The Dangers of Inauthenticity

Is inauthenticty a word? Maybe in the spirit of Stephen Colbert, it is now. We need something for the opposite of authenticity. That's the word. Here's an example.

I caught on SA a news story from the US about a high school 'scared straight' stunt where students were told their classmates had died, only to discover later that it was a deception intended to 'shock' them about the realities of drunken driving.

Quote from the article:

On a Monday morning last month, highway patrol officers visited 20 classrooms at El Camino High School to announce some horrible news: Several students had been killed in car wrecks over the weekend.

Oceanside Unified Schools Superintendent Larry Perondi discusses the DUI program as a student looks on.

Classmates wept. Some became hysterical.

A few hours and many tears later, though, the pain turned to fury when the teenagers learned that it was all a hoax, a scared-straight exercise designed by school officials to dramatize the consequences of drinking and driving.

As seniors prepare for graduation parties Friday, school officials in the largely prosperous San Diego, California, suburb are defending themselves against allegations that they went too far.

At school assemblies, some students held posters that read, "Death is real. Don't play with our emotions."

Michelle de Gracia, 16, was in physics class when an officer announced that her missing classmate David, a popular basketball player, had died instantly after being rear-ended by a drunken driver. She said she felt nauseated but was too stunned to cry.

"They got the shock they wanted," she said.

Some of her classmates became extremely upset, prompting the teacher to tell them immediately that it was all staged.

"People started yelling at the teacher," she said. "It was pretty hectic."

Others, including many who heard the news of the 26 deaths between classes, were left in the dark until the missing students reappeared hours later.

"You feel betrayed by your teachers and administrators, these people you trust," said 15-year-old Carolyn Magos.

On one hand, I applaud the school for teaching their students to distrust authority figures and question the veracity of what they are told. Not that high school students need much encouragement in that area, but it's always a good lesson to reinforce. So bravo to the administrators for that.

But there's something even more deeply disturbing here that relates to my job. I realize I haven't blogged about work recently, but I'm going to start doing it again, so bear with me.

Manipulation is something that is so ingrained into so many people for so many reasons that it can become justifiable to them in instances like this. The administration's argument, that the ends outweigh the means, is faulty. I could post statistics that show being honest and straightforward with kids (and people) is the best way to influence their behavior. I could post a rant about schools manipulating their students (as soon as you're born, they make you feel small.) But instead consider it from the side of authentic communications, in which my company has become a major thought leader.

The fact of the matter is the old model of manipulate and obfuscate doesn't work. At some point your deception will be discovered, and the ends do not justify the means. Ever. Some marketers view the public as children to be manipulated. Traditionally, this thinking may work. It may get headlines. But like the student response to this deception, is the backlash worth it? If the administrators had instead sat down and shown them something equally shocking but not deceptive, for example, photos of DUI victims that you can easily find online, they would have achieved their goals without the need for lies and without the inevitable negative backlash and loss of trust.

The quote by the girl at the end really sums up the risks and dangers of inauthenticity: "You feel betrayed by your teachers and administrators, these people you trust."

Subversive Puppet Show PR Policies

Being in online PR, I'm sympathetic (moreso than some other 'professionals' in this field who will remain unnamed) to the efforts of those who are trying to dip their toes into the wild and woolly world of blogger outreach. Therefore, if you're a PR professional please find the rules for contacting me below. The rules are kind of like a flow chart: if you meet the criteria for the first rule, continue to the second and so forth. If you make it through, please feel free to drop me a line. If not, please don't waste your time contacting me.

1. I blog as a hobby and am therefore interested in writing about relatively few things. Rather than telling you what I don't want to be contacted about, I'll tell you what I do want to be contacted about. If your product doesn't fit into this list (the exception being Rule 8, below), chances are I'm going to ignore you. The list:
   • Comics, specifically Groo, Hellboy and The Fantastic Four
     
   • Movies of any type, but horror and science fiction specifically
     
   • Video games of all kinds, specifically classic and Xbox 360
     
   • Traditional games of all kinds. Note that I write for some RPG companies on a freelance basis and may not be able (or willing) to talk about a direct competitor to a project upon which I'm working, although it never hurts to ask
     
   • Books, although I'm not terribly keen on nonfiction unless it's about history or religion
     
   • Television, but only The Simpsons, Futurama, Jericho and Battlestar Galactica
     
   • Traveling
     
   • Good wine and good cheese
2. Please take the time to find my name. It's not hard. It's on the blog's heading. Use the correct salutation - if your email begins "Dear Subversive" (as an email I received this morning did) that's as far as I'm reading before I hit "delete." Although some would argue it is unwise, I use my real name on this blog for a reason.
   
