PR and tragedies – always the third rail?

Royal Caribbean's facilities in Labadee, Haiti

It’s the classic PR snafu. Some tragedy happens and a hapless flack gets a public thrashing from a journalist for pitching them about how their company / product could have helped.

But, what can companies do when their everyday operations lead them to be embroiled in a major humanitarian disaster? This is exactly what’s happened with Royal Caribbean International, (RCI) whose cruises include a stop in Haiti, as outlined by this CNN article.

The gist of it all is, is it ethical for RCI to continue going to Haiti (albeit to its developed, guarded compound many miles from the affected region), or to pull out as a sign of respect? Frankly, it’s a tough choice. For the cruisers, the thought of being so close to so much suffering and being cocooned  away from it all could be quite distasteful. On the other hand, if RCI pulls out, that will take away a much needed source of jobs and revenue for the island, and we all know that they need all the help they can get right now.

I actually think that although the knee-jerk reaction would be to pull out (and there is certainly lots of talk about this subject), and on the surface of it, that’s the “nicest” response, RCI made a sound decision in staying.

It also handled the PR well, by announcing it would donate at least $1 million in humanitarian aid to Haiti and contribute all of the its net revenue from Labadee (RCI’s resort in Haiti) to the relief effort. RCI is also helping with the humanitarian aid – its ships are also delivering supplies – including rice, dried beans, powdered milk, water and canned goods – to the region. What’s best is that all of this was accomplished without the all-too-easy-to-do PR hand-wringing,

Although obviously RCI’s motives will always be questioned as to how much of it is altruistic and how much is simply brand halo-polishing, RCI is helping Haiti both short and long-term with its efforts, and this should be applauded.

Quick Disclaimer: My client, Johnny Rockets, has a relationship with RCI, with locations on a number of its vessels. But that doesn’t have anything to do with this post. I still think RCI is doing the right thing.

The only thing unbreakable was his composure…

"But my product manager said it was unbreakable..."

I always wonder why PR people still allow their clients to promote anything as “un-[XXX]-able.” It almost never goes well. In my past I’ve had clients talk about their firewalls as being unhackable, and here’s yet another example.

You have to admire that the CEO of Sonim didn’t turn ashen when the BBC reporter managed to break his phone within about three seconds, but even behind his smile, he must have been thinking “why did I set myself up for this”

It would have been so much for him just to say that it was toughened and could stand up to most knocks. That would have been a much easier (if slightly less sexy) pitch than calling it unbreakable. But oh no, bravado and / or too much faith in your products took over. And it wasn’t pretty.

Tip for marketers everywhere. If you issue a challenge, someone, somewhere, will take you up on it. And if they succeed, you’ll know about it – especially if it’s a tech reporter doing it on camera at the world’s largest consumer electronics. So be warned, it will end in tears.

Behold the Google Phone

Google finally announced the details on its new phone, the cryptically-titled Nexus One. To say that this could shake up the mobile phone market is like saying that the introduction of the internal combustion engine may have had an impact on the auto industry.

So what’s so good about it (or bad, depending on whether you’re a carrier)? Well, the big thing is that it’s going to be sold unlocked, meaning you can run it on any network you want, whereas the iPhone, for example, has typically been tied to AT&T. Also, Google will be pushing full VoIP to the phone. That means that you won’t get charged for minutes from your carrier, regardless of where you dial to. This means we may finally start to see traditional mobile telcos simply become a dumb pipe – like your Internet connection at home, with will act simply as a data conduit, regardless of what information is sent down it. Even in today’s era of $50 all-you-can-eat packages, it could still have a huge impact on the market, particularly for high-margin business users.

Being someone who travels abroad quite a bit though, the big turn on for me is that they will allow users who travel to Europe to connect to HSDPA (that’s tech speak for “faster than the wireless data access you get in the U.S.”) networks for just €20 per month. No more horror stories of thousand dollar data bills. Exciting times, indeed.

