 Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
On the PRCA logo appear the words ‘The Power of Communication’. That’s because of our strong belief in the power of our industry – it changes behaviour; it changes lives; it changes companies and Governments. And most of that power is used for good. But just occasionally, it is used instead for the wrong purposes. Today, we expelled Bell Pottinger from the PRCA. We did so because of their unethical and racially divisive work on the Oakbay Capital account in South Africa. We did so because they had used the power of communication for a morally wrong purpose. .
In a reply to a publicist who contacted me recently on some subject or another, I surprised even myself when I wrote to her that I could not take up her pitch because she used the phrase “reaching out” in her email.
If memory serves, I actually went so far as to tell her it is my policy to say no to pitches in which the phrase “reaching out” or any of its variants is applied. It was a ridiculous, ornery reply to a well-meaning request for coverage, for which I apologize.
However, the “reaching out” phrase rankled me, and I am trying to figure out why. One reason is its overuse. This phrase -- “reaching out,” “reach out,” “reached out” or whatever form it takes -- is certainly overused in the p.r. biz today (and in many other places too)....
The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 debacle is a master class in how not to handle a crisis. Much will be investigated in the months ahead. But what I find particularly interesting is how Samsung communicated what was happening at each stage of the crisis.
This weekend, the US DOT banned the Galaxy Note 7 on all US flights, categorizing the phones as “forbidden hazardous material.” It doesn’t get much clearer than that. Yet, just a few days earlier, Samsung portrayed the situation as “temporarily adjusting the production schedule to ensure quality and safety matters.”
The gap between “forbidden hazardous material” and “temporarily adjusting the production schedule” is a massive chasm. A few weeks earlier, Samsung similarly described a “global product recall” as an “exchange program.”...
Gold's Gym is acting quickly today to defuse a PR crisis sparked by an Egyptian franchisee who created a social media post that showed a pear and said "This Is No Shape for a Girl." (UPDATE: The gym chain has posted a lengthy explanation and apology on Facebook, where the company says it has terminated its franchisee agreement with the location behind the ad. See below for the company's full statement.) While the Egyptian location has apologized for the image, it remains in circulation on social media, with many thinking it's an official marketing image for the gym chain. This morning, Gold's Gym's official Twitter account has been responding to many of the ad's critics....
As PR pros, we all know there are those pitching missteps that journalists loathe. There are surveys telling us what they prefer and advice on how they like to be pitched.
Did you know, though, that there's a Twitter account where journalists share #PRfails?
Yes, @SmugJourno retweets reporters' #PRfail tweets.
It's a fun account to follow, as not only are many of them laugh-out-loud funny, but you can also gain valuable insight into what not to do when pitching journalists. Have a look....
Don’t waste words. That includes meaningless disclaimers at the bottom of your emails.
This week I dismantled a recruiting email with an astoundingly low meaning ratio of 6%. At the bottom of that email was the following disclaimer:
Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail.
This message (including any attachments) is confidential and may be privileged. It may be read, copied and used only by the intended recipient. If you have received it in error please contact the sender (by return E-Mail) immediately and delete this message. Any unauthorized use or dissemination of this message in whole or in part is strictly prohibited. Please note that, for organisational reasons, the personal E-Mail address of the sender is not available for matters subject to a deadline.
This is so dumb that I have to have a little fun with it. Here’s why...,
Twitter can be a fun place to exchange ideas, opinions, jokes, and news. But as quickly as you can press the Tweet button, you can create a PR disaster.Just take a look at some of these tweets from celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and Martha Stewart and big name brands like The American Red Cross, KitchenAid, and Urban Outfitters.Some of these tweets are cringe-worthy, some downright offensive, but they are all among some of the most epic failures ever....
A lot of businesspeople wonder why a certain press release fell flat. Nine times out of 10, the answer is quite simple: It didn't highlight any news.
Once you're able to understand what's newsworthy, your press releases will start to generate results.
Focusing on the following six topics is a surprisingly common pitching mistake in the startup world. While some of the topics are trivial or just advertorial, others have a germ of an idea that could made newsworthy by a shift in focus in the press release....
Last week, Gawker uncovered a hapless tie-up between genetically modified seed/pesticide giant Monsanto and Condé Nast Media—publisher of The New Yorker, Bon Appetit, GQ, Self, Details, and other magazines—to produce "an exciting video series" on the "topics of food, food chains and sustainability."
Marion Nestle was offered $5,000 to participate for a single afternoon. Since then, I've learned that Condé Nast's Strategic Partnerships division dangled cash before several high-profile food politics writers, in an unsuccessful attempt to convince them to participate....
...It seems that luck is a simple affair – if you don’t get a parking ticket while having sex in your car, you’re one of the lucky ones amongst us. However, if you don’t self-report as ‘lucky’ in an online survey, it’s clearly your own fault: However, two in five people who say they are unlucky have never done anything superstitious to turn around their luck with 61 per cent of them saying they would happily walk under a ladder.
There may be a very good reason why people considered to be unlucky haven’t gone out of their way to ‘turn their luck around’, namely that that isn’t really a thing. But, far be it to point out such minor details, when the stakes of poor luck are so high: Unlucky people are also twice as likely to be single and will probably not have any children.
