“I learned as a boy that actions speak louder than words. Words can lie. If I say ‘apricots are good for

Bernays with David Letterman

you’ maybe they are and maybe they are not. But if I get Johns Hopkins to report on the health value of apricots, that’s what I call good public relations. We didn’t rely on words, we relied on action.”
 
Bernays was very conscious of the words he used. “In the U.S., words have the permanence of the wind and are subject to change without notice.” With a gleam in his eye he remarked. “I used to use the word ‘gay’ as in ‘I went to the gayest party,’ but if I use that today, they would incriminate me.” He was very conscious of using non-sexist language, consistently saying “she” every time he said “he.” This was no surprise because Bernays' wife and partner was the first woman to insist on using her maiden name on her U.S. passport. 
 
Bernays retained a zest for life. I gave him a Beaupre coffee mug and he said “Do you sometimes drink whiskey out of this?” (uh…)
 
Bernays was proud of the way he had practiced. “We never worked with a company we didn’t enjoy. We’d just tell them, 'I’d like to cancel my contract.’ We never took on a client unless we got a six month or one year contract. One year would turn into 30 years.” To illustrate his point, he said United Fruit and Procter & Gamble were clients of his for three decades. He was proud to have turned down Hitler, Franco and Somoza as potential clients. 
 

Source: Museum of Public Relations http://www.prmuseum.com/

Bernays was living history. As I walked through his Cambridge home, the walls spoke a hundred tales. “Here I am with Eleanor Roosevelt in 1919.” “That’s Al Smith.” “This was the first flyer who flew to the U.S. from Europe.” “That’s when I worked for the State Department.” “That’s me and my wife on Fifth Avenue when we were first married.” “Here I am with the first television performer.”
 
Bernays was interested in people. While autographing his books for me, he asked about my personal situation. “That’s a French name.” “Are you married?” “Do you have children?" “You must have been married as a kid!” “Where did you grow up?” “What does your town do?” “Where did you get my books?” ”Are you going back to New Hampshire now?” “How long will it take you to get home?”

Bernays’s ego remained intact. As we walked through his library, I commented on his vast collection (he owned over 10,000 books). He remarked, “This is my ego shelf.” I asked him what he meant. He said, “All these books are about public relations or refer to it.” I asked if he had read all the books. He chuckled, “Well, I read the parts that referred to me.” Bernays had a hefty ego, loved to talk about himself and had many friends and contacts. He would have loved social media.

This is the second blog in a three-part series highlighting my one-on-one visit with Edward Bernays, the oft-named “father of public relations." Bernays passed away 15 years ago this week.

Bernays was persistent. He never gave up on the idea that PR professionals should be licensed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

While I understand and largely support these views, Bernays ultimately believed it was imperative to protect society from “charlatans.”

Personally, I’d like to see a middle ground solution.

• My take on this morning’s Tiger Woods press conference: maybe his approach was too controlled and he still doesn’t get the concept of transparency for a global brand influencing millions, but I say let’s put this one to bed. I believe Tiger’s vast ego has been kicked in the gut and he’s learned a few lessons about himself. He seemed sincere; he wants to move on. Let’s let him. He’s a golfer, not the Pope or President of the Free World. America loves a comeback story: Alec Baldwin screamed at his kid and rebounded nicely. Mickey Rourke committed every sin and is now a darling of Hollywood. David Letterman came clean and is # 1 in the late night ratings. Everyone deserves a second chance. Let’s see how Tiger does getting his life back on track. Go hit the little white ball.
• Nice to see that Akio Toyoda, the President of Toyota, changed his mind and will appear before the Congressional Oversight committee next week. He personifies the brand and needs to put himself on the line to listen, exhibit compassion and make things better. You made the right call. 
• Sheryl Stack was quick to express her sympathy to the victims and their families. Her husband, Joseph Stack, crashed his Piper Cherokee plane into an Austin office building yesterday. Caring about others when you’re in a real-time hurt state demonstrates wonderful compassion. Thanks for thinking beyond yourself in a moment of shock and grief.

The Vancouver Olympics open today. What’s your reaction? Is it yay!, yawn, or yikes?

 

Watching the endless hype and hoopla as NBC prepares to broadcast the Games, I’m wondering whether the current Olympics concept remains right for these times.

 

Don’t get me wrong. I love my country and enjoy healthy competition among nations. I appreciate the ancient Greek credo of healthy mind/healthy body. I subscribe to Sports Illustrated. I’ll watch some of the Games.

 

It’s none of that. It just seems to be an awkward time for excessiveness.

