The remains of Britain’s King Richard III were found last year. Turns out the guy was pretty stressed out. Analysis of his teeth showed that they worn smooth from teeth grinding and clenching—a common accompaniment to a stressful life.

With late hours and client deadlines, some of us might be grinding our teeth, too. Public relations was recently named the 5^th top most stressful profession of 2013, higher than “photojournalist,” “taxi driver,” and “police officer.” The least stressful jobs, in case you’re wondering, included “university professor,” “seamstress/tailor,” “jeweler,” and “dietician.”

Is public relations really that stressful? Well, yes. Clearly some pressure is built in. When I worked on the agency side, I organized many new business pitches. We squeezed in the long hours of preparation between and around client work. It wasn’t easy—but when we won, it was exhilarating. In addition, I came away with some valuable coping skills that still serve me. I take care to manage my time wisely, so that I can accommodate unforeseen events as they arise while still producing what I’m on the hook to produce. I also delegate to the right people when I can and involve new players who add new thinking to the situation.

Wondering how other executives in our profession have managed the pressure in the course of their careers, I reached out to two: Gibbs & Soell CEO Luke Lambert and Elise Mitchell, CEO of Mitchell Communications Group.

Both acknowledged the stresses of running a PR firm, but they also put this issue in perspective. “I find it hard to put our industry in a ‘top five’ list of stressful professions,” Lambert said. “First responders, military personnel, their families…that’s real stress.” Mitchell noted that PR professionals can handle stress better than most, for we are more comfortable existing in a constant state of ambiguity and flux. “Being prepared for anything is one of the PR pro’s greatest gifts and certainly something that is critical for success in today’s evolving business environment.  When others feel a need for clarity, we’re comfortable with uncertainty and can offer counsel, help them think through various options and simply provide clear-headedness and calm in the midst of chaos.”

Researchers are finding that a limited amount of stress causes positive changes in our brain physiology, leading to better mental functioning. As Lambert sees it, there are some important business benefits, too. “Agencies whose teams build up their resilience to stressful situations can embed into their culture certain endurance strategies, ultimately building team unity and organization-wide confidence.” Mitchell notes that stress only hurts us if we let it paralyze us. “The best way to manage stress is to understand why you are feeling it, what your worst fear is, what the best outcome could be, and then determining an action plan to both avoid your worst fear and realize your best outcome.  Most of the time, our worst fears never materialize, and if we become effective at channeling our energy toward achieving the best possible outcome, you have a much higher chance of attaining it!”

As far as tips go for managing stress in the course of a high-performance career, Lambert and Mitchell suggest that up-and-coming professionals in our field the following:

• Stay optimistic.
• Always retain your sense of humor.
• Plan well—so that you can focus on your work rather than worrying about your deadline.
• Go outside your company for help on things you can’t do on your own.
• When your company is rapidly growing, stay open to evolving and growing as a leader. Putting up resistance just adds more stress.
• In truly stressful times, take time to step back, gain perspective, and develop a strategy.
• Train your teams to manage conflict better. If they’re less stressed out, you’ll be, too.

All this is great advice. And I’m sure many of you out there have favorite techniques of your own. I hope you’ll take a moment and share them with us in the comments box.

I find it rather exciting that we’re thought of as the #5 most stressful profession. All meaningful jobs have stress. We need to push beyond our comfort zones if we ever are to create anything new and worthwhile. But we also need balance. So work hard, help clients through their tough moments, and grow your businesses. But don’t forget to play hard, too.

Not listening. Listening.

In today’s world, we’re constantly chattering, twittering, blogging, talking. With so much talking, listening tends to go by the wayside. And by listening, I don’t just mean registering messages other people throw at you. I mean taking the time and care to interpret, understand, and empathize with someone else’s point of view.

Before coming to the Council, I worked for a couple of years as a freelance journalist. I began to develop an ear for what people were really saying—not so much the words but the underlying feelings and themes. As I later discovered, having an ear matters in public relations, too. We’re constantly taking information in from our clients, synthesizing it, and sending it back out for public consumption. The better and more deeply we listen, the more we “get it,” the more effective our communications.

Listening also helps us build better relationships with clients. When clients move business from one firm to another, one of the biggest reasons they cite is that their old firm “doesn’t understand my business.” Active, thoughtful listening goes a long way to helping you comprehend the nuances of your client’s challenges and needs. And it shows respect.

