Saturday April 27, 2024

What Is Important?

President Obama might have wanted the nation to focus on his State of the Union speech but for at least 100,000 Americans it wasn’t important.   They are more concerned about the immigration status of a Canadian-born pop singer.  It is a lesson to communicators and others that what we consider urgent may have no […]

The Medium For Our Time?

Global smart phone shipments have reached a billion, according to research firm IDC.  That is a significant fraction of the world’s population.  It makes smart phones as common as PC’s or any other computer-based medium.  From the point of view of communicators, smart phone capabilities make them the medium of choice and perhaps the medium […]

Multiple Threats

Companies can face multiple threats at the same time, any one of which can put them out of business.  If they are to survive, they have to deal with them promptly, but it is not always possible to do so.  Consider the start-up Uber, which makes an application for calling a taxi from your mobile […]

When Is A Crisis Not A Crisis?

When nearly everyone agrees that it isn’t whether or not it is.  What do I mean by this?  Take, for example, the rolling disaster of the new F-35 fighter that is supposed to serve three arms of the military — the Air Force, the Navy and the Marine Corp.  The fighter is faulty, over budget, […]

Guaranteed Publicity

How do you guarantee publicity for a client?  Offer a billion dollar prize.  That is what Quicken Loans is doing with the backing of Warren Buffett.   Of course, the chance that anyone will win it is vanishingly small.  One would stand a better chance of getting hit by lightning many times over at the same time […]

Wrecking PR

Here is a way to destroy the name of your company.  How the fate of a man’s daughter ended up on an envelope is hard to understand or to believe.  One wants to posit that it is a fake.  But what if it isn’t?  The company that sent the junk mail has explaining to do. […]

PR And Terrorism

It is hard to make a good impression when your event is threatened by terror.  This, however, is the case facing Russia at the Sochi Olympic site.   Security has been a concern for some time, and Russia has isolated the venues to prevent bombings, shootings or other acts of violence.  But, the need to do […]

Perils of PR

What if your PR agency was hired to promote the stability of a country?  You send a film crew there to get shots of order and progress only to have the crew arrested within hours of starting work.   That is exactly what happened to a PR agency hired to promote Egypt.  It is a […]

Changed Environment

What does a company do when its environment changes so radically that it can no longer compete?  This is the quandary facing gambling casinos in Atlantic City, NJ.  Even online gambling is not enough to stabilize their revenues and profits.  And, anyone who has gone to Atlantic City will tell you that it is not […]

Political PR

One way to get into trouble as a politician is to ignore the media — like this governor is doing.  Rightly or wrongly, reporters consider themselves proxies for citizens and ready to ask questions that the populace would if they had access to the top.  More than that, statehouse reporters delve into issues that the […]