Quick Hits

Posted At : February 24, 2010 12:23 PM | Posted By : name
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  • I have to admit to a grudging admiration for the British businessman who convinced the Iraqi government that a box with a stick on it was some sort of mystical bomb detector --"it works like a divining rod," he told one curious reporter--and then sold hundreds of them. Of course, a country that offers homeopathic "remedies" under its national health system has no right to feel superior to anyone when it comes to falling for charlatans.

  • The Federal Trade Commission may soon start cracking down on "green" advertising and packaging claims--although the majority of the claims described in this article are misleading rather than downright dishonest. I can't help thinking that civil regulation (ie publicizing deceptive practices, naming and shaming the worst offenders) is going to be more effective (and less costly) than government regulation.

  • From Iceland to Portugal, some of Europe's most troubled economies are seeking public relations help . Says one source quoted in the story: "Market sentiment is driving public policy. Going into the capital markets to explain yourself is the only way to reverse that."

  • I'm not sure the "corporate antagonism" The New York Times writes about here --using the Time Warner Cable-Fox News dispute as an example, is quite the new phenomenon the Times thinks it is. Companies have been fighting merger and acquisition and public affairs battles in public for 40 years.

  • Congratulations to Howard Rubenstein on his Metropolitan Opera debut.

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    Quick Hits

    Posted At : January 4, 2010 8:24 AM | Posted By : name
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    After a long holiday season break, there are lots of Quick Hits worth catching up with, so here's a massive New Year data dump:

  • A cool Knowledge@Wharton article (sub required) takes a look at the art of finding the all-important "first mouth" to generate a successful word-of-mouth marketing campaign. Drawing on an example from the healthcare community, the study found that "socio-metric" leaders--identified by asking other physicians to identify colleagues with whom they felt comfortable discussing the clinical management and treatment of the disease, and up to eight doctors to whom they typically referred patients--were the most powerful sources of credible information, and that many of them did not fit the stereotype: many were self-effacing rather than self-promoting.

  • The headline says AIG Proves Reputation Matters, which might be either over-stating the importance of the story or stating the obvious, but this Atlantic Business piece is interesting. It draws on a Bloomberg report that "AIG's life insurance unit's reputation is suffering from problems that were caused by its financial products division" despite the fact that "life insurance had nothing to do with the troubles at AIG." Its conclusion: AIG should spin-off the "innocent" parts of the business and allow them to establish their own identities and their own reputations.

  • The delightful and insightful Wendy Kaminer takes a look at the Tiger Woods fiasco, or rather the media's coverage of it and its reliance on so-called experts and observes sharply that "that pop culture promotes expertise especially when none is required. When extensive knowledge and experience are essential"--think climate science, or recent vice-presidential candidates--it seems to prefer "common sense" to any kind of empirical knowledge or relevant expertise.

  • Ah, Exxon, still handling crises with all the skill and sensitivity that made the company's response to the Valdez disaster 20 years ago such a textbook example of the art. The charge that the company responded to an oil-spill near the Chad-Cameroon border by giving the affected villagers three promotional Esso-branded backpacks is bad enough; the fact that it apparently failed to respond to repeated requests for comment suggests an institutional failure to learn from past mistakes.

  • Speaking of organizations that continue to act according to type (it's easier to change your image than it is to change your character), the American meat industry--which several years ago worked overtime to prevent regulation that would have restored international confidence in its safety procedures--has been shooting itself in the foot again. Meat Trade News reports on a lawsuit by Nebraska Beef against churchgoers who were victims of a meat-related e-coli outbreak. Says the publication: "From a public relations standpoint, Nebraska Beef's lawsuit against the church-goers was a complete disaster." Who'd have guessed?

  • Via the Freakonomics blog (which I still read, despite its authors bizarre resistance to empirical evidence when it comes to global warming), I learned about an interesting Israeli effort to encourage organ donor-ship by moving those who carry donor cards to the top of the list to receive organs in an emergency. This seems like a healthy manifestation of the incentives discussed in Nudge, one of last year's most interesting books. I'd like to see it duplicated elsewhere, but I suspect in the U.S. it would prompt an outcry about religious freedom from those whose superstitions prevent organ-harvesting.

