Month: April 2015

Twitter’s numbers came in well below expectations yesterday and the stock took a beating.  The way it happened is embarrassing to the company and CEO.  Apparently, its investor relations vendor posted the earnings release too early.  A spider crawling web pages discovered it and posted the results on… Twitter.  Wall Street took notice and the run from the stock was on.  More embarrassing was the earnings miss after promises and forecasts from the CEO.  Analysts are now suggesting that the CEO has compromised his leadership and should depart.  Others are questioning the long-term viability of the company.  That is about as bad as it can get.  One more quarter of poor numbers and the CEO can pack his bags.  PR gaffes can be fatal.

The Roman Catholic pope is holding a climate change meeting to call attention to the issue.  The PR value from the event will be international since for many, the pope’s actions carry moral weight.  Adding to this meeting, he will issue a formal encyclical discussing stewardship of the earth, and he is making sure that the contents of the document are discussed down to the local level and from pulpits in churches.  This will carry the weight of authority for Catholics, some of whom do not believe in or are conflicted by climate change.  The communications tactics are basic but effective.  Hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, will hear his message then it is up to them to accept or reject it. But, the pope will have done his duty by getting his views before them.

Polls show that Americans aren’t concerned about the decline of unions.  That’s a pity.  Unions should be for the lowest-paid workforces in the country like fast food or farm workers.  These people have basic skills and need economic protection but frequently don’t get it.  Unions for major craftsmen are good but their workers are paid well now and have benefits.  These unions have to some degree outlived their usefulness, especially with the decline in manufacturing and rise in robotics.  The thrust of a union should be to elevate the defenseless and provide protection through organization.  There are millions of unskilled jobs in the US, all of which should be covered by unions.  It would seem that unions need to do a better job of PR.

There is a site that purports to guide one in writing the perfect e-mail.  It assembles data from the internet and builds a profile of the person to whom you want to communicate with instructions for how to do it.  Has it come to this?  Having taught e-mail writing to business school students, there is a need to change habits.  Many have difficulty getting to the point or lose the point completely.  That said, PR practitioners are often no better.  The essence of e-mail is the short message that states what one wants to say in as few words as possible.  There are exceptions — i.e. pitch letters to reporters, although these are questionable.  There are reports but the key message should be in the first line.  E-mail was never meant to be a lengthy communication.  It got that way because people have trouble getting to the point.  If the site helps one condense messages, more power to it.

Sometimes, in spite of all information given to the public, some citizens persist in their beliefs and actions.  When their actions are harmful to others, PR ends and the law steps in.  Consider this case.  There are a significant number of well-educated people in California who refuse to vaccinate their children because they believe vaccines cause autism.  Their children are endangering others who for health reasons can’t be vaccinated.  No amount of evidence and reasoning has been successful in getting these parents to protect their children.  Hence, a bill is pending in the California legislature to ban unvaccinated children from school populations.  Parents protest:  They cannot see the harm in their actions.  Everyone else understands.  PR can’t eliminate such blind spots.  It assumes that reasonable people are willing to engage with a message.  When citizens are unreasonable, communication ends and compulsion begins.

The Comcast Time Warner Cable merger has been hung up for over a year.  Now, Comcast’s reputation for compliance with FCC requests is at issue and is being used as a reason why the merger shouldn’t go forward.  For leaders who don’t think reputation matters, it is a lesson.  Comcast is determined to see the merger through or it would have given up by now.  The government is pecking it until the company sees the light.  Had Comcast’s reputation been sterling, consummation of the combination might not have been blocked for so long and might be done by now.  As it is, the company is looking at months more of government examination of the deal and millions more in lawyers and lobbying.  Reputation counts in cash and time.  It is not some ethereal ideal.

In a case of closing the barn door after the horses have escaped, a Sony lawyer sent a warning letter to the media not to use any of the material that was hacked from the company in late 2014.  Predictably the media were not impressed.  The lawyer forgot or didn’t know that once information is public, people can and will use it, especially in the Internet age.  The solution to Sony’s problem was not to get hacked in the first place.  Its cyber security was deficient, and the embarrassment the company suffered cannot be masked by a lawyer’s missive.  Sony will be struggling for months with the fallout from the hacking incident.  The lesson is not to let it happen again.  A company’s reputation can take only so much damage.

Here is a PR challenge. Norway is going to shut down its FM radio stations and move completely to digital transmission, but 50 percent of the listeners aren’t prepared for the shift.  They are happy listening to FM.  Norway has given itself two years to make the shift and that should be enough time for its citizens to purchase digital radios for homes and cars, but, of course, it won’t be. People procrastinate, and many won’t understand what has happened until the day they switch on their radios and nothing comes out.  Norway has two years to saturate the public with messages about the coming of digital radio.  If it fails, look to its D-day to move.  Officials also should be prepared for long and loud complaints from people who want to be compensated for buying new radios.  However, it is better that a relatively small country is making the change first.  Imagine the protests in the US.

Google’s social media platform, Google+, has been a failure.  Some are declaring it dead.  The question that has not been answered is why a company that is so successful in search is unable to launch a popular social media site?  There have been plenty of reasons given for it, but it is likely that it is a case of too little too late.  Facebook got there first and won the market share.  Google had missteps along the way from which it has never recovered.  Given that, what kind of PR campaign would Google need to be competitive again?  Or, as with many technology products, is it too late and the company should just shut down the whole operation?  It must be painful for the firm to see its hard work go for naught, but it is the Darwinian nature of high tech for this to happen.  Google might have to content itself with being the largest search company.

It is not often that one witnesses true humility in a public figure.  Here is a rare case.  The Chief Justice could have made known to the court and his fellow citizens who he is, or he might not have shown up at all, claiming privilege of his high office.  He did neither of those things.  Instead, he took his place in the queue and he was questioned like any other juror.  The only sign that he might be someone special were two security officers accompanying him.  That was almost certainly a requirement.   In PR, we spend too much time burnishing the clay feet of clients and trying to make digits look like metal.  It’s nice to have a leader who doesn’t need it.