at a Milwaukee agency, said to a class I was taking: “the words I never want to hear from my team are ‘hey, you know what would be cool … ’”

Sometimes those campaigns end up just looking stupid. Other times, they are downright insulting.

Look at the recent Kenneth Cole Twitter campaign, which coincided with the uprising in Egypt: “Millions are in an uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring is online at (sorry, but I not dignifying that with the URL). So let me get this straight, people are risking their lives to free themselves from an oppressive, brutal dictatorship. Kenneth Cole sees this as a good platform to sell shoes.

When Groupon’s incredibly insensitive Tibet Super Bowl ad was roasted worldwide, one of the defenses was that people were now talking about the discount service. Yeah, there’s a client meeting I would like to attend. “Well, I have good news. We have raised awareness of Groupon to 87 percent of the targeted audience. Isn’t that great. Of course, they all hate us and are talking about organizing boycotts, but they know who were are.”

One of my “favorites” is the ad for the gout treatment Uloric. It shows some poor schlump hauling around a giant beaker of uric acid. He gets on a bus for goodness sakes. Would you want to sit next to somebody hauling around a container of sloshing disgusting liquid? He then takes the magic drug so the beaker shrinks down to a size small enough to fit into his fishing creel. Yeah, that’s what I take along when I go fishing – something guaranteed to scare away every aquatic animal for miles.

I am not trying to minimize gout. I know it is a serious, painful, often debilitating condition. But there was no way I could focus on that while watching this guy schlep around a couple of gallons of uric acid.

While I don’t know the insides of any of those campaigns, I have worked at a major agency where I have sat in on creative meetings. I have seen what happens to a campaign when too many people get involved. What should have been a simple message about a client’s product becomes a mishmash of bad ideas and bad execution.

That’s why there is an advertising slogan I keep in mind: “Know when to say no.”

I have been seeing a number of blogs and statements lately arguing that social media might be the next dot-com bubble. I cannot figure if the people who make this argument are trying to be provocative, really believe that social media is a bubble, or don’t understand it and wish it would go away. .

Social media is not going away. Quite the opposite, actually. Look at the data Marketing Sherpa collected on marketing tactics for 2011.

“As marketing strategies evolve from outbound to inbound tactics, there is also a shift in the ways in which money and resources are spent. We asked more than 1,100 marketers how they foresaw budgets changing in 2011 for the following marketing tactics,” Marketing Sherpa wrote. This is what they found:

Look at the chart carefully – 1,100 marketers see the budgets for websites, search (search engine optimization/pay per click), and social media increasing by more than 50 percent. That doesn’t sound to me like social media is going anywhere.

In order for any of these marketing methods to prove successful, a company must use the three together.  A company needs a top-flight webpage so potential customers like what they see when they land there. Search engine optimization is key so potential customers find that website. Social media is needed to create the inbound links to the website so search engines find it. A marketing campaign that doesn’t use all three is a like two-legged stool.

So, I am not sure why some people seem to think social media is going away. I do have some hypothesis though.

First, I think many people are comparing Facebook, Google, Twitter, Linked in, YouTube and other social media sites to companies that were created during the dot-com bubble of the 1990s. That rationale doesn’t apply to the current crop of digital companies. What killed most of the dot com companies is that they never made a profit. Plus, their stock prices were widely inflated. When the recession of 2001 hit and the investment spigot was turned off, those high fliers suddenly had the aerodynamic properties of a rock.

There were a lot of lessons learned in that period. Companies just don’t operate like that anymore.

As I said before, I think some people are just trying to be provocative. They want to be contrarians. Kind of like the people of Vermont, who will never do what the rest of the nation does. Those social media contrarians just want to start an argument. They see themselves as loners, as people who don’t follow the crowd. I image their forebears rode horses and used kerosene lamps by choice well into the 1930s.

Finally, I think there are just some people who hate the whole concept of social media. They have been using the old ways for decades, dammit, and those methods work just fine. They don’t want to take the time to learn something new. It is too confusing for them. Before you automatically assume these people are all old, I was able to qualify for an over 55 discount the other night. And I love social media.

I suppose it is possible one of the more popular social media sites will go away. I don’t think that will happen, but one never knows. Things do change. I grew up with one phone company, three television stations, a record player and a typewriter. The companies that produced those items either went away or changed out of necessity. Yes, I know some places are again selling turntables and other old technologies. But some places still sell candles, but I don’t see them again becoming our primary source of light.

However, the functions those old ways doing things performed did not. I think the same is true of social media. If Facebook or Linked in disappear, something will take their place. Social media is just too dominant to think otherwise.