Businesses wanting to grab people's attention have two options: advertising and publicity. They are not the same.

Advertising is a commercial deal between your business and the media.

You buy a fixed amount of print space, billboards, radio or TV airtime, or web traffic. You take responsibility for providing the advertising material – called copy in the industry – at your cost.

If you've got the budget, you can hire creative specialists to prepare the copy for you. It's usually worth the cost. Advertising professionals know how to get results.

As an advertiser you are in control. You decide when and where your adverts run. You have the last say over the message.

Advertising is expensive. Publicity is often cheaper. It is also riskier.

Publicity is when you grab people's attention in other ways. If you hire a publicist, a public relations expert or a press officer, those people will attempt to place stories in the media on your behalf. They can't usually guarantee anyone will sit up and take notice.

You have far less control with publicity. It works best when you have something newsworthy or interesting to say. If it isn't interesting then the media will ignore it. And your story can be crowded out on days when there are other more interesting stories.

Editors and journalists' first responsibility is to their readers. It's not their job to sell your business. It is their job to keep readers informed and interested.

Publicity is a scattergun. It can work. It might not. Use advertising to make certain your message reaches your target audience. It acts like a guided missile and costs about as much.

For an old school journalist like me, reading Trevor Young's  8 Things I'd Do If I Was a Starting Out in PR Today¹ is like the Poms getting hold of the German's Enigma machine at the start of World War 2.

It means I know what the enemy² is thinking and can stay one step ahead – at least some of the time.

Young has written a road-map for junior public relations professionals. It should be cut out and pinned beside every agency or in-house desk. It shouldn't. That's old school thinking. It should be downloaded and stored on every PR person's iPad or smartphone.

Along the way he writes:

SIX – I would read every newspaper I could get my hands on, hang out at the newsagent and flick through as many magazines as humanly possible (without getting sprung!); read newsletters, swap radio stations, check out the array of cable TV channels on offer.

Traditional media is not going away any time soon; if you can 'join the dots' between traditional and social media, you will become a lot more valuable to your employer!

The advice applies to everyone, but journalists and PR people not reading everything in this way are in the wrong job.

¹. Trevor, the ninth thing I'd do is learn how to write headlines in Australian newspaper style, grammatically correct and without sticking capital letters on everything. Or am I out of touch and this is just old school journo thinking?

². If all PR people were as smart as Young, who cleverly brands himself online as the PR Warrior, we could drop the idea of journalists and PR people being at each others' throats all the time.

In 1997 I spent six months on a contract editing the Australian Net Guide. At the time it was owned by Ozemail.

The job was great fun and I worked with some terrific people. This story appeared in The Australian as we went to press with an issue looking at online sex. The content was far more innocent than you might imagine, but we still sealed the section – ANG was, after all, a family magazine.

Canadian public relations practitioner Dave Fleet says Twitter has moved through the Gartner Hype Cycle to the point where it will now quickly become unfashionable. In his  Five Potential Effects Of Twitter's Shift To The Trough Of Disillusionment Fleet charts the technology's progress and predicts what will happen next.

Fleet's analysis is on the money. But there's something else going on with Twitter. After a period of stability, the service is changing. Earlier this week the company altered the way users propagate messages – a process known as retweeting.

In other words, Twitter is still evolving. It will probably be a different beast by the time it resumes its progress through the later stages of the Garter Hype Cycle. Or maybe something else will replace it.

When they want to create something that looks like a grass-roots campaign, but isn’t, big companies use astroturfing.

The Drop the Rate campaign that began yesterday with support from Consumer, Tuanz and 2degrees is a classic example.

At first sight it’s aims are laudable. Lord knows we pay way over the odds for mobile phone services. The campaign aims to put pressure on Vodafone and Telecom to cut the mobile termination rate or MTR. This is the amount one phone company has to pay another when customers call between networks.

There’s no question New Zealand’s MTRs are high by international standards. That’s only part of the reason mobile phones are far more expensive to run here than in Australia – or just about anywhere else. It is also a major brake on the economy – calls that could be made, possibly should be made, are going unmade because of the high costs involved.

Yet despite it being worthy in principle, there’s something phony (or should that be phoney?) about the Drop the Rate campaign.

For a start, there’s an expensive PR company behind it.

Who is paying Matthew Hooton’s fee? Good on him for getting the job, but you can be sure Exceltium isn’t collecting money from cake stands and sausage sizzles for this work.

Second, 2degrees doesn’t want to talk about the MTRs it pays to Vodafone and Telecom and has gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure grass roots, that’s real grass, not astroturf, New Zealanders don’t get to know the rate.

Of course no-one can blame 2degrees for taking part in this kind of stunt. Telecom and Vodafone play hardball. And both are less than snow-white in their marketing and political lobbying.

Campaign gets wide media coverage

Hooton certainly proved his PR skills. The Kiwi specialist press was full of the story. At The National Business Review Chris Keall expressed some weariness about the campaign in 2degrees again a little sneaky on MTRs at the National Business Review. The story got a good run in the New Zealand Herald and the Dominion Post.

At Computerworld Rob O’Neill seems more willing to take the campaign at face value. His Drop the rate mate' campaign targets MTRs offers no comment. Paul Clearwater at The Line reports that Vodafone disputes the information on the campaign’s web site in 'Drop the rate mate' campaign begins.

