Two random musings from a day in the life of the CEO of a PR firm:

1: This morning, I received a standard client request to call a reporter and vet an opportunity he was presented with.  The reporter answered his phone at the designated extension of his major business publication, and proceeded to ask a series of questions.  I found these questions to be quite unorthodox given the usual style and length of articles in this particular publication.  After 10 minutes of prodding and back and forth, I learned that this reporter was working on a book and using this publication’s resources and credibility to call sources for it.  

When I established that my client wouldn’t participate in the book, the reporter got very upset and spoke of editorial rules, none of which exist when dealing with a book writer.  Quite simply, remember to always investigate media opportunities; evil may be lurking, and journalists can’t always be trusted.  Don’t be naïve.

2:  Yesterday, I received a package in an expensive bag filled with a great new product – a consumer packaged good.  I received the gift I imagine as part of the target demographic of business owners, or entrepreneurs I imagine, and my estimate is the package cost $75 or so per piece.  I imagine I was gifted with the hope that I’d love the product and tell employees, clients, and friends about it – maybe even purchase it. 

And I did love the product.  But when I tried to reach out to the people who sent it to me, I found that they had sent the package without the card of a contact person.  So, after spending all that money to research who I was and then deliver me the package, they overlooked one of the most basic tasks: I didn’t even know who to thank. And it’s far from the first time it’s happened.  Don’t forget the basics.

Ronn Torossian

5WPR

We are in the midst of a new economy that is still being defined.  A new economy where years of wealth have been lost, where a debate on Fox News I saw this weekend asked if all banks should be government operated, and where bailouts are the most popular form of financing.

I had breakfast yesterday at The Loews Regency, one of my favorite NYC breakfast locations and a 5W client.  An older couple there, playing with their grandkids, told me that in 28 years of owning their own business, they had never before had layoffs.  But now, they’ve already had two rounds, and they’re worried about whether or not their business will survive.  In the gym that afternoon, an entrepreneur who rented a new, 6,000-square-foot office six months ago told me he’s closing his company and giving his landlord back his keys.  Scary times.

5WPR’s answer?  We are looking at many new hires and ways in which we can invest in our clients’ businesses and our business.  We’re looking at items (and people) that don’t require ramp up time.  We’re demanding more from employees.  We’re delivering more to clients.  We’re conserving cash, but investing in the future as we believe we will be one of the few PR agencies to emerge from this recession stronger than we went into it.

We also continue to look at PR firms, or one- or two-person PR consultant operations, that may want to stop running their own business and be absorbed by a larger agency.  We have had many discussions, made some offers and will emerge stronger.  Are you a small PR agency with a client base?  Let’s chat. Email me directly at ronn@5wpr.com

It’s a new economy, and the rules have changed.  As an employee, look around and realize what needs to be done today.  As an entrepreneur, it’s war.  And I only continue to learn what this new economy means: the unemployed financial executive who just accepted a 200k job, even though he previously earned in excess of 700k, or my countless friends in real estate who aren’t doing even 10 percent of the deals they used to do.

It’s a new economy, and the rules have changed.  Without knowing when it will change back, everyone needs to adapt to the new rules and change accordingly.  I continue to be focused on continuing to grow and hopefully change the PR industry.  The line from The Notorious B.I.G. movie (which I saw this weekend) epitomizes it: “You can’t change the world until you change yourself”.

Ronn Torossian

5WPR

Why is it that so few people, including professionals, and business owners understand media relations and the essence of how the media works?  Conceptually, it’s really not that hard, but every day I’m amazed by the basic questions I receive from smart business people.   Just today, someone with a very successful business asked me how much we pay news anchors to place clients on the air.  (Any PR or Marketing 101 class we tell you in this country, one can’t pay news anchors to book guests. At least not in the PR business.)

Public relations, particularily media relations, is a fairly easy to understand business: find a story angle, pitch it to the media and open the paper (or turn on the TV) and there’s your story.  Yet one of the reasons PR budgets are so low in comparison to advertising budgets is that so few understand PR.  If they did, you’d see many more businesses spending much more on all aspects of public relations in general.

Ronn Torossian
5WPR

One of my closest friends, a well-known person in his field, emailed me with a witty one-liner from an industry conference this week: “The game has changed, but I still love playing it.”  This afternoon, a credit card that we have done business with for years called out of the blue and said that we now have a credit limit.  We have perfect credit, and this company hounded us for months to take a credit line with them, and we have never had a credit limit.  But they said the limit was standard for every company they work with.  The times they are changing.

The world has changed; the question is for how long.

I believe those of us in the service industry - PR, advertising, marketing and the like – need to work harder than ever before.  We need to be more focused and keep our eyes on the ball.  We can control our own destiny, but especially now, only excellence can survive.

