Established in 1964, the Accredited in Public Relations credential (APR) is awarded by the Universal Accreditation Board (disclosure: I earned my APR in 2000). It measures a public relations practitioner’s fundamental knowledge of communications theory and its application; establishes advanced capabilities in research, strategic planning, implementation and evaluation; and demonstrates a commitment to professional excellence and ethical conduct.

The APR credential has nothing to do with a person’s ability to govern effectively on the board of a national PR society. Zip. Zero. Nada.

Currently, PRSA requires that any prospective board member be accredited. When a ground-up rewrite of the PRSA bylaws was proposed last year, the organization’s General Assembly (the PRSA version of Congress) rejected the proposed language that would have stripped accreditation from board requirements. Despite voting a few years ago to drop the requirement that all Assembly Delegates be accredited, the Assembly balked at taking the next logical step.

The reason the PRSA general assembly voted to drop the requirement that Assembly Delegates be accredited (or “decouple” service from accreditation as we called it then) was that doing so eliminated so many highly qualified PRSA chapter leaders. How could a person serve as the president of a large chapter and not qualify to represent that chapter as a PRSA Assembly Delegate?

The rationale for keeping the accreditation requirement for Assembly Delegates then (as it is now for board service) is that it illustrates an organizational commitment to the credential. If PRSA’s leaders aren’t willing to pursue and achieve the credential, how can the organization suggest it has value for everyone else? What kind of PR practitioner would seek a leadership position but not consider it worthwhile to seek this profession’s credential?

That is a pretty good argument, but we aren’t in a world where everything makes sense. The fact is that only about 20 percent of PRSA members have achieved the APR credential. As a result, until the middle of the last decade, the organization basically had a class system of governance. Only 20 percent of the membership had the ability to serve on the PRSA General Assembly and/or Board of Directors. The other 80 percent, for which everything else was the same (including dues) could not participate in leadership.

Included in that 80 percent are highly capable PR practitioners, including accomplished leaders in corporate communications and agency management. Included in that 80 percent are people who have been leaders of the profession for 20 or more years and regularly shape thoughts about effective strategies, trends and ethics. And included in that 80 percent who, until the mid-00s, could not serve as an Assembly Delegate and STILL cannot serve as a PRSA Board Member are practitioners who have given countless hours of their time as leaders at the chapter and regional levels.

It didn’t make sense for the PRSA General Assembly and it does not make sense for the PRSA Board of Directors.

Last year when the general assembly passed an amendment to the proposed new bylaws that re-inserted the accreditation requirement for board service, I thought it was wrong. To make a point, I presented an amendment to re-insert the accreditation requirement for service as a General Assembly Delegate. I knew it would be defeated, but I wanted to make a point that their insistence on requiring an APR for board service made no sense given their vehement distaste for requiring APR for the assembly.

It was and is a blatant contradiction. If you believe accreditation should be a requirement for PRSA leadership, I respect that. But I can’t understand how you can require accreditation for one set of leaders but drop the same requirement for the other set of leaders.

I don’t think anyone really got the point I was trying to make. Turns out PR people are a very literal group and don’t really get irony.

Fast forward to today with forum posts and e-mails flying with semi-respectful insults pitting the leaders of our profession against each other. Each side is entrenched with very little likelihood that many will be influenced by the back and forth argument. But here’s the bottom line:

• It makes no sense to require accreditation of the PRSA Board of Directors, especially since the PRSA General Assembly dropped the requirement for accreditation for itself and nearly all chapters have no APR requirements for leadership.
• Given the fact that a majority of the leaders of PRSA chapters, regions and the PRSA General Assembly are not accredited, it is impossible to argue that accreditation has any impact on the ability to govern. The organization is already largely governed by unaccredited PR practitioners.
• The inability of four out of five PRSA members to serve on the PRSA board regardless of their level of achievement, track record of service to the organization or interest in serving is patently unfair.
• If the real goal is to illustrate the organization’s commitment to the credential, there must be better ways to accomplish that goal than coupling accreditation and board service.

That last point is where a meaningful and productive conversation really should start, but unfortunately year after year the PRSA General Assembly gets a glossed over report on the status of the organization’s accreditation promotion efforts. Let’s hope this year it is different.

For instance, the Facebook advertising tool tells you there are 6.8 million Texans age 18 and older on Facebook,  1,216,000 are in Houston and 1,080,820 are in Dallas. If you take just the English speakers, the number of Texans goes down to 6.5 million. And then you get to “likes and interests,” where it gets really interesting. I’ve done some work for clients in pet care, so I clicked on “dogs.” There are 27,200 Texans over 18 on Facebook who are interested in dogs, 4,600 of whom are in Dallas. Add “puppies” and the number in Dallas goes up to 6,640.

So instead of creating an ad that goes out to all sorts of people who don’t care about your product or service, you could specifically target people in your town who care deeply about what you have to offer them.

