For those who haven't heard it, H&K Canada has started a regular podcast called Connected Conversation. Its focus will be online and offline communication issues, strategies, challenges and trends.

Now, I am aware of (and have had a number of suggestions about) the technical weaknesses in this first episode . . .  but I am happy to take counsel from anyone about how to improve the sound and 'entertainment value'. More important, though, I would love to hear from others about what subjects would be a good focus for these 8-10 minute podcasts on strategic communications, or the drawbacks to current podcasts about these issues.

Happy to read and consider any comments . . . and give credit where credit is due!

Some notes from the afternoon of the workshop on municipal communications I am chairing  . . .

Patricia MacDonell from the City of Toronto outlined the basis on which the city makes decisions about the languages in which it provides communications services. As one of North America's most multi-lingual cities, Toronto faces quite the challenge. But rather than rely on a blanket policy specifiying core languages, the city looks at various aspects of a program for language selection: census demographics, needs of the particular community, geography or neighbourhood, and type of information being communicated (for example, health information is offered in more languages than, say, by-laws). It is a flexible and apparently workable approach.

This from Alan Chumley (a blogger) at Cormex Research on public relations and measurement: Forget about talking about ROI in public relations. Even the most sophisticated research models can't prove a correlation. Better to take a look at such measures as 'return on expectations' or 'return on target audience influence.' (And thanks to Alan for introducing Hill & Knowlton's work on influencer network analysis . . . completely umprompted.)

And a final word from Catherine Clement who is leading the communications team at the City of Vancouver in preparation for the 2010 Olympic Games: "We are already exhausted, and we still have three years to go!" 

Canadians David Jones and Terry Fallis kindly let me make a comment about the corporate blog approval process on their podcast called InsidePR: Exploring the World of Public Relations, which goes live every Tuesday.

I argue that if a company or organization wants to be present in the blogosphere, it will have to surrender what Terry calls the "command and control" approach to communications. Senior management should create a blogging policy, agree with the blogger on limits to the scope of subjects to be covered . . . then get out of the way.

This is my first effort at podcasting and I come across a bit formal, almost stuffy. Although I do admit a propensity to literalism which might explain the tone, I promise David and Terry to work on it for future contributions.

Preparing very early yesterday morning for a presentation to the Ontario Hospital Association on new dynamics  in crisis communications, I realized just how tough hospital communicators have it. Most of their audiences feel deeply ambivalent about the hospital: Patients and their families -- in Ontario, Canada in any case -- about the quality and timeliness of the delivery of the facility's core service and the protection of their personal health infomation; the hospital's health professionals about the pressures on them of under-funding and over-work; communities about the accessibility of service; politicians about the hospital's ability to manage the funding it receives.

Marry this with some of the problems endemic to Ontario's health care system (after 15 years of abusive treatment by various provincial governments) including shortages of physicians, nurses, emergency and operating room spaces, and acute care hospital beds, and you have a 'perfect storm' of conflict with which hospital communicators have to wrestle every day. I know, as well, they are relatively poorly paid and lack many of the resources most corporate communicators have at their disposal.

Having said that, I did stress in my presentation that all communicators -- even those who face the every day challenges of hospital community and stakeholder relations -- have a responsibility to take the measure of social media as a possible strategy. The simple fact is that even for hospital communicators with limited budgets, blogging, for example, is an alternative method of engaging communities in discussion about hospital issues or even rallying those communities in support of hospital initiatives. Lack of time; lack of budget; limited understanding; tough internal approval procedures . . . they are just excuses.

I have often made reference to a quotation from American uber-investor Warren Buffet about the value he places on corporate reputation . . . without knowing its provenance.

Thanks to a link from SRI Notes to a MarketWatch column by Paul B. Farrell, I have learned that Buffet's well-known statement was apparently made before a Congressional committee (which committee is still a mystery.) Here it is again for the benefit of those who help companies enhance or defend their reputation:

"I want employees to ask themselves whether they are willing to have any contemplated act appear on the front page of their local paper the next day, be read by their spouses, children, and friends ... If they follow this test, they will not fear my other message to them: Lose money for my firm and I will be understanding; lose a shred of reputation for the firm, and I will be ruthless."   

By the way, the SRI Notes column itself is of interest as it addresses the question of whether the likes of Warren Buffet and Bill Gates are in reality socially responsible investors. Mr. Kurtz, however, provides only a quizzically ambivalent answer: "And that's an important point about social investing - how you do it depends on who you are.  For Warren Buffett to be a social investor he doesn't have to do what I think is right, or what anyone else thinks is right.  He has to do what he thinks is right."

