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Some PR Savvy: What I'd Like to Hear From Eastern Bank about Buying Wainwright Bank and Trust

I stopped by the local office of Wainwright Bank & Trust Co. at Fresh Pond Mall in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the other day. I was excited to pick up a copy of the bank's 2009 Annual Report and the report's insert, Wainwright Bank: A Social Justice History.

Taken together, the 2009 Annual Report and the Social History portray a bank that is nothing short of wonderful: growing, recovering from the recession, and committed to social justice in its market in areas ranging from affordable housing finance, environmental lending, lending to not-for-profits, equitable treatment of people without regard to class, race, gender, or sexual orientation, and innovation to keep it all going. I'm glad to have accounts at a bank like Wainwright.

The bank's three leaders, John M. Plukas, founder and co-chair; Robert A. Glassman, founder and co-chair; and Jan A Miller, president and CEO; have won numerous personal awards from many politically left organizations.

So how do I feel about all this? I feel sad because in late June, Wainwright and Eastern Bank announced that Eastern will acquire Wainwright later this year. Eastern is a much bigger bank, founded in Salem but now headquartered in Boston, just a few blocks from Wainwright's headquarters office. I'm sad and disappointed because I think Eastern clearly knows what a special bank it is buying.

I think Eastern has been pretty upfront about the business reason for buying Wainwright: the latter's network of retail banking offices in Boston and the immediate surrounding towns fills in a gap with Eastern, which has strong presence in Eastern Massachusetts, but not in the Boston core areas. While Eastern has made its interest known in filling in the hole at the center of its donut, Eastern has not said as much specifically about the social justice aspects of Wainwright's life as a bank. For example:

• Wainwright's devotion to funding social and community efforts is legion. It supports housing projects up and down the housing ladder. U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., said, "I'm very appreciative of Wainwright for showing how profitability and social responsibility combine."
• In 1993, Wainwright was the first publicly traded company to sponsor Boston's Gay Pride event.
• The bank signed onto Green business and banking principles.
• The bank was named one of the world's Top 20 Sustainable Stocks by SustainableBusiness.com.
• The bank is among 75 socially responsible companies ranked as an "ultimate high-purpose company" in The High-Purpose Company, by Christine Arena.

Is Eastern Bank an unaware slouch in this arrangement? Hardly. It also has an enviable record for lending to not-for-profits (though not as amazingly strong as Wainwright). It wins the Customer Satisfaction Award from J.D. Power. It is a mutual bank, accountable only to its account holders, whereas Wainwright, for all its benefits, was organized as a public company and thus subject to the short-term whims of Wall Street, which boosted the likelihood of an eventual sale. And Jan Miller, the CEO of Wainwright, will become CEO of the new Eastern Bank company. All of this is good and speaks well for what might become of the combined Eastern/Wainwrtigh

So what do I miss? What makes me disappointed? I'd like Eastern to acknowledge that it is doing more than buying another bank. I'd like to receive a letter from Eastern, very soon, that commends me on my decision to bank with Wainwright, for my support of Wainwright's socially responsible banking practices, and promises me that Eastern will change and evolve as it absorbs Wainwright so that Eastern absorbs many of Wainwright's socially responsible practices, too. I'd like to know that Eastern will sign the same pledges and principles that Wainwright signed earlier.

If I, as a customer, received a letter from Eastern saying all that, I'd be very happy and I would look forward to the day that the Wainwright signs come down and the Eastern Bank signs go up. Absent those assurances and explicit recognition of the extraordinary characteristics of Wainwright, I not not happily look forward to the merger. I have too much counted on banking on Values, to use Wainwright's tag line.

Online PR Featured in New Issue of Canright Communicates

Introducing: Canright Communicates for November-December, 2007.

We feature Barbara Rozgonyi, founder of CoryWest Media and blogger at Wired PR Works, who I introduced earlier. And a how-to piece on putting more interactivity into PDFs. Our milestones include showing off an ad for Blackman Killick atop the new Crain's Chicago Business list of largest accounting firms.

