The first was this interview with Yann Martel by The Guardian‘s Stephen Moss, who admits that his first move is to ‘rather rudely insist that the young woman who is steering him round the UK and Ireland on the publicity tour for his new novel, Beatrice and Virgil, absent herself from the room while we talk.’

Ahem. I’m guessing Stephen Moss is a tad old school, shall we say, in terms of his views on PR folks? I think I might perhaps counter with the notion that anyone smart enough to get a more than one million dollar advance from a publisher in this day and age can probably figure out how to take a taxi by himself and get to an appointed meeting in a hotel, especially in a country where his own mother tongue is spoken. And that, therefore, the young woman’s role might have been just a bit more than merely that of courier/chaperone.

But then I saw this article from the fine folks at Knight Science Journalism Tracker at MIT, in which the suggestion was made that disclosure is necessary when a public information officer (who fills the role of a corporate communications or public relations person) sits in on an interview – and that the situation should be avoided at all costs to avoid having the interview ‘influenced.’

I’m both mystified and saddened by this suggestion. The single biggest complaint PR people hear from journalists – both mainstream and bloggers – is that they’re not appropriately ‘pitched’ – in other words, not enough time and care has been taken by the PR person before approaching a journalist. Bloggers complain that PR people don’t read their blogs and journalists complain that they too have been inappropriately targeted.

Sitting in on interviews with clients is a learning experience for a PR person in many ways. Ultimately it ends up being a learning experience for the client as well. My presence in interviews is as discreet as it can be, given that I’m actually there and haven’t yet mastered invisibility. In fact, I usually take notes, because it’s part of my job to assess my client’s actual performance and to determine if more media training or coaching is required. It would never occur to me to intervene in an interview after the ground rules have been established (and sometimes they do need to be). I can, however, be helpful in a variety of ways once the interview’s done, by providing additional prepared background information (you know, like the interviewee’s bio, correct spelling of name, exact title, etc.), and by ensuring journalists can meet their deadlines by getting supplementary material like photos sent directly to their editors if necessary. I can also help the journalist by finding them someone else to interview if they need to consult an independent third party expert.

Do I influence the interview? In one way, I can definitively answer, Certainly not. I am not the spokesperson. On the other hand, my – and my colleagues’ –  influence is necessary prior to the actual interview. My job is to ensure I provide and deliver a spokesperson who’s ready, willing and able to answer the questions the journalist poses – and who can do so in a timely fashion to ensure the journalist’s deadlines are met. I’ve been to enough briefings with enough new clients to know that no journalist has time to listen to an hour-long dissertation so mired in random detail that the journalist has probably forgotten the question by the time the answer is obliquely approached. Fun though conversational segues are in real life, this is business, both for the client and for the journalist.

I’d also add that many times, as I’m ‘steering’ clients around to interviews, my role is to sense their mood, help them overcome their apprehensions, and get them into the right frame of mind to provide a focused interview. Some clients are too low key, too low energy in that hour or so before the actual interview and need to be psyched up. Others come close to hyper-ventilating, and need to be reassured – or, if I’m confident they actually know their stuff – distracted from the prospect of the interview, so that by the time we arrive and the interview actually happens, they’re ready to put their best foot forward. It’s very similar to the frame of mind in which you want to be when you arrive at a job interview. As opposed to rain-soaked, fly undone, with windblown hair and 10 minutes late, you know.

I once sat in on an interview and did have a question for the journalist later on. Not actually being the soul of tact, my question went something like, ‘That was a really non-linear approach to an interview – your questions were all over the map – what’s up with that?’ The journalist explained it was a technique he used to get more spontaneous answers from subjects. Which is fine with me – I infinitely prefer lateral thinkers. But it’s something many of the software and other engineers and scientists with whom I worked might find disconcerting – which means they’ll need a heads up if I arrange an interview for them with that particular journalist.

When the interview’s over, the client gets some frank but constructive feedback on their performance. Sometimes they get their knuckles rapped, not so much for what they’ve said during the interview but for the way they’ve treated the journalist. ‘So who watches this show anyway, housewives?’ and ‘Thanks to the five of you who bothered to dial in for this teleconference’ were two remarks that earned clients a few performance-enhancing tips from me for the next round.

