Laboring to Communicate

Teachers at three eastside Portland-area districts have threatened strikes this spring. Next week employees at Reynolds School District actually may be on strike. An arbitrator’s decision on Monday has stirred up memories of the tough transit negotiations during the last two decades.

Communications for labor relations is a touchy, sometimes nasty business. That’s on a good day. Pulled into strike mode, the communications job can become painful. Regardless of whether you represent labor or management, here are eight basic survival tips:

1. Don’t waste time:

Contract negotiations on the horizon? If an organization has the luxury of time, take full advantage of it to research the talks from previous years, then get to know the issues both sides will put on the table this time around.

Pull together a media strategy, create fact sheets making your arguments, find the personal stories that humanize your case and identify the credible spokespersons you’ll rely on to carry messages. Note: Your spokespersons most likely aren’t occupying an executive office suite, but may be frontline service providers.

2. Understand the role of the media:

Are your executives up to speed on what to expect from the media during tense labor talks or a strike? If not, consider media training for a core group, grounding them on the key messages and preparing them for interviews.

3. Managing the messages, speak through your brand:

Craft your messages to support your labor relations goals. Speak to your audience, not to your membership or executives. Keep it simple but memorable. Speak through your brand. View the public debate about your organization as a way to remind the audience of your brand promise and who you are.

4. Manage communications for the long-term:

Avoid succumbing to the passions of the moment. It may feel good to zing the other side with wit or a damning broadside, but that’s a tactic serving no long-term goal and yielding no benefit. Your labor communications campaign should fit into the organizations broad communications program. Manage your public comments for the long-term, keeping in mind the goal of maintaining or restoring relationships.

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Watergate 40 Years Later: Shoe Leather vs. Google

It’s vitally important that public relations specialists know how journalists work. PR professionals can’t corral solid earned media results for clients without understanding how editors and reporters go about their daily jobs. 

There’s no better inside look at the reporting craft — a great case study for communications students — than the investigative saga of the Watergate scandal. This June marks 40 years since the break-in at the Democratic national headquarters, the beginning of a gripping drama that ended in a disgraced Richard Nixon resigning as president.

Watergate news coverage, led by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post, is a shoe leather story. The reporting duo painstakingly assembled their facts through Interviews with reluctant subjects and stealth meetings with confidential sources. Details of undisclosed Nixon reelection campaign financing and expenses — including discovery of a secret fund — emerged only through tedious sifting of the data.

Watergate took place in that ancient time before PCs, the Internet and Google existed. Yale University journalism students recently were asked, “How would the story unfold in the Digital Age?"

Surprising answers from the students point to a generation gap in the understanding about traditional reporting techniques and the use and role of the Internet’s search capability. Student comments left Woodward quite perplexed when he and Bernstein met with the Yale students. 

The Yale tale is best told in the just-released book "Before 'Watergate' Could be Googled" by L. Gordon Crovitz. He writes about a talk Woodward and Bernstein gave at the annual meeting of ASNE, the American Society of News Editors. 

“Mr. Woodward said he was shocked by how otherwise savvy students thought technology would have changed everything,” Crovitz said in a Wall Street Journal article. Continuing to quote Woodward: "I came as close as I ever have to having an aneurysm," he said, "because the students wrote that, 'Oh, you would just use the Internet’ and the details of the scandal would be there. The students imagined, as Mr. Woodward put it, 'that somehow the Internet was a magic lantern that lit up all events.'"

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Save the Lipstick

What do you do if Moammar Gadhafi calls asking for help to spruce up his image? Unless you are prepared to tell him to his face to give up being a dictator, you should decline the opportunity.

Monitor Group, a consulting firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, finds itself in the embarrassing situation of explaining why it accepted the assignment of a Gadhafi makeover.

The truth is too many public relations firms sign up for work that demands extreme candor without ever intending to be candid with their client. That's unfortunate and probably unprofessional.

Assisting an organization or individual in managing their reputation requires a accurate assessment of public perceptions and a realistic set of the client's vulnerabilities.

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CFM’s Brand of Public Affairs

The term “public affairs” is widely used in the PR world, but has many definitions and is not easily understood.

CFM’s brand of public affairs focuses on managing communications between an organization and its publics, with the goal of acting responsibly and building trust with those publics.

Good communications follow good actions, I’ve learned during a long career as a one-time journalist and as a supervisor of strategic communications. If you do the right thing, the right thing to say will be obvious.

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Picks From CFM’s Bookshelf: The Brain and How We Use It

What’s on your bookshelf? Here are public affairs and marketing communications ideas from CFM.After all the talk about target audiences and key messages, the real secret of effective communications is getting an idea intact from your brain to someone else's brain.

Cresting interest in neuroscience and behavioral psychology provides some clues.

David Rock's "Your Brain at Work" offers practical personal strategies for overcoming distraction, regaining focus and working smarter. It also explores how to collaborate with others more effectively.

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