Author: Jim Horton

The National Rifle Association has much to answer for, not the least of which is this.  That we still don’t have good data on gun deaths is inexcusable.  Nothing in the constitution bars gathering information, but the NRA in its paranoia has blocked any such data collection.  I’m not adverse to guns just like I’m not against driving, but it is sick that we have more stats on auto deaths than from guns. Yet both are involved in the same number of deaths a year in the US.  I’ve long favored a national registry for weapons just like data collection for autos, but here again the NRA says no and Congress listens to it.  The NRA proves that an organization with a suspect or outright bad reputation can continue to do business as long as it has supporters somewhere.  The NRA speaks to gun owners and mobilizes them against anything that might constrict their free use of arms.  They are a minority of the American population but they are vocal.  Hence, nothing changes.

How costly is a bad reputation?   In the data world, post Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Administration, it means that data is frozen in the EU.  It might have been difficult in any event to continue data transfers between Europe and the US, but NSA’s bad reputation for snooping sealed the decision.  This means thousands of companies with European operations may have to find another way to transfer personnel data or simply work with it in Europe and not send it at all.  The process is bound to be cumbersome and open to legal challenge.  Had the NSA not been so aggressive in collecting data, there might have been a chance to convince the courts to allow the transfers.  We will never know and Europe has already instituted the “Right to be forgotten” rule, which is hamstringing Google.  Still, NSA’s reputation did not help.

Cue and queue lobbyists for and against this trade pact.  The Trans-Pacific Partnership is both detested and celebrated and will be full employment for lobbying and PR firms for months to come.  Unions hate the deal because to them it means lost jobs.  Businesses support it because it means less expensive and faster ways of engaging in commerce with Asia.  Expect to hear a lot from both sides until the crucial vote in Congress supporting or denouncing the deal.  And if the trade pact is upheld, the complaints won’t go away.  Some are still denouncing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which went into effect in 1994.  Will it help or harm the US?  We won’t know for 10 to 15 years after the deal is approved.  It will take that long for business investment cycles to be fully implemented. Meanwhile, brush up your foreign languages.

One way to tell whether an organization cares about its reputation is how it behaves.  The Islamic State wants to be feared, and it has reduced ancient sites to rubble to show its intent.  There is nothing about Palmyra that should offend IS.  The muslim terrorists blew up the Arch of Triumph because it was there.  Such behavior is an example of negative relations — power through intimidation.  One doesn’t set out to win public support but to rule through fear.  It works but at a cost to the leaders in time.  Eventually the populace will rise in revolt.  It might take years or decades but people will seek a way out of oppression through flight or force.  Consider North Korea.  It rules through its military and concentration camps and by shutting its borders so no one can leave.  It was the same strategy the Soviet Union and its satellite states used until their demise.  Negative relations work but at a cost.  That price is hatred from the citizens and pressure to change.

It’s not often a CEO starts his tenure with an apology, but the CEO of United has done so.  He is asking forgiveness for the mess his predecessor made of a merger. Note that he doesn’t name his predecessor nor does he refer to him in his letter of apology, but it doesn’t take reading between the lines to see that he has thrown the previous CEO under the bus.  The circumstances in this case are extraordinary.  The new CEO has stated publicly that the company has lost credibility with employees who are demoralized and angry.  The only way he is going to get them back is through meeting them and listening to their complaints.  It seems just about everything went wrong in the combination of United and Continental airlines.  The new company spent months planning the integration of reservation systems only to have them crash repeatedly discouraging agents and outraging customers.  Five years into the merger, the airline is still stumbling and can’t seem to find its way.  No wonder he is apologetic.  But, that will buy him only a few weeks before reality sets in.  Customers and employees are unlikely to forgive a second time.

How hard is it to communicate through the web?  Try a billion times to be heard above the noise. Or, to be more precise 935,950,654, give or take a few tens of thousands.  Those of us who have long memories and can recall the early days of the web are gobsmacked by its growth and wonder how anyone can make his way through the welter of new sites and expiring old ones.  Having run online-pr.com for 18 years, that makes the site a Methuselah on the web, and probably in the top 1 to 5 percent in terms of longevity.  Online-pr.com has evolved over the years as new links supplant old ones and new features such as social media appeared.  The site changes approximately 10 percent a year.  The entire web might change more than that.  It is surprising how many sites wink out of existence without so much as a goodbye.  What this means is that several times a year, I must clean links from online-pr.com and add new ones.  It is not hard work, but it is a reminder that the web has reached a size that no one can comprehend.

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.