3. Don't pretend to have read my blog if you haven't. When I'm doing PR outreach, I either go out of my way to familiarize myself with a blog - typically because I've been reading it already - or I simply recognize that someone might be interested in what I'm selling and go from there. None of this "I really liked your post about X" that I see in so many outreach templates that pass through my hands. Don't lie to me. People online have higher bullshit detectors than normal, and PR people like me create bullshit. I can smell it a mile off, so don't bother.
   
4. If I'm not interested, I'm not interested. If you don't hear from me, one follow-up will suffice. Normally I will at least do you the courtesy of responding but sometimes I simply don't have the time for it. And there's no need to track me down on MSN and Twitter and leave messages for me on Xbox Live and Flickr.
   
5. Understand that my company's blogging policies restrict me from talking about competitor's products and often prevent me from talking about PR competitors in all but the broadest terms. I happen to like my job and want to keep it, so please don't get bent out of shape if I can't discuss your competing product here.
   
6. If your product is blatant advertisement - IE, an advergame - you're really going to have to impress me before I'll write about it. I've supported enough crappy advergames to know what a shitty situation it is trying to get people to write about one, but this isn't the place. Sorry.
   
7. I am not interested in anything racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-religion or hateful. Not only will such things be deleted, you probably won't want the kind of PR I can give you for sending me such a thing.
   
8. The Zombie Rule. Zombies override all other rules here. If you're selling zombies, I don't care if it's an Apple-branded Zombie iPhone that uses NeoOffice, you hit me up 20 times on Xbox Live about it and you misspell my last name - I want to hear about it.

These rules are subject to change without notice, so please review them before contacting me. They will also be permalinked from the front page of this blog.

To My PR Colleagues

Dear PR Colleagues,

We've got to talk. Our relationship is starting to change, and we need to figure out where it's going. I will say right up front that I don't want to break up with you and I think that we've laid the groundwork for a really good friendship here - so hear me out before coming to conclusions.

Lately you've been making a lot of requests and you haven't been listening to me very well. I think it's great that you realize what I can do and the importance it has to the field currently known as public relations. It's awesome that your clients have heard of the Internet and want to be engaged on Facebook. It shows that you're listening to me and that's good, but I don't think you're necessarily listening beyond the first few bits.

Engaging online means a lot more than making a website or a 'viral' video (note: please stop using that term, OK? I don't call you 'stooges,' so I don't think it's too much to ask that you don't call strategies 'viral' when you're referring to outcomes.) You have to do a little research first. When I ask you what people are saying about you online right now and you look at me with that blank, doe-eyed expression and wonder what that has to do with creating the next Subservient Chicken for your clients, it's very endearing and cute the first time but it's frustrating as hell the 100th time.

Let's face it: creating a 'vibrant, online community around our client's light sour cream' (full disclosure: that is a made-up example) may look great on your Powerpoint presentation to your clients in the pitch, but let's be realistic - just because you promised your client the moon doesn't mean us hard-working chumps down here can deliver, especially if we didn't have any input from the git-go. Because 'vibrant online communities' are great and all, but is your cutesy micro-site, a few emails to bloggers and creating a Facebook page going to create hundreds of threads of conversation where light sour cream enthusiasts come out of the woodwork to sing the praises of your product? Probably not.

What you have to realize is that the kind of 'vibrant, online communities' you're talking about on the Internet are created not around specific products but around people's hobbies and interests. People don't go online looking for communities about things they buy (unless that thing happens to be their hobby - I'll give you that). They go online looking for communities about things they enjoy - movies, cooking, television, games, books, politics. This is the lesson so many people have to learn, and an increasingly desolate landscape of $30,000 Second Life islands devoid of life except for furries doing inappropriate things, forgotten Facebook groups and forums with less than 10 registered users means that people continue to learn the hard way.

You don't have to learn the hard way - just hear me out! Remember that doe-eyed look? You have to know what people are saying about you and where! Maybe instead of creating a 'vibrant, online community' about your particular brand of light sour cream you seek out an existing 'vibrant, online community' about cooking where several users have mentioned your sour cream (I did some Google-Fu just now and found at least two that fit that description) - and talk to them instead? Don't whack them over the head with your PR-ness either. You'll scare them and probably piss them off. Why don't you simply offer your information, offer yourself as a resource and see what happens?

We can't keep going on like this, PR people. Something's got to give in this relationship. I know I don't say this very often, but in this instance I'm right, OK? All I need you to do is listen.

And seriously stooges, stop calling them viral videos!

The Value of Engagement: Appendix

Brother None made a really good comment challenging something I said in my third post (and the Fallout 3 blog gave me a nice shout out too.) He raises an exceptionally good point, one I'd like to talk about here. Money quote:

The example of how to do modern community management and PR "right" is BioShock, and going strong at 1.5 million sales, it's shown to have worked...

