Filed under: Business columns, Customer relations, reputation management | Tags: corporate ethics, Customer relations, IRS, peter kurer, public relations, public relations ethics, reputation management, Swiss banks, UBS Bank
At its most basic, public relations is an effort to achieve the intimacy and trust of interpersonal communications. What makes it so difficult is to achieve this goal while targeting tens of thousands, if not millions, of people. But there are strategies you can adopt to make your tactics more effective. One of the most important is to behave ethically at all times: do the right things, and when you stray from the straight path, own up to it completely and without excuses.
Whatever misdeeds Swiss bank UBS is guilty of, this is the tack they are taking now. The bank has admitted wrongdoing on a large scale, according to the NYT story about it:
In a striking admission, UBS said that from 2000 through 2007, some of its private bankers and managers had “participated in a scheme to defraud the United States” and the I.R.S. by helping American clients set up and conceal offshore accounts. The scheme involved falsifying or not properly obtaining or filing certain tax forms required of both the bank and its clients.
Another important step in the PR process is to have a high-level executive perform the mea culpa, to demonstrate the organization’s commitment to avoiding malfeasance in the future. UBS can cross this off its list as completed; the words of its Chairman, Peter Kurer:
“UBS sincerely regrets the compliance failures in its U.S. cross-border business that have been identified by the various government investigations in Switzerland and the U.S., as well as our own internal review. We accept full responsibility for these improper activities.”
In a nutshell, that’s what’s required. A statement admitting not just guilt, but summarizing the extent of the guilt. Then, the statement of regret/remorse from a high-level executive, to humanize the statement and make it resonate with target audiences.
If you ever find that you or your organization has abrogated the trust of its target audiences (clients, customers, shareholders, etc.), do NOT prevaricate. Come clean right away, so that you can salvage your image and reputation, and move on to bigger and better things.
Filed under: Customer relations, reputation management | Tags: bloogger relations, budget, Dartmouth, media relations, Nancy Fontaine, public relations
Somewhere out there on the Web, most of us – individuals, sole-proprietorships, companies, non-profits – have a “data cloud,” comprised of all the many contexts in which we appear online. When somebody uses a search engine to search our name, or elements thereof, they access that data cloud. Most entities have very little control over their data cloud, and this is especially true for large organizations. That’s why they try to shape that cloud as best they can.
Prominent organizations, like Dartmouth College, for example, can’t possibly engineer every reference to them online. But they certainly can – and do – search for mentions of their institution relative to hot-button issues. This is what happened yesterday, when I posted the blog entry immediately preceeding this one. In it, I discussed Dartmouth’s handling of its budget cuts and layoffs; my conclusion was that they did a great job of segmenting their audiences. I was contacted the same day by Nancy Fontaine of Dartmouth Public Affairs, who pointed me toward the college’s comprehensive budget website.
This is an example of extremely astute public relations: finding out what is being said about your organization, and helping those sources to do a better job. Examination of the website reveals that the college has put out an enormous amount of information about its budget; the subtext is therefore that Dartmouth is committed to complete openness about its financial situation and ongoing fiscal management.
If you have the resources to help shape your data cloud by reaching out to bloggers and others who contribute to it, it’s a smart move and can pay dividends in the long-run. Blogger relations is growing to in importance, and someday will rival media relations as a critical tool for image and reputation management.
Filed under: Customer relations, Economic, reputation management | Tags: Dartmouth College, James Wright, layoffs, public relations, recession, target audiences
Dartmouth College announced recently that it is responding to the economic downturn by trimming its budget by tens of millions of dollars through 2011. For an ivy league institution to announce something like this is difficult; it has an incredibly diverse array of audiences to think about when crafting its communications, and so its messaging must reflect a recognition of these disparate, and sometimes even conflicting, expectations.
The announcement on Dartmouth’s website shows us clearly who they are talking to; going straight to the source is the best way to discern their intentions. The first sentence of the release – presented as a subhead of sorts – notes that Dartmouth President James Wright has put the excellence of the academic programs at the top of the priority list, along with maintaining the college’s ability to admit highly-qualified students regardless of their ability to pay tuition.
The primary audience for the overall statement, therefore, are prospective qualified applicants – those who, upon hearing that Dartmouth is cutting back, might consider a “competing” institution that’s in the same league as Dartmouth in terms of prestige and selectivity. Despite the many other audiences – trustees, alumni, faculty, staff, parents, community members and more – the life blood of the institution is the flow of intelligent, motivated students whose activities during and after their Dartmouth experiences bolster its image and reputation.