I asked Brad Wilks, Midwest Managing Director at MSL Chicago, and Lisa Ross, President & Partner, rbb Public Relations, how listening on the part of employees benefitted the firm. They rained down a whole list of benefits:

• Higher productivity, because employees understand an assignment the first time and are more focused.
• An ability to spot early signs of evolving problems with relationships.
• An ability to spot future business opportunities by understanding better client needs.
• A more compassionate, friendlier, more harmonious workplace.
• Stronger relationships with clients who can recognize cues and offer helpful suggestions.
• Better, more compelling messaging.

Ross and Wilks see listening as a skill that can be taught. Wilks explains that we must first learn “to avoid the trap of constantly focusing on how you are going to respond to what the other party is saying instead of simply listening. Because we see ourselves as consultants who are expected to come with a point of view, we too often arrive at solutions before truly coming to grips with the problem.” Less experienced professionals may need special training, since many “have been conditioned [by social media] to constantly be ‘in the conversation’ rather than letting the other party speak.”

In a broader sense, firms benefit by learning to “listen” better to what consumers and other stakeholders are saying via social media and other forms of data. Don Bartholomew, Ketchum’s Senior Vice President, Digital and Social Media Research, explains that many companies try to “boil the ocean” and listen for all brand mentions. Instead, they need to “perform targeted listening where you are listening for only very specific types of conversations—consumers trying to make a buying decisions or initial reactions to a new product launch or current customers threatening to take their business elsewhere. Targeted listening helps separate the signal from the noise.”

“Targeted listening” in relation to data sounds similar in spirit to the more thoughtful, interpretive listening I was describing earlier. In both cases, the very human act of stepping back and really thinking about the messages coming your way results in that all too rare animal: actionable insights.  Here at the Council, our Take Flight with PR initiative materialized when dots were connected from personal conversations, member anecdotes, committee meetings and internal data – all pointing toward a significant opportunity to educate future generations about the diverse career opportunities that exist in public relations.

Ernest Hemingway once advised, “When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.” I encourage you not to be like most people. The next time you find yourself harried and multitasking while someone is speaking to you, take a deep breath, slow down, and give your colleague or client your fullest attention.
If you don’t, who knows what you might be missing.

Yes, big business is discovering data, especially that produced by social media. But executives at some of the largest clients are also wrestling with its complexity. One social media expert put it well: We are data-rich but insight-poor. We have lots of data, but lack the right filters for it.”

In a recent global survey of executives, a majority claimed that, “management decisions based purely on intuition or experience are increasingly regarded as suspect.” At the same time, almost half of respondents in this survey found that unstructured data—the kind often delivered by social media services—was “too difficult to interpret and manage to be used in support of decision making.” As the title of an article reporting on the findings observed, big data was “necessary, but not enough.”

That spells a major opportunity for PR firms. Over 80% of respondents in our recent quick survey of PR firms reported that social media data management and counsel would be a more important business in three years than it is today. Almost 50% of respondents had at least a quarter of their clients on some kind of social media monitoring/analysis program. Almost half of firms also said that providing counsel on how to engage influencers was the biggest service they offered their clients. A sizable number of firms reported providing social campaign development and management. (The infographic below contains more data from this survey).

“Quest for Social Insights” Infographic

How can firms best handle social media data and deliver the insights clients need? The Council explored this question last week in a webinar entitled, “Becoming A Data Savvy PR Firm.” Bryan Haviland, Agency Channel Manager at our Premier Partner Astute Solutions introduced the event by noting that “boiling the ocean of data is not enough any longer.” To succeed, firms require strong knowledge of the client’s business, a market research mentality in search design, and a team trained in the use of social media analytics tools.

Pat Lilja, Director of e-Strategy at Tunheim Partners in Minneapolis, went on to give an overview of how firms can best help clients master social media data. Firms today need to keep track of a dizzying array of data sources ranging from simple email to Facebook to specialized social media sites like Sermo or Cafemom. They need to pay attention to a whole range of metrics, including engagement, influence, and sentiment, but most importantly, the KPI’s specific to each client. Firms also have to have systems in place to manage and take advantage of data.

What does such a system look like? Firms must work with data from the very beginning, even before a client engagement begins. Many develop a process for collecting data and performing testing on an ongoing basis throughout an engagement. Most importantly, they are hiring “smart and experienced people that can do data analytics and make it actionable.” These employees must know the client’s business, be able to mentally visualize the meaning of sets of data, be able to manipulate data, and be able to tell the story of the data. Not a small agenda at all.