 

• The current estimated cost for the Vancouver games is $6 billion – that’s nearly $6 billion of Canadian taxpayer money. Experts expect the final number to climb as high as $8 billion. It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the Beijing Olympics which racked up $50-60 billion (U.S. dollars).
•  According to the Vancouver Sun, the cost of security alone will be $800 million more than the budgeted $175 million.
•  NBC paid $2.2 billion for rights to the 2010 and 2012 Olympics. Meanwhile, Dick Ebersol, Chairman of NBC’s Sports Division said the network will lose money on the deal.

We observe (and sometimes experience) this mind-blowing spending every two years, in different cities/countries every time.

 

One month ago today, over two million people became homeless in Haiti and more than 200,000 people died. It may take that country 25 years to recover from the earthquake.

The Great Recession is in full bloom. More than 10 million Americans are unemployed. Home mortgages are being abandoned. Consumer confidence is low. Canada’s New Democratic party says 15,000+ British Columbia residents are homeless as the frivolity begins. It’s a climate of fear, uncertainty and doubt.

To make the point, some folks organized the Vancouver Poverty Olympics this past Sunday, protesting the billions being spent.

 

With this undercurrent, do you think it’s time to steer the Olympics in a new direction? Yes, a lot of it is funded privately, but does it feel like it’s too much spend for too little gain? Billions and billions of dollars for 17 days?

 

Aside from the massive spending, there’s also the issue of Olympics brand erosion.

 

Did the Olympics jump the shark when it shifted from every four years to every two years? Does the adage, “absence makes the heart grow fonder,” apply? Did dividing the winter and summer games dilute the brand?       

 

This is supposed to be a global event, but Anheuser Busch, for example, is using the Vancouver Olympics as a “regional play,” according to Ad Age, strategizing the World Cup delivers a more global platform. Is it just this particular Olympics? Winter games always draw less than summer games (80 nations in Vancouver vs. 200+ in summer). Is this a growing trend for penny-pinching advertisers?

 

I’m all for fun and games. I like the Olympics concept. But is it time for this gargantuan bi-annual undertaking to be simplified and re-imagined?

 

Now the auto company that could once do no wrong has shut down production lines and instructed dealers not to sell some of its most popular models. The New York Times reported that Toyota knew about the acceleration problems two years before it issued the recall. Rep. Henry Waxman, one of Congress’ most persistent consumer watchdogs, announced he will hold hearings to investigate the sudden acceleration problem next month.

To borrow a line from Scrooge, “I’m as giddy as a drunken man.” With today’s Apple iPad intro, it feels like Christmas.

 

I was glued to Engadget’s live blogfeed of the announcement. Apple is leveraging its iPhone technology in a new tablet format, adding bells and whistles like unlocked, no contract, and cheap 3G data plans, a keyboard dock and the iBookstore.

 

But once again, as we’ve seen in the past with Apple, the whole may be larger than the sum of the parts.

 

In the tech industry we pay homage to “innovation” as the ultimate springboard for leadership positioning and killer differentiation.

 

Lots of companies make products, but only a few reinvent how we learn, communicate and experience. Remember trying to use a pre-iPod Mp3 player? Mine was a Diamond Rio; frustrated and ticked off are two reactions that come to mind.

 

Remember how you felt the first time you used an iPod? For me, it was the same feeling I get when I step foot in a new country. Wow, this is someplace different, and it’s cool, and a little scary but I’m happy to be here and I want to discover this new place.

 

The iPod wasn’t just innovative because of its simple design and intuitive ease of use. The kicker was the iTunes store – it gave us a whole new way to stay on top of music, broaden our horizons, consume and share at far less cost. The entire experience of finding and listening to music was transformed.

 

I used to think it was de rigueur to be able to stay in touch via e-mail on my mobile phone. But now as an iPhone user, I can’t fathom how I was satisfied with a device that made surfing the web painful and offered little else.

The iPhone gives me a broader, more fulfilling experience. While typing is a little less speedy, I now have - in one device – painless Internet, much better viewing, a decent camera, games, nifty video, all the music I love, instant social networking connections, an e-book reader and access to over 140,000 apps. Nice trade-up.

The iPad isn't perfect (bad name; doesn't multi-task; no webcam; no widescreen; no GPS) but it may hold similar long-term promise.

If I was a newspaper or magazine publisher, I’d be more hopeful. This device has the potential to help reinvent the publishing industry like iTunes reinvented the music industry. As I watched today’s New York Times demo, it reminded me of the Harry Potter movies where animated video moves across “The Daily Prophet” student newspaper. The iPad features drop down context menus; re-sizing of pages with a pinch; and embedded video inside articles. If the content providers and app developers get onboard with this vision, it could be a reinvention of how we read and learn.

It remains to be seen whether the iPad will make it or die a Newtonian death. The lesson I walk away with is that consumer and B2B brands can endear themselves to their customers - and potentially win - if they focus on innovating customer experiences vs. merely announcing feature-rich products. The former is a benefit-laden differentiation that’s damn hard to disrupt.