There's also a "web-only" piece -- as the MSM say -- that expands the discussion with Barbara Rozgonyi into blogging itself, as opposed to the wider topic of Online PR.

And no issue would be complete without the ever-popular Canright team's reading/watching/listening/viewing suggestions.

Internet's Share of Global Ad Spending to Overtake Radio in 2008

Radio, historically the most flexible and most immediate of the major media, is giving ground to an even more flexible and immediate medium: the Internet.

Tuesday's Chicago Tribune carried an Associated Press report that the global share of advertising spending on the Internet will top the share of ad spending on radio in 2008.

Zenith Optimedia, an English ad firm, said the Internet's share of the global ad spend would rise to 9.4 percent in 2008, up from 8.1 percent in 2007. Radio's share will slip to 7.9 percent from 8.2 percent.

I like the power of radio. But I like the power of the Internet much more.

A Subtle Way to Help Make Indy a World-Class City

My hometown, Indianapolis, is capable of wonders few other cities its size consistently achieve. The latest improvement will show that an upgrade in customer service will improve public perception of the city. And this action will be in an oft-overlooked area: parking meters.

Deputy Mayor Steve Campbell tells the Indianapolis Star that electronic parking meters that take charge cards -- plastic! -- will be a winner with motorists (think: public parking customers) angling for a metered space downtown or in the Northside entertainment distrit of Broad Ripple.

Campbell cites convenience, and of course he's right. But the electronic meters support the image of Indy as a 21st Century World-Class City, which is what all of us want -- at least those people who care about Indy's future. Perception of the city will move up another notch on the hip scale, and that's good news for bringing people back to our fair and hospitable city.

Gannett Buys Blog Syndication Services; Will TDW be Blogging Next Door to Rayagn Swan?

Could Hoosier bloggers day find ourselves quoted in the Indianapolis Star, the Louisville Courier-Journal, or in Gannett's Indiana newspapers in Richmond, Lafayette, Fishers, Noblesville, Muncie, and Marion -- and sooner rather than later?

Blogs (at least the best of them) are about to take another leap into respectability and social acceptance.

Jennifer LeClaire of TechNewsWorld reported this morning that Gannett is among the customers for a syndication service for 600 of the best bloggers. Pluck, maker of RSS readers and other fine software, is releasing the service on Tuesday. (I cannot tell if that means today -- probably does -- or next Tuesday, April 18th.)

Besides Gannett, the Washington Post Co., the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Antonio Express, and the Austin American-Statesman are among the launch clients for the new service.

As for Indiana, imagine Doug Masson, Joshua Claybourn of Indiana Barrister, Mike Kole, Gary Welsh, TDW, and the  Bilerico gang going head-to-head on the pages of your local paper? We'll need the Indiana Law Blog and the Indiana Blog Review to mediate.
 

More Crummy Ethics When $$ Involved

Thanks to Daily 'Dog relaying word from the Austin (Texas) American-Statesman, we see another case of crummy ethics. The hits -- hits to the public relations profession -- just keep on coming.

The political news show Fox News Sunday paid $14,000 to former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, for an interview four days after his indictment for alleged violations of Texas campaign finance law.

Good gracious, Fox. Do we need to review simple rules of media relations ethics? Try these:

• No self-respecting journalist should ever pay someone for an interview. I know it happens occasionally, and I have here some of the Barbara Walters interviews in mind. As for Fox, the $14K payment only reinforces the common belief that Fox is the right-wing cable news network.
• It's OK for media -- especially media fixed in one location such as a talk show wedded to its set -- to pay expenses for people to come to a studio for an interview. But paying for private jets ought to be very rare. And whatever happened to live remotes? Most local TV stations use them often.
• There are rare cases -- primarily in trade journals and among travel writers -- in which the product (resort, car rollout, new products) will pay for small but significant trade journals and newsletters to cover the launch of a product. I don't particularly like this practice, but as long as it is very limited to that segment -- and the payment is disclosed by the writer -- I can look the other way.

To sum up: Money paid by media to interviewees? No. Money paid for usual and customary travel expenses? OK, but better the media go to the interviewee. Money paid to journalists for interviews or travel to trade shows and product launches? Not good in vast number of cases, sometimes overlooked in cases of smaller newsletter or trade publications in which the travel budget can barely fund one trip. Should be disclosed.

