PR 101

The headline on this piece is one of the most basic marketing communication rules on the books. Benjamin Franklin coined the phrase more than 250 years ago in his Poor Richard’s Almanack. Like much else of what Franklin had to say,“ three can keep a secret if two are dead” is still very applicable today.

Yet, it still amazes me that in this digital age of electronic sharing of everything people have not internalized that rule. It hey did, it would keep them of trouble of their own making. Not following that rule will always lead to public relations problems and a lot of collateral damage.

The latest person to fall victim to a failure to pay attention to Franklin’s aphorism is U.S. Navy Capt. Owen Honors. Honors’ career was derailed because of a series of videos he made when he was the executive officer of the U.S.S. Enterprise. According to the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot newspaper, “The videos were a series of profanity-laced comedy sketches that were broadcast on the USS Enterprise via closed-circuit television.” Some were described as homophobic.

Did Honors think no one was ever going to talk about this to an outsider? But as Ben said, secrets just cannot be kept. In Honors’ case, almost 6,000 men and women who crew the aircraft carrier saw these videos. The odds were better than even that someone was going to talk.

I not am going to talk about the content of the videos or Honors intent in producing them. I am not seen the videos. From everything I have read, Honors was a rising star in the Navy. He apparently was an excellent leader slated to become an admiral. Perhaps he one day would have become Chief of Naval Operations – the overall Navy commander. Not anymore.

This entire situation is about how the videos were perceived and the fallout from their release. There are numerous stories talking about how the videos show the sexist, homophobic culture that the writers claim permeate the military. Again, I have no idea if that’s an accurate picture of our fighting men and women. I would say not from own experiences dealing with our armed forces. I do pro bono work for groups that work with veterans. I married into a military family. I have a lot of experience with our military.

However, truth does not matter, only the perception. I tell this to clients all the time. Perception is reality as far as the outside world is concerned. That’s why you have to be careful because the odds are very good that what you view as an off-hand remark could come back to bite and bite hard.

Remember, this is the era of social media. What once might not have spread beyond a city block will now zip around the world in minutes. Once the problem is out of the box, there is nothing that can be done to put it back.

As Capt. Honors unfortunately found out, it is not just the individual who will get burned. It can be an entire organization.

HowHH

This is going to be a different kind of rant. I am a fed up and I want tell the world about it. Yes, I am as mad as hell and I not going to take it anymore. The problem is I don’t know what to do about it.

This is going to be a long one. There is nothing that says you have to read all of it or any of it. If you like it, let me know. If you don’t let me know that too.

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you know my rants are usually about something marketing misfire. I try to call out campaigns or companies I feel need to be chastised for missteps or incompetence.

Well, this time I am calling out the whole economy, or more specifically, how companies, politicians, bureaucrats, and all of us are reacting to it. I will admit this is personal to a point because I cannot convince anyone out there to spend any money on marketing. I am feeling the pinch and it’s a hard pinch. Expenses are rising while income is flat.

I know I am not alone. I have lost count of the number of conversations I have had with other small business owners about the same topic. We all hear the same things from potential clients – not now; I am not sure we can afford this now; I will find something who will do it for half your price; things are too uncertain; your service is not that important.

Or my personal favorite, give us a proposal. Which I labor over for many hours and then send off. The company decides they cannot afford me right now, but then uses my ideas. I know it has happened. I know people on the inside of many companies. What can I do – sue?

What frosts me is that no one has a solution and I mean no one. Not the Republicans, not the Democrats, not any level of government, not corporations, not the media, and no individual that I have heard. Since I think they all deserved to be skewered equally, I am going to make this a series.

Not that I think it is going to do any good. I am not sure most of you are going to read this far down. But, it might make me feel better, so that makes it worth it.

Let’s start with the two political parties – the Republicans or Tweedle Dum and the Democrats – Tweedle every bit as Dum.

First, I do not belong to either party. I used to lean Democratic, but lately I have decided they are no better than the party across the aisle.

So let us begin with a quote from my favorite philosopher, cynic and curmudgeon: “The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.” H. L. Mencken (1880 – 1956)

Mencken sums it up quite nicely. No matter how many ideals or plans any newly elected candidate has at the beginning, within about six months all they care about is being reelected. Which means instead of coming up with a real solutions to a problem, they pander to whoever has the most money or shouts the loudest. To steal a phrase from an English writer, most politicians are intellectual pillows. They bear of the impression of the last person to lay on them.

Lately, they so want to stay in office, they will not admit the other side might have a good idea. I honestly think that if one party in either Washington, D.C. or any state capital introduced a bill saying the sun rises in the morning, the other would oppose it.

Also, all politicians are very good as distracting their constituents from the real issues. At a time when we are still fighting two wars, the economy is the toilet, the unemployment rate is somewhere around 10 percent, and the national debt is somewhere north of $1 trillion, they get people fired up about gay marriage? Give me a break. What a waste of time and effort. Time and effort that could be spent solving real problems. Both sides are so stuck in their positions they are not open to any new ideas.