  • Ben Goldacre's Bad Science column at The Guardian< http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/12/bad-science-goldacre-climate-change"> asks why half the population of the U.K. does not share the scientific community's belief that man-made climate change is a reality, and decides that the media deserves much of the blame: "The media privilege foolish contrarian views because they have novelty value, and also because 'established' views get confused with 'establishment' views, and anyone who comes along to have a pop at those gets David v Goliath swagger." I'm not sure his explanation is particularly original, or comprehensive, but in the wake of the Copenhagen damp squib the arguments require repetition.

  • The Economist's Free Exchange blog, which makes economics clear even to illiterates like me, calls "bullshit" on a Brookings Institute argument that essentially claims anti-climate change measures can't be revenue positive or companies would already be taking them. Isn't it odd that even after the bubble-and-bust cycle of the past few years, there are intelligent people who believe that the markets--or rather corporate leaders--are both omniscient and perfectly rational?

  • The New York Times (hat tip, in this instance, to my wife) takes a look at some innovative digital and social media efforts coming out of the fashion industry, from Burberry's "street-level views of men and women in their trench coats" to Hermes, which has "has one of the most imaginative sites going," while looking at some laggards--Prada, for example--for whom creativity seems to end on the fashion house floor.

  • The Hill, a supposedly sophisticated observer of the political scene notes that Joe Lieberman's favorable ratings have dropped 10 points while his unfavorable rating has risen, and then writes what is surely one of the most bizarre sentences in recent journalistic history: "It is difficult to pinpoint when or why Lieberman has taken a hit: In the past two weeks, he not only crucial in helping remove the healthcare bill's public option and Medicare buy-in provisions, but also subsequently announced that he would join with Democrats to support the bill after those provisions were removed." So basically, Lieberman is single handedly responsible for denying millions of Americans access to good quality, affordable healthcare, and The Hill can't figure out why he's not exactly Mr. Popular.

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    Quick Hits

    Posted At : November 23, 2009 8:33 AM | Posted By : name
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  • The FT has an interesting examination of the evolution of corporate responsibility in Brazil. "Today, however, the most enlightened companies engage in extensive dialogue and planning and are forming partnerships with government, NGOs, community groups and others to push forward an ever wider and deeper agenda."

  • The New York Times reports that Hollywood movie studios are cutting back on advertising and investing more heavily in earned media, which is encouraging. Less so it the fact that studios are measuring PR efforts in ad equivalency terms: "Disney recently went so far as to develop a computer program to help it determine how much monetary value was coming from such publicity efforts. It can quickly plug in data--Access Hollywood" had a 30-second interview with a star of The Middle, a new ABC comedy--and the program spits out what that same 30 seconds would cost to buy." But hey, one step at a time.

  • It would be nice to believe that the national media might take a once-bitten-twice-shy approach to real estate stories, but USA Today still apparently thinks it's news when the real estate industry predicts growth, although it was making similar predictions right up to--and for a few months beyond--the start of the recent real estate crash. It might be helpful to at least note that the National Association of Realtors has a vested interest in a more bullish market.

  • The Wall Street Journal's Law Blog rightly notes that companies should probably hold off filing suit "when the public-relations blowback does more damage than the behavior complained about in the lawsuit," and points to a clearly counter-productive claim by AT&T against Verizon to prove its point. The article quotes MarketWatch asking the question I would have asked: "Did AT&T's top public-relations people have any input before the go-ahead was given to a highly-paid law firm to file this muddled request for a temporary restraining order?"

  • AT&T is also taking some heat over an internal memo asking its employees to register their displeasure with Net Neutrality legislation without disclosing that they are AT&T employees. As BtoB magazine notes: "It wasn't so long ago that a company could reasonably expect internal memos to remain internal and that even disgruntled employees could do little damage. But today an executive indiscretion can turn into an embarrassing publicity mistake. Corporate communication barriers are too porous and employees too eager to share evidence of wrongdoing to make deception viable. The vast majority of employees may toe the corporate line, but all it takes is one malcontent to leak the offending document to a critical outsider. Every management memo is, in effect, a public document."

