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On Monday, Memorial Day, most of us will have the honor to put on our uniforms and march and pray at department services for the souls of those who made the ultimate sacrifice.
Memorial Day is slipping away from our consciousness. This national day of mourning sees our fellow citizen’s head out to the beach, country, malls, car dealers, picnics and barbecues without ever giving a second thought to those who paid the price for our freedom.
The history of the public relations profession in many ways can be considered kind of bland. Don’t get me wrong; what we do is crucial in the dissemination of information. I can’t imagine a world without public relations, but from an historical perspective things sort of, in my mind, just fed off of itself to evolve. The last several years have show tremendous moves forward in the way we practice our profession, but the good old days really wern’t that old at all!
I’m going to a Firematic Service for a deceased honorary member tonight. We’ll gather at the firehouse in our Class A uniforms and proceed to the Funeral Home. I know a large number of members will attend, they always do. Those in attendance will line up single file on both sides of the parlor room, remove cover, listen to the brief service and then in groups of two, proceed to the coffin for a final salute.
I’ve been to more Firematic Services then I can remember. Some have been for younger members that I knew well, but most have been for senior guys who served many years ago and who I hardly, if at all knew.
What motivates so many to go to these services and pay tribute to those we might have just known in passing or given a quick, “how you doing?” nod to?
One of the most frustrating aspects of our jobs as PIO’s is being second guessed by many who find our career to be something that the immediate world could step into in a pinch. Unfortunately these seeming to know it alls can rattle us by providing suggestions that might make us second guess our own ability. It’s the “no but I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express” syndrome.
There has long been a battle over the defining line between marketing and public relations. A goal of many of us in PR for many years was to take command of all communications functions, including advertising and marketing. Well it appears that this is finally coming to fruition.
I just received some PowerPoint slides from a presentation I saw in Las Vegas a few weeks back that tackled this issue. I thank Peter Clarke of Omnex Marketing and Media Solutions for the presentation he sent.
Here are some of his salient points. Some pertain to our work as PIO’s, some are more business and agency related, but still interesting reading -
I end the week with a pretty cool video that hopefully will inspire you as a PIO to try just a little bit harder and go just a little bit further.
We all learned during our Firefighter I that when water converts from liquid to vapor at 212°F, it expands 1,700 times its volume. Water can only be as hot as 212ºF, but steam reaches thousands of degrees in temperature, which can not only be potentially fatal to us but also very uncomfortable and often the cause of serious injury. That one degree difference should always be on our mind when it comes to ventilation tactics and nozzle choice.
That one extra degree to steam can make a world of difference in how we react on the fireground and the potential outcome.
SnapStream Media is hosting a free live webinar on Thursday, June 3 at 12:30 pacific time. The main presenter will be SGT Tim Schmidt the PIO for the Anaheim Police Department.
Schmidt and spokespeople from SnapStream will discuss -
The traditional vs. progressive TV monitoring approach
*Digitally recording and archiving TV coverage of your city
*Allowing cross-departmental access to clips and recordings
*Pinpointing mentions of interest & creating clips
*Being notified of issues/events via automatic e-mail alerts
*Creating daily media reports
A few months back my department reinforced a standing policy that overnight Company duty crews need to be in place to provide a first due engine or truck. Each Company, on a rotating basis, provides one month of overnight service a few times a year.
A firefighter came up to me a few days after the policy was reviewed by the Chiefs in front of the membership and made this startling statement – “Everyone is up in arms over this policy. Guys are going to just stop answering calls altogether if we have to spend months getting up overnight.”
At one time in my life I would have immediately looked at this statement as a sign of mass internal discontent that could create a major crisis within the department. I would go into crisis communications mode. But I’m older and smarter now and I use as the litmus test the famed Denniston Theory of Crisis Communications.
Like in the movie Groundhog Day I have a situation that happens over and over again, in the same manner each June. My department hands out a number of scholarships to deserving students at the high school, I take pictures, submit them to the local paper and they never get printed.
Everything I normally send to this newspaper gets printed, I have a great relationship with the paper, its employees and editor but each year for some unknown reason the scholarship story and photos never makes it to print.
While I was at a conference in Las Vegas last week I had the opportunity to speak to some SONY execs. I always like to hear top corporate marketing people talk about the trends and new techniques they are examining.
