Author: Jim Horton

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.

Google Books started out as a generous and innovative idea.  Google wanted to scan all of the books in the world and make them available online.  Then, it ran afoul of authors and publishers who didn’t want their works made available free when there was still a chance of remuneration.  Since then, Google Books has gone silent.  It is sad that such a major project has run afoul.  Maybe Google will take it up again when the legal challenges are settled.  In the meantime, it is a lesson that even the best intentions can be thwarted and positive public relations turn against one.  The problem with Google’s idea is the sheer size of the project.  People don’t trust such a task to be just from the goodness of the heart of a major corporation. It seems the larger a corporation gets, the greater its vulnerability — or, at least that is the case here.  One wonders what more the company can do in order for it to  resume its project.

As this article points out, the cost of healing or delaying fatal symptoms in healthcare is hard to determine and fraught with cost-benefit calculations.  If the only regimen is a high-priced medicine for a particular condition, health care providers have to hold their breath and pay.  They can scream later to the government that it is not right to hold patients and health care funders hostage to the cost.  Drug companies seem to be following the path of charging whatever the market will bear, given that the market is captive to their pills. Their reasoning has long been that it is expensive to develop a new drug.  Researchers go down tens of thousands of blind allies until they find a molecule that is effective and safe.  Critics counter that the drug discovery process is inefficient and unnecessarily expensive.  From a PR perspective, it looks like drug companies are gouging patients, and they need to do a better job of explaining why a drug costs so much.  If there were more transparency in pricing, that might help, but the key in the end is lower cost and until pharmaceutical manufacturers can achieve that, they will be targets for abuse.

Collegiate rankings are a much fought-over area of education, and as the White House discovered, it is best not to do them.  The reasons are clear.  Using a single measurement ignores multiple outcomes.  It is poor PR to proclaim rankings on the basis of one or even two measurements.  The publicity factor is high, of course, as winning schools trumpet their positions and losing schools argue with the methodology.  Publicity is not what rankings should be about.  Rather they should measure real aspects of education and their outcomes. That is difficult to do no matter the yardsticks one uses.

News has come out of a flaw in General Motors’ OnStar GPS and communications system for vehicles.  It turns out that five years ago, university researchers demonstrated a software hack of OnStar that would allow someone to take over control of a car except for steering.  GM did nothing about it until this year.  Apparently, the auto giant felt the vulnerability wasn’t a priority until other hackers demonstrated they could take over a Jeep a few months ago. So, now GM is downloading software into millions of vehicles’ OnStar systems to prevent such an event.  This comes under the heading of “What were they thinking?”  Certainly the company had to be aware of software intrusions elsewhere.  How could it have dismissed hacking of its own vehicles for so long?  It was a consumer and PR failure to have disregarded the fact that OnStar was vulnerable.  One hopes after this black eye that GM will act more quickly in the the future.