PR blunders are almost always due to a bad decision upstream, not the reaction to them. You could say DPS’s recent decision to offer a southern style lunch of fried chicken and collard greens in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a bad decision. You could say a lot worse.

They said it was well intentioned so let’s give them that. Looking at this with a light most favorable, how do you think it possibly could have gone down? Maybe I’m naive, but I’m having a hard time imagining there wasn’t at least one person who raised a concern.

Don’t you think that someone – anyone – just had to have wondered aloud “I wonder if this might come across as stereotyping?” Why didn’t anyone listen to this voice?

The mother who brought the menu to our attention called this “a teaching moment.” Indeed. As a starting place, before DPS tackles cultural sensitivity issues which at this point seem depressingly out of their reach, I suggest DPS should learn a basic public relations principle:

When in doubt – when there’s a sliver of a doubt – don’t do it. Just don’t.

Did DPS even weigh an alternative? If they did, what were they afraid of? Bad press as a result of not offering a special menu in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.?

Exactly opposite of athletes and musicians, working professionals spend 99% of their time executing and 1% of their time practicing. It’s hard to find places in business to practice. So when you do, you have to take advantage of them.

It’s not surprising to see Tiger Woods recognize the need to get out in front of stories during a crises. He’s a smart guy. He proves it in this article, where he comments aabout Michael Vick back in 2007:

If you made that big a mistake, you got to come out and just be contrite, be honest, and just tell the public ‘I was wrong’…I think waiting a long time got a lot of people polarized.”

So he knew, just like most of know, how to manage in a crises. But knowing isn’t the thing. Executing is. And he of all people should know that effective execution requires practice.

The past few weeks have been powerful. I’ve reconnected with two long-lost friends. One’s a guitarist I met while attending Berklee College of Music, the other a magazine editor I worked with for a short stint in my career.

The guitarist moved back to Israel, the editor moved a few blocks away from me. The guitarist I found on Facebook, the editor I found at the neighborhood frozen custard shop.

International, hyperlocal. The reach of social media, the power of sugar and cream.

Two very different people with whom I shared important times during transitional periods in my life. I learned important lessons from both of them. And the lessons connect.

The guitarist taught me about the importance of technique. That you have to work to get it, that it never comes easy, that it isn’t the end but rather a means to an end, and that you must have it to be great. I’ll forever admire his technique, his work ethic, and his steadfast focus.

The editor taught me about forgiveness. That bad decisions happen and we’ve all made them. And if someone owns it, demonstrates how they’ve learned from it and will change (demonstrating attrition is not enough), then we all have a responsibility to forgive. I’ll forever be thankful to her for forgiving me once, and instilling in me the responsibility to forgive others.

In my professional world I’ve connected these lessons to the recent high-profile marcom gaffs and the discussions that have followed. Mistakes from the likes of Cayne, Ballmer and Judge seem to me to be a function of sub-par technique. Business executives certainly know better, but sometimes they just don’t have the chops to execute correctly.

And it happens to all of us. So we should be able to forgive a brand or a person every now and again if they’re willing to learn and change. I’d suggest that this is a lot more powerful than fanning the flames.

I’ll point once again to this seemingly simple post from @chrisbrogan. What makes it a gem is the last section: This Could Be You.

A guitarist taught me that it doesn’t have to be. An editor taught me what to do when it is.

It’s a simple concept: repeat as many skills within as many contexts as often as possible so when it comes time to execute, you aren’t thinking. You’re fully in service to the prime function of the enterprise and its mission.

It’s precisely the opposite in business. We’re executing all the time with hardly any practice. The results are obvious. Time and again we see gaffs far more destructive than an MJ missed dunk. And we blog about it and pass it around the social media sphere, fingers pointed.

As several recent blog posts have illustrated, discussions about your brand are prototypical examples of unpracticed behavior in the marcom discipline. @chrisbrogan has a nice post in response to Best Buy CMO Barry Judge (with a nice twist that looks at the back side of the issue). @stevetobak turns some problematic statements from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer into productive advice on how to speak about your competition.

(These are the positive examples. Big kudos to these two for providing us with something to learn instead of the too-typical banal jeer.)

For me, there’s always a little voice in the back of my brain telling me these folks know better. That it was poor execution. That maybe they just didn’t practice enough.

