Pilots Walk The Gangplank / from MediaPost

I'm not writing about BP again today -- or anytime soon. Really, there's nothing left for me to say that hasn't been said elsewhere. However, in the same vein of "PR crisis control fiasco," I am writing about ceding control of the story to others, just as the pilots of Spirit Airlines did earlier this month when they went on strike over a pay lag and bungled salary negotiations spanning three years.

I found the pilot strike to be something of a paradox. The human in me wanted to side with the pilots' cause; after all, why would they not be entitled to a compensation package that is fair and reasonable? I wanted to side with the underdog -- you know, the powerless worker versus the corporate goliath, but I simply couldn't.

Why? Because the pilots did not share their plight with me -- or the rest of country, for that matter. They didn't communicate their story with anyone but each other.

Instead they embarked on a PR strategy of silence and handed the opportunity of telling their story to management on a silver platter.

Trying To Work Out Who The Good Guys Are

Click here to continue reading.

QUITE POSSIBLY THE WORST PRESS RELEASE EVER

I don't normally write in caps, or use all caps for titles.

This post is the exception - I had to grab your attention to what is quite possibly the worst press release ever written. Ever.

I received this pile of junk last week and in the spirit of what follows, OMG. What you are about to read will make you want to stick pins in your eyes.

Are you ready?

"TEXTCHX - Text Message Marketing: A New Way of Advertisement

A good look at how TEXTCHX text message marketing has allowed small, & medium sized businesses to highly target customers & keep them coming back to purchase. Also, showing how this tool directly boosts brand awareness in the mind of the consumer.

(I-Newswire) June 15, 2010 - Text message marketing is a new innovative way of getting your business’s products and name out there. Almost everyone has some sort of text message service. It’s just ingrained in our culture. We want to be able to quickly send and receive messages to keep us up to date with what’s going on in the world around us. We get news, weather, social networking sites updates, we can vote on our favorite soft drink or American Idol star…almost anything—within reason—can be done with text messages!

As a business, you can benefit from a new form of advertisement. But what is this type of advertisement? What does it do?

Mobile text advertising is a wonderful way of sending your customers updates and new deals that are going on at your establishment or company. It’s easy—not a lot of people go without their cell phones. You can reach them anywhere and tell them all about your awesome new business, your deals, or whatever else you have to offer. Almost every major company supports text messaging marketing.

With sms marketing software, you simply choose a keyword, and your advertisement is sent out to a subscriber. Someone who is texted is more likely to read your message than someone you contacted over the phone, email, or any other media methods. You can also choose between local, statewide, country wide or even international markets. Imagine being able to reach customers EVERYWHERE! In Hong Kong, Baton Rouge, London, Brussels, or even Algiers!

But the text messaging advertising isn’t just limited to text messages. There are also options including mobile internet and app advertising.

Say you’re a dating service and your contract includes a mobile app that a lot of single people use. Maybe there’s a guy. He’s twenty-ish, not bad looking, but extremely shy. He doesn’t know where to start, poor thing. He wants to get out, see people! He knows he’s a lady’s man on the inside. He just has to find it!

Then, he sees your advertisement—thanks to your text messaging software—and decides he’s going to give it a try. He does—and discovers he LOVES your dating service. So he texts all of his friends and tells them all about it, earning you even more customers! All because of one little advertisement."

ENOUGH!

Whoever wrote this needs to be spanked and sent back to Grade 3. It's precisely this sort of crap that gives the PR industry a bad name.

Not to mention that the company is about 2.5 years too late to the party.

I just re-read it, I need a drink!

Oh, and Happy Tuesday.

PR vs The Spirit Pilots

A recent bNet blog by Brett Snyder does a good job outlining the PR situation surrounding the Spirit pilot strike. Though my personal experience with the strike differs a bit from Mr. Snyder’s opinions - I reflexively sided and identified with the pilots (labor), probably due to my own attitudes as much as the actual media coverage - Synder correctly points out that the pilots have actively ceded the PR advantage to Spirit management, by declining to provide any information. Shame on them!

Nature (and the media, of course) abhors a vacuum, and the Pilots’ union at the center of the strike should have realized that if they weren’t willing to fill that vacuum with commentary, details, and other story-building efforts, and in doing so gain the support of the traveling public, the other side most definitely would.

And that, according to Snyder and my own opinion, is exactly what has happened.

One of the basic tenets of crisis communications is to appear candid and upfront at all times (hello BP?). Another is to try and define the story on favorable terms, and to maintain as much control over the story as possible. At times these can be futile pursuits (see Petroleum, British redux), but the interesting thing is that failure to properly execute these strategies often results in the same outcome as not trying to execute them at all. What a quandary, huh?

