His government is run along command and control lines (read Cameron Stewart’s interesting piece in last Saturday’s Australian magazine).

His media strategy is a campaign strategy.

Win the day, stay in front.  Make your opponent the issue. Control the message. Make no mistakes.

This is the goldfish in a bowl approach. Every day is new day, every week is anew week.

It works for politics, it’s hopeless for government.

Government is about implementation, not just rhetoric and across-the-despatch box abuse.

The ETS (emissions trading scheme) is the focal point of Rudd’s first term as prime minister.

It’s the self-designated ‘big test’ for the Rudd Government.

It’s a sleeper, potentially much bigger than the current fuss over asylum seekers.

It is, according to government rhetoric, the biggest single economic reform ever.

Bigger than the GST.

Very few people know how it will work and if it will achieve anything.

It sounds like something straight out of the Enron playbook.

A new round of financial trickery much like the stuff that just brought the world economy close to the precipice.

Environmentalists think it is a cop out. Too many compromises with too many big polluters.

The right, Alan Jones and the rest, are screaming about ‘world government’ and ‘loss of sovereignty’.

Increasing numbers of voters are buying the Opposition line that it is just a tax and part of Rudd’s global ambitions.

Cynics are asking if Macquarie Bank (and all the other CBD law and advisory firm spivs)  think it’s a great idea why shouldn’t we be suspicious.

In the face of all this Rudd has left a vacuum.

A vacuum he tried to fill last week with 14 pointless media interviews and a bizarre rant at the Lowy Institute.

The rant has only served to convince his opponents that they are getting under his skin, and that he is according to Jones: ‘rattled’.

What is needed is a real education program, some hard facts that might help win the debate and reassure the voters.

The Rudd Government seems strangely unwilling to do the hard work of a retail communications campaign.

Two years down the track and its media and broader political strategies seem stuck in the realms of the 33 day campaign when only the the headline matters.

Time is slipping away, if Rudd et al don’t win the implementation debate this whole thing is going to blow.

And what happens if Rudd gets his ETS through the Senate and the Copenhagen conference fails to make any progress?

Doesn’t bear thinking about. But I hope Rudd’s minders have a plan B.

This is important in a country where very few large organisations do.

So full marks for effort.

No doubt, Telstra’s re-entry into the fledgling field of corporate social media will be generally applauded within the small band of people who care passionately about this stuff.

But looking at Telstra’s new blog, called, in best marketing speak, Telstra exchange, I can’t help feel a little sad and a little more convinced that big corporates and social media don’t really mix – well, maybe a little bit, maybe as a little superficial gloss on the dull, besuited hearts of the corporate world.

Edgy, it’s not.

I guess this new approach is consistent (or ‘aligned’ in suit-speak) with Telstra’s new more co-operative approach to government and media relations.

Getting along with people is generally the best strategic approach, but it often makes for less interesting copy.

And the new blog was launched on a day when Telstra had to backflip on a PR disaster – a fee to pay your bill.

The media release on the backflip contained this wonderful example of the PR genre:

“I have listened to the community debate and believe that the way we introduced the fee did not align with our commitment to put customers back at the heart of our business,” Mr Thodey said.

“It is now clear to me that introducing this fee across our existing plans was the wrong way to encourage customers to move to electronic payments.

“We designed the fee in a way that exempted more than a million elderly, pensioners and disadvantaged people but it was still unacceptable to many of our customers.

Well, I guess that’s better than just saying ‘we got it wrong’ or ‘it was the wrong thing to do’.

Earlier today I linked to some musings by Steve Rubel about the blending of media and social media to the point that they are now the one and the same thing.

I think this is true, or will soon be true, of corporate communications.

Your social media effort will only be as good as your overall comms approach.

There’s not much point trying to get a social media fig leaf to cover up an unchanged culture where nothing is ever wrong, it just doesn’t ‘align’ sometimes.

Still, Telstra are having a go and that puts them ahead of just about every other big organisation in Australia.

And, it’s unfair to be too critical. I just wish..

Salt knows the value of a bright new social trend, be it tree changing, sea changing or now Nettels.

Yes, folks, Salt has interrogated the data (generously provided by taxpayers) and discovered (drumroll please) that many people are time poor.

Of course, as startling as this insight into our society might be, its not going to get more than a cursory media treatment without something to ’sex it up a bit’.

And that something is an acronym which is also a word. Very cute, very media-friendly.

He probably spent hours or days on it, perhaps he worked with a creative consultant, perhaps it came to him in a shower moment.

All this is great for Salt and great for his business.

And it’s another example of the marvelous value-add of PR.

Social media has become far more important in the past five years. Is it still as exciting – probably not. A road less traveled loses some of its appeal when the 4WD (SUV) crowd start their a/c’d, DVD’ed, leather upholstered pilgrimages.

Anyway, I would have missed this great anniversary had it not been for John Cass who interviewed me on his blog to mark the occasion this week. So thanks John. The interview is reposted below.

Some others have also blogged to mark the occasion, including AgWired, Bastien Beauchamp, Tom Murphy, and Colin McKay.

So here’s the interview:

John: What was the significance of the Global PR Blog Week for you?

Trevor: It was fun and it helped demonstrate how people could come together online and create a body of mostly good quality material on line. Most of all I think it helped to counter some of the “PR is dead” stuff that was popular around that time, which originates from a false (IMO) view that PR is only about spin when PR done well is mostly about good communications. People (eg Naked Conversations) sometimes like to think that if only PR got out of the way then communications in our society would automatically improve. That’s a bit like Reagan’s “government is the problem not the solution” statement. It’s simplistic and wrong-headed. The real challenge is to make PR better, and social media will help, is helping, to do that.