Update: Computerworld reports on Hooton’s attack on Telecom and Vodafone in Mobile termination row goes nuclear. The story finishes;

Hooton has words for Telecom, too, as the MTR debate goes white hot.
"Telecom now seems to be saying that it needs to rip off mobile consumers in order to fund more investment in the industry," he said. "Good luck to Telecom arguing that a cosy duopoly leads to more investment in services and coverage than a more competitive environment."

My opinion: Hooton proves he is a worthy campaigner against the arrogance of Telecom and Vodafone – clearly he was the right man for the campaign. Despite this, I’m still not comfortable with the astroturfing.

Australian tech journalist Renai LeMay says Twitter is journalism. He's right but only up to a point.

LeMay writes;

Journalists are not simply using Twitter to promote their own work and get news tips. This is nowhere near to being the whole truth. In fact, audiences are using Twitter as a powerful tool to engage with journalists directly and force a renewal of journalism and media along lines that audiences have long demanded.

Well some are.

I follow Australian and New Zealand journalists on Twitter. I'd say only 40 percent of journalists are using Twitter in the way LeMay suggests.

Some use it to promote their stories. They aren't joining the conversation, they use Twitter as a broadcast medium. I suspect, but can not prove, this usually is because of dumb managerial restrictions on their use of the technology. A small percentage dabble in engagement, going on and off-line depending on their workload (I'm guilty of switching off Twitter when there's a looming deadline and a huge number of words to write).

The rest are still in the dull "morning tweeps" and "I had muesli for breakfast" or the more disturbing narcissistic school of Twittering.

via Twitter’s impact on media and journalism « Renai LeMay.

Journalist Simon Sharwood aimed this advice at public relations people, but the same basic principles apply to anyone new to Twitter.

Basic rules are don’t be selfish, don’t be evil.

Post 7, 2009. Twitter Do’s and Don’ts for PRs « JargonMaster

Companies need to keep communication channels open so:

• investors,
• business partners,
• employees and
• customers

stay informed.

You might think  because you are a knowledge worker, your job puts you in a back room role where you don’t need to worry about communications. You may work for a company that thinks it has watertight external communications strategies.

Spokesperson

Even if your employer has access to the brightest and best communications experts, you may still find yourself acting as spokesperson.

In fact, if your employer uses the best communications experts, you are more likely to find yourself in the media front line.

That’s because experienced journalists see through the platitudes and feel-good nonsense spouted by corporate spin-doctors. Although they may not immediately be able to dig deep enough to find the real story behind a smokescreen, they know what a smokescreen smells like.

Putting genuine, but trained and fully briefed, voices in front of the media works to a company's advantage.

You might  be forced to speak to the media even if your employer prefers you to stay in the background. This means that being able to articulate a company's position is a key skill.

Crisis management

Dealing with communications when things go wrong is crisis management. Smart firms put crisis management plans in place long before any anticipated problems, this saves valuable time when troubles appear.

Developing a crisis management plan is best left for another time. The key elements are establishing lines of communications and putting people in place who can articulate a company’s point of view to the media.

Of course, it's a good idea to give all senior managers media training.

Let's assume you don’t have media training, there are no well-developed lines of communications and you know nothing of any crisis management plans. Things have gone badly wrong and you are in the thick of it.

What should you do if a journalist quizzes you about a potentially damaging news story?

Good stories, not good news

Before we go any further, I must declare a personal interest. I am a journalist, I cover technology companies, I write news. I like to write good stories.

Good doesn't necessarily mean positive. The news media likes stories with reader interest – from your point of view that might be anything but good.

I prefer to go straight to the most obvious news source – the man or woman in the department dealing with the matter – and ask direct questions. The idea isn’t to catch someone out or make someone look stupid – my goal is to get to the bottom of the story and find facts.

Most employers expect employees to take one of two courses of action at this point. They might prefer it if the employee said nothing, refusing to speak and blocking all questions. Or they might expect an employee to tell outright lies.

Both courses of action are equally damaging, both to the company and to the employee.

Telling lies is dumb

Aside from any ethical considerations, telling lies is just plain stupid.

Sooner or later the truth will emerge and you will be on the record as a liar. Your employer won't look any better.

You may get away with this. A future employer will not know, not care or even be impressed you lied to cover your previous employer’s backside. Maybe.

Other people will remember your lies. And that will harm your reputation over the long-term, maybe even your business.

At any point a rival might remember those lies and make them public. Your lie might be legally actionable.

On the other hand, if you block a question, it can make things sound worse than they are.

It might  mean you or your employer don’t get an opportunity to put the record straight.

There are worse possibilities.

Suppose you were to read in a newspaper, 'company X refused to comment on claims that it was trading while bankrupt'? What does this make you think about the company?

In my experience I’ve come up against more advanced forms of blocking, but they all amount to the same thing.  'The executive responsible for the exploding television monitors could not be contacted yesterday' doesn’t sound innocent.

So what should you do when the media calls?

Rules number one, two and three are do not tell lies.

Don't even consider it. It is better to say nothing.

If you don't want to answer questions or are not authorised to speak, find someone else who can.

There's nothing wrong with telling a journalist that you aren’t able to help with enquiries but your immediate boss can.

There's also nothing wrong with telling a journalist that you, or whoever can speak, is busy but will call back shortly – when you do this, calling back quickly is important. This approach can buy you time to think about exactly what to say, take a deep breath and calm those nerves.

You might even want to take advice from a communications professional.