One of the rules in PR is that an organization must always express its disappointment at having to lay off employees. I don’t mention this as a merely rhetorical device to be used by cynical administrators – I remain convinced that managers hate having to let people go during economic downturns, and genuinely feel bad about the effect it has on those people. And I believe this should be communicated.
But the Dartmouth statement mentioned almost nothing in this regard. President Wright noted that the cutbacks of staff are “one of the most difficult” of his presidency, but that’s about all the release offered in terms of sympathy for employees. The statement did, however, give us an indication that employees received communications directed specifically at them, obviating the need to divide the focus of the main statement.
The statement noted that laid-off employees will be given a generous severance package including some pay, continuation of medical benefits, career counseling, and special consideration for re-employment over the next year. In other words, they probably received this offer couched in a very nicely-worded letter that expressed the administration’s dismay at having to take this step.
This is based only on inference from the statement, and from my interaction with some Dartmouth personnel, which has given me the distinct impression that they truly, deeply care about staff at all levels. The fact that it doesn’t come through in their statement indicates only that the primary audience is their immediate concern, since laid-off employees have already been reached.
The lesson: Using completely different channels to communicate is wise if you have widely divergent interests among your various target audiences. As long as you aren’t giving contradictory messages to the different audiences, segmenting them is sometimes the best way to proceed.
Filed under: Customer relations, crisis communications, reputation management | Tags: Austin Quality Foods Toasty Crackers, crisis communications, Food and Drug Administration, Kellogg Co., Kellogg's, Kris Charles, media relations, peanut butter, peanut corp., public relations, salmonella
The huge peanut butter recall that has dominated headlines over the last several days offers a great illustration of how important it is to be proactive and engaged with the media when an incident threatens your organization’s core. The salmonella outbreak linked to Peanut Corp. in Georgia has affected many brands that have had to pull their products due to the contamination, but the Kellogg Co. is one of the biggest food companies impacted, and has garnered the most media attention.
The odd thing, however, is that Kellogg has come out of this looking pretty good, despite having to pull a long list of products from store shelves. The key is how they handled it, and how they communicated their handling of it.
First, they started pulling products from the shelves before there was any report of illness linked to any Kellogg’s products, and they framed it in terms of their highest purpose: We’d rather be safe than sorry; we want to ensure that our customers can remain confident of their safety when they buy a Kellogg’s product.
This is a critical element of branding: every point of intersection between a consumer and a particular brand must be positive in some way. So even in dire circumstances surrounding a salmonella outbreak, Kellogg’s is keeping to the brand values.
Second, and just as important as pulling product early, Kellogg’s has engaged the media actively. This recent story is a prime example, because most of the information comes from Kellogg’s Co. spokespeople and statements, rather than from the FDA:
On Monday, the company based in Battle Creek said that contamination was confirmed by the Food and Drug Administration in a single package of Austin Quality Foods Toasty Crackers with Peanut Butter.
And here:
It was not immediately clear how many packages of Kellogg crackers had been tested, if more tests were being made on other products or if some had already been found not have salmonella, Kellogg spokeswoman Kris Charles said. A spokesman for the FDA said the agency was not providing any new information Monday.
This latter passage is particularly good, because the Kellogg spokesperson is providing information, which contrasts nicely with the FDA’s refusal to comment. Even if the casual reader doesn’t discern such detail, you can be sure the reporters do. In the world of reporting, those who help them do their jobs well and make deadline are heroes; by building up a bank of good will with journalists, the Kellogg spokesperson is laying solid groundwork for future media relations efforts. And, if she’s done her job well in the past, what we’re seeing could be the result of long-time relationships she has established with these journalists.
It’s often the case that crisis situations bring out the worst tendencies of a company, and only those who have a truly superior crisis communications plan – one that they have practiced over and over – will come out of a terrible incident looking good. Kellogg’s is in that position… so far.
Filed under: Political, reputation management | Tags: Gaza, Hamas, IDF, Israel, media relations, New York Times, Palestine, public relations, reputation management
Disclaimer: It’s a dicey proposition for me to draft a public relations blog on the war in Gaza, because I am not an objective observer; nonetheless, I present my thoughts on the image- and reputation-management implications of this horrific situation and leave it to the reader’s judgement whether my bias shows through.
