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	Phil's Blogservations Friday, February 28, 2003 Posted by philgomes 4:36 PM Setting The Record Straight -- Phase Two Strategies And The PeopleSoft Team: I'm a little late getting to this, but I just read the Feb. 10 PR Week and, frankly, I'm incredibly irritated. PR Week Reporter Andrew Gordon penned the well-written article "Client Losses Need Not Be Insurmountable For Firms," chronicling how firms coped with losing gigantic seven-figure-revenue clients that contributed to a large share of an agency's revenue. Here is a bullet-point summary of the dissolved agency/client relationships discussed in the article: TSI Communications and IBM Hoffman Agency and HP Applied Communications and Oracle Access Communications and Siebel Phase Two Strategies and PeopleSoft For those who don't know, I worked at Phase Two Strategies (PTS) for three years, though not in service of the PeopleSoft account. I came in as a senior associate and left as an account manager. In a description of PTS post-PeopleSoft HR situation, PTS CEO Bill Boehlke is quoted in the article as saying (Emphasis added): "We had some people who resigned, because the shock [of PeopleSoft firing PTS] was so great," says Boehlke. "They had dedicated themselves to PeopleSoft, and they just didn't understand what it was going to be like not working on that account anymore." If this is an accurate quote, it hardly does justice to the former PTS staffers who sweated blood and burned lean tissue in service of the account, delivering award-winning results. These were very smart, talented, and resilient people who worked on the PeopleSoft account. They were battle-tested and far from the lily-livered, fold-under-adversity plebes that this excerpted statement might lead one to believe. Life without PeopleSoft did not send these folks into a state of apoplexy, the way that perhaps a world devoid of marijuana might make Woody Harrelson, Cheech, Chong, Phish, and Cypress Hill cower in the corner of their bedrooms. The fact is, they knew that the skills and relationships built on behalf of PeopleSoft could easily have been retargeted at another client prospect. One superstar PTS manager, in particular, left to ply his considerable skills at a PeopleSoft competitor. He did not resign because not working on PeopleSoft suddenly siphoned all of the meaning out of his professional life, as the quote might indicate. And, as you might guess, the loss of PeopleSoft meant that other headcount-reducing measures had to be undertaken. These measures did not rely on waiting for a bunch of shellshocked agency staffers to throw in the towel. The following is a list of folks who worked on the PeopleSoft account at Phase Two Strategies, but are no longer with the firm. Any agency or corporation would be hard-pressed to find a better group of professionals, even with the rich talent pool of qualified between-jobs PR folks out there. Aeron Noe Alicia Nieva-Woodgate Andrea Landsberg Artemis Anderson Bill Rader Craig Kaufman David Swain Daylan Burlison Diane Petek Eugen Babau-Iladi Hugh Burnham Jane Dryden Jessica James Kellianne Toland Kiersten Kessler Laurie Wilson Madge Miller Michelle (Zawrotny) Dyson Pamela Klores Sarah Treat Sean Mills Steve Jensen In going beyond the call-of-duty and delivering incredible work on the PeopleSoft account, these people had PTS drink their blood while they licked the agency's wounds during the tech PR industry's most brutal deceleration. In post-PeopleSoft PTS, they came out swinging in an aggressive program to replace the business and the revenue. Alas, market forces were entirely too formidable and, sadly, some good people had to go find work elsewhere. The PTS PeopleSoft team -- the one that built and executed PeopleSoft's phenomenal public relations turnaround in 2000-2002 -- simply deserve more credit. Much more. Thursday, February 27, 2003 Posted by philgomes 1:40 AM Lessons From My Hero: I won't go into too much detail, but SAS co-founder and CEO Dr. Jim Goodnight is one of my personal heroes. In my universe, he should be revered at many times the level reserved for "Neutron" Jack Welch or Lee Iacocca. (This Fast Company article offers an excellent profile of the man.) I had the privilege of hearing him speak at the Churchill Club this week. As he spoke on the panel, he casually mentioned something about himself that I've always admired. Here is a man who owns two-thirds of a ten-figure-per-year private company...And he still writes computer code. Take heed, PR folks. I've always been uncomfortable with the fact that PR folks -- particularly in the agency environment -- feel that they are somehow above the task of media relations when they reach a certain point in their careers. What this inevitably breeds is an agency power structure where the people who are farthest from