Technology a PR Challenge and Tool, Cable Spokeswomen Say

The onslaught of information and communication technologies is a challenge to public relations executives, but also gives them more tools to communicate with employees and outsiders, panelists said at an Association of Cable Communicators conference Thursday. A multiplicity of technologies spurring a quickening pace of the spread of news has made those spokeswomen’s jobs more complicated, the four panelists agreed. While several said “sleeping with your BlackBerry” or other mobile device at one’s bedside has become more common among them and their colleagues, they also said technology makes it easier to work remotely.

Use common sense before tweeting, said several panelists, as some said they don’t preview the tweets of all employees. Some Univision executives tweet on their own, including promotional material, said Executive Vice President Monica Talan. “It’s really common sense: Think before you tweet.” To an audience question about “how do you deal with that very fine line on social” media in terms of what’s acceptable and not, Talan replied not to “tweet before you think.” That means thinking through the implications, she said. “It’s really telling people at the end of the day, it’s your own brand, wherever you're putting that out there. We do have policies, but it’s also a lot about conversations” about best approaches, Talan said.

Another panelist recalled when she could clarify then-Turner Chairman Ted Turner’s remarks to a reporter before a story was written. “At that time, you could call the reporter back and say ‘what Mr. Turner meant to say was'” this, said TBS Senior Vice President Misty Skedgell. “Those days are gone. And I think all our employees need to understand the same thing applies to them.” That same speed of communications makes it harder to share a company’s news with employees before it’s made public, said several panelists. Comcast has “a very robust intranet site” and VOD channel, both just for employees, said Rudnay. “We bend ourselves in pretzels to try to” communicate with employees, she said. “If something leaks early, we put that on our employee blog right away."

"We need to build social media” into all parts of a company, said Time Warner Cable Vice President Susan Leepson. “We all have to be familiar with it.” The “speed and the scope” of sharing information “today is just insane,” she said. “That message goes broad, fast,” said Leepson. “It makes our job a lot harder.” Rudnay finds it sometimes hard to react to a “flood of constant news and chitchat” and find PR staff with “the experience to handle all these vehicles” of information dissemination. “An unintended consequence of our technology ... is it’s very hard to keep that human touch” in employee communications, Rudnay said. With “questions all the time” about a wide range of devices and not just consumer ones, for a PR person in the video business, “it’s no longer enough to understand the media world and understand the world of ratings,” she said. “It’s the distribution of the technology and everything that goes along with that."

Corporate use of Twitter should balance guidelines with spontaneity and personality, so consumers don’t feel as if they're interacting with an inanimate entity and companies can react to changing conditions, said a Twitter staffer in its Washington office. Jenna Golden advised the audience to “be authentic and have a personality,” because “people don’t want to feel like they're talking to a wall.” She cited American Express’s Twitter feed as making users feel they're “talking to a person” because it lists the names of the employees who monitor it (https://twitter.com/americanexpress). “Having a little bit of personality is incredibly important,” said Golden. “Where appropriate” that includes “being funny,” she continued. Guidelines are important “so you're staying on the same page,” but a backup plan is needed, too, she said.

Search engine optimization shouldn’t be ignored by cable companies, a crisis communications executive said in a later speech after few in the audience raised their hands when he asked if they focused on SEO. The Susan Komen Foundation didn’t find out until after a controversy arose over its funding of family planning including abortions that it “didn’t own the terms ‘pink,’ ‘breast cancer’ or ‘Susan G. Komen Foundation'” on Twitter, said Jason Maloni, chairman of Levick’s litigation practice. “You need crisis plans just like the food industry or the airlines,” he said of cable companies. “Google is where every reporter goes to decide what to write about today,” and where lawyers go to find targets of lawsuits and where people who may later be jurors hear about a potential defendant, he said. “If you're not shaping the results on Google, you're missing a huge opportunity.” Maloni advised credit-card payment processor Heartland to “run to the light” after millions of consumers’ account numbers were stolen in 2009, he said. The day after, the company pledged to work with rivals to improve processing security, which was “effectively communicating your strategy,” he said: “You're the hero” and no longer the “villain.”