Throughout this conflict, Israel has let its media-savvy show. Their spokespeople are relentless and disciplined when it comes to repeating their key messages, and their audience-targeting is absolutely perfect. They have used a combination of carrot and stick – proactively showing reporters the damage by Hamas rocket fire, while actively preventing reporters from entering Gaza, where the death and suffering of Palestinians dwarfs anything the PR flacks can display in Sderot or Ashkelon.
This is from a NY Times reporter’s blog:
for an 11th day of Israel’s war in Gaza, the several hundred journalists here to cover it wait in clusters away from direct contact with any fighting or Palestinian suffering but with full access to Israeli political and military commentators eager to show them around southern Israel, where Hamas rockets have been terrorizing civilians. A slew of private groups financed mostly by Americans are helping guide the press around Israel.
Like all wars, this one is partly about public relations. But unlike any war in Israel’s history, in this one, the government is seeking to control entirely the message and narrative for reasons both of politics and military strategy. [emphasis added]
In terms of messaging, Israel sticks to those that give it the broadest possible latitude for action in the densely-populated Gaza Strip: 1) This war is a defensive action that is not targeting Gaza civilians, 2) Its real target is Hamas, which is a terrorist organization lobbing rockets at Israeli civilians, 3) Hamas hides fighters and weapons amongst Palestinian civilians.
Whether the spokesperson is from the military or the civilian government, they do not stray from the approved line, and it is repeated on media outlets all over the world, hour after hour. Regardless of the credibility you attach to the messages, the simple fact is that by repeating them under all circumstances, they work… but only with the target audiences.
There are huge swathes of the world – comprising the vast majority of it, in fact – that opposes Israel’s assault for various reasons. Public opinion around the globe is decidedly against the war and regards the civilian deaths as deplorable and avoidable. But Israel isn’t wasting resources trying to convince the world that it holds the moral high ground; its messaging targets only those audiences that matter, and those that want to believe them: the United States and Israel’s citizens.
This illustrates a key consideration in public relations: some audiences will never believe you, and you should therefore not bother trying to convince them of anything. Ignore them. Say things they would regard as pure fabrication; from a strategic standpoint, they simply don’t matter. In the U.S. and Israel, however, the three key messages are believed by many, are high-impact, and result in strategic gains: financial and political support for Israel.
One of the key factors contributing to this credulity in the U.S. is the vast difference in coverage of the war by U.S. news outlets compared to foreign ones. From the beginning of the assault, foreign news organizations have tended to focus on the human suffering in Gaza, with painful images of the Palestinian injured and dead. American news coverage, by contrast, did not show as many civilian casualties until days into the conflict. And, interestingly, the Israeli line is evident even when civilian casualties are being depicted. On this CNN slide show, for example, babies and other civilians injured and killed by Israeli bombs are shown under the headline, “Israeli forces target Hamas sites in Gaza” [emphasis added].
The Israeli PR machine, I must note, is not successful in the absence of supporting facts; it is undeniably true that Hamas continues to fire rockets into civilian populations of Israel, regarding all Israeli citizens as legitimate military targets. This, of course, is a notion completely at odds with reality. From a PR standpoint, one can point to decades of injustice and oppression under Israeli occupation as reason for the ongoing rocket attacks by Hamas, but relatively few are convinced that this means all Israeli civilians are legitimate targets. What about peace activists in Israel who deplore their government’s actions against Palestinians and actively advocate for Arabs’ rights? What about Orthodox Jews who believe the state of Israel shouldn’t even exist as a political entity? How can they be regarded as military targets?
As long as Hamas continues to fire rockets at Israel, thereby creating randomly-selected Israeli victims, they will be giving Israel all the rhetorical ammo it needs to continue the assault and further brutalize Palestinian civilians under the umbrella of “a defensive action.”
Filed under: Political, reputation management | Tags: Brad Ellsworth, Congressional raises, Dan Burton, Dianne Feinstein, Evan Bayh, Ginny Brown-Waite, Gus Bilirakis, media relations, Mel Martinez, Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi, National Taxpayers Union, Pete Sepp, political communications, politics, reputation management, Steve Ellis, Taxpayers for Common Sense
Members of the U.S. Congress long ago figured out a way to give themselves raises every year without having to vote on it each time, but this year the mechanism has served to further tarnish their already horrendous image. From a PR standpoint, this story offers another illustration of the dangers of clamming up in the face of uncomfortable media inquiries.