Lilja went on to offer seven tips for successfully utilizing social media data:

•  Find or develop smart people to make sense of data you have
•  Find great tools and help your team to master them
•  Put systems in place so nothing gets missed
•  Make sure that what the client sees is simple, easy to understand, and valuable.
•  Start looking at data ahead of time to prepare for a new client or initiative.
•  Generate great targeted data through testing.
•  Know your clients and their businesses.

To complement Lilja’s presentation, the webinar then treated participants to a client-side perspective. Tara Clark, Consumer Affairs Social Strategist at ConAgra Foods, differentiated between the goals of a consumer affairs department and the marketing/PR teams at her company. Marketing, she noted, was more focused on driving awareness and providing marketing insights, while consumer affairs emphasized building loyalty and trust and representing the voice of the consumer. Both worked together to use social media to advance the company’s larger goals in the marketplace. Clark also offered participants three important “lessons learned” from ConAgra’s years of work in social media. Personnel on the client-agency teams needed to share data among one another, breaking down the traditional disciplinary silos. They needed to communicate across these boundaries to develop insights. And they needed to trust their gut in the course of interpreting social media data.

Big data represents a huge challenge and opportunity. There is no quick and dirty answer to how firms can best help companies sift the wheat from the chaff to arrive at insights that drive business results. But by following Lilja’s advice and keeping Clark’s client-side point of view firmly in mind, firms can provide increasingly more relevant and powerful thinking. We at the Council look forward to continuing the conversation.

We’re happy to report on a Council event held last week in Chicago entitled, “Taking Flight in Chicago: The Talent Imperative.” In a morning session, Council chair and Fleishman-Hillard President/CEO Dave Senay led an engaging roundtable discussion with area communications professors and PR firm principals. Topics included the greatest talent needs of PR firms, critical skills for the future and recent innovations in college programs.

As one professor noted, today more parents know what public relations is, therefore, she has noticed that more students are aware of our industry as a viable career choice. But some young people think PR means handling publicity for the stars, like Beyonce and Jay Z. We help them understand the other facets of PR, such as reputation management.

As the roundtable proceeded, it became clear that the curriculum at many colleges has changed over the past five years. Social and digital media now figure more prominently.  Meanwhile, the talent needs of PR firms are changing. Tactically, today’s interns seem strong, but participants agreed that firms also need deeper, more strategic thinking. Indeed, the Council’s own recent survey of PR firms found that about 40% of respondents wished that colleges were teaching more business strategy skills, second only to the approximately 60% who wished that better writing skills were taught. There was consensus among firm leaders that writing remained the most important skill, with many firms using it as a filter to weed out prospective candidates.  Math and analytic skills are also becoming desirable in the emerging era of big data.

Reflecting on the session, Senay remarked that a meeting of the minds had taken place, one that would bring benefits to all parties. “Educators have their finger on the pulse of the next generation and can open the eyes of agency leaders about the evolving attitudes, beliefs, behaviors and expectations of youthful recruits of the future.  Agency leaders provide an unvarnished look at the increasing demands on practitioners, driven by client needs, which educators can use to adapt their curricula to meet the needs of our rapidly changing industry.  This dialogue should continue on a regular basis.”

Our evening session brought a panel of executives face to face with students themselves. Fred Cook, CEO of GolinHarris, urged students to branch out, be different, and try new things, whether it’s traveling to new places, learning new languages or simply reading different magazines.  He noted that his firm is hiring different people than it used to, people with backgrounds in video production, for instance, as opposed to a traditional communications degree. He urged students to “find the thing you love and specialize in it.” PR firms today don’t just want to teach young recruits about PR; they also want to learn from young recruits.

Others on the panel echoed this message. Take chances, they told the students. Don’t be afraid to fail. Savor the unpredictable twists and turns of life. Don’t rush, because you have plenty of time to decide what you want in a career. Panelists also told students that PR firms are looking for candidates with curiosity, persistence, an ability to listen, and an entrepreneurial spirit. Students added much to the discussion, asking questions that reflected considerable thought and preparation. They wondered how panelists had developed their careers, whether opportunities for global account work were possible, and about the reputation of the industry.

Overall, participants seemed to find the event extremely helpful and worthwhile. Anne Marie Mitchell, PR Studies Program Coordinator at Columbia College in Chicago, told us that events like this one “are so important for our students.  The students are making a big investment in their education, and the least we can do is ensure that we’re working together with industry to ensure we’re all doing what’s needed to help them succeed.” Ron Culp, Instructor and Professional Director at DePaul (and panel moderator), noted that they “provided essential feedback and insights that allow academics to speak with authority to students in the classroom as well as with college officials who determine academic curricula.” Students proved just as enthusiastic, with one attendee tweeting that the event was a “once in a lifetime” experience.