But let me ask some of you journalists, bloggers, and PR folks out there: what’s your view on this issue? Frankly I think it’s one of the most important services I can provide to a client.

Andrew’s right – Twitter in particular and social media in general are such overwhelming and customizable experiences that it’s really bewildering when you first try to get involved and leverage it for business goals. One of the things I really enjoy about working with authors, (aside from the fact that you can count on them to do some of the writing for you – because let’s face it, public relations is about writing compelling copy in exactly the right way – and then tweaking it and repurposing it and coming up with yet another catchy angle that will help you reach another segment of your target audience) – where was I? Oh yes – while authors (not the ones I work with!) may sometimes be a bit off in the EQ department, they’re rarely slouches when it comes to IQ.

This means that if they’ll listen, they learn. Before you know it, they’re teaching you things. I’ve learned a lot about how to behave on Twitter from Stuart Clark, and I used him as a shining example when I was working with Andrew on his initial Twitter training, namely:

• Thank people for retweets (RTs) and for follow Friday (#ff) recommendations.
• Always check your @messages. Engage with the people who are seeking to engage with you. Always be gracious. Don’t get involved in gossipy and churlish pissing matches.
• Let people on Twitter get a little glimpse of who you are as a person, not just an author flogging a book – let your passions show a little bit.

So I’m delighted to pass on a couple of great posts that Andrew found and tweeted re authors and social media.

The first is Holly Robinson’s Huffington Post article on a writer’s first year with social media.

The second is Penny Sansivieri’s Twitter primer (also a HuffPo post).

As for Stuart? Well – as he’s about to make the transition from non-fiction to fiction author with the first of his three novels about astronomy and science giants, he too is reading and sharing more information about not just astronomy and cosmology, but is also beginning to engage with fiction readers, by sharing this review of Juli Zeh’s novel about two competitive physicists, Dark Matter.

The best thing about working with writers? Establishing goals that support marketing objectives is a dawdle. It’s not about building brand awareness or shifting public opinion. It’s about selling books. And by selling I mean sharing. Because readers are passionate people with an insatiable desire for their next fix. And it had better be quality stuff. Writers are the folks who supply that demand, either through content creation or content sharing. I’m so glad they exist. I’m even more glad I get to work with some of them.

DeNel found me via a guest post I’d done on Kimberly Walsh’s East Coast by Choice blog and a comment I’d left on her own blog, where she’d reviewed Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel, The Lacuna. She took at look at my blog and got in touch via email to ask me to do a guest lecture to her class. Once we worked out the time and date logistics (since my East Coast sojourn was back in 1973 and I was pretty sure she didn’t have budget to fly me to Halifax), I stopped procrastinating about needing a computer with more juice, bought a refurbished iMac, and mastered Skype for once and for all.

My first test run on Skype taught me a valuable lesson: makeup required for Skype video because even north light produces glare, and I didn’t want to look like a burn victim with unhealed skin grafts (no offense intended). That meant an earlier start for me, but that’s ok – I didn’t want to scare people or rattle myself (although I have to say, the great advantage of doing an in-person talk is that you don’t have to look at yourself while you’re doing it – at least not after the rehearsing-in-front-of-a-mirror segment of the procedure is over).

DeNel and I agreed to try to keep the experience as technologically simple as possible. I emailed her the link to the presentation I planned to use (which I’d found on my friend Allen Gibson’s blog) so she could run the PowerPoint and I could focus on trying to make sense.

Here it is:

Marta Kagan

As follow up, I sent DeNel an email recommending a few books for her students, namely:

The New Rules of Marketing & PR – David Meerman Scott
The New Influencers: A Marketer’s Guide to the New Social Media – Paul Gillin
Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies – Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
Friends with Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook – Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo

I also sent a link to Mhairi Petrovic’s web site, which I mentioned in my talk. Her blog (here’s the feed so you can subscribe) is a classic example of how to position yourself as a thought leader in a particular space (social media marketing – I rely on Mhairi’s posts to ensure I have at least a passing acquaintance with what’s happening in that hyper-evolutionary field).