Common sense tells us this: a stonewall is interpreted as guilty denial, a ‘no comment’ is an implication of guilt.

It can be argued that this isn’t technically a crisis situation; after all, a strike isn’t at all like an oil spill, or a bankruptcy. It’s true, a labor dispute does not by definition call for a crisis communications strategy. But in a sense the Spirit debacle is more dangerous to both sides from a PR perspective if only because each side is actively trying to pin blame on the other. It’s also worth remembering that this is in fact a crisis for US CONSUMERS, particularly those travelers with cancelled flights and plans due to Spirit’s and the union’s actions. The aggrieved parties -- and anyone else who can sympathize or identify with the affected consumers, which would be, um, everyone -- will also be looking to assign blame.

So in this sense, this is indeed a crisis situation, and demands good crisis communications to mitigate it. Unfortunately for the union, management seems to have heeded this advice sooner, and have seized the advantage.

Once again, shame on them.

When No News is Better Than This News....

It must have been a REALLY noneventful weekend to have Sarah Palin's boobs (and the question of whether they are real or not) make it into the headlines.

Boobgate? The Huffington Post?

C'mon guys, what the hell is wrong with you!?

About Experts... They Are Not Always Right

Just read an interesting NYT article about a blogger who accurately predicted the European debt mess.

Besides feeling a bit of shame at never having read the man (he's a countryman of mine, Edward Hugh, and who sounds just fascinating), my initial reaction was... of course! It's always the obscure but attentive amateur analysts that make the good calls, but their message is usually buried under an avalanche of mainstream media-approved 'experts'. The NYT lumps him in with previous economic Cassandras (like Nouriel Roubini, of the subprime collapse fame) that have since been lionized, or at least vindicated, by the events they portended - as tragic as they are. He's also mentioned alongside one of my all-time favorite op-ed columnists, Nobel winner Paul Krugman.

There's a larger message here, something about how the blogosphere has democratized the concept of expertise, and how the guy or gal that has everything figured out is always hiding in plain sight.

Or maybe the message is that while equivocation and pollyannaism may sell newspapers, it's only those that are laboring to make unpopular pronouncements that are actually making good predictions. Or maybe it's just that with so many opinions out there to be read and viewed, one of them is bound to hit the nail on the head??

Either way, Mr. Hugh's blogs have made their way into my RSS feed. I hope you start to follow as well.

You can read the article on NYT here - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/business/global/09blogger.html?pagewanted=2&ref=business&src=me

"I Want My Life Back, Waaaaa, Waaaaa"

“I just want my life back.” – BP CEO Tony Hayward

As a tough-as-nails chief executive of one of the largest energy companies in the world, I’m not given to nostalgia, except when I am. Today’s one of those days.

I was sitting in my ‘command center’ at the New Orleans Four Seasons- where I remain despite the fact that it’s so much more Spartan than my usual corporate command center, because I recognize that it’s important to be ‘on the ground’- and I got to thinking about the good old days. That was the good life. And as I took a look around at the four tiny bedrooms of this suite, all totally crammed with daily briefings and newspapers and open laptops streaming video of those silly little robots at the bottom of the sea, I realized: I want it back. I want my life back.

Is that so wrong?

I mean, I don’t want to return to the halcyon days of my youth, booting a football ‘round a verdant little pitch outside Windsor (I guess for you Yanks it might be like tossing the pigskin on a clear summer day at the beach- er- in the back yard). No, nothing like that. I just want the life I had six months ago back.

Back then, every time I mentioned oil it was at a shareholders meeting, or some convention, and everyone I was speaking to would cast their eyes up at me with a look that can only be compared to worship. With a barrel of the light sweet stuff going for almost 66 quid (sorry, a hundred bucks), who could blame them?

They used to look at me like a god, now every time someone looks me in the eye- which happens a lot more often now- they look at me like I’m the destroyer of worlds. It’s enough to make a man want to crawl aboard his yacht and sail to some distant shore without any frickin’ tar balls on it.

In fact, that’s where I was six months ago. December kind of sucks in London, so I took the old sloop down to the Virgin Islands. Not your Virgins, ours. Just kicking back in my deck shoes, wearing Bermuda shorts, sipping rum the color of the stuff smeared on those Louisiana pelicans.

See, that’s the kind of life I want to get back. Dark rum, Bermuda shorts....

It was warm and breezy six months ago in the Virgin Islands, not humid and sweltering like it’s been here. I don’t know how people on the Gulf coast do it. I’m actually pretty impressed with their resiliency. They can’t fish, they can’t go to the beach, and it’s muggy all summer? And they had a storm around here a while back, right? Wow.

