Are you in PR? Well, this could be you. You could be Prisoner #31236-112.

The following is a letter from John Stodder, former SVP in the L.A. office of Fleishman-Hillard. As you know, almost exactly a year ago he and former general manager Doug Dowie were convicted of multiple counts of conspiracy and fraud in a scheme to overbill the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

That said, we at Strumpette strongly believe they're innocent. Well, let’s put it this way: if they’re guilty… so is all of the PR Industry. Bottom line: What they are going to jail for, all of us have done; Ninety-eight percent of us will do today.

That aside, we’ve gotten to know John personally this last year. We know him only as a total gentleman, one that exudes character and principle. Excuse me, he wouldn’t steal a dime from Bill Gates to buy his last stick of gum.

Let me put that in perspective: We know legions of PRs. Like the makeup of any group, you’ve got people with principle and character; you’ve got people too confused and regrettably stupid to know principle if it hit them in the head; and you’ve got total parasites that live on loopholes and the weaknesses of others. Considering the makeup of the PR industry, John Stodder is quite rare.

Without further ado, here's his letter. Read it. Most of all, put yourself in his shoes. Imagine going to jail for what you've done as a matter of standard practice just today.

-----Original Message-----
From: John Stodder [mailto:johnstodder@hotmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 02, 2007 7:41 PM
To: Johnstodder@hotmail.com
Subject: Hey there: An Update

Dear Friends:

I am not in prison! At least not yet, not for a few more weeks and hopefully never.

I thought it might be a good idea to update my friends and former colleagues on my situation. As you might know, I was sentenced in January to serve 15 months at a minimum security federal prison camp. Subsequently, the camp to which I’m supposed to surrender was identified: CI Taft. It is located about 40 miles southeast of Bakersfield. It is a privately-run facility that has 1500 low security inmates, and 500 minimum security “campers.” (I’d be among the latter.) If I go there, my mailing address will be:

John Stodder, #31236-112
CI TAFT
CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION
P.O. BOX 7001
TAFT, CA 93268

At issue now is whether I should be granted bail during my appeal. In the District Court, Judge Feess denied me bail, which means he believes I should serve my sentence while my appeal works its way through the Ninth District appellate court. Effectively, this means I would serve most or all of my sentence before getting a result on my appeal. The federal prosecutors and the judge have taken the position that because they see no merit to my appeal, there is no reason to delay my incarceration. I believe there is considerable merit to my appeal, and that it would be unfair to force me to serve a sentence that is likely to be overturned. However, as I’ve done more homework on the way the federal system works, it is not unusual for this to happen, even if there is no flight risk. Some defendants in my position get bail, some do not. There is no easily discernable pattern. I believe it has to do with the merits of each case.

If my request for bail is successful, I will be able to continue with my life and my job until the appeal is decided, which is one or two years down the road. At that point, there are myriad possible outcomes, ranging from total exoneration to affirmation of my conviction – which would mean I serve my sentence.

In preparation for the possibility of serving this sentence, I have found the following site of great help: http://www.prisontalk.com/forums/ It is full of very specific information about the Taft facility. But it also is a huge lesson in understanding my own situation, putting it into context of what is happening to a lot of our fellow Americans in an era when both parties seem to be in a competition over whether the Democrats or Republicans can throw more of us in prison. (I think the Republicans have an edge, but not by much.) It doesn’t take a knee-jerk liberal to see injustice when it stares you in the face. Browse around this site and you’ll find plenty of it.

Sure, we need prisons to separate us from violent people, predators, victimizers of children, habitual criminals and egregious violators of the public trust. But we need to take down the scoreboards that encourage prosecution for the sake of prosecution – to make the prosecutors look good by how many they indict, how many they convict, how many pounds are seized, etc. etc. There’s a scene in Martin Scorcese’s Gangs of New York that perfectly encapsulates what I’m trying to say:

Boss Tweed: Bill, I can't get a days work done for all the good citizens coming in here to harass me about crime in the Points. Some even go so far as to accuse Tammany of connivance in this so-called rampant criminality. What am I to do? I can't have this. Something has to be done.
Bill: What do you have in mind?
Boss Tweed: I don't know. I think maybe we should hang someone.
Bill: Who?
Boss Tweed: No one important, necessarily. Average men will do. Back alley amusers with no affiliations.
Bill: How many?
Boss Tweed: Three or four.
Bill: Which?
Boss Tweed: Four.