And that I need to find more practice fields so I don’t make the same mistakes. Or invent entirely new ones for people to blog about.

There are several leadership thinkers who have written about the concept of practice fields for leaders. Heifetz, Linsky, and Grashow come to mind. As does Kouzes’ advice for finding practice fields in everyday meetings. And the practice field experience is often cited as a key benefit by enterprises offering leadership training programs.

So where to find practice fields for branding and marketing folks?

At first glance, the repetitive nature of new and social media is numbing. How many times can we be expected to read a post about brand monitoring through social media? Sit through a video about search engine optimization? Hear advice about the still-illusive practice of viral campaigns?

I’m beginning to think that new/social media is my practice field. That maybe I can never read or view or hear this stuff enough. That I shouldn’t be so quick to skip a blog post or a snappy quote in my Twitter stream. Maybe the repetition in the new/social media domain is my practice field. Maybe this is where I can hear, again and again, best practices that will make my execution more effective.

And if I involve myself more in discussions instead of glossing over a topic I think I’ve heard before, my assumptions will be challenged. I’ll dig a little deeper. I’ll practice.

Another apropos @chrisbrogan blog post: Five Tasks in the Morning. Seems to me that he’s scheduled time for practice. And he does it every day.

From what little I know about him, he doesn’t miss many slam dunks.

With Chick’s band, Weckl put all kinds of electronic triggers on his drums and got drummers everywhere thinking about how to use the machines to their advantage instead of worrying about them signaling a pending drummer irrelevance (in a way, the 80’s were to drummers what today is to ad agencies).

Like him or not Weckl was a game changer writ large. Everyone started triggering their sets. Buying Octopads. Trying to figure out his impossible polyrhythms. Calling themselves Weckl Heads. Growing mullets.

It took Weckl several years of fame before releasing his first instructional video. Drummers buzzed about it for years. Couldn’t wait. Give us an Elektric Weckl magik pil. Unlock some secrets. Take us into the future. Teach us the impossible.

In 1988 he finally released it: Back to Basics. My music career (such as it was) took me away from fusion but I never forgot the statement Weckl made with that video. Wanna change the game? Understand the game first.

Today as I think about good branding, marketing, and communications I’m ever convinced that it all starts with a thorough grasp of context. Godin and Crayon and anyone else extolling the virtues of being remarkable risk missing the point that sometimes — just sometimes — organizations need to rethink the basics (if they ever thought of them before). If authenticity is primal (and I believe it is), some organizations need to get the basics down first. Reflect who they are and build a risk tolerance competency within the organization before playing polyrhythms and adding triggers.

Such was the case recently when I created a strategic PR and communications plan for a group that hardly has a PR function within it at all. They’re very good at executing on their mission and have a terrific story to facilitate but they needed a back-to-basics explanation of the public relations function, probably even more than they did a plan to execute. The plan itself included some down-and-dirty brand platform stuff (what the story is), some organizational change recommendations, and a goals-to-strategy-to-tactics-to-objectives plan (how to go about telling it).

A section on PR as a Function preceded all of this, and was a great exercise for me. Articulating something is the best way to affirm a grasp of a concept (even if it’s to yourself). Especially if you’ve done something for a while, explaining it forces you to challenge assumptions and be clear about your starting place.

Here’s a re-work of the media relations section of the PR as a Function part of the plan. Sometimes in the midst of rapid change it’s easy to loose track of the basics. Seems to me that today’s socialnew2.xmedia frenzy is just like what drummers were going through in the 80’s.

I’m no Dave Weckl of the MarComm world. Not by a long shot. And there’s plenty of PR specialists out there that have a lot more to offer on this subject: Todd Defren, David Mullen, Brian Solis, Chris Brogan, Glen Turpin, and Cori Keeton Pope are a few I keep an eye on. But maybe the following 101 will help a few others reflect on the basics and how many principles still hold true.

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(Big thanks to Cori Keeton Pope of Keeton PR. She helped in many ways with the plan discussed in this post. My first time working with her, and I look forward to many more.)

I started with two definitions to establish the gestalt.