UPDATE: Jan. 31, 2:37 p.m.
With ethics showing up so much in the recent news, I just added an "Ethics" category to this blog. I wonder how I got along without it for so long.

Technorati Tags: money payment pay interview media "Tom DeLay"

'Media Multitasking' Revealed in Ball State Study

When it comes to communications, there's no better campus than Ball State University, 90 minutes away from Indianapolis in Muncie, Ind.

BSU proves it again today.

On the heels of studies identifying the trend toward media multi-tasking (my favorite is the study on teenage media multitasking by the Kaiser Family Foundation), Ball State takes a look at a nuts-and-bolts approach to an important question: How does concurrent media use affect advertising-supported media?

According Ball State's Jan. 27 news release, written by Marc Ransford of BSU media relations:

The typical consumer often uses more than one type of media at any given time, preferring to work on the computer while the radio plays or surf the Web as the television blares in the background, says new research by Ball State University. However, not all ad-supported media are multitasked, also known as concurrent media use (CME), in the same way or to the same extent, according to the university's latest white paper, "Engaging the Ad-Supported Media."

The new research produced by Ball State's Center for Media Design (CMD), compares and contrasts elements of media experiences for the major advertising-based media, including magazines, newspapers, television, radio and the Internet. The findings are based on data collected from about 400 people in Muncie and Indianapolis for 2005's Middletown Media Studies 2 (MMS2), producing information on more than 5,000 hours of media use.

"We know Americans spend about nine hours daily with radio, television, magazine, newspaper, computer and other media, but looking at media use solely in accumulated total minutes barely scratches the surface of how we use various media," said Michael Holmes, CMD faculty research fellow and communication studies professor.

"We dug deeper, looking at a variety of issues related to spending time with the media," he said. "Our findings for concurrent media exposure — what others call media multitasking — varied depending on the media, time of day, day of week and a person's location."

-- snip --

The white paper's principal researchers include several faculty from Ball State's College of Communication, Information, and Media, including Holmes, telecommunications professor Robert Papper and journalism professor Mark Popovich. Mike Bloxham, CMD's testing center director, is also a research team member. Findings from the research will be used to create a series of reports and white papers in the coming months.

More information about the free white paper and other CMD research is available at www.bsu.edu/cmd/insightresearch.

-- snip --

The Center for Media Design (CMD) is a research and development facility focused on the creation, testing and practical application of digital technologies for business, classroom, home and community.

Middletown Media Studies 2 (MMS2) builds upon Muncie's reputation as "Middletown America," a typical community in the United States. Muncie earned this distinction as a result of the Middletown Studies of the 1920s and '30s by sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd. MMS2 is a follow-up to a 2004 study that found people consume much more media than they say they do.

I'm not sure if this study definitively answers the advertising question. And I'm not sure of its implications for public relations and marketing. I think I'll read the report and find out!

Technorati Tags: "Center for Media Design" Middletown ad-supported advertising communications "Ball State" Muncie "concurrent media use" "media multi-tasking" advertising magazines radio television TV computer music

It's Right Now. Do You Know What People are Blogging About Your Organization?

There are ways to monitor blogs to see what's being said about you or your organization.

ZD Net describes why and how this should be done.

In Which StraightTalkPR.com Finds a Cousin

Discovered: A public relations blog with a similar name. We have to check it out.

The blog is called MWWStraightTalk. It's authored by Michael Kempner, president and CEO of MWW Group and a p.r. professional for 20 years.

Buy or Sell a Blog? What Will They Think of Next?

Thanks to Denise Wakeman of Build a Better Blog, we are now informed that there's a market for buying and selling blogs. Who would have thought?

Ms. Wakeman has a ton of useful links in her post, most importantly a link to a two-part podcast by Michael Pollack and Yaro Starak. Starak purchased the Small Business Branding blog from Pollack, so Pollack could move on to another project. In turn, Starak received a going blog business.

Cool. We await the day that Indiana blogs command market value.