I spoke briefly about the need to customize social media strategies, particularly in the context of small businesses and a recent post I’d read that questioned the value of social media for small businesses in particular. One student challenged me on this (rightly so!), based on her internship work experience with a local Halifax bakery (I’m hoping she’ll remind me of the name of the bakery in the comments section), which gave me a chance to talk about the importance of geolocation services for location-specific businesses, regardless of whether they’re seeking to expand to other cities or franchise. I also mentioned the stellar job Sarah Petegree of Bray’s Cottage Pork Pies is doing with combined social media and traditional PR strategies. I should also have mentioned another UK company, Wiggly Wigglers. The Marketing Profs case study I read was the first I’d come across that talked actual dollars and ROI for social media marketing vs traditional advertising spend (afraid that one is paid content so I can’t link to it here). From what I can remember, ad spend was cut by more than 85% and sales increased by more than 300%.

We talked very briefly about measurement of social media efforts – a vast subject in and of itself, and I suggested a customized approach to that as well, but one that kept an eye on some sort of bottom line – if not sales, then at least hits/web traffic/app download increases – something relatively tangible.

I also talked about the folly of attempting to do all your customer service via social media in general and Twitter in particular, and how disastrous that could be. Within five minutes of finishing the lecture, I came across this fantastic post from Radian 6 about how they manage connecting and engaging with customers online. Hint: by working both smart and hard at it.

For more social media smarts, here’s a video everyone needs to see, Social Media Revolution 2. As for the motivation for this post? Partly great content that needed to be consolidated in one linkable spot, but mostly because DeNel told me she’d assigned one of her students to monitor my blog. Time to generate some more content then!

To today’s MSVU students: you were a great crowd. Hope to hear from you in the comments below. C’mon. Try it. You’ll like it. See that big RSS feed button? Click on it, it won’t bite. Ultimately it will make your lives easier.

It’s so very clear when you engage with social media that we’re all members of many tribes. I’d love to see graphic illustration of tribes and how we connect with folks on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. based on our interests. Haven’t seen the app for that yet, although I’m betting there’s already one in the works.

‘I realized that I might be a lonely Indian boy,’ says Alexie’s protagonist, Junior, ‘but I was not alone in my loneliness…. I realized that sure, I was a Spokane Indian. I belonged to that tribe. But I also belonged to the tribe of American immigrants. And to the tribe of basketball players. And to the tribe of bookworms.

And the tribe of cartoonists.
And the tribe of chronic masturbators.
And the tribe of teenage boys.
And the tribe of small-town kids.
And the tribe of Pacific Northwesterners.
And the tribe of tortilla chips-and-salsa lovers.
And the tribe of poverty.
And the tribe of funeral go-ers.
And the tribe of beloved sons.
And the tribe of boys who really missed their best friends.’

‘It was a huge realization,’ concludes Junior. ‘And that’s when I knew that I was going to be okay.’

Whenever I think of this passage I immediately want to start listing tribes to which I belong. So I thought I’d give it a shot. Feel free to list some tribes to which you belong in the comments.

I’m a member of

the bookworm tribe
the feminist tribe
the WASP tribe
the Echo tribe
the PR tribe
the writer tribe
the social media tribe
the quilting tribe
the Canadian tribe
the Southern Alberta tribe (at the moment, anyway)
the Anglophile tribe
the Austen lovers tribe
the foreign film lovers tribe (my one regret about not having cable is the inability to get a dose of Bollywood once a week – don’t ask me why, I can’t explain it)
the Fitzgerald lovers tribe
the Salinger lovers tribe
the Eric Rohmer and Wim Wenders lovers tribe
the ‘why?’ girls’ tribe
the knitters’ tribe
the quilters’ tribe
the Six Feet Under tribe
the fast-talking Easterner tribe

That’s all I can think of at the moment. How about you?

Bora Zivkovic, Online Community Manager at Public Library of Science, didn’t think much of the piece (at least that was my conclusion from his preface to tweeting it, which was ‘Hrmph…what do you think?’)

Here’s what I think: Begley generalizes and dances around the real issue. She lets a certain amount of frustration with some of the scientists she’s encountered seep into her piece. She makes some very good points regarding successful communication (that which is both clear and persuasive) when she talks about cultural differences between the US and the UK (although I don’t think she nails them precisely – that thing that happened in 1776 really was both the War of Independence and the American Revolution).