Naturally, the company who paid for this ‘research’ have their own vested axe to grind:
When it comes to recent Google Plus news, what we have from Google is a failure to communicate.
To recap, last Thursday Vic Gundrota, senior vice president for Google Plus, publicly announced his resignation by this rather touching Google Plus post And Then.
His boss, CEO Larry Page, responded with his own G+ post to Gundotra’s.
The cat was out of the bag the previous week with this post on the Secret app: “Vic Gundotra is interviewing.”
Of course the news exploded in the technology media and speculation continues to echo around the Internet. Including Google’s own survey asking if G+ would be missed as reported by Curtis Jacob?
What was missing was a proactive Google PR response....
One of our readers alerted us to a surprising example of how NOT to recover — and the most interesting part is that the mistake was made by PR News, an outfit that publishes newsletters, blogs, guidebooks and other resources which they say hone PR practitioners skills in things like media relations and crisis management.
It seems PR News sent out a blast email this week trying to get businesses to buy some of their products. The email talked about how to “score big” in business and carried the subject line: “Don’t be like Wichita State.”
Apparently the theory was that the subject might catch the eye of folks following the NCAA basketball championships. What PR News failed to understand is that it would offend supporters of the Wichita State basketball team which had just lost in the tournament following a 35-0 start to the season....
One of the hottest new apps set to debut this week at SXSW, that annual intermingling of tenuous ideas and easy money, was LIVR, a social network exclusively for drunk people. Media and investors alike lined up to laud it....
"I've worked closely enough with media, and I've done enough of this sort of thing before, to know that the media would blindly jump at it. I was more surprised when people did reach out to me; I can count on one hand the number of outlets that bothered to call me up.
The media in a way allows this to happen to themselves... The media will just jump at a juicy story and not look deeper into it. I think it's because a lot of people working at these blogs and media outlets are overworked and underpaid. Especially around an event at SXSW, they need to crank out story after story. So it's kind of like this cheapening journalism. I don't know if they can even be called journalists anymore; it's more media as a mouthpiece for the companies that want to get a message out."...
|
We — John Borthwick and Jeff Jarvis — want to offer constructive suggestions for what the platforms — Facebook, Twitter, Google, Instagram, Snapchat, WeChat, Apple News, and others — as well as publishers and users can do now and in the future to grapple with fake news and build better experiences online and more civil and informed discussion in society.
Key to our suggestions is sharing more information to help users make better-informed decisions in their conversations: signals of credibility and authority from Facebook to users, from media to Facebook, and from users to Facebook. Collaboration between the platforms and publishers is critical. In this post we focus on Facebook, Twitter, and Google search. Two reasons: First simplicity. Second: today these platforms matter the most.
We do not believe that the platforms should be put in the position of judging what is fake or real, true or false as censors for all. We worry about creating blacklists. And we worry that circular discussions about what is fake and what is truth and whose truth is more truthy masks the fact that there are things that can be done today. We start from the view that almost all of what we do online is valuable and enjoyable but there are always things we can do to improve the experience and act more responsibly.
In that spirit, we offer these tangible suggestions for action and seek your ideas.
Weight Watchers sent lightbulbs like this to female journalists.
The intention was innocent enough – promote a positive body image among women. But the delivery was not so subtle.
Weight Watchers dipped their toes in the "PG sex toy" industry this week, sending out low wattage light bulbs to users – designed to give users a "boost in the bedroom".
But public relations expert, Mike Hutcheson slammed the stunt as fattist, ill-judged and probably "written by a snot-ass skinny person"....
Never ruin an apology with an excuse." – Ben Franklin
In less than 24 hours, two of the biggest stories in the world involved some kind of "apology" for offensive behavior and/or lying. Last night in Charlotte, North Carolina, the notoriously unrepentant Donald Trump shocked observers by expressing "regret" for words that "may have caused personal pain." And this morning Ryan Lochte issued a widely criticized apology for "not being more careful" with how he described an incident in which he lied about being held up at gunpoint in Rio de Janeiro.
Neither of them qualified as a true apology since they both offered an excuse for their behavior, failed to give a detailed account of what happened, failed to acknowledge or specify the hurt and damage they’d caused, and didn't take responsibility for the situation.
A proper apology is "an exercise in honesty, accountability, and compassion," says interfaith minister Lauren Bloom, the author of The Art of the Apology. Of course, it's difficult and nerve-wracking and fraught with tension. But it's the right thing to do. So above all, be sincere: "It's the essence of an apology."...
Joel Gascoigne, CEO of social media tool startup Buffer, shared a 3500-word post in which he explains why he’s laying off 10 of his 94 employees. In contrast to bloodless posts from the likes of Inteland Microsoft, it indulges a different sin: oversharing. A lot of my correspondents forwarded Gascoigne’s post to me, hoping I’d praise it because it is so different from the other CEO communications I’ve shared. And there is a lot to like here: it’s extremely open, fair, and honest. Gascoigne is living his sincere promise to be transparent. But a CEO should be communicating the realities of his or her business regularly, not dropping it all at once in a 3500-word lump along with a layoff. What a team wants from their CEO is to share what’s relevant, not to share everything. This is a good example of how it’s possible to overdo transparency....