All the Republicans want to do is give tax breaks to rich people, who frankly could afford to pay some more to the government. Their mantra is government is evil and must be stopped. Judging by their positions, I think they must be anarchists. Their perfect government would be no government.

In the perfect Republican world, a business would be free to do whatever it wanted. They could pollute the water, blow the tops off mountains, treat people like disposable tissues and never be called to account for any of it. Of course, they wouldn’t be paying any taxes. I don’t want to see rivers catch on fire or try to explain to my grandchildren where all the forests went.

As for the Democrats, well they want to coddle people so they are so dependent on government they no initiative of their own. They think government is the solution to everything. They expect us to pay for things like free cell phones for poorer and to rebuild houses of people dumb enough to build in a flood plain. In this case, I don’t want to have to explain to my grandchildren why 90 percent of their income is going to pay taxes.

Both parties cater to the wing nuts on the left and right. Of course, some of them are wing nuts. It never fails to amaze me what comes out of some elected officials mouths. As a friend used to say, they run their mouths in fourth gear and their minds in neutral. Or as my father used to say: “they don’t even have the brains they were born with.”

Is their solution to all of this? I don’t know. I am not very optimistic. I do not see a Theodore Roosevelt or Harry Truman on the horizon.

I will end this with a song written by a brilliant man, Pete Townsend:

Won’t Get Fooled Again

The Who

We’ll be fighting in the streets

With our children at our feet

And the morals that they worship will be gone

And the men who spurred us on

Sit in judgment of all wrong

They decide and the shotgun sings the song

I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution

Take a bow for the new revolution

Smile and grin at the change all around me

Pick up my guitar and play

Just like yesterday

And I’ll get on my knees and pray

We don’t get fooled again

Don’t get fooled again

Change it had to come

We knew it all along

We were liberated from the fall that’s all

But the world looks just the same

And history ain’t changed

‘Cause the banners, they all flown in the last war

I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution

Take a bow for the new revolution

Smile and grin at the change all around me

Pick up my guitar and play

Just like yesterday

And I’ll get on my knees and pray

We don’t get fooled again

Don’t get fooled again

No, no!

I’ll move myself and my family aside

If we happen to be left half alive

I’ll get all my papers and smile at the sky

For I know that the hypnotized never lie

Do ya?

There’s nothing in the street

Looks any different to me

And the slogans are replaced, by-the-bye

And the parting on the left

Is now the parting on the right

And the beards have all grown longer overnight

I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution

Take a bow for the new revolution

Smile and grin at the change all around me

Pick up my guitar and play

Just like yesterday

Then I’ll get on my knees and pray

We don’t get fooled again

Don’t get fooled again

No, no!

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

Meet the new boss

Same as the old boss

This may come as a shock to lot of bloggers, but they are bound by the same rules on libel, slander and defamation as any reporter at an old media daily newspaper. I have written several times that the Internet is the wild west of the law. There have not been a lot of cases dealing with such things plagiarism, copyright infringement, and other areas of the law that govern publishing.

That is changing however.

“It was probably inevitable, but we have seen a steady growth in litigation over content on the Internet,” Sandra Baron, executive director of the Media Law Resource Center in New York, told the Los Angeles Times

“Although bloggers may have a free-speech right to say what they want online, courts have found that they are not protected from being sued for their comments, even if they are posted anonymously. Some postings have even led to criminal charges,” the LA Times reported.

This is my rant for this week. Just because you have a laptop and an Internet connection does not mean you can ignore the rules.  As many bloggers are now finding out, pretending those laws don’t apply get them into a whole heap of trouble.

Yet for some reason many bloggers continue to act like they can write and say what they want. There is something about the Internet and the feeling of anonymity that leads people to write things they would never say in person.

What also bothers me is that many blogger could not define libel if it bit them on the butt.

Here for your edification is the definition of libel from the Associated Press Style Book: “at its most basic, libel means injury to reputation. In some states libel is distinguished from slander, in that a libel is written or otherwise printed, whereas slander is spoken; in either case, the word defamation generally includes both terms. Words, pictures, cartoons, photo captions and headlines can all give rise to a claim for a libel.”

One of the very first things drilled into every rookie reporter are the rules of libel. Lawsuits are expensive. Editors don’t like to use their budgets on legal fees.

“Most people have no idea of the liability they face when they publish something online,” Eric Goldman, who teaches Internet law at Santa Clara University, told the LA Times. “A whole new generation can publish now, but they don’t understand the legal dangers they could face. People are shocked to learn they can be sued for posting something that says, ‘My dentist stinks.’”

Under federal law, websites generally are not liable for comments posted by outsiders. They can, however, be forced to reveal the poster’s identity if the post includes false information presented as fact.

That’s right, you cannot hide behind a false identity. Keep in mind that to everyone at your Internet Service provider – with the exception to those who send you the bill – you are a series of numbers. Those numbers are unique and cannot be changed by you. In other words, they can identify you quite easily.

“There’s a false sense of safety on the Internet,” Kimberley Isbell, a lawyer for the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard University said to the Times. “If you think you can be anonymous, you may not exercise the same judgment” before posting a comment, she said.

So, think before you hit that publish button.