She gets closest to making the point implicit in her article explicit when she says, ‘Like evolutionary biologists before them, climate scientists also have failed to master “truthiness” … which their opponents – climate deniers and creationists – wield like a shiv.’

Having just finished Ian McEwan’s Solar, which I’ll be reviewing on my personal blog, I think the issue is both more complex and yet more clearly understandable.

‘Climate deniers’ in and of itself is an odd phrase, because no one denies climate exists. ‘Climate change deniers’ makes only slightly more sense – the more appropriate phrase should be ‘global warming deniers.’ And here we’re beginning to get to the crux of the matter.

Environmentalists sounding the alarm bells regarding what we’ve done to our world by allowing ourselves to become dependent on fossil fuels never sat down and thought about what their key messages were before they started engaging the public. Or if they did, they didn’t think them through sufficiently and consult widely enough amongst themselves before going public. ‘Global warming’ was a specious, no-win phrase from the get-go, frankly, since the explanations required to communicate what it actually is are daunting.

You can’t trot out a phrase you want to see in headlines and then backpedal furiously while you try to explain that global warming manifests itself not only in warmer, drier summers, but also in wetter, colder winters. Let’s be frank – we’re not all climatologists, nor do the vast majority of us aspire to be. By asking me to accept at face value something that’s highly counter-intuitive at the outset, without clearly explaining how to reconcile the two opposing facts, you’ve lost me.

What the ‘climate change deniers’ and ‘global warming deniers’ did right at the very outset was to dig into their deep pockets (because the oil and gas companies of the world are part of a now-entrenched financial hierarchy) and invest in communications advice to nail down their key messages. They went even further as the pro-environmental tide rose: they modified their messaging, their behaviour, and thus their perception among stakeholders.

The investment in a single wind farm by an oil and gas developer is as disproportionately positively perceived as the percentage of birch trees in a mixed deciduous/coniferous forest is overestimated if you don’t do an actual count of even a small area. Did you do that kind of study in your public school nature field trips? Try it sometime; you’ll be astonished.

The key messages of the oil and gas industry have been very clear:

• ‘Our form of energy creates and enables wealth and growth.’
• ‘The alternatives to fossil fuels will be both difficult to engineer and expensive to create.’
• ‘We live in an oil and gas-dependent world and we will continue to seek out new sources of fossil fuels until we’ve exhausted them so you can continue to live the lifestyle to which you think you’re entitled.’ (Zoom, zoom.)

In contrast, I’d be hard pressed, without doing a fair bit of research, to come up with three overarching key messages regarding climate change. Those three key messages would be only the beginning of the process, however, because one immediately needs to distinguish between natural cycles of climate change (those it would be very difficult for us to control) and those we’ve caused (and can therefore, theoretically at least, control by a change in our behaviours). Take a look at this paragraph from Wikipedia (and before you sneer, remember that this is what you’re going to get when you enter ‘climate change’ into a search engine – in other words, this is what most people looking for information are going to find first):

‘In recent usage, especially in the context of environmental policy, climate change usually refers to changes in modern climate. It may be qualified as anthropogenic climate change, more generally known as “global warming” or “anthropogenic global warming” (AGW).’

My head is already aching. I know that anthropogenic means ‘person-made’ (manmade if you want to be a stickler for Greek word origin). I’ve now got three terms that all mean the same thing (supposedly). And an acronym that certainly hasn’t caught on – AGW? Haven’t seen that in any of the thousands of mainstream media articles I’ve read on global/climate/warming/change in the last three decades. Except that they don’t mean the same thing, really. Or do they? When invasive plant forms suck up disproportionate amounts of water from the water table, drought can occur. And invasive plants can spread from any form of ‘disturbance’ – including floods and fire, not all of which are person-caused. Which then leads to a cycle of hauling food you can no longer grow yourself longer distances using finite and ozone-depleting resources and releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, thus creating more global/climate/warming/change….

There’s really no point in looking at manmade client change outside the context of non-anthropogenic climate change (and what is the scientific term for that? Again, more research on my part required.).

