PR Resource

I’m going to be away for a few days on client assignment.  I will return Wednesday.

Say what you want about ISIS, the muslim terrorist group, but they are masters of generating negative publicity.  A book burning is guaranteed to get the media’s attention and a Christian book burning demonstrates the group’s hostility to religions other than its own. This kind of publicity is self-defeating, however, because it convinces the world that ISIS is a dangerous entity that needs to be stamped out.  One wonders why such radicalism is so blind to the consequences of its actions.  One explanation is the terrorists have convinced themselves that they are in the right and the rest of the world is wrong.  In other words, they are the antithesis of public relations where one listens closely to people before acting.  ISIS imposes its rigid view of life on everyone under its power and cannot allow deviance of any sort.  It’s a power ploy and not religion, at least not muslim beliefs.  Each negative act like a book burning brings the group one day closer to extinction.

Cable companies are fighting a loss of subscribers who are cutting the cord and relying on the internet for programming.  For the most part, cable has only itself to blame.  Their service was bad and charges for bundled channels, most of which few watched, are high.  One wonders why cable kings let things fester as long as they have and the answer is that they were the only outlet in many towns.  One had to deal with them or rely on rabbit ears for the few over-the-air channels left.  When one is a monopoly, there is a greater temptation to let service slide.  The attitude is to whom can one complain except the local municipality.  Cable companies are now relying more on delivering broadband than channels.  They won’t go away but their importance has diminished.  One wonders if they had practiced good public relations from the outset whether they would be in the same fix today.

A video making the rounds shows a stomach-churning scene of an employee peeing onto a food assembly line.  Kellogg is investigating the incident but the damage is done.  An employee has sabotaged the company and added a yuck factor to its food products.  There is little any company can do to avert worker sabotage.  It can happen in an instant.  A business has to hope it has enough of a relationship with employees that they will not stoop to such things.  But there is always a dissident, the disaffected whom one can’t reach.  This kind of person needs to be weeded out before he causes real damage.  Kellogg is faced with delving into a two-year-old incident, which is not easy because the worker might have since moved on to another part of the plant or out of the company all together.  Meanwhile, Kellogg is left with the task of assuring everyone its food products are safe, but really, how would the company know?

Volkswagen is not only facing billions in fines for its deception but now it is toying with the idea of leaving the mass market in the US.  That is causing its 600 dealers to fume.  The  brand has been so damaged, however, that its national aspirations are long gone.  The company is a case example of what happens when one practices poor public relations.  Pulling the wool over the eyes of regulators and customers has savaged the company’s image, and it will take years for it to come back, especially in the US where the company has had problems selling its vehicles.  VW has only itself to blame, and its new management team has many apologies to make before the public forgives and perhaps, forgets.  The company  is on probation.  It can’t deceive the public or regulators again and expect to survive as a brand.

Here is a case in which a hospital spoke too soon about its pioneering surgery.  The Cleveland Clinic knows an uterine transplant is risky and should not have bruited in the press that it was trying to do the first in the US.  Now the hospital has to deal with the failure of the first transplant and increased risk for the 10 others it plans to try.  And, it is doing so under the scrutiny of the media and the public.  It would have been far better had the hospital kept the transplant under wraps until it was certain that it took. A successful surgery would have given the institution credibility that it lacks now.  Perhaps in the second attempt it will succeed.  Perhaps not, but if it fails again the pressure on the hospital and its surgeons will be immense.

Amazon couldn’t buy publicity as good as this.  The column is a mash note to Amazon’s Echo device that understands human speech and can perform a myriad of functions at one’s command.  The positive article comes from experience with using Echo and Alexa, its voice.  The author found that it became more useful as days passed until it was part of the fabric of the family.  Whether or not Amazon loaned the machine to the writer, the result was a highly positive time with it and an adoring article.  This is the kind of publicity coup that can make the career of a practitioner.

A Google computer has defeated one of the top Go players in the world in the first game of five to be played for a million dollar purse.  Go is harder to learn than chess with a nearly infinite number of moves possible on a 19 x 19 square board.  Google’s challenge was a PR move to demonstrate advancements in artificial intelligence.  Even if Google doesn’t win in the end, it will have shown the world that it has a machine to be reckoned with that can defeat human intuition.  The feeling one has for a discipline is born of repeated trials that build experience.  Google’s machine has taken that course of learning to the extreme by playing millions of games and from them choosing likely courses of action.  What the professional Go player cannot rely upon is the machine breaking down once it makes a mistake as a human opponent might do.  There is little left that a machine can’t do in games, but it is still not human.

PR is what you do and not only what you say.  This is great PR.  Doctors Without Borders has been travelling to the trouble spots of the world for decades in order to provide basic medical care.  It makes sense that it would provide medical help and better living conditions for migrants in France.  The not-for-profit concern understands what needs to be done in the most desperate of situations and is not afraid to go into harm’s way.  Several of its medical staff have been killed in recent months from bombing of its hospitals in war zones.  The French situation is easy by comparison.  Doctors Without Borders is a wonderful institution with worldwide impact and it deserves all the support it can get.

North Korea knows how to bluff the rest of the world.  Invoking the nuclear option, the country has placed South Korea and other nations on edge.  It is known that the North has a plenitude of missiles aimed at Seoul and the leadership of the North is enough off kilter that one has to worry it will use them.  The cruelty of the North’s regime is one reason why the rest of the world has to take the country seriously.  It is amazing in this day and age that a Marxist dictatorship can survive as the North has done.  One asks why the populace has failed to rise up but the paranoia of the leadership is such that it will jail anyone on a pretext of disloyalty.  There is no good way to communicate to the country except through sanctions, which makes the populace’s life even more miserable.  Somehow, the leadership continues to get all that it wants and more from fine whiskey to banquets and available women.  It doesn’t acknowledge the hell that it has the rest of its citizens living in.