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In case you missed it, Bloomberg Businessweek published an intriguing story yesterday by veteran journalist Paul M. Barrett that ran with the headline “What It’s Like to Be Attacked by Putin’s Flack.”
The “flack” in question is Ketchum — more specifically D.C.-based partner Kathy Jeavons, who “heads both the Ecuador and Russia accounts” for the firm.
For the record, Jeavons did not personally attack or even contact Barrett. But a source did forward him a talking points document that the firm wrote for Nathalie Cely, Ecuador’s ambassador to the United States. The doc included both well-stated observations about Ecuador’s history with Chevron and suggestions for casting doubt on the credibility of Law of the Jungle, Barrett’s upcoming book on the lawsuit that accuses the company of abusing its relationship with the people of Ecuador....
A GIANT public relations agency that has been under fire for a couple of gaffes in the last couple of weeks says it is taking steps to try to make sure such blunders do not recur — the kinds of steps it would recommend to clients in the same predicaments.
“What the leadership team decided,” Ben Boyd, president for practices, sectors and offerings at Edelman in New York, said in an interview on Friday, is that “we will treat ourselves like we treat a client.”
“Lesson learned,” he added.
“Just because you advise clients on the complexities of today’s world, that doesn’t mean they’re easier to manage,” Mr. Boyd said, adding that “it would have been smart” to have had in place at Edelman some of the internal protocols and processes that the agency’s 5,000 employees suggest that clients adopt....
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....
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....
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)...
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....
Cleveland Browns fans looking for some action on Super Bowl Sunday found their antagonist in Purell. The hand sanitizer brand took to Twitter during the game with a taunt about how the Broncos looked as bad as the Browns.
By early Monday morning Purell had pulled the tweet, apologized on Twitter and on the website of Cleveland’s major newspaper, and promised that nothing like that would happen again.
And Purell wasn’t the only corporate Twitter account using the Super Bowl as pretext to tweet its foot in its mouth: MSNBC ran into trouble for a racially charged message about a Cheerios ad. The frequency with which companies tweet apologies can make it seem like they’re not doing much of anything else on social media.
There’s evidence to back this up. A study published recently by Ruth Page in the Journal of Pragmatics, which covers linguistics, looked at the way we apologize on Twitter, studying 1,183 apologies issued by corporations, celebrities, and normal folks between 2010 and 2012. The first finding: Corporations apologize a whole lot. Corporate accounts used the word “sorry” at 8.6 times the frequency of individuals, while the words “apology” or “apologize” pop 7.4 times more for corporations and the word “regret” is used a whopping 37.5 times more frequently in corporate tweets. The study filtered out nonapologetic uses of these words....
Social media offered many opportunities for (quite justified) outrage this year. But did they come at a price?
...Here was instant comeuppance for someone who said something terrible. Here was comeuppance for a white person generalizing shallowly about Africa, the continent, as if it were one large country with only one story to tell. Here was a woman reveling in her whiteness and assuming that her whiteness was some kind of shield against a disease that does not discriminate. I was amused by the spectacle. I followed along even though something in my stomach twisted as the hours passed. It was a bit surreal, knowing this drama was playing out while Sacco was at 38,000 feet.
At the same time, I was horrified. It all felt a bit frenzied and out of control, as interest in the story mounted and the death threats and gendered insults began. The online outrage and Sacco’s comeuppance seemed disproportionate. The amount of joy some people expressed as they engaged with the #HasJustineLandedYet hashtag gave me pause.
Somewhere along the line, we forgot that this drama concerned an actual human being. Justine Sacco did not express empathy for her fellow human beings with her insensitive tweet. It is something, though, that the Internet responded in kind, with an equal lack of empathy. We expressed some of the very attitude we claimed to condemn....
When a product or service doesn’t work as promised, some people get angry. Really angry.
Cloud contact center provider Five9 released a report and infographic today looking at “customer rage” and what companies can do to prevent it. Turns out 85 percent of consumers will retaliate against a company if their customer service needs are not met. 49 percent of all consumers will stop doing business with that company, and 18-34 year olds are three times as likely to vent their frustrations on social media.
Addvocate has an interesting take on the potential pitfalls of using social media at various stages of intoxication. As crisis communicator Jonathan Bernstein noted on his blog, keeping alcohol out of the mix isn’t as obvious as it may seem.
“Most people wouldn’t hold a press conference or shareholder meeting after spending a few hours at the bar,” he wrote, “yet for some reason many of those same people feel strangely comfortable sharing to social media when they’re in the midst of tying one on....
Last year, on a whim and a prayer I purchased 50,000 Twitter followers. Three months later they were all gone, along with my self respect as a so called “social media expert.” I knew I was cheating, but I did it anyway.
Tomorrow marks the twelfth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, which means it's also the time of year when people get angry at other people for not being sufficiently reverent about the occasion.
You can easily make the argument that young journalists need to learn that online verbal diarrhea has consequences in a business where you're expected to maintain at least a modicum of objectivity and personal distance from the audience.... In case you’re unaware of Shea Allen’s story, up until a few days ago she was an investigative reporter in Huntsville, Alabama, probably doing her fair share of personally satisfying work but I guarantee suffering through all the various indignities that go along with being a reporter in Huntsville, Alabama. That ended, both the good and bad, as soon as she published a post to her personal blog called “Confessions of a Red-Headed Reporter,” which both laid out and ever-so-gently riffed on the real life of a small-market reporter. This was the result...
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Filed under: The most WTF thing we've seen in months.
