The Wax Blog

100 million years ago I worked as an executive at a publicly held tech firm. We knew that in order to bury bad news (ie a poor quarter) we would send the release out at 4 pm on Friday. By the time Monday rolled around there would be two to three more days of news covering ours.   Now more companies have become much more ingenious ways at burying their bad news – rather than addressing it properly. (For more on that, read my post on  “Crisis Communications in a 2.0 World“)

Wondering how they do it? Here are just a few methods I’ve seen. Comment with more examples, please!

1) Flood the Internet with alternative messaging. Piling on the social media releases, blogs and Twitter posts can help bury a negative opinion or story quickly by using SEO. Studies show about 60% of Internet users click on a result in the first page. Keeping that page inundated with positive information – particularly if it appears to come from sources that are not your own – can easily bury negative opinions. I agree with the Online Marketing Blog, though, that using this to address a real crisis is not a long-term fix.

2) Bury it on a holiday. At the end of 2009, a story came out about Goldman Sachs selling mortgaged-based CDO’s to clients and at the same time  selling the securities short themselves. Goldman Sachs supposedly made it quite hard for reporters to reach executives for comment and further blocked the story so that it came out Christmas Eve in the New York Times. Thereafter it’s received little press.

3) Make it impossible to fact-check the article. Although bloggers can write pretty much whatever they want, traditional media still needs to check facts in order to run with a story. Keeping CBS or as in Goldman Sachs “allegedly” keeping the New York Times from verifying aspects of a story can bury it too.

4) Divert the issue.  Although most of the messaging surrounding the Toyota recall focuses on sticky floor mats, the real problem may be the pedal or as Steve Wozniak asserts, it could be a computer glitch. (If you haven’t heard, the Woz ’s Prius gets stuck at 97mph while in cruise control) Although Toyota states there “may” be a problem with the pedal in its latest update, much of what we’ve seen in our media is concerning the floor mats. The Woz asserts its a software problem, not a pedal or mat issue. Since the main issue is sudden acceleration – something we haven’t seen in any of Toyota’s messaging – this is probably a good example of a diversion tactic.

5) Lie. It almost worked for Martha and it definitely worked for OJ.

Bottom line is that the organizations with true investigative journalists are dwindling. TV and print media no longer has the budget to spend months on uncovering stories ala Watergate. Companies have learned the game and crisis communications firms have become much more adept at the spin.  And that could be a very bad thing for us.

Toyota announced a recall of more than 3.8 million vehicles last week and today announced it was halting production on eight models.  Ah, responsible Toyota, right? Think again. This is a great example of how a powerful public relations teams, with the weight of advertising dollars behind them, are able to smother news that the public really needs to know. Toyota’s PR department has been pumping out misinformation on this issue for months now and it makes me ashamed of my profession. In December, the Los Angeles Times reported that Toyota had been covering up these problems way back to 2003.

The issue is that the accelerator on these models can stick. Here’s a bit of background on this stuck accelerator…the problem has been apparent to Toyota since 2007, according to USA Today and other publications. Toyota issued a statement yesterday that said the problem had not resulted in any deaths. Yet tell that to the family of highway patrolman Mark Saylor, killed with his family last August after his accelerator stuck on his loaner Lexus. That story was all over the news, as were four other incidents resulting in deaths. Even yet, in November of 2009 Toyota issued statements that blamed the problem on bad floor mats.

But we really aren’t hearing about that too much until this week when national TV news picked it up- could it be because network news relies so heavily (or did) on car manufacturing advertising? It’s not a stretch. Back in 1993 a Dateline producer rigged a Pinto to explode for a segment. Well, that’s been happening for a long time according to Walter Olson and the National Review. It’s part of the ‘magic of TV’. But with the Pinto, unfortunately GM decided to pull its weight with NBC. The producer was exposed and fired for something the rest of his colleagues had done for years.

I’ve only had to lie like this once for a client.  I felt like crap and I’ll never do it again. Somebody needs to blow the whistle over at Toyota and it should be one of us flacks that does it. I realize that it’s the corporation’s responsibility to be honest, but in this case the messenger should bear a great deal of the blame as well. And that’s usually the public relations department.

Comments? Do you think Toyota covered this up?

Since I’m working the Minneapolis Boat Show this week I thought it would be appropriate to share my top tips for getting great public relations for any event. Although they all might not be as big as this one, events work well for traditional broadcast and print pitches. But there’s definitely a trick to it – here are some things that work for me. Read the rest of this entry »

Watching the Golden Globes last night and hearing all the references to Haiti made several questions come to  mind. Were they really “sad” to be there chugging champagne and getting awards? Did they really (like director Lee Daniels of Precious) think their work was suddenly ‘unimportant’? Or were most of them spewing talking points from their publicists so they didn’t look selfish in the light of a disaster? Read the rest of this entry »

There are a lot of business owners that despise marketing as much as some people despise working out. Just like going to the gym, it’s easier to stay on track if you’ve got a someone you’re accountable to. Some business owners use groups on social media sites like LinkedIn to ask questions and find guidance but I think it’s important to have a live person you know that can be a sounding board for your marketing activities. There are tons of great networking groups where you can find potential contacts. Here’s a list of some of the small business social networks you can tap into locally to help find your marketing workout buddy. Read the rest of this entry »

You don’t get big muscles after just one workout and you can’t expect big marketing results right away either.  Lots of small business owners worry constantly about the ROI of their marketing investments. Instead, schedule time to review the results of what you’re doing on a weekly or monthly basis, depending on your sales cycle. (For some of you online marketers it needs to be daily) Otherwise don’t worry about it. Trust your judgement!

If you’re not sure how to measure your results, go back to Step 1 and review. And please share with me any new ways you might be measuring results particularly with social media. We’re all learning on this one!

It’s important to change up your marketing efforts and try new things…without throwing out the things that work.One of the hardest things to measure is the synergy that develops when you combine marketing mediums. It’s the basis for integrated marketing communications (IMC) concepts but no one has really captured where the actual motivation occurs to get your customer to buy, call, whatever.  To keep tweaking your marketing recipe you constantly have to look for new ways to get your message out there…here are a few ways to do that each month that won’t take much time. Read the rest of this entry »

Marketing – as opposed to sales remember – is one of those proactive tasks that seems to get pushed aside for more urgent ones. An astute commenter in my last post mentioned you need to always be planting seeds for future business to grow. Just like your workouts if you put marketing time on your schedule each week and hold it sacred, you’ll see the benefits very quickly. Here are some tips for finding the right time to work on your promotions, social media, advertising, whatever you consider ‘marketing’. Read the rest of this entry »

How much time should you spend on a weekly basis doing marketing and promotion tasks? It will vary of course but there are some rules I’ve learned working with a broad swath of companies and industries over the past couple decades including B2B, B2C, online and retail.Feel free to poke holes in my theories here…but tell us all WHY so we can learn from your successes. Read the rest of this entry »

Rather than reinvent the wheel, here are some links to blog posts and articles  to help you figure out the right mix for your business…

For blending social media with traditional media, and choosing the right mediums, check out my blog post at Main Street Savvy

To follow steps for picking the right marketing vehicles for your business, go to my post on Evobloggito

Some ideas for starting social media are right here on the Wax Blog “How to Bake a Yummy Social Media Souffle”

If you’re sick of me, Entrepreneur has a great piece on this topic “3 Steps to Finding the Right Marketing Mix”

For B2B’ers, SalesVantage has a great post on the topic too.

Keep in mind it might take a bit to find the right recipe…and it needs to be measured and tweaked on a regular basis to keep working well.