hese "publics" are more demanding than ever because they have been ignored for SO long, but their voices, if we will listen, are also clearer. We run into trouble when we concentrate on one voice to the exclusion of others or confuse their voices with the general clamor of the marketplace, with the gilding and gelding that passes for honest discourse. Don't Dance to the Music of Your Own Buzz Public relations is not about polishing an image or creating buzz; it's about building a long-term relationship between an institu- tion and its stakeholders. As in any relationship, image and buzz can be powerfully intoxicating pheromones, but they can also make at least one of the parties feel cheap and used the morning after. A company's clippings and the gyrations of its stock price are poor gauges of the relationship's strength. Armstrong Arrives Mike Armstrong boarded an AT&T corporate jet for the first time on Sunday, October I9, 1997. The crew had been told that they were shut- tling an important customer from Los Angeles to a meeting in New Jersey, and they pretended to believe it, even though they all knew that they were carrying AT&T's new chairman and CEO. When the plane landed in Morristown, New Jersey, and taxied to the AT&T hangar, the first person up the stairs and through the cabin door was the man widely believed to be Armstrong's most serious rival for the job: John Zeglis, the company's former general counsel and now its vice chairman. The two had never met, and Zeglis had volunteered to drive Armstrong in his own car to the Short Hills Hil- ton, where they would have a private dinner before the AT&T board of directors assembled on a 7:30 P.M. conference call. Tough Calls Armstrong, who usually drives either a Porsche or a Harley, slid into Zeglis's Buick Roadster for the twenty-minute ride to the hotel. Walter Elisha, the AT&T board member who had led the search, was already at the hotel, as was the man Armstrong would replace, Bob Allen. The board call had only two agenda items, electing Arm- strong cha