I took a group of students to London in May 2005, for a two-week tour of communication agencies, firms, and government officials. It was fantastic. I wrote this article for our Alumni newsletter, but it never made the cut. As so many of our readers are recent graduates, I thought I’d edit and share what I learned. I still feel, two years later, that it’s apropos. - Luke

“Look Right.” Two simple life-saving words are painted on nearly every crosswalk throughout London. As Americans cross the street, our first instinct is to look left first – since that’s the side from which our traffic comes first. In England they drive on the left side of the road.

So what?

So it means if you want to make it across the street without incident, you need to look right first.

I spent two weeks in England, leading a group of students on a PR tour of businesses across London. Our mission was to meet with journalists, CEOs, and professionals covering all aspects of the art and practice of relating to people.

“Look Right.” It seems like that could be a PR practitioner’s motto, too. PR strategically monitors and alters the environment for the benefit of the organization. But in order to effectively enact our strategies, we have to be able to see properly…or look right.

How do we find out what’s going on? How does one environmental alteration affect one’s company? How do we get people to listen? The people we met with had answers. The following is a compilation of intellectual gems I gathered from these professionals.

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[Author’s note: This is the second of a series of metaphors of PR. The first is here.]

If you think about your typical rock band, you’ve got a singer, a guitar player, a bass player, and a drummer. You could take several bands from the 70s to today and probably (depending on your age) be able to name all the band members BUT the bass player. It’s okay, it’s not your fault; you’re not a bass player. Look, let me show you. The Who. Singer: Roger Daltrey. Guitar player: Pete “The Windmill” Townshend. Dummer: Keith Moon. Some would say the best drummer ever. Bass Player? Uh, wait, wait, don’t tell me. You don’t know, do you?. Some more. Van Halen…the original: David Lee Roth, Eddie Van Halen, drummer Alex Van Halen. Bass Player? You don’t know. Violent Femmes: Gordon Gano sang and played guitar. Victor DeLorenzo was the drummer. Best acoustic bass guitar player ever. You don’t know, do you? The Fray: Well, they don’t count. They don’t even have a bass player. Nickelback: Wait, I hate Nickelback. The Killers: Brandon Flowers, Dave Keuning strums it, and Ronnie Vannucci Jr. lays down the drumbeat.

And what’s my point?

My point is that everyone knows the other members of the band, but how incredibly important are the bass players? Very. And whether you know it or not, they are. And whether you know it or not, a good one can make you soar and the bad ones can kill you.

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[Author’s note: Paull’s latest post has stirred me into creating a series of metaphors of PR. This is the first of that series.]

I’ve been reading a lot of books by Jack Trout lately. Jack writes books on the marketing strategy of positioning, which is what our agency’s philosophy is based on. It’s a fascinating concept, and while I don’t agree with everything he says, Mr. Trout (and co-author Al Ries) wrote some incredible things. One of the things I don’t care for is that he tends to use the terms “publicity” and “PR” synonymously as if PR is nothing but publicity. Granted, many PR people only do publicity work, and many non-PR people only see the publicity side of PR work, but that’s certainly not all there is to it. Ask most PR professionals and they’ll surely agree with me. The ones who disagree are uneducated buffoons. What? Who wrote that? These prankish fingers.

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[Editor’s Note: This post is long and I had reservations about putting it up, but Luke promised to buy me some Whole Wheat Fig Newtons and I agreed to post it in its entirety. It’s also LOL funny]

The Internet has totally made geography obsolete. Well, for socializing, anyway. And every day broader broadband and wider wireless networks make the world smaller and smaller. Before long, tech savvy people were posting their prose, poetry and thoughts on the web in the form of logs. Then along come these lightweight content management systems that make posting notes on the web way easier; and soon everyone is a publisher with their own web log (web-log…blog, get it? Seriously, how many of you didn’t know that?)

And that’s when the magic happens. That’s when boundaries became really loose, borders became stretchy, and geography blurred. The social aspect of the web came alive. Instead of speeches and soapboxes, people were engaged in conversations.

There are two people I personally know who have had their lives change dramatically by the social aspect of the blogosphere. One is me, the other is Paull Young. Of course, there are a myriad of people whose lives have changed more than mine by the social network of the Internet; bands making it big on MySpace, desperate people meeting in strange bars, that lonely woman who orders that special trinket on eBay, and that fool Aussie embarking on a world blog tour.

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Still within the first few months of my PR career and I just thought I’d share some observations. After all, that’s what I do, make observations. I’m sure the other newly employed PR flacks can join in here, the seasoned can attest, and the students can learn from my misjudgments.

