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Bad News Friday usually makes things worse

Even in the always-on Internet era, many companies and government offices still rely on the old trick of waiting until late Friday afternoon to release bad news.

In most cases they're just making things worse come Monday. Here's why:

You stop nothing.  People who care most have news alerts, stock tickers and other Internet tracking gizmos to get your stuff the second it hits the fan. Your stock will still move in after-hours trading guided by speculation and negative expectations.  Media outlets will still run breaking news, except this time you’ll be covered either by reporters who know to dig for whatever you’re trying to hide or by inexperienced weekend reporters who don’t know the situation.

You create a new credibility issue.   Maybe ten people on the planet won’t perceive that you tried to bury bad news on Friday afternoon. You risk creating a whole new PR problem with stakeholders and media for thinking they don’t see you trying to sneak out the back.

You dig a deeper hole.    Friday-night announcements don’t make bad news go away.  They create a 48-hour vacuum for people to assume the worst. Some will interpret your move as a signal that there’s still another shoe to drop. You could be in a worse defensive position on Monday morning as you reopen the doors to angry shareholders, anxious employees and reporters working on follow-up pieces about your company mishandled a crisis.

You still announce on Monday anyway.  Assuming you’re somewhat successful in burying your bad news over the weekend, you’ll have to deal with the response on Monday from people seeing the news for the first time. Now you’re dealing with two sets of responses: the people who are just hearing it, and the people who saw and reacted to it over the weekend.

Bad News Friday isn’t a secret, it’s bad public relations.

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The staggering speed and scale of Internet culture

Less than 12 days after the first headline, a Google Web search for “Balloon Boy” returns more than 11.1 million results – more than the number of people in New York City and Los Angeles combined.
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Stuff you put on the Internet is always fresh, never frozen.

One of my most popular posts this week is the one I wrote about Home Depot’s customer service problems.  Another blog referred to it in a post titled, The 10 Best (and 10 Worst) Companies for Customer Service.  It’s been drawing hits, links and comments all over the Internet.

The problem is that I wrote the post about Home Depot more than three years ago.  The post it got linked to is three years old, too.

How did a November 2006 post in a niche market blog outsourced overseas rise above the clutter in September 2009?  Hard to say. Somebody pasted the original article verbatim into another site and through the magic of search engines got it to show up. Readers began linking and posting comments to it.  And just like that old stuff is current again.

A good rule to remember about social media:  Criticism and bad news in particular have an indefinite shelf life.
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• Scatterbox |  The business of social media creates new headaches for business reputations

CEOs won't say Twitter and other contradictions about the hottest social media thing since the one before it

What a time.

Four years ago, a BusinessWeek cover story said blogs will change your business and influence the course of civilization just like the invention of the printing press did more than five hundred years ago.

Now a Time Magazine cover story announces that Twitter will change the way we live .

At this rate we should expect another planet-altering social media tool by Labor Day.

That is, unless you don't think a free online short-message service rastes with our generation’s revolutionary information technologies: voice mail, cell phones, the Web.

You’re the people who think Twitter is the Internet-era version of the CB radio fad. 

And you don’t believe that hot hype will take precedent over the cold realities of the marketplace.

In "Ten ways Twitter will change American business,"  Time’s writer predicts that the ability to send and selectively receive 140-character Tweets will give business, politicians, media, investors and other interests the ability to “engage” people like never before. For example:

“Twitter … will increasingly become a place where companies build brands, do research, send information to customers, conduct e-commerce, and create communities for their users. Some industries, like local retail, could be transformed by Twitter… having the opportunity to tell customers about attractive sales and new products can be done at remarkably low cost while providing for greater geographic accuracy.”

The problem with this vision is that it assumes consumers will do four things:

… One, that they'll stay fixed on reading and writing Tweets all day long, day after day.

… Two, that they’ll want to receive product announcements, promotions, surveys, celebrity restaurant orders, contests and other sponsored messages, at every turn of their day.

… Three, that they’ll overlook the intrusive advertising and spam that will increasingly pollute their legitimate news and conversation stream.

… And four, that they won’t mind how Twitter reserves all rights to sell any information it has on them so others can identify, locate or contact users.

Consumers don’t behave this way.  They won’t for Twitter.

Twitter’s problem is that the Internet has no walls.  There are no beachheads to dissipate the relentless waves of marketing and campaigning.  We hear anecdotes like how a suitcase company responded to a customer who Tweeted about his broken handle.  But take that scenario a few years from now – if that long – and that same customer will be inundated by followers, followees and interlopers Tweeting everything from luggage deals and discount travel to political fundraisers and pleas to help some secret princess transfer money. 