At this point I have to return to what I know something about, which is how to communicate. Key messages are the magic potion, and three key messages are the magic number, because that’s about all we can remember. It was Socrates, that Greek, who first articulated this, apparently.

• Key messages have to be jargon-free. (That means we’re going to use ‘manmade’ rather than anthropogenic, and if, when we’re working on these key messages, you continue to say anthropogenic, you will be slapped figuratively, if not literally.)
• Key messages have to answer the first question first. Before you can talk about the specific human behaviour that has you as a scientist up in arms (and your concerns will be different if you’re a marine biologist than they will be if you’re an astronomer), you have to take a huge step back and create overarching key messages. So the first question – regardless of whether you’re an astronomer or an oceanographer – is, ‘what is climate change?’
• Key messages have to be short. Why? Because short is memorable; long is not. I’m willing to bet that may be the one phrase – short is memorable, long is not – from this post that you’ll remember two days after reading it.

I’m going to break the rule of threes here to add one more point:

• Key messages have to be written, rewritten, massaged, edited, and perfected before they’re memorized. And then they have to be delivered in exactly the same innumerable times. That’s why they have to be good to begin with. This is not about controlling your spokesperson or your message. It’s about crafting your message so it will actually get through. Why are you more likely to remember that it has to be short to be memorable? Because I’ve now repeated it three times in this blog post. I don’t expect you to have studied rhetoric – I haven’t. But trust me, if you had, you would have learned the importance of repetition in successful communication.

Here are two excellent articles on crafting key messages. The first is Dr. Judith M. Newman’s, in which she defines and gives a few examples of key messages. Perhaps the most important point she makes is when she says key messages ‘open the door to direct communication…because they bridge [the gap] between what your audience already knows and where you are trying to take them.’ (emphasis added)

The second is from the Communications Overtones blog, in which Kami Watson Huyse outlines a nice little three-part formula for developing key messages: claim, fact, example.

So here’s my challenge (you knew that was coming, didn’t you?) to all the scientists and environmentalists I know. In the comments section, let’s see if we can, together, craft three overarching key messages on climate change – both manmade and non-manmade. And then let’s take a stab at creating the next set of key messages that relate solely to manmade climate change.

While I don’t agree entirely with the analysis by Jeremiah Owyang, former Forrester analyst, now Altimeter Group partner, I couldn’t agree with him more when he says Twitter is ‘being treated like a chat room’ by most marketers, ‘not a marketing platform.’ I do think the SWOT portion in particular is less than comprehensive, and I’d like to quibble about the line re ‘Usage by tech savvy, media, and celebs.’

Why quibble about that? (At this point something I’d written got lost between drafts; I’ve tried to reconstruct it in the rest of this paragraph. Just, you know, to make sense!) It’s not that I disagree that – I’m going to call them geeks, not the ‘tech savvy’ because if you own a computer for personal use you’re tech savvy, media and celebs have the largest number of followers, tweet the most and make the greatest use of Twitter. It’s just that I don’t necessarily think they make the best use of Twitter. Most media outlets still automate their tweets, don’t interact with their followers, and don’t get that it’s an interactive medium. Ditto many celebrities. And the geeks – well – again – there’s a lot of navel gazing and infighting amongst Twitter’s earliest adopters and most vehement proponents. And Twitter’s growth isn’t coming from these people; it’s coming from the non-geeks who are beginning to realize social media presents an opportunity. (That’s not quite what I said the first time but it’s what I was trying to say – and where did it go to anyway – between-draft limbo?)

Twitter’s greatest strength is actually the power it gives the user to customize her/his own experience with the medium. Trending topics notwithstanding (you don’t have to even glance at them), what makes it a brilliant platform is the fact that it allows you to listen to and connect with only the interesting people at the party and pay no attention whatsoever to the egregious bores, the time wasters, the hysterics, the gawkers and the ambulance-chasers (no, I don’t mean personal injury lawyers, I mean the people who thrive on fomenting controversy/scandal/gossip).

