Press Urges Chief to Become Involved in Company’s Relations
by Kathy Keenan
If public relations is the voice box of an organization, the chief executive officer is the brain directing the voice. Unfortunately, many CEOs still view PR as a tactical marketing tool.
In October 1991, the Public Relations Society of America presented a panel discussion entitled, How Important Technology News Reaches the Public. The panel featured journalists from such publications as Fortune, Business Week, and The New York Times.
Over and over, these journalists repeated the same message: The CEO is critical to successful public relations. “We look to the CEO because the CEO personifies the company,” said Doug Ramsey of CNBC Business News.
During a discussion of a press event announcing the alliance between Apple and IBM Corp., Mr. Ramsey commented, “I was rather surprised at all the pictures we had coming in. We had John Sculley there, CEO of Apple, who’s generally very available to the press and quite helpful. But not John Akers of IBM. So I was wondering to myself what’s going on here? Why is this happening? What was the doing that was so important that he could not be there when the other person there was the CEO of Apple Computer? There has got to be a story there somewhere.”
David Kirkpatrick of Fortune added, “Considering they are trying to sell that alliance as significant, it was notable that [John Akers] wasn’t there.”
The press looks to the CEO’s level of involvement to gauge the importance of news, and they look to the CEO to embody the company’s mission, values and position. Although an engineering manager may be the best spokesperson on technology and the marketing vice president is best able to explain distribution strategy, when a journalist is researching a corporate story, nothing less than the CEO will do.
Given the broad range of the CEO’s responsibilities, how much involvement is enough?
“A good CEO is intimately involved with PR because he or she is the most visible ‘voice’; of a company,” said Guy Kawasaki, author, former CEO of a software company, and ex-Apple software evangelist. “A CEO who relegates this role to marketing weenies is a fool. An active CEO shows the press that the company cares and considers them important.”
Mike Boich, chairman and former CEO of Radius, Inc., concurred. He also believes the company benefits directly from a CEO’s involvement in PR because when the EO delivers the message, the company gets more attention from the press.
The CEO, Mr. Boich said, is the only person fully qualified to articulate the long-term vision of the company. “When I was the person out there telling it, I knew that the story was the one I had in mind,” he said.
The CEO should not, however, become involved at the tactical level — reviewing press releases or selecting media, Mr. Boich said. “The CEO should understand strategy and let the PR manager or the agency worry at the tactical level.”
Another reason the chief executive should become involved in public relations, according to Rich Melmon, CEO of Objective Software of Palo Alto and a former advertising agency principal, is that “the story can often be confused because it comes from multiple sources who may not be fully informed.”
Below the CEO level, Mr. Melmon said, the employees’ vision is too narrow to project a total view of the company.
The CEO should be sophisticated about PR and have a good relationship with the journalists who are knowledgeable about the firm’s business. “He should listen to his own instincts and pay little attention to the advice of PR people as to what to say or how to behave,” Mr. Melmon said.
Mr. Kawasaki had a similar view. “Some PR yo-yo told Clinton to say he had ever broken ‘U.S. law.’ Then some PR yo-yo told him to say he didn’t inhale. The only person more pathetic than the PR yo-yo is the person who listened to the advice.”
Although the CEO should not allow himself or herself to be “managed” by PR professionals, he or she should use competent public relations advisors to plan strategy, to keep a PR program going and to develop opportunities for the CEO to meet with the press. CEOs are too busy to drive the PR program.
“The broader the audience, the more it makes sense to get professional help,” Mr. Melmon said. “The more indirect the process of reaching the audience, the more professional execution counts. You have to work harder. And it’s amore complicated process.”
Mr. Kawasaki said hiring an outside PR firm is necessary when the company “is unfamiliar with the press and analyst infrastructure of an industry — entering a new market, for example.”
The PR firm’s role “ is to guide, to refine a company’s PR efforts and to open some doors,” Mr. Kawasaki said. “Too often, companies abdicate the PR function to PR firms because they ‘have the connections.’”
Mr. Kawasaki added, “If a CEO who relegates PR to marketing weenies is a fool, then the CEO who abdicates PR to a PR firm is an idiot.”
In sum, the CEO’s active and informed involvement in a company’s public relations program will result in better relations with the press, more exposure for the firm and its products and a clearer articulation of the company’s message to its audience.
The downside of the CEO’s involvement in PR is that “it takes time,” Mr. Boich said. “But it has a lot of value. You have to believe that the goal is worth the price.”