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    Quick Hits

    Posted At : November 11, 2009 10:07 AM | Posted By : name
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  • Shel Holrz offers up some thoughts on what best practice employee communications looks like in the social media age. I particularly like this: "Show employees who's saying what, right now. Employees already participate in the networks and communities aligned with their interests. Some may be interested in engaging elsewhere, such as communities they've never heard of where the company or its brands are being discussed.... Ideally, companies will let employees see, in as close to real time as possible, what the members of those communities are saying about the company."

  • A new global survey from McKinsey finds that "despite the global economic downturn, a greater proportion of executives than last year say large corporations make a positive contribution to the public good." Those same executives think the economic crisis has increased the public's expectations of business, and see business benefits in greater social and political engagement.

  • Yet another article, this one in The Guardian by Mark Borkowski, focuses on the threat to corporate reputations--and PR people's peace of mind--from Google Sidewiki. But this one draws the right conclusion: "Applying communication's ancient conventions and old codes of conduct to the new world of parallel influence will only accelerate the inconsequence of traditional marketers.... The only answer for PR folk is to take a more active role in being brand custodians, representing a higher degree of brand and reputation management. Ad agencies once proactively shaped vision but now PR is demonstrably just as capable at understanding and cultivating future thinking, if not more so. PR has always engaged in a two-way conversation and should be capitalizing on this to earn its clients' trust. SideWiki is a call to arms."

  • Australian blogger Bob Crawshaw offers up 10 steps to engaging communities using social media.

  • The U.K.'s Daily Telegraph reports that "an executive has won the right to sue his employer on the basis that he was unfairly dismissed for his green views after a judge ruled that environmentalism had the same weight in law as religious and philosophical beliefs." Sounds reasonable to me. Not because I think environmentalism is a religion or a faith, but because I never quite understood why religious views deserved a protection not available to political or philosophical views.

  • I've never quite understood the popularity of New York Times columnist David Brooks, who strikes me as an ordinary writer and an even more ordinary thinker, and I found his latest offering--on how social media are killing romance--particularly weak. It follows a familiar Brooksian path: he finds an anecdote that fits his pre-selected theory and then constructs his theory around the anecdote. Ezra Klein offers link text a better rebuttal than I could: "Texting, he says, is naturally corrosive to imagination. But the failure of imagination here is on Brooks's part."

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    Quick Hits

    Posted At : November 2, 2009 7:37 AM | Posted By : name
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  • Katie Paine is really, really excited about a vote by the Institute for Public Relations measurement commission to reject "advertising value equivalency" as a meaningful measure of public relations success. I'm not sure this is quite the "emancipation proclamation" Katie thinks it is--in part because people were using AVE voluntarily before this declaration and will doubtless continue to use it voluntarily for the foreseeable future--but I agree with her, and the Institute, that anything that renders AVE less credible is a good thing.

  • Still on measurement, Bob Pearson makes some good points arguing that companies should be measuring share of conversation rather than share of voice.

  • A slightly facile survey purporting to show that workers' use of social media could be costing companies £1.4 billion in productivity losses has been generating a lot of media coverage , but via Twitter @jonrognerud and @markhass have been asking the obvious follow-up question: "What's the cost to a business if employees don't use social media?"

  • Is it just me? The last time I saw those ads in which Apple makes fun of PC customers, they were irritatingly smug but at least they seemed to score some points, because the truth was that the Windows operating system had some pretty serious ease-of-use issues. But the ads that I've seen since coming back to New York this weekend--which come as the new Windows 7 is getting mostly rave reviews--have a slight whiff of desperation about them.

  • Mark Penn, writing at Politico, has the same take on Obama's response to the Fox war on the White House as I do. Key point: "If a Democratic administration ostracized Fox News, it was mild compared with the Republican attempt... to institute a criminal investigation by the attorney general into The New York Times for its coverage of the Iraq war."