Thanks for all your support during these difficult years. My family and I are so grateful for the many expressions of support. I’m sorry I haven’t been out and about as much recently – this imprisonment hanging over my head has me mostly focused on my family and my work. When I know whether I have more time, I hope to be calling folks for lunch and coffee, and resuming our years of collegial friendship. Please write back if you have a moment – I would love to know what you’re doing.

With all my best wishes,

John Stodder

PREDICTION: This particular article will be the single-most read of any we've ever posted here, bar none. It's timely and poignant. IT'S HUGE!

Why? Because if you are thinking of a career in PR, this is a essential read before you make that decision; if you are a junior or mid-level practitioner and have had second thoughts in the last year or so, this might shed a little light as to why; if you're a VP or better and have amassed a nice little nest egg but have a growing sense that you could lose it all... this article could save your life.

The infamous Doug Dowie needs little introduction in our business. He's the former head of Fleishman Hillard’s LA office wrongly convicted last fall of masterminding an over-billing scheme with L.A.'s Department of Water and Power. Who better to counsel the industry on how to avoid getting indicted?

Well, after a few months of begging and pleading, Doug agreed. We are thrilled to have this exclusive.

Without further ado...

How Not to Get Indicted
By Doug Dowie

In late January of 2004 I got a call from Doug Michelman. Until he left Fleishman Hillard to take a senior position at Visa USA, he had been my boss. He had been president of the western region and I had run one of his most profitable offices.

We had remained good friends – colleagues referred to us as “The Dougs” -- and he knew I needed some support.

“You’re untouchable now,” Michelman said.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“I’m standing in the lobby of our ad agency and I’m looking at the new edition of Los Angeles magazine,” he said. “You’re bullet proof.”

Michelman is a smart guy, but he was wrong. My bullet-riddled body is proof that he was dead wrong.

The profile of me in the magazine, which I hadn’t seen when Michelman called, was indeed complimentary. According to the story, the Los Angeles office of Fleishman Hillard was the most successful, politically connected PR operation in the city. A couple weeks later, 300 people – including some of California’s most powerful politicians – gathered at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel when The American Jewish Committee honored me with its Civic Leadership Award for 30 years in journalism, politics and public affairs. And I’m not even Jewish.

But the political winds in the nation’s second largest city were shifting and FH was caught in a cross current that over the next few months became a hurricane. By the end of the following year, it was a Category 5.

The facts of my case are well known by now: after passing a private polygraph and volunteering to take an FBI polygraph test, I was charged, tried and convicted of running a scheme to overbill the L.A. Department of Water and Power and several other clients. I pled not guilty, maintain my innocence and will appeal the verdict. The amount of the alleged over billing is still in contention as I move forward with my appeal, but even the government concedes it was never more than a tiny fraction of the approximate $60 million the office billed during the six years in question.

For the record, I was ever accused of making a dime in the scheme.

I’ve been asked countless times how this could have happened? Three years ago, I would have asked the same question. Not any more. Last week, after Joe Nacchio, the former CEO of Qwest, became the latest senior executive convicted in a high-profile, white-collar trial, the following comment, signed by someone calling himself Kafka, appeared on the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog:

“The so-called justice allows for the DOJ to lie all they want (as long as it can’t be proved with an unattainable certitude); the grand jury is a figment of the judge’s imagination; the DOJ is allowed to bribe their own witnesses and intimidate the defendant’s witnesses, family and friends; and the jury of your peers is a bunch of people who can miss work for an excessive amount of time (if they even have jobs). The only surprise is anyone in this country pursued by the DOJ has the audacity to go to trial or of course as the DOJ sees it, the money. It took the Supreme Court to clear Arthur Andersen of any wrongdoing but of course that was after the DOJ bankrupted the firm and forced 100,000 people from their jobs. Give me the power of the DOJ and I could convict you of fraud on any matter.”