John: As one of the organizers of the conference what did it take to organize the conference, what do you recall about the event from your perspective?

Trevor: I basically came up with the initial concept and contacted a bunch of people to participate. This was easy because there was only about two dozen PR bloggers in the world at that stage (now there seem to be countless thousands), and most responded to my email within hours and were keen to participate. Most of the real hard work was done by Constantin Basturea who is now at Converseon in NYC. He did all the website stuff, which I can’t do. Constantin deserves most of the credit for making it happen. Today, with twitter and facebook etc PR blogweek would have been far more interactive – the technical challenges were greater back then. Constantin’s work meant we were able to do the whole thing without cost to the user – a bit like the Bloggercon idea – and that made it far more accessible.

John: What were the lasting effects of the Global PR Blog Week?

Trevor: The NewPR wiki that Constantin set up after PR blogweek partly as a way of storing the material was a very valuable resource for a lot of people. Anecdotally, I think a lot of people were encouraged to start blogging or to get more committed by the examples they saw in PR blogweek

John: How did the Global PR Blog week influence you and the industry?

Trevor: I think it helped to point to, or confirm, that PR could embrace social media and get real benefits from it. But it was a conference, and there have been many others. It was of its time when PR blogging was embryonic to say the least. I made contact with some great people like Constantin, Steve Rubel, Neville Hobson, and more and that was great fun and taught me a lot about PR in other parts of the world.

John: Reviewing the post(s) you wrote for the Global PR Blog week what has changed? What has not changed, since you wrote the post?

Trevor: Social media has grown rapidly much as we anticipated back then, but the rise of twitter, youtube and facebook have all been a surprise to me. Many of these services are far more accessible to users than blogs. Blogging tends to be a bit high end. Blogs that survive and do well over a period of years need to produce great content consistently and regularly and that’s hard work. I find it difficult to blog and do everything else I want to do in life, as do many others – social media provides an easier way to stay in contact.

The media has adopted social media to a large extent and is promoting it heavily. Can that save big media – well some of it, but there is still going to be an almighty rationalisation especially in regard to newspapers. Nevertheless, I find the continuing “blogging versus journalism ” debate so tedious. Bloggers are not journalists, and only a few want to be. Just as boring is the “social media can do everything” line that passionate advocates sometimes push. No-one believes it in the real world. Your client is interested in how social media fits in and adds value to the existing comms strategy. Few clients listen to the ’social media can revolutionise everything’ hokey. I was more naive back then, a few years of trying to sell the social media idea to clients has toughened me up on this point. I stopped doing media interviews a while ago because the journalists always wanted you to either say something alarmist about social media (identity theft etc) or they wanted a cookie cutter evangelist to say something simplistic and naive.
In my view, we’ll be there when we lose the media / PR construct and just communicate. Media would add value principally by selecting and packaging great stuff for a mass audience. PR would be the people in your organisation that facilitate but don’t actually do the communicating. The roles of journalist and blogger would be in the background, and the real business of communicating would be in the foreground. We’re still a long way off.

John: Give an update on what you’ve been doing in the last five years, and what you are doing now?

Trevor: In the last couple of years I’ve changed direction a bit and while I still do some PR work, I’m back at university researching a Phd on Australian politics and teaching, most recently in a course on Australian Foreign and Defence Policy. I still blog a little bit and I’ve written a lot of articles for Australian online media sites. I’m on twitter and I enjoy Facebook because a lot of my real world family and friends use it.

John: Thanks Trevor for coming up with the original ideas, helping to organize the conference and a great interview.

On a day when news of Michael Jackson’s death was dominating people’s attention, the Federal Government has announced that it’s killing off its controversial Grocery Choice website.

In PR, it’s an ill-wind etc

The NRL is trumpeting an increase in crowds and television ratings for 2009.

The league says crowds are up five per cent on the same time last year and have totalled 1,688,948 so far in 2009.

It says game one of the State of Origin series reached a record average of 2.322 million viewers across the five capital cities, 177,000 better than the previous best, for game three last year.

Weekly television ratings for NRL games are up 21.7 per cent in Brisbane and 14.2 per cent in Sydney.

And club memberships have grown 27 per cent with nine of the league’s 16 clubs achieving record numbers.

Of course, it helps that the competition is even and the quality of the football is high. And the publicity, even bad publicity, keeps it top of mind with the sports-loving public.

The proposal itself is quite silly. The NSW Government proposes a ’single mandate’, which is just another description for a joint commonwealth-state effort. There is no rationale for a joint effort other than it keeps the NSW Government in the game, at a time when 78 per cent of voters want it out of the way. The voters recognise that the NSW Government is the problem not the solution (to paraphrase Ronald Reagan). A joint effort would ensure more bureaucracy, more red tape, more blame shifting – all the stuff that has helped to cripple the system so far.

What’s worse is that the ’single mandate’ idea doesn’t solve the crisis, it just ducks it (as most NSW Government ’solutions’ do). Beyond getting the NSW Government, and its horrible management, out of the way, the problem requires a lot more funding. That substantial extra funding has to come from patients, taxpayers and the privately insured in some mix or other. That’s the problem the Federal and state governments ought get together on. Pretending otherwise, pretending that it can all be resolved by a change of administrative arrangements, is simply dishonest.

Click here to view the embedded video.