HARLAND W. WARNER, President, Public Relations Society of America : Spinning Gold : Public Relations Emerges as a Powerful Corporate Tool

Just a few years ago, all that was needed to work in public relations was a good Rolodex and a knack for writing corporate brochures.

Today, the profession is evolving to encompass the more sophisticated ability to research a customer’s future or that of an industry. That so-called issues-based public relations could become a powerful corporate tool as practitioners take the lead in creating stories for media that are growing more fragmented and explanatory.

Harland W. Warner, president of the national Public Relations Society of America, visited Orange County this week to address the local chapter. He is director of crisis management and executive vice president of Manning Selvage & Lee, a public relations agency based in Washington.

Warner began his career as a journalist, working for the now-defunct Hartford (Conn.) Times for 14 years. After that, he moved to Corning, N.Y., to become public directions director for Corning Glass Works. He has worked in the Washington area for 12 years.

In an interview, Warner spoke with Times staff writer Anne Michaud about trends in his industry.

How is your field changing?

We were seen for a long time as being publicists. Basically, we were seen as doing strictly media relations or maybe special events and things of that sort.

Now I tell students that, at this point, that is the tip of the iceberg. Those are the tactics, the things that people know we do--news releases, press conferences, special events, newsletters, annual reports.

But below the surface is counseling that we give to management on emerging issues, on crisis planning, on issue management, on research analysis, on constituency relations, on conflict resolution. I feel that we are now, in a lot of cases, the reputation managers in an organization.

More and more, PR people are showing up at the management table. (Trade journal) Public Relations News a few months ago had the results of a survey that showed that 33% of public relations people today are counseling the CEO of their organization. That’s a big change. I would’ve said when I came into the profession very, very few of us were reporting at that level or getting into the position where we were really listened to at that level.

What happened to change that?

When I went to Corning as a publicist, I was supposed to promote Corning Ware and Pyrex ware and make everybody want to buy it. All of a sudden, Ralph Nader appeared on the scene, and we were in the consumer era.

I remember that a futurist at the time identified all the issues that grew out of the consumer movement, and there were over 2,000 individual issues. Well, we now have the environmental movement, which probably has more than 2,000 issues, and then we’ve got health care. The discipline that helps an organization identify those emerging issues is a discipline that’s going to be very important. And to me that’s the role of public relations.

There is talk within the news media about how we’re becoming no longer “mass” media but are breaking up into smaller fragments. Consumers will be choosing which news reaches them, many predict, not too long from now. How does that affect public relations?

One of the things that we’re finding is that media people are changing jobs. For years, when I was a journalist, I was dealing with the same people, it seemed. They either liked me or didn’t like me, whatever. But today, we don’t have that long-term relationship with very many people.

This is different because you’re always having to sell yourself and your credibility to a new person. If you’ve dealt with me two or three times, you get the feeling that you can trust me or not. Assuming you can trust me, we begin to develop a relationship where we can discuss in-depth, meaningful issues. It benefits the client, but it also benefits the media covering that business.

We are going to see that time where you’re going to be able to package the different sections of a newspaper, for example, so the people next door can get one thing and you can get something else. It is happening. It’s going to change the way we have to deal with the media.

There are so many directions, and we can’t be in all those places. So we’re going to have to identify which media are going to be of greatest importance to our organization. Then we have to build the relationships there. I think there’s going to be a lot more focusing in the future.

How is your field being affected by the recession?

We’re seeing more and more niche public relations. A person is downsized in a corporation, out of a job. This person is an expert, let’s say, in investor relations. So what does he or she set up? They set up an investor relations firm. It’s a niche firm; that’s all they deal with.

A company looks out and says, ‘We need investor relations services. Why not hire this firm? They’re not going to be trying to sell us products in other areas.’ For example, you hire my firm, and if we can get our foot in the door on investor relations, we probably are going to say, ‘Gee, they also need marketing help, and they need help with employee relations.’ We’re trying to have a bigger piece of the pie.

Another thing we’re seeing is everybody talks about downsizing the public relations function in a company. Then I look, and I find that the people who were doing employee relations are still there, but they’re in human resources. The people who were doing investor relations are now in finance. The people who were doing product publicity are now in marketing.

Our first reaction was, “Oh, boy, that’s not good for us.” My reaction now is that probably it is good for us. We have never been able to sell ourselves throughout the corporation. Now suddenly we’ll be in those departments, and they’re going to begin to see the value in what we do. We’ll have that closeness that breeds understanding.

Do you think starting out in newspapers is good for young public relations professionals?

