I've never asked a client, "Would you like fries with that?"

Everyone’s entitled to change their minds, but if you’re like me, it’s hard to admit it when you’re the one doing the changing.

I think that’s because it implicitly means you were once wrong.  And who likes admitting they are wrong?

Yesterday, The New York Times ran an interesting blog post from an entrepreneur who has changed her mind about the need for public relations. Last year, in the same blog, the writer announced she really didn’t need a PR firm — she could manage media relations all by herself. This year, she’s hired some outside help.

Her experience is not unlike most small business people I’ve encountered. When you’re starting up a business, you’re concerned about cash flow and to save money, you do a lot of things yourself. While most small business people wouldn’t try to be their own attorney or accountant, many think they can be successful running their own PR programs.

Over the years, I’ve had many friends come to me for PR advice for their start-up. Sometimes, they try to convince me to work with them on a freelance basis. I always say no.

I say no, not just because I don’t want to risk my friendship, but also because I don’t like the unrealistic expectations small business people tend to have. Most small businesses — meaning their products and employees — aren’t newsworthy. Yet they seem to think if you know a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, then you can magically make a favorable story appear with a quick phone call or email. (I wish it was that easy.)

If there is a small business with a truly innovative product which is newsworthy, I won’t take on the work because, frankly, too many entrepreneurs are micromanagers. For many small business people, their business is like their child — perfect in every way. Only they know how to parent their child.

I have no patience for people who want to hire a PR professional, but really want to order items off of a media relations cafeteria menu. I’ve had a lot of PR jobs over the years, but I don’t recall ever asking my clients, “Would you like fries with that?”

Another big reason I won’t take on PR work with an entrepreneur is because in nearly all cases, they think that they need PR, but what they really need are some solid marketing communications and marketing programs. That should be their first order of priority — the PR can wait.

The biggest reason I won’t work with entrepreneurs is because they’re often penny-wise and pound-foolish. Earlier this year,  I was approached for some PR advice by a friend of a friend who was starting up a new business. The business is truly innovative and I think will do well when it’s ready to launch.

My friend’s friend and his partner had raised several million dollars in venture capital to get the business off the ground. They had also invested several hundred thousand dollars of their own money. Despite all of this, they were really only prepared to spend about $20,000 on PR for their first six months of business.

When I advised them what they should be prepared to invest to get the PR results they expected, they were stunned.

“We can just do the PR ourselves.”

But here’s the thing: they can’t. They have no idea how to craft a pitch to a reporter, no idea how social media works, no idea how journalism is changing and frankly, no idea how much time they will have to invest if they try to do it themselves.

I’m tempted to send them the blog posts from entrepreneur who changed her mind about PR, but I’ll resist that urge.

That’s not to say that the business won’t have a successful launch — I’m pretty sure it will be successful simply because the product being sold is a terrific idea.

But I’m also certain that the guys starting the business should be spending their time on what they know and hire a PR professional to help them with what they don’t know.

You could win a trip to the Sundance Film Festival if your footage is chosen for "Life In A Day".

It all starts with YouTube.

Tomorrow, Saturday, July 24, you have a chance to become a co-director of a film called “Life in a Day” which will be screened at next year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Ridley Scott, who worked on Alien, Blade Runner and Thelma & Louise, is the film’s producer. He explained the project on the film’s YouTube site:

“Life In A Day is a historic global experiment to create a user-generated feature film, shot in a single day, by you. On July 24, you have 24 hours to capture a glimpse of your life on camera. The most compelling and distinctive footage will be edited into an experimental documentary film, produced by Ridley Scott and directed by Kevin Macdonald.”

Macdonald, an Oscar-winning director (for the documentary film, “One Day in September”), describes the project:

“What I want to do is to make a film, unlike any film, I think, that’s ever been made before, which is to ask thousands of people, everywhere in the world, on a single day, which is the 24th of July this year, to film some aspect of their day and then post that material onto You Tube so that we can use it to make a film that is a record of what it’s like to be alive on that one day. It’ll be kind of like a time capsule, which people in the future, maybe in twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, a hundred, two hundred years, could look at that and say, “Oh my God, that’s what it was like.” A portrait of the world in a day.”

I’m not sure what I’ll film tomorrow, but I’m going to shoot something. And I may just try to make it Sundance next winter. (Truth be told, that’s the best time to ski in Park City — everyone’s at the movies!)

Photo credit: Flickr: rscrobinmx99

The struggle isn’t new and it’s not unique to the Post.

But if you work in media relations like me, I urge you to read the column. It will give you a better idea of the pressure journalists are under and also a better idea of what kind of story they are likely to be interested in.

I don’t envy journalists working in the newspaper business. As they say where I grew up, “they’ve got a tough row to hoe.”

But their work is vitally important to our society, our politics and our culture. As PR people, our efforts to help reporters with their work become even more important.

Clearly, I'm not the most influential person online, but who is?

Fast Company’s cover story for its November 2010 issue ought to be interesting.

The magazine has launched a search to discover the most influential person online. Dubbed the Influence Project, the magazine is capturing the social graphs of readers who enter a short bio and upload a photo. Whoever influences the most people to join the experiment is deemed the most influential. (Oh and the more influential you are, the bigger your photo gets on Fast Company’s Influence Project site. And your photo could be included in a cover illustration.)

