Sean Williams – CommAMMO at BGSU

Any longtime reader knows that I’m a fan in the most inclusive sense of the phrase, “public relations” to describe the work I’ve done for more than 30 years in professional communicaiton.

As a board member of the International PR Research Conference, and my activities with the Institute for PR Measurement Commission, plus years with PRSA’s Employee Communication section, and now leading the NW Ohio Chapter of PRSA, PR is in my blood. And yet, there periodically are spasms of discussion about what we call ourselves, particularly as Content Marketing creeps into our sandbox, Native Advertising and Sponsored Content tries to pass themselves off as news content, and the “media” changes practically by the moment.

I’ve held for a long time that there is more to PR than media relations — employee communication, reputation management, issues management, crisis, and much more — but that has meant some people hear me say PR and misunderstand. So the effort to find another term for what we all do is understandable to me.

I like “Strategic Communication” quite a lot. I also like “professional communication,” which may be a bit inaccurate because we don’t need professional licensure the way accountants, doctors and lawyers do. We are, however, the only people in most organizations who are business people for whom communication is our superpower. So why not embrace the more general “communication” in some fashion that differentiates it from telecommunications — the technology to carry our messages?

A lot of people like “Integrated Marketing Communications,” but I believe (as others have quoted me) that all marketing is communication, but not all communication is marketing. So that’s not going to work. A ton of smart people like to say that everything is about marketing anyway, so why not just used that term?

J’ Rèfuse! See comment above!

Gini Dietrich uses PESO === Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned == and I bring that to my students all the time to show how different tactics help us communicate to our many stakeholders and constituents. In my AMMO model (audience, message, method, objective) PESO covers the methods. The remaining components are the ultimate in strategy, and thus lift up our discipline to the highest levels.

So StratComm is it, at least for me. It’s the only term that lets me fully blend the various elements of the communication mix. What are your thoughts?

Sean Williams is an Asst. Teaching Professor of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University, in NW Ohio. He coordinates the School’s online master’s program in StratComm.

A pal texted me this morning asking, “How could we have two Cy Young award winners and not with the whole thing?” Ah, yes, the pain, the pain.

Here’s what I believe.

Number one: Underperforming hitting. So many teams with terrific pitching have their offenses suddenly play snooze tag during the playoffs. In the MLB’s list ranking the last 25 World Series Champs, there’s ample evidence that the old adage “good pitching beats good hitting” is true.

But, even anemic attacks can come alive on any given day. Just ask St. Louis’s David Eckstein, who won the WS MVP in 2006, or (ack!) Edgar Renteria for the Marlins in (darn it) 1997. Or Steve Pearce for the Red Sox in 2018, David Freese for the Cards in 2011, or Pablo Sandoval for the G’nts in what, 2012?

Without the element of luck on the offensive side, it doesn’t matter how great your pitching is. The Indians have had the best staff in something like five out of six years, and yet they’ve made the Series once and been booted in the first round twice because there was no offense. Even from star offensive players!

That’s the proof to my thesis. You need pitching good enough to hold down the best of the opposition, but without someone standing up to hit, you will lose a lot of low scoring games. How we typically talk about this conundrum – offense vs pitching and defense — is a throwback to the days of Bob Gibson and Sandy Koufax. Dominant starters supported by a variety of hitters who were flexible in their attack.

Let’s put it another way: No one cares if you win 11-10 or 2-1, as long as it’s a W.

I’m teaching Media and Communication 6550 this summer, Organizational Communication. Having spent nearly my whole career in that field, I anticipated that it would be a walk in the park.

This is the third time I’ve taught the course; the first two were last fall, one online and one conventionally. The 15-week semester of then, however, is NOT the six-week sprint we are in now!

In a whole regular semester, we use a textbook. For summer, it’s a selection of journal articles. There’s a team project for the former and a final paper for the latter. There are DEEP details we can get into and discuss in the longer version. For summer, we leave aside a fair amount of theory beyond a few critical items, and try to get to applying those key theories as quickly as possible.

I’m a pretty good online lecturer; I break longish stuff into many parts, am an “animated” speaker who’s very well aware of the need to perform online, and try always to impart a passion and excitement for the material.

Whew.

This one is tough!

So far, the students are hanging in there. The reading is demanding, the online discussion assignments are challenging, and the lack of synchronous communication means you have to save up your questions and formally ask me via email. Can’t be easy! We have nearly 30 in class, and it’s a mad dash.

Short version: We contrast classical management theories from Fayol, Weber and Taylor with more modern paradigms, focusing on the communication impacts and issues of those managerial ideas. And this week, we look at a few important 21st century developments (like the communicative constitution of organizations (CCO) theory).

I wish I had known this material at Goodyear and KeyCorp!