And there's there real puzzling bit. How is Bethesda doing it "right"? They're doing exactly, and I do mean exactly, what you advice PR people not to do in your first posts. They made their press packets, they sent them out, and they're getting their hyped-up posts, on over a 100 sites and magazines that I've seen.

It's all cut and jib stuff. In the meantime, the community FAQ is the only bit of real interaction given, and it was indirect and slowed down, and failed to create any significant buzz anywhere (it had only about 400 posts on their forum, compared to, say, the 800+ posts on NMA's preview).

The bolded bit is the important one, and upon further reflection I think he's right, or very nearly so.

2K did do some of same kinds of things with BioShock, at least in the very beginning. It had a showing at E32006, which kind of kickstarted the campaign, and there were articles in magazines. But otherwise, I think Brother None's point stands. Through a function of writing a post at three separate times and trying to reign in thoughts that are evolving, I didn't articulate exactly what I wanted to say in the third post, so let me make an addendum.

Bethesda is doing some things right. They still have a year or more develop their program, and the "20 community questions" is a step in the right direction, but thusfar their interest has been in engaging traditional media rather than engaging the community on an individual level. And, as BN notes, that could end up being an Achilles' heel as the chatter in the community becomes more negative.

I'd rather not dwell on what they're doing wrong, but instead make some (free - my agency might kill me for this) suggestions about what they can do to improve.

• Engage transparently on their forums. A lot. A community manager should spend 60% - 80% of his time engaging with the community. Even if he isn't answering questions about Fallout 3, he can be talking to fans about things. Post-nuke books and movies. Wasteland. Shared experiences. Favorite beers. These are the kinds of things that show you're not a PR stooge, you're a person.
  
• Engage on other sites. Yes this is hard because you won't be in your own playground anymore, but make accounts on Duck and Cover and NMA. Roll up your sleeves and get into the discussion. Be ready to be called names - this takes a thick skin - but get in there and do eet.
  
• Here's a novel one and Brother None will no doubt enjoy this. Offer to do some guest posts on the Fallout 3 blog. It can't hurt.
  
• Set up a Fallout 3 Twitter. Twitter is now so popular that the White House has a Twitter you can follow. Whether you'd want to is up to you, but you can do it. It's easy, and it's a good way to stay in touch.

That's not a comprehensive list, but this isn't a new business pitch either so I can't give away too much for free.

It's going to be very interesting to see how this develops over the next few months. I'm definitely going to revisit it from time to time, not only because it's a topic of personal interest but it's a very interesting test case.

Captain America: Dead. Capitalism: Alive and Well

Major hat tip to Angus for pointing me towards this story.

Even if you aren't part of my comic-readin', game-playin' crowd, you are probably aware that a couple of months ago, Marvel decided to kill off Captain America. You know this because you probably heard about it on the news; Marvel's PR team did a fine job of getting the word out. Character "deaths" happen in comics all the time, but the last time I can remember a comic event like this (hell, any comic event) getting this much mainstream media coverage was the death of Superman in the early 1990s.

His death was the talk of the geekosphere for quite a while, and I didn't weigh in because I really didn't have much to say (Jeff, however, had quite a bit of interesting stuff to say if you want to get up to speed.)

It turns out that there's another interesting side to this story that takes place well outside of the Marvel universe, and firmly in ours.

A little preface for the non-comic-reading Puppeteers: Wizard Magazine is pretty much the only print publication that caters exclusively to comic book readers. There are others, of course, but none come close to scratching Wizard's subscriber base, sales, and quality (and by quality, I mean the quality of their layout and print.) The mag tends to cater to the juvenile side of the aisle - it's kind of like Maxim, but with female superheroes instead of airbrushed celebrities - but it is a solid and credible news source for comics and entertainment news.

And Wizard Magazine is the main character of our story today.

Wizard Magazine is only one arm of Wizard Entertainment, who run the various Wizard World conventions as well. Wizard also runs its own online store, selling comics and collectibles. At WizKids, we worked with Wizard on several promotional figures that they sold both through their magazine and their online store. The idea behind those offers was to increase circulation numbers of the print magazine, and because Wizard is basically the only show in town when it comes to comics news, they tend to get what they want when it comes to things like exclusive promotional tie-ins. Companies want to see their product featured as a promotional item, because it's basically free PR. (You HCRealms guys: pay attention.)

Now you might know that print publications, like game companies, tend to run pretty far ahead of schedule on their news - meaning they have to know things about 3-4 months before they release/happen, so they can cover them in a timely manner. This is all the more important for them now given how fast news travels over the Internet; more than once, WizKids had exclusive news we'd given to a magazine leaked online, and the mags were none too happy to have been scooped.

