It used to be like pulling teeth to get corporate America to talk about anything that even resembled proprietary financial or strategic information. These days, it seems, the
reverse is true: In the wake of Enron/Andersen, corporate leaders seem almost too eager to open their ledgers and lay it all on the table. "Suddenly, confession is right there
alongside the bluster...not because they want to but because they fear the consequences if they don't," says a recent article in Business 2.0 magazine.
"You think it might have something to do with congressional investigations and going to jail?" quips Craig Winn, founder of defunct online retailer Value America and co-author
of In the Company of Good and Evil. "That's just a guess, though."
Crying Wolf
For PR professionals, the corporate urge to spill presents a new range of challenges. First and foremost, the sheer volume of information inherent in the new confessional mode
can seriously undermine a corporation's mainline PR efforts. "The main risk is in losing attention," says Lou Hampton, president of communications firm The Hampton Group.
"I am concerned that a lot of this transparency involves things that are not newsworthy," says Hampton. "It's like the person whom you meet at a party who bores you for 10
minutes with every detail of his stubbed toe. Those are the people whom you quickly learn to avoid in future cases."
Libby Roberge learned the hard way that sheer volume does not always equal good communication, and in fact can work counter to a PR team's larger purpose. "I was doing crisis
communications for a corporation," recalls Roberge, now director of PR at the Public Relations Society of America. "I had done everything I could possibly think to do, and I still
was not reaching the target community."
In retrospect, she says, that effort was missing the mark largely because the audience assigned no particular value to the information being presented. "A PR person always
needs to consider the legitimacy of the news story," she says. "Sometimes, it is not that you over-communicate, but it may be that the communication is not effective because there
just is no news there."
In fact, some observers say, that is just the dynamic that has played out since the Enron troubles emerged. "I have had corporate clients who have wanted to go into more detail
on certain issues than was necessary," says Hampton. "In one case it would have resurrected an issue that was essentially over and done with, and it served no purpose to bring it
back up. They were interpreting 'full disclosure' to mean that we have to tell everything, rather than just what is newsworthy and significant."
His litmus test: "Is it newsworthy? Does it create understanding? Does it further our corporate goals? Anything else is just corporate narcissism."
In Over Your Head
Beyond merely muddying the waters, there's a larger PR challenge inherent in the tell-all trend. Simply put, PR professionals may be out of their depth here.
With Enron as the catalyst, the new passion for disclosure has focused very much on the area of bookkeeping. "Companies like IBM and General Electric now have this great desire
to say that maybe they did not play the game quite square and that maybe there's $1 billion here or $400 million there that was not exactly like they reported it," says Winn.
Trouble is, PR professionals are not accountants.
"If you are a PR person, how do you effectively present something that is so arcane that even the senior executives inside the company don't understand it?" Winn wonders. "You
have to put out something digestible for the masses in a sound bite that has to be no more than one page, and yet what you are communicating is something that the experts, given
hours of time and all the documents, still cannot fully understand."
Compounding the difficulty, some observers say, is the fact that giving all the details simply runs counter to the longstanding practices of many corporate PR practitioners.
"In the private sector there tends to be a culture where the role of the corporate PR department is to act as a screen, to shield the CEO from the press," says Lloyd Trufelman,
president of Trylon Communications Inc. in New York.
Trufelman trained in politics before turning to serve the private sector, and he sees the new corporate openness as a positive development overall. "People who have come out of
public-sector PR see the press as a vehicle for getting their story out, since they know the story is going to get out anyway," he says. "And besides, the more you attempt to get
the press away, the more the press gets interested in finding out what's going on."
But there are limits to how much can and should be told, and it often falls to the PR professional to enforce those limits in the face of pressure from other corporate
executives.
"I had a client who wanted to announce a modification to a product, a sort of upgrade, and in reality there was no news value in it. All it really would have done was to
highlight the fact that they were having some problems with the current product and that those problems were now going to be fixed," says Hampton. "So I encouraged them to do a
lower-key announcement to current users, rather than to go after something larger. The concept of getting out ahead of issues is critical, but it's a risk management issue. You
have to weigh questions like how viable is the story and how long is it likely to last."
If the CEO absolutely insists on baring the books, Winn says, it may be most appropriate for PR leaders to simply step aside.
"Have the accountants and the lawyers write the soul-baring press release and explain it in the most arcane accounting language and legalese possible, and then go back to
talking about what is so good about the business. Nobody understands this garbage anyway, so why try to make sense of something that is senseless?" says Winn.
"The smartest thing the PR people can do is to focus on the core values of the business, rather than focus on the imponderable nature of accrual-based math. The success of
every politician is that when they don't like the issue, their handlers change the issues, and that's what PR people need to do this time."
(Contacts: Trufelman, [email protected]; Hampton, [email protected]; Roberge, [email protected]; Winn, through Sherri Nuss, 828/459-
9637)
Too Much Information
When does corporate disclosure go too far? By and large you've probably said too much when your communications...
- Jeopardize significant business developments, such as pending mergers
- Go against corporate ethics, as in the case of medical institutions releasing patient information
- Address concerns or questions that no one outside the firm has raised or is likely to raise
- Muddy the waters, distracting attention from the firm's core messaging efforts
High-Tech Companies Too Quiet?
While some companies are focused on transparency, the high-tech industry seems intent on invisibility. A few years ago, high-tech PR went hand-in-hand with frenzied news
releases. Now PR professionals with limited budgets have let the pendulum swing to the opposite side. Their silence, says Maria Scurry, VP at Duffy & Shanley in Providence,
R.I., has killed credibility as quickly as a flurry of meaningless releases. Here's Scurry's advice for telling your story and ensuring the news is significant.
Talk to your CEO. Ask your CEO, "If your biggest customer asked you what has been going on in the company in the past few weeks, what would you tell them?" Thinking about it
as a conversation rather than a release can uncover good news like corporate milestones framed in a way that makes them more significant.
Consider what is news to your investors. It may not be news to you that the company has completed a few minor implementations. But investors want to see momentum. (Contact:
Scurry, [email protected])