As the Council celebrates its 15th Anniversary, our focus on attracting great people to the industry continues with upcoming “take flights” programs on U.S campuses, the annual Diversity Distinction in PR Awards and the student video contest. We hope you’ll join with us to proactively educate and engage with today’s young talent. And please stay tuned for more exciting developments in this area throughout the year!

One basic scenario runs like this:

To get ahead, you need to come up with that next brilliant, account-winning, boss-pleasing insight. To come up with that account-winning, boss-pleasing insight, you have to bounce yourself up against fresh ideas. To get that bounce, you need to read a lot, and venture out of your usual zone. So how do you stretch yourself in a new direction without getting lost in a million crazy and meaningless memes?

A five-letter answer comes to mind: blogs. If you want to stay intellectually fresh yet don’t have the luxury of settling in with your Kindle, you could do a lot worse.

Most of us are familiar with blogs covering public relations, news, communications topics, marketing, or general business issues. But I’ve tracked down a number of blogs that are useful for keeping tabs on areas of culture, society and life peripherally helpful for the communications business. Venture into these digital thought-hives, and you’ll find yourself making all kinds of fresh neuronal connections that will benefit your clients and their brands. (Extra benefit: you’ll also have something interesting to say at cocktail parties).

Many people in public relations have humanities backgrounds. For a good, all-purpose, general blog that helps you track new developments in ideas, you can’t go wrong with Arts & Letters Daily. Sure, you’ll find some articles about Plato and Aristotle that might not seem directly relevant to your daily life, but these are balanced out by updates on all the burning issues of our day from across the English speaking world. For still more burning issues, because you never really can have enough of them, try The Big Think.  And then try Wordspy, one of my favorites for years now. This blog tracks the appearance of new words in our vocabulary, allowing for a fascinating and humorous window on all that is new.

For PR professionals, numbers are just as important as words, so an economics blog is essential weekly reading. If you liked the Freakonomics book, chances are you’ll like the blog. Or try Marginal Revolution, run by well-known economist Tyler Cowen. Or Vox.

What are consumers doing and thinking, and what are companies doing in response? Yes, there are blogs for that. Like Trendwatching. Or Retail Customer Experience, which covers, well, retail customer experience. Did you know that CVS is offering a virtual shopping experience? You would if you checked out the blog. Forrester has a pretty cool blog on consumers, too.

The public relations business is global. Global Post is a good place to keep tabs on global news headlines. I also like Project Syndicate, which is heavy on the economics but covers everything from Kurdistan to Margaret Thatcher, with a little North Korea thrown in.

There are so many good technology blogs out there. For gadgets, try geeksugar or Gizmodo.  Springwise offers “your essential fix of entrepreneurial ideas,” many of which involve technology. To really get into mind-blowing futuristic stuff that is or will soon be upon us, there’s Singularity Hub.  Last time I checked Singularity Hub, they were talking about swallowable computer chips, breathalyzers for your smartphone, and nano-machines. Wow.

Sometimes, when you are tired, it’s nice to peruse some random items of interest. You don’t know if anything will click, but sometimes it does. Metafilter is great for what I’ll call the art of edifying time-wasting. Other recommendations include Lost At E-Minor, Neatorama, and Laughing Squid.

Every good blog posting must have a message. So here goes. There is a huge world of ideas out there to be found, experienced, digested, and pondered. It can be overwhelming, but if you know where to go, you can find your mind humming with fresh ways of looking at your business challenges.

Enjoy the adventure—and if you have some good blog suggestions of your own, please send them along!

Supply chain issues pose a constant threat to brands. Pet food, computers, pharmaceuticals—brands in each of these sectors and many others have been hit by damaging supply chain mishaps. And product recalls are increasing. ExpertRECALL’s Quarterly Recall Index, most recently released in February 2013, found that during the 4^th quarter of 2012, companies announced an average of six food related recalls per day. The 552 recalls of FDA-regulated food products announced during the fourth quarter affected some 18.4 million items, including fresh fruit and vegetables, nut products and other foods and beverages.

All this amounts to many potential wounds inflicted on corporate and brand reputations. Consider, too, that the damage can extend to well beyond the brand in question. In the wake of issues at the now-bankrupt Peanut Corporation of America in 2008, confidence in all brands of peanut butter declined.

What should companies do to protect themselves?

