Emotionally attached to your writing? Maybe PR isn't for you.

President Obama shares his hand-written edits
on a speech about health care reform

Photo by Pete Souza, courtesy of the White House via Flickr

In PR, we do a lot of writing – for a wide range of audiences, and many different objectives. We are skilled wordsmiths, who understand how to cast a message in a multitude of ways to make it persuasive to a multitude of audiences.

We’re experts, and our clients and employers reward us for that expertise.

Does that mean they always use our writing without making edits? Absolutely not.

Do their edits upset us or bruise our egos? Nope; or at least, they shouldn’t.

Don’t forget the client is the client

I once worked with a gifted writer who was tortured by the edits an internal client would make to his prose. He would work diligently to create beautiful pieces of writing that clearly and engagingly told a story and conveyed key messages, only to see them, as he perceived it, jargoned-up before they were sent off to press.

It seemed he’d be in a funk for days before he could shake it off: how could they? How could they take such excellent writing and strip it of its clarity?

Corporate writers should absolutely strive for perfection in their writing; they should absolutely be proud of their work. It’s their responsibility to debate ill-advised revisions with the client, in an effort to show why clearer, simpler writing is always the most effective choice.

But they also have to remember that their client – whether inside the organization or outside it – is the boss. The client decides what (s)he wants to say and how to say it. And, believe it or not, the client may actually know his/her own audiences even better than the writer does.

Young communicators sometimes worry that edits from a client mean they didn’t get it “right.” What’s important to remember is that some clients have pre-conceived ideas about how the final text should sound, and that the only way to get it perfectly “right” is to get inside the client’s head and write it from there. A text may be effective and lovely – but sometimes, if it isn’t written exactly as the client had envisioned it, (s)he’s going to change it. And oftentimes, (s)he should.

A boss I once had in the corporate world used to say “They pay me to give my advice, but no-one is paid to take it.” I think that’s a healthy way to look at professional writing, too: I’m paid to draft a text, but in the end, the client gets to decide what the final version will say. I’ll suggest revisions to the revisions if I’m welcome to, but always position them as “suggestions for your consideration.”

And if the client doesn’t use them? No worries. Hey, even Barack Obama’s speechwriters get edits from the boss.

There is no such thing as “off the record”

President Obama has provided us with another “teachable moment.”

Just before an interview with CNBC yesterday, the President was chatting informally with the various broadcasters, technicians, PR people and other assorted handlers on set, and was asked his thoughts on Kanye West’s stunt during Taylor Swift's acceptance speech at Sunday's MTV Video Music Awards.

Said the President, “I thought that was really inappropriate… The young lady seems like a perfectly nice person, she’s getting her award… what’s HE doing up there? He’s a jackass.”



Immediately following the jackass comment, Obama jokes “where’s the pool?” referring to the pool microphones (assumedly the very microphones which recorded the clip now playing on TMZ), and then asks the assembled group to “cut the President some slack” – in other words, “this is off the record, don’t share it.”

The whole exchange is very casual, and while I'm sure he'd have preferred the recording not get out, I highly doubt the President will suffer much PR damage as a result of its release. (Frankly, I suspect a large majority of American voters agrees with him.) While not all that "presidential" sounding, the statement didn't betray any national secrets.

Some seasoned PR people have relationships developed with certain journalists over time, which give them the confidence they can provide information off-the-record and have it kept that way; they have to accept, though, that they are taking a risk every time they do it. While this example involves an off-hand remark as opposed to strategically leaked information, the lesson is the same: the only way you can guarantee you won’t be quoted saying something is not to say it.

Sometimes, though, PR professionals feel their clients would be well-served if certain information was made public, even though it might not be politically or otherwise expedient for them to release it under their own (or their client's) name. In those cases, and if they feel they have a strong enough relationship with a journalist that they can be fairly certain their anonymity will be protected, they'll elect to provide information off-the-record.

Off-the-record agreements, when they must happen, should be negotiated in advance; the PR professional should ask for the journalist’s assurance of confidentiality before providing the sensitive information. It isn’t fair to a journalist to provide tantalizing information without their having agreed to keep it anonymous, and then expect them to do so. Their job is to report on what they find; you can't give them something and then half take it back. (Also, in that case, they have no obligation whatsoever to keep it confidential; so if you want to risk going off-the-record, make sure to get the journalist's agreement first.)

Obama's comment wasn't included in the CNBC interview, but it was published on Twitter by ABC’s Terry Moran, according to a story on politico.com last night. While Moran’s tweet was taken down soon after having been posted, the fact that Moran has more than a million followers on Twitter allowed it to reach many eyes before it was taken down.

POLITICO’s story provides an explanation and apology from ABC as follows:

In the process of reporting on remarks by President Obama that were made during a CNBC interview, ABC News employees prematurely tweeted a portion of those remarks that turned out to be from an off-the-record portion of the interview. This was done before our editorial process had been completed. That was wrong. We apologize to the White House and CNBC and are taking steps to ensure that it will not happen again.

So. If you don’t want to be quoted saying something, don’t say it.

On the topic of good PR, toward the end of the recording you can hear someone in the background joking about having a fly queued up for release at a certain point in the interview (a reference to an earlier unscripted Obama moment that earned lots of mostly positive attention, which I blogged about here) – and asking whether he has his chopsticks ready.



Wax on, wax off.

Why don’t PR people always answer questions immediately?