Why Carrie Prejean’s publicists need to be fired

It’s likely that a lot of people saw Carrie Prejean’s meltdown on Larry King last night. But if not, here’s the car crash in all its glory.

Now, you can say all you like about her views, and although I personally don’t share them, I initially felt somewhat sorry for her the way the Perez Hilton asked her an unfair question on Miss USA and then skewered her (obviously not literally – it’s not his thing) for her answer.

So because of this media storm, unsurprisingly, Prejean decided she needed PR support and signed a (Christian) publicist in April 2009.

Since then, it has just been one disaster after another, with the culmination this week being her interviews by Meredith Viera and Larry King – neither of them falling into the Spanish Inquisition school of interview harshness. While her (and her publicist’s) goal for this was obviously to shill her new book, the fact that this all took place in the days following her sex tape was leaked made it strikingly obvious that that would be a pretty major element of the interviews.

Obviously nobody was a winner – her ex-boyfriend obviously chose to leak it then to cause maximum harm to her, which is frankly a pretty mean trick (although he claims that it was actually made only two years ago, when she was 20, but her team told him to lie about it, but that’s another story entirely). On the other hand, her position on morality has been somewhat undermined by what she supposedly did on the tape (feel free to Google it).

But anyway, in spite of all this kerfuffle, her publicist continued to put her on the national interview circuit. The fact that she came across so horribly suggests one of two things. They either completely failed to adequately brief her on what the subject of the interviews would be (which shows a total lack of understanding of the media culture), or alternatively thought that their client was capable of handling the questions (which shows a complete lack of their client’s strengths and weaknesses, to anyone who has seen her on TV).

So the fact of the matter is that Carrie’s publicists did a terrible job. In a damage-control situation like this, their prime job is to protect their client, who was obviously well out of her depth. Typically, that involves keeping them away from situations that can’t be easily controlled. Such as hive national TV interviews.

However, they just continued with the line of “let’s roll her out to the cameras to sell this book,” even though the story had gone way beyond that. They failed in their duties and should be fired because of it.

Should Obama have turned down the Nobel Peace Prize?

St Barack of Obama

There has certainly been a lot of surprise, not just from the man himself, about Barack Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

One of the recurring themes, which was raised to me this morning by my pal and political junkie Colin Mahoney, was this: would it have been more prudent of a PR move for Obama to have been honored to have been nominated, but then decided to turn down the award?

He – or rather, his barely pubescent (OK – I’m jealous) speech writer Jon Favreau – put together some eloquent words on the subject, saying, “I am both surprised and deeply humbled. I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments. But rather as an affirmation of American leadership. … I will accept this award as a call to action.”

However, the last sentence really does mean just that. He’s essentially been pre-awarded the prize for things that he now needs to live up to. And if he fails, it will not only seriously dent his own personal credibility, but will also have a very negative impact on global sentiment to the Nobel Peace Prize.

The question is – should he have said “I appreciate the honor, and although I firmly believe my actions are on the right track towards helping with world peace, I do not believe that my actions thus far have merited such a prestigious award” or some such? That would have given him the PR boost credibility of looking like the humble, bigger man, while also allowing the Prize committee to reflect on his actions. After all, the deadline for nominations was February 1st. He’d been in power for less than two weeks at the time, so to say that this award was made on anything other than promise was somewhat far-fetched. After all, the last two sitting Presidents (Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson) to get the award had drawn up the 1905 Russia-Japan peace treaty and helped in the founding of the League of Nations. The Nobel Peace Prize should be offered as a reward, not an incentive.

BTW – the photo of Obama is actually a White House handout.  Wonder how ironic they were being.

No such thing as a free…book?

Sexy librarians. Not available online.

Google was recently in Congress to defend its right to post books online and make them searchable. Obviously one of the big talking points was about just how far Google Books can go in its indexing, and whether this is fair, even though you can actually click through to an online retailer from the site and purchase of copy of whatever you’re reading (FYI, Google is facing a ton of opposition, but that’s another story).