First, be prepared. Every organization should have clear policies in place regarding the quality, safety, legal compliance and ethics of its suppliers.  Depending on the industry and the type of supplier, that may range from having suppliers sign fairly simple legal forms to ensuring complex monitoring programs and traceability standards. If a crisis breaks, a reasonable person will likely not hold you responsible for knowing everything going on at your supplier. This person will, however, expect you to have taken reasonable steps to confirm that supplier’s integrity.

A policy alone won’t insulate you from perceived responsibility. As part of your crisis planning process you should conduct a threat assessment that includes supply chain vulnerabilities (e.g. contaminated ingredients, faulty parts, manufacturing disruptions, regulatory violations). Make sure you have a solid crisis plan in place that includes tactical plans for the highest-priority threats, including a solid product recall plan. Conduct crisis simulations to identify gaps in your plan when it comes to supply chain. Any company with significant vulnerability to product recalls should conduct a mock recall scenario annually with all internal stakeholders participating, on both the operational and communications sides.

View your major suppliers as extensions of your company, just as your stakeholders are likely to do. The actions of one of your company’s business units, or even one employee, can significantly impact your overall reputation and bottom line.  In the B2B world, customers and potential customers typically evaluate you in part based on the organizations with whom you conduct business. Work with suppliers with reputations for reliability, diligence and compliance, since these can reflect positively on your company’s reputation.  Conversely, regard a poor reputation on the part of a supplier as a potential dollar-and-cents liability—as it can be costly indeed if things go wrong.

Once a crisis breaks, we have four pieces of wisdom:

• Recognize that you “own” your supplier’s actions in the eyes of stakeholders.  Regardless of where legal liability ultimately falls, your customers, consumers and others will expect you to step up to make things right.  They want accountability and action, not finger-pointing.
• Don’t let the initial “facts” paint you into a corner.  The facts can prove a moving target, particularly when key information is coming from another company dealing with a crisis of its own. To avoid setting unrealistic expectations or having to eat your words, avoid offering conclusions about the cause of a problem or the time required to solve it until you’re really sure.
• Don’t count on your supplier to fix the problem. You will be held accountable for the effectiveness of the actions taken to address and resolve the situation. If your supplier needs help, be sure they get it.  If your supplier is making the fixes, check and double-check the results.
• Don’t count on your supplier to communicate effectively.  Some suppliers have sophisticated global operations, but many others are small-to-midsize B2B operations with virtually no PR teams and little-to-no crisis experience.  If you need them to do or say something, tell them directly; if they need additional communications resources (such as an outside PR firm), consider providing them.

As in any crisis situation, an organization’s key audiences ultimately assign responsibility, so clients and firms should understand stakeholder expectations. Those managing a brand built heavily on integrity and ethics shouldn’t be surprised when customers and others hold the brand responsible for failing to police a supplier’s real or perceived misconduct. A company that sells private-label products should expect to accept responsibility when a supply-chain source causes a quality or safety issue, and the private label company bears the burden of new responsibilities for public recall notification and retrieving those products from the marketplace.

A brand’s ability to influence stakeholder perceptions in a crisis is getting smaller all the time. Yet once set, perceptions are extremely hard to change.  Crisis preparation and avoidance are thus central to most companies’ business operations—and not merely when a supplier has caused the problem. The savviest companies are working with their suppliers as a team. Conduct threat assessments together. Create joint simulation scenarios. And make sure your major suppliers have their own crisis plans in place.

lululemon might be the most recent casualty of a supplier–induced crisis. But one thing is certain: it won’t be the last.

It’s a commonplace to note the speed of communication in the digital age. But you hear a lot less about the small size of communications. Tweets. SMS. Facebook posts. Even blogs (gargantuan messages by today’s standards). With the marketing use of twitter and texting  expanding, we might wonder about the impacts on the way PR firms write and also manage the people who do the writing.

This topic occurred to me last week as I perused the “Jargon Madness” bracket Forbes.com has been doing, ranking annoying business terms and having them “compete” against one another, much as college basketball teams are competing in “March Madness.” (“Drinking the Kool-Aid” won Forbes’ contest, by the way, beating out “leverage.”) Like many, I have it out for buzzwords and clichés. But then I started wondering why we are so hemmed in by jargon these days.

It occurred to me that in an age of small messages, when you have to convey an idea or report a happening in only a few words, buzzwords become immensely useful. Without a buzzword like “core competency” or “bleeding edge,” you’d have to use precious verbiage to explain those concepts to people, each and every time you communicated. Much easier to deploy a word that everybody knows instantly.