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    Quick Hits

    Posted At : October 27, 2009 8:14 AM | Posted By : name
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  • Very nice article here about my old friend Howard Bragman, founder of first-rate entertainment PR agency Bragman Nyman Cafarelli and now CEO of Fifteen Minutes. The article focuses on his niche expertise in helping gay celebrities come out in Hollywood: in theory one of America's most liberal industries but in practice one of its most homophobic. Kudos to Howard for his efforts in this arena.

  • I'm not sure I'm as offended as The Guardian's Andrew Clark by KFC's efforts to get the United Nations to recognize a new country called "grilled nation" but I do think it's one of the least amusing publicity stunts of the year.

  • A little while ago, I joined in a conversation initiated by Gini Dietrich at her Spin Sucks blog over whether social media would kill static websites. Now I find Shel Holtz making the same argument I did, but in a much more articulate and compelling fashion.

  • Discussing attempts to rein in executive compensation at AIG, The New York Times' Joe Nocera insists that "there is nothing [pay czar Kenneth] Feinberg can do because those bonuses were already written into contracts." Which sounds like a principled defense of the sacred nature of pre-existing contracts, unless you consider Nocera this time last year, when he argued that "it is critical for General Motors to be able to break its contracts with both its unions and its dealers."

  • With the British media castigating the postal unions and postal workers for a proposed strike, entertaining and contrarian Spiked insists that the blame rests squarely on the shoulders of management. The obvious argument: "at a time when a national strike is as rare as a Penny Black stamp and about as popular as a late-delivered birthday card, the fact that some 120,000 postal workers have opted to face the abuse and take action together shows they must have a serious grievance."

  • Where were the public relations advisers when some genius at Toyota was coming up with this brilliant social media idea?

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    Quick Hits

    Posted At : October 25, 2009 4:52 AM | Posted By : name
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  • In many parts of the world, corporate responsibility has advanced beyond the idea that you can atone for your sins with a massive bribe--sorry, philanthropic contribution. But over at Goldman Sachs, someone believes that if it ain't broke, why fix it. Ken Makovsky is a little less cynical (or perhaps more pragmatic) than I am, but would still like to see "more clarity.... The aim is to be specific and gain public support.... Goldman is sitting on a golden opportunity in terms of public relations."
  • The Guardian's sustainability blog highlights the failure of companies to engage with stakeholders online around the issue of sustainability and responsibility reporting, suggesting (as I have done in recent posts) that companies are fearful of social media engagement. Key quote: "The web presents a real challenge to companies because this medium is all about taking down the barriers to dialogue and discussion and it's looking increasingly anachronous to try to hold the tide back."
  • Highlights from the Echo Research summit in London, which I chaired and also live tweeted (I am so web 2.0 now!) are now online. There's a lot of good stuff, particularly from Bob Pearson of WeissComm and Rita Clifton from Interbrand. Download both presentations if you have time.
  • The FT asks a variety of management experts--including Edelman U.K. chief executive Robert Phillips--when and how companies should confront their critics, using the example of Novartis CEO Daniel Vasella and animal rights extremists. The consensus is that Vasella was right to fight back. I agree. Companies have been too willing to hide behind trade groups, particularly on this issue.
  • An interesting new blogger outreach/social media engagement effort from Coca-Cola.

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    Quick Hits

    Posted At : October 21, 2009 9:35 AM | Posted By : name
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  • Ok. I don't want to nitpick, but surely the headline on this "Poacher Joins Gamekeepers" story from Forbes about a former Public Citizen activist joining the Food & Drug Administration as a policy advisor should be "Conservationist Joins Gamekeepers" or something similar. In any analogy in which the FDA is a gamekeeper, aren't the pharmaceutical companies the poachers?


  • Gene Grabowski, one of the best at what he does and a former head of communications for the Grocery Manufacturers of America, explains why hamburger manufacturers can no longer hide behind "compliance" when their products are linked to the kind of problems highlighted in The New York Times a couple of weeks ago. What he's too polite to mention (but I'm not) is that regulatory compliance is no longer sufficient in part because they industry lobbied for precisely the kind of lax oversight that leads to more crises and lost public confience.