Here is a great presentation from Clara Shih, author, entrepreneur and director, Social Networking Alliances and Product Strategy at Salesforce.com, speaking to a class at Stanford University on this topic. I especially appreciated the portion of the presentation that begins at 15:38 in which she describes how someone who attended an earlier talk actually created a Facebook ad specifically targeting just her that only she would be able to see.

So this afternoon I created a Facebook ad for my Media Interview Skills Training service, targeting just people in Texas who have a college degree, are over 25 and are interested in public relations. So just four screens and I was down to a marginally specific population of 4,400 people. But I feel fairly confident that these are the people who would influence the selection of a media trainer. We’ll see how that goes.

Since GoDaddy.com hosts my Web site, I was able to use a $50 credit offered by them for the test, so it is free at least to start with.

But I also wanted to check the laser like capabilities of Facebook advertising. So I created an ad targeting just the 20 people on Facebook who indicated they work at Schipul – The Web Marketing Company, which is one of my clients. The content of the ad is simple — I appreciate the Schipul team and would love it if you became a fan of my company’s Facebook page.

The ability to target the employees of a specific company is remarkable. A few additional screens would make it possible for an IT service provider to specifically target the IT decision makers of each of the companies on their list of prospects. And since the ads are applicable to that specific person or group, they are not considered spam — especially if the content is meaty.

This is very cool stuff and I strongly recommend tinkering around with it. I will let you know what I learn through my trials and anticipate helping clients think through how this can help in their marketing efforts as well.

My wife read the story and the fact that popped out was that the woman was driving a Toyota.

And that is the legacy of Toyota’s ham handed approach to crisis communication over the past six months. If a person is killed driving a Toyota now, at least a part of your brain immediately jumps to the possibility that the car could have contributed to the circumstances leading up to the accident.

How does a person get hit by a train? The accelerator gets stuck? The brakes malfunction? Was she driving a Toyota? Yes. Oh.

Nick Morgan wrote a great piece posted on the Forbes Web site, “Almost Everyone Gets PR Wrong,” in which he details why it does not make sense for a company or individual defend their former positioning once there is a drumbeat of bad news. This runs counter to human nature — we want to fix the problem and return to business as usual. But that is a losing battle.

Morgan suggests that instead companies should change their narrative. Change the way they think of themselves and tell their story. Ultimately, they must change their story because whatever problem they’ve endured has changed the way their communities think of them.

Because our brains retain stories better than any other form of information, we develop shortcuts to handle all the information we need to in the modern world. The most important shortcut is the narrative. The narrative is the quick story that has developed over a long period of time for any organization, company or important public figure. It’s the way we store and organize the information.

Toyota had been the quality car. Volvo is the safety car. BMW is the performance car. Mercedes is the luxury car. Porsche is the sports car.

Now, as it works through the recalls, Toyota appears to want to return to its positioning as the quality car. It won’t work. They need to re-imagine what it is the brand can be, but quality is not it. For many years to come, if a Toyota is involved in a mishap, the public will question whether the car contributed to the wreck. A brand can’t simultaneously be connected with quality AND suspicion.

Instead, Toyota can build upon what it is learning during this period — that it needs to be a customer-focused company. This was Saturn’s original positioning and it was incredibly powerful. But over time, Saturn was folded into the GM umbrella and lost what made it special in the mid 90s. Today, the position has been abandoned with the death of the Saturn brand. For the most part, Toyota drivers love their cars and have rallied in defense of the brand. Their positive experiences with their local dealerships handling the recall have amplified their positive feelings. There is already a community there.

Toyota will only prolong its problems if it seeks to defend its former positioning as a quality car. It must move on and embrace a new narrative. Other companies that have found themselves in similar straits have learned that taking decisive action to change propelled them on a positive course and punctuated the end of their crises.

Mike, at what point does “plausible” become likely? Plausible means conceivable, possible, it could be the case.

In fact, according to Dictionary.com,  the definition of plausible is, “Seemingly or apparently valid, likely, or acceptable; credible: a plausible excuse.” But an alternate meaning is, “Giving a deceptive impression of truth or reliability.” So does that really make you think “likely” means the same as “plausible?” I don’t think so. It goes onto say, “The person or thing that is plausible strikes the superficial judgment favorably; it may or may not be true: a plausible argument (one that cannot be verified or believed in entirely).”

I think the Star-Telegram really blew it with that lead. Hopefully, nobody read beyond the headline.

Disclosure: No client relationships, but like everyone in North Texas, I own property in the Barnett Shale.

This presentation from comScore makes the case that you shouldn’t be fixated on large audiences. For many organizations, if the video is viewed by a few DOZEN people, that may be great — if it is the right dozen people.

The webinar was presented by  Tania Yuki, comScore’s online video industry expert.