It certainly was in my day. I think we’re asking a lot more from public relations people now. Journalism may have done it before, but now we’ve got many public relations people coming out of schools of mass communications, behavioral sciences and business schools.

My own daughter wanted to go into public relations, and I advised her to go into business administration and take a minor in public relations. So much of what we do requires an understanding of business, how to work with the business structure, so I feel that it’s very important.

You still need, however, the writing skills you get in journalism. Everything is reduced at some point to a piece of paper, and when it is, those who write well are the ones who are going to make it.

How strong a trend is issues management?

I do almost all issue work. Now, of course, I’m in Washington, and that’s probably not a very good place to judge by. But (Wednesday) I was in Sacramento, and you have a slew of lobbyists and public relations people there who are dealing with issues.

We’re far more issue-oriented than we were 10 or 15 years ago.

What is issues management?

Well, we often wait too long to deal with an emerging issue. I have a chart in my office that says an issue develops over five to 10 years.

When it’s first seeded, let’s say a public interest group seeds a concept, and the media says, “Hey, that’s new.” They publish something about it, and a group develops around it. That’s the period when the company, the organization that’s going to be faced with that issue, can kind of shape the issue. In other words, you’ve still got a chance then to get into the issue and to shape it.

But most companies say, “We don’t want to get near that.” Then it develops into a legislative issue. A survey is done. All of a sudden, this thing takes a shape of its own, and you end up not being able to shape it; you end up fighting it. So business always comes off as being defensive.

I’m saying you get into issues at the beginning. That way you begin to shape the issues. You have the constituency relationships with the public interest groups.

We in business used to avoid public interest groups. That’s not happening. Now more and more companies are saying, “We have to know the public interest groups, we have to know what they’re thinking, what to expect from them, what are the issues that are going to come forward.” It’s changing the way we do business, and it’s going to change the way they do business.

Can you give an example of when an issue has been managed successfully?

At Corning, during the consumer era, companies didn’t meet with Consumer Federation of America or the Consumer League or groups like that. We did.

One of the things I did at Corning to make that change happen was that we had seven or eight home economists who traveled around the country. They’d come into a newspaper and they’d see the food editor, and they’d tell how to cook in our Corning Ware products.

Well, these food editors were talking about food safety, about warrantees, they were talking about issues that had to do with the movement.

So I proceeded to move the home economists into different types of jobs and brought in consumer information specialists who were actually out of the school of human ecology out at Cornell (University). These were young people who understood consumer issues, and we had them out on the road talking to editors about what they really wanted to talk about.

Your specialty is crisis management. What are your guiding principles in that area?

I simplify it down to, number one, you’ve got to have the authority. And having the authority means having a crisis plan. If the CEO’s halfway around the world, nobody else dares to make a big decision, so you’ve got to have something that allows somebody else within the company to make a decision.

Next, make a crisis plan simple. You don’t have time to go through a volume, you’ve got to have rules of thumb you can follow.

You also need a crisis team. You need a group of people who talk frequently about scenarios. When they see another company having problems, they could talk about how it applies to their company so that they become a working team. Then they’ve already begun working together, they know what to expect from each other, they know what strengths each one has.

Having a crisis plan and a crisis team, the third thing is to have a spokesperson. (In one recent case in which hospital patients were infected with hepatitis by blood transfusions), we had a hospital administrator who wasn’t there when the crisis occurred. He was going to be talking to the media saying, “My staff tells me. . . . “

I didn’t think that was going to be particularly effective. I knew that their PR director had a very high standing with the media, plus I had seen him on television before, and I knew he could handle the situation. Also, he had two years of medical school, and I knew he could talk the medical language. So we decided to go with him, and he was perfect.

Now, nine times out of 10, I would say you don’t want to put the PR person up there. But you choose by the situation: Who is going to be the most credible in this particular case?

Can you give an example of a company that handled a crisis well?

We could talk about what just happened with Pepsi-Cola (and the hypodermic needles reportedly discovered in soda cans).

They had a lot of choices of things they could’ve done in that first couple of days. They didn’t deny that they were responsible until the public saw that roll of tape. That made the public comfortable that there was no way (tampering) could’ve happened inside the plant.

You don’t try to shift the blame, you don’t try to deny anything. But you come forward and talk about how you’re working on it until you can put together a package like Pepsi finally did. They had the CEO go on with videotape that virtually turned everybody’s opinion around.

How about when a crisis was handled badly?

So many organizations get themselves in trouble by denying, stonewalling, saying nothing. If you recall the Three Mile Island incident, there was a case when the company decided right off that it wasn’t going to say anything.

Then, by the time the company got around to saying something, the federal government, the state government, the local government and a lot of public interest groups already were on the record. The company was not believed.