Recession PR

Loretta has cut back on trips to the hairdresser due to our 2009 recession spending plan.  Check out her Facebook page (or the pic at the bottom of this post) to see if her new style looks like Barry Gibb of the 70’s Bee Gee’s fame.  Oddly, I recall being at a disco in Honduras in 1980 and the crowd going wild when the DJ spinned a Bee Gee’s song.  Sorry, that’s the kind of useless tangent that gives blogging a bad reputation.

We might be in a recession, though who knows what the economists will say months from now.  I am routinely hearing of layoffs among friends and acquaintances.  And yet anxious customers are still lining up before Best Buy opens its doors in the hopes of snagging a sold-out wii gaming system.  Is it a depression?  An implosion?  A head game?

In the midst of downsizing, Recession PR is in full swing.  That means fewer marketing dollars and more “earned media”. It’s a critical time to re-do a communications strategy.  One good way to deal with reduced budgets and increased expectations among communications staff is to max out technology.  I just finished refresher training with a database subscription service that tracks all of Camino’s media, our media relationships, and the market value of our results.  I have automated systems that tell me when an issue is emerging, what’s happening with opponents of my issue, and what scheduled events the media is planning to cover related to my clients.  All this technology means that staff can focus on proactive and creative work.

I’m about to interview candidates for a staff position that includes “research” so that all this technology can be meaningful.  Way back when the Bee Gee’s were sexy, research meant mastering things like the Dewey Decimal System.  Now research is all about using Boolean logic. Melvin Dewey was barely a teenager when George Boole died, but his work predated Boole’s impact on information searching.  Dewey created the organization system over 100 years ago for a university library and this basic system became, and remains, the theoretical framework for library organization.  Anti-Semitism and sexism mar Dewey’s place in history, and his legacy is threatened by the fact that an alarming number of public schools can’t afford books anymore.

I’ve rarely sent a researcher to the library; today the Internet rules, and for that I need to hire people who get the logic of Boolean.  I need mathematically inclined research staff more than I need organization-inclined staff.  Instead of a hierarchical system,  Boolean  uses a mathematical approach to narrow the search.  Words like AND, OR, NOT, NEAR are the soul of Boolean logic.  For example, my daily apartment search looks something like: apartment AND Manhattan AND 2 bedrooms NOT walkup.

History remembers Boole kindly as a brilliant mathematician, and a modest man inspired by literature and philosophy.  Words and logic together were his poetry.  He said:

“No matter how correct a mathematical theorem may appear to be, one ought never be satisfied that there was not something imperfect about it until it also gives the impression of being beautiful.”

Below is Loretta’s recession PR hairstyle, compared to the coifed Barry Gibbs at the height of his career.  You be the judge — look alike?

The Rubric Resume

Here is the best quote from the nearly 600 résumé’s I’ve received for a part-time position at Camino PR: “I have never been particularly interested in working with a PR firm…”

I posted the job on Craig’slist late Friday, and by Saturday my inbox was bursting. We already had a few candidates who responded to our website listing, like a Doula whose positive ch’i leaps off her resume like perfumed stationary. I plan to invite the Doula to interview. There was also a wonderful activist who had taught capoera to homeless children in Africa. But we thought we ought to create a broader candidate pool, particularly of communications professionals. I toyed with the idea of paying for a listing in PR Week, but decided instead to use recession recruitment tools: Craigslist, and the NYU job board.

A small firm simply can’t look at 600 résumé’s. On Saturday afternoon, after I quoted aloud from the first 80 emails while browsing résumé’s at the kitchen counter, Winnie threatened to come in and do the job herself. I’m not sure if she meant that she would sift through applicants or if she would actually be our project assistant. She would be fantastic at organizing our office. She is the kind of chef (and I mean chef, not just cook) who simultaneously finishes preparing an organic and healthy dinner and has all of the dishes clean before I’ve even set the table. In my defense, it is often difficult to find the matches so I can light the candles. I have never once seen her not make the bed the second she leaves it, and more than once she has even made the bed while I am still lounging in it (“So when you get up its already done,” she says). I am a thousand percent certain that we would never have lost the plug to the monitor or knocked the fax machine off its wobbly shelf if Winnie were in charge.

One thing I am quite certain of is that my occasional office junk food junkets would end the minute Winnie joined our staff, so I kept pouring through applicant emails. Soon I found myself looking for tedious reasons to like or dislike an applicant. If their email address name sounded silly, I worried. If they seemed to have a long commute, I wondered if they would last long. I loved the applicants who had checked out my website, I got angry at those who obviously did not.

