Media

MSU Called 'an Ignorant Client' for Costly PR Deal to Monitor News and Social Media

March 29, 2018, 7:15 AM by  Alan Stamm

Institutions in crisis can react weirdly as they scramble to keep up with criticism, accusations and other fast-moving developments.

As MSU grappled late last year with the spreading impact of L'Affaire Nasser, which put its reputation in a national spotlight, the administration of former President Lou Anna K., Simon enlisted expert crisis managers. 

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That's sensible, not weird -- though who was hired and at what cost is an eye-popper, to put it gently. Matt Mencarini of the Lansing State Journal pulls back the curtain via a public records request:

A public relations firm billed MSU for more than $500,000 for January as it tracked social media activity surrounding the Larry Nassar case. . . .

The work by Weber Shandwick, a New York-based firm, totaled $517,343 for more than 1,440 hours of work, according to documents obtained through a public records request. The firm billed for work done by 18 different employees, whose hourly rates ranged from $200 to $600 per hour. Five of those employees billed MSU for more than $50,000, including one who billed for $96,900 and another who billed for $120,893.

Weber Shandwick no longer works with the university.

Keeping an eye on news media, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms for MSU threads "had previously been done by members of Michigan State University's Office of Communication and Brand Strategy," the State Journal notes. Some campus employees "continued to do so in January," Mencarini adds.

Weber Shandwick, based in Midtown Manhattan, is a global PR giant with a Metro Detroit office in Birmingham.

As part of its half-million-dollar engagement, the agency sent daily "media summaries recapping the previous day's coverage . . . to then MSU President Lou Anna Simon, the members of the Board of Trustees, the university's in-house attorneys and others," the Lansing article says.

It recapped media stories about Simon's attendance at the second day of Nassar's Ingham County sentencing, the speculation around Simon's resignation and her letter doing so hours after Nassar was sentenced after the seventh day of the sentencing hearing.

Seven days after she quit abruptly Jan. 24, trustees picked ex-Gov. John Engler as interim president. Two weeks after starting work Feb. 5, Engler tapped his former press secretary -- John Truscott -- to advise on crisis management and media relations on a three-month contract for $325 an hour.  

Truscott's rate is $34 an hour less than the average billed by 18 Weber Shandwick employees monitoring MSU-related news coverage and social posts.

The university was "an ignorant client" that accepted a far-too-costly arrangement, says Matt Friedman, an experienced crisis communication and PR specialist in Farmington Hills.


Mastt Friedman's firm links to his post.

In a Wednesday night blog post, he calls out Weber Shandwick harshly, though without naming it . (A link to Mencarini's investigative article is handily present for anyone who's curious.) 

Friedman, a founding partner of Tanner Friedman strategic communications, is embarrassed angry about "despicable" billings that reinforce the PR industry's "reputation as greedy and superfluous." Excerpts:

This kind of embarrassing larceny has been going on for so long in the PR industry that it damages the rest of us. . . .

Now, for the eyes of the nation to see, one of the largest firms in the world has been caught fleecing a public institution in crisis. If only this was an aberration.

The average billing rate for the work was an obscene $359 per hour. Some of the work was performed for an astronomical $600 per hour. Eighteen employees worked on the business – the size of an entire medium-to-large local firm. One employee billed $96,000 alone.

Here’s a secret – monitoring isn’t necessarily hard work. It isn’t even time-consuming work. There are shortcuts, via software, that help ethical firms do the work very time efficiently.

This work not only could have been done at a small fraction of the cost, it should have been done that way, by a small fraction of the people for a small fraction of the time. This is a complete ripoff in every sense. . . .

It’s a fee arrangement that, with some education, should have been rejected.


Read more:  Lansing State Journal


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