September 2009 data from the comScore Video Metrix service showed that more than 168 million U.S. Internet users watched online video during the month. Online video viewing continued to reach record levels in September with nearly 26 billion videos viewed during the month.

The title was “Dramatically Increase Productivity by Slaying the E-mail Monster,” by Michael Valentine and Lynn Coffman, the principals of Coffman Valentine & Associates.

The basic takeaway is that the typical knowledge worker (read: everyone in PR) treats e-mail differently than any other information that they deal with. When the mail comes, you might quickly look through it to see if there is a check, an invoice or something urgent that needs attention. If not, you don’t open the mail and read it all. You set it aside and deal with it later. If someone adds a file to your the inbox on your desk (okay, confession: my entire desk serves as a giant in-box), you don’t lunge to see what’s in the file and breathlessly respond to each item. You work through the inbox by prioritizing the items. Some you file while others you delegate.

For some reason, e-mail is different. We feel a compulsion to have to open them immediately and respond as if the world would end if a minute passed. And then we keep the e-mail as a memento. Okay, it isn’t just a memento — it can serve as a reminder or proof or just help us find the sender’s e-mail address. Another confession: I currently have about 3,500 e-mails in my inbox. I use my e-mail inbox as a repository of everything from good ideas to things I need to follow up on.

No more. After the Coffman Valentine session at PRSA ’09, I am now working with a different process. They teach knowledge workers the four “A”s: Axe, Act, Allocate and Assign. You need to delete the stuff that has no value (Axe), take immediate action to deal with the stuff that require just a couple minutes of time to review or respond (Act), set aside specific time to work through those items that require more than a few minutes (Allocate) and look for things that can be taken off your plate and delegated (Assign). Here is how I am using it:

1. I no longer keep my Outlook on all the time. I have two computer screens on my desktop and my standard process for years and years has been to have Outlook open on my right screen. Not anymore. I close Outlook after working through my e-mails now.

2. I process all incoming e-mails and leave my inbox empty when I’m done. I have established files for each client (duh) and move the e-mails there.

3. As an adjunct to step 2, I have established a better filing system for e-mails. If an e-mail requires action (the development of a news release or drafting of an article) I file it either in my “action” file or I drag it to my calendar to schedule a specific time block to deal with it. I did not even know this was possible. Just drag your e-mail to your calendar and a calendar box will pop up that gives you the ability to set a date and time for a reminder. That is a game changer. It is also still a work in process. I have not fully adopted this step yet.

4. I am being more careful about the outgoing e-mails I send. Coffman Valentine made a point that e-mails beget more e-mails. There is a 60% boomerang effect, which means for every 10 e-mails you send, you can expect to get six back. But consider each e-mail you send goes to four people — that means you can expect to receive 24 e-mails back for every 10 you send. Consider the other ways you can deliver your message. Heck, pick up that funny looking thing you hold to your ear — the telephone! If you reduce the e-mails you send, you will reduce the e-mails you receive. Brilliant!

5. I am being more clear and specific in the subject lines of the e-mails I send. A lot of e-mail traffic is spent clarifying or correcting poor communication. You send an e-mail and the person who gets it goes charging off in the wrong direction because they thought you were saying one thing when you really intended another. Clear and specific subject lines can prevent a lot of that back and forth.

So if you were wondering why I haven’t sent you an e-mail in a while, it is because I am trying to break my e-mail addiction. In recent days I have been curled up like a junkie shaking and sweating while wonder if I have e-mail in my in-box, but I am making strides. I am taking it one day at a time.

Alos: Henry Devries, APR, who moderated the session has posted some of the basics at the ComPRehension blog: http://comprehension.prsa.org/?p=980. They also had a CD that they were handing out that makes for a good 60-minute podcast, but I don’t see it posted anywhere online.

Images made available from Mir Hossein Mousavi’s election  campaign media operation, Ghalam News, via AP.

I have been sad today watching the events unfold in Tehran and other cities throughout Iran. I am not sad that these uprisings are happening. I am sad because I can imagine how it will end. Because those of us over the age of 20 have seen it before. When a tyranical state is challenged, it moves with swift certainty to eliminate those who threaten to undermine authority. I can’t imagine how it will be possible for the backlash against the sham elections in Iran to have a happy ending.

We can hope and send our good wishes and watch for updates. And color our Twitter avatars green and at some point surely there will be rallies of support in cities around the world.

20 years ago I was a 25 year old journalist – the news director of a Chicago-area all news-talk radio station. It was the most amazing time anyone could possibly imagine. Things that we assumed would last our entire lives were crumbling unexpectedly. The Soviet Union relinqueshed control of Eastern Europe and the people of Germany joyously climbed atop the Berlin Wall — to celebrate and to begin tearing it down. The change happened so swiftly that it was literally breathtaking at times.

