Distance Ed Ideas -

• PR Isn't Just for Big Corporations - A Case Study
  We generally think of public relations as a tool for large corporations, but as Martin Luther King Jr. proved, it can be an effective tool for social change organizations as well. NPR has been running stories this week about how a group of migrant workers won a PR battle with fast food giant Taco Bell to improve working conditions and wages. An interesting story and a great case study. (NPR)
• When Public Relations Trumps Real Life, Practitioners Catch Flak
  One of the basic rules of public relations is that the communication you send out needs to match the action you are taking, something that PR professionals ignore at their peril. So it's little wonder that state and federal government officials are catching loads of flak (scroll down a ways) for worrying about what they wore and how they looked during Hurricane Katrina. It didn't really matter whether they were dressed appropriately for responding to the disaster, what really mattered was that they really didn't respond! Commentary from the ever-interesting Leonard Pitts. (BTW, the thing that makes Pitts so interesting is that although he is fundamentally a liberal, he doesn't let his views keep him from being critical of folks from the left as well as the right.)
  
• When PR Meets the News Business
  My ethics students are working on term paper proposals right now where they are supposed to be looking at the connections between advertisng or public relations and the news or content side of the media business. Here's a couple of recent items that would seem to fit within the topic:
  • How do DC Flacks Control the News?
    Interesting story from The Hill about how Capital Hill flacks go about shaping the news. Do you suppose that reporters depend too much on PR folks for the news? (Certainly a good thing for the PR people...) Thanks to Romenesko for the link.
  • Where Do White House Photos Come From?
    When we see photos in magazines and newspapers of events at the White House, if we think about them at all, we probably assume that they come from one of the dozens of photographers who follow the president and vice president around. But according to Susan Walsh, president of the White House News Photographers Association, the administration is increasingly keeping photographers at a distance and instead feeding news organizations with official "hand out" photos. A great discussion of the issue from NPR's On The Media. This is the second story OTM has done on the issue of handout photos recently. The first was back in November and dealt with the Associated Press carrying hand out photos from the Pentagon over the wire. OTM provides as an example this photo that ran in the Detroit News. (Look at the credit line.)
    
• Vroom Vroom Dept. - How Yamaha Handled a PR Crisis Perfectly
  What's a crisis? Anything consumers or the media say is a crisis. Sometimes it's real, such as when an airplane crashes, an oil tanker leaks, or a product is tampered with. Sometimes something trivial becomes a crisis when a company dismisses a small problem as unimportant, such as Intel pooh-poohing the computational flaws in the initial Pentium processor.
  
  Yamaha Motor Corp. showed this winter precisely how to handle one of the latter crises. This is a little complicated, but bear with me. A new Yamaha 600 cc motorcycle was advertised as having an engine redline of 17,500 RPM. This was significantly higher than any competing motorcycle. It turns out that the tachometer and the marketing department were both a little optimistic - actually about 9 percent optimistic because the motorcycles true redline was 16,200 RPM.
  
  Does this discrepancy really matter? Probably not.
  
  Motorcycles never weigh as little as the spec sheets claim (spec sheet weight is some mythical "dry" weight that includes no fuel, oil, battery, or maybe even tires), nor make as much horsepower or torque as the brochures claim (the companies give a theoretical figure that doesn't account for losses from the gearbox and chain). And I can tell you for certain that the speedometer on my motorcycle reads somewhere between 5 and 10 percent higher than the GPS measured speed.
  
  And yet, Yamaha was selling the bike as having this unique property that had an undeniable objective measure not subject to debate.
  
  So when the complaints about the discrepancy started surfacing on Internet discussion groups, Yamaha had to decide how to respond. They made a very simple decision to completely neutralize the crisis. The company sent a letter to everyone who had bought the motorcycle and offered to buy back the bike - including tax, setup, and interest. No questions asked.
  
  Will Yamaha be forced to eat many bikes? The Motorcycle Daily web site doesn't think so. They say that the Yamaha R6 has received great reviews and is a very good sportbike regardless of its true redline.
  
  What's the important lesson for PR professionals here? When your company messes up and creates a crisis for itself - deal with it. Honestly. Immediately. Openly. And generally the crisis will get better.