My son interrupted my résumé surfing with a homework question related to the “rubric” for his book report assignment. It occurred to me then that the rubric résumé approach was the best way to engage the issue, both from the perspective of the job seeker and the employer. For those of you who have been out of middle school a long time, a “rubric” is a chart that details the requirements of the project and grades each category of the rubric. I took a look at the job advertisement, and chose four things that were critical, ranked in priority. Then I made four piles: one, people with no match; two, people matching the top criteria, three, people matching the second criteria, etc. I also created a wildcard pile for people like the Doula – someone that I had a gut reaction to even if their skill set didn’t match up perfectly.

I still had the time consuming task, however, of actually opening each email and glancing at the résumé. Here’s what I learned, from a job seeker perspective:

Number one (and this is huge): Make the subject line count. Almost every subject line was the same, “Project Assistant Position”. Email number 455 wrote “Amazing Project Assistant Position”. I looked at his application out of order. He turns out to be a communications pro, and someone I will definitely call about an interview.

Number two: Tell me what you will do for me based on what I’ve asked for. Don’t lead with what I will do for you.

Number three: Write well. Use full sentences and old-fashioned good grammar.

Number four: Sell me on your candidacy in the first paragraph of your cover letter AND in the first paragraph of your email. Simply writing “Attached is my resume” is a huge wasted opportunity to stand out. If I don’t believe in you by the fourth sentence, I’m not reading further.

Number five: Both attach your resume and copy it in the email. That saves me time.

Number six: Do some research – at minimum, check out the employer’s website.

Here’s what I learned, from an employer perspective:

I should have paid the money for a targeted ad – perhaps a combination of PR Week and Non Profit Times. The price tag seemed high for a small firm, but my time is billable by the hour, and Craigslist turned out to be a very pricey way for me to get the job done. I assume that using PR Week would have limited the candidate pool to those who are serious enough about communications work that they are engaging trade magazines. I might have eliminated the hundreds of people recently laid off from the financial sector.

It is tough to get a job in this marketplace. I have Ivy League graduates, distinguished authors, and seasoned researchers interested in this entry-level position. The hard truth is that everyone needs to figure out how to market him or herself. Public relations isn’t just for celebrities or snack food vendors. Just ask applicant number 455, whose head bobbed above the hundreds of hopeful emails. These days interactive or other forms of advanced resumes, clever outreach, and storytelling are vital for highly successful job searches and school applications.

Bailout confusion

“Hey M,
I didn’t take economics or finance in college, huge mistake. What’s going on? I can’t keep it all straight. Should we be doing this bailout? Are my hedge fund office neighbors about to go out of business? What’s the deal for poor and middle income people — is it all about to go to hell? PLEASE explain as tho I am in middle school. Hope you and J are riding this out without too many bumps. I have been too afraid to call and find out what’s happened to my retirement account.
Miss you,
E

PS – Want to have dinner when I’m in town next month? Somewhere cheap?”

Despite decades of doing advocacy work on issues like poverty, I am deeply confused about how the money machine in our country actually churns. I didn’t realize I was so confused until NPR started unveiling the shenanigans that many people engaged to make a quick buck. The easy piece of the puzzle is to point at Bush, but digging deeper, every day I am learning about new fiscal zigs and zags over recent years that should have sparked millions of advocacy email alerts firing through virtual space. Now that we’re in the kind of mess that can’t be disguised or ignored, the messages in the media are hard to sort out: conservatives like William Kristol are deeply skeptical about the buyout plan, the Presidential candidates are weaving and bobbing, and progressives like Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank are behind a massive bailout with a pinch of pork barrel sprinkled on top.

In search of the unvarnished truth, I sent an email to one of my college friends, M, who is such a finance whiz that she and her husband retired years ago. M was the first woman on the floor of the Pacific Stock exchange not long after we finished college. She used to trudge to work in the pitch dark at 4:30 AM and then start calling to see if I wanted to go to happy hour mid afternoon when Wall Street closed up. We would be chatting on the phone and then suddenly she’d hang up, mid-sentence. “No time to say goodbye” she would later explain, unapologetically. That’s what I know about the stock market. It’s so important and chaotic that microseconds matter.

