Further to my piece on the shrinking reputations of prominent financial analysts. The Mercury News has a story on how one of the most prominent of all, Frank Quattrone is launching a PR campaign in an effort to regain lost ground.
Quattrone is calling in the Valley’s big guns to help out. Tony Perkins of Red Herring fame is rallying around Quattrone calling him “a paragon of shrewdness, intelligence, business savvy and aggressive salesmanship.”
Burson-Marsteller has launched a new service called PRePARE which is designed to help companies ensure their websites will cope effectively with any possible crisis.
From their press release:
PRePARE “incorporates the agency’s earlier September 11th research based on a review of 88 Web sites from Fortune 500 companies and the 50 most-trafficked Web properties. The study revealed that 86% of Web sites had in one way or another responded to the national crisis within one week of the terrorist attacks.
More from B-M at their press room. More at PR Week.
Note: (I’d link to the press release itself but there’s no URL in the pop-up window from their website and I just couldn’t bother trying to discover it. A criteria for PRePARE 2.0 perhaps?)
For anyone involved in the technology business Jon Udell’s blog is essential reading. Jon is a full blown card carrying journalist with Infoworld, who also happens to write a hugely popular weblog and is open to helping PR people understand how all these new technologies can be used for good 🙂
In case you haven’t read Jon’s earlier posts, he outlines how blogs intersect with PR here, and also covers Phil Gomes’ RSS and PR whitepaper here.
He has an interesting post on the new virtual press room that has been created by Phil Wainewright (another media blogger) over at Loosely Coupled’s site. It’s a good example of RSS in action.
Phil’s blog is at http://www.looselycoupled.com/blog/
For all our clever inventions and sophisticated thinking, we really do have some major weaknesses. The human race is simply unable or unwilling to learn from the lessons of history.
We make the same mistakes again and again and again, even with the knowledge of what went before.
Reputation Management and crisis communication is a great example of this weakness.
Let’s be honest, there is no harder discipline in Public Relations than dealing with the aftermath of a crisis.
And of course when it comes to crises hindsight is 20/20. Looking back at past crises you can see the errors being made and you ask yourself how they could get themselves into this situation. Unfortunately it’s a little more difficult when you are in the heat of the battle.
Anyone who has the potential to be involved in a crisis, and that includes every single PR people on the planet, should become a student of past crises. There are valuable lessons to be learnt by evaluating them, lessons that could help you through a future crisis.
Pan Pharmaceuticals in Australia could have benefitted from evaluating how a crisis way back in 1982 was handled. Johnson & Johnson’s handling of the Tylenol crisis was exemplary and even though we live in a very different world today the basics of good reputation management haven’t changed.
Based on reports from the Sydney Morning Herald, they could have done with the help.
Of course it’s not just PR that’s been getting a hiding recently. Within the next couple of years I am sure investment analysts will have some movies of their own to discuss.
The aftermath of the Internet stock implosion has hurt the credibility of every financial analyst whether they are culpable or not, and in many ways the impact has been far more serious than some movie-inspired character assasination.
The news that ten Wall Street firms have settled for $1.4 billion is hardly a surprise. Nor is the negative attention that the prominent analysts like Mary Meeker, Henry Blodget, Jack Grubman and Frank Quattrone are now receiving.
What is a surprise, and is a very relevant lesson for anyone working in communications, is the wealth of information investogators were able to unearth from the banks’ e-mail repositories. We’ve all known for some time that e-mail records are now one of the first ports of call for investigators in any case, but it seems the message has been lost on employees of the banks.
By way of example, here’s an e-mail from an analyst at Lehman Brothers: “well, ratings and price targets are fairly meaningless anyway…. but, yes, the `little guy’ who isn’t smart about the nuances may get misled, such is the nature of my business.”
Or this beauty: “This profession is a bad joke.” Which is an excerpt from an e-mail exchange between two Goldman Sachs analysts cited in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s case.
These misplaced e-mails are a growing Internet phenomenon. People don’t treat e-mail as they would other communication channels. Just take a look at the e-mails you receive every day with bad grammer and poor spelling . Furthermore, people seem to assume e-mail is safe. A cursory visit to InternalMemos.com will give you an insight into how lazy we have become in communicating correctly.
Sensitive issues should be communicated face-to-face, not just thrown into an e-mail because it’s faster and easier.
Communicating online requires you to marry the best of the traditional communication techniques with the new tools, not just taking the easiest route. I find that phone calls are increasingly more effective than e-mail in many cases. Like elsewhere on the Internet, there is a balance required between online and offline tools. It’s in your interest to communicate based on content.
The new batch of films which have kindly portrayed our profession in what I might charitably call an unfair light, has been well covered on this blog.
In response, Jim Horton, who runs Online-PR.com has written a great whitepaper entitled: “Truth Fact and Perception – A Constant PR Challenge” 
.
It’s definetely worth a read, as is Jim’s blog.
“There is no novelty about truth, fact and perception, but there is mystery.”
Doc Searls has an interesting article in Linux Journal about how the technology advertising business is beign turned on it’s head by the success of Overture and Google
“Obviously, you can’t export Google’s type of on-line advertising to print, television and radio. But you can export the value system, and that’s exactly what’s bound to happen, among both advertisers and users. When it does–as it inevitably will–we’ll watch the end of advertising as we knew it.”
Oftentimes there are a number of small events that come together to create a trend.
Over the past couple of months, we’ve been seeing a number of such events. Salon’s survivial was one, news that over $2 billion worth of online content was bought last year was another.
Now when the music companies agree to sell music online @ 99 cents a song, you know the Internet is really coming of age.
The music industry has steadfastly refused to look at the potential of the Internet, and instead spent far too much time worrying about protecting existing business models.
The Apple music store is quite a step forward. Read what Karlin Lillington has to say about it.
Coupled with that news, the New York Times reports that online magazine, Slate is finally making money (thanks to Deborah Branscum for the link).
It seems the Internet is slowly but surely throwing off the post-dot bomb lethargy and quietly becoming a profitable new media channel.
The Internet has created an environment where hoaxes, myths and misinformation are a daily occurence. There’s no doubt that PR people today deal with more crises than ever before. This of course represents a major challenge for us all and there’s no doubt that monitoring what’s happening online is an increasingly important element of Public Relations.
However, let’s not forget that crises also happen in traditional ways.
New Bedford in Massachusetts recently launched an advertising campaign to promote the town as a tourist destination. The ads feature New Bedford residents and the first ad featuring a New Bedford sanitation worker ran on Sunday. The advert, which you can see at the Smoking Gun, features a full page photo of the worker with the word “Pride” emblazoned across the ad.
Only problem is, the sanitation worker in question is a convicted child molester. That’s a good old traditional crisis.
Here’s a story on the launch of the campaign and a story on the error here.
There’s no mention of this on the New Bedford website. Thanks to AdRants for the link.
PR Week has an interesting article on how PR agencies are using their clients to win new business.
Spotted an interesting PR job advert. Sega Europe are looking for an “experienced PR executive” to work across Europe. What is an experienced PR executive in Sega’s eyes? 1-2 years experience should do it, seemingly….
The Detroit News has a nice story on a prank played on a local PR exec by her staff.
AP Story on Nike defending its Public Relations.
The Portland Business Journal has a story on Waggener Edstrom being selected as one of the top three PR agencies in North America to work for – as the best large agency. The award is from the Holmes Report. It threw me at first because the survey is from last January. However I’ve posted it, because it makes interesting reading and I haven’t referenced it before. The outright winner was Dome Communications with RBB Public Relations in second place.
And finally, what can only be described as one of the more off-beat stories posted here in a while.
Murphy's Law 