Trust Building Using Crisis Communication

It is quite obvious that company is in trouble when you look at its website and see all the digital distress signals. Check out these sites of recently troubled or confused enterprises, including Maclaren, Toyota, Playtex, and Tylenol for examples of these distress signals.

When you look at its Web site, Toyota, which recalled millions of cars for their faulty accelerator pedals in January, seems to be going into a apology spring sale frenzy. The plan appears to be to express less chagrin than gratitude and largess. “Toyota wants to thank you with our biggest offers ever,” reads the home page. To the left of that declaration is an equally thrilling-seeming banner, this one red states why they are thanking you: “Recall Information: Get the Latest Updates Here.” Check out last months Toyota Trust Communications BOCA blog for more of their crisis communication. I think they should have followed Tylenols "gold standard" and been alittle less sorry and a little more transparent.

Johnson & Johnson is well known for its profound corporate recovery, in the way it finessed a comeback after the 1982 Chicago Tylenol murders. The Tylenol Web site projects absolute self-assurance on in spite of January recalls of Tylenol and other of its medicines (Rolaids, Motrin, Benadryl) after complaints of a moldy smell. A big red button on the home page points a finger at “Important Recall News” and links to a matter-of-fact press release and to a handy way to tell if you’re holding a recalled Tylenol product. Though it lacks the distracting ebullience of the Toyota site, Tylenol plays its setbacks similarly, positioning recalls as though they were all in a day’s work for a scrupulous company that manufactures a lot of important products.

Seven people died in 1982 after taking Tylenol capsules, which had been tampered with and contaminated with cyanide. According to Effective Crisis Management, Tylenol’s market share quickly went from 37 percent to only seven percent. Johnson & Johnson faced a huge challenge. Not only did the company have to manage the crisis communication of just Tylenol, but also of the entire company’s reputation. J&J recalled approximately 31 million bottles of Tylenol from across the country and stopped all advertising.

Some say J&J set a standard for crisis communication when they “assumed responsibility by ensuring public safety first and recalled all of their capsules from the market,” despite the fact that the bottles were tampered with after reaching the shelves. Tylenol was reintroduced into the market with triple-seal tamper-resistant packaging, offered coupons for the products, created a new discounted pricing program, new advertising campaign and gave more than 2,250 presentations to the medical community. According to Managing Crises Before They Happen (Mitroff, 2001), J&J actually increased their credibility during the crisis because of the candidness of the executives. Notre Dame expert Professor Patrick Murphy said J&J set a “gold standard” in regards to business ethics as well because J&J was proactive and transparent.

“Industry expertise” vs. “skillset” - A BusinessWeek Case Study

One of the most frequently asked questions that PR professionals hear is “who (what journalists) do you know in my industry?”

I’ve always found this question interesting. Why? While it is important who you know, what’s more important is what you know, how you know it, and what skills you have that are transferable.

Sound counter-intuitive? Let’s take a look at Fortune 2000 CEOs and CMOs. They cross industries all the time. Take Edward Whitacre - previously a senior exec at AT&T and now CEO of General Motors. Clearly, GM thinks he’s extremely qualified despite the fact he didn’t come out of the automotive industry. What matters is the fact that Whitacre is a seasoned business professional and CEO.

A great leader is a great leader. A great marketer is a great marketer. A great communicator is a great communicator.

At BOCA, we often take on a new client in an industry that is new to us. One example is Shipwire, a company we began working with a few months ago. Shipwire is our first client (of many, we hope) in the SMB (small/medium-sized business) world. We learned its space, uncovered key reporters, and more importantly, used our seasoned communications skills to secure them a very nice position in the Small Business section of BusinessWeek.

Coincidentally, a technology writer from the same publication wrote a feature story today on our semiconductor client, Telegent. Two different writers in two completely different industries – one within which we’ve had years of experience (semiconductor) and the other new (SMB).

What’s the point here? Knowing the right reporter is a very small piece of the bigger puzzle. Being a seasoned, strategic PR professional who understands business and relationships is how one wins the game.

Read more:

http://www.career-line.com/job-search/new-gm-ceo-comes-from-att/

http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/mar2010/sb20100318_940081.htm

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-03-25/maxlinear-s-34-advance-signals-potential-for-telegent-s-ipo.html

The "Monster" SXSW Tech Week

South by Southwest (SXSW), the vast festival in Austin, Texas, covering music, film and interactive technologies, is starting off with a bang. Representatives from the likes of Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Spotify and hundreds of other companies of all sizes are addressing the tens of thousands of attendees throughout these first five days.

But what’s interesting about SXSW is not just the big names, it’s the smaller developers and start-ups who are presenting their ideas in the tucked away corners of Austin’s Convention Centre and the surrounding hotels into which the conference overspills. Finding them is another matter – the list of speakers runs to 41 pages.

The SXSW Web Awards took place last night (winners here), with location-sharing service Gowalla beating out Foursquare for best site in the mobile category and search site Wolfram Alpha nabbing Best in Show. TechCrunch liveblogged Twitter co-founder Evan Williams’s keynote Q&A. Evan did not go into details about the company’s new ad platform and was surprisingly tedious according to many audience members. But his Twitter posts about the event were followed in awe by millions. Other big news: Google Buzz was a “privacy fail” (via ReadWriteWeb), and music service MOG will let you stream any song on demand to your phone (via GigaOM).

This event is starting off like it was intended: “A hotbed of discovery and interactivity, the event offers lucrative networking opportunities and immersion into the art and business of the rapidly evolving world of independent film.”

