Two reminders of my day job hit me during my quick getaway weekend in Orlando. First of all, I wish Universal would buy better biometric readers at their turnstiles. Either no one has told me that I'm in the witness protection program and my fingerprints have been altered or they have the worst readers in the industry. More amusing for someone who just returned from media training 42 people at one of our clients a week ago was the intro to the T2 Terminator show at Universal Orlando. The staging area offers this premise: Cyberdyne's Community Relations Director is introducing a short video about the wonderful technology advances in store for all of us through their "world domination of communications." The actress does a great job of being controlling, in her fake-sweet way, describing her position as being in charge of community relations and media control. I laughed out loud at that last part. For more than 21 years we have been helping prepare our clients for interviews with media and analysts and, now, bloggers. Just as I've repeated over and over again that "there is no such thing as off the record," there certainly is no such thing as media control.
Getting back to the 42 "students" we just worked with, it's been fascinating to review their feedback from the sessions. The majority are hungry for two things -- more practice with interviews so they can feel comfortable when the real event happens and more specifics from their own PR team regarding approved messages, customer references and anything else PR can give them so they are armed and ready with the most up-to-date, safe information to discuss. I applaud their interest in trying to help their company through the right kind of communication. This session also gave our respective client's PR team great leverage to influence all of these potential spokespeople to carry the right messages at the right time.
I'm hopeful they also heard my often-repeated "no such thing as off the record" speech. With the rapidly increasing news cycle caused by blogging and online media, it is so easy to unwittingly provide a "scoop" that will quickly swirl out of control and make it hard for a company to get the right kind of coverage for its news. It may seem like fun give someone in the media an inside tip about some news "off the record" -- especially an influential business press reporter or top blogger. The ramifications can be very bad, however, and all of the great plans your communications team made to do a "big splash" with your news and inform all of your key influencers at the same time will be blown.
And if you make this mistake, your PR team can't fix it. There is no such thing as "media control" except, perhaps, in the Universal Studios Cyberdyne alternative universe. Your PR team is really trying to help you. They also are doing their best to maintain your -- and their -- relationships with all of the influencers you did not whisper the news to who will feel they missed a good story. So before you offer that juicy tidbit "as background," just pause long enough to repeat to yourself "there's no such thing as off the record." And then stop talking.
