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!

Ecuadoran Asylum or Not, Assange’s – and WikiLeaks’ – Credibility is Shot

In a desperate bid to dodge extradition to Sweden – where he’s wanted for questioning on a sex-crime accusation and which would likely turn him over to the US government – Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder and document dumper extraordinaire has found political asylum in Ecuador.

The WikiLeaks founder, who has been ensconced in the Ecuadoran embassy in London since June 2012, got confirmation today that Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s president, has decided to shelter the beleaguered Assange in his country, believing the latter’s human rights are likely to be violated if English police arrest him.

I absolutely agree with the Miami Herald’s South American Bureau Chief Jim Wyss, Ecuador is a bizarre choice for Assange, (I’ve written about Wikileaks in my MediaPost column back in 2010 and 2011) whose website has  leaked reams and reams of classified government documents, videos and photos. Correa, on the other hand, has a penchant for clampdowns on – and multimillion-dollar lawsuits against - the country’s press.

But in the end it may not really matter, not for Assange or WikiLeaks. At least it won’t matter when the organization is now pulling sophomoric rubbish like faking an article to make it look like a New York Times columnist supports its iffy “mission.”

This summer seems to have been one long string of assorted PR fiascos that, I admit, have been somewhat fun to skewer on this blog. And yet, to the PR professional in me, these calamitous blow-ups still have a nails-on-the-chalkboard effect. I have to cringe.

And cringe I did when I read WikiLeaks’ smug tweeted admission of responsibility for the fake op-ed piece, which has since been taken off the Web, attributed to the New York Times’ Bill Keller. In the bogus column, Keller seems to say that WikiLeaks’ activities should be protected under the First Amendment. Once the article was outed as fake, Keller took to his own Twitter feed to deny any connection with it.

Whoever is tweeting for WikiLeaks actually characterized the hoax as “successful.” Well, I guess if their intention was to blow their own credibility out of the water, then yes, it was very successful indeed. Particularly for an organization which purports to increase transparency and challenge our world’s corrupt power arrangements by exposing their innards, credibility is the very cement holding together the cinderblocks of its purpose.

Without it, the whole house falls apart.

Uncovering the truth is supposed to be WikiLeaks’ entire raison d’ etre. So, when it brags about having fooled the NYT and everyone who pays attention to these issues, it’s cutting off its own nose to spite its face.

After all, what did WikiLeaks really accomplish by pulling that stunt? Did it help itself in any way? No, all it did was tell the world it can create very convincing fake documents.

And that’s just going to make the world think twice about the authenticity of its next document dump. 

An Internet Hot Spot’s Cold Response: When Calling Something an ‘Experiment’ is no Safeguard from Critics

In one of the early scenes from the dystopian 70s cult classic Soylent Green the camera shows a largely homeless and grotesquely overpopulated New York City street whose riotous masses are cleared with dump trucks – called scoops – treated more like rubbish than people. And in later scenes the audience learns not only is prostitution legal, but the women that come with the little remaining luxury property that’s left are called “furniture.” Nice.

If only treating people like objects was confined to Charlton Heston-starring science fiction.

Instead, the recent marketing misstep by BBH Labs, the innovation arm of the international marketing agency BBH, has brought us all a notch lower on the “soylent slide.” Earlier this week, at the annual tech-fest better known as the SXSW technology conference, BBH Labs hired 13 volunteer homeless people to stand in as human mobile hot spots. Carrying Wi-Fi devices and wearing t-shirts that read: “I’m [name] a 4G Hotspot,” the volunteers were enlisted to help prevent the overload of the existing mobile network, a common occurrence at tech-crowded events. It was also intended as a conversation starter – homeless workers would have an opportunity to speak with mobile users about their plight and discuss America’s homeless problem. And who knows, maybe a chance encounter would aid their employment and housing prospects?

In fact, Saneel Radia, the director of innovation at BBH Labs, who was quoted in a New York Times story about the Austin, Texas event, seemed utterly surprised by the public backlash.

“We saw it as a means to raise awareness by giving homeless people a way to engage with mainstream society and talk to people,” he said. “The hot spot is a way for them to tell their story.”

Somehow I think that positive outcome is unlikely, especially when you start with turning homeless people into an awkward marketing ploy while treating them like glorified telephone poles –albeit telephone poles with enough of a human voice to request that their 4G “customers” consider a donation to help them survive. While it’s true that these unlucky 13 did volunteer for their services and were paid for their efforts (more on that later), the program speaks to the worst kind of human exploitation. It’s one thing to know your actions are exploitative and nevertheless carry them out based on some flawed “greater good” logic, but it’s another level entirely when you’re oblivious to that cruelty.

The marketing carelessness also highlights another disturbing trend related to technology, a term that Chris Klauda, a vice president at D.K. Shifflet & Associates, a travel and hospitality market research company calls, “isolated togetherness” – people in close physical spaces, but remaining disconnected from the “real world” and are instead solely focused on the goings on in their virtual worlds via their smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc.

As the technology through which we all communicate continues to advance, becoming more immersive, digitally interactive, and mobile, it’s critical we – not as public relations professionals but as moral, caring, and empathetic members of the human race – remember that treating people with respect isn’t just about asking for someone’s assistance or paying them for their efforts in some endeavor. Nor does calling a marketing misfire a “charitable experiment,” excuse BBH Labs from their decision. That kind of qualified and dare I say bullsh*t language serves no one. In fact, it’s the kind of language PR professionals rely on so often that gives our industry a bad reputation and further fans the flames of the media mess at the heart of this blog post.

For their efforts the 13 volunteers, selected from the Front Steps homeless shelter, earned themselves free t-shirts, $20 a day (which based on an 8-hour work day amounts to $2.50 an hour or about the same legal minimum wage in 1976, and $4.75 below today’s legal minimum), and the opportunity to collect some extra donations.

But if you ask me, and the many others who were similarly disturbed by this story, I think they all got a lot less than they bargained for. Consider this “charitable experiment” a dismal failure, and hopefully one that will not be re-dressed and re-hashed for the next South by Southwest technology conference.

They may not have been called furniture as in Soylent Green, but these 13 volunteers definitely served as a 2012 appliance.

Shame on us all.

Blurring the lines of Journalism

(My opinion piece appeared in Ragan on September 24, 2009)

A big UUUM moment – looks like I’ve caused a furor over an opinion piece that appeared in Ragan.com today about the blurring lines of journalism. The central focus of my opinion piece was David Pogue, tech columnist for the New York Times, and some recent comments he made about him not being a journalist. Apparently, I took his statement out of context and applied it incorrectly.

Notwithstanding, I read Pogue’s posts religiously and I value his comments – as do thousand/millions of others. He knows what he’s talking about. That’s why he’s an expert and that’s why tech companies will continue to court him and fawn over him – as they do other influential columnists, technology-focused or otherwise.

Do I think any less of him? No.

Will I stop reading or respecting what he says? No.

Am I trying to make enemies? Absolultely not.

Can I voice my opinion? Yes.

Here’s a link to the entire post on Ragan.com, "Times' David Pogue blurs journalism lines"