A reporter friend once told me this joke:

Q: How many PR people does it take to change a light bulb?

A: I don’t have all the facts at the moment; let me check into it and get back to you.

Yeah, it’s funny, because it’s true. But not for the reasons journalists sometimes think.

I once interviewed a newspaper reporter who wanted a PR job I had advertised. During the interview, he said something like: “And don’t worry, I know how it works. When a reporter calls, you put the message to the side and work on everything else first.”

His purpose in saying this was to reassure me that he wouldn’t put the media first just because that’s where he’d come from. But instead, it served to underline how little he knew about what goes into responding to a media call.

When a reporter asks a question, (s)he knows where (s)he is coming from, knows the basis for the question, and has a certain amount of background information on which (s)he has based the question. It’s entirely possible the reporter has spoken with others on the story, and has been given a number of different perspectives on the question, each of which comes informed by a bias of some kind.

But when the reporter’s question comes to the PR professional (especially when it isn’t expected), the PR professional doesn’t necessarily have the benefit of all that information. So (s)he has two choices: answer the question based on what (s)he may know on the spot, or take some time (taking the reporter’s deadline into account) to gather some information and ensure his/her answer is based on the most up-to-date facts. Yes, that takes time – sometimes only a matter of minutes – but it’s time well spent, and most reporters understand it’s a worthwhile investment in an accurate story.

Case in point: President Obama vs. Cambridge police

This evening, President Obama will reportedly share a beer and (hopefully) a laugh with Cambridge Police Sergeant James Crowley and Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. at the White House, in an effort to clear the air after Obama’s “unfortunate” comments about Gates’ arrest in his own home in Cambridge last week. (I put “unfortunate” in quotation marks, because that’s the word Obama used to characterize his own comments; I might have chosen “ill-informed” or “poorly-considered,” but that’s another blog post.)

Don’t get me wrong – I think very highly of President Obama as a communicator. But he's not immune to making mistakes, which he did by answering a question about something he didn’t know enough about, and using inflammatory language that made the issue worse.

Here is the initial out-of the-blue question, and Obama’s answer, on Gates’ arrest.



Obama knew of the incident and obviously felt that prefacing his comments with “I don’t know all the facts” would cover him in case he had any of the details wrong; but as the ensuing fallout demonstrated, it didn’t. It would seem that Obama was confusing two different charges: breaking and entering (the suspicion of which prompted the 911 call in the first place, but with which Prof. Gates was never charged) and disorderly conduct (for which charges were reportedly laid and later dropped).

The issue of whether Gates was indeed the homeowner was irrelevant to the charge of disorderly conduct – to be able to judge whether that charge had been warranted, you’d have had to have known what happened between Prof. Gates and the police officers at his home. Thesmokinggun.com published the (alleged) Cambridge police reports of the incident here.

Obama’s statement that “I think it’s fair to say… the Cambridge police acted stupidly” ratcheted up the media heat on the issue, so much so that the President had to clarify his intended message, sort of.



(I say “sort of,” because to me, at least, the message behind “I unfortunately gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge police department or Sergeant Crowley specifically, and I could have calibrated those words differently” isn’t quite right. Saying “it’s clear” that someone “acted stupidly” is more than giving an impression.)

At any rate, this was a “teachable moment.” Obama recognized his “choice of words didn’t illuminate but rather contributed to more media frenzy.” Had he had all the facts, he very likely would have chosen words other than “stupid” – and he may have “calibrated” his message to sound more like it did in the second clip, after he’d been fully informed of what had happened.

We’ve all misunderstood a situation on first hearing, only to see it differently once we’ve had a chance to get better informed; unfortunately, Obama created further problems by answering before getting better informed.

So, what should he have done when asked the initial question?

I don’t have all the facts at the moment; let me check into it and get back to you.

Charisma + charm + substance = a truly great communicator

President Obama addressed the Radio and Television Correspondents' Dinner tonight in Washington.



His thirteen-minute speech poked some lighthearted fun at the media, and more at himself, members of his administration, and his government's actions since assuming office; it allowed him to personally connect with his audience before concluding with sincere recognition and thanks for the important role journalists play.

Obama is walking proof of the positive impact of charisma and charm in leadership. We can all think of politicians who offer tremendous substance, but whose personalities aren't quite as attractive; while they may indeed provide excellent direction for our government, we aren't as quick to get behind them. That personal charisma factor -- a gift, impossible to teach or to learn -- is what sets the truly great communicators apart from the very good.

This isn't to say that charisma and charm are enough. Without substance, a candidate won't go nearly as far (or at least, not with longevity); but as Obama has proven time and again, a leader who exhibits both personal "likability" and real substance is tough to beat.

Hats off to PETA

Whether or not you agree with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)’s hard-line stance on animal rights or its envelope-pushing tactics to support it, you have to admit the non-profit is a master at earning headlines.

In its latest PR coup, PETA has publicly promised to send President Obama a “Katcha Bug Humane Bug Catcher”, which allows you to catch flies and release them outside, rather than killing them. This follows the President’s much-celebrated fly-swatting during an on-camera interview with CNBC correspondent John Harwood on Tuesday.



PETA has taken exactly the right approach: it has taken advantage of a topic in the news, and employed non-confrontational tactics to earn media coverage and make its point.

It’s a great lesson in how smart PR can help you get your message out – without a huge investment in advertising.