Academics have argued that small communications are altering our use of the English language. Research reported in the journal New Media and Society has found that “young people write in techspeak, using shortcuts, such as homophones, omissions, non-essential letters and initials, to quickly and efficiently compose a text message.” Other research discovered that people who texted more “were less open to new vocabulary, whereas those who read traditional media were more open to expanding their vocabulary.”

Kids themselves don’t seem concerned. As one infographic I encountered reveals, 64% of teens admitted using short “techspeak” in classroom assignments. Almost all said that proper writing skills were important to their career success, but only 11% agreed that electronic communications were affecting their writing. (by the way, the infographic is itself part of this trend toward briefer communications. They’re like white papers used to be—only skinnier)

So is the much-discussed workplace divide between tech-savvy Gen Y and older generations appearing in part as a linguistic divide?  And are firms having more trouble finding candidates with strong writing skills?

Janet Tyler, Co-CEO of Airfoil, observes that “finding good writers now is harder, but only marginally so. Firms might consider including a writing test in their hiring process.” More generally, she believes, the profusion of small communications hasn’t made her job as a communicator easier or harder, just different. “The environment has changed for everyone, not just PR. Everyone in marketing disciplines feels this impact.”

Tyler does have some advice for firms seeking to communicate in short form. First, keep it simple and personable. “Remember, there is an individual on the other end of any communication, even if it’s a corporate/branded handle.”  Secondly, know your audience. “Ask yourself what data you know to be true about the person or organization you are communicating with and use it to inform your communication.”

One risk of the trend toward texting and twitter is that professionals will seek to use short-form for all communications needs, including important business matters.  Recent Harvard Business Review blogs have re-affirmed the virtues of the formal business letter and traditional good grammar. In New Zealand, where a series of employment disputes have broken out over the use of text messaging in workplace situations, the country’s Employment Relations Authority has urged professionals to pay more attention to how they communicate about important matters. “It sometimes seems some people have lost the ability or inclination to actually speak to each other at all,” one member of the Authority said.

According to Tyler, short communications has not substantially changed the way her firm communicates with its clients. “We work in technology where speed and brevity equate to efficiency. That said, periodic in-person conversations remain key.” All of us would probably do well to examine the medias we use to communicate certain kinds of messages. Some situations require a bit more breadth in order for more complicated and important messages to get through.

Ultimately, the impact of short-form on the public relations business remains an open question. If you have your own thoughts or experiences, we’d like to hear them. (And if you happen to throw in a little tech jargon or make a few grammar mistakes, that’s okay, too.)

It better be!

In 2000, the FTC issued its “Dot Com Disclosures,” disclosures interpreting advertising law for the online world. At that time, the guidelines focused mostly on display advertising.  Nearly thirteen years have passed, and with it the emergence of entirely new technologies and platforms used by advertisers, marketers and communications companies every day, including Facebook, Twitter, and mobile devices.

This past month, the agency released a new, updated version of “Dot Com Guidance” that considers advertisers’ responsibilities when using the new technologies. Given how engaged the public relations industry is in the online and social media space, firms should be sure to read the new document carefully and apply it thoughtfully to their client work.

The new guidelines’ basic precept is clear enough: “consumer protection laws apply equally to marketers across all mediums, whether delivered on a desktop computer, a mobile device, or more traditional media such as television, radio, or print.” Although its energizing to work in new media, agencies must always be sure to stay close to the truth and avoid communications that are deceptive, unfair or that lack substantiation. In particular, agencies must ensure that all required disclosures contained within content created on behalf of clients are “clear and conspicuous” in the eyes of consumers.

What does “clear and conspicuous” mean? That’s the million dollar question. As the new guidelines remind us, “There is no set formula for a clear and conspicuous disclosure; it depends on the information that must be provided and the nature of the advertisement. Some disclosures are quite short, while others are more detailed. Some ads use only text, while others use graphics, video, or audio, or combinations thereof. Advertisers have the flexibility to be creative in designing their ads, as long as necessary information is communicated effectively and the overall message conveyed to consumers is not misleading.”

The specific content being displayed, the platform being used and the unique context of that display will play a huge role is determining the type, scope and manner of the disclosures.  For example, a user should not be required to go through excessive scrolling to read important disclosures.