Mark Borden, the Fast Company editor heading up the project explains:

What the Influence Project aims to do is remove some of the mystery behind the inherent passivity of social network numbers. This experiment will show what happens when an individual takes an audience at rest and applies an unbalanced force–through suggestion, advice or direction–that converts it into an army of action. That’s power that can be quantified and lead to an understanding that can be applied to both the largest and smallest of networks. No doubt it’s profound to address a million followers and get 100,000 of them to respond. But what does it mean when you have one hundred friends on Facebook and 97 of them click through to a site on your recommendation?

I don’t know if I’d call this person influential, but I do think this project will help tell you a bit more about what Facebook calls your social graph. Businesses should learn a lot about social networking from this story and Fast Company will rake in tons of valuable data about its readers — for free, mind you.

Each person who enters is given a unique URL. Here’s mine. If you click on it, supposedly, I’m considered just a bit more influential than the next person on Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare.

If you ask me this little experiment is open to mischief, but I’m vain enough, narcissistic enough, curious enough to play.

What about you? Are you more influential online or off-line?

The Washington Post’s media critic, Howard Kurtz, has an interesting piece in today’s paper about the departure of reporter David Weigel from the Post and the retirement of Gen. Stanley McChrystal from his job in leading the Afghanistan war effort.

Weigel is more of an inside-the-Beltway figure.

And yes, Virginia, journalists have opinions. Straight-news reporters usually do their best to keep their biases out of their work (although story selection, language and tone are invariably affected). The new hybrids — bloggers who work for mainstream newspapers — can serve up analysis and attitude, a welcome flavor infusion for the often bland ingredients of daily journalism. But trash-talking — at least if it becomes public — is another matter.

• Breaking: Sprint announces EVO 4G promotion for sweaty left-handed people. #attwireless #shameless
• It’s a feature! No call should be longer than 3 mins. RT @jeremybrooks: 1st call w/ iPhone4 lasted 3 minutes before AT&T dropped it #att
• Dude. Totally on it. xo RT @chrismessina: AT&T 2 turn 2 social media 2 lift its image. Just hire @BPGlobalPR. http://bit.ly/ahlHqf

But don’t expect this parody account to take off like the BP one. Remember, we’re talking about a cell phone company, not a company whose negligence has devastated an eco-system and put tens of thousands of people out of work.

Plus, the Fake AT&T guy isn’t as funny as BP, or for that matter, the fake Steve Jobs.

Tell the truth. Have you ever thrown a news release at a reporter waiting to see if, like spaghetti, a few bits of news stick to the wall?

The news release is dying and perhaps is already dead. Don’t tell Businesswire or PR Newswire. And heavens, don’t tell the stable of PR firms who throw them at journalists like spaghetti, hoping that at least one of the nuggets of information sticks to the wall.

I hate news releases, mostly because too many lazy PR employ them and do so ineffectively. My favorite blog find this week offered a Mad Lib approach to writing your next news release.

I don’t know if traditional news releases need to be killed, per se. (Done well, they still are effective and have a role to play.) But I am encouraged by the growth of the social media form of news releases. (Ford does the social media news release especially well in my opinion.)

But simply forcing the traditional news release into a social media form won’t solve the real problem: too many PR waste the time of journalists and bloggers with poor writing, a lack of brevity and an absence of real news. Even worse, there are way too many people who don’t deal with reporters in person. Ever.

Like most PR people, I work with a lot of journalists exclusively via email and phone. There are quite a few journalists who live on the other side of the country who I have great working relationships with and we’ve never met in person.

But when it comes down to it, there’s no substitute for connecting with someone in person. That’s when you can really get to know a journalist and learn how you can best work with them to help them do their job.

When was the last time you met with a reporter or blogger in person?

Photo: Flickr.com/jshj

According to the New York Times, BP made the request of Twitter today.

When I first wrote about the BP parody account on May 22, the account had 900 followers. Now over 148,000 people follow @BPGlobalPR and the story has been reported on in dozens of news stories.

Not that BP is taking anyone’s public relations advice, but had BP contacted Twitter earlier as I had suggested, I’m pretty sure that the request would have escaped media attention. (It certainly wouldn’t have merited a New York Times mention.)

Well, not really. But anyone who works in marketing and public relations should read “Leroy Stick’s” essay which explains what the very best of us should be doing — not just when we’re faced with a crisis — but every day at our jobs. And it’s pretty easy folks and not revolutionary at all: just tell the truth.

When I first blogged about @BPGlobalPR the account had 900 followers. That was May 22. As of this writing — less than two weeks later —  there are over 110,000 people following this account.

“Leroy Stick” explains:

I started @BPGlobalPR, because the oil spill had been going on for almost a month and all BP had to offer were bullshit PR statements.  No solutions, no urgency, no sincerity, no nothing.  That’s why I decided to relate to the public for them.  I started off just making jokes at their expense with a few friends, but now it has turned into something of a movement.  As I write this, we have 100,000 followers and counting.  People are sharing billboards, music, graphic art, videos and most importantly information.

Frankly, with all due respect to “Mr. Stick”, a fake Twitter account is the least of BP’s problems.

BP needs to fix the leaking wellhead and prevent further damage to the coastal areas and clean up what’s been damaged. Most importantly, they need to cooperate fully with the government’s investigation and they need to invest more in helping the local communities along the coast. (Just last night I saw ABC’s Chris Cuomo shame BP into helping the Mayor of Jean Lafitte, La. by providing more booms to protect the town’s marshlands. Should a national news crew have to show up at your doorstep before you do the right thing?)

Until they take care of those things, there’s little any corporate communications department can do to help the company.