From your perspective as a business owner, PR person, head of a non-profit, or someone else whose image and reputation impact your effectiveness, the short version of the lesson is this: if you are faced with media scrutiny that threatens to make you look bad, the last thing you should do is refuse to respond, either by telling the reporter you have nothing to say, or simply by being inaccessible. Why? Because it allows others – primarily your detractors – to tell your story for you.
In the case of Congress and its 2.8 percent “cost of living” raise, the issue is a no-brainer: almost everyone around the country – that is to say, the people represented by Congress – are losing jobs, reducing work hours, going without raises, wondering if their businesses will survive; in this climate, for Congress to give itself a raise to $174,000 is extremely unseemly. I understand fully the argument that we need high-salaried positions in Congress to ensure that we can attract qualified people and provide at least a modicum of disincentive to bribery and kickbacks.
However, this is an issue of perception during one of the hardest economic downturns in a generation. Surely these people can come up with something to say about it, right? Apparently not:
Finding anyone brave enough to defend the pay hike in Washington these days is like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. When they’re asked to comment, usually accessible members quickly go missing, are on vacation, are extremely busy with family members or can’t be reached on their cell phones because they’re in remote locations.
And…
Pelosi’s office declined to comment on the raise.
So what’s the result? The story is heavily skewed against the Congressional pay raise, with taxpayer watch-dog groups excoriating Congress members for their perceived perfidy:
“When you look at the rest of the country, people are hoping to hang on to their jobs, much less get a salary increase or a bonus,” said Steve Ellis , the vice president of the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense.
Other critics say that Congress has done nothing to deserve a raise. “The general public can’t help but think that lawmakers are patting themselves on the back, and padding their wallets, for presiding over the worst fiscal-policy blunders in recent history,” said Pete Sepp , the vice president for policy and communications for the National Taxpayers Union.
And this:
While members of Congress will receive a raise, 12 percent of seniors are living at or below the poverty line, said Daniel O’Connell , the chairman of The Senior Citizens League. A senior who receives average Social Security benefits will get a $63 monthly increase in 2009, he said. The congressional pay raise is expected to cost taxpayers $2.5 million next year. “This money would be much better spent helping the millions of seniors who are living below the poverty line and struggling to keep their heat on this winter,” O’Connell said.
So now the story has been framed by Congressional critics. A few folks who have adopted a voter-friendly position come off as heroes in this discussion:
Four members of Congress from Indiana have announced that they won’t accept the pay increase: Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh, Republican Reps. Mike Pence and Dan Burton and Democratic Rep. Brad Ellsworth. In Florida, Republican Sen. Mel Martinez and Republican Reps. Gus Bilirakis and Ginny Brown-Waite said they’d vote to block the raise if congressional leaders allowed a vote. California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein said she wanted nothing to do with the raise. Feinstein, the chair of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee , intends to donate her raise to charity, spokesman Phil LaVelle said Tuesday.
These folks look good not because they talked to the media, but because they are talking about turning down taxpayer-financed raises. But this illustrates another important point: the more you clam up in the face of scrutiny, the more you’re going to have your story written for you, and your options restricted when you finally decide to talk.
What can the holdouts say, once they become accessible again? Naturally, they’re going to have to toe the line and turn down the raise. They’ll have a hell of a time coming up with messaging that resonates with their constituencies if they take any other position.
Filed under: Economic, Political, reputation management | Tags: bailout, Neel Kashkari, public relations, public relations ethics, Treasury Department
To some, ethical public relations is an oxymoron, and this story about accountability for bailout funding fuels this perception. The story relates how the Treasury Department is releasing documents about the bailout with huge chunks blacked out. What chunks, you might ask? The parts that delineate how our money is being spent, of course!
This is transparency?
Assuming that the primary information taxpayers are interested in is where their money is going, this release of documents is sure to disappoint. Nonetheless, here’s the quote from the Treasury Department describing how they see themselves:
Neel Kashkari, an interim assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury, sought to ease concerns about how the just-enacted $700 billion financial bailout plan would be implemented. “We are committed to transparency and oversight in all aspects of the program,” Kashkari said, “and have already taken several important steps in this area.”
Predicated on the notion that people in general are not idiots – especially people who are concerned about huge amounts of their money – my judgement as a PR professional is that Mr. Kashkari committed PR sin number one: he lied. Perhaps it’s a failure of imagination on my part, but I can’t think of another way to describe the juxtaposition of his quote with the release of such redacted documentation.
Today’s obvious lesson: don’t lie; it looks bad.