Who am I to argue with Kafka?

But there are ways to protect yourself. I’ve learned a lot over the last three years. If I were to be cleared tomorrow and magically returned to my office at Fleishman Hillard, I would do a lot differently. I’m happy to share these lessons with other managers in the public relations business. Call it:

How Not to Get Indicted

Get Off the Public Teat – Those public contracts can be huge. Sometimes they’re profitable. They are all time bombs. Every clause in those dense, complicated contracts can put you in jail. If you’re doing work for a public agency, ask your assistant to get you the contract. I’ll bet you $10 bucks that she can’t find it. After you track it down, assemble the account team in a conference room, slowly read it out loud and ask everyone if they understand every detail. Since this exercise will understandably cause you to break out in a cold sweat, adjourn the meeting, go out for a drink and think about this: IN THE EYES OF THE GOVERNMENT, YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR EVERYTHING THEY DO! If they are rounding out hours on an hourly contract, or billing an hour for an incredibly successful 15-minute phone call to the editor of The New York Times, that’s fraud – and it’s your neck if you don’t know it’s going on, even if the public agency client believes you are doing a superb job. Remember, the general manager of the LA DWP wrote the judge in my behalf during sentencing, telling him that if given the opportunity, he would hire me again. He also attended the sentencing hearing. His opinion was apparently ignored.

Stop Sending Email – If you haven’t figured it out by now, email never goes away. Never. You can delete it, be assured by your company that it’s gone after a certain amount of time and just when you’re lulled into believing some moronic, racist, sexist, ambiguous, or incriminating email you mindlessly banged out on your Blackberry four years earlier while rushing down 57 Street in the rain comes back to destroy your life. Fleishman Hillard somehow found and gave the government more than a million emails during the investigation. I read tens of thousands of them before the trial. (More on that later.) Throw your Blackberry away today and start using the phone. Your colleagues will enjoy hearing from you for a change. If I hadn’t gotten hooked on the technology and was forced to defend every word in every email I sent or received during a six-year period, I wouldn’t be in this mess.

Never Delegate – I ran an office that billed about $10 million a year. During my tenure, the headcount reached about 60-65 people. While I was GM, my senior staff included dozens of senior partners, partners, senior vice presidents and vice presidents. Those senior executives reviewed billing work sheets, drafted invoices and signed the bills, while I devoted most of my time to client relations and developing new business. I hired the best and the brightest and never for a second believed anyone on my staff would commit a crime to satisfy me or our supervisors in St. Louis. During my sentencing the judge said that delegating the billing process was a cynical move to insulate myself from wrongdoing. In a plea bargain with the government, a former SVP testified he “thought” I wanted him to inflate bills when I told him to hit the financial projections he had given me just 30 days earlier. If you don’t have time to carefully scrutinize every worksheet and bill, tell your bosses you need more help. If they refuse, quit.

Buy a Stopwatch and Clipboard – If you think you don’t need to keep careful track of your time when you become a GM, forget it. If your assistant enters your time, you’re vulnerable. If you provide thousands of hours of billable time to a client without charging, it will get you nowhere if the FBI challenges the bills. Same thing for writing off bad debt. Nothing counts except the tens of thousands of individual time entries by hundreds of account executives, even if it’s impossible to determine which are legitimate and which are not. Remember, the government is not interested in charging some account supervisor. They want YOU! There was any number of FH employees who clearly inflated time who were never charged. All they had to do was blame it on someone else.