Perhaps you see where I'm going with this. Wizard almost certainly knew of Captain America's impending death weeks, if not months, before it happened. And magically, within hours of the release of the issue - when it was sold out at almost every comics store in North America - the Wizard online store had plenty of copies. They had so many, in fact, that they had already graded them (a comic industry term for putting a funnybook in plastic with a permanent grade of its status, for hardcore collectors only) and put them on eBay - in the hundreds.

They also engaged in a major Google ad buy to purchase ads that redirected people searching for issues of the comic right to their online store.

In and of itself, that's not so terrible. This isn't Martha Stewart-esque insider trading; it's comics, and their profits on this venture could probably be measured 4 digits, 5 at the most. Does it hurt comic book retailers? Sure, a little, but I would also argue that comics and games retailers can be their own worst enemies (I'll get into this another time.)

But retailers themselves would probably disagree, and Brian Hibbs in his "Tilting At Windmills" column certainly does. (Brian's column, incidentally, is where most of my facts regarding the timeline of events came from). But Brian is also arguing for something new and interesting that, so far, the comics industry has seen very little of. It is something I experimented with at WizKids, and it's something I've discussed here before: transparency. I'll let him tell you:

To me, as a guy who sells comics and stories for a living, knowing months ago that Cap was going to die would have helped me sell more comics, not less. Because it’s not the action itself that’s the important thing, it is the execution of that action. That’s what people are buying.

I couldn't agree more. I'm not calling for a radical, "Marvel ought to let us know every line of dialog from every upcoming comic" - that's unreasonable. But as I've argued before, that information would have been relevant to the overall discourse. And I doubt very much it would have impacted the media blitz surrounding Cap's death. If anything, people lining up in front of comic book shops - people who had knowledge of the event because their comic shop guy told them about it - would have been a great picture to put on CNN.

Kevin Huxford at Newsarama did an excellent interview with Wizard's PR guy Drew Seldin about the issue, where Drew all but concedes the company, operating as one unit, did in fact have advanced knowledge of the issue. I can empathize with Drew, being a PR guy myself, and I'm not sure I would have handled it quite like he did (Hey, I'm new! only goes so far, especially in the comics industry where insiders tend to frown on outsiders to begin with), but I present it a Wizard's reaction to the debate.

Frankly, what matters here is not whether Wizard did anything shady. It's that people in the comics (and games) industry should closely consider what Brian had to say about releasing information sooner. It is antithetical to the "old way" of doing things, but those are the kinds of steps that might need to be taken to reignite interest among fans used to having more information at their fingertips than the sum-total of human knowledge 50 years ago.

Ain't That a Kick in the Head

I've blogged somewhat about transparency and other requirements of PR in new marketing, but today's bruhaha is more about the crossover between traditional PR and the blogosphere. The line between journalists and bloggers has always been a blurry one, especially when many journalists themselves have begun to blog. And I can say from working on the inside that when it's crunch time before a big outreach effort, it's doubly-important to make sure you've got things right.

Like say, for example, not sending a briefing bio to the journalist rather than the client. Oops.

All things considered, this is really just a minor screw-up. Someone at Waggener Edstrom sent Fred Vogelstein of Wired his own briefing bio. Other than a rare inside look at the machinations of corporate PR, there really wasn't much relevant information in there. Fred posted about it online, and posted the bio itself (PDF). Chris Anderson blogged about it at the Long Tail, and Wagged responded on their blog.

My first (and snarky) thought was "thank God it wasn't me/us!" But I have to wonder if this even would have been a story if it had happened before the blogosphere. Chris Anderson (full disclosure: I am a big fan of the Long Tail theory of online distribution, and I was involved in some outreach to him when I was on the Xbox corporate account) titled his post "Some choose radical transparency, some have it thrust upon them." As PR evolves and we try to find our footing with a top-tier blogosphere that consists largely of journalists like Anderson and Vogelstein who are actively (and rightly so) blurring the lines between traditional journalism and blogging, our internal machines will change as well. Does that mean us PR types are going to stop creating briefing documents? I seriously doubt it - as some of the comments on Anderson's post indicate, that's what our clients pay us to do.

But just as we can't expect to create a blog supposedly by 12-year-olds for a video game system, we also can't expect that kind of information to stay secret - and thus the need even for internal transparency. This would have happened eventually, whether it was a bio accidentally pasted into an email or some less-than-scrupulous person stealing the information and posting it online.

The interesting thing to watch here will be the blogosphere's response to this: will they act like journalists and see it for what it is? Just as PR is taking its steps out of childhood and into our awkward adolescent phase when engaging with bloggers, so too are bloggers looking across the dance floor at us. Both "sides" (and I use that term loosely) are gangly and not quite sure of themselves yet, but it'll be interesting to see whether we can manage to hold hands and dance for a song or two.