Thanks to social media, the word got out of ravaged Haiti immediately, people mobilized and money was raised instantly.

 

While this isn’t the first time it’s been a vital link in a crisis, it’s invigorating how social media has woven itself into the fabric of traditional media.

 

There was a time, not long ago, when major news organizations relied primarily on its own news gatherers to shape the story. Now an increasing number of media is open to – and relying on – citizen journalists to tell their tales.

 

With buildings crumbled, roads blocked, power out and land-lines dead, mainstream U.S. media relied heavily – especially on Tuesday and early Wednesday - on testimony accumulated from social media from Haitians and Americans. Cell phones, satellite broadband systems and Skype worked. Twitterfeeds provided a real time view of what was unfolding. Blogs like Troy Livesay’s and Carel Pedre got the word out. Images were sent on Twitpic, Facebook and Flickr. YouTube had hundreds of videos posted by Wednesday.

 

CNN is the poster child of this blending of social media and traditional news gathering. While they reportedly have at least seven reporters on the ground in Haiti, they’ve filed highly compelling stories constructed from social media sources. Check out “What we’re hearing via social media.” 80% of this story is shaped by attributed quotes from Twitter users and bloggers in Haiti. CNN’s citizen-filmed iReports spread the word in a personal way.  

Meanwhile, organizations like Red Cross leveraged their presence on Facebook, Twitter, and their own blog to communicate. Their 90999 mobile “insta campaign” is urging cell phone users to text the message “Haiti” to that number to make an instant $10 donation. Twitter users retweeted #HelpHaiti.

Many other organizations got involved and sent out their own fund raising tweets. Daily Finance reported  that $5 million has been raised so far via text messages.

Citizen journalists are re-shaping the news business. Social media is no longer an adolescent finding its way; it’s become deeply embedded, viable and in instances like Haiti, a fresh, objective, needed voice shaping the story. It’s a reinvention of media – an improvement of media - that’s deeper, wider, more personal and much more real time.

Did you read CareerCast’s top 200 jobs for 2010?

 

They analyzed and ranked careers that provide “a positive experience for a majority of employees,” (italics from CareerCast). Five measurement standards were applied – stress, working environment, physical demands, income and hiring outlook. They did this across a number of industries, skill and salary levels.

 

Communications made the cut, with “public relations executive” at #79 and “advertising account executive” at #105. We ranked higher than piano tuners, barbers, teachers, photographers, janitors, podiatrists, commercial airline pilots, senior corporate executives, surgeons, bartenders, fashion designers, nurses, corrections officers, actors, police officers and photojournalists.

 

Ditto for undertakers and sewage plant operators: we beat them too.

 

I would have never figured actors, photographers and fashion designers have more stressful jobs than us communications professionals. I envision them spending most of their time emoting, creating, visualizing… and doing lunch. We do this stuff too, but we also have to explain how to measure social media.  

 

I feel bad for newspaper reporters. They had a nasty year in 2009, barely making the list at #184. But they beat out stevedores, butchers, garbage collectors and lumberjacks. Ever heard of a stevedore? Me either. Turns out they load and unload cargo from vessels. This sounds harder than leading a discussion to create a new positioning statement.

 

Actuaries ranked #1 in the CareerCast survey. They calculate the probability and financial impact of illness and property loss. I don’t care if this job ranks low in physical demands and stress; it’s gotta be less fun than tweeting.

 

Anthropologists landed 32 jobs ahead of PR. They study the social customs, language and physical attributes of people throughout the world. We do this too, whenever we meet with CEOs and CMOs. But we don’t get to do it in a lush, biodiverse forest in Borneo.

 

Historians are ranked #5. This sounds like a cushy job. You sit around, ponder and interpret the past. Sign me up. This must be easier than trying to predict future outcomes, which clients and corporate execs ask us to do all the time.

 

The roustabout came in at #200; these unfortunates perform routine labor and maintenance on offshore oil rigs and pipelines. This is definitely more demanding than conducting a statistically valid survey.

 

Sociologists nabbed the #21 slot. They study human behavior by examining the interaction of social groups and institutions. We do that too in public relations, but after we study, we have to interact and try to get along. That’s harder.

 

I was surprised about parole officers at #29. They monitor, counsel and report on the progress of people who have been released from correctional institutions. How did this job crack the top 30? Scoring a Wikipedia entry is a lot less hassle than worrying about being harassed, stabbed or shot.

 

Dental hygienists came in at #10. I’d much rather attempt to decipher the mysteries of SEO than loosening plaque and probing gum depths all day. But that’s just me.

 

Happy new decade PR pros; there’s a lot to be thankful for.