Broadcast: scattering and disseminating information widely
Podcast: Literally Personal On Demand dissemination of information

There is no doubt that we live in a Podcast reality. Information is gathered on the stakeholders’ terms. More and more, it does’t matter what enterprises (including mass media companies) consider important. Or when they consider it important. It matters what stakeholders consider important. And when.

Our podcast reality drives two important principles:

1. An enterprise’s story isn’t what we think it is. It’s what they (stakeholders) think it is.
2. An enterprise’s story will not be crafted and told by the enterprise or its PR agency. It will be crafted and told with its stakeholders.

For many, the old way of approaching public relations was to devise a systematic process of controlling messaging. Today the most effective public relations campaigns revolve around facilitation — encouraging dialog, sparking discussion, and adding value. This means promoting the story, yes, but also recognizing that countless stakeholders can and will participate in the telling of the story.

Today everyone has a microphone. Attempting to control messaging is not only futile, but oftentimes generates a reputation antithetical to the way stakeholders demand information and, as a result, craft reputations in their minds.

Creating Good Stories To Tell

Usually an enterprise’s activities are not as interesting to stakeholders outside of the enterprise as they are to those within it. Organizations that understand the discipline of thinking about their activities beyond their own self-interests are those that have their stories told more broadly. This happens in three stages:

1. Upstream: Considering what activities to pursue by equally aligning the interests of the broader community with the mission of the organization.
2. In Stream: Capturing the results of the activities performed — money raised, lives changed, introducing something new to the world, value added.
3. Downstream: Telling the story of the activity with the mission of the organization (and the activity) beyond the self-interest of the organization: how it changed people, the community, or the world.

Facilitating the telling of stories — the job of the communications and public relations function within an enterprise — requires a strong set of skills, talents, relationships, and tools. But having good stories to tell depends on a strong partnership with the enterprise in the first place: a willingness to put story-telling considerations at the table with mission or operational considerations.

Media Relations

Some of the most important vehicles for telling an enterprise’s story are not controlled by the organization. This includes legacy media (print, television, radio, and so on) and new media (blogs, internet radio, podcasts, and so on). Despite the seemingly disparate means by which the people behind these vehicles do their work (the storytellers), there are commonalities among them that allow an enterprise to approach media relations with a simple and rational set of strategies.

First, however, comes a principle that must be understood and embraced. Regardless of their medium, storytellers have a job to do. Their goals are actually pretty simple:

1. Tell a compelling story to the audience they’re targeting,
2. Do it better and earlier than anyone else telling stories in the same space, and
3. Be authentic and truthful.

Storytellers don’t accomplish these goals in a vacuum. They use and partner with a variety of people and enterprises in three fundamental ways, always in service to their goals:

1. Upstream fishing: Muse relationships to find ideas, trends, advice, or anything of value to their audience.
2. Midstream authentication: Finding experts and sources to validate the facts in and the angles of their stories.
3. Downstream promotion: Leveraging any opportunity to expand the audience of their story.

With this understanding, the single most important principle in media relations is this:

Enterprises must add value in service to storytellers’ goals if they want to be a part of the process.

When working with storytellers, it’s rarely — if ever — about the enterprise. It’s always about the story and its teller. Those enterprises with the strongest results from their media relations approach their work from a starting place that is a steadfast dedication to this principle.

In the end, it’s about building relationships. Like all relationships, the key to working with storytellers is adding value. In the media relations world, here’s what adding value means:

1. Approach storytellers only with those in your enterprise who have, without question, these three A’s:

- Authority
- Authenticity
- Availability

2. Be on the storyteller’s timeline

- If you help a storyteller with a last minute deadline, you’ll become a resource they know they can count on.
- If they want another interview for clarification, give it to them.
- If you promise follow-up information, give it to them. If you can’t, don’t promise it. They’re waiting for you and won’t come back if you leave them in a lurch.

3. It’s about the quality (as opposed quantity) of your story ideas.

- Your organization won’t be the first to realize the value of engaging with storytellers; there are a lot of people who have figured this out.
- Storytellers are like the rest of us: they hate spam, and they get a lot of it.
- Releases and personal outreach need to be relevant to the niche.
- Releases and personal outreach need to think about the storyteller’s goals first, and the enterprise’s agenda second.

The strategies and tactics outlined in the plan started from this place and of course included much more than just media relations. I’m looking forward to executing on it. The group truly has a special story to tell.