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Microsoft already had a public relations crisis on its hands with Thursday's news that it was laying off 18,000 employees. That's 14 percent of its workforce, and the biggest batch of job cuts in the company's nearly 40-year history.
How it's communicating those layoffs to employees doesn't seem to be helping matters. Microsoft published the email from Stephen Elop, head of Microsoft's devices unit, to about 12,500 laid-off employees. The lion's share of the employees who are losing jobs come from his department.
The memo begins, "Hello there," ends with "Regards," and is loaded with business jargon. Terms such as "financial envelope," "business continuity," and "right-size our manufacturing operations" are peppered throughout. Worse, it barely makes clear that its recipients have been discharged. It's mostly about the company's new strategy to make and sell Windows phones, which wouldn't seem a primary concern for people who no longer work for Microsoft....
...As Kiera Butler noted on Mother Jones, Chick-fil-A—whose chicken sandwich is stuffed with 27 grams of fat, 1750 milligrams of sodium, and an ingredients list almost as long as the Declaration of Independence — is an odd fit to launch a wellness site.
It’s clearly an effort to change the image of a brand that’s currently recognized nearly as much for its stance against gay marriage than for its fast food, but in doing so, Chick-fil-A is dismissing two of the cardinal rules of content creation: don’t trick your consumers, and don’t piss them off.
Healbe finished up its Indiegogo scampaign for its miracle, calorie-counting wristband on April 15 with promises to ship in June. As we have reported previously, even if the product was suddenly scientifically possible (which it isn’t), that was a really tough deadline to meet. For one thing, manufacturing a complicated electronic product in two months would be unheard of and, for another, when photos of its prototype leaked online, hardware experts who we showed them to commented that it looked rough and primitive.
Well, after Healbe had teased that it would be releasing its June delivery schedule this week… it turns out we were right....
It seems that no matter how good you think you are at cleaning, you’re just not up to scratch – missing those vital nooks and crannies where all manner of everyday dirt might hide and fester. If only there were a solution to your squalor! A spokesman for ContractCleaning.co.uk, who polled their employees, said: ‘We appear to be a nation of clumsy people, and not only that we’re lazy as well, with many people admitting they’ve never once cleaned behind the fridge.
Given that this story was created and pushed into the news by a professional cleaning company, it’s little surprise that the results condemned our cleanliness so. That said, there’s a silver lining here: ContractCleaning.co.uk created this story by polling its employees… therefore, what we’ve really discovered, if this story is true (usual caveats apply, there), is that people who hire professional cleaners to clean their homes are utterly filthy.
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.
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....
If you're going to launch a "War on Fox News" -- and decide to appear on the Fox News Channel anyway -- you should have been prepared better than this.
...The first lesson is this, as stated by Political Wire’s Taegan Goddard: “Pro tip: If you’re running for Congress and pledging a “war on Fox News” then it’s probably best not to appear on Fox News.”
But I only agree with that partially. Appearing on Fox News while pledging a war on the network could have turned this local Democratic candidate into a popular national Democratic hero—if he was a skilled debater who could have held his own against an experienced host....
Before the “selfie” term was coined, many people were already figuring out ways to take photos of themselves...
Before the “selfie” term was coined, many people were already figuring out ways to take photos of themselves, whether it be with digital cameras, smartphones, or even film cameras back in the day. Safe to say “selfies” aren’t exactly new per se.
However with the term having been officially coined, it seems that there is now a mental disorder associated with it as well.
According to the American Psychiatric Association, the act of taking a selfie can be considered a mental disorder. The disorder has been labeled selfitis and is defined as an obsessive compulsive desire to take photos of oneself and publish it onto social media, like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and so on..
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....
Bill Ackman isn't playing nice in his campaign against Herbalife, but he's playing the system the same way big corporations do.
Astroturf-marketing campaigns and manufactured news events are standard fare for big corporations looking to influence lawmakers, regulators and the public. We've grown numb to their antics. So it's usually not a big story when some hare-brained promotion or lobbying effort goes wildly off track.
But when a billionaire hedge-fund manager uses the same techniques to attack a company whose stock he's shorting, the dark arts of public relations suddenly seem novel again. And so the New York Times today delivered a well-researched opus on Bill Ackman's hilariously inept crusade against Herbalife Ltd., the nutritional-products distributor....
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."...
But our real heartburn came with what happened next. Apparently, Sablonski held a news conference but instructed the media not to take video of her face. Amazingly, they complied and only showed the back of her head.
The Sup's explanation for the bizarre order was that the story was not about her -- and therefore her face was unneeded...
From the math teacher who tweeted about getting high to the Taco Bell employee who was fired for urinating on nachos, check out the tweets that got these 10 people fired.
1. The Math Teacher Who Tweeted About Getting High In January 2013, Carly McKinney, a 10th grade math teacher at Overland High School in Aurora, Colorado, was put on administrative leave. A local news station uncovered tweets containing revealing photos and boasts about bringing marijuana to school. One post read, "Naked. Wet. Stoned," while another said, "Watching a drug bust go down in the parking lot. It's funny 'cuz I have weed in my car in the staff parking lot." Other messages suggested that the teacher was grading papers while under the influence of drugs and spending time on Twitter instead of being productive during the school day.
