PR and publicity can go only so far. At some point recipients of messages accept or ignore them. One can persuade but not compel. Consider this example. Railroad authorities have repeated ad nauseum a warning to respect gates at crossings and to never, never go around them when they are down. Yet, a driver did. […]
Posted on February 28th, 2019 by admin
Filed under: Uncategorized | 146 Comments »
Major brewers and packaged good marketers in the US are facing a conundrum. Consumers are passing them by and buying other products off grocery shelves and from liquor stores. Sales of Budweiser, particularly, have stalled. Anheuser-Busch is working frantically to turn around. The company is being assaulted by thousands of craft breweries whose production is a fraction of what […]
Posted on February 27th, 2019 by admin
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YouTube is learning that, despite its efforts, evil is winning and destroying the video channel’s reputation. Major advertisers have left because child pornographers have found a way to penetrate YouTube’s algorithms. The company has reacted by “terminating more than 400 channels, deleting accounts, and disabling comments on tens of millions of videos.” But, it is […]
Posted on February 24th, 2019 by admin
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Google committed a technology faux pas by failing to tell customers that its Net Secure Smart Home hub has a microphone built in. People concerned about privacy were unhappy. How could the company forget to mention it in technical specifications? The company says it was a mistake and was never intended to be a secret. […]
Posted on February 21st, 2019 by admin
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Sometimes transparency is a curse. One is naked to the public and criticized constantly for everything. It would be better to make decisions behind closed doors and to reveal them later. Consider the Oscars and their ongoing mess. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has been fiddling with the ceremony in a futile […]
Posted on February 21st, 2019 by admin
Filed under: Uncategorized | 150 Comments »
I know how the media feel about PR practitioners who flood them with irrelevant pitches and releases. Every day I get a dozen or so emails from PR newswire. I use none of them. There is one agency that importunes me to interview authors. I don’t do book reviews or author sit-downs. Just once, recently, […]
Posted on February 20th, 2019 by admin
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As this article discusses, fake facts are a growing crisis in the digital age, there are more ways than ever to broadcast them. With the low cost of publishing online, lies spread quickly. As PR practitioners know, there needs to be fast-twitch response to combat falsehoods, but even that might not be enough. Who is […]
Posted on February 18th, 2019 by admin
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Opportunity, the Mars rover, was a PR feather in NASA’s cap for 15 years. Now, it is dead. It was designed to last three months but it kept going and going and going for 28 miles and dozens of discoveries. Opportunity proved that a mobile instrument package could survive the harsh environment of another planet. […]
Posted on February 14th, 2019 by admin
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Here is just another recall. There doesn’t seem to be many PR implications to hauling vehicles back to the repair shop. Every car company does them: It is a cost of doing business. But, it makes one wonder what a company could say if it has few to no recalls for an extended period, say 10 […]
Posted on February 13th, 2019 by admin
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This HBR article gives advice on what to do when one makes a mistake. It reads like a PR text. One should take responsibility without ducking or blaming, address what needs to be done right now and share what you will do differently next time. It is transparency and an admission that no one is […]
Posted on February 11th, 2019 by admin
Filed under: Uncategorized | 137 Comments »