“Dear E,
I’m confused too, but hoping for the best — trying out the Pollyanna approach. Would love to see you in SF. Where are you staying? Will give you Econ 101 then with lots of wine!
Love you
M”

As I suspected, the prevailing public message from the entire disaster is confusion. It’s a well-researched phenomenon that when a situation appears to be too entrenched or overwhelming, the public has a harder time engaging a solution. Show a picture of millions of starving people and donors think, what good can my small contribution do? Show a picture of a single starving child and the donor thinks, I can help.

M used to take me to the kind of bars where stock exchange people gathered. By the time I arrived, like 5:30, happy hour would have been in full swing for some time. She once introduced me at the bar to the ABC Radio reporter who covered the stock exchange. His voice swaggered and his endearing term for everyone was “you old f—-er.” As soon as M spotted me across the crowd he boomed, “Finally she’s arrived! Come here E and buy me a beer, you old f—er.” By 7:00 he got off his bar stool, stumbled once, and then collapsed drunk on the floor. That is my enduring image of the stock market: swaggering, powerful, and then in a split second laying immobile and drunk on the dirty bar floor.

Failing the fat test

This past weekend, while sitting at a small dinner party sipping a glass of Malbec wine, the legs on my plastic chair broke and flipped me backwards onto the floor. I careened into the wine bar head-first and shards of plastic chair legs flew into the living room. Perhaps the weight limitations of the plastic seating were not suitable for dinner parties. But…

This morning I dropped the kids off early at school and went to my new gym to conduct a fitness evaluation with their most senior trainer. Too much fat, not enough muscle was the diagnosis. My evaluator was seven months pregnant but looked more fit than I have ever been at any age. “I look more pregnant than you do” I couldn’t help remarking as she was pinching my abdominal fat, “and it’s been 11 years since I had my youngest kid.” My back is crooked which creates waistline chaos, so I encouraged her to measure the pinch of fat on my thin side. The fatty results were the same.

As if it would comfort me, she tried pinching her own waist and said, “I’m all muscle.” She explained that New Yorkers imagine ourselves as thin and fashionable, but physically maybe not so much. Her theory is that we drink wine like Europeans, eat super fatty street food, and mistakenly believe that climbing all those subway stairs keeps us fit. She said that when she asks a New Yorker if they had to choose between the wine and losing ten pounds, they are likely to choose the wine.

It is wildly depressing that my family has used precious Manhattan apartment square footage for an elliptical machine for three years and yet I failed the Equinox fat test.

September is Go Healthy Month, sponsored by the Alliance for a Healthier Generation. Their aim is to make living healthy the norm for kids. They are investing in a youth movement around health, but a big part of that movement is getting adults on board with healthy food and exercise. In fact the Equinox evaluator started our evaluation by asking me about my childhood fitness footprint. Meaning, what had my body absorbed about fitness as a child? She was encouraged that I grew up in an athletically-inclined household and seemed genuinely pleased that I was undefeated on my high school tennis team, even if I was only ranked number three.

Kudos to the The Alliance for a Healthier Generation for investing in a nationwide childhood fitness footprint. The Alliance is using online and offline strategies, including computer games that kids can play like exploring the “cave of nutrition.”

My middle school niece, Desiree Leyva, sits on the national youth advisory board of the Alliance. Her and other board members consistently point to the prevalence of junk food as a top challenge for kids who are trying to live healthier. She did her first media interview for a Spanish language paper where I mistakenly read that she was concerned about everyone “eating fast.” I re-read the paragraph with sharper Spanish translation skills and understood that she was concerned about “fast food.” That seems to be the number one response when you ask kids about their personal challenge when it comes to fitness and health – the lure and omnipresence of fast food.

Last year I was at a branding presentation by Nickelodeon where their marketing executives were patting themselves on the back for their new programming which encourages kids to exercise and eat well. A marketing executive from Subway complained that they had been trying, unsuccessfully, to become a Nickelodeon fitness partner because Subway was being very proactive about healthy kids meals, but Nickelodeon was partnering with fast food chains like McDonald’s instead. The frustration had a lot of merit – if you line up a McDonald’s happy meal against a Subway Kids meal, the calorie counts are wildly different. The Nickelodeon rep grimaced and said that their partners had everything to do with ad budgets, not calorie counts.

As for my fat ratio, Equinox is pretty sure that I can make things right again if I do what they suggest for six weeks. And that includes continuing to sip glasses of Malbec. I’ll report back in late October.