the data make strategy recommendations to clients. These recommendations are often based on how the practice of media relations was performed the last time the strategist was tasked with that responsibility. In my own career, this has manifested itself in many, many strange ways. I'll offer one example. We were putting together an event at a tradeshow for a very large company. In addition to printed invites, we opted to email "save-the-date" notices to journalists and analysts who had demonstrated great interest in what the company was doing. I have never sent an email to a journalist in anything but plain text. HTML- and RTF-formatted emails tend to be bulkier and there is never a guarantee that the recipient's email program will render a richly formatted message correctly. Additionally, sending unsolicited attachments to a contact is always a big, big no-no. When my supervisor heard that I planned to send my email notices in *gasp* plain ASCII text, she went batshit. She said something vague about making the "best-possible" impression on behalf of our client. I humbly suggested that my approach was best. Well, I clearly didn't know what I was talking about. She huffed away, fired up Powerpoint, and developed a flashy, graphically rich, one-slide invitation. She saved it as a Powerpoint show, such that the recipient (victim?) would be treated to a full-screen presentation of this colorful invite upon double-clicking the attachment. "This is how it should be done," I was told. "This is how we go the extra mile for our clients. Now, don't argue with me and send it to your contacts." I did. I liked my job. And, you know, it's a miracle that some of these contacts will still take my calls. First, it was a 200kb unsolicited attachment. Yes, that's 200kb for one slide. One editor was traveling and had to deal with the download over a 33.6kb nibblenet connection in his hotel room. He didn't RSVP. One publisher -- and a very important one -- operated almost 100% on Lotus Notes. Their implementation of Notes didn't like Powerpoint very much. "You mean you actually believed Microsoft's lip service to 'interoperability?'" one reporter screamed. Of course, by sending the invite as a Powerpoint show, there was no console, button, or keystroke that allowed the journalist to print the invite. The journalists had to hand copy the invite information off of their screens. Now, if this supervisor had been engaged in some of the media relations, even in a small way, she would have had a much better handle on email etiquette. The notion of sending an email in plain text would not have seemed so terrible. And perhaps our turnout at the event would have been better. The lesson: The day you as a PR professional consider yourself above media relations is the day that you've lost control of your career. QED. End-of-list. Sure, as you get promoted, more of your time might be spent planning, strategizing, and so on, but it would behoove you to devote at least some time to pitching. Things have changed. We should be dedicated to changing with them. Thursday, February 20, 2003 Posted by philgomes 3:41 PM Dear Mr. Chirac: Please Read this and get back to me. Thanks. Wednesday, February 19, 2003 Posted by philgomes 3:47 PM The Google Buyout Of Pyra Labs -- Some PR Thoughts: I'm a little late getting to this news item. I think it is incredibly significant, so I wanted some time to mentally unpack this industry development. The excellent Web search tool company Google has now added Blogger creator Pyra Labs to its incredible suite of Web offerings, which also includes an acquired Usenet capability through the Deja buyout. Google News can show you some the places where this story has broken. Slashdot has a good discussion going, and Dan Gillmor seems to have been the one to break the story in the first place. How is this going to affect how people do PR? Not a whit, unfortunately. And this is why the PR industry is fundamentally broken. When I was screaming that the Usenet was an incredible tool for PR and competitive intelligence, my supervisor at the time dismissed it as "Phil screwing around in his chat rooms again." This person's views were echoed throughout the company, despite consistent evidence of how Usenet monitoring yielded actionable information for the client. When I wrote one of the first industry articles about PR and blogging, it was dismissed within my then-company as self-promotional fluff that "made too much out of an online fad." So incensed was I that I asked ExpertPR to remove the company's name from the article and add that of my own, G2B Group, months later. Industry watchers like Kevin Werbach, Dan Gillmor, and many others seem to think blogging is important. These are people that the average PR pro would kill to get a client in front of. However, my contention is that blogging has shaken a good