Yesterday I wrote about Wal-Mart apparently confusing communications challenges with real business issues. Today, in an article in Slate, Fred Kaplan makes the same point re: the U.S. State Department. Using an op/ed and an interview with former State Department PA person Price Floyd, Kaplan shows what happens when business or government allow a gap to be built up between words and actions. Floyd notes:
"I'd be in meetings with other public-affairs officials at State and the White House," he recalled. "They'd say, 'We need to get our people out there on more media.' I'd say, 'It's not so much the packaging, it's the substance that's giving us trouble.' "
PR is a great tool when there is a gap between what a company or a government is actually doing and what people think they are doing. Or to showcase how a company/government has changed behavior. Where it doesn't work so well is when the gap works the other way -- where people don't like what a company is doing, where they understand and disagree. All the words in the world don't help there.
Words without deeds are meaningless indeed.