The I’m Here To Spin You And You’re Here To Screw Me Mentality Won’t Get You Anywhere says, Charlie Rose

During the PR Summit in San Francisco Charlie Rose let his good friend and PR legend Howard Rubenstein turn the tables and interview him about his 17 years of interview experience. 

When asked about why Charlie's interviews are so revealing Charlie answered by saying that an interview is like a tennis match. It's not a QA QA, its about reading the person's response and responding appropriately. "You hit a line drive, they respond with a back hand", said Charlie. It's about engaging with them, making then feel comfortable enough to want to open up and share their story. You've got to convince them that you care and are interested. 

While Charlie Rose is known for interviewing everyone from Bill Gates to Sophia Loren, he also interviews unknowns. He is looking to interview people who can tell a story and who can bring a different experience to the table. What Charlie Rose does best is capturing the moment and that experience. 

While it can be challenging at times, I think helping our clients reveal what's unique about them and their products and helping them get their story told is one of the most satisfying parts of the job.

Howard Rubenstein asked Charlie to list two or three of his most interesting interviews and Charlie went on to list 8-10 including:

Sophia Loren (his favorite)

Rupert Murdoch

Ted Turner

Bill Gates

Warren Buffet

Bruce Springsteen

Iraqi Journalists

Bill Buckley

Here is some excellent advice that Charlie left us with for placing personalities on his show, The Charlie Rose Show. I believe that this advice can and should be applied to all pitching for all clients:

- Show them that you understand what they do and what they need

- Give them whatever it is they think will be useful

- Don't try to sell a product - try to sell authenticity

- Help them know going in why this is a good story

- Remember what the person on the other end needs and wants

Charlie Rose's last piece of advice, "Don't insult our intelligence". Just like you do with your clients, be an advisor and a consultant and offer strategic advice.

I wish there would have been more time at the end of this session for Charlie Rose to interview Howard Rubenstein. He spent the last 50 years building an amazing PR business and I could tell that Charlie, among many other top dogs in the industry, have a huge amount of respect for him. I'd love to hear his story.

Duncan Wardle Makes Disney Dreams Come True

I attended Bulldog Reporters’ PR Summit 2008 earlier this week and had the opportunity to listen to some PR visionaries, like Duncan Wardle, VP of Global PR for Disney Parks. I’ll be sharing what I learned in the other sessions over the next few days so stay tuned!

Duncan is a phenomenal speaker, with a great accent I might add, and spoke about the Future of PR, the communication revolution if you will. He started out by showing the EPIC 2014 video (Evolving Personalized Information Construct by GoogleZone) which predicts that the press as we know it will cease to exist. Check out the clip below if you haven't seen it before - it's kind of creepy to see the early predictions come true. I think the video was made in 2004.



Duncan’s message was about being authentic and using real people to start that two way dialog with your customers. We’ve all heard Duncan’s message before, it’s by no means a new concept, but how many of us our tapping into our brand evangelists and leveraging their enthusiasm for the brand? According to Duncan, the only way to reach consumers in 3-5 years will be through our evangelists. We’ll have so many tools at our disposal to filter all the content out there in order to get what we really care about that it’s going to take our brand evangelists to help us reach the people we can’t.

It's about letting go and not trying to control the message at all times. As a result of this Disney created some really great social media programs like Disney Dream Job Experience and created a panel for Moms called Moms Panel where Mom's can share their experience and give their $.02 on what they want to see at Disney Parks.

The Disney Dream Job Experience turned out to be a huge viral success, generating thousands of consumer generated videos where brand evangelists had the chance to tell Disney what their dream Disney job would be. The ‘real people’ they used to kick off their campaign were their own employees! They found that their employees were just as passionate about Disney as their fans were and this was a chance for them to show it. By the way, this was one of Duncan's favorite videos that was submitted for the program.



One of the biggest challenges that Duncan admitted to was one that we can all relate to....legal interference. Again, it's about letting go of the message - that's what social media campaigns are all about!

According to Duncan, one of the biggest contributing factors for making this campaign a success was working together with all teams, including PR, Brand, Marketing and Advertising. By working together you accomplish great things for your campaign, like working with bigger sites (yahoo) and striking bigger deals. Creating programs like these is something that our team is focused on this year with clients like Coinstar and Wizards of the Coast, and we've already seen great things come from working together with everyone at the table.