But there’s another issue, which addresses something completely different – if Google can track what you’re reading (and you can bet that they do), who else could be checking up on what you’re reading? Several organizations, from the ACLU to EFF are concerned about this, suggesting that it could stymie peoples’ choice of what they read.

While it’s certainly a valid point, is this necessarily a Google Books issue, and do people have the right to complain? After all, what Google Books is doing is allowing people to read for free what they would generally otherwise have to pay for. It’s the consumer’s choice – either get it for free and potentially have someone know what you’re reading (which is only probably really bad if Google is subpoenaed to hand over your book list), or pay for it and, well potentially have someone know what you’re reading.

Should you wish to get the book somewhere else, would you still be able to expect – or be able to have – such a right to privacy? Not in a library, where consumers need to sign up to get out books. Nor in brick-and-mortar store, unless you choose to pay cash and hope that there are no security cameras catching your purchase. And certainly not Amazon.com, where your purchase history is extensively used for marketing to you.

So where does that leave Google? Is the trade-off between convenience and price, and possible privacy invasions worth the risk? Time will tell, but I seem to remember that there was outcry about the targeted ads within Gmail when that was launched, and it doesn’t seem to have done too badly so far.

Blogs, Twitter and that funny thing called privacy

Elementary, my dear Watson

There seems to have been a lot of discussion of late about the right to privacy online, from fired anonymous bloggers to fired Tweeters.

I personally find it interesting how many people seem to think that the Internet is some big anonymous  forum where anyone can say what they want or do what they want with no repercussions. I mean, if I were to stand in the middle of Times Square, Piccadilly Circus or some similarly populous place and speak my mind, although I’d obviously have the right to do so, should I expect a veil of anonymity (and therefore shield from the law)? No. In fact if you do say this kind of thing and slander / libel people, you should expect to receive whatever is thrown at you.

So the question is, should a blogger expect similar? It could be argued that anonymity is critical when revealing information that is essential to the public media, but if you just use it as a platform to air other people’s dirty laundry, should the same protections be afforded? It’s obviously a difficult one, where free speech and privacy intersect with people’s right to know who is saying what about them.

Similar is the story about the guy who got fired from California Pizza Kitchen for his Tweet “@calpizzakitchen black button ups are the lamest shit ever!!!” Again, we’ll probably never know whether this was just the tip of an iceberg, or if he was simply the victim of an over-zealous HR department. However, was it unnecessary of them to fire him? Well, although a stiff rebuke may have been necessary, the guy was obviously trying to get their attention (he could have quite easily said “My employers” or even “CPK’s, ” but starting it with “@calpizzakitchen makes” it pretty obvious what his intention was). Given that he’s now been posting a (now private) video on YouTube talking about why he got fired seems to suggest that he wasn’t just some innocent kid caught up in a the moment. Thoughts?

Some of the crowd are on the pitch…

Completely off-topic, but OH YES! You can’t beat qualifying for the World Cup with an emphatic 5-1 drubbing, be it Croatia or the old adversary, Germany.

So now we’ve qualified, it’s just a question of finding (and paying for) tickets. If I’m out in South Africa  for all four weeks (who am I kidding? Like we’ll get to the final), the plane ticket starts at $2,091 , with a 36 hour trip time. Add on to that a hotel and tickets, and it could get rather prohibitive.

Looks like I’ll be watching it with the rest of the ex-pats down at Shakespeare’s…

Paid online news – dead and buried or rising from the grave?

Few things in life are certain. Death, taxes and...free online content?

In the beginning was the Internet, and it was good and it was free (and if not, people just ripped it and made it available on a P2P network).

And then to spoil the party, more sites came along with content which was either partially or exclusively paid, such as the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New York Times, CNN and salon.com.

