To learn something about how public relations works, take a look at a new technology designed to help it work better.
"This software allows us to... digest massive quantities of news content faster, and with a consistency that has previously been unavailable," says Mark Weiner.
Weiner is vice president of the research unit of Medialink, which introduced its news-processing service InfoTrend on Thursday.
InfoTrend pores over news coverage, looking for pre-programmed keywords, such as product brand names and adjectives like "polluting" or "comfortable." Next, the software analyzes the gist of the story, tallying up the positive and negative perceptions. It converts the results into a report on the success or failure of a given corporate campaign.
"A bank asked us to track the emergence of privacy issues over last five years -- privacy at home, banking privacy, privacy over the Net," Weiner says.
"It was wide-ranging. They wanted it done in three weeks. Ordinarily, that would have taken us months. But we are able to complete in 10 days and process thousands and thousands of articles in doing so."
The key takeaway for the PR industry: more efficient monitoring of, and reaction to, press reports, according to Weiner. "Knowing what was reported is one thing. But knowing why and what you can do about it is [InfoTrend's] value-add."
It's the very suggestion that PR can influence press coverage that concerns some industry critics. What's good for PR is bad for journalism, including technological efficiency.
"This is an example of the increasing power and ability of professional propagandists -- PR practioners -- to manage and control the content of news and journalism," says John Stauber, editor of the newsletter PR Watch. "Journalism is for many reasons in decline, and the content of journalism is to an ever-greater degree managed public relations material. This technology furthers that unfortunate trend."
Kalle Lasn edits Adbusters magazine, which organizes "culture-jamming" efforts in the name of environmental and other causes. He says he is frequently in a war of messages in which the corporate PR machine has a potent advantage.
Lasn described his own efforts to spin the media into using a term such as "ecosystem-killer" to describe the auto industry. He suggests that, were InfoTrend to pick up too many instances of the term, Detroit's PR agencies would likely launch a counterattack.
"I guess that's the sort of cat and mouse game we're playing."
InfoTrend isn't the first instance of the PR industry turning to tech. The business usually analyzes media coverage of an issue with keyword searches of periodical databases, such as those available through Lexis-Nexis. But InfoTrend doesn't just find stories, it judges them.
Medialink works with its clients to teach InfoTrend what represents positive and negative company press. InfoTrend then churns through reams of press clippings and broadcast transcripts to convey the state of a company's image through charts and graphs.
Medialink's Weiner and others say the process represents companies working to ensure their side of a story gets told. Technology that helps that goal, they say, simply means better communication.
Nancy Bavec, assistant vice president of media relations for GTE, explains the process of media analysis with an example. "The Internet is a hot media topic.... So we look at our media analysis to see what 'voice share' is getting out on [GTE] being a top-peer data company."
If GTE comes up No. 2 behind AT&T, the company will craft a media strategy intended to boost its profile, Bavec says. "We would work hard to find story angles to pitch to major news media. We would probably increase the frequency with which we do background briefings with key reporters."
If the strategy is successful, Bavec says, when a story gets written about the Internet, GTE will be "top of mind."
PR Watch's Stauber insists that InfoTrend only boosts the disproportionate power of an industry assigned with such Machiavellian tasks as spinning the image of sewage, or sludge.
Stauber co-authored a book Toxic Sludge is Good for You, which documents the PR effort to get media to focus on the advantages of toxic sludge as a food fertilizer.
The PR-intensive technology industry has its own examples.
In April, Microsoft was embarrassed to find its own media-manipulation campaign exposed by the Los Angeles Times. The scheme aimed to generate a show of public support for the company amid the brewing federal and state antitrust lawsuits.
The plan called for articles, letters to the editor, and opinion pieces that would be drafted by Microsoft spin doctors, but presented as glowing testimonials from local businesspeople.
When the ploy broke, Microsoft officials first denied -- then copped to -- the plan.
One PR professional who asked not to be identified detailed techniques that use the media to pressure other companies into making deals before they're ready.
Companies will use their PR spokespeople to prematurely leak pending deals, she says. The flood of press coverage pushes the second company back on its heels and may force it to sign before it has sorted out agreeable terms.
Similarly, she pointed out how companies will leak joint announcements before agreed upon dates. The company that leaks the message stands the best chance of getting premium play in the resulting coverage.
But such Machiavellian schemes make for bad PR, GTE's Bavec says.
"When it works well, good PR and good journalism work side by side," she says. "It's not so much manipulation as conveying more the reality of what's going on."
To Adbusters' Lasn, InfoTrend is nonetheless another cannon for an overwhelmingly potent corporate voice. "The strategic molding of the public agenda is by far the most important aspect of this."
But the idea that companies can steer the media dialogue couldn't be further from the truth, Bavec says. In fact, she says, research is proving consumer purchase habits are less and less affected by news.
As media outlets proliferate and grow more specialized, the press grows increasingly Balkanized, she says.
"There is no one dominant source of media anymore in this country. A newscast is probably going to be seen by relatively few people. A lot of people are starting to migrate more to the Internet."
"People are not seeking out a lot of news and when they do they're seeking it in a lot of different places."
Medialink's Weiner says that if public relations can be used to spread misinformation, the reverse is true too.
"I don't focus on the dark side.... There are lots of tools that can be used for good or evil."