Ronn Torossian
5WPR

The definition of Public Relations is rapidly changing to mean many things to many different folks: media relations, marketing, social media and many other things.  I spoke at a great event to a few hundred people at The Princeton Club this week on the power of networking, and naturally, on-line networking came up.  The question arose of how to meet people, deal with people you meet online, etc.

I don’t believe that people (particularly successful people and executives) maintain enough privacy on Facebook, Twitter, etc.  Often times, internal staffers and friends ask me detailed questions about blog postings.  It’s information I often can’t and won’t share, because PR for me is not an academic exercise but a profession.  I have to keep secrets, and as I have said before, my blog is biased toward my clients, my interests, etc.

I don’t post personal information on social network sites, because I don’t believe my staff or clients should know if I am out till 4 AM.  My “friends” online are contacts – not necessarily people I share intimate thoughts with.  First and foremost, people are concerned about their interests.  If I am out at 4 AM, and G-d forbid, the next day at 9 AM we lose a client, may my staff see a connection?

I write this as another PR firm learned a painful lesson: one of their senior executives twittered insulting a client’s home city.  He got blasted en masse by the client (who cc’ed both the PR agency management team and internal management).

While Twitter is about honesty, a PR agency shouldn’t forget clients pay the bills.

Ronn Torossian
5WPR

In the past few days, I’ve overheard two pieces of very confidential PR information.  Needless to say, their purveyors were less than clandestine.

I ducked into an Upper East Deli Thursday afternoon when I finally had a break from my swamp of meetings.  With about 20 minutes to spare, I sat for a quick bite next to two well-dressed people who had documents on letterhead of a major non-profit littered in front of them.  They spoke extensively about some major news; today, this same news in being reported on blogs.  I’m confident it will hit mainstream media this week.

And last night on my flight home from a Midwest city, I watched a lawyer sitting next to me work on a PowerPoint for one of the largest investment banks in the U.S. on the restructuring of their internal sales and marketing teams.  It would be jaw-dropping if I wrote the name of the bank, but suffice it to say, it is one of the largest in the U.S.

Simple lesson?  There are many secrets to be kept, and transparency (especially in delis and airplanes) is always needed.  When in an elevator leaving or going to an office, don’t speak about the meeting, as you don’t know who else is listening.  Today, it’s too easy for one person to take that information and throw it to the wind.  Some information should be kept private for a reason.

Ronn Torossian

5WPR

I was copied today on a note from the President of one of our clients.  I found it inspiring and absolutely truthful, so I wanted to share an excerpt.  In many senses, every business today is a start-up, which makes this advice so universal.  I try and adopt this attitude every day for myself and my employees:

“Guys: There are make or break moments in any company’s life….  So for all of us here this month, we need to live and breathe the big and little things associated with our business.  I want everyone to have a fully rounded life, but if you’re here and you see your deskmate sticking around doing something incredibly scintillating like affixing mailing labels or QA’ing a new feature on our QA site, ask if you can help if you’re not involved in a pressing assignment yourself.  You will see me do this too.  If I don’t do it enough, knock me upside the head.  There’s no hierarchy at a startup when it comes to winning.  Moreover, no one here has the franchise on ideas.  So, if you are in the shower and you have a great idea for how we can increase the buzz for either project, mention it to me directly.  Hmmm…I won’t be IN the shower with you, so take a quick note when you hop out and dry it off so you can read it later.
Look for opportunities in your daily life and think outside the box. We are small and nimble.  We can attack a great idea quickly. We’ve all hopefully had a restful holiday with friends and family, but if we’re doing anything right this month, it should feel like an all-out sprint every day.”

This note was copied and is being posted with permission from Sue Heilbronner, President of Webook. 

I agree.

Ronn Torossian
5WPR

This op-ed was published today in the BullDog Reporter:  
 
COMMUNICATIONS OF AN A.D.D GENERATION
By Ronn Torossian, CEO, 5W Public Relations

Yesterday, from 5 PM until 8 AM the following morning, I couldn’t reach one of my closest family members; someone I communicate with multiple times a day via email, SMS, and less often, by phone.  Contemplating a breaking and entering to her home after five of each, emails, texts and unanswered phone messages, and after a sleepless, worried night, she called and woke me with a simple explanation – “I didn’t feel well and turned off my phone at 5 PM to rest;”  simple and instant.  Yet in today’s age of communications within an Attention Deficit Disorder generation, untypical and scary.