Spy on Your Staff – Once a month, review all the email sent and received by your staff. It’s the company’s property and you’re entitled to it. You’ll be horrified. As I said earlier, Fleishman Hillard gladly provided the government more than a million emails to the government before the trial and we got all of them during discovery. I spent the summer of 2005 in a conference room of my law firm reliving six years in the life of the Los Angeles office of Fleishman Hillard. Think all those employees who smile and chat with you every day in the kitchen while you get coffee like you? Forget it. Think those employees who get big raises appreciate it? Forget it. Think those employees who seem to work so well together like each other? Forget it. Think you learn about your staff’s opinions during annual reviews and anonymous staff surveys? Forget it. You will discover many of your most trusted employees hate each other and their supervisors and have no hesitation to express their opinions – about everything from office love affairs to drug use to the bathroom habits of SVPs! – in emails to each other and their friends. Remember, if your office comes under the same kind of scrutiny that was directed at mine, these are the employees who will jump to cooperate with the government to save their own skins. Get rid of the most vicious and malicious of them now. (I also learned that two mid-level account executives carried on a torrid email affair for months in messages that described in explicit detail what they hoped to do to each other once they got out of the office that day. I never knew either of them could write so well.)

Ignore Your Financial Targets – When you’re told after the second quarter that your profit target is being increased to $2 million from $1.3 million – despite that fact you’re not even sure you’re going to hit the original number – tell your boss that you’re afraid that if you communicate that information to your overworked staff that you run the risk that they’ll “think” you want them inflate hours. Tell your bosses that you prefer that they explain to staff why it’s necessary to boost the financial targets halfway through the year. If they demur and order you to do it, call the FBI. (It might not be a bad idea to wear a wire to that meeting with your bosses. See next rule.)

Never Trust Your Boss – This is the most important rule. First off, if you work for an agency that’s owned by one of the massive holding companies, your bosses aren’t really your bosses. The holding company will be calling all the shots. And when a crisis hits, they have only one goal: the preservation of the company. No matter how many years of loyal service you’ve provided, how much money you’ve made for the company or how much your clients love you, you are dispensable. You’re the guy in the lifeboat with the gangrene leg. It’s just a matter of time before you swim with the fishes for the good of the group. Testimony taken during my wrongful termination suit revealed that from Day One lawyers were advising the executives I had worked beside for 13 years that if I wasn’t thrown overboard the company faced indictment. That means you’re fired, publicly humiliated before you’re even charged and the company stops paying your legal bills, even if they originally promised to pick up the tab, which in my case is an astounding $3 million! It also means your company’s attorneys enter an unholy alliance with the prosecutors to demonstrate the firm’s sincerity. Information is shared and side deals are negotiated. If you don’t believe me, print this out and attach it to a letter to your CEO asking him or her if the firm would support you if one of your subordinates – maybe a senior vice president – told the government in a plea bargain that they inflated bills without complaint for years because of pressure from you. Ask for a reply in writing and see what you get.

Think I’m cynical? You bet I am. I was in the in Marine Corps and served in Vietnam, then spent 20 years in hard news and politics before I ever moved to PR. I was cynical before I ever heard of Fleishman Hillard. But I wasn’t prepared for what I’ve experienced in the last three years. You can ignore my advice, or just write it off as sour grapes. Think it can’t happen to you? Think again. It can happen to anyone.

Last month the judge who presided at my trial denied my motion to remain free pending appeal. We’ve appealed that decision to the Ninth Circuit and should know sometime next month whether I will begin serving my 42-month sentence. Meanwhile, I’ve sued both Fleishman Hillard and Omnicom to recover my legal fees. The first hearing in that case is next week.

DISCLAIMER: The picture above is a representation and not of Mr. Dowie.

What's the magic word with clients? "Measurement". Wanna make a PR person squirm? Ask them about "measurement". So what does it mean when one of PR's most noted measurement experts calls to "mothball measurement." Yousa! That's gotta be a bombshell no matter what side of the table you're on.

Katie Delahaye Paine is one of PR's leading measurement experts. Paine is the founder of KDPaine & Partners, a worldwide leader in PR measurement and evaluation. Prior to launching the firm in '02, she was founder and president of The Delahaye Group, an industry leader in business and communication intelligence.

There's more: Katie was an initial founder of the Institute for Public Relations special commission on measurement and evaluation. She served as the US liaison to the European Standards Task Force to set international standards for media evaluation. And she's a Research Fellow at the Society for New Communications Research.

So listen up!! She's dead serious when she says, "It's time to stop talking about measurement and change the conversation!"

Without further ado...

