Month: September 2015

Everyone knew the shale oil boom would last for years.  “Consider the price of oil,”  they said.  “It won’t drop below $50 a barrel even with the extensive drilling in North Dakota.”  That was then.  Now, North Dakota has thousands of dwellings under construction with no one to put into them.  Man-camps have disbanded.  Thousands have left the state with the price of oil in the gutter.  The bust defied conventional wisdom and the “known.”  Boom and bust has a long history in American economics.  It most frequently happened with gold mining.  One would think that given the past, the present day investor would be smarter.  But no, each time everyone thinks this boom is different.  What goes up, stays up.  PR practitioners should know better because they see fads rise and fall in the media daily, but they are not immune.  They reflect the “known” in their publicity and rarely question whether it makes sense.  After all, everybody believes a certain way.  Why buck the trend?  So, they don’t, and the outcome is that they too fall when the bust comes.  We ought to know better.

This could be a PR disaster when it starts on Oct. 1.  Forcing doctors to use 140,000 codes to describe an illness or injury is far too much specificity.  It will be difficult enough for a specialist to master the codes in his area.  What about internists on the front line of medicine who see a bit of everything?  There is such a thing as too much data, and this is it.  The propagators of the code understand the enormity of the challenge and have tried to train doctors for its arrival, but the real problem will come when stressed doctors, behind in appointments day after day, try to choose a code on the fly.  Expect approximate results and not accurate ones.  The real worth of the coding system will be known in a year or two when analysts crunch the numbers and look into their validity.  Expect chaos.

One way for a politician to avoid responsibility for his acts is to blame the media for reporting on them.  This is what Bill Clinton has done on behalf of his wife.  However, the problem remains that she did use a private e-mail server rather than the State department system.  No matter, it is easier to focus on media reporting and to say that it was “no big deal” that Hillary erred.  This type of counterattack usually doesn’t gain a politician much ground nor does it wave off media attention.  Rather, it stimulates reporting.  There have been several “smoking guns” brought to light but no official movement on the part of the Justice Department.  The longer this issue remains in the media, the worse it gets for Hillary, her husband’s defense notwithstanding.  It is better not to blame the media and to take criticism in silence.

It happens in politics, in business and elsewhere — the internal revolt. Dissidents rise in protest over an organization’s actions and sometimes go public directly, such as Edward Snowden or indirectly through whispering to the media.  There isn’t much one can do from a public relations perspective.  It is up to the CEO or organizational leader to confront the dissident and resolve the issue or to remove the dissident through changing his job or firing him.  PR can only relate the actions taken and the reasons for them.  The hard part is when an internal revolt is played out in the media.  Frequently, journalists will take the side of the dissident, and there isn’t much an organization can do to balance the picture.  One weathers the storm the best one can while continuing to put accurate messages out to the public.

Hillary Clinton violated a norm of public relations and is suffering a self-inflicted wound that isn’t getting better.  Yes, it is about her State Department e-mails and use of a private server.  New information keeps dribbling out to reignite the story and damage her reputation.  Her favorability numbers have tanked and the door is open for Vice President Joe Biden should he decide to run.  Clinton’s strategy appears to be deny, deny, deny then concede on a point to stay alive.  She can’t or won’t let the entire story come to light, which raises suspicions of what she was doing with that unprotected server outside the State Department network.  As the article states, PR 101 is to get all bad news out at once and be done with it.  Why Clinton hasn’t done that is a mystery.  She knows it is affecting her campaign.  Perhaps, events have taken a life of their own, and there is nothing she can do to stop it.  If she had disclosed sooner, that might not have happened.  Who knows what will unfold now?

This article shows why it is hard to pigeonhole the pope along American political lines.  He doesn’t fit neatly into the categories of liberal or conservative.  He is his own man, an independent thinker and believer.  The effort to pigeonhole him demonstrates the human tendency to put things into boxes in order to deal with them more easily.  It is something PR practitioners know intimately.  We call it perception, the lens through which the world is viewed.  We try to change perception constantly on behalf of clients through widening or narrowing the lens, or, if need be, changing it altogether.  We understand the power of perception and how it distorts or amplifies.  We know that reputation is based upon perception, that how one is viewed is how one is considered.  Fortunately, the pope has good press, but that can change any day and at any hour, and he understands that.  He is not here on the strength of his press clippings.  His purpose is higher and he hopes to be perceived through a lens of spirituality.

The story out of Volkswagen is so strange that it is nearly unbelievable.  That a car company would have the audacity to fudge tests on its engines and then sell tens of thousands of them before the EPA caught on is putting a loaded gun to the head and pulling the trigger.  Didn’t anyone in the engineering department, the marketing department or at headquarters stop to consider the reputational damage to the company from this chicanery?  Volkswagen, which has trumpeted the clean diesel, now has to admit that they aren’t so pollutant-free after all.  The fallout from this debacle is already being felt.  Volkswagen has stopped sales of cars with the engines in the US, whether new or used.  Fines from the EPA are bound to be stiff and the CEO of Volkswagen may be looking at the end of his job.  Even if he didn’t know, he should have known and stepped in before the blunder was released to the marketplace.  This is a classic, “What were they thinking?”

Ever wonder how NASA and its affiliates generate publicity for their missions?  They work hard at it.  The link is to an article that details the Pluto flyby mission, which went off so successfully this past July.  It turned out to be a multi-day media event that required plenty of logistics, press access to the scientists, conferences, individual interviews and accommodations for more than a thousand guests and staff.  This might be “old-hat” for NASA but for the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins it was new and strange since APL is a closed facility handling sensitive government projects along with the Pluto mission.  The brunt of the success depended on photos taking four hours to reach earth.  Until those images popped onto the screen and in Instagram, no one could know for sure that the satellite had done its job.  Talk about nerve-racking.  Years of scientific work and months of publicity planning hung in the balance.  As we now know, APL and NASA performed magnificently.

The global financial community has been involved in a guessing game.  The sport?  When the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates from the near-zero level where they are today.  Yesterday was the latest iteration of the game and once again, the Fed blinked and left rates alone.  This means the sport will last months longer and markets will once again be primed to react.  At some point, the Fed will have a credibility issue, especially when global turmoil has eased and inflation picked up. One can assume the Fed will react quickly when that happens, but there is no certainty it will do so.  The conundrum for the agency is that it is in largely uncharted territory.  Economists have used the Depression of the 1930s as the analogue, but the two situations are not alike, especially in the level of unemployment.  The economy is sluggish and has been for years.  It is closer to Japan which has been in and out of recession for 25 years.  The Fed must be asking if low growth is a new normal for the country, and if so, how should it react other than what it is doing.  It is a global public relations issue.

More than sparking sales, McDonald’s needs to rebuild its relationship with its franchisees.  They are hurting and as a result, their view of corporate is negative.  McDonald’s can’t afford to go to war with its franchisees.  What it needs to do is to listen to them closely then decide what to do to regain growth.  This is a giant internal PR task for the company.  There is no easy way to get it done.  Inevitably franchisees’ interests will conflict.  Some will want to maintain the menu.  Others will ask for it to be reduced to speed service.  Some will ask to modify the franchisee contract.  Others will be happy with the way it stands.  The corporation will need to thread through the opinions and to find an approach that is both pro-growth and satisfying to its franchisees.  It will be a monumental task, but if McDonald’s is to start growing again, it needs to be done.