Your Twitter experience will undoubtedly be entirely different from mine, and that’s the beauty of it. I follow a diverse and fascinating group of: global media outlets and journalists; scientists; quilters; authors; Vancouverites; local folk; PR, marketing and social media types; publishers; museums; people I know in real life; people I don’t know in real life; people I’d like to know in real life, and people I probably wouldn’t care to meet. At one point I was following people on Twitter so I could keep my eye on them for competitive intelligence reasons. I’m not doing that any more. Life is too short.

I should also point out that I’m an extremely fast reader (although I retain little), and that I assimilate information well via print and text. My aural comprehension is almost nil. But I actually got through an average of 2500 pages of reading a week in third year university as an English major. I know there are other people like me.

One of the best points in the analysis cited is the boilerplate: ‘Everyone has a morning ritual…I invest two hours reading, thinking and blogging each morning. I hope this helps you cut through the noise – if it was helpful, please pass it on, email to colleagues, tweet it, and blog about it.’

This may well not be your idea of a morning ritual (it wouldn’t be most people’s – long hot showers and gallons of coffee would probably be more like it; getting yourself, your children, and your pets cleaned, dressed, fed and dispatched is usually part of the equation too).

Social media is probably not your area of expertise. If it isn’t – and if you haven’t got the time or the will to adequately research it – it can be bewildering, pointless, ineffective and exhausting. This great post by Mhairi Petrovic of Outsmarts lists some of the pitfalls of social media and provides some great suggestions on how to avoid them.

Of these tips, I’d have to say ‘develop a strategy’ is the most important. I’d also add: hire a consultant to help you develop your strategy. Unless you don’t value your own time at all, getting caught up in the never-ending party on your computer is going to leave you short on sleep, frustrated, lacking in perspective, and probably no closer to achieving your agreed-upon goals. No consultant worth his/her salt is going to pretend they can help you achieve an impossible goal – or fail to tell you when your expectations are unreasonable.

This week on Twitter I’ve watched a major UK cell phone provider make a horrific mess of customer service by over-reliance on Twitter as a way to deliver customer service. I’ve also seen two major media outlets deal ineffectively with a spammer and watched friends who did something good get their feelings hurt and become embroiled in a small but pointless controversy that’s undoubtedly interfered with their productivity today.

Time is time and money is money. I’ve always contended that since time is the one truly non-sustainable and non-renewable resource we’ve got, my time is as valuable to me as yours is to you, regardless of our respective incomes or hourly rates. While Mrs. McCooeye, Grade 8, was right when she wrote on my report card, ‘Ruth would get more out of Reading Club if she put more into it,’ there was a presumption on her part that I wanted to get something out of it. I didn’t. I just wanted to read. But if you’re investing your personal or your corporate time (and your organization’s resources) in social media, you’d better want to get something out of it, i.e. have a goal. At the very least you should make sure you’re not doing harm to yourself or your organization via social media.

How can you find the right consultant? Ask people you know who’ve used one. Check their blogs, their Twitter feeds, and their LinkedIn profiles. See if you like what they have to say about their areas of expertise and if you like the way they conduct themselves in the public mediums in which they engage. Ask a consultant you’re considering using if you can talk to or email some of her/his clients. Try to get some idea of how the consultant works best – and if your organization/project fits in with the consultant’s interests and expertise. Compatibility matters almost as much as expertise. Put in the front end time to find the right consultant so you can work smarter rather than harder.

I know that last sentence may seem not only counter-intuitive (consultants are supposed to be vying for your business, not the other way around, right?) but wrong-headed. If your budget is big enough, the detailed RFP route may still be the way to go. It’s a process I no longer participate in, because I’m not willing to spend a week’s time researching and writing a proposal, and I’m neither interested in nor equipped to work with large companies on megaprojects. But that’s just me.

It’s a derogatory term, and I believe there are some terms and words that can never be reclaimed (in this I differ from the hiphop artists who have ‘reclaimed’ the ‘en’ word – in my view it would be better to let that one fade away to the point that 23rd-century folk who encounter it would have to ask what it meant).

Implicit in the word spin is the idea that deception is involved, facts are being turned on their heads, and/or there’s so much fast talking going on the truth would be unrecognizable even if it were part of the mix. The ‘truth’ is, it’s as much of an insult to call a public relations practitioner a ‘spin doctor’ as it is to call a woman a ‘chick.’ And it is a female-dominated profession, although not yet at the most senior levels.