Why "measurement" should be mothballed
By Katie Delahaye Paine, CEO
KDPaine & Partners, LLC

Jim Dowling, Planning Director for Oglivy PR in Asia, had a recent blog post with a catchy title: “FCUK MEASUREMENT.” Where he went on to say a number of things I disagreed with; I agree with the headline. No, I’m not suggesting we stop being accountable. It’s just that we should be talking about data and research, and stop fretting over how big our rulers are. It's time to stop talking about measurement and change the conversation! Here are three reasons why:

Reason # 1 -- Measurement is too often just bookkeeping; trying to meet some management target that is not necessarily closely related to your real goals.

The very word “measurement” seems to bring out fears in a great many PR practitioners. Maybe it’s because they had their hands smacked with to many (or not enough) rulers as children. Maybe it’s the genetic fear of “word people” fearing numbers and charts and graphs. But, for whatever reasons, it is clear that measurement seems too scary a word. In reality measurement is just a more direct way to achieve your goals based on decision making with the right information.

So instead, let’s start talking about what kind of data you need to make better decisions. When you’re in middle of a battle for thought leadership positioning, how do you know if you’ve won? If you client asks you what’s a better way to launch a product a press conference of a VNR, do you have the answer at your fingertips? More importantly, do you have the facts to back up that answer? If you’re trying to make a decision on how to launch a new product, what’s the best way to break thru the clutter? If your boss asks you who the most effective spokesperson is, can you name the top three? Is your answer based on facts or gut instinct? The reality is, in 2007, you have to have that data at your finger tips. There is simply no tolerance these days for decisions based purely on gut feelings, mostly because what gets done depends on whose gut is bigger and more powerful. (Now that’s a disgusting visual.) What we need is data that tells us what works and doesn’t work, data to tell us what makes our constituencies act/buy/report, data that gives us regular direct feedback on our activities. Besides, when you have half a dozen people all lobbying for their own pet project, the only way to shut them up is with data. That’s what measurement provides – the hard data to back up your gut instinct and help you make better decisions. But somehow when you call it “measurement” it becomes something to put off, delay or avoid all together.

Take KDPaine & Partners. It's a perfect case study. We’re about to launch two new services, at the end of the month, -- the first is a social media consultancy to facilitate conversations among communities in New Hampshire, the other is a significant expansion of our survey research business. At the end of our first little brainstorming session we had a list of some 30 potential tactics ranging from bumper stickers (No Paine, No Gain) to islands in Second Life. The problem is that we don’t have enough budget to do it all, so how do we make a decision? We look at the data. We look at the type of people we’re trying to reach, our goals for the launch, the type of people participating in each community, who we’d reach by participating, what the relative cost is and what the competition is doing to make noise in our space. Once we have the data in front of us, we make a decision.

Reason #2 -- There shouldn’t be a standard for “measurement” so why wait for it.

The other thing we have to stop talking about is measurement standards. Do you have a standard way that you evaluate your friendships? Do you use the same benchmarks to decide whether you’re having dinner with friends and family? Some programs are designed to generate media coverage, but others are designed to avoid it and still others are designed to influence the media coverage of others. Still other are designed to solicit ideas or change perceptions? So how can there be a standard way to measure all of this? The answer is, there isn’t. But PR people seem to forget that the R in their title really does stand for relationships and that there is no way you can evaluate the health of your relationships by counting column inches and comparing the result to what you might (if you were stupid enough to pay full retail) have to spend on the equivalent advertising. Just because counting column inches and comparing results to falsified ad equivalency numbers is a lot easier (and makes you look better) than doing real relationship measurement, is no reason to do it. Yes, it’s a lot easier to call in an air strike than negotiate with your enemies, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. Like I tell those wimpy agencies that still do this AVE stuff when they say “the client demands it” – If the client demanded heroin would you give that to them as well?

Reason #3 -- Whether you like it or not, you become what you measure.

If you measure nothing, you are worth nothing. When you measure eyeballs and/or the number of bloggers you’ve pitched in the last week, the end result will be that you may meet your numbers, but you may or may not have touched your target audience at all and you will have left a lot of pissed off blogerati in your wake. If, instead, you measured your awareness or perceptions or the types of conversations that people are having, you’ll become a better communicator because you’ll have the data to make an informed decision based on what has or has not worked.

