PR Resource

The manufacturer of the cladding that burned on Grenfell Tower in London has now discontinued sales of the material. This is an example of too little too late. A number of news reports have discussed a prolonged argument against the cladding because of its lack of fire proofing. Yet, it was used anyway to deadly effect. Arconic, the maker, has a PR crisis on its hands of its own making. The company knew the product was flammable, and it recommended that it not be used beyond the range of fire ladders. It must have known that it was installed on towers in London. Why didn’t Arconic speak up? This is a crisis for which there is no good solution. An apology for the death of 79 people is hardly enough. There is a chance the company will go bankrupt as the matter is hauled through the courts, and that is as it should be.

Some people should be kept away from social media for their own protection. The President is one of those and so is this fellow. Their postings are egocentric, frequently false and just plain dumb. Rather than building a following, they appeal to a narrow class of readers, and they are mocked by the majority. Already, Trump’s tweets have been used against his position on Syrian immigrants in court. True to form, neither Trump nor Shkreli seem to be aware of the damage they are doing to themselves. They persist. If they were to listen to communications counsel, they would be told to hang up their twitter handles and stay quiet. But, they don’t hear. Their over-confidence gets in the way. So, we watch them sink themselves day by day and we wonder how they will respond to their ultimate fates.

Search engine optimization has become a specialty within marketing and PR. There are good and bad ways of doing it and techniques need to change constantly to keep up with Google’s immense algorithms. The article discusses a number of methods, both black hat and white hat means of guiding the search engine. What is significant in the story, however, is the comment that it takes at least six months now to optimize a link in Google. This is a long time, especially for companies looking to push down bad news about themselves. Read the whole piece.  It is a good summation of the field.

Travis Kalanick has been dumped from scandal-ridden Uber, and it is an act of CEO accountability. Board members and investors determined the rot in the company’s culture extended from the top and came from an atmosphere of growth at all costs. It made no difference whether executives made suggestive remarks to women and bent rules as long as the company continued to expand at a breakneck pace. Kalanik still has board defenders but investors are opposed to him returning as a CEO after his leave of absence. He will retain a board seat but that is all. Uber now has to find a path to profitability while it continues to grow worldwide. It also needs to stop bleeding in the US where Lyft is taking market share. It’s a hard task for any CEO, especially one who will need to replace executives who have already left the company. There is no guarantee Uber will be successful, but at least there is a chance that turmoil in its ranks will end.

A good deal of public relations is still the personal touch, the effort to meet people face to face and to hear them out. Politicians understand that and they make every effort to get down to where people live and work. I witnessed that recently when Congressman Jimmy Panetta presented World War II medals to my 100-year-old aunt who had served in England and France. He talked with my aunt for 20 minutes although he was on a tight schedule. His focus was on her and not the photographers in the room, of whom I was one. He related his own service in the Army to her and she to him. My aunt was a nurse who cared for soldiers wounded in battle as well as POW’s. Panetta served as an intelligence officer in Afghanistan. The time Panetta spent with her solidified a relationship with others in the room who are voters as well. He didn’t have to show up. My aunt could have received her medals in the mail or through one of his staff, but he took the time and the personal touch. It was great public relations.

Britain is cracking down on militant speech in an effort to slow terrorist attacks. It is considering regulating the internet. In the US, the Supreme Court struck down a North Carolina law banning sex offenders from social media. It cited the First Amendment. This is the difference in speech between the two countries. It will be interesting to see what happens when a US militant web site is banned and it sues to the Supreme Court. Will the body of nine men and women take the British point of view, especially if the site calls for violence against the US and its citizens? The Court’s view of the First Amendment is broad and deep. We hear from radicals on both sides of the political spectrum. This hasn’t prevented calls for self-censorship at Google and Facebook who are moving against hate speech on their systems. They are dealing with worldwide views of speech that are less broad than the US. However, what is happening in China with government censorship won’t happen here.

President Trump is meeting with high-tech executives to get ideas for how to reduce government expenditures. It will be a photo-op, but the practical results of the meeting are likely to be slim. The principle reason for this is that tech executives have little knowledge of the functions and operations of government. It is easy to throw around concepts and bright thoughts, but the actual doing is much harder, and in some cases, impossible. It takes money — lots of it — to put in systems that reduce the number of employees in a service delivery vehicle. The government doesn’t have available cash to spend on such automated operations. Secondly, it takes time to train employees in how to use new systems. That will take months, if not years. The Trump administration doesn’t have that kind of time. So, let the photographers snap their shots of the tech leaders, but understand that it is suspect publicity.

When Jack Welch ran GE, he was hailed as the CEO of the Century. Now that his successor is stepping down, there are questions about how Welch ran the company and whether he accidentally set up Jeff Immelt to have troubles. The truth is that when Jack ran the business, it was a finance company with manufacturing. When Immelt took over and after the financial markets crashed, he had to turn it back to a manufacturing company that also did financing. It was back to the future for Immelt and GE’s stock suffered. Now the new CEO coming in has said he is going to evaluate all of GE’s units to see which will stay and which will be dumped. It seems he will make GE into a sharply focused manufacturing conglomerate to better compete. Welch was accurate when he said his success would be determined by how Immelt would grow the company in the next 20 years. He couldn’t have foreseen the effects of 9/11 and 2008 and how those events slammed GE. He was realistic enough to know that the future was tenuous. His legacy years later is not what it once was.

This is an interesting take on philanthropic marketing. It seems photos of poor and starving children and adults are not as effective as pictures of success. Expressions of hope are more powerful than images of hopelessness. It seems counterintuitive but data apparently show that people are motivated by the application of money. There seems to be a bit of Missouri in the average giver — “Show me.” People want to see their gifts used for charitable purposes rather than just collected. This is a lesson for nonprofit marketers and one they should be testing. Does it hold true for every charity? Are there exceptions? Should one retool entire marketing campaigns? There is a need to move cautiously because there are thousands of charities in need of help, and they are all competing for the same dollar. If a campaign turns off one’s base of givers, that could be fatal. Nevertheless, ignoring a potentially better way to market is dangerous as well.

When violence descends into an orgy of killing, communication fails. Consider this example. Mexican citizens were slaughtered at the hands of a drug cartel and authorities felt powerless to stop it. When government does nothing and allows renegades to roam, leaving is the only safety — if one can do that. In this case, few could get away. The article pins the blame for the terror on the US Drug Enforcement Agency. The DEA gave the telephone pin numbers of the leaders of the drug cartel to Mexican authorities. Predictably, the action was leaked, because Mexican authorities at that time were corrupt from top to bottom. There was no reasonable or persuasive means to get around gang members with weapons. The jackals were rapacious and bloodthirsty. Force is the only means of communication in instances like this and power was lacking.