News flash: I just moved to an office in downtown San Francisco — woohoo! I love The City, and now I have a chance to be here everyday again. I last worked in SF in 1997.
One thing that has changed since 1997 — there are a LOT more Starbucks in downtown SF. No duh. There are Starbucks EVERYWHERE in the U.S. — 6,700 total locations [probably excluding franchisees, such as those in museums and Barnes & Noble].
Now there is going to be reliable, free WiFi hotspots all over urban/suburban America in Starbucks starting July 1.
As soon as I heard this news, I immediately started reconsidering my expensive $60/month broadband wireless card. Yes, it comes in handy when I really need it, but it is becoming less and less necessary as more free hotspots crop up. And if I drop it, with the money I will save, I can always splurge on hotel WiFi when I need to.
But this isn’t about me. 
This is about the larger question of free municipal WiFi — something that you may remember was touted as a slam dunk by now, but hasn’t happened. Why? Because it’s harder to do than it looks, and where it is installed, it’s largely unreliable.
Now, there’s going to be a free, RELIABLE alternative — Starbucks, and likely the sidewalks right around your closest ‘Bucks, and probably around lots of other coffeeshops that will no longer be able to insist that you buy something before letting you use their WiFi. [Not to mention the 11,000 McDonalds that already offer it]
What Starbucks did for lattes — made them easy to get and reliably prepared — I predict they are going to do for WiFi.
Brilliant move by Starbucks — but — what about the money? Starbucks charges ~$3-4 for a premium cup of coffee, but they are giving away the WiFi — how’s that going to work?
The answer to that is in the second part of their release, about the Starbucks Digital Network. For now, they are talking about the free content that their WiFi users will have access to, but just you wait — they will figure out ways to separate you from your money through this network, I’m sure of it. And that’s how they will make some money on this, while changing the equation of whether you need your own network access service anymore.
Let’s face it — if you’re operating a business these days, people expect to find you on the Internet. And very likely, they will form first impressions of you, your company and your offerings from what they find on the web.
I’m always surprised when I run across small businesses or solo consultants who don’t have a web site or one that is hopelessly out-of-date. Come on, people! How hard is to it put up a blog-based web site that’s clean, simple and easy to navigate? Or at least a simple one-page landing page with your name, some art and contact info?
Then there are the big players, consumer brands that send powerful and sophisticated messages. What do their initial web pages say about who they are?
The Sunday New York Times took a look at the web sites of some brands in the news, including Toyota and Maclaren, the stroller-maker. For, as the Times said:
A company shows anxiety on its face — that is, on its Web site, which has become the face of the modern corporation. Visit sites for recently troubled or confused enterprises, including Maclaren, Toyota, Playtex, Tylenol and, yes, John Edwards, and you’ll find a range of digital ways of dealing with distress.
Here’s their conclusion:
There’s a lesson in this tour. Web sites should update or shut down; the ones that hang around collecting cobwebs have an almost frightening, hollow-eyed quality. If your plans change, you should note the revision publicly, and manifest confidence online. If you hit a losing streak or your plans crumble, as did the plans announced on JohnEdwards.com, you should close up Web shop as soon as possible — and maybe keep to yourself for a while.
I don’t agree about this last point. John Edwards needs to have a public presence on the web, but I agree, it should be short and to the point: Here’s me, I’m still out here, here a sentence or two about what I’m doing, and here’s how you can contact me (some generic contact info).
One of the most important lessons of crisis communications is that most crises are not communications problems, they’re operational problems. Communications can help in many ways to diffuse a crisis and calm people down, but if the operational issue at the heart of the problem isn’t addressed, no amount of PR spin is going to distract interested parties from that fact.
This, is a nutshell, is my fan-level reaction to Ticketmaster‘s new PR ploy involving its captive reseller program, TicketsNow. Ticketmaster had a big problem earlier this year when it was caught transferring ticket seekers from the original ticket onsale screen to the TicketsNow resale screen, where the same tickets that had just gone on sale were now supposedly only available for huge markups on TicketsNow. Read more
We’re now far enough along in the development of the Internet and desktop software that corporations can now access very sophisticated tools to monitor the messages flowing out there in the world about them. I recently had a chance to demo dna13′s new Enterprise software and it looked to me like the future of reputation management.
First, let me say that I do not ordinarily tout PR tools and technologies, and this is not an endorsement per se. But I was sufficiently impressed by the depth and breadth of dna13′s software that I wanted to write about. If you want to stop reading my drivel and go straight to their site for more information, here’s the link.
Dan Abrams, the MSNBC talker and would-be PR counselor, has been taking some heat (from this blogger and elsewhere) about the stated strategy of his Abrams Research shop to use working journalists as moonlighting PR consultants to his clients.
With journalism under siege and journalism jobs vanishing faster than you can say “Huffington Post,” it does make some sense that these professional communicators would look over the hedge and see public relations as a place to earn some cash in today’s (and tomorrow’s economy).
As I said earlier this week, Abrams’ use of freelancer journalists as PR consultants is not really new. Get a fulltime NY Times staffer to serve as a consultant, and now you’ve got something innovative (if not desirable). But those on the margins have been making a living wearing different hats for a long time.
Anyway, it turns out Abrams as either sparked a debate or just been early to the trend. Via Ragan’s daily email blast, here are some links that also relate to this emerging trend:
- Reason magazine: Will PR pros take the baton of investigative reporting?