So stop measuring and start gathering data. Stop waiting for someone to come along and give you a ruler, and start making decisions.

If there's one thing that characterizes the current social media explosion, it's the rush to push the limits. It's absolutely exhilarating... well... that is, until the Gods push back.

This is about the Gods pushing back. It's a must read for everyone in PR and corporate communications. It's a perfect example of when organizational interests clash with the now sacrosanct "conversation". Here, it's simple: When everyone's a potential corporate spokesperson, the potential (read likely) results are nothing short of a type of systemic Tourette's.

The lesson? The phrase "loose lips sink ships" is still in effect. With one little comment on Twitter last Friday, Edelman PR SVP Steve Rubel dissed an audience of 11 million. Now that's PR!

A word to the wise.

Boycott Edelman, or would that be over reacting?
By Jim Louderback
Editor in Chief, PC Magazine

How far can you really take business transparency? While I've been pushing some of the more radical transparency options at PC Magazine, where I'm editor in chief, now I'm really not so sure. What's given me pause? A recent web post I read from Edelman Senior Vice President and noted blogger Steve Rubel, that "PC Mag is another. I have a free sub but it goes in the trash."

Rubel shared his thoughts via the new micro-blogging platform Twitter, a new stream of consciousness service that combines the immediacy of instant messaging and SMS with the permanence and subscribability of RSS and blogging. Post a quick thought on Twitter, and all of your friends and fans instantly see it, either on their PC or cell phone. Steve has 601 friends, and 987 followers, which is certainly a lot. But it's not just a private conversation between those 1588 individuals, because those same Twitter thoughts are also available on the internet, apparently forever, for all to see.

When I saw the post, a torrent of thoughts flashed through my head. The first, of course, was to ring up the guys in the basement and cancel his free subscription. It costs a lot of money to print and mail those copies of PC Magazine out, and these days every dollar counts.

But then I started thinking about what this means for our relationship with Edelman. One of the company's top execs had stated, in a public forum, that my magazine (and by extension, my audience) was useless to him. He wasn't even interested in seeing whether we'd covered one of his clients. Did the rest of Edelman think like Steve? Were we no better than fishwrap to the entire company?

Should I instruct the staff to avoid covering Edelman's clients? Ignore their requests for meetings, reviews and news stories? Blacklist the "Edelman.com" email domain in our exchange servers, effectively turning their requests into spam? If we're not relevant to Edelman's employees, then how could we be relevant to their clients?

I did a quick search through my recent email, and found that over the past few weeks Edelman staff pitched me about news and new products from Palm, MarkMonitor, Mozilla/Firefox, Microsoft (hardware and Xbox), Eyespot.com, Vulcan Flipstart and Dash Navigation. Heck, they even pitched me yesterday on the release of Adobe's new Creative Suite 3, which has to be relevant to at least some of the 11 million folks we reach across our magazine, web and video properties each month. And then I realized that this was probably just the callous act of a rogue Edelman exec, and it didn't necessarily reflect the views of the rest of the company. Still, it made me wonder. And in the future, if I'm on the fence, I'll probably be somewhat less inclined to take a meeting with one of Edelman's clients.

Did transparency work in this case? I'd say no. While it's nice to know what at least one person at Edelman really thinks about us, it didn't do much for the relationship between my 11 million-strong audience and Edelman's clients. But at least two good things came out of it. First, we get to save a little bit of money on our comp subscription line item. And second, I get a chance to remind everyone out there in PR that, even if you don't read that copy of PC Magazine, please don't toss it "in the trash". Pass it along to someone who really wants it - or at the very least, be kind to the earth and drop it in the recycle bin instead.

Jim Louderback is Senior Vice President and Editor In Chief of Ziff Davis' Consumer Tech Division, including PC Magazine, PCMag.com, Gearlog.com, ExtremeTech, DL.TV and Cranky Geeks.

UPDATE 4-17-07: Rubel apologizes.