A quick overview of the graphic above… One of the central concepts of OrgComm is the idea that an organization isn’t a “container” full of communication activity. The communication is actually helping to structure, support and change the organization itself. Anne Nicotera wrote that it was an O1, O2, O3 arrangement – organizING, OrganiZED and OrganiZATION. That is, the communication actions are creating the needed structures for the firm in real time, leading to a state of being organized and thus supporting the entity of an organization.

That self-structuring activity is how teams and sub-teams get built and discarded, how the rules for discourse get made and abandoned. Institutional positioning among various stakeholders is also a reflection of that structuring, as are the processes by which people join, stay and leave the firm. Without the communication activity, these processes don’t happen, or don’t happen as well.

Stay tuned. I’ll share some more on this class as we go along.

Sean is also marketing the BGSU Online Master’s in Strategic Communication program for the balance of summer semester. Find the details here. Want to do some visual learning? Here’s a webinar that outlines the program in more detail.

I’m not naming names, but certain politicians rely on hyperbole, exaggeration and drama that frequently seems to have little relationship to facts. That’s not a political statement, it’s an observation. So is that merely a rhetorical distinction, or is it important.

I once wrote in response to Bob Batchelor that public relations/communication isn’t evil, but that political PR probably is. Lee Atwater, James Carville, Karl Rove, George Stephanopoulos, and now Kellyanne Conway, Sean Spicer, Sarah Sanders… Technically NONE of these people are public relations. They are creatures of the political, not dedicated representatives of principled, ethical advocacy.

It’s really unfortunate, because those of us who do see ourselves as the latter are often observed to be the former. Certainly the strategic thrust of our job is to represent our client/boss and the interest of our organization in finding and supporting competitive advantage.

The question is, how far should we go?

In advertising law there’s a phrase that applies: Puffery. When a potato chip says, “no one can eat just one,” the reasonable person doesn’t think that is a literal claim. When a roofing company says in an ad that it’s a “world champion,” we know that there’s no objective competition under way that might support that contention. It’s puffery – it’s rhetorical and used to raise awareness and prompt interest, and the law says that’s ok.

In politics, however, there’s a whole industry dedicated to convince you that you didn’t hear what you just heard, that “she meant” something different. That we should “take him seriously but not literally.”

Danger, Will Robinson.

As a near 30-year pro in professional communication of varying stripes, I believe words and images matter. To quote the Christian bible, “He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much: and he that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much.” (Luke, 16:10, KJV) If we can’t trust you with the small stuff, how can we do so for the big stuff?

The political realm is one of the only places where the “official” text of a speech is different than what the speaker actually said. Congress allows Members to “revise and extend” their remarks. So you cannot believe what you hear, right?

The rules on puffery shouldn’t apply in politics. We should expect our representatives in both the legislative and executive branches to speak the truth. Not a partisan version of it, but the actual truth. If they are engaging in speculation, or interpreting something, they should say so and NOT claim they are telling the truth or exposing lies when they are doing nothing of the sort.

Part of my job is coordinating BGSU’s online master’s in strategic communication, and as a result, I get to teach grad students in that program. Likely in the future, I’ll teach some in person as well, as I did at Kent State.

Amid my peregrinations among these students I’ve picked up some interesting tidbits of information, and I thought I would share them with you.

1. Grad school isn’t easy. In my grad program (I was on the five-year plan) I went part time while teaching a class and serving clients in Communication AMMO. Three of those were retainers of significant commitment, so for a time, Saturdays and Sundays were full of reading, writing, and thinking. That’s fine, and I enjoyed it. But it’s worthwhile to know that I worked for myself, and could fudge my schedule around to make time for all this stuff. These students inevitably work for other people, and at varying degrees of seniority. Making the time is hard when balancing work and family responsibilities, and professors should know that it’s a different gig than when they were in school, mostly going straight through and not attempting to strike that balance.
2. Academic writing is, well, not the way people normally write or speak. We all know style (AP, APA, Chicago, MLA) is just meant to provide some rules that make it easier to read and to write. But our insistence on following the arcane formality that’s commonplace in academic writing makes it much harder to learn the material. I use a YouTube video from a Brit Ph.D. student to give suggestions on how to read scholarly material. It involves OneNote or something similar and helps demystify how you pick out important stuff from the morass that often results. It would be awesome if the plain language movement from finance could find an auxiliary footing in the academy!
3. The applied, for people who will not go on to Ph.D. and an academic life, is more important than the mechanics and the theory. I qualify that statement, though, by claiming that theory is every bit as relevant and important as the applied, but we have to bring it to life! Learning how to do structural equation modeling would be a mind-expander, but in reality, most of us in the comms profession will never have the need to do that. We do need to know what it is, how to recognize a good research design, what to do with the data and how to apply it to strategy!

There’s more, but this post already has a tl;dr pall gradually creeping over it.

Suffice to say, I get SO much from the time I spend reading and listening to students! Love this job.