- TechNewsWorld: The 21st Century Journalist: PR by Day, Reporter by Night?
- Society of Business Editors and Writers: Keeping it Honest in a Freelance World
Chevron got grilled on “60 Minutes” a couple of weeks ago for its alleged contamination of the Amazon rain forest in Ecuador. If you’re huge oil company, that’s definitely par for the course. Causing environment damage? Check. Getting caught? Check. Getting unfavorable treatment on 60 Minutes? Check.
This is the pattern that major multi-nationals have been subjected to for decades. And without a doubt, many of them have been absolutely as guilty as charged. This isn’t a blog post applauding a cover-up or making excuses for corporate pollution.
But this is a blog about media relations and managing public perception, and we call ‘em as we see ‘em. So we have to say that Chevron’s aggressive move to combat the 60 Minutes piece by producing its own video was a good move.
From the Times story:
Gene Randall, a former CNN correspondent, spent about five months on the project, which was posted on the Internet in April, three weeks before the “60 Minutes” report was shown on May 3.“Chevron hired me to tell its side of the story,” he said. “That’s what I did.”
That’s how you do it, folks. You don’t sit back and wait and then react. You go on the offense and present your side of the story, whether it is through an expensive media like network-quality video or by printing up flyers.
There’s a new book out by the New York Times correspondent Neil MacFarquhar called, amazingly, The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday.
Yes — you read that right. The Lebanese militant organization Hizbollah has a PR department, and it sends birthday greetings to New York Times correspondents. What a world.
MacFarquhar’s book is not primarily about PR or media relations, but rather about the everyday realities in the Middle East — things you wouldn’t necessarily find out reading the war and diplomatic coverage of the area. But one of those realities is that even Hizbollah has a media relations staff to get its message out and influence coverage.
There’s almost always a lesson in my blog posts, and this one is no exception: everyone can benefit from having a proactive communications strategy. Either you define yourself, or other people will do it for you.
If you’re in a life-and-death struggle, having a PR operation is a no-brainer. But if you’re just a run-of-the-mill business, don’t kid yourself that you don’t need a public communications strategy. It may not involve traditional media relations, but at the least it should involve regular and clear communication with your key constituencies.
I’m skeptical about the supposedly major damage done to the Domino’s brand by a gross YouTube video a couple of its employees made showing them sneezing on a sandwich and doing other inappropriate food-handling things (you can search for the video online if you want).
Soon after the video hit YouTube and started to make the rounds, Domino’s responded with its own video apology, and they posted apologies on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.
Still, online communications pundits seem to believe that the company didn’t do enough, fast enough, to combat this incident and that the video and their response had “damaged” the brand.
You know a story like this is peaking when the New York Times weighs in, and so they did, saying,
In just a few days, Domino’s reputation was damaged.
The proof of brand damage? Found online, of course:
The perception of its quality among consumers went from positive to negative since Monday, according to the research firm YouGov, which holds online surveys of about 1,000 consumers every day regarding hundreds of brands.
An online survey? Is that a joke?
Two observations: Domino’s pizza is terrible: cheese and tomato sauce on cardboard. It’s hard to imagine that their brand’s “quality” image was materially harmed by a sophomoric (obviously) online video. And how many of Domino’s core customers are tracking the brand online? I didn’t do any man-on-the-street interviews, but I doubt that the “average” Domino’s customer cares what is being said about the company online.
Even as powerful as the online world can be at times, it’s still only a tiny fraction of the real world. My advice is to keep that in mind, and in perspective.
KD Paine, the Queen of PR Measurement, has just put out a must-have checklist for PR Measurement programs. You can download it here, and following is an executive summary:
- Define the objectives of your PR program, and what you hope to accomplish with a measurement report (e.g., increase your budget, get more internal support)
- Define the audiences of the PR program, and ask yourself: How does a good relationship with your various target audiences benefit your organization?
- Prioritize your audiences, and be brutal about which ones are most important to your success
- Determine a benchmark: what keeps your boss up at night? Keeping up with the competition? Staying ahead? In other words, who or what will you be comparing yourself to over time?
- Select the right measurement tool to measure your success against your objectives. Which tool will you use, and what will it measure? Will it tell you what you need to know about whether you are moving toward your objectives?
By now you’ve probably heard about the otherwise wonderful Rachel Maddow’s rant about PR and specifically, about industry giant Burson-Marsteller, regarding B-M’s representation of AIG, the big insurance company that has gotten tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailout cash.
Maddow let her inner media whiner out and went on a classic anti-PR rant about Burson, saying that AIG shouldn’t be spending taxpayer money to spiff up its image, and simplifying (or dumbing down) a segment of Burson’s client roster to a who’s who of evil-doers (the manufacturer of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, for example) — the latest of which, by extension, is AIG.
Now my perspective is that this kind of criticism is to be expected in our industry and tolerated to some degree. We are the industry of spin, we are relatively easy to understand (and hence criticize), and we make so many gaffes that we are easy targets. But we’re not alone. How would you like to be a “trial lawyer” or a “tax collector” or a “meter maid”? See my point? They get ribbed all the time too, but you don’t see them and their industry associations crying about it.
So my question is not whether we are fair game (we are), but is AIG’s decision to hire PR help a good move or a bad one? Should AIG be spending any taxpayer money on outside PR counsel, or should it acknowledge that spending money on outside PR help is counter-productive because it generates the negative coverage that AIG is, presumably, trying to avoid?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd6gqvydzOk]