Despite the cross-fertilization that occurs between journalists and PR practitioners (since writing well is the foundation skill for both professions), there is also the perception that journalists are those who ferret out the truth and present it objectively, while PR folks do their best to deflect, disguise, and distract from the truth. The notion of the muck-racking journalist being free of bias is laughable in the 21st Century. We wouldn’t have populist, right-wing, and left-wing media outlets if bias weren’t inherent in every medium, whether it’s the way the headline is written, the fact that the story is covered at all, or the selective presentation of facts. The notion that objectivity is in disrepute is, thankfully, permeating the zeitgeist – and not a moment too soon.

The inspiration for this post came not from the field of public relations, however, but rather from some tweets by Portuguese journalist and science communication PhD candidate Andréia Azevedo Soares (BordadoIngles on Twitter) re Mike Hulme‘s ideas on the climate change debate. Hulme is the author of Why We Disagree about Climate Change and recently gave a lecture at Imperial College London. (The book will be out in paperback in early 2010.)

Here are her tweets from Hulme’s Dec. 7, 2009, lecture (rearranged to appear in chronological order and edited into paragraph form):

Mike Hulme suggests there are six different ways to frame the climate change debate: market failure, technological hazard, global injustice. overconsumption, climate change as mostly natural and finally as a planetary ‘tipping point.’ Hulme shows that those different frames lead to different solutions to climate change. They relate to our various worldviews, beliefs, and values. Different framings suggest we need to recognise pluralism in our approaches to make climate change policies.

Oddly, I’ve rarely heard the term ‘framing’ used by a public relations practitioner. But it struck me as something that should be a integral part of the PR lexicon, since it is precisely what we do. From the Wikipedia definition, framing is ‘…an inevitable process of selective influence over the individual’s perception of the meanings attributed to words or phrases. A frame defines the packaging of an element of rhetoric in such a way as to encourage certain interpretations and to discourage others.’

Framing is inevitable, an involuntary reaction that is part of our effort to make sense of the world around us, its people and its problems. I particularly like the example used in the Wikipedia article of a wink vs a blink (although I’d argue both eyes close during a blink). The glass half full/glass half empty analogy probably works better, since by definition half means equal portions.

Whether you view the world through rose-coloured glasses or not, whether you think all politicians are dishonest or revere those who occupy the corridors of delegated power, whether you’re a MacHead or a PC fan, we all have filters we apply to information, and these filters affect our decision-making processes.

There is nothing illegal, immoral, or unethical about choosing a frame. You need to be aware that there’s more than one framing choice. You need to consider the fact that others won’t choose the same frame as you. Ultimately, though, you will have to either pick one or leave the picture unframed. Choosing a frame and developing a strategy for its presentation is the heart of public relations. As a practitioner, aligning yourself with clients whose framing aligns with your beliefs and values is the soul of a successful PR consultancy.

Perception has never been reality. It just appears to be. That, I suspect, is a natural consequence of the human condition.

To find any of these chats, log on to Twitter and use your search function to search for them by hashtag (on the far right, under your profile you’ll see a search function – type in #solopr or #litchat). Scroll through the tweets and you’ll discover the chat moderator, whom you can then start following, and the regularly scheduled time for the chat.

When Twitter grinds to an almost-halt, the chats can be a frustrating experience. But that doesn’t happen all that often these days, and the wonderful thing about the chats is the commitment the moderators make to ensure they happen on a regular basis. My hat is off to the lovely Kellye Crane, for instance, who not only organizes the #solopr chat every Wednesday from 1-2PM EST, but ensures she’s got a backup if she’s travelling that day so the chat can continue.

New to Twitter as of Tuesday, November 24 is #askdrstu, a series of five scheduled chats led and moderated by Dr. Stuart Clark, author of the award-winning The Sun Kings: The Unexpected Tragedy of Richard Carrington and the Tale of How Modern Astronomy Began.