Transparency is important to all elements of the food movement, but it is particularly relevant in the realm of chocolate, Carla Martin, lecturer on African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and founder and executive director of the Fine Cacao and Chocolate Institute, told Quartz. She cites examples like Cadbury’s ignoring the use of slave labor in its supply chain in the early 1900s, and early industrial chocolate makers who were found to be bulking up chocolate with corn sugar.
“It’s something that people involved in the craft chocolate movement are very concerned with,” she says. “There are ideals about this kind of openness in one’s business practices and it comes from very real concerns about fraudulent practices in the food industry.” Similar concerns continue to the present day: Most of the world’s chocolate comes from West Africa, where practices like child labor and rainforest clearing are rampant.
It’s easy to attribute all of the negative comments to resentment from other chocolate makers—Mast Brothers gets incredible press from a range of publications all over the world. “There is a certain kind of jealousy,” Bernardini told Quartz over email, “but more of an anger.” “But [chocolate makers] should also be angry with the media as it is the fault and responsibility of the media that Mast Brothers became so famous (with a mediocre and sometimes also bad quality). Only because they wore clothes like Amish people with long beards.”
Is hiring a public relations firm even worth it in a world that changes so quickly? Has the whole game of a public relations firm become obsolete because of 800 TV channels, thousands of satellite radio channels, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Medium, Meerkat, Periscope, blogging, Blabbing and all of the other social media platforms? Can a firm even grab the attention of television, radio or newspaper producers long enough to pay attention to their pitch?
I’m writing this after giving three different firms a year each to produce results. They promised results, I expected results — neither result was delivered. And each relationship started the same way; we met at my home or out for lunch to get to know one another. I told them my story, they asked who I wanted to reach — they got excited, I signed a contract and then I pumped them with massive amounts of relevant content that they could pitch to producers....
Invariably, each year brings its share of PR crises and scandals, and 2014 was no exception. This year had a robust number of meltdowns, PR debacles and downright embarrassing episodes among some of the globe’s most recognizable brands. Here’s a partial list of some of the year’s worst PR crises.
Sept. 11 is a difficult time for brands to take on Twitter. While some industry observers applaud brands that try to inject themselves into social chatter, more often than not, tweets can end up as fiascoes in an otherwise well-meaning flurry of posts.
Already, many marketers' 9/11 efforts today have ended up as #brandfails. CVS Pharmacy posted a photo of Manhattan with two lights representing the Twin Towers and a logo in the bottom corner. The tweet was swiftly removed after people started complaining about the branded skyline, although several Twitter users managed to screengrab the tweet. The Vitamin Shoppe and Burlington Coat Factory posted similar tweets this morning and have, at press time, kept them live.
Then there are sex brands like Official Fleshlight and Brazzers weighing in on Sept. 11, which seems totally out of place. And a tweet from Birmingham, Ala., tie company Tied to the South requested a retweet for every death caused by the terrorist attack. The latter was quickly deleted. Build-A-Bear also removed a tweet this morning of a teddy bear in fatigues after getting some flack on Twitter....
Last week Uber General Manager Chris Nakutis (follow him on Twitter) spoke to a group of entrepreneurs about his experience launching the e-commerce platform Short Stack–and became the latest heavy-hitter to weigh in on the “do startups need PR” debate.
As you can tell from our headline, he answered in the negative.Nakutis said that PR was not a valuable tool in growing his business and that the return on investment was not immediate or well-defined despite the good press.
Here’s the key quote: new companies “can almost jump over the PR process.”...
The maker of ‘Watch Dogs’ sent an Australian news publication a safe with a copy of the game inside. When staffers got suspicious, they called the cops.
Samsung may be learning a lesson this week that most of us observed by watching Mr. Smith a long time ago: What flies in Hollywood doesn’t having any relation to the real politick of Washington, D.C. And so it is that headlines are calling out both Samsung and Boston Red Sox slugger David Ortiz for “punking” the President with a moment reminiscent of Ellen DeGeneres’ selfie-fulfilling prophecy at the Oscars that did, indeed, set a record for the most retweets....
General Motor’s Mary Barra admitted this week that, “something went wrong with our process…and terrible things happened.”
And while that is certainly true and laudable for the new CEO of the auto giant to admit her company mishandled some safety issues for 13 years, saying she is deeply sorry is not quite enough.
Yesterday, she held what GM described as a news conference but, according the the WXYZ-TV report below, only handful of print reporters were invited, slamming the car door on local Detroit stations and the national news networks.
There are times (particularly when dealing with good news situations) when companies can play favorites. But when you are in a hole like GM — you can’t afford to annoy major parts of the media....
|
In our 48-year history, these are the harshest sanctions PRCA ever has handed down to a member. They reflect the severity of Bell Pottinger’s breaches of PRCE ethical frameworks. And they reflect how seriously PRCE takes those frameworks