Growing up in the Bronx in the mid-1980’s, there was a corner public phone bank adjacent to the park where all of the local kids took turns manning the phones as our parents would call and demand us home for dinner, or our friends would call to see who was there and what was up.  These calls were often our only communication for hours at a time.  Today, walk into restaurants, meetings, movie theaters or otherwise, and people are typing away, blackberries in hand, on chatting on their cell phones, too often oblivious to the person in front of them with whom they can communicate without the technology.

Owning a PR agency, I am perhaps more cognizant of, and surely guilty of the instant communication bug.  I often explain and even offer semi apologies to potential clients and new friends.  I carry my blackberry and like an addiction, must check it every few minutes; not to do so can mean missed media opportunities, or worse, a newswire quote which reads “couldn’t be reached for comment,” – which occurred recently when I didn’t call a reporter back within an hour.  The journalist also expected instant gratification, and when I finally did call back, it had already appeared on more than 80 websites.  Is this indeed life today?

People update their Facebook or Myspace statuses countless times a day instead of sitting face to face with actual friends.  We create identities online and befriend people who in reality we may not actually want to sit with, chat up or share anything with.  Is this authentic or flawed communications?

Similarly, as much of today’s news originates from the blogosphere, much of what we see on blogs today is biased rant.  The bloggers who make headlines are the ones who fancy themselves as progressive journalists, unbound from the conventions of traditional journalism, such as checked facts and arms-length objectivity.  This has become acceptable only because of this A.D.D. communication generation.  This communications generation now jumps so fast, fearful of being scooped or being behind the times; they accept the blogs, often devoid of facts, but indeed instant.

Along with those marketing-savvy bloggers come what is usually a small host of commentators who use pseudonyms, anonymous posts and the like without accountability in the comments section of these blogs. Some of these “followers” are not followers at all, but actually the hosts themselves, or shills planted by the host to say the things that, coming from the host, would damage his or her credibility. Yes, indeed it’s instant; but accurate or ideal? No!  However, that’s not required for an A.D.D. generation.

In this Attention-Deficient world, it is much harder to validate or check identifies.  The guilt is shared, whether it is the New York Times which last week ran a Letter to the Editor falsely blasting Carolyn Kennedy by someone thought to be the Mayor of Paris, or the teenager who killed herself because her teenage rivals’ mom mocked her endlessly pretending to be a cute teenage boy.   While today’s instant communications of email, SMS, Facebook and the like is instant, I believe it’s not authentic.  It’s raw but it’s not real, on so many levels.  It could be a husband texting a wife a quick answer to a simple question, or a client annoyed at an agency that doesn’t instantly reply to an email.

In the earlier days of professional communications, or PR, mail forced people to plan ahead with care.  It required thought, strategy and planning, something which today often is not available. Today it is hard to plan even a day, or an hour in advance, for if you don’t reply instantly there can be mass panic.  Instant gratification has become a double edged sword; what we do believing to be cutting edge, can also dull the sharpest blades.

One of my earliest bosses taught me to use the draft box for email when I was upset “Wait an hour or a day before you send that message” – I try to use that advice as much as I can.  Perhaps one of the lessons of the current recession is to be wary of the uber-quick – There will be many false messiahs in times such as this – Just as one cannot “get rich quick”, perhaps we should all try and slow down and be wary of anyone who requires instant communications. While instant communication can seem great, we must too be wary of only relying on instant rather than building longer, real bonds.  Face-to-face, or extensive real phone calls are much more real and valuable than blog commentating and Facebook profiles.

Of course, had I heeded that message, or considered for that someone else might be heeding it, I may have slept last night.  For tonight, I will only check my Blackberry two times during dinner instead of every five minutes – and dinner will hopefully last longer than ten minutes.

Today marks the start of the 7th year since I started 5WPR on a 400 square foot roof.  In light of the occasion, I stopped to reflect on the growth and success we have had, and how proud I am of our team and our clients.  We have been able to accomplish a ton, and we are just getting started.  As we close our 2008 financials (which we will disclose publicly to our industry trades), we will show slight growth.  We enter 2009 confident and excited, despite the uncertain economic times.

I believe a lot of PR activities will gravitate toward agencies, particularly independent PR firms.  With internal cutbacks, PR remains an inexpensive way for companies to build their brand.  This is an interesting year for all businesses, but Public Relations particularly.  In January 2003, I started 5WPR with the hope of building a major PR agency and doing great work for clients. 

Today, at the start of our 7th full year, we look onward and upward, determined to continue to do great work for clients, and continue to be a powerhouse in the world of PR firms.

Ronn Torossian

5WPR

Found this article to be interesting, and a simple manner in which PR works, and public opinion can be affected.  Interesting and fun article.  1st impressions in person count, and so do smiles.  The right attitude can bring you to the highest places.

Ronn Torossian

5WPR