The Power of Public Relations

But the irony is that a field concerned with image suffers from an embarrassingly poor image of its own. Long regarded as a "female ghetto," PR still gets tagged with the stereotype of the know-nothing "flack" who mechanically repeats ideas that she doesn't really understand. At a deeper level, public relations carries the image passed down by Edward Bernays, the field's founding father: In the 1920s, he conceived of the profession as a way for powerful elites to manipulate a gullible public. Pam Edstrom, chief public-relations specialist for Microsoft and executive vice president of Waggener Edstrom Inc., says of her own firm's image, "I give us a D-minus. The shoemaker's children have no shoes. Our clients have beautiful handcrafted boots. We go barefoot."

Yet firms like Alexander's, Cunningham's, and Edstrom's are quietly changing the rules of the PR profession. Unlike their predecessors, these firms don't rely on legions of low-paid young women who merely take journalists out to lunch. Indeed, they're owned and run by women. And these smart, well-educated, ambitious women operate fast-growing businesses that do far more than craft public statements and put out press releases for their smart, well-educated, ambitious (and still mostly male) clients. To be part of Alexander's or Cunningham's stable has become another coveted qualifier for a startup, like having the venture-capital backing of Kleiner Perkins or Hummer Winblad.

As the roles have changed, so has the script. Alexander offers one model: the PR firm built on intense personal relationships, a knack for networking, and a laserlike focus on the convention circuit - combined with military discipline and computer-backed precision. Cunningham offers another: the values-based PR firm straight out of Jerry Maguire, limiting the number of its clients to offer more personal service, bringing truth into its clients' often-insulated world, representing the anti-PR firm in a world of overheated hype.

The Power of Relationships

"I just need to use up this film," says Pam Alexander as she coaxes John Markoff of the New York Times to step into the photo she's about to take. Her pitch seems plausible, certainly, and innocent enough to be credible. But Markoff must realize that he's the target of a grand master of schmooze. He's the dean of technology reporters, perhaps the journalist whom high-tech PR people would most like to influence. And here's Pam Alexander getting him to pose alongside two other powerful figures: Stewart Alsop, venture capitalist and irascible pundit, and Bob Metcalfe, Ethernet pioneer, columnist - and a client of Alexander Communications. Alexander cheerfully pals around with these three consummate insiders as if she were a high-school class president, eager to capture golden moments for the yearbook. Alexander may be outside the frame, but make no mistake: She's staging the picture.

All of this low-key, high-stakes persuasion is going on during a break at yet another high-tech powwow - the elite, invitation-only Forbes/Gilder Telecosm conference, held at a luxurious resort in Palm Springs. The conference is a Pam Alexander work-in-progress. She and four of her associates are here on a dizzying variety of missions. They have their usual agenda: to facilitate conversations between corporate clients, on the one hand, and key reporters, analysts, and industry insiders, on the other. But that's table stakes. Alexander is also doing PR for a dozen or so of the attendees, from venture capitalist John Doerr, who's talking up the Technology Network (a political-services organization that he cofounded), to Charles Brewser, head of MindSpring Enterprises Inc. (an Internet service provider), who's here to talk about the future of telecommunications. Alexander is also in charge of PR for the conference itself.

But for Alexander, managing multiple agendas is the only way to do PR. In fact, her 24x7 work life seems to represent one woman's manic attempt to refute Andy Cunningham's contention that it's no longer possible for a PR person to influence the ever-proliferating media hoard. She started her agency 11 years ago in Atlanta, where she had worked in marketing for a mainframe-software company. In 1991, when her clients at Hewlett-Packard said they needed an agency with a presence in the Bay Area, she opened a San Francisco office. Now the agency employs about 120 people there and at its offices in Atlanta and Denver. Clients run the gamut from six different parts of established giant Hewlett-Packard to fresh startup MangoSoft, from media titan Ziff-Davis to media upstart Herring Communications. The firm took in $12 million in revenues in 1997 and expects to make $20 million in 1998.