In last Monday’s edition of The Hobson & Holtz Report, Shel and I spent a good 15 minutes in the show discussing the communication and employee relations challenges facing British Airways and Gate Gourmet following last week’s flight cancellations fiasco. The broader consequences of that fiasco will be pretty far reaching, starting with financial aspects […]
Category: Reputation
Celebrity self destruction
BBC News: Fashion store H&M has done a U-turn and says it will drop Kate Moss as the face of a campaign after drug allegations. Tabloid newspaper claims that Moss had snorted cocaine initially led H&M to condemn the British model but vow it would continue using her. Many of H&M’s customers are teenage girls […]
End of the road for Land Rover customer
The happy ending to the Land Rover Discovery saga that Adrian Melrose had been hoping for just hasn’t happened. The latest news from Land Rover’s most patient, loyal and suffering customer is that he has finally reached the end of the road: […] So I throw up my hands in the air and tell Land […]
Keeping Apple coolness intact
The problems with scratches on the new iPod nano that hundreds of users reported during the past two weeks hasn’t turned out to be the brand, reputation and PR crisis for Apple that it could have been. Thanks largely to a public acknowledgement that a batch of nanos did suffer from a manufacturing defect regarding […]
Can Ketchum now walk their talk?
Via Jeremy Pepper, news that the Ketchum PR agency has now launched a blog to support its ‘personalized media’ offering. Regular readers will know the story of Ketchum and how their entrance into the PR blogosphere in June attracted almost universal derision by members of the PR community. If you didn’t follow that story, let […]
Lessons from Interpublic’s global financial chaos
The Financial Times reports the sobering story of marketing and ad agency group Interpublic who, after over 400 acquisitions and global expansion, found itself having to restate its accounts for the past ten years and be the subject of an SEC investigation into its accounting practices: […] The company discovered “instances of deliberate falsification of […]
A new call for ethics in PR
PR Week reports on a call to action by the newly-appointed president of the International Communications Consultancy Organization, Fleishman-Hillard executive V-P John Saunders: Following on from an impassioned speech at last week’s Prague global summit, where his presidency was announced, he told PRWeek: ‘This is no longer the golden age of PR. We will need […]
Dell’s hell as earnings fall short
ZDNet: Dell announced on Monday that third-quarter revenue will fall well short of expectations due to sluggish consumer sales and a faulty component in its OptiPlex desktop PC. […] The leader in computer manufacturing blames its shortfall partially on sluggish consumer sales in the U.S. and U.K. […] Dell fell into similar territory in [the […]
TypePad customers get an offer that’s hard to refuse
As many TypePad users know, the hosted blog service has been a literal nightmare to use in recent months. I’ve posted my frustrations about it as have many other TypePad users. There’s even one blogger who started a blog (on Blogger) last week on filing a class action lawsuit against Six Apart. No takers yet […]
Sony’s rootkit woes tip of the reputation iceberg
Mainstream music publisher Sony BMG is getting hammered left, right and center as fall-out continues over Sony’s rootkit debacle. The rootkit in question was a spyware-like application encoded onto certain copy-protected music CDs that Sony sold in the US and which did some “ET phone home” type of activities from your computer without you knowing […]
Oil blaze communications challenge for Total Oil
I’m following the still-breaking news about the massive oil terminal blaze in Hemel Hempstead in the UK that started on Sunday – what some reports are saying is the biggest fire of its type in Europe since 1945 – and thinking about PR. In an event that’s making news headlines worldwide, this has all the […]
Yahoo! hammered by users over poor successor to Konfabulator
In my post on Monday about software hits and misses, I gave the new Yahoo! Widget Engine 3.0 a definite ‘miss’ verdict for the moment as this version for Windows really doesn’t appear to be worthy of unleasing on an unsuspecting public as this growing comment thread in the support forum clearly indicates. When I […]
FT: ‘Tolerate some libel for the greater good’
There has been much written in recent weeks concerning the character assassination of John Seigenthaler over his biography in Wikipedia, prompting much discussion over the trustworthiness of an open information resource like Wikipedia which anybody can edit. The character assassin was outed and Wikipedia is now implementing tighter controls over who can edit material. The […]
Getting back up to speed with TypePad
A welcome sight for every TypePad customer – you can access the TypePad service again and you can update your blog to reflect accurate content. (Quick jump: I’ve included some tips below on how to republish your blog and how to make a backup of its post content.) If you didn’t visit this blog at […]
Six Apart: Perceptions and the role of communication
This is clearly not a good time for some companies offering blogosphere services. Last week it was Six Apart’s nightmare with the TypePad service outage for almost a full day. Now it’s the turn of del.icio.us which is still suffering in the aftermath of a power failure at their datacenter last week. If you try […]
TypePad’s indelible record
Noodling around the web and the blogosphere in preparation for tonight’s podcast discussion about Six Apart’s TypePad outage last Friday, I noticed that in the majority of blog posts I scanned, the bloggers concerned were apologizing for their blogs being offline. “Indelible record” is the phrase that immediately springs to my mind. All those hundreds […]
Salesforce.com and Six Apart outages: What’s the difference?
The anger and frustration over the TypePad service outage last week was an interesting phenomenon. Bloggers are passionate and opinionated! So when I read an InfoWorld story about Salesforce.com’s service outage yesterday, I wondered what bloggers were saying. A quick Technorati search on the term “salesforce.com+outage” turned up just 10 posts. In contrast, a Technorati […]
Mine tragedy ‘miscommunication’
Today’s news of the tragedy at a coal mine in the US where a dozen miners were killed would, for most people, be just another terrible news story were it not for a truly awful element to it. According to news accounts, information emerged initially that one miner had been killed and one other injured, […]
Pricey freedom of the press
BBC News: Danish-Swedish dairy giant Arla Foods says the ongoing boycott of Danish products in the Middle East had so far cost it between £40m and £50m. As the Muslim world refuses to buy Danish goods in protest over cartoons published in a Danish newspaper, Arla is losing £1m a day. Arla has also had […]
Factoring blogs into crisis communication planning
A feature on blogs in the current issue of The Economist hardly adds any value with a subject focus that’s been flogged to death by some sections of the mainstream media, notably Forbes magazine last October. Bloggers can be vicious but they can also help companies avert disaster, says the sub-title as The Economist devotes […]