But what really made those moments awe-inspiring was what had happened in June of 1989. The 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square was just a couple weeks ago.

I don’t want anyone to think I was there. I was not. But as story tellers, all journalists played a role in examining and explaining the meaning of what happened. In that respect, I did cover the events in Tiananmen Square, seeking to give it some context in between the weather, traffic and sports.

This video does a great job of explaining how events unfolded:

20 years later, China remains a superpower. It has never been more economically powerful and a good argument could be made that it has never been as politically or diplomatically powerful. As the U.S. struggles to find its place in a new world economy, China is calling more shots and flexing its diplomatic muscle like never before. I am not an expert, but from what I understand, China’s people enjoy more freedoms than in the past, but they remain under the control of single party rule. There is no free press. Dissent is not tolerated. 

There are clear similarities between the reform movement in China and the protests in Iran. Like in China, a charismatic leader is urging the young protesters on. The protesters are capitalizing on sophisticated communications techniques to disseminate images around the world. The provoked government provides just enough latitude for the leaders of the revolution to reveal themselves. At which point, swift, definitive, deadly action will be taken and it will all be squashed. Literally and figuratively.

It is a generation later. Many of the Chinese citizens who sought reform are now in the 40s. However, lacking the charismatic leaders who were killed or imprisoned for treason, they remain powerless and voiceless.

I fear for the men and women in Iran. I worry that in their urgency to act they may be helping the government rapidly dismantle a fledgling Democratic movement. If you look at the movements that brought change to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, you will see that they took a long time and blossomed from the inside out. Between Gorbachev and Yeltsin, it took nearly a decade to bring Democracy to Russia.

Can change happen more quickly? Certainly. But will that happen? No. I just hope that the impending slaughter does not set Iran’s reform movement back so far that 20 years from now — in the year 2029 — we are not wondering if Iran’s reformers will ever re-emerge.

I grabbed my camera and asked Harte to walk through what she thinks are the most important points for PR professionals to consider in this rapidly changing environment.

At this point — about five years into the social media adoption cycle — I can’t help but feel that there aren’t too many more original thoughts on the subject. The PR pros who haven’t yet emersed themselves in social media have to be making a conscious effort NOT to do so. I mean, my 78 year old Mom is now on Twitter and plays card games with gamers around the world on Yahoo when she gets a break from caring for my 102 year old Grandma. If you are behind the adoption curve from my Mom you really must be trying to not advance in PR.

So my point is that everything I just heard Beth say is fine, but I worry that it’s not pushing us forward. And it’s not just Beth — it seems to be everyone who is out there speaking to PR groups about social media. I don’t hear anyone showing those of us who have a cursory level of involvement in the space anything particularly new. It isn’t new to suggest that we need to plan and have objectives and measure results on the back end. It isn’t new to suggest we need to know who we are engaging and be authentic. Anyone who has been involved in a grassroots effort knows the importance of connecting with influencers in a genuine way.

So it starts to dawn on me that this isn’t about the technology. It’s about PR fundamentals. But I am telling you: IT IS ABOUT THE TECHNOLOGY!

If the PR community intends to annex the social media space, we can’t just say that we are social media counselors and then suggest that all the rules we’ve always followed still apply going forward. They may not. Do we really need to spin our wheels examining the tone and frequency of every blog post that mentions us? To what end? I say go ahead and engage. Just like if you overheard a conversation about your company or product on a street corner. Listen and then offer your two cents. Connect! No need to over-think it!

Of course more information is always better than less, but the constant push by PR pros to slow down the process in the name of strategy inevitably diminishes the magic that comes with embracing spontaneity. You can be strategic and spontaneous. We do it all the time in issues management and crisis response. Just because you are making decisions on the fly doesn’t mean that they aren’t rooted in strategy.

Do I really need to assess if taking a camera along for a tour of a client’s facility and posting the videos on YouTube will deliver results? It doesn’t cost anything extra. And yet, how many PR folks have a video camera in their bag? How many have a basic understanding of video editing?

If you haven’t noticed, folks, the media is US. All of us. So if you want your stories told, go ahead and tell them.

We have to constantly push forward and examine how new technologies can be used. For instance, we need to understand the emerging world of cloud computing, which some suggest will radically change the way information is generated and shared in the coming decade (disclosure: I represent Mezeo Software, developer of the Mezeo Cloud Storage Platform). We need to better understand crowdsourcing and collective problem solving.

We spend so much time obsessing about Twitter that I am certain we are completely ignoring the NEXT Twitter. Whatever the next big thing will be is probably already in use. We’re oblivious because we’re all patting each other on the back for starting a Twitter account and updating our Facebook status.

EDIT: Beth Harte has posted a great response on her blog. Just to be clear, this wasn’t intended as a critique of Beth’s presentation. It is a reflection on the PR / social media relationship.