You love reading about their campaigns in all the major media. You aspire to their level of PR sophistication. Although you realize that their world is harsh, unforgiving and demanding, you somehow covet their klieg lights and glory and believe that this is where the real PR action is.
Well, step right up, tech PR folks. Now you too can learn about PR political style, and can adapt all their tools and techniques to your next tech PR campaign. In one easy lesson I will teach you how to:
- Trick out your war room so that is has feeds and displays that rival CES and intelligence that is the envy of the CIA
- Craft position papers and conduct opposition research
- Leak with the best of them and go on deep background
- Drive the other side crazy with astroturf campaigns and dirty tricks
- Develop enemies lists
- Plant negative stories
- Hobnob with the power brokers and elite
- Dodge fire at press briefings and arrange photo opps
- Spew lines like "They're killing us in Detroit. We need to rally our base and get you on Larry King, stat!" with aplomb
All kidding aside, I do hold a kind of bizarre fascination for political PR, which stems from my addiction to news and passion for politics. I somehow wound up in tech PR, which kind of makes sense considering I studied and worked in tech previously.
It is an ambivalent feeling. On the one hand I do think that many in political PR are on the cutting edge of our craft. Then again, it seems to be take no prisoners, cutthroat PR. You can gather this from reading about the results of their campaigns and inferring what is going on behind the scenes. Sometimes articles lay out PR tactics in gory detail. Also, I had first-hand experience: the Obama campaign hired away one of our top guys last year for a "once in a lifetime opportunity" that amounted to a four month gig. They insisted he decide and start immediately, and we were screwed out of the customary two week notice (hi Ben!)
There's a practice in business called benchmarking, in which managers study practices in diverse industries outside their own to see what they can learn. Is it possible that the world of tech PR can learn something from political PR?
We can start exploring this question by examining the topic of astroturfing, the practice of contriving grass roots campaigns. I saw an Op Ed piece in the NY Times which defended the practice and suggested that it is not all that different from plain old political organizing (actually, reading this gave me the idea for this post).
Food for thought? Or is the idea of co-opting political PR tactics for tech PR not a good one?