  • A t lucid and well-argued riposte to the FTC's proposed blogger regulations from Robert Niles at the Online Journalism Review. I think I agree with every word.


  • Kudos to Marks & Spencer--a perennially leader among the U.K.'s top ethical brands--for pulling its advertising from a Daily Mail story so full of hate, bile and ignorance it would not have been out of place on the Rush Limbaugh show.


  • The Wall Street Journal argues that Lazard got the communication around CEO Bruce Wasserstein's illness right in part because Apple got its communication around Steve Jobs so wrong. Says author Michael Corkery: "By being straightforward about Wasserstein's illness, Lazard is enabling investors to decide for themselves about the possibility of a leadership change at the storied firm."


  • The Atlantic's James Fallows, currently living in Beijing, is producing a series on Doing Business on China. His latest webisode deals with a topic that will resonate with public relations firms: keeping Chinese employees happy.

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    Quick Hits

    Posted At : October 14, 2009 3:33 AM | Posted By : name
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    • I was at a conference in London last week at which Rita Clifton of Interbrand noted the decline of the Ford brand over the years. Several people--including me--were live tweeting the event, and one of them mentioned the Ford reference. Within minutes, Ford's social media communications manager Scott Monty had responded via Twitter, which I thought was pretty impressive. So it's nice to see Ford's social media strategy getting some kudos.
    • The front page Daily Express article Ben Goldacre discusses here (I'm not going to link to the original, because I don't want to do anything to help raise the Express's page views) is an egregious but not atypical example of the British tabloid media's unbelievably irresponsible coverage of health issues. Goldacre tracks down the source of the quote on which the Express based its hysterical claim, and finds that the story is if not a complete fabrication, at least a seriously bad piece of reporting.
    • Motorola is using social media to reach out to consumers and developers and help rebuild its reputation. Says one analyst: "Everyone wants to have a great, busy social media persona for their brand, but until you have something to offer, it's a little difficult to see how you can pull that off." In this case, Motorola is using social media to make a promise; obviously, it will have to keep that promise through product and service.
    • Gini Dietrich comes down on the same side of the FTC blogger regulation debate as me: "Shouldn't journalists be held to the same FTC guidelines as bloggers?" Not all of her commenters agree. A sample: "Traditional news organizations long ago established parameters. The important difference between a legitimate news organization and everything else is the former earnestly struggles to self police." Such faith in the integrity of the traditional media is touching. I don't share it.
    • I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that Jim Cameron --"People in PR who waste their time "tweeting" on behalf of clients could better be spending their time pitching a journalist or blogger"--hasn't read Twitterville. (Or Cluetrain, or Naked Conversations, or Groundswell.)

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    Quick Hits

    Posted At : October 8, 2009 9:14 AM | Posted By : name
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  • A survey of U.K. employers by staffing solutions company Robert Half Technology, which found that more than half of the companies questioned ban social networking on the job, has been getting plenty of attention. BNet's Joanna Higgings has the best response .

  • Harvard Business Review's talent blog asks whether your best female employees are a "flight risk" and finds that they might be--with damaging consequences for the companies that let them go. Especially pertinent for the PR agency business, which is dominated by women at the junior level and loses too many of them at middle and senior management levels.

  • Carol Cone met with--and spoke immediately after--the Dalai Lama at a recent EngageNow conference and blogs about it here. The Lama's key insight: "Trust is the basis of harmony."

  • Salon's Glenn Greenwald has a devastating critique of the Washington Post's "reporting" on the Obama administration's defense of the Patriot Act, with a focus on the sourcing of quotes: "Obama aides pointed... administration officials said... a senior administration official said... officials said... a senior administration official said... senior Obama officials stressed... a senior administration official said... aides said... officials said... one senior administration official said... one senior official said... The official said... a senior administration official said... a senior administration official said... administration officials said... a senior official said." Essentially, it's an anonymous op-ed reported as news.

  • You can demand that companies be more transparent, and you can provide people with important information, but this study of the impact of food labeling in New York suggests that you can't make people use that information. More research is needed, but I'm not sure the outcome is as important of the principle that more information is always better than less.

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