Still, no one has to go through what I go through every day since that stupid rig exploded. So many questions and accusations! “Tony, you broke a bunch of safety rules.” “Tony, how long is it going to take to stop the leak?” “Tony, you lied about the amount of oil being spilled.” “Tony, what the hell is a Top Hat?”
Look, I don’t know, all right? I know you all don’t run a company with a $109 billion market cap, and none of you are CEOs with a $1.5 million salary, so let me explain how it works. I hire guys like me, guys with very nice suits and long resumes and great club memberships. I know those guys. Then those guys hire guys, and I know some of them, too. But when those guys hire guys (and so on and so on), I don’t know them. They’re not calling me and asking, “Hey Tony, you think we oughta check the blowout thingy today, or can we let it slide for a week?” If they had called me and asked that, of course I’d have told them to check it. But they call the guys hired by the guys hired by the guys that I hired. How am I supposed to know what they said?

And everybody breaks rules. If we had to follow every ticky-tack safety regulation those bleeding heart Labour and Democrat politicians push through, we’d still be juicing Texas tea from rusty derricks like Daniel Day Lewis. Except all the roughnecks would be wearing fire-retardant full body padding and taking a break every ten minutes. Fortunately for our North American operations, the kids in charge of enforcing those rules in the US were too busy boffing each other to notice when we let some standards slip.

Nobody minded, six months ago. We were all getting along so well! Now it’s a different story.

It’s like you break curfew one time, and you’re grounded forever. How is that fair?
Anyway, this thing’s going to go on for a long time. You just know I’m going to have to take a salary cut, and I’m going to have some monster hotel bills if I have to stay here the whole time and look concerned. I’m not looking forward to that credit card bill, you know what I’m saying?

So I guess I’m sorry. I mean it, I wish none of this had ever happened.

You all see that tough-as-nails CEO Mr. Hayward; really, I’m just a very sad little Tony. I want to sail on my boat and watch a little World Cup.

That’s what I’d be doing if I didn’t have to be here in this slimy, oily swamp.

So if it’s not too much trouble, I’d like my life back, please.

Best,
TH

PR Is No Substitute For The Truth / from MediaPost

When I wrote a column about BP last month, I wasn't expecting to a) eat my words, or b) write about BP again so soon.

But alas, here we are.

At the time of my column, "Advice To BP That It Didn't Ask For," I and several PR peeps felt that BP had been transparent, genuinely not at fault and were doing the best they could in the terrible circumstances à la "it was all Transocean's fault Ma, honest."

I hate being wrong but we were wrong. Very wrong.

It's hard to feel sorry for liars. It's even harder to feel sorry for those people and companies that deliberately mismanage information and mislead the public for financial gain (hello, Goldman Sachs).

But what is absolutely sinful about BP's actions -- and there are many -- is the company's blatant disrespect for our intellect, for our country and for our lives. You may feel I'm getting off PR-focus here, but the fact remains that when a company tries to sustain a sheen of purity in the midst of massive oil slicks, toxic shrimp and environmental seppuku, PR and "positioning" is no substitute for the truth.

We believed Tony Hayward and we believed BP. But they lied to us and to themselves.

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Taking back what I said a month ago, no amount of full-page mea culpas pasted in all the country's major broadsheets will change public perception right now -- or anytime soon. In fact, these ads may just have the reverse effect when you consider the millions being plundered from fixing the problem, and being diverted to the "We're going to fix this" ad campaign instead. I don't buy it and no one else should either.

Open Mouth, Insert Foot

It appears that no one believes anything that BP has to say, tweet or print anymore, and that it has lost all credibility and control of its brand.

Case in point? A new Twitter account called BPGlobalPR, a satirical send-up of BP's blunders. With 130,000 followers and counting, it quickly provides a sense for the level of mistrust and hatred that is cursing through America's veins, online and off. When compared with the 12,000 followers on BP's feed, BP-America, it's clear that people have tuned out from the grimace-inducing comments issued by BP, much preferring comments like "Money can't buy happiness. But Tony Hayward did buy a giant yacht he calls 'Happiness'. It has a frickin' helicopter pad on it!" and "Flew in a ton of seafood from Asia last night, ate almost half of it and slept for 12 straight hours. What a weekend! #bpcares" on the faux BP blog.

So now that almost everyone knows about BP's misinformation strategy, I tried to imagine what Thomas Friedman or John Stossel would have to say about the company. Sadly, neither were available for comment when I contacted them last week, so I have taken a creative liberty in recreating their imagined responses:

Click here to continue reading.