Archive for the ‘Communities’ Category

If you don’t subscribe to The Holmes Report, and you are a communicator, Paul’s latest issue is worth the annual subscription. Go get it. He zeroes in on "Ten Communications Lessons from the Shameful Mismanagement of Katrina" – every one of them a good one. In the interests of copyright I’m not going to repeat them…

I wonder how many companies in Silicon Valley have crisis plans in place to accommodate a similar scale of tragedy…?

A New York judge rejected the SEC’s finding that Siebel had breached a regulation prohibiting companies from selectively tipping off analysts and large investors to important corporate developments.

It took some 27-pages but U.S. District Judge George B. Daniels dismissed the SEC’s claims that Siebel execs in April of 2003 privately told some large institutional investors that business was better than had been publicly described and that those remarks were responsible for a subsequent 8 percent runup in the company’s stock.

"[The] nature and content [of the statements by Siebel officials] do not support the Commission’s claim that Siebel Systems or its senior officials privately disclosed material nonpublic information … Excessively scrutinizing vague general comments has a potential chilling effect which can discourage, rather than encourage, public disclosure of material information," Daniels wrote.

"[The agency’s approach] places an unreasonable burden on a company’s management and spokespersons to become linguistic experts." Daniels ruling is something of a blow to the SEC.

Said Columbia University law professor John C. Coffee Jr., ”I do think this is a serious problem for the SEC because in other cases defendants will raise this decision and claim that they could not have known that given information was material when they leaked it to analysts."

Finally someone rules in favor of conversations but unfortunately not necessarily in favor of transparency. SEC guidelines were definitely tempering very important and meaningful conversations with analysts, driving execs to use necessarily opaque language – like "I’m not saying it’s good or bad. We are having positive conversations with customers."

But by allowing small groups to benefit from intimate conversations with companies in which the complete context of conversations (body language, tone…) results in the stock moving (and I am not suggesting Siebel did) the judge is only reinforcing the very opacity the SEC created with its rules.

What are your thoughts… Would love to hear them…

A terrific site gets a new look…

I’m not sure why research firms are so desperate to attach the word Reputation to their efforts when in fact the research has little to do with reputation. Despite the media’s willingness to promote these desperate efforts, it does their own reputation no good at all with the final reader who I am hoping is smart enough to see straight through the nonsense.

Take the latest… drum roll… Delahaye Media Reputation Rankings… If you accept that this nothing more that flagrant self promotion then no need to read on. If you actually think this is right, I’d like to suggest you think again.

The tone and quantity of of coverage is not an indicator of reputation. Reputation – like brand – sits sqaurely in the minds of constituents. Your reputation is something your customers possess – they give it back to you in the form of loyalty, respect, trust… and much more. You can manage your reputation, much like you manage your brand. And you might choose PR as one of the tactics by which to do that.

Where reputation does not exist is in a news clipping. Some argue that media coverage reflects reputation. I have a real problem with this notion. Coverage in whatever form is nothing more than an opinion or view, right or wrong, distorted by the stark commercial realities of the media. Suggesting that coverage is a manifestation of your reputation entirely ignores the construct in which new is created and the very requirements under, and in which, journalists are expected to create stoires. Connecting news clippings to reputation in this way suggests some kind of pure nirvana in which news represents, absolutely, the truth about a company or individual. Which we know it doesn’t.

Aside from just really annoying marketing, this is dilutes the importance of reputation management. Wit the headline of the Delahaye press release: Microsoft Earns Best Corporate Reputation in the Media According to Delahaye Index. What nonsense. You generate lots of coverage and by default you’ve got the best corporate reputation? What garbage.

I do think all bloggers have a responsibility – to themselves more than anything – to drive towards accuracy of facts. And that PR people need to be very engaged in informing bloggers as to where facts are wrong. David gets at this in a recent post:

It’s a matter of personal style and their comfort level with the chosen approach and all that goes with it (eg: impact on audience perception). When Robert Scoble decided that the time may have come to do more fact checking, he didn’t go from being a blogger to a journalist. He went from being a writer that took more chances to a writer that took fewer. You’d be hard pressed to find a self-proclaimed journalist that hasn’t also moved in one direction or another for whatever reasons.

Opinion based on lies, incorrect facts and drivel in effect becomes so itself. We shouldn’t rely on the self-correcting features of the blogosphere as a proxy for not taking time to check facts – or at least indicate where they aren’t. I’ve deleted several blogs from my reader because of their ongoing propensity to express opinions as fact, or support them with nonsense.

Ultimately, while the choice rests with readers, hopefully the majority will support blogs that do take time to write as accurately as they can, leaving the rest jabbering, irrelevantly, away to themselves. David ends with some sage advice:

Thanks to the blogosphere, on relatively short order, I went from writing twice a week to 10-15 times a week and sometimes more. There are plenty more where I came from that are feeling and responding in-kind to that same pressure. But, as the established media community picks up the pace, there are those of us in it who would prefer to keep constant the number of chances we’re taking.  But if the PR community doesn’t also reinvent itself to keep pace with the media revolution by responding to the fact checkers on blogopshere time, it will leave those writers with no choice but to take more chances. I don’t know about you, but if I were a PR professional, I sure wouldn’t want to be the guy that blew that one opportunity to contain the story that snow-balled into a disaster for the company I represent.

You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow, this opportunity comes once in a lifetime  – Eminem