PR Resource

Among scientists there is a war of ideas.  Should man return and colonize the moon or reach for astronauts on Mars?  There are arguments for both sides and it has become a PR battle — who can be the most persuasive to target audiences.  In this case the message recipients are Congress and the White House, both of whom would have to appropriate the billions to get either job done.  The scientific community isn’t helping itself by its division.  What is needed is a concerted and unified effort to get government to move.  Arguments for the moon are that we have been there although it was 50 years ago and the technology exists to return — this time to stay.  Arguments for Mars are that it is a living planet although unfit for human habitation.  Science on Mars promises greater rewards than science on the moon.  While the scientific community debates, years pass and nothing gets done.  Man is stuck in low earth orbit in the international space station.

NASA has a built-in publicity advantage over other government agencies or commercial businesses.  It has the cool toys every journalist wants to play with.  The systems and training devices the space agency has developed for its astronauts are fun to experience, and reporters line up for a chance to try them out.  NASA is only too willing to oblige their requests.  These then become positive stories that naturally promote the idea of space travel and NASA’s role in it.  Credit NASA for knowing how to use its machinery to good effect.  The agency has had dark moments in past years with astronauts dying from fire, explosions and disintegration of space vehicles, but it is hard to remember that when one is playing with the training equipment.

Wells Fargo Bank can’t escape a cycle of bad news.  It was hit again by regulators for discriminatory community lending.  The bank’s reputation had already taken a blow for its mortgage lending practices and for unauthorized customer account origination.  One wonders how many more strikes against it the bank can endure.  It is hard to believe Wells Fargo is so badly run.  It sailed through 2008 when other large lenders were humbled.  It was looked upon as a conservative and savvy institution.  Then bad news began slamming the bank and it hasn’t ceased.  One wonders what the morale of its employees must be.  The familiar red stage coach and horses of its brand have become a mockery.  Wells Fargo executives have a tall order to turn the bank’s reputation around.  It will take years, but it can be done, and it needs to start with better controls.

This fast-growing internet store has discovered a secret to online retailing — deep customer involvement.  It goes beyond feedback and ratings in Amazon.com and rewards customers for participation. The site has online contests, comments on items the company is considering selling and online photos of customers with the distinctive company bag in hand.  The site makes shopping fun and personal and as a result has reached $30 million in revenue in three years.  A lesson for PR practitioners is to let the public have a say.  Yes, that opens a site to trolls as well as customers, but input should be curated.  Most web sites today are little more than brochures that get updated occasionally.  For some companies that have no b-to-c involvement that might be OK, but for consumer-facing businesses, it is missing an opportunity to build closer relationships.

Little Estonia is giving a lesson to the world on how to fight propaganda.— fake news coming from Russia.  The country quickly checks Russian news stories then debunks them if they are untrue.  Estonia’s media will not interview Russian politicos because they know that a story is already written.  The country maintains vigilance and acts fast.  The same ought to be true with fake news in the US and Europe.  The longer it survives in the marketplace unchallenged, the greater damage it can do.  People start to believe stories if they see them coming from two or three sources or if they see support in the form of “likes”, even though the “likes” are from robo software.  Educational institutions are trying to combat propaganda by training students to be skeptical of news they read, but that only goes half-way.  The rest of the lesson is vigorous exposure to facts — transparency, as Estonia is doing.

There is a PR crisis in science.  It has to do with publishing.  There is now an abundance of fraudulent science journals on the market.  They are pay-to-play, charging scientists for getting their papers printed.  They are not peer-reviewed.  They have no credibility to the knowledgeable, and they are a trap for the less aware.  Scientists caught in the publish-or-perish cycle are using them to buff their resumes, and there is no way to know whether their data has been vetted.  There is a reason for examination of one’s experiments by other scientists.  Science is hard, and there are many ways for experiments to go wrong.  There are also unscrupulous scientists who make up experiments and invent data solely for the purpose of getting published.  The cure for phony journals is transparency.  The scientific community should unmask them and expose them to ridicule.  Papers published in them should be discounted, and authors put on notice.  There is no excuse for letting this kind of dishonesty continue.

Facebook is rolling out its fact checker to protect its members from fake news.  Among the first debunkings is a false story of Irish being brought to America as slaves. What Facebook is doing is essential PR.  It is deepening its relationship with its members through watching out for them.  It is not acting like a scolding nanny but simply informing its members that independent third-party fact checkers have reason to believe that a story is false.  It then leaves it up to the member to accept the story or not.  Some might wish Facebook would go a step farther and remove the story from its site.  That might come some day, but for now a warning should be enough for most readers.  Conspiracy theorists will accept a story as true and reject warnings, but there is little that can be done about them.

Google is apologizing to advertisers for placing ads next to hate speech and other offensive material on the web.  It is important for the company to get ad placement right because most of its income and earnings comes from advertising.  Saying I’m sorry will not be enough, however.  Google has to police the web and to remove the material to protect advertisers.  This will take people and technology.  However, there is no way Google can watch every web site all of the time using humans.  It will require artificial intelligence to scan myriads of web sites where Google places advertising and a computer-based ability to recognize offensive speech.  This will be a test of the company’s technical capabilities and of its PR.  Apologies in the future will not be enough.  It has to fix the problem.

Sometimes it takes a pope to say, “I’m sorry.”  That is the case with the Rwandan genocide of 1994.  Some Roman Catholic priests took part in the murder of Tutsis and moderate Hutus during an ethnic uprising that claimed 800,000 lives in three months.  It was a savage bloodletting for which the bishops of the country have already apologized, but that wasn’t enough.  Pope Francis has asked the Rwandan president for forgiveness for the actions of church members and from a PR perspective that is the least he can do.  There was no justification for the violence and even if there were a bonafide reason, a Catholic priest should have had no part in it.  These were men who had forgotten their position as religious.  The Roman Catholic Church will take many years to live down the slaughter and well it should even though it was the actions of a few rather than the majority of priests who killed Rwandan citizens.  Even one priest gone rogue was one too many.

Sometimes the best of intentions are misguided.  One overlooks a critical part of a program and it bites.  Consider this case of a philanthropic PR campaign.  Cheerios is giving away packets of wildflower seeds to help sustain the bee population, which has been decimated by Colony Collapse Disorder.  There are problems with that, however.  In some regions, part of the wildflower seeds are considered noxious or invasive pests.  And the bees that wildflowers support are not hive creatures but other species.  Other than that, the idea is a good one and should have a positive effect.  One wonders if the program director at Cheerios looked into all of the permutations of the campaign before launching it.  It appears this wasn’t done.  The result is a campaign that is a half-success at best.  That’s a pity.