What PR People and NFL Kickers Have in Common

As I was watching tonight's Monday Night Football game between the San Francisco 49ers and Phoenix Cardinals, I was reminded of an essay I wrote comparing NFL kickers and PR people. It's pretty crude and rough, but hopefully you'll get the idea I was going for.

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What PR People and NFL Kickers Have in Common
by Charles Var

The crowd roared as the New Orleans Saints’ kicker trotted onto the field with 1:55 left on the clock to try and kick the winning field goal against the Denver Broncos. The snap. The hold. The kick. No good! The kick sailed wide right. For this kicker on this day, there were no high fives, slaps on the back, congratulatory head-butts or the all-too familiar ride off the field on the shoulders of fellow players. No, for this kicker there were only cold stares of disappointment from fellow teammates – if they bothered to make eye contact at all.

So is the life of an NFL kicker. A champ one minute; a chump the next. Their value to the team is measured solely on the result of their last kick. Who cares about last week's winning kick? So too is the life of many PR professionals who work day in and day out to create positive awareness for their company, product or cause. What they did last week, last month or last year matters little. All that matters now is the next big announcement or next big story.


NECESSARY EVIL

The similarities between an NFL kicker and PR professional don’t just stop at the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately nature of their jobs. They also both suffer from the constant criticism, misunderstanding and envy of the people working around them. If you've ever played organized football and run endless amounts of wind sprints while the kicker frolicked on the sidelines kicking balls, you know the sentiment. “Kickers are pussies!”

Executives within businesses often view PR professionals in the same way, assuming the job entails nothing more than schmoozing at fancy parties, traveling the world on a bottomless expense account and lounging with the big wigs. What few people see is the groveling, scraping, negotiating, pleading, arguing, and fighting that’s behind every single piece of media coverage they generate.

NFL kickers and PR people are also plagued with the common misperception that what they do isn't that difficult or complicated. “I could do that easily if that’s all I did all day long,” many people reason. The truth of the matter is that they’re probably right. Practice kicking a football enough, and almost any athletic position player could kick a field goal. The same is true about PR. Take any reasonably smart and educated executive, and they too could learn to do the basic job of a PR professional.

Ironically, there are a lot of occupations and jobs out there that are reasonable simple to learn and even master. Take a commercial pilot. Today’s modern aircraft are so well designed and so well equipped with sophisticated computer systems, that most of them literally fly themselves. But how many of us think to ourselves, “I could do that, no problem.” Even well educated and trained doctors performing surgery admit that the routine nose job is a relatively simple procedure. Yet, surgeons are among the most respected and well-paid professionals on the planet.

But if an athletic position player could learn to kick and a smart executive could learn to do PR, why don’t teams and companies just do away with kickers and PR professionals all together? They answer is simple. They can’t. If they did, they’d be at a major competitive disadvantage.
The truth is that it’s not enough just to be able to kick a ball or do the basic PR jobs. What counts is whether you can do it consistently, and more importantly, do it when it counts.

Kicking a football off a tee in practice is easy. Kicking a football in the last seconds of a game in front of 70,000 screaming fans while 11 monsters from the opposing team fly from all angles at you is hard. Likewise, writing or editing a press release from your office on an idle Tuesday afternoon is easy. Convincing an overworked, underpaid and pissed off journalist who listens to countless corporate blowhards that your company is interesting, different and worth writing about it is hard.

Each time a kicker misses the winning field goal, I suspect there's no shortage of upset position players who grumble, “I could have kicked that field goal.” However, I suspect by the time the next practice rolls around, few if any step up to ask the head coach for the kicking job. And even if they did, any smart NFL coach who really cared about winning would surely tell the player to just worry about his own job.

I hear the same thing in Corporate America all the time. CEOs, heads of marketing, and even the occasional ego maniacal venture capitalist constantly criticize PR professionals and belittle their jobs. “You don’t need to hire a PR firm or PR person” they preach. But to this day, I've yet to witness any one of them take on the job full time themselves and do any better. And I don’t mean those wanna-be CEOs at start ups who work from their parents basement and do everything from business development to balancing their business checkbook with Quicken. I mean the real CEOs of real businesses. Perhaps more importantly, I've yet to find one single successful company – small or large – who doesn't have a veteran PR professional somewhere on the payroll with the skills and balls to kick it through the up rights when it really counts.

Like them or hate them, kickers and PR professionals are necessary and important parts of any successfully team. If you don’t believe me, by all means give it a shot. But trust me, the only thing you’ll be kicking is yourself.

The More Security, the Less Safe I Feel

This week I attended the annual RSA show in San Francisco. I was literally surrounded by security 24x7, both inside and outside the show. In addition to attending the world's largest electronic security show by day, I was staying at the Hilton near Union Square, which happened to be hosting the Chinese contingency doing the Olympic torch run through SF on Wednesday afternoon. Secret service, SF police and hotel security were everywhere. Despite the tremendous amount of physical security present, I'm not sure if I felt safer. In fact, I felt less safe. I reasoned to myself: the more security, the bigger the threat, right? Wouldn't I just be better off moving down the street someplace else, I wondered. While the thought crossed my mind, I stayed.

The same uneasy feeling hit me while walking the aisles at RSA. Row after row was filled with fantastic security products and solutions, ranging from technology to encrypt and protect my laptop and thumb-drive to high-end anti-spam and anti-virus hardware and software to protect my email, instant messaging or web browsing. If there was ever a time or place where I should feel safer and more confident about my electronic security, it should be at RSA, right? But I didn't. Instead, I felt overwhelmed and uneasy about the state of electronic security. Like my experience at the Hilton, I reasoned: the more electronic security, the bigger the electronic threat and hassle.

I'm not suggesting that my fear about staying at the Hilton or fear about my electronic security is logical or even reasoble. But they are real. And I wonder at what point does the fear or inconvenience become so great, that I actually decide enough is enough. For example, at what point would I have actually decided to check out and move down the street? I really don't know? Likewise with email and the Internet, at what point does emailing or browsing become so dangerous or inconvenient that I decide to stop doing them or doing something radically different? Both thoughts are almost inconceivable. But to assume there isn't a tipping point would be naive in my estimation.

I'm not sure where that tipping point exists, but if feels closer than ever to me.

HAS EMAIL REACHED A TIPPING POINT?

Some people love to hate email. Others hate that they love email. Either way, there’s some degree of hate involved. Despite its prevalence as the de-facto means of communicating – or because of it – email is quickly approaching a critical tipping point, in my humble opinion.

Full disclosure. I work in the email security business, so I probably have a warped perspective on email in general. Still, I don’t believe that we are reaching a tipping point with email simply because of the rising levels of spam and viruses. Today’s security solutions do a pretty darn good job filtering email.

Instead, I think the tipping point is driven largely because existing email technology doesn’t map to normal human behavior. That fact, combined with the volume growth of email has caused email to become a productivity inhibitor versus a productivity enabler.

Wait! Before you chalk me up as another dooms-day nobody (I am a nobody for sure), ask yourself the following questions:

1. Have you ever worked a full day, thought back and wondered, “I know I was at work at my desk all day reading and typing, but I can’t tell you one thing I actually did today.”
2. Have you ever spent two or three times longer looking for something in email than actually using it (e.g., a phone number, a document you needed to read, etc.)?
3. When you absolutely, positively need to communicate with someone, does a tiny voice in your head say, “You better call them just in case they don’t read or miss your email.”
If you answered yes or maybe to some or all of those, then you understand what I’m getting at. There must be a better way.

This blog will explore email productivity, whether it’s getting better or worse, and most importantly, what is anyone doing about it.