The new guidelines go on to comment in some detail about what advertisers should and shouldn’t do to ensure “clear and conspicuous,” with special emphasis on mobile devices and social media. Some highlights:

• Advertisers should be sure to place disclosures in close proximity to the claim they are making. Because mobile devices require “significant vertical and horizontal scrolling,” advertisers should consider “empirical research about where consumers do and do not look on a screen.”
• In situations where it’s necessary to hyperlink to a disclosure, advertisers should make sure the hyperlink’s labeling is obvious and that the label conveys the disclaimer’s importance. Advertisers should also “[c]onsider whether and how your linking technique will work on the various programs and devices that could be used to view your advertisement.”  However, material issues should not be buried in a hyperlink.
• Advertisers should employ the latest and most appropriate technology when placing disclosures on a website. Be mindful, for instance, not to use Adobe Flash for disclosures meant to be viewed on a mobile device, because these devices might not support Adobe. Also avoid pop-ups that could be blocked by blocking software.
• Disclosures should be made visible in each ad that might require a disclosure. In a medium like Twitter, where multiple instances of an ad might appear, it’s tempting to think that consumers will become aware of disclosures given the context, and that including a disclosure isn’t necessary each time. The new FTC guidelines argue otherwise.
• In short form mediums like Twitter, advertisers must be sure that the use of a short disclosure—even a single word, like “ad” or “sponsored”—adequately relays to consumers “the essence of a required disclosure.”

Industry often welcomes new guidelines, since they can answer questions that many industry participants have. Given how broad and general the law is, it’s always helpful to understand how the FTC itself is interpreting it. But the guidelines also raise an important question: Who is responsible for knowing the rules around disclosure—the firm or clients? What is the firm’s liability? Firms need to understand their obligations and delineate it clearly in contracts they negotiate with clients.  Both an agency and a client can be the subject of a regulatory action in the event there is an alleged violation of applicable law, regardless of any provision or indemnification obligations in the client contract.

Most firms today take FTC guidelines seriously, yet room always exists for improvement. Some firms could stand to become more strategic and cautious, putting a process in place to assess risks and ensure adequate compliance. At the very least, firms reviewing the new guidelines should consider whether the disclosures accompanying their existing work suffice in the context of mobile devices.

We urge you to take the time to know the law and understand its continued relevance. No matter who bears ultimate responsibility, thinking carefully and creatively about disclosures is sound business practice, assuring the best results for firms, clients, and consumers alike.

Michael Lasky, Partner and Chair of the Public Relations Law Practice at Davis & Gilbert contributed to this post.

The traditional, rigid work culture that had come to be defined by cubicles and a 9 to 5 workday has been eroding for years now. But with the entrance of smartphones into professional life, the line between work and home life has become non-existent. Add to the mix the needs and preferences of tech-savvy Gen X & Gen Y workers, as well as the business imperative to attract and retain the best workers, and you have employers struggling to understand how best to organize the work experience for the benefit of company and employee alike. The result is a fluidity in the workplace itself, an intense period of experimentation in perks, practices, processes, and office architecture.

Companies of all kinds are going well beyond common perks like ping-pong tables, happy hours and open, living-room style collaboration spaces. Recognizing the importance of regular exercise, the technology company Gartner has installed a treadmill desk on every floor of its Fort Myers, Florida research facility. The medical device company Arthrex, provides free nutritious lunches to its employees, enabling them to stay healthy and break bread together.  Employees can bring their pets to work at the body care company Indigo Wild.

Communications firms are also taking the lead. To improve employee interaction, Weber Shandwick has installed a very popular coffee bar in the reception area of its New York office. As Deputy General Manager Joy Farber Kolo relates, the bar is “the central place for our teams to get their java and serves as a casual meeting place for our people to catch up and connect. People really use it, enjoy it and seem to appreciate it.” The suburban Rochester, NY advertising and PR firm Dixon Schwabl allowed their employees to brainstorm a “wish list” for the company’s new offices. Employees wanted a slide running from the second floor to the main lobby, and they got it. The company also provides weekly ice cream delivery, a perk ranked higher by employees than the company’s profit-sharing plan.

Another interesting—and successful—office experiment is the PR firm Borshoff’s “Bring Your Baby to Work” program. Since 2000, the firm has allowed new parents to bring infants between six weeks and six months in to work with them. Parents provide all supplies and equipment and sign a legal agreement releasing the company from liability. If the baby becomes disruptive, Borshoff or its employee can end the arrangement with three days notice. Parents in the program receive slightly less pay to compensate the company for the time they are spending with their baby on the job.

So far, nine babies have been brought in. Participating parents and managers alike seem to love it. “Bringing my children to the office made the transition back to work very smooth,” said one mother. “I got tremendous emotional support. It created a family-friendly atmosphere and moved relationships with my co-workers to a more personal level.” A supervisor reported: “I was reluctant to embrace the idea, wondering if productivity levels would drop. Instead, we saw increased morale and a strong work ethic from the mothers. Plus, babies brighten the creative spirit.”

