Author: Jim Horton

This is a case study of what to do when a CEO dies unexpectedly at a young age.  Employees need time to mourn but they also need to be refocused on their jobs.   HR has to parry calls from companies seeking to recruit away staff. Senior executives need mentoring for how to carry on in the absence of the leader.  A caretaker chairman or CEO needs to step in to keep operations running.  The board needs to launch a search for a successor and review its succession plans.  The company’s strategy needs emphasis so the business doesn’t drift.  PR should show the world how the company is doing and how it is getting back to normal.  There should be a focus on positive messages and rebuttal of negative ones.  The fundamental theme is that no company should be dependent on one man.   There are such companies, but they tend not to rise above proprietorships, and SurveyMonkey is well beyond that stage.  The company might struggle for a while but that is to be expected.  A new CEO can jump-start the business and help employees put grief in the past.  No one will forget the former CEO but they will carry on.

Politicians are already on the low side of the honesty scale, but one wonders if they are allowed to make up quotations that people never said.  Consider this case.  Apparently our founding fathers never wrote some of the things attributed to them by book author and politician, Rand Paul.  Or, at least, quotes are misinterpretations of what the Founders said.  This kind of sloppiness earns historians poor marks and public shaming.  It is interesting that, other than this one story, not much has been said to point out Paul’s errors.  Are voters uninterested or do they expect inaccuracies from pols?  In public relations, making up or bending quotes is a ticket to aspersion.  Reporters have little time for those who aren’t accurate in their dealings with them. Politicians can sometimes get away with such truth-bending, but PR professionals can’t.  Does that place us above elected officials?

How far does the moral authority of a religious leader extend to the public?  The Roman Catholic pope is about to find out with his encyclical on the environment.  Already he is getting blowback from politicians, Catholics and others who do not agree with his point of view.  That is to be expected.  There are many who believe the pope has no right nor duty to comment on issues of the day.  This pope disputes that and has been active in pushing European governments on the refugee crisis as well as poverty.  There is a chance that he might go too far and earn the enmity of those he is trying to persuade, but so far, he has worked with care to highlight issues and point to humanitarian needs.  As long as he does that and avoids meddling in political issues, he should be a positive irritant and reminder to the world that there are issues we must address whether we like it or not.  What better definition of moral authority than that?

What can one say about this fellow that is positive PR?   Comedians use him as the butt of jokes.  He has been a long-standing embarrassment to society, a self-regarding egotist, and a man filled with a sense of self-importance.  In nearly every way, he is anti-PR yet he continues to get publicity for himself and his projects and he explains away his failures as the other guy’s fault.  There must be a businessman in the puffed shell of a celebrity.  He is worth billions, or so he says.  Unfortunately, he gives business a bad name and is a cartoon of what a CEO should be.  There is room for negative examples in the PR business.  He is one but he is so extreme that it is insulting to a CEO to be warned not act like him.  One wonders how many more years the public has to suffer with him on the scene bloviating to everyone, even those who aren’t listening.

The Greek debt default negotiations have been interesting to watch.  Greek politicians have taken the position of “Save me or I’ll cut my throat.”  They are demanding debt relief without any more changes to the country’s budget structure.  As European negotiators have tired of  telling them, that is not possible because the country cannot turn around with the ongoing deficits that it has.  Greece has been at the 12th hour for days now, and it is only a matter of someone pulling the trigger.  The country has until this weekend or it will commit fiscal suicide.  This opens a public relations question.  What publics is a country beholden to? Its citizens or the citizenry of other countries?  The answer would seem to be both but Greece’s radical government is stalling on behalf of its suffering people.  That might seem heroic within Greece, but it looks like unrealistic stubbornness elsewhere.  No matter what happens, the country has a reputational issue for years to come.

Twitter’s CEO is looking for a job after failing to turn the social medium into a profitable communications service.  The wonder is why.  Twitter has hundreds of millions of users and visitors.  It is a darling of traditional media who tweet daily about what they are reporting and carry on discussions with readers.  It is used by celebrities, by politicians, by company executives, by marketers, by PR practitioners, by tens of millions of ordinary citizens.  Yet, it is struggling.  Could it be that the service has run its course and will disappear like so many other technologies that couldn’t keep up?  The internet as a disruptive medium can shatter its own offerings as much as traditional media.  It is Darwinian, high-speed evolution.  Only a few media will survive for the long-term — some traditional media that have successfully changed course, some social media that have adapted.  There is no guarantee for any medium that it will be successful and growing in 10 years, or even, five.  That means PR practitioners, marketers and other communicators should never show too much preference for one medium over another.  One never knows when it will disappear.

It is little wonder that the public doesn’t trust politicians when hacks seek to monetize everything.  Consider this instance.  Sit with Hillary for $2700.  That’s cheap, but the image it projects is of a candidate for sale when a politician should be demonstrating integrity to the public.  Instead, it is bucks here and there and everywhere.  Candidates protest that it is costly to run a campaign and they have to subject themselves to the grind of fund-raising constantly to pay off debts.  Indeed, Hillary had a huge IOU from her first campaign for president.   One hopes there is a better way for candidates to reach the public with a message, and maybe the internet is a solution — social media and web sites and news aggregators.  They are far less expensive than TV advertising, the huge nut for candidates to crack.  Until then, look for more ways for candidates to market themselves to the public and hold your nose.

How do you handle PR when your idea has smashed into an impenetrable wall?  This is a problem for Republican governors who rose to their elected offices with a pledge of “no new taxes.”   They are facing budget deficits without revenue to offset them.  So, they are taking pragmatic action.  They are selectively raising taxes and fees to fill gaps.  Will voters remember at election time that they broke their promises?  The problem with the pledge is that government is often the provider of last resort.  It takes on jobs and issues that no one else wants to tackle, such as feeding the poor and providing the destitute medical services.  These segments of society are reliant on government to watch out for them.  The money for serving these groups comes from taxing wealthier citizens.  Republican governors who have cut state services to the bone are learning the lesson that unlike corporations that can fire people, government often can’t do that.  Societal ills do not disappear when funds are taken away.

Someone tampered with the data in Google’s search and posited this as an explanation for the disappearance of dinosaurs.  Google had no explanation for how it happened.  Data tampering happens constantly, and Google is put in the position of catching up rather than being proactive and correcting misinformation.  The problem is endemic to Big Data.  When one is dealing in terabytes and larger of information, there is no way to police it all.  One has to rely on data users to alert information technologists of the corruption.  It can and will become a public relations issue when controversial information is slipped into the data stream.  Just ask Wikipedia.  Public relations practitioners need to be aware that in an era of Big Data there will be mistakes and they are likely to be frequent.  The public will judge a company by how fast it corrects errors and the measures it puts into place to prevent mistakes from happening again.

Facebook is celebrating the one-billionth download of its messenger app.  It is not the only company to have reached that number, but it is extraordinary nevertheless.  It is hard to conceptualize big numbers and a billion is beyond the imagination of most people.  That is the population of the US nearly three times over — every man, woman and child.  It is a greater number than the population of Europe.  From a PR perspective, it is a wonderful accomplishment and one that the company should boast about.  From a business view, advertisers have a vast audience to reach.  A billion of anything is huge.