Tainted Horsemeat Turns PR’s “Gallop” to a Slow Trot

You have to wonder if the corporate executives dealing with Europe’s horsemeat food crisis haven’t just thrown their hands up in sardonic frustration and shouted “it was horsemeat, people, not horse s***!”

Be a dear and pass the Pepto-Bismol please!

Seriously, though, it’s cold comfort for the millions of Europeans who’ve been left with an unsettled stomach over the unfolding food scandal. And while there’s been a concerted effort on the part of Burger King, Tesco, Nestlé and others to address the meat recall across the continent – including the suspension of IKEA’s famous Swedish Meatballs – it hasn’t prevented social media from turning the crisis into one of misappropriated humor. There’s also been plenty of finger pointing at the failure of Big Business to protect the quality of the products they distribute, no matter where their third-party processing and distribution operations may be located.

And while that story was souring hearts and stomachs, another communications problem was gathering momentum stateside: the Newspaper Association of America, the New York Times and other newspapers joined The Associated Press in support of its lawsuit against Meltwater, a company that tracks and monitors media stories as related to client needs, but allegedly copies whole article leads and headlines without paying proper licensing fees to the AP.

Tsk, tsk, tsk.

Whether Meltwater wins or loses the eventual lawsuit probably doesn’t much matter in the court of public opinion. As a media agency they’ve only furthered the age-old belief that the PR industry is filled with nothing but “hacks and flacks.” 

Both stories reminded me of a more encouraging PR Daily article by Dorothy Crenshaw, CEO and creative director of Crenshaw Communications, named one of PR’s 100 Most Powerful Women by PR Week. Her article, How to Think Like a PR Person, articulated some of PR professionals’ most valuable skills. And by doing so, underscored that proper PR executive-think is very similar to the standards journalists hold high. In reality, this is a recipe that also works for corporate execs independent of their communications partners – something the horsemeat industry and Meltwater could learn from and use right now.

Crenshaw’s most relevant points included:

·         Think in sound bites: Talk about food for thought. This isn’t just a good idea for pitching media. It also helps condense one’s thoughts into step-by-step processes, more like an equation. When a company is in crisis mode, as IKEA and others are, this is particularly important.

·         Media training is essential: For similar reasons , media training is also about clarity of thought and preparation for difficult questions – ideal for Twitter and 140-character space restrictions – whether the questions are coming from news outlets or everyday consumers.

·         Voraciously consume media and content: Note, this does not say, “voraciously copy and paste media content.” For PRs pros this boils down to what I call “news aggregation with a point” – embrace the hyperlink, attribute constantly, and draw conclusions from the data used, helping prevent Meltwater-like accusations. (Exactly what this post does) From a corporate standpoint, knowing the news helps put immediate successes or crises in perspective.

·         Look for trends: Trends help connect the proverbial dots and can help draw conclusions from the above news consumption and content. For instance, if I were representing IKEA or another food brand right now, part of my voracious consumption of news would include data on the last time a food recall of this magnitude had occurred in Europe. I’d also be clamoring for positive data showing that incidence of these events has fallen to their lowest level in decades and the number of people taken ill has been negligible. Such trends help blunt the emergency of the immediate.

As I wrote earlier, whether it was horse meat or horse s*** doesn’t much matter to those affected by the tainted products. Hopefully this new week will see PR’s trot return to a gallop as communications and corporate executives consider this advice. Take that from the horse’s mouth and not from its rump!

Celebrity Boob Jobs More Important than the Victims of 9/11? NBC Thinks So

Over the past few weeks, a number of ThinkInkers (myself included) have been spending a lot of time sitting in airport lounges, in cramped seats at 35,000ft, emailing from the back of taxis or shepherding clients through a series of trade conferences in different time zones. To say we’ve been busy would be a gross understatement.

So I haven’t been keeping up with my vigorous daily digesting of news. Naturally, when I did get some time to pore through last week’s newsfeeds, I couldn’t help but groan when reading about NBC’s blunder on the 11^th anniversary of 9/11.

While all the other networks cut away from their regularly-scheduled morning programming at 8:46 am on Tuesday, September 11^th to observe a minute of respectful silence for the thousands of innocents who lost their lives that horrific day, NBC’s “Today Show” skipped the brief tribute and kept rolling an interview with 

Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, who rambled on about her breast implants.

Really, NBC?

Naturally, the network earned itself an avalanche of criticism for the inane decision and now sports a serious PR shiner. Social networks and the comment sections on dozens of news sites lit up with outraged readers launching their verbal slings and arrows at the network. And who could blame them?

Few, if any, events have had a more thorough and absolute impact – beyond the 3,000 lives lost that day – on so many aspects of American life in the 21^st Century than the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

After the Al-Qaeda hijackers flew their planes into New York City, Washington DC and a Pennsylvania field, the government sent our armed forces into two wars. Those wars have deprived 298,000 people of their lives and have cost American taxpayers a whopping $4 trillion, according to Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies.

It’s because of 9/11 that we have to take off coats and shoes, haul laptops out of bags, give up our bottled beverages, endure intrusive pat-downs and even subject ourselves to scans that show all our nooks and crannies to get through airport security.

And it’s because of 9/11 that so many innocent Muslims, as well as non-Muslims who “look Arab” or wear turbans, have been the targets of ramped-up verbal and physical attacks by ignorant, frightened bigots.

NBC has defended itself by saying it stopped observing the minute of silence in 2006, with the exception of last year’s 10^th anniversary. That may be. But the network dropped the ball by replacing a moment so meaningful to so many with mindless fluff about a member of the vacuous Kardashian clan.

And that single minute of misjudgment has cost it a conviction in the court of public opinion. I wonder how they’ll try to make up for it next year?