number of agencies who are stuck on the edcal-speakcal-medialist-and-press-release treadmill. The reaction is to dismiss the development as the Internet's equivalent of the 1970s CB radio craze. Media developments like blogging force the PR industry to re-think about how it does business and services clients. In my experience, this is like mentioning the word "bias" in a network newsroom -- everyone knows the need to address the issue, but no one wants to really give it a hard look. The fact is that PR firms are terribly relectant to consider blogs legitimate avenues for corporate communications. I guess it doesn't sound as good in client meetings or sales situations to talk about addressing the blogging community and leveraging its virality and influence when everyone's egos demand top-of-the-fold coverage in The Wall Street Journal. Don't get me wrong. The PR industry is definitely interested in blogging -- G2B Group's web site has recorded several hits from some of the very big agencies, particularly with regard to the Media Relations Report interview on blogging. PR pros like Tom Murphy do a very good job of following these trends, and are passionate enough to do so on their own time. Trylon Communications and the PRSA were thoughtful enough to write and run this article about pitching blogs. The discussion is burgeoning, certainly, but the voices are few. But where are the C-level PR leaders we heard so much from in the late '90s and why aren't they holding forth on this topic and loudly? I'm talking about the flacko di tutti flacki of the ilk that Fast Company gave such generous coverage to in this April 1998 story. The inevitable wave of agency acquisition had an unfortunate effect on PR industry thought leadership -- CEOs became VPs and were probably told to fly in formation by their new bosses. This is where blogs are helping: industry-leading thinking in PR has been democratized, again, thanks to the work of PR-focused blogs. Perhaps Google's acquisition of Pyra will get the PR industry to take blogging seriously as 1) a significant development in journalism, 2) an incredible means to gain insight into a journalist's work and/or the communities s/he serves, 3) an increasingly important message vector, and 4) an rich and fairly immediate feedback mechanism. It's staggering to think of the effect that 1.1M Blogger users, now closer to the panoptic eye of Google, will have on how news, messages, and sentiments are disseminated, searched, and archived. Friday, February 14, 2003 Posted by philgomes 4:48 PM When Microsoft Becomes A Media Company: There's an article on MSN's bCentral entitled "3 signs you need a new computer." Not surprisingly, answer Number 3 is "Your computer won't handle Windows XP or certain software applications." However, Windows XP takes reliability to a whole new level. I would argue that it is necessary if you're using Windows ME, 98 or 95. Those operating systems were based on DOS, and are much more crash-prone than XP. If you're thinking of moving up, I'd encourage you to do so. Helluva way to sell more OS licenses. If someone runs out and decides to buy another computer based on this and other information in this article, it's highly unlikely that it will come without an OS. Not crying foul. Just raising a red flag. Thursday, February 13, 2003 Posted by philgomes 2:42 AM Feb. 2003 Tapeout Is Posted: Just finished uploading the Feb. 2003 edition of G2B Group's newsletter, Tapeout. Enjoy! Thursday, February 06, 2003 Posted by philgomes 6:11 PM Lecturing At SFSU: I'm scheduled to lecture at the SFSU College Of Extending Learning within Beatrice Blatteis' class on "Interactive Web Marketing" (March 14 & 15). I come in twice per year and contribute the PR element, usually on the second day of the class. I discuss offline PR basics and online principles. Of course, blogging will play a key role. In any case, it's always a pleasure doing this for Beatrice and her students. HOME | OBSESSIONS | FAQ | HEROES | CAREER | BLOG | CONTACT Note that the views expressed on this site do not necessarily reflect those of Phil's employer, its business partners, its clients, or anyone or anything that doesn't come from Phil.	ABOUT THIS BLOG This blog not only discusses PR and media matters, but Phil's everyday observations about a variety of topics. EMAIL phil[at] philgomes[[dot}]com SYNDICATE Feedburner ARCHIVE YAHOO! IM SKYPE WISH LIST PITCH POLICY MY PHOTOS www.flickr.com Photostream RSS Enter your Email Powered by FeedBlitz COMMENT AND TRACKBACK POLICY Comments and trackbacks are unmoderated, though I will delete the patently offensive ones. Any comments and trackbacks are the opinions of the individual writer of those comments and trackbacks, and not those of Phil Gomes, his employer, its clients, or its business partners. 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