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The great thing about social media is that it allows whatever stupid thing you want to say to reach your audience instantly. The terrible thing about social media is that it allows whatever stupid thing you want to say to reach your audience instantly. It takes about 30 seconds of thought to accurately gauge whether your brilliant marketing gimmick will build brand engagement or be prosecuted as some kind of hate crime in certain countries in Europe.
The folks on this list did not take those 30 seconds......
...On Monday, the NCAA announced a $20 million settlement with former and current players seeking to be compensated by the use of their images and likenesses in video games. That's in addition to the $40 million EA Sports has also settled on. Although the NCAA claimed there has been no compromise of its policy that prohibits any form of compensation for performance, the deal was announced the same day as the start of a long-awaited antitrust suit brought by former UCLA star Ed O'Bannon in a U.S. District Court in Oakland....
An interview about criminal charges in the Richmond Height, OH mayor's office quickly escalated on Thursday, as Mayor Miesha Headen tried to shove reporter Sarah Horn's camera out of her face. Headen quickly apologized, but the awkward and aggressive exchange continued as she refused to answer the reporter's questions.
...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:
A global ad agency has sparked outrage with its mattress firm cartoon promo showing Pakistani teen Malala Yousafzai being shot in the head.
Ogilvy & Mather is catching serious heat for the sick illustration for Indian bedding firm Kurl-On that sees the young schoolgirl "bouncing back" from being hit by a Taliban gunman.
In the advert Malala is shot in the face, falls backwards covered in blood and is treated in hospital.
But then, after bouncing off the mattress, she receives an award wearing her trademark pink and gold hijab....
In February, Chevron apologized to residents of a town where a fracking well exploded by giving them pizza coupons. Columbia University seems to be taking a similar, food-based approach to contrition over its alleged mishandling of high-profile sexual assault cases.
Anna Bahr—who writes for the campus magazine the Blue and White and publications including The New York Times Upshot blog, according to her Twitter profile—tweeted a photo of a cake she saw in the Ferris dining hall decorated with red roses and a message written in cursive that reads “sexual violence prevention”:...
Note to self: Never mention a celebrity on Twitter from a company account. Recently, it hasn't worked out well for two different brands.
A few weeks ago, people were in an uproar over Red Sox slugger Big Papi's selfie with the President. Then, last week, Katherine Heigl issued a lawsuit to Duane Reade for posting a paparazzi photo of her on their Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Here's what they posted on Twitter (Facebook's post was almost identical)...
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....
The FTC announced on Thursday that it has caught ADT paying bloggers for endorsements (on blogs as well as national TV/radio) and not disclosing it.
Folks, the rules and the law on social media ethics are clear, as I’ve been sharing for years.More here.
In addition to ending the program, ADT will now be required to get a signed confirmation that a blogger has reviewed and understands their disclosure requirements — from every blogger they work with, for the next 20 years.
How awesome of a punishment is that?
The sad thing about ratings is they make people do strange things. You may be familiar with theOscar “Blade Runner” Pistorious trial in South Africa where Olympic/Paralympic wunderkind shot his model girlfriend because he allegedly thought she was robbing his joint.
Everyone is interested in more information on this trial. How do we know? Ratings.
To wit, NBC News did whatever it could to earn the attention of Reeva Steenkamp’s mother for a series of interviews. As you can in the screen shot, it’s a hoity-toity “exclusive,” which is supposed to mean NBC got it and everyone else is watching it. Only one problem, the inference is that NBC News got it the old fashioned way —they eaaaaaaaaarned it.
Nah, the new school way is more trendy — they paid for it. By some reports, for $100,000....
Mastercard’s PR agency, House PR, went ahead and offered Telegraph journalist, Tim Walker, a press pass to the Brit Awards on the condition that he shamelessly plug Mastercard and the hashtag associated with the brand #PricelessSurprises on Twitter. Walker wasn’t even given creative license on the tweets – the content of each one was specifically outlined in an email he later released (hence how the situation blew up in Mastercard’s face). Needless to say the whole debacle erupted into a Twitter storm of negativity directed at House PR and Mastercard.
However, after looking into the Twitter data with SocialBro it seems the Mastercard#PricelessSurprises hashtag was not a fail at all. The negativity surrounding the hashtag was namely from the industry itself and outweighed by its popularity with the TV audience. In total the 14,992 tweets that used the hashtag during 24 hours had a potential reach of over 25 million people. Interestingly, the SocialBro data shows us that the hashtag was a hit with the public, it also didn’t hurt that celebrities such as Kylie Minogue got involved on the night, mentioning and retweeting the hashtag several times....
It's the golden rule and the core of all communications etiquette: If you can't say something nice, don't say anything. On Tuesday, Kelly Blazek, who runs the Cleveland Job Bank, learned that lesson the hard way when her email smackdown of a young job seeker named Diana Mekota, who contacted her through LinkedIn, went viral.
"Love the sense of entitlement in your generation. And therefore I enjoy denying your invite," read Blazek's poison pen letter, in part. "You're welcome for your humility lesson of the year. Don't ever reach out to senior practitioners again and assume their carefully curated list of connections is available to you, just because you want to build your network."
Mekota posted the complete email on Reddit, Imgur, and Facebook, along with these comments: "Guess us twenty somethings should bow down to senior professional because clearly we have nothing to offer," and "Let's call this lady out." From there, it was like a torch thrown into a desert of parched tumbleweeds...
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Microsoft fumbles its layoff announcements terribly. For a billion dollar company, they couldn't have made a more amateur effort.