The Power of Public Relations

It's the first night of COMDEX, the biggest IT trade show in the world. More than 215,000 geeks, nerds, and high-tech execs have gathered in Las Vegas to hear moguls predict the future and to check out the gadgets that will create it. Bill Gates, the most powerful man in the world's most powerful industry, is about to give the keynote address to 7,000 people at the Aladdin Hotel on the Strip. Outside, there's a line of people stretching four blocks long, all clamoring to get into the packed auditorium.

But as Gates approaches the stage, something is missing. Or someone is missing - in fact, a number of someones. Quite a few important members of the technology press corps - Stephen Manes from the New York Times, John Clyman from PC Magazine, Gina Smith from ABC News, Jason Pontin from the Red Herring, Theresa Carey from Barron's - are unaccountably absent, even though their red press badges would let them slide into the auditorium, in front of the teeming masses.

If you want to find these heavy-hitting technojournalists, just go up the road to the Hard Rock Hotel, where they're partying at an elite soiree thrown by Alexander Communications Inc., one of high-tech's most influential PR firms. There you'll see 350 of the media's top reporters, pundits, and analysts being lavishly entertained by 30 of Alexander's employees, who carefully introduce them to executives from 18 of Alexander's choice client companies: rising stars such as MangoSoft Corp. and Encanto Networks Inc., along with established winners such as Hewlett-Packard and IBM. The host, Pam Alexander, is conspicuously absent from her own gala, much like a latter-day Gatsby, but her awesome industry clout is clearly on display. She's picked a time slot directly opposite Bill Gates - and she's managed to upstage him!

In the marketplace of ideas, the conversation has gotten extremely noisy. At COMDEX, for example, some 10,000 new products are on display. Virtually every surface in Las Vegas, from taxicab roofs to hotel-room bills, is layered with marketing for some company's booth. With so many journalists, analysts, and players in one place, COMDEX is a PR person's dream; with such brutal competition for their attention, it's a PR nightmare. How do you rise above the din? Is it even worth the effort?

Pam Alexander's approach to COMDEX, and to PR in general, involves the precise organization and incredible discipline of a military operation. With the proper combination of a soft touch and an iron will, she believes, her firm will not only rise above the clamor but also command the attention of the industry's biggest stars. And the turnout at the Hard Rock seems to prove her right.

But in an economy of competing business models, there is another school of thought. Andrea "Andy" Cunningham of Cunningham Communication Inc., one of Alexander's main competitors in the Silicon Valley high-tech PR scene, sees in COMDEX evidence that traditional public relations is close to a breaking point. Cunningham's 13-year-old firm has offices in Palo Alto, Phoenix, Cambridge, and Austin, and employs about 130 people. It boasts such clients as Cisco Systems, Novell, Sprint, two Motorola operations, the IBM Consumer Division, and parts of Hewlett-Packard. Cunningham's vision: It's futile to practice PR the old way.

"Ten years ago, our job was to manipulate people in the press," she says from her perch on a futuristic black chair in her bright, airy office in Palo Alto. "It wasn't that hard to do - there weren't that many of them. For every company, there were maybe 20 or 30 print and TV types that you had to influence. If you had enough charisma and made relationships with them, it was fairly easy. Today you have to communicate with 300 people about every client. It's just not possible."

In Cunningham's view, the new economy is the new cacophony: "Today you get an article in, say, Fortune, and a week later, it's meaningless. In fact, we got this incredibly great article for Cisco in Fortune. It was called 'Cooking with Cisco.' It was a really hot article. Less than a week later, everybody had forgotten it because something else came out after that. Business Week did something, and somebody else did something else." The only way to escape this ratcheting of news and noise - this spiral of ever-increasing volume, ever-decreasing impact, and permanently lost control - is to reinvent PR, says Cunningham.

Welcome to the new world of public relations, where hot startups and hot venture-capital firms are matched by every-bit-as-hot PR shops. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the industry is on a roll: Public relations will be among the fastest-growing professions in the United States from now until the year 2005. And within the field, the technology arena is by far the fastest-growing sector - fueled in large part by startups, whose biggest expenditure is often for PR.