The talk turned to social media. As this form of communications continues to evolve the stark reality is if you are waiting at the station the train has already passed you by. If you are not actively engaged in social media or even on the most basic level, frequent updates on the content of your website, you are letting the fastest growing form of communication with you community slip away.
When I departed Long Island for Las Vegas a few days ago I noticed that the TSA was profiling blue hair. Oh I understand everyone is on edge with recent breeches, put this was the definitive example of perhaps spending too much time on the wrong person.
I’m in Las Vegas this week attending a conference. Last night I went to dinner with a bunch of guys from Medina, Ohio who are huge Cleveland Cavalier fans. We positioned ourselves near a mega screen monitor so we could see the Cavs ultimately pounded by the Celtics 120-88.
Early on, when the game was relatively close and spirits were higher, the LeBron James rumor mill was the talk of the moment. Facing July 1 free agency everyone at the table had an opinion on whether LeBron will stay or go. With each opinion came a rumor about what someone told someone about LeBron’s status. Also with each rumor and opinion came blame. Who to scapegoat and take to task if LeBron seeks mega millions elsewhere?
As a PR guy this got me thinking. It’s not about just LeBron, it’s about sports in general. Each day is filled with stories in the paper and online, as well as sports radio and television, that are based on heated rumors and bashings about one team, coach, manager or athlete.
If these were stories about our fire departments, chiefs or firefighters we as PIO’s would be apoplectic! We would be in total crisis communications mode!! This would constitute one of the worst days of our careers.
I had the opportunity last August at the American Legion Convention in Louisville to hear Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff speak. During his talk one thing kept on ringing clear to me, Mullen wanted the public to have as much knowledge of the current conflicts as possible so they could make an informed decision on where they personally stood. This was refreshing in that Mullen wanted the public to have access to all the information at hand, both good and bad.
Now Mullen has blueprinted a new social media strategy for himself that is stunning in its scope and outreach. I can think of no other military or public official that has such a keen understanding of the value of social media and citizen outreach. It is a lesson in openness and transparency that we as PIO’s should take note of.
I’ll admit it, I’m getting old, but as the saying goes “the more things that change, the more they remain the same.” I was recently going through a bunch of old boxes and found some college books and papers that included an article written by Larry Litwin and Ralph Burgio back in 1971. It was on the timeless topic of the definition of public relations. Although computers and others technological tools we take for granted, and which play a big part in our work, were nowhere to be seen back then, their definition is still time tested and right on.
Here are some nuggets from their wisdom -
Many PIO’s also serve as their department’s photographer. In my department I take hundreds of photos a year along with another firefighter who also handles camera duties.
We both do pretty good work at a scene and many of our photos are used by the media. I am much more comfortable and talented at snapping the action at a fire then shooting a group photo at an awards ceremony. I always feel that the way I ask a group to pose is the same way it has been done since the camera was invented.
There are something’s good and something’s pretty bad about this story.
The LA Times recently printed a piece entitled “Hot, dangerous work inspired Fireman’s Brew.”
It’s the story of two Los Angeles County firefighters Rob Nowaczyk and Ed Walker whose daydreaming after a hillside fire by a freeway lead to the creation of Fireman’s Brew. They imagined brewing their own beer, just as they liked it, and donating a portion of the sales to benefit a LODD fund.
There is an old adage in baseball that an umpire explaining his job once said “I calls em as I sees em.” Well it appears to me that if Justin Pizzi, a reporter at WCAU, the NBC affiliate in Philadelphia, was calling balls and strikes his career as an umpire would be over before it began.
I just got off the phone with a friend of mine who is an Army Captain. She was working on a PowerPoint presentation that she is giving tomorrow. She was concerned that the presentation was following both Army and overall military SOP for PowerPoint’s. In the Army the standard operating procedure for presenting a PowerPoint is to use every tool, chart and graphic possible to both try to glaze over and bore those gathered! I know. I’ve sat through quite a few.
My suggestion to her was to do something radical and against the Army curve – keep it simple.
Here are some of my suggestions to her followed by the definitive video on PowerPoint’s, the funny Don McMillan’s “Life After Death by PowerPoint”
We all know the feeling of getting the page in the wee hours to respond to an incident that requires the attention of the public information office.
The attempted car bombing that took place in Times Square in NYC on Saturday evening is one such type of incident where the split second coordination of internal and external information to and from many departments is required.
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