One thing that has changed since 1997 — there are a LOT more Starbucks in downtown SF. No duh. There are Starbucks EVERYWHERE in the U.S. — 6,700 total locations [probably excluding franchisees, such as those in museums and Barnes & Noble].

Now there is going to be reliable, free WiFi hotspots all over urban/suburban America in Starbucks starting July 1.

As soon as I heard this news, I immediately started reconsidering my expensive $60/month broadband wireless card. Yes, it comes in handy when I really need it, but it is becoming less and less necessary as more free hotspots crop up. And if I drop it, with the money I will save, I can always splurge on hotel WiFi when I need to.

But this isn’t about me.

This is about the larger question of free municipal WiFi — something that you may remember was touted as a slam dunk by now, but hasn’t happened. Why? Because it’s harder to do than it looks, and where it is installed, it’s largely unreliable.

Now, there’s going to be a free, RELIABLE alternative — Starbucks, and likely the sidewalks right around your closest ‘Bucks, and probably around lots of other coffeeshops that will no longer be able to insist that you buy something before letting you use their WiFi. [Not to mention the 11,000 McDonalds that already offer it]

What Starbucks did for lattes — made them easy to get and reliably prepared — I predict they are going to do for WiFi.

Brilliant move by Starbucks — but — what about the money? Starbucks charges ~$3-4 for a premium cup of coffee, but they are giving away the WiFi — how’s that going to work?

The answer to that is in the second part of their release, about the Starbucks Digital Network. For now, they are talking about the free content that their WiFi users will have access to, but just you wait — they will figure out ways to separate you from your money through this network, I’m sure of it. And that’s how they will make some money on this, while changing the equation of whether you need your own network access service anymore.

This, is a nutshell, is my fan-level reaction to Ticketmaster‘s new PR ploy involving its captive reseller program, TicketsNow. Ticketmaster had a big problem earlier this year when it was caught transferring ticket seekers from the original ticket onsale screen to the TicketsNow resale screen, where the same tickets that had just gone on sale were now supposedly only available for huge markups on TicketsNow.

Last week, Ticketmaster announced a so-called “Fans Up Front” program that claims to address the concerns of ticket buyers who believe that Ticketmaster holds back tickets from the original ticket distribution and then makes them available via TicketsNow at a markup. The program includes a side-by-side comparison of the original price and the scalper/TicketsNow price, and will tell prospective TicketsNow buyers whether there are still original price tickets available via Ticketmaster.

Here’s why it’s an attempt to use PR to solve an operational problem: both of these initiatives are lame-ass smokescreens. Two of the easiest pieces of information for a concertgoer to figure out are a) the list price of the ticket and b) whether Ticketmaster has any more original tickets for sale when you go online to get them.

What none of us understand is the answer to the question that Ticketmaster continues to evade: how is it that tickets are “sold out” minutes after they go on sale, only to be available for huge markups on the TicketsNow site and elsewhere, such as eBay? The answer, I and many others suspect, is that in the byzantine world of ticket sales, lots and lots of people have their hands in the proverbial cookie jar, skimming off the best tickets for themselves, for friends, for ticket brokers and for scalpers. What’s left for the average fan is the crumbs.

Until Ticketmaster addresses its operational problem — that far fewer than 100% of the available tickets are made available to the general public — then lame PR programs like “Fans Up Front” will continue to be seen for what they are: ineffective spin.

First, let me say that I do not ordinarily tout PR tools and technologies, and this is not an endorsement per se. But I was sufficiently impressed by the depth and breadth of dna13′s software that I wanted to write about. If you want to stop reading my drivel and go straight to their site for more information, here’s the link.

dna13′s Enterprise software does the following things:

• It allows you to post and share audience-specific messages across the enterprise (e.g., messages for consumers, investors and government affairs)
• It allows you to set access controls so that only the proper people within the organization can drill all the way into the information
• It allows different communications functions across the enterprise to see what the others are doing — who media contacts are, what has been said in various outlets, the tone of the coverage, etc.
• It gives top-level marketing and communications executives (e.g., the CMO), a comprehensive dashboard to see what’s being said and done throughout the organization in real time.

It of course also includes a media database (provided by PR Newswire) as well as access to media monitoring services (those are table stakes). And it’s a SaaS (software-as-a-service) offering, so it’s hosted by dna13 and doesn’t need to be installed on enterprise servers.

My fascination with this product is that is seems to provide everything the modern Fortune 500 level CMO would need to leverage network computing power to stay on top of communications trends affecting their company.

I’ve known the dna13 folks for awhile but finally got the demo at the recent Media Relations Summit, which draws largely a mid-level PR audience. I don’t think this service is going to sell through this group, though. I think dna13 must pitch this service higher up the communications ladder, to CMOs, CFOs, VPs of governmental relations, and the like.

With journalism under siege and journalism jobs vanishing faster than you can say “Huffington Post,” it does make some sense that these professional communicators would look over the hedge and see public relations as a place to earn some cash in today’s (and tomorrow’s economy).

As I said earlier this week, Abrams’ use of freelancer journalists as PR consultants is not really new. Get a fulltime NY Times staffer to serve as a consultant, and now you’ve got something innovative (if not desirable). But those on the margins have been making a living wearing different hats for a long time.

