SeanReadsTheNews

Dow's Bad Deal on Olympic Sponsorship

Ernest Scheydar of Reuters News has a story today on the ugly PR pummeling Dow Chemical is taking in England for its sponsorship of the coming 2012 Olympics.

This blog likes to point out where the practice of public relations is uplifted to a core business competancy, like operations or finance and this case is one such example.  We frequently like to blog about where "public relations problems" are actually problems with bad facts (like BP after the Gulf disaster) rather than bad practice of PR.

In the case of Dow's situation in London right now, what I see is a completely unfair, media-driven attack on a blameless company that is admirably refusing to engage in the PR dance of apologize-make token-to-huge payment-move on model.

Dow said the controversy has not hurt sales of its plastics, insulation and other products. The company said it was surprised at what it considers a large amount of misinformation surrounding its link to Bhopal.

"Dow was never there. We did not acquire any of the connection with Bhopal," said George Hamilton, Dow's vice president of Olympic operations. "For some to try to tie Dow to this, and then to use the Olympic platform to try to serve their cause, it does call for some strong words."

Dow justified the sponsorship by forecasting an Olympic-related sales boost of $1 billion by 2020. Hamilton said that revenue goal remains on track.

To a certain extent, the media had to cover this story once India's government objected and large numbers of Indian nationals started protesting the Olympic site - but they didn't have to do so as often as they have and as one-sidedly.

I entered the public relations business in 1990 working for a firm that specialized in chemical companies.  Bhopal was a fresh memory then.  What I recall was that even at the time, any objective reporting noted that the wall collapsed and the poison gas escaped because Indians built a separate structure on a load-bearing wall connected to the plant over the objections of Union Carbide's management.

Then, when the disaster hit, the feckless Indian government quickly turned on a chemical company it had romanced into the country to avoid taking the blame for permitting the structure.

Now, nearly 30 years after the initial incident, the decedents of that government are still trying to find a deep pocket from which to collect monies that were never earned either by work or as payment for wrongdoing. The fact that they are trying to shake down a company that owns parts of Union Carbide that didn't include the part that operated the Bhopal plant makes the whole process even more transparently phony. 

FT's Kellaway on Googlespeak in Motorola Announcement

Making fun of badly written press announcements and empty CEO-blather shouldn't really be a specialty - all journalists should contribute - but Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times seems to have grabbed it anyway, delighting back on August 19 with a column on Google's announcement that it had bought Motorola.

“Together, we will create amazing user experiences that supercharge the entire Android ecosystem for the benefit of consumers, partners and developers. I look forward to welcoming Motorolans to our family of Googlers.”

These 32 words were last week repeated uncritically in newspapers all over the world, but no one seems to have stopped to wonder: what on earth was he on about?

Lucy then goes on to deconstruct every noun and verb in the sentence to explain what each cliched term was intended to communicate - and implicitly how far from the truth it landed.  You need to read the whole thing to get it, very worth it.

My answer is that journalists have broadly given up on expecting CEOs to make sense.  In part, this response is expected based on the risk executives incurr from communicating clearly.  After one too many announcements like that from a company like Google that you can't just ignore, they've started to just use the canned quotes and then try to get the truth into the article elsewhere.

The great stories either get the executives on the record saying something coherent, or just make fun of the whole process.  And to Google's credit, at least they put what they hoped to accomplish with the deal ahead of the vacuous quote about how happy they are to have done it.  

Aside from Barak Obama signing the debt ceiling increase, when was the last time an executive made an announcement and then went on to say how unhappy he was that he was forced into it?

WSJ: American Weirdness Keeps Wal-Mart PR Folks Hopping

The volume of strange goings-on that happen in Wal-Marts generated a coveted ahed article for retail reporter Miguel Bustillo of The Wall Street Journal on July 8, in which he reported on stores with rodent mascots, unsanctioned rap videos, break-ins and vigilante parking lot justice.  Naturally, all America is concerned about how such things affect Wal-Marts PR representatives.

There's no reason to believe that zany stuff happens per capita at Wal-Mart more than at other retail locations. Rather, it's the sheer ubiquity of the big-box titan—with some 3,750 U.S. stores visited by customers 140 million times a week—and its role as the de facto town square in many corners of the country, that keeps the company's public-relations representatives busy.

"Wal-Mart has become a microcosm of American life. So it is not uncommon to see our share of the things that happen in every town across the country," says David Tovar, a company spokesman.

I would love to believe that Wal-Mart placed this story after their PR team got one too many of these calls and turned it to their advantage.  It's more likely that Bustillo came up with the idea himself based on a Google alert for his beat's largest component.  Either way, the retail giant gets points for playing along instead of shutting down and trying to pretend stuff like this isn't news.

Wired: Taking a Stand Against Duke Nukem - And Really Short-sighted PR Responses

After having spent this morning blogging a Wall Street Journal article that was a critical piece disguised as a rave, this afternoon I find that Ben Kuchera of Wired has called out a video game PR firm for threatening to withhold review copies from journalists who slam the recently introduced Duke Nukem update.