Seems a bit irresolute to me . . . not too far from  the 'I'm okay: You're okay' school of 1970s' popular psychology.

Since much of Ira Basen's show Spin Cycles is judgment masquerading as fact, it shouldn't have been so surprising that episode five ("Spinning War") repeats the seventeen-year old apocryphal story about how Hill & Knowlton singlehandedly laid the groundwork for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 1990.  

In brief, the story goes like this: H&K was "secretly paid" $10 million dollars by Kuwaiti royalty and expatriates of questionable provenance to create an organization called the Citizens for a Free Kuwait. This front group then proffered a young woman named Nariyah Al Sabah to testify before the US government's Commission on Human Rights about the atrocities she had seen committed by Iraqui soldiers in Kuwait. (Actually, I believe Basen only refers to her as Nariyah. I guess his painstaking investigation of the events didn't uncover her last name).

Her story of Iraqui soldiers throwing Kuwaiti babies out of incubators and bayoneting them on cold hospital floors became the torchlight for American politicians campaigning to support an invasion. That's the oft-repeated story anyway and Basen -- taking his lead from the self-professed PR "watchdog" Center for Media and Democracy which he features in this episode and, I could be wrong, uses as his source for the "facts" -- buys into it without providing even a scrap of balance.

Here is what I know about what happened 17 years ago, based on my own independent inquiry. I stress independent because about four years ago, I was asked to step in as a substitute speaker for our Canadian CEO at an ethics conference in which the issue of our role in Kuwait was to be discussed. I told Mike Coates I would do so only if I satisfied myself that we were not guilty of the manipulation implied in the apocryphal version of the events or, at the very least, that there was another side to the story. So, I reviewed the committee testimony and media reports from the time. I spoke at length with Frank Mankiewicz (former press secretary to Robert Kennedy), currently H&K's vice-chairman. He tells a much different story of the events. As does the president and COO of our Asian operations Viv Lines in a letter published in the South China Morning Post in 1999.

Their version, argued passionately (in Mankiewicz's case almost apoplectically so irate is he about the distorted history of H&K's role), presents it this way: We were asked to provide public relations support to the Citizens for a Free Kuwait which had been set up by Kuwait expatriates and former members (some government ministers) of the Kuwait National Assembly . . . not members of the Kuwait royal family. According to Lines, during the course of H&K's work to familiarize Americans with the facts about the Iraqui invasion, we were ASKED by Thomas Lantos, chair of the Commission on Human Rights, to provide witnesses for hearings the committee was holding into apparent Iraqui human rights abuses. One such wtiness was Nariyah Al Saba, the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the U.S. who had been volunteering in a local hospital at the time of the invasion. Yes, she was coached in preparation for her testimony: She was a teenager and scared, according to Mankiewicz. No, she was not coached to lie or fabricate. No, her identity as the Ambassador's daughter was not purposely hidden to make it seem she was just an innnocent teenager. Various newspapers subsequently verified the facts of her testimony. So did the Pentagon (okay, not the most reliable source of truth and fact). Subsequent investigation by the risk consulting company Kroll also confirmed the crimes.

This is all by way of saying that if Basen was truly interested in uncovering the truth (What happened to the investigative journalistic spirit the absence of which Basen decried in an earlier episode?) he could have dug a little deeper. Mankiewicz is still around. The letter from Lines is available. Or was he more interested in proving a point at the expense of accuracy. Remember my definition of spin: "The wilful distortion of facts and the manipulation of half-truths to create a more persuasive or one-sided story."

In fact, if you want a lesson in spin, listen to the choice of words used in recounting the Kuwaiti war myth :  "following standard operating procedure"; "an astroturf organization with fake grassroots"; "secretly paid"; "selling war"; "the whole campaign was a fabrication".

Could anyone be less circumspect about his own use of language in a series on spin? What hyprocisy.

Interest in my commentary on the Spin Cycles series appears to be waning as evidenced by the declining number of views. This may be because my writing is somewhat pedantic, which I recognize as a fault. But I like to think the indifference is more a function of my argument that the series -- so far -- has little new to say about public relations and the media.