Five chats are planned for 2009, on Tuesdays beginning November 24 at 1PM EST (10AM PST, 6PM GMT).  Each week the chat will focus on a different popular astronomy topic. The first relates directly to the subject matter of The Sun Kings: “What level of influence does the Sun have on climate change?” Stuart will share what he’s learned from fellow scientists Henrik Svensmark, Mike Lockwood and : Kalevi Mursula in Bruges, where he recently moderated a debate on space weather and its effect on earth’s climate.

The other four chats are scheduled for December 1, 8, 15 and 22. Subjects could/will include topics he explores regularly in his role as a science journalist: ‘What is dark matter?’ ‘What defines a planet?’, and ‘Why isn’t Johannes Kepler better remembered?’

Whether you’re an astronomy buff or neophyte, you’re guaranteed to learn something by participating in the #askdrstu chats.

And if astronomy’s not your cup of tea, check out the hashtags used by the smart, funny people you follow on Twitter and find a chat that does make you want to join the conversation.

That static Web 1.0 web site you spent so much money on two or three years ago is sneered at and in order to maintain your search engine rankings you feel under increasing pressure to add a blog and feed it with content. Then you have to master Twitter to promote your blog and no one will read your media release unless it’s a social media release which means you’ve got to start shooting amateur video you can post on YouTube and you haven’t mastered Facebook and now you’re being told you need to create a Facebook group page and instead of ever being done with this whole business of communicating so you can get on with growing and running your business, you end up feeling like you’re even farther behind than when you started.

Inspired by a recent post from the brilliant folks at Juice, I’m going to suggest that you still need to learn to walk before you can run. Or, as the folks at Juice say:

There has been a wave of mania about social media and, in particular, Twitter. These have a place in an overall digital public relations plan. But let’s all get our basic building blocks in order first, the usability and optimisation of our websites, the effectiveness of our email marketing campaigns and a blog integrated into our website and using a relevant set of keywords.

Public relations is a process, and this is, perhaps, the single most misunderstood aspect of the profession. The big launch event that generates coverage and begins the buzz is a beginning. It’s not the goal and it’s not the endpoint. No matter how brilliant you are or how revolutionary your product, establishing yourself as an industry expert or your product or service as the market leader is not something that happens overnight. Even the ‘instant sensations’ like Susan Boyle have 1. spent years – often decades – studying their craft and 2. aren’t necessarily the most sustainable – or optimal – strategies. If you’re satisfied with 15 minutes of fame, fine. If you want to be a household word for a decade or more, you might want to pace yourself a bit.

Instead of dreaming of instant riches as a result of ‘going viral’ on the internet – which is probably about as likely as learning to read today and delving immediately into the works of Roland Barthes the next – organizations need to invest in branding, marketing, and public relations strategies that move at a pace with which they’re comfortable and which are achievable. For new businesses in particular, the challenges of the start-up phase are daunting – and that includes finding the right people to hire as your business grows and ensuring you don’t end up in a cash flow crunch that means you’ve become a victim of your own success.

How will this drive a public relations renaissance? Sooner or later, when social media-only efforts fail to produce the desired results because they’re not part of a larger strategy that includes all stakeholders – including those who don’t want to participate in social media, those who want and need more than a 140-character Tweet, those who prefer the ‘personal touch’ (even if it’s only excellent customer service via telephone) – organizations are going to have to go back to square one, create content that’s effective, and develop communications strategies that do what communications strategies were always meant to do: reach everyone who needs and wants to be reached in the way they choose to ‘engage.’

This can mean more work rather than less. It can also lead to being overwhelmed by the sheer volume and pace of online communications and the ever-shifting ‘advice’ from the latest self-styled social media guru. Social media-savvy public relations consultants can help you allocate and focus your resources – both your communications spend and your time. Think of us as communications organizers rather than people to whom you’ve outsourced your conversations and it will all seem a little less overwhelming. And remember the first question to be answered in the communications planning process is, “Where are we now?” Also remember that while there have really been no good interviews that ever resulted from a mere recitation of key messages, the more interviews you do the better you’ll get at them. But without putting in the time and effort to learn mainstream and social media culture from folks who study it, you’re a lot more likely to drown from a dive into the deep end than you would be if you paddled in the shallows and learned how to float first with someone hanging onto your bathing suit, ready to pluck you out of the water if you start to drown.