 The press and PR relationship may sometimes be strained, but it’s rarely adversarial.
 That is, until the Redner Group’s official Twitter account posted something you almost never see: an open threat stating that outlets who reviewed Duke Nukem Forever poorly may not receive review copies of games in the future. Anyone who has done this job for any amount of time has suffered through a dry spell after giving a publisher a bad review, but this is the first time the threat of a blacklist has been made public.

I've blogged often about how the new age of transparency extends to PR pitches and practices.  Activity that used to take place behind the scenes and wasn't considered news, now it is.  It wouldn't be uncommon for a journalist to publicly display a blacklist notice received privately.

But for Redner Group to put out a tweet threatening reviewers?  What will that do their credibility as news sources?  That's suicidal, and it seems like the owner is already walking back from it.

It's bad enough to be wrong - but journalists are now willing to make you famous for being so.  In the industry, we have to be careful because mistakes we made 5-10 years ago that would go unmentioned are food for the media beast in 2011.

WSJ Nordinc Walking Coverage: Perfect Feature Story Parody

I didn't read the Personal Journal section of yesterday's Wall Street Journal until the way home, so I almost missed this gem on Nordic Walking by "Aches & Claims" columnist Laura Johannes.

This is what happens when a good journalist reads too many feature pitches - she flips and writes a loving paean to the subject but at every opportunity slips in subtle jabs at its source.  The result is a meta-take on the journalism-publicist relationship and perhaps the most sly parody of the genre I've ever seen in a serious newspaper.

While similar to hiking poles used for balance and stability on difficult trails, walking poles are mainly for use on easy trails or neighborhood streets, say the companies that sell the poles.

Kenneth Cooper, the 80-year-old founder of Cooper Aerobics Center Corp., a Dallas health-and-wellness company, says the poles are ideal for seniors with balance or stability issues.

The study, published in 2002 and funded by Finnish pole maker ESB Sports Oy, found some individuals had a calorie burn as much as 63% higher than they did walking at the same speed without poles—but that is the "extreme" only, says study author Timothy S. Church, now director of preventative medicine research at Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La.

Exerstrider's Mr. Rutlin says the company's claim is based on the company's own unpublished research.

She takes us out of the moment a bit at the end by challenging some of the claims against her own experience and finding outside sources to dispute industry claims - but that's in paragrah 16 of a 17-paragraph story.

The story made me laugh out loud on the bus on the way home last night and is a welcome corrective to stories of this type.

USA Today Feature on Burson Campaign To Discredit Google

This blog tracks the newsworthiness of the practice of public relations and we hit a new plateau yesterday when Byron Acohido and Jon Swartz of USA Today reported on a pitch they had received from Burson Marstellar intent on discrediting Google.

Burson last week stepped up a whisper campaign to get top-tier media outlets, including USA TODAY, to run news stories and editorials about how an obscureGoogle Gmail feature —Social Circle— ostensibly tramples the privacy of millions of Americans and violates federal fair trade rules.

Former business technology journalist Jim Goldman was outed as the pitcher as well.  This kind of thing has surfaced before, usually when reporting on PR attempts to help companies rebound from scandal, but this story really did hit a new height for being comprehensive, carefully researched and behind the curtain.

In a May 3 e-mail to former FTC researcher and blogger Christopher Soghoian, Burson's Mercurio offered to ghost write an op-ed column to that effect for Soghoian. Mercurio even offered in a widely circulated e-mail to help Soghoian get it published inThe Washington Post, Politico, The Hill, Roll Call and The Huffington Post.

We're in a media environment now when everything PR people do needs to be transparent because even this relatively common practice is now considered news that can discredit the very idea it is meant to advance.

GE Spoof Release Fools the Media

SeanReadsTheNews intends to catch up for the last several days this afternoon, starting with a now painfully dated April 13 article by Alex Sherman of Bloomberg News on how the media got fooled by an activist group that put out a fake press release that GE was going to give back all the money it claimed in tax breaks last year.

The release, which was picked up by the Associated Press, was part of the group’s effort to pressure companies to pay their taxes, Andrew Boyd, a spokesman for the group, said in an interview. US Uncut had the idea for the GE tax effort and then cooperated on execution of it with a group known as the Yes Men, which has been involved in similar hoaxes.

Alas, AP, this one was catchable.  I like stories like this because they demonstrate the true bonds of trust that journalists have with PR people - even though whenever anyone asks them they say they check it the fact that their mothers love them.

No, you don't.  You need us, and you need us to be reliable and tell the truth.  I find myself running into fewer PR haters out there in my usual business than in years past - probably because the demand of constant deadlines mean we've gone from a luxury to a nice thing to have to the water, sun, and sky for journalists trying to stay current.

WSJ: Tokyo Electric Power Communication Makes Bad Situation Worse

Here's an example of how taking three weeks between blog posts can really put you behind - John Bussey's March 17 Wall Street Journal takedown of Tokyo Electric Power Company's bad communications during the Tsunami/nuclear meltdown.  TEPCO's ability to make an impossibly bad situation even worse has become legend.  But back on St. Patrick's Day this was actually insightful and fresh.

