Murphy's Law

“If there’s anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.”

“Arthur hoped and prayed that there wasn’t an afterlife. Then he realised there was a contradiction there and merely hoped that there wasn’t an afterlife.”

When the unexpected occurs and a crisis rears its ugly head, sensible PR practice teaches us that full and early disclosure is the best course of action.

In what may well become a case study of it’s kind.  The New York Times yesterday disclosed that one of its staff reporters, Jayson Blair, “committed frequent acts of journalistic fraud while covering significant news events in recent months.”

In a report on the issue, the Times disclosed detailed information on an internal investigation into Blair’s reporting, including some damning findings into how this occured such as “a failure of communication among senior editors.”

The article describes the event as a “low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper” and an editorial states that: “The Times regrets that it did not detect the journalistic deceptions sooner. A separate internal inquiry, by the management, will examine the newsroom’s processes for training, assignment and accountability.” 

I think it’s a very interesting case study, and the Times’ full disclosure of the issue is to its credit.

It’s worth a read this morning. 

What happens when your founder leaves the company that shares their name? The eponymously named Sterling Hager PR firm were faced with just that problem when Mr. Hager took the decision to get out of the PR business. The senior management team at the firm have migrated all the staff and clients to a new firm called Shift Communications. The former firm’s website has been consigned to the fantastic Wayback Machine.

PR Week reports on how to manage the departure of a senior executive and also looks at how Wal-Mart is preparing a PR offensive in advance of potentially the largest employee discrimination case in the US.

Vocus have announced that Mensa have chosen their PR management software. I hope at this stage Vocus have started using their own software as five months on, I still haven’t heard from them…

Finally, while I was doing some research on domain name issues, I happened across a very useful resource for any practitioners who might be facing issues from people hijacking derivitives of your domain name such as Acmesucks.com. The World Intellectual Property Organization has some very sensible guidelines.

Quiet news day today. 

Mediamap’s ExpertPR newsletter is going monthly. The latest issue has an interesting story on how the Catholic Church’s PR advisor in Boston managed their crisis. It also looks at alternative media outlets and preparing for future product announcements.

LexisNexis’ The Scoop newsletter this month interviews Richard Laermer, co-author of  the latest PR book, Full Frontal PR. They include a review and ExpertPR have reviewed it also.

Some recommended reading…

Traffick a website that covers the search engine business has an interesting article that looks at the development of PR from Ivy Lee and his ground breaking work for the Pennsylvania Railroad at the beginning of the twentieth century through it’s development as propaganda in the second world war to the Internet and PR’s new potential role in promoting organization’s online reputation.

The piece was written by Greg Jarboe and Jamie O’Donnell who as I previously mentioned have established SEO-PR a firm focused on helping PR folks maxmize the potential of search engines.

Here’s a poser for you.  You head up PR at a very large global company. Following the economic downturn some media have been negative about your firm.  Some of it justified, some of it not. What is your approach to rectifying the situation?  Do you address the naysayers, try and get to the core of their issues, communicate with them or do you simply exclude them from future announcements and briefings?

From a different perspective, if this was an unhappy customer, do you try and fix their problems (in the knowledge you can’t win them all) or do you ignore them?

These are the questions prompted by a case study in PR Week this week.  It’s a look at Internal Communications at Oracle. Now Oracle is a company I have always admired, not least because it’s founder and CEO, Larry Ellison coined the phrase “Good marketing and average technology, beats average marketing and good technology every time”!

The article looks at new techniques Oracle is using to get consistency across their messages.  It’s innovative.  But then halfway through, it turns to media relations and it gets a little weird.

PR Week reports that many reporters it contacted said Oracle is no more difficult to work with than any other corporation.  So far, so good.  “But then there were those who said the company can be “retaliatory,” and “punishes” reporters by withholding information or access.”

Oracle’s response?  “Let’s just say we keep score,” says VP of corporate PR Jennifer Glass. “We can be extremely aggressive, because Oracle has rights in this game too. There’s no room for inaccurate and misrepresentative journalism. If a reporter does one of those stories, they will get a call from me, and it won’t be pleasant. Some publications go out of their way to give us an extra kick. I guess it makes good copy for them. We’re not looking for the sweetheart story; what we want is fair and balanced.”

Back in July 2002, I questioned the validity of this approach following another PR Week interview with Oracle’s VP of global corporate communications, James Finn, where he said that they (Oracle) “would not be as keen to work with reporters who take a one-sided view of the company.”  

Do you agree? Is your job to address the media’s issues, to deal with reporters’ negativity or to exclude anyone who steps out of (what you consider to be the) line?

I admit sometimes you simply can’t win.  But often working through a reporter’s issues can yield results.  I’d never advocate cutting off your nose to spite your face…

The Internet has created a medium where anyone can post opinions and information. Of course users vote with their mice and the best sites typically get larger audiences.

Now as the poor economy continues to struggle, and as magazines and newspapers continue to struggle, there are a growing number of influential journalists, who although not still working with a publication are communicating with their audience online.

The upshot is that as a PR practitioner the media landscape becomes more fractured and you have more sites to monitor and target.  I am not solely talking about blogs here, though they are the most obvious agent of change.

Infoworld recently moved from the traditional tabloid format to a magazine.  In the process they reduced the number of columnists and one of those who will not be contributing to the new magazine is Ed Foster who for many many years wrote the “Gripe Line” where readers could raise issues around problems with IT vendors, and not just technical problems but problems with licensing, contracts etc.

Now Ed has create Gripe2Ed a website which will continue the good work.  It is a good example of the fragmenting that is going on and why it means PR people will have to be on their toes more now than at any time in the past.

“Because the gripes I�ve been covering here show no sign of stopping, I�m not going to stop addressing them, either. It’s my intention to keep publishing this column or one very much like it. To do so, I�m going to borrow a little from the open-source philosophy and publish an e-mail newsletter that is free to all who want to read it. And, if possible, I�d also like to keep it ad-free because gripes and ads don�t really mix. “

Anchorage is the latest in a long line of US cities looking for external PR assistance in building a more positive profile.

Another sign that the Internet is melting into everyday life, an Orlando PR firm, Bitner.com is renaming itself Bitner Goodman.

An interesting profile and interview with Las Vegas agency owner Solveig Thorsrud.

PR Week has an interesting feature on the role of consultants in the selection of a PR agency.

More on the Pan Pharmaceuticals crisis from the New Zealand Herald.