From 50,000 Feet

Scott Berinato, who blogs for Harvard Business School, is mighty impressed with the online press release Delta and Northwest airlines created to launch their recent merger:

Think of it as a mini-site, or temporary site, almost like a booth at a trade show. It’s a combination of marketing, investor relations, and customer service. The content here is meant to answer all of the questions from any of the merger’s stakeholders.

The legalese on the site calls it a press release, a phrase that evokes something texty, a single page with a headline, contact information and some canned executive quotes. No more. The new press release, for major events anyway, is a full-blown communications center.

This one is professional, well designed, and neatly organized by stakeholders—employees, customers and communities (read: local governments that control airports).

The amount of information available is impressive. Employees worried about layoffs get a detailed FAQ, a merger time line and more. Customers can choose their home state to see how the proposed merger affects their service. Investors and municipalities get a 17-slide presentation with statistical information and maps of the combined network of routes.

The site strikes me as an all-you-can-eat buffet run by a chef with OCD.  You can watch highlights of the press conference, or the entire press conference.  Or, you can watch just the comments of certain executives who spoke at the press conference.

There are separate fact sheets, rich with links, for employees, customers and “communities,” meaning the current Delta or Northwest hub cities and the other markets they serve.  Minnesotans get a page all their own, where you can learn that Northwest’s roots in Minneapolis/St. Paul go back to 1926, while the Utah page salutes Delta’s equally long relationship with Salt Lake City (via now-disappeared Western Airlines, which Delta swallowed up some years back).  But they don’t stop there.  The proposed merged airline’s got a message for all 50 states, with even more information for specific cities.  It is a web developer tour de force.

Keep digging around and you’ll find message points on high fuel prices — not really relevant to this story, but the mad PR chef wanted to prepare something in case somebody asked.  Almost humorously, there are frequent places to link to Frequently Asked Questions. Who could possibly have a question left after sifting through all this verbage?  If it hasn’t been covered, it’s probably a question they don’t want to answer.

And that’s the problem I have with this mega-release.  It’s a high-tech version of an old PR technique that one could call “drown the reporter.”  Only now, the audience isn’t just the business press, it’s customers, employees and communities.  It creates the impression that you’ve been told everything.  But of course you haven’t. And if you managed to think of a question not covered in all these pages, there is no way to ask it.  There is no link that allows you to e-mail anyone at either airline.

However, they’d love it if you would write your elected officials, using a note helpfully drafted for you by our OCD chef. You can send the following e-mail to up to 10 of your friends and family at a time:

Dear Friend,

Please visit the link below to learn more about the merger between Delta and Northwest Airlines and to find out how you can get involved.

Spam from your own family!  And you can spam yourself, sign up for regular e-mail updates about the merger, presumably with more requests to write Congress and get your friends into the act.  Maybe you’ve got friends overseas you want to share this news with.  The release is available on this site in 12 languages.

Well, you’re probably thinking this is much more information than anyone can ever use.  How much interest is there, really, in this merger?  The vertical slice of the audience that cares deeply will find this site unsatisfying on many levels, and everyone else will find it to be overkill.  This is the kind of site you could spend an hour reading, but you’ll actually only give it 30 seconds.

Berinato has a theory as to why the airlines’ PR departments went to all this trouble:

I would argue that the Delta and Northwest had no choice. After all, boycottnewglobalairline.com is still available for $9.95. If the airlines don’t put out a compelling message, others may. Who? It could be any group or anyone: The pilots’ union. A blogger who calls himself the cranky flier. Ralph Nader!

People who want to know what this merger means to them will go directly to the web to find out. It’s not that Delta and Northwest would lose control of the message without a website. They wouldn’t have a message at all.

Maybe so.  That’s what PR people tell their clients anyway.  But if this is the press release of the future, it doesn’t seem to have much to do with the press. The whole idea of this release is to talk directly to readers who come across it, to let them identify themselves by audience segment, and to reassure them that, yes, we’ve even thought of you, Mr. and Mrs. Vermont Stakeholder.

But after you swim around in this sea of blather for awhile, you find yourself wanting to escape, escape to a world where someone will utter a skeptical word.

Tags: Delta Airlines, Harvard Business School, Northwest Airlines