Still, the crisis at Fukushima has been aggravated by the spare, often contradictory information issued by the government and Tepco, revealing what at times appears to be their own uncertainty about what's happening in the reactors.

Tuesday was a case in point. As more explosions reverberated at the facility and radiation levels spiked in venues far from Fukushima, the government sought to reassure the public that health was not threatened. But actions spoke otherwise: Officials evacuated workers from the plant and expanded an exclusion zone around the dying reactors to 30 kilometers, helpfully advising homeowners trapped by wind-borne radioactivity to "please keep the windows shut. If you are hanging up your laundry, please do it indoors."

In a subtle rejection of multi-cultural nonsense, Bussey openly mocks the Japanese mania for apologizing - which he rightly notes is a cultural way for the senior executives to duck hard questions about how bad the problem is.

Usually in these situations I find myself sympathizing with the embattled company in these situations but not this time for reasons Bussey makes abundantly clear.

Wired: Foxconn's Suicide Problem May Be Overstated

This blog has covered the Foxconn suicide streak on occassion because PR people often look at crisis situations and wonder "what would I do if it really got that bad."  

Communicating for a company whose PR problem is that it's workers kept jumping off buildings - well, you have to pay attention.

Which is a long preamble to this story by Joel Johnson in Wired Magazine (the March cover) in which he examines the suicide rate among Foxconn employees against the overall rates in China and finds that it's actually fairly close to the average.

I seem to be witnessing some of those damage-control efforts on this still-warm fall day as two Foxconn executives—along with a liaison from Burson-Marsteller, a PR firm hired to deal with the post-suicide outcry—lead me through the facility. I have spent much of my career blogging about gadgets on sites like Boing Boing Gadgets and Gizmodo, reviewing and often praising many of the products that were made right here at Foxconn’s Shenzhen factory. I ignored the first Foxconn suicides as sad but statistically inevitable. But as the number of jumpers approached double digits, latent self-reproach began to boil over. Out of a million people, 17 suicides isn’t much—indeed, American college students kill themselves at four times that rate. Still, after years of writing what is (at best) buyers’ guidance and (at worst) marching hymns for an army of consumers, I was burdened by what felt like an outsize provision of guilt—an existential buyer’s remorse for civilization itself. I am here because I want to know: Did my iPhone kill 17 people?

You know Burson gave him the data on suicide rates among American college students. Just the initial framing of the story has to be considered one of the great triumphs of media relations.  Somehow, the company has seized the narrative.  The story turns into a weird kind of negative muckraking, wherein the journalist is trying to shock his audience that life in a Chinese factory isn't so bad, all things considered.

That 17 people have committed suicide at Foxconn is a tragedy. But in fact, the suicide rate at Foxconn’s Shenzhen plant remains below national averages for both rural and urban China, a bleak but unassailable fact that does much to exonerate the conditions at Foxconn and absolutely nothing to bring those 17 people back.

But the work itself isn’t inhumane—unless you consider a repetitive, exhausting, and alienating workplace over which you have no influence or authority to be inhumane. And that would pretty much describe every single manufacturing or burger-flipping job ever.

He does close by blaming consumerism for sins like forced overtime and family separation that they lead to - but overall any PR person confronted with this problem would have to be ecstatic at this result.

Another key point to observe is that media team found exactly the right reporter to work this piece, which is a hidden talent as most PR involves "taking what you can get" from whoever will take your calls.  This guy had the guilt to do the story, the talent to do it well and the objectivity to report the story in full rather than making it either a hit piece or self-indulgent whining.

The team had to find exactly the right reporter to handle this - and they did.

Taco Bell Strikes Back Against Lawsuit: WSJ

Julie Jargon, Emily Steel and Joann S. Lublin report today on Taco Bell fighting back against a lawsuit accusing it of falsifying ingredients in its restaurant offerings with a social media campaign of its own.  Like the Spanish Civil War provided a glimpse of modern warfare fully realized in World War Two, we might be seeing a dress rehearsal for how brands fight back when their critics go viral.

Days before Taco Bell was even served with the lawsuit—which was filed by a disgruntled customer on Jan. 19—news of the allegations that the restaurant chain's taco mixture consists of more filler than meat spread widely on the Internet. Stephen Colbert already has parodied the claim on his Comedy Central show, "The Colbert Report."

Taco Bell, a Yum Brands Inc. unit with almost 6,000 stores world-wide, responded swiftly with a spicy and potentially risky retort to the lawsuit. Its rebuttals include full-page newspaper ads headlined, "Thank you for suing us."

Unsurprisingly, the crisis communications experts in the story who will get paid by companies in this position in the future were unanimous in saying that Taco Bell was right to mount an aggressive defense but my take is similar and I don't do much crisis work.

A few years ago a scamster tried to plant a severed figure in a meal at Wendy's and the restaurant's aggressive campaign calling B.S. on it quickly pushed the attackers back on their heels and contained the crisis before it started.  It also potentially scared off similar extortion schemes.

Reputation is worth protecting and it is good to see companies doing so.

I also have one more question: do any social media besides Twitter, YouTube and Facebook matter?  They always seem to be the only three mentioned whenever any crisis specialist talks about using social media to respond to an issue.