The Prestigious Information Security RSA Conference in SF

In the new information security age, you’re trained to expect the unexpected. Changes occur in a nanosecond. The RSA Conference in San Francisco, CA is the most all-inclusive forum in information security offering enterprise and technical professionals a place to learn about all those changes. A place where they can go there to learn about the latest trends and technologies, get access to new best practices, and gain insight into the practical and realistic perspectives on the most critical technical and business issues facing you today. This year’s theme is the Rosetta Stone, designed to remember “the Rosetta Stone’s legacy to modern Egyptology and its lasting message on the power of collaboration.”

Our client Narus spearheaded and spoke on yesterday’s panel, “Delivering a Unified and Resilient National Cyber Security Framework.” Moderated by Wall Street Journal reporter Siobhan Gorman, the impressive panel looked at the Obama Administration's concentrated effort to protect the U.S. national infrastructure from cyber threats, and the pitfalls it has encountered thus far in doing so. The panelists discussed how this problem may be solved with cooperation between government and the private sector. Narus CEO Greg Oslan and Cisco CSO John Stewart joined top national security advisors Melissa Hathaway and Bill Crowell for this lively discussion. The panel had about 175 satisfied attendees from major security agencies, defense contractors, governments and large enterprise companies.

GenArts & The Foundry Strategic Alliance

We are very excited about the recent strategic alliance between our client GenArts, Inc., the premier provider of specialized visual effects software for the film, television and video industries, and The Foundry, the world-leading visual effects software developer. GenArts is a revolutionary plugin developer who has expanded its visual effects software portfolio (Sapphire, Monsters, Raptors and wondertouch) and the alliance should ensure its plugins work seamlessly with The Foundry's popular Nuke software.

GenArts will now be taking over development of The Foundry's Tinder and Tinderbox plugins. The companies also will collaborate to build the capabilities of the infamous Nuke, which has been adopted by a number of vfx shops, including Weta Digital, Industrial Light & Magic and Sony Pictures Imageworks.

GenArts will start off big and immediately get started on all of the development, sales, marketing and customer support of Tinder and Tinderbox. GenArts' acquirement of The Foundry's Tinder and Tinderbox business allows both companies to focus on delivering best of class of product portfolios to the industry.

For more information on the alliance between GenArts and The Foundry please view the press release, FAQ, or check out the recent buzz in the news on fxguide, VARIETY, xconomy Boston.

The Wonderful New World That Allows You To Become “One” With Your Machinery

It is already perfectly ordinary to interact with a new wave class of devices entirely by using natural gestures. The Microsoft Surface, the iPhone and iPod Touch, the Nintendo Wii, and other gesture-based systems accept input in the form of taps, swipes, and other ways of touching, hand and arm motions, or body movement. These are the first in a growing array of alternative input devices that allow computers, like Hitachi, and PC makers that are on the brink of rolling out game consoles, televisions and computers that use gestures to control the machines. The idea that natural, comfortable motions can be used to control computers is opening the way to a horde of input devices that look and feel entirely different from the keyboard and mouse.

Gesture-based interfaces are changing the way we interact with computers, giving us a more innate way to control devices. They are increasingly built into things we can already use; Logitech and Apple have brought gesture-based mice to market, and Microsoft is developing several models. Smart phones, remote controls, and touch-screen computers that casually accept gesture input. You can make music louder or softer by moving a hand, or skip a track with the flick of a finger. Instead of learning where to point and click and how to type, we are beginning to be able to expect our computers to respond to natural movements that make sense to us.

The most common applications of gesture-based computing are for computer games, file, media browsing, and simulation and training. A number of simple mobile applications use gestures. Mover lets users “flick” photos and files from one phone to another; Shut Up, an app from Nokia, silences the phone when the user turns it upside down; nAlertme, an anti-theft app, sounds an alarm if the phone isn’t shaken in a specific, preset way when it is switched on. PicLens currently offers a small icon cue inset in each Web photo that lets users know they are at a site like Facebook and Google that can be browsed with the software. Some companies are exploring further possibilities; for example, Softkinetic develops platforms that support gesture-based technology, as well as designing custom applications for clients, including interactive marketing and consumer electronics as well as games and entertainment.

Because it changes not only the physical and mechanical aspects of interacting with computers, but also our perception of what it means to work with a computer, gesture-based computing has the potential to transform technology forever. The user and the machine become closer and the sense of power and control increases when the machine responds to movements that feel natural. Unlike a keyboard and mouse, gestural interfaces can often be used by more than one person at a time, making it possible to engage in truly collaborative activities and games. These activities that are used frequently in many casual sporting activities are suited now becoming suited for gestural interfaces on game consoles, televisions and computers.

Deviscapes Q4 2009 WIFI Report

Devicescape, the leader in Easy WiFi, performed a very detailed WiFi (preference and trend) report in 2009 with nearly 3,000 survey respondents around the world. The survey queried a cross-section of Devicescape's members, a group that includes a variety of professionals and students.

The report found that a majority of users (sixty-eight percent) will view advertisements in exchange for free WiFi. It also found that Sixty-three percent of respondents would like to receive coupons from nearby Easy WiFi venues for product discounts. If a condition is to view an advertisement for free WiFi access at a cafe or other Easy WiFi Network venue, the majority of respondents (eighty-one percent) are willing to view the sponsored advertisements. The report showed that a majority (67 percent) of respondents still will not pay for WiFi, while twenty-five percent stated they would pay up to $3.

We already know about the importance and demand for WiFi from prior quarters' reports, the most recent survey aimed to uncover compelling new trends that will shape the face of WiFi over the next few years. I think the use of advertising is an important trend to watch, one that will likely help offset the cost of providing free WiFi to users. In general, attitudes toward the ads were encouraging, as a majority of survey respondents indicated they would watch advertisements in exchange for free WiFi service. This opens the doors for endless opportunities in the near future.