Urban Outfitters, purveyor of clothing and home goods, big-ass floppy hats and occasionally offensive T-shirts, has outdone itself with this product on its website—a "vintage" Kent State University sweatshirt featuring fake blood splatters.
In 1970, the Ohio National Guard fired on a group of unarmed anti-war student protesters at Kent State, killing four and wounding nine others. The sweatshirt sold out quickly, because there was only one. ("We only have one, so get it or regret it!" said the description.) Now it's listed on eBay by someone who says he/she will "give 50% of the profit to the Southern Poverty Law Center, who protect those who cannot protect themselves, often those who are victims of police brutality."...
Like so many of you, I have been stunned by the images of a militarized police force in Ferguson, MO harassing, tear gassing, arresting and even beating citizens who are protesting the police shoot...
...Let me be clear – these police actions are absolutely wrong from a human perspective too. And, from what I have seen, they have trampled on the people’s right to assemble, freedom of the press, free speech, destruction of personal property, unlawful arrests and likely dozens of other rights I’m not even familiar with.
But, strictly from a PR perspective, they are cutting of their own noses to spite there faces....
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......
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”:...
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....
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...
Apparently, Russian authorities think journalists are sabotaging hotel rooms in Sochi -- thanks to bathroom surveillance cameras.
The press arrived in Sochi this week for the Winter Olympics, and it did not go well.
Tweets, photos and full-on articles told the world of shoddy, unfinished accommodations that gave Vladimir Putin's Olympic Games a black eye before they'd even started. Russian officials remained largely mum as Sochi's unfinished construction — rooms without doorhandles, toilets that can't flush paper — became the story of the week that ends Friday with the Olympics' opening ceremony.
Then, on Thursday, a Russian official finally addressed reporters, ostensibly to set the media straight and correct the false narrative that gained so much momentum....
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A public relations executive for the prominent New York-based Internet media company IAC lost her job on Saturday after she posted a message joking about AIDS in Africa and race on her Twitter account, sparking an online furor.
JPMorgan shouldn’t have announced its Twitter Q&A unless it was prepared to contend with the public’s negative view of it and other banks.
... JPMorgan’s bankers are getting used to business deals with young men who communicate in emojis and text-message abbreviations. (“During the Facebook roadshow,” according to Bloomberg, “Lee dropped his usual pinstripes for a Mark Zuckerberg-like black sweatshirt with his name on the back.”) Yet, when the bank devised the promotional Q&A, it may not have fully grasped the extent to which new media has transformed how people share information, and how this has tipped existing structures of power.
This is Twitter’s very purpose: to allow any individual to share the same space with, for instance, a hugely powerful bank. With this space comes attention and authority. Unlike at JPMorgan’s Park Avenue headquarters, there are no security guards keeping undesirable elements out of Twitter. If JPMorgan executives expected that #AskJPM would attract only future job applicants—the kind who would don snappy new suits and genuflect nervously—they must have been stunned at the reckoning....
One start-up learned the hard way that negative stunts don't bring positive buzz.ay be the worst marketing idea of 2013: Faking a school shooting to advertise your start-up.
The team at Bevii, a social media app founded by students at the University of North Carolina, learned this hard way on Thursday. They sent a marketing email that tricked their college classmates into believing there was a shooting occuring on campus, reports Valleywag's Sam Biddle."
Chapel Hill Police are investigating a report of innovation which occurred around 10:01 a.m., Monday, October 14," the message began. "The current suspect is Bevii, a mobile, location-based social network only available to select Universities." It didn't sit well with students that the email copied the format of UNC's university-sanctioned alert system, alertcarolina.com. The university has blocked Bevii on its servers, and now it will be hard to downplay the stunt....
It's been a great year for JustFab.com--the "subscription" shoe website just pulled in a $40 million investment, bringing their total VC backing to $149 million. The service boasts millions of users...
When you go to JustFab.com, there's no hint about how the site really hauls in its money. It just looks like any other shoe store—think Zappos, with a drunk 10th grader sloshing some pink paint around. Beneath the mall-chic facade is the "JustFab VIP Membership Program," a near-compulsory subscription shoppers are pushed into joining upon checkout.
The pitch: you can get a pair of high quality boots for just $40!
The reality: you'll be charged $40 every subsequent month whether you want more boots or not.
This fact is presented to you in the most obscured—you might say deliberately!—manner. The VIP Membership isn't mentioned on the front page, it's not mentioned during sign-up, it's not mentioned when you take a "style quiz"—only when you hit checkout do you have a (slight) chance to read the very fine print....
A group of customers at a Wild Wing restaurant in Charleston, SC were forced to wait two hours for their table and then were ultimately denied service on the basis of their race. According to Charleston’s WNEW Channel 5, the group of 25 African-Americans were asked to leave because a white customer felt “threatened.”Michael Brown and a group composed of family and friends were gathered in July at the North Charleston Wild Wing Café to say farewell to a cousin who was moving away. The party waited for two hours for a table only to be told by a manager that there was “a situation.”
“She said there’s a situation where one of our customers feels threatened by your party, so she asked us not to seat you in our section, which totally alarmed all of us because we’re sitting there peaceably for two hours,” Brown told Channel 5. “Obviously, if we were causing any conflict, we would have been ejected out of the place hours before.”...
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In the rough-and-tumble world of politics, multinational corporations and public affairs, there are always plenty of bruises to go around. The original article provides a fascinating look at PR strategy and reputation management. Ketchum's analysis and advice appear sound though ironically as the journalist suggests, they vindicate his own views on Texaco/Chevron's actions at the same time. I expect the book will become required reading for environmentalists, PR consultants and corporate managers.