Dusk. Dusk is a pretty good transition. From the bustle of the busy day to the quiet of the sleepy night, dusk gently leads us from one to another. And, really, it’s your perspective of day and night that changes your opinion of dusk. From good to bad, from bad to good, or just from one stage to another. Your call.

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Our favorite man from Down Under has done it again. No, I’m not referring to the spray cheese incident: I’m talking about starting another revolution! You’ll recall in the past that Forward’s own podcast guru, Paull Young, started such wonderful things as the Young PR Lens on Squidoo as well as…uh, some other really great ideas none of which I can think of right now, but you’ll just have to trust me.

And now, he has paired with Trevor Cook and the two of them have used their powers for good to start the Anti-Astroturfing campaign. For those of you who don’t know, Astroturfing is faking a grassroots movement through sinister, deceptive, and cunning communication tactics. Less-than-honorable PR professionals *gasp* have been known to do it.

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This is sort of a brief extension of my earlier post about networking. I was thinking about this the other day and I find it so important that I decided that I should write another post about it.

In a bizarre turn of events the very day I was thinking about it, David Jones and Terry Fallis released a podcast about it. Inside PR #8 covers the networking concept very well. This podcast is a great addition to the PR profession and a great listen for incoming PR pros and students.

But I was disappointed when I heard this. “Drat,” I thought, “they beat me to it.” But while they were talking about it, another podcast sprung to my mind: Manager Tools. I thought, “Aha! I’ll take the Inside PR podcast and this other podcast and write a post about networking using both examples.” I was feeling pretty good about myself. Manager Tools is a great podcast. It really doesn’t have much to do with PR, per se, but it’s a great resource for working in the business world and has some really great tips. For instance, I listened - surprisingly - to the entire 45-minute podcast on The Secret to a Great Handshake (4/17/06). Forty-five minutes! It was fascinating! Well, just recently the gentlemen at Manager Tools had a fantastic show on Building a Network (5/9/06), which dovetails into the world of PR so very nicely. Whether you’re looking for a job or developing relationships with members of your key publics, this podcast is a must listen.

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Here’s an article from the New York Times by Anna Bahney that really boils my blood and has already generated a little buzz in the blogosphere. It’s not the article that angers me, I love the article. It’s the chowderhead subjects.

People have been stupid for years, so there’s nothing new there. What is new is the lightning fast way in which you can prove your stupidity to hundreds or thousands of people within seconds. And do so in a way that might never go away, bonus! Yes, the Internet is the recorded, megaphoned soapbox that morons around the world can now utlize for the embarrassment of us all.

I’m being harsh, but truthful.

Trevor Cook points it out, Denise Howell has an interesting take on it, and Slashdot weighed in for example. There’s not a lot of discussion about it, just traffic. The article pretty much says it all. It’s humorous, to the point, and pertinent. The most quoted part in blog postings I’ve seen from the article is this:

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I got this Washington Post article By Frank Ahrens in my PRSA email news today and it really struck a chord.

“When CBS television writers and producers sat down this spring to think about “Jericho,” a new program for this fall, they crafted two story lines: one that would appear on television and one that would appear — and fish for ad dollars — only on the Internet.”

And this is an amazing proactive step for networks that, Ahrens points out, have been notoriously slow to change (and they’re not the only ones). They’re actually conceptualizing a program with the dual strategy of producing a network broadcast and providing additional must-see content on the web from the start.

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Newspapers. We�ve been hearing about their demise for years now. But, seriously, is that ever going to happen? Let�s see, the only medium I can think of that really went offline was the telegraph. And that was a rare case.

As Shel Holtz is fond of saying: �new media don�t kill old media, they just force them to adapt� and I believe it. Radio changed the world, and forced newspapers to change. Television changed the world again, but radio and newspapers adapted. Now we have the Web, which is forcing everything to evolve again. The demise of newspapers? I don�t think so.

Readership may be declining, but enrollment in journalism schools is on the rise. This article from Seelye in The New York Times is outstanding. Witness:

�Students are also driven by the very changes that are upending the old media. For one thing, many do not read the print version of newspapers. As Dustin Hodges, 22, who is graduating from Missouri in August, put it, ‘I don’t pick up a newspaper unless it’s in front of me and it’s free.’ For the latest news, he hops online, where he spends three or four hours a day anyway.

Today’s students have grown up immersed in the Internet and with the ability to adapt rapidly to new technologies, giving them a comfort level with things that newspapers are just discovering, like blogs, podcasts and video clips.�

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