Anyway, it turns out Abrams as either sparked a debate or just been early to the trend. Via Ragan’s daily email blast, here are some links that also relate to this emerging trend:

• Reason magazine: Will PR pros take the baton of investigative reporting?
• TechNewsWorld: The 21st Century Journalist: PR by Day, Reporter by Night?
• Society of Business Editors and Writers: Keeping it Honest in a Freelance World

This is the pattern that major multi-nationals have been subjected to for decades. And without a doubt, many of them have been absolutely as guilty as charged. This isn’t a blog post applauding a cover-up or making excuses for corporate pollution.

But this is a blog about media relations and managing public perception, and we call ‘em as we see ‘em. So we have to say that Chevron’s aggressive move to combat the 60 Minutes piece by producing its own video was a good move.

From the Times story:

Gene Randall, a former CNN correspondent, spent about five months on the project, which was posted on the Internet in April, three weeks before the “60 Minutes” report was shown on May 3.“Chevron hired me to tell its side of the story,” he said. “That’s what I did.”

That’s how you do it, folks. You don’t sit back and wait and then react. You go on the offense and present your side of the story, whether it is through an expensive media like network-quality video or by printing up flyers.

Yes — you read that right. The Lebanese militant organization Hizbollah has a PR department, and it sends birthday greetings to New York Times correspondents. What a world.

MacFarquhar’s book is not primarily about PR or media relations, but rather about the everyday realities in the Middle East — things you wouldn’t necessarily find out reading the war and diplomatic coverage of the area. But one of those realities is that even Hizbollah has a media relations staff to get its message out and influence coverage.

There’s almost always a lesson in my blog posts, and this one is no exception: everyone can benefit from having a proactive communications strategy. Either you define yourself, or other people will do it for you.

If you’re in a life-and-death struggle, having a PR operation is a no-brainer. But if you’re just a run-of-the-mill business, don’t kid yourself that you don’t need a public communications strategy. It may not involve traditional media relations, but at the least it should involve regular and clear communication with your key constituencies.

Soon after the video hit YouTube and started to make the rounds, Domino’s responded with its own video apology, and they posted apologies on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

Still, online communications pundits seem to believe that the company didn’t do enough, fast enough, to combat this incident and that the video and their response had “damaged” the brand.

You know a story like this is peaking when the New York Times weighs in, and so they did, saying,

In just a few days, Domino’s reputation was damaged.

The proof of brand damage? Found online, of course:

The perception of its quality among consumers went from positive to negative since Monday, according to the research firm YouGov, which holds online surveys of about 1,000 consumers every day regarding hundreds of brands.

An online survey? Is that a joke?

Two observations: Domino’s pizza is terrible: cheese and tomato sauce on cardboard. It’s hard to imagine that their brand’s “quality” image was materially harmed by a sophomoric (obviously) online video. And how many of Domino’s core customers are tracking the brand online? I didn’t do any man-on-the-street interviews, but I doubt that the “average” Domino’s customer cares what is being said about the company online.

Even as powerful as the online world can be at times, it’s still only a tiny fraction of the real world. My advice is to keep that in mind, and in perspective.

1. Define the objectives of your PR program, and what you hope to accomplish with a measurement report (e.g., increase your budget, get more internal support)
2. Define the audiences of the PR program, and ask yourself: How does a good relationship with your various target audiences benefit your organization?
3. Prioritize your audiences, and be brutal about which ones are most important to your success
4. Determine a benchmark: what keeps your boss up at night? Keeping up with the competition? Staying ahead? In other words, who or what will you be comparing yourself to over time?
5. Select the right measurement tool to measure your success against your objectives. Which tool will you use, and what will it measure? Will it tell you what you need to know about whether you are moving toward your objectives?

Maddow let her inner media whiner out and went on a classic anti-PR rant about Burson, saying that AIG shouldn’t be spending taxpayer money to spiff up its image, and simplifying (or dumbing down) a segment of Burson’s client roster to a who’s who of evil-doers (the manufacturer of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, for example) — the latest of which, by extension, is AIG.

Now my perspective is that this kind of criticism is to be expected in our industry and tolerated to some degree. We are the industry of spin, we are relatively easy to understand (and hence criticize), and we make so many gaffes that we are easy targets. But we’re not alone. How would you like to be a “trial lawyer” or a “tax collector” or a “meter maid”? See my point? They get ribbed all the time too, but you don’t see them and their industry associations crying about it.

So my question is not whether we are fair game (we are), but is AIG’s decision to hire PR help a good move or a bad one? Should AIG be spending any taxpayer money on outside PR counsel, or should it acknowledge that spending money on outside PR help is counter-productive because it generates the negative coverage that AIG is, presumably, trying to avoid?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd6gqvydzOk]

This is the gist of the podcast interview I gave to Eric Schwartzman of iPressroom and the amazing On The Record: Online podcast series. If you’re a client, or an agency person, I recommend you give a listen.

If you can’t, here are a few nuggets:

• The most important questions to ask an agency: do you know our industry (and can you prove it) and will the senior people pitching the business work on my account?
• Garbage in, garbage out: or vice versa. Agency relationships aren’t turnkey. If you throw your business over the transom and expect results, you will be disappointed. Aside from the two questions above, the most important determinant of a successful agency relationship is how much time and energy the client puts into it, in terms of providing access and resources for the agency to work with.
• The next most important component of the relationship is accountability. Put what you want in the contract, then have simple ways to measure or judge whether it is happening. And make sure to have weekly check-in calls to monitor progress and keep things moving.

Hiring an agency and want some help sorting out your options? I’d be glad to help.