PR Resource

Give Burger King points for a clever way to promote its Whopper hamburger sandwich.  As you can see, BK employs Google to explain the make-up of its product.  Google is not amused and has put a stop to it, but the publicity value for BK far exceeds the initial reach for the ad.  It is an ingenious method to exploit multiple media in order to get a message across.  Look for others to follow BK’s example.

One amenity the homeless lack is a place to clean clothes.  Anyone who stands near a homeless person on the subway can attest to that.  The pope also understands the issue and did something practical about it.  He opened a free laundromat for the homeless of Rome.  It seems a small gesture but it means a lot to those living on the streets.  They now have a place where they can spiff their clothes and feel like an ordinary person again.  Smart PR engages in practical solutions like this.  It is not just words and persuasion but deeds.  This pope is action-oriented, and he uses his own example to motivate Catholics around the world.  It is visible leadership setting achievable goals for others to follow.

Sometimes a stock with a good story will be valued more highly than traditional competitors.  Consider Tesla.  Investors have pushed its worth higher than Ford and nearly the equal of General Motors.  Yet, Tesla lost $674 million last year, while GM made $9.4 billion.  PR practitioners should be skeptical of such enthusiasm for a company.  Fundamentals still apply.  A business that can’t make money consistently is headed for a fall.  Eventually reason returns and investors realize the the “king has no clothes.”  Only a few companies have been able to grow with marginal earnings and investor support.  Think Amazon.com, which deliberately took losses for years as it built out its distribution system.  Amazon, however, had and has strong sales.  Tesla is still proving it can turn out autos efficiently.  Let Tesla show the least weakness, and it will plunge in value.  Elon Musk is balancing on a needle point.

By now, if you haven’t seen this video and story, you don’t pay attention to news.  It is a PR disaster of United Airlines’ own making.  The first error was overbooking the flight. The second was forcibly removing a passenger from the plane in front of passengers’ cameras.  The third was dragging the passenger down the floor.  United’s CEO was apologetic but it is going to take a lot more than words to wipe the video from people’s minds.  This comes under the heading of “what were they thinking.”  Surely there had to be a better way.  Putting the passenger in a transport chair.  Carrying the passenger off the plane.  The employee who did the dragging was imposing his will on the passenger and not thinking about the consequences.  At the very least, the employee needs training and for that matter, all of United’s gate agents and security need rules and equipment to prevent this from happening again.

This is good PR while at the same time a rebuke to the Trump administration.  The key, of course, is not just the sign but acceptance of foreigners when they arrive.  The xenophobia demonstrated by the government is not the way the country was built in spite of past exclusion laws.  We know what Hispanics bring to the country.  They have added food, culture and hard work to the American mix.  We might not understand yet what Arabs and Muslims will bring but if we deign to look, we can surmise what a large population would add to our neighborhoods.  If history remains true, each new ethnic group has given more to the United States than it has taken from the government and its citizens. These signs are testimony to that fact and are more accurate than the administration’s attitude.

This kind of speculation needs to be shot down quickly.  Left unchallenged, it is damaging to the company and its customers.  The reporter used slim pretexts for a thesis that Apple is a company divided against itself.  There was a name for this when the Soviets controlled Russia and were silent about their internal dealings — Kremlinology.  It is the same kind of guessing used today for North Korea.  Apple has never been transparent when it comes to product plans, so reporters and analysts resort to opinion.  That their personal beliefs might not be accurate is beside the point.  They write anyway.  Apple’s public relations department should be on guard for this kind of story and ready to disabuse the commentator.  But then, if Apple chooses not to reveal its developments, the PR department is ham-strung and unable to act with any kind of credibility.  It’s a difficult position to be in.

In the 19th and early 20th Century, medicine men selling potions made their rounds of large towns and small.  It made no matter to them that their cures were fake as long as a gullible public would buy.  That same fraud and naive public continue to exist today in the supplement industry.  There are good manufacturers and distributors of supplements that actually work, but along side of them are shysters who put anything in a bottle, make extravagant claims and reap sales from those who hope more than they think.  The government doesn’t regulate the field and insist on blind studies as it does for the pharmaceutical industry.  Hence, anyone can get away with just about anything.  It makes for poor PR for the supplement industry, and it demonstrates that the business is incapable of regulating itself.  What is needed is much-dreaded government oversight of the business.  It is safe to say many supplements marketed today wouldn’t pass a test for efficacy.  They are no more than hope in a bottle.

How do you invent a typeface that looks the same in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, English, Cyrillic and Greek?  Google and Adobe have done it with the help of a number of type foundries.  What’s more, the developers have open-sourced the typeface for others to use.  That means multi-lingual web pages can look like they are in the same family without the jarring mishmash of fonts that were needed until today.  It might not seem like a big deal but it is important in relating to one’s audiences that one use fonts that are familiar to the reader.  The detail that the designers navigated was extraordinary, but they worked it out patiently. The result, Noto Serif CJK, is destined to become as common as Arial or Helvetica.  It might seem odd that PR can encompass such small detail but it does.

The Los Angeles Times has torn into President Trump for Trump’s habit of lying.  The editorial is devastating and one wonders how anyone could recover from its words.  Trump probably won’t worry about it.  He doesn’t care.  The editorial posits that Trump lies so frequently he hasn’t a grasp on what is the truth.  If one lie doesn’t work for him to reach his constituency, he lies again to regain his stature with those lost in anger and conspiracy theories.  It is sad to have the nation’s leader disregard facts.  There is no PR solution for such behavior.  First of all, PR is built on accuracy and lying is antithetical to its core.  PR is persuasion based on facts and what an individual or organization has done.  For Trump, the practical effect of his lying is to impeach his character and to cause loss of control of his agenda.  Already in light of his failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act, naysayers are predicting doom for his effort in tax reform.  If the US is fortunate, Trump will be a one-term president and maybe, we will get a new president who has respect for the truth.

It is easy to talk about difficult feats.  Doing them is proof of performance and at the core of public relations.  This is an example of walking the talk.  Never before has a company or space agency flown a second-hand booster into space and then recovered it for use again.  It promises to slash the cost of launches to millions of dollars from tens of millions.  Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, has a right to crow about the performance of his rocket.  It is not hype if one can do it, and he has.  Musk predicts that it will change the industry, but it is a little too early to know if that is true.  Other companies will have to adopt the same philosophy for their boosters and master the mechanics of flying a spent rocket to a location then setting it down gently.  Still, Musk is close to cornering the commercial market with his better and cheaper way of handling launches, and he deserves the revenues he will reap.