Over time, many of these organizations eased their restrictions on paid content, with FT cutting almost all of its paid content, and WSJ now allowing a significant amount of content to be made available online. The fairly straightforward theory behind this was that people recognized and appreciated the quality content and would keep visiting the sites, and that the increased page views could translate to higher ad rates, offsetting the subscription fees lost. For example for the New York Times, page views went up 80% after paid subscriptions were dropped.

All of that seemed fairly straightforward, and also translated quite nicely into the offline world. When I was living in London back in 1998-2001, the Tube was always littered with copies of the free Metro, which although not exactly Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism, provided a good morning read while trying to avoid your face making contact with some strap-hanger’s armpit.  Again, it was distributed so widely that it attracted premium ad rates.

Similarly, the free USA Today that was shoved under my door at hotels across the country nicely boosted its circulation, increasing ad rates quite nicely (in fact almost 50% of its distribution was free, through hotels, car rental agencies, etc).

But then the bad times hit. One the one hand, advertisers could no longer afford the high-priced insertions. One the other, hard-pressed companies needed to trim fat from their bottom lines by cutting out items such as free daily newspapers. Marriott cut free copies of USA Today in early 2009, reducing its circulation by a full 7%. Today, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp announced it was closing down its free London Paper (cunningly called thelondonpaper), one of three free daily papers in the UK’s capital.

This decision falls hot on the heels earlier this month that News Corp will start charging for access to digital content across its stable of publications around the world, from the Journal, to the illustrious New York Post and its esteemed sister paper, The Sun.

But the question is, who will pay for it? While premium business-oriented content can still command serious subscription revenues – after all, it’s mainly paid for by corporate accounts, I would imagine – would someone really want to shell out for gossip and scandal that can be found online on myriad other sites, blogs and so on?

On top of this, as a culture in general, have we not all got so accustomed to consuming free stuff (from Hulu to Pandora and beyond) that the idea of paying for online content has become so alien that it would dismissed out of hand? It will be interesting to see how well Murdoch can pull this off, and if he can, who will be the next on the bandwagon. After all, we all thought he was crazy paying half a billion dollars for a money-losing Web site, but that seemed to work out quite nicely.

Lies, damn lies and the healthcare debate

Protesting the right to be wrong?

The healthcare debate has certainly reached fever pitch of late, with packed Town Halls across the country full of people screaming and yelling thoughtfully discussing the future of the country’s healthcare. But listening to NPR this morning, a lot of the attendees were quoting all sorts of things about higher taxes and death panels and so on.

I’m not an economist, and nor have I read the healthcare bill (if you have a second to spare, it’s here). So, I’m not going to try and figure out how much it would cost or what’s involved. But instead, I wanted to focus on some facts about just how well the current system is working (after all, I’m a firm believer in if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.)

So, I took a look at some statistics on the state of U.S. heathcare in comparison to the rest of the world and I was rather surprised.

According to the WHO rankings of international health systems ranks the U.S. 37th, way behind the UK (19th), and just two spaces above evil child-eaters, Cuba. Even more surprising, the U.S. lies beneath most Western European countries and even *gasp* Cuba when it comes to life expectancy. The U.S. is the number one developed nation when it comes to the obesity rate.  And if you really want to get depressed, take a look at the comparison between per-capita healthcare spend and life-expectancy.

So really, my question to all the people who are in favor of the sweeping reforms is why are they not focusing on the fact that we’re actually a really unhealthy country, even though we spend by far the most on health care? As all good PR people know, you can’t beat throwing some stats into a story to give it some zing. Is it just that we don’t want to compare ourselves to the rest of the world as it’s un-American to point out our failings compared to others? Or is it just that the pro-change lobby hasn’t succeeded in drowning out the “Death Panel” rhetoric with cold hard facts?

So frankly, all these “Hands off my Healthcare” people bamboozle me. I’m lucky to have a great employer who provides me with excellent coverage, but I’m sure that many people who are out there protesting aren’t in the same boat as me. Are they horribly misinformed, or is it more the case that, as Col. Nathan Jessup once said, “you can’t handle the truth.”