PR Resource

Disneyland has a medical and PR problem.  A measles outbreak has been traced to the theme park.  Disneyland wouldn’t have the issue if parents vaccinated their children, but many aren’t.  What is the company to do?  It would risk its business if it demanded that parents bring vaccination papers from their doctors before they are allowed into the park.  On the other hand, it is risking its business with the measles outbreak — a disease that was supposed to have been eradicated through vaccination.  This is an example of an unintended consequence.  What company would think about childhood diseases being a major PR issue?  Yet, challenges like this arise regularly in business.  There is little that Disney can do other than to encourage parents to get their children vaccinated.  Parents who fear vaccination won’t, but others who have overlooked the issue might.  Meanwhile, the park has to do the best it can to minimize instances of this highly contagious disease and its spread.

Five years ago the most devastating earthquake in Haiti’s history killed 200,000 people and left hundreds of thousands more homeless.  The media covered the quake and its aftermath intensively then moved on.  Today there are still more than 85,000 homeless in the country and little is being done for them.  The media’s attention is elsewhere, such as in France where terrorism is an issue.  What would it take to get Haiti back into the headlines?  Would there need to be a coup or other political upheaval?  Would homeless Haitians need to riot?  Reporters and editors are always chasing the next big story.  There is less attention to circling back and seeing what has happened after a major event.  Here is where publicists and PR practitioners can prove their worth by digging up stories that capture media attention and keeping an issue before the press.  Haitians are too poor to afford a massive media campaign as are most Third World countries.  They depend on outside help that is focused more on necessities — food, clothing and shelter — and less on telling the story of a people’s plight, or the aid agencies don’t have the skills to build a narrative that captures the media’s attention.  Haiti is just one example of the media’s attention moving on.  There are many more.  No wonder that Walter Lippman compared the press to a searchlight that moves randomly in the darkness.  Where it shines, it illuminates intensely but then it moves on and darkness falls again.  It is up to PR practitioners and publicists to get the searchlight to return.

Google has a program to wipe out bugs in software.  It is called Project Zero.  The policy of the internet giant is to give companies 90 days to fix a vulnerability and if the company has not done so, Google publicizes the flaw.  Microsoft ran afoul of Project Zero with a Windows 8.1 bug that it failed to fix in the 90-day window.  In fact, Microsoft was set to release a patch for the flaw just two days after the 90-day window shut,  Microsoft is peeved at Google and faulting it for a lack of cooperation.  From a PR point of view, the clash comes from differing policies in how best to serve users.  Google could have waited and Microsoft could have sped up distribution of the fix, but their approaches preclude that.  Microsoft does corrections in batches.  Google wants to push software companies to repair promptly code that can allow hackers to penetrate user systems.  The two companies need to talk and come up with a joint communications policy.  If they don’t, it will happen again.

Honda Motor Co. has just taken a $70 million hit to its reputation for safety in the form of fines imposed by the Federal government.  The fine, actually two separate penalties, comes from a failure to report defects to the government so it could act if recalls were needed.  Honda has a reputation for well built vehicles but one must stop and ask questions given the size of the fines.  Or, in other words, would you buy a car from a company that has had such a large penalty?  It is too early to know whether the fines will affect sales of Honda’s autos and vans, but it shouldn’t take long to learn.  Meanwhile, salesmen are left with the burden of handling questions with no good answers.  It is safe to say that Honda will be in compliance in the future. If it isn’t, it deserves to go out of business.

How do you protect your product when competitors give away competing offers free?  This is the latest challenge for the database industry, but it isn’t new to software. Operating systems, such as Linux, open source office software, applications of all kinds are offered for nothing.  It is a marketing and communications conundrum that software developers fight through feature-rich offerings, but many businesses don’t need all of the functionality. Simple is enough and they can develop the tweaks they need.  So there is erosion that software developers are helpless  to stop.  One needn’t worry about companies like Oracle today, but five years from now might be a different story if free software catches on among more businesses.  Oracle should be concerned.  I would like to know their marketing/PR plans for handling the issue.

Mayor Bill De Blasio of New York City is learning the hard way about maintaining proper public relations with his police force.  The mayor’s remarks about the way police handle arrests and deal with minority communities enraged the force.  Police officers turned their backs on him when he spoke at the funerals of two officers who were murdered recently. Ticketing for infractions has plummeted throughout the city.  Arrests are down.  There is a war of words between the head of the policeman’s union and the mayor’s office.  It is clear that the mayor blundered even if his comments were accurate.  He now has to win back the force, which he is trying to do, but a climate of suspicion and impaired credibility will be his legacy going forward.  The job of mayor of a major city is difficult enough without mistakes like this.

News that Israeli settlers stoned a US consul’s car and vandalized 5,000 Palestinian olive saplings raises an interesting question.  How far can dissidents go before they lose public sympathy?  They are skating on the edge of losing support internally in Israel and externally with nations sympathetic to the country.  One wonders why Israel can’t control them or at least better protect those trying to find a solution that is amenable both to Palestinians and Israelis.  Zealous Israelis claim the land by birthright and treat Palestinians as interlopers who must be moved out.  Palestinians who have lived there for hundreds of years object. Violence on one side sparks violence on the other.  Outrage begets anger.  Attempts to make peace swirl down the sewer.  There is no relationship among the publics on both sides and little chance of developing one.  Ultimately one side or the other has to be vanquished before there is any chance of peace and that might take decades.  It is a dangerous way to live.

It is a new calendar year but the same problems and opportunities exist for individuals and companies and the same PR challenges remain.  Days off don’t shift the cast of them and probably do not revise the personal view of what one needs to do.  We forget with the hoopla of a New Year that life and business are continuums.  What we did in December, we will do in January and forward.  So, while it was fun to toast the turning of the clock, it didn’t mean much.  Here is a hope that the days off did provide relaxation and boosted determination to meet the challenges.  The New Year Holiday should be good for something.  As for 2015, it takes no forecasting ability to say that new problems and opportunities will arise that will take one into 2016.

When the public revolts, what then?  This is what Greece is about to find out.  The ballot box will be the communication that tells whether its citizens have had enough of austerity or are willing to stay the harsh course.  There is little that the politicians in power can do except to point to the outcome if the country rejects restraints on its budget and control over its deficit.  The party in power doesn’t like the budget measures itself but was forced into it because Greece’s economy tanked and it became a ward of the European Union.  Now, the country can decide again whether it wishes to remain in the Union or find its own way.  There isn’t much public relations and communications can do to change minds.  People are hungry for work that isn’t there and tired of standing in bread lines.

PR without people can run amok.  Consider this example from Facebook.  An algorithm reprising the year continuously reminds a person of his dead daughter.  Humans are fallible, more so than machines, and they can be unthinking and cruel, but a mistake like this might have been caught if there were human review instead of machine decision.  Many steps in PR can be automated, but there still needs to be a human in the mix.  The human’s job is to catch the improbable before it is published and an organization like Facebook looks silly or worse, uncaring.  There is no doubt that Facebook put in the year in review as a way to serve customers.  The intent was good PR:  The outcome was not.  Facebook owes the person an apology.