Episode four, though, actually makes some worthy observations and heaves up a host of red flags about democracy. (If you are wondering what happened to episode three, the audio doesn't appear to be available. A rather odd technical glitch for Canada's public broadcaster don't you think? Once CBC gets its act together, I'll comment.) Focusing on political spin, Basen and his interviewees argue that a contracting news cycle, all-news channels with plenty of dead air to fill, shrinking newsrooms and writing for the front page rather than for accuracy have changed the relationship between reporters and political spinners. (In the field of politics at least the term "spin" is apt.)

As former BBC newsman Nigel Jones says journalists are no longer "judged on reliability nor on judgment but on the ability to deliver exclusive stories" . . . and I would add stories delivered quickly and certainly before rivals, whether corporate or professional. The new zeitgeist is fertile ground for political spinners who believe -- in the peerless words of Paul Rhodes (a Canadian spin master) -- that what they do is "arrange facts in a certain order so that you are more inclined to believe my version of the truth than my opponent's." It's an atmosphere in which being first is rewarded before being right or shrewd, an ethos in which the "source" is often the politician or party who has "favored" the reporter with a leaked revelation.

Political spin is a subject about which I know very little, at least from the inside. Never having been involved actively with a mainstream political party, I am only a cynical bystander or watcher (and great fan of the Allison Janney presidential press secretary character on the now defunct television show The West Wing). But I do find it surprising that reporters care so much about covering the posturing and transparent manipulation of fact and emotion of our politicians, even when not in an election fight. Political spin is a game in which the players think others care far more about its devices and demagoguery than they do.

I wonder what would happen if a politician gave a news conference, or offered a leaked exclusive, and no reporter cared. I wonder what would happen if reporters and editors stopped worrying about the imperative of speed and concentrated on playing the role of the Fourth Estate as defined by Carlyle.

I wonder if it will really matter for long in the new demos that is social media.

The CBC, Canada's national radio network, is airing a six-part series called Spin Cycles: A Series About Spin, The Spinners and The Spun, developed and hosted by -- you guessed it -- a journalist named Ira Basen.

Despite a less than auspicious first episode, in which the usual hoary shibboleths are trotted out, I am willing to give the series the benefit of the doubt. I will listen to all of it without prejudice and comment on each episode from the perspective of someone who has been on both sides of the great divide -- magazine journalist and public relations professional. But I will only write about those things that stand out -- egregious misinterpretation or welcome insight -- not every aspect of the program. So, if you're interested in Mr. Basen's point of view, you will have to tune in every Sunday night or click through to the CBC's web site.

Let's start with episode one:

Point One:

The premise of the series seems to be that public relations is only about the art of stage-managing the media. This may be what politicians do; but it is not what absorbs many of us in the profession today. There are more effective avenues for engaging audiences in conversations about ideas than hoping a journalist gets the story right . . . social media for example; or dialogue panels; or co-creative developmental approaches to tackling tough community issues or decisions.

I know it may seem like a type of sophistry to suggest the series should be about something else. Really what I am saying, though, is I hope that in future episodes the series rises a little above the increasingly irrelevant matter of what journalists and PR professionals think of each other.   

Point Two:

From Mr. Basen's perspective public relations is synonymous with spin or "an alternative to outright lies." I have another definition that is more inclusive of other actors in the tragicomedy of supposed rational public argument: Spin is the wilful distortion of facts and the manipulation of half-truths to create a more persuasive or one-sided story. The most blatant spin in the last few years has to be, as Mr. Basen rightly points out, the monumental myth of weapons of mass destruction.

But looking at spin from my definition, one is justified in asking who are the real "spinners"? Could they as easily be journalists who select facts to make a more compelling story, or advocacy groups (some NGOs among them) who use selective science to defend a case. Here is an example of spin right from Mr. Basen's mouth: "But truth is a word that makes many people in PR uncomfortable". Is that because we are more comfortable with lying? Are you, reader, part of the many? (By the way, there are a number of other obvious examples of journalistic spin in the series. Perhaps others who listen in could point me to their favorites.)

Point Three:

Unlike Mr. Basen, I don't see "messaging" as ipso facto "spin". Messaging to my way of thinking is making a point of view apparent . . .  with simplicity, clarity and force. It is an element of Aristotelan rhetoric and is the foundation of ordinary discourse. Using it on behalf of a client to explain -- truthfully and openly -- a point of view is much less manipulative than juxtaposing a terrifying image with an alarmist headline. Of course, when messages are treated as dogma they can't help but sound like spin.

So, I await episode two with some unease.