Borshoff regards the program as an “incredible employee retention tool.” Other benefits the company has seen include increased productivity and shorter maternity leaves, higher staff morale and positive feedback from clients all with no hard cost to Borshoff. The firm recommends the program especially for companies that already offer flexible work environments, are open to new ideas, encourage a strong team spirit, have positions that don’t require frequent client contact, and that have enough physical space for parents and children. Since implementing the program, Borshoff has received a number of employer awards, including 2012 PR Week “Best Places to Work” and 2012 Indiana Chamber of Commerce “Best Place to Work.”

As the public relations profession continues to expand and develop, it’s great to see firms innovating to make work a win-win for employers and their team members.

Gail Becker, Chair of Canada, Latin America, and the U.S. Western region for Edelman reports that her firm strives to “continuously listen to feedback from our employees and provide solutions that make sense for them and for our business. Great company culture requires continuous movement, priority and effort.” That’s the spirit unfolding in our industry when it comes to workplace experience, and we at the Council hope we’ll see more of it.

Have you come across other fresh workplace perks PR firms would do well to embrace? Tell us about it in the comments section.

Very much like the public affairs firm Global Strategy Group (GSG).

Founded in 1995, the firm began as a political research company, doing nothing but qualitative and quantitative research for the first five or six years of its existence. Today, research tasks still reside at the core of most strategic communications engagements the firm does, for both political and corporate clients. “We’re firm believers in research,” co-founder Jefrey Pollock notes. “We believe in being accountable for communication services and strategic guidance—research is an incredible way to do that.”

A belief in accountability follows naturally from the firm’s political roots. As co-founder Jon Silvan explains, nobody in politics makes a move without providing polling data to support it. Corporate clients so often pay lip service to research and analytics, but they haven’t integrated it as fully into strategy as political clients have. “There’s always an election in politics no matter what. So we deal fundamentally that there is a finite day where we have to show results. There’s no hiding. There are winners and losers. This ‘results’ mentality carries over into all the work we do, giving us an edge with corporate and non-profit clients.”

Most GSG engagements begin with a research product, including both primary and secondary investigation. Explains Pollock, “we want to make sure that there’s data and there’s some foundational data behind whatever decisions we make. We are steeped in the notion that you don’t run a campaign or message without tests. You figure out how it’s going to work, who your voters are—and it should be no different in the corporate world. In our experience, far too many campaigns in the corporate world are just based off gut instinct.”

GSG’s research orientation has served it well during the pitch process. The firm does so much polling on an ongoing basis that when it pitches a large account, it can easily add in new questions that help shape its proposed strategy. Rather than farm out its original research, the firm does its own, coming to the pitch table with recent, statistically sound original data. Relates Silvan, “We don’t just come in with gut feelings. We bring bright ideas that are tested to see if they resonate. It’s a big difference.”

Research significantly enhances client engagements, too. Since 2005, GSG has worked with Northeast Utilities and Connecticut Light and Power, conducting research for communications strategy focused on two audiences: customers—both business and residential—and opinion elites. This ongoing brand research tested advertising concepts as well as program promotion and day-to-day messaging around initiatives like energy efficiency, community participation, and commitment to customers.

Additional research helped guide proactive and reactive messaging during unprecedented—and back-to-back—weather events in the state. In these instances, research helped guide the communications team in their interactions with the media and other stakeholders.

The result? Northeast Utilities and Connecticut Light and Power achieved more targeted, informed marketing efforts and audience interactions, which in turn have yielded year over year gains in approval ratings and awareness. Praise followed in turn from elected officials for the companies’ improved storm outage communications.

Other clients seem to be appreciating the difference research can bring. In recent years, GSG has landed high quality accounts from all areas of the communications world. GSG’s revenue has doubled in size—from $12 million in 2009 to nearly $25 million in 2012. This growth has been aided by the significant expansion of GSG’s communications and digital offering, which has grown over 160% during that time.

Looking ahead, the firm will continue its expansion beyond its traditional base as a New York and regional public affairs firm. Fueled by investments the firm is making in its Washington, DC office, as well as in its ever-expanding digital practice, the firm hopes to be a leading player on the national public affairs stage.

“We could not be happier or more enthusiastic with the team we have in place,” Pollock says. “And we could not be more optimistic about our business model. Research and accountability are important now in communications, but they’ll be even more important going forward. And we look forward to being there, leading the way.”