Nobody says Twitter doesn’t have huge potential for mass communication.  It does. The Iranian election aftermath shows how microblogging can facilitate real-time citizen-journalism.  But the same holds true for misinformation and propaganda.  The bad guys know how to use Twitter too. 

That's one reason corporate America isn’t exactly clamoring to get on board. And Twitter's goofy dot-commish name itself alienates the service from thousands of CEOs already averse to social media.

In fact, big brands see less value and more risk in associating with any Internet free-for-alls.

Consider YouTube. Time Magazine reports that despite drawing 99.7 million viewers watching 5.9 billion videos, YouTube's content is overall so bad that marketers have become reluctant to embed their messages within it. 

After paying $1.65 billion to own it, Google told investors that YouTube is "not material,” making the Web’s third-most popular destination also one of the ten biggest technology failures of the last decade.

It's a stretch to think Twitter will do better.  It doesn’t even own the micro-blogging concept, and several competitors already offer more features and open-sourcing.  RSS inventor Dave Winer, who PC World calls the father of modern-day content distribution, went so far as to predict that Twitter is the next Netscape.

As for the 29 million users, new research also suggests that Twittermania may have already peaked:

• 90 percent of all Tweets come from only 10 percent of all Twitter users. (Harvard University study of randomly selected sample of 300,000 Twitter users)
  
  
• Though 99 percent of Generation Y -- age 18 to 24 -- use social media, only 22 percent of them use Twitter.  (Pace University study for Participatory Marketing Network)
  
  
• 55 percent of Twitter account holders have never posted a Tweet and 56 percent aren’t following anyone.  53 percent have no followers. (HubSpot analysis of 4.5 million Twitter accounts over nine-month period)
  
  
• 60 percent of Twitter users quit after the first month.  (Tracking from Nielsen Online)
  
  
• Twitter’s growth came to a screeching stop in May, growing by only 1.5 percent.  (Tracking by Mashable)

Then there’s the Oprah factor.

Well over a million people signed up for Twitter in the first 72 hours after Oprah featured the service on her show.  But as Silicon Valley Insider reported, Oprah is already bored with it.  Despite having 1.56 million followers, Oprah herself follows only 14 people and Tweeted just four times in June. 

So what are we to make of all this?  I agree with InternetNews columnist Mike Elgan, who thinks Twitter is simply leveling out to what it really is minus the hype. 

“It’s no longer a new frontier, an elite club or a culture-transforming medium,” he writes. “It's just a service for sending messages.”

And you can get mine at Twitter.com/StevenSilvers.  Or at least until I move on to the next big thing.
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Also read:  No, social media doesn't actually sell anything. And no, you can't afford to ignore it.

Rhetoric strains forced bond between government and corporate community

The nation's media reports that the corporate world is peeved about what it considers President Obama's devisive anti-corporate rhetoric. As U.S. News and World Report observes, "Another week, another assault on business-as-usual by President Obama. Or is it, as some critics are starting to wonder, an assault on business, as usual?"

Reports Associated Press:

"Relations between President Barack Obama and U.S. corporate leaders have grown tense in recent weeks, with business groups bristling over his sharp rebukes of lenders and multinational companies in particular.

Executives and trade groups that praised Obama's outreach during his post-election transition period say they have felt less welcome since he took office in January. More troubling, they say, are his populist-tinged, sometimes acid critiques of certain sectors, including large companies that keep some profits overseas to reduce their U.S. tax burden."

A U.S. Chamber spokesman called the President's talking points "an oversimplification of the real world." Another trade lobbyist called it the same old cynical, political class warfare.

The White House is throwing out its own doublespeak, explaining that the business community is just freaked out by how shockingly supportive the President really is. Said Commerce Secretary Gary Locke in the U.S. News report:

"President Obama has a very good relationship with the business community. He's working extra hard on creating more jobs and stabilizing the financial crisis.... In many ways, he's perhaps surprised the business community with just how moderate he has been and how much he is willing to work with them."

The posturing between Obama and corporate America has always been convoluted. As a candidate, Obama ran anti-corporate campaign ads criticizing CEO compensation. Yet he still raised enormous sums of money from corporate backers including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, National Amusements and Google.

A few months before the election, a Chief Executive poll found that more than 70 percent of all CEOs thought an Obama presidency would be a "disaster."  Yet Business Week reported that corporate leaders gave President Obama "relatively good grades" after his first 100 days. People were still wary on the details, but as the Business Roundtable's president told the magazine: "We're happy with the general outlines of what he's done; things are starting to take hold."

Today's ambivalence between government and business represents tensions that exist within a shotgun marrage unlike anything in history. Taxpayers are now direct stakeholders in the financial and auto industries, and are rapidly becoming the safety net by which the nation's housing, healthcare, energy and even news media industries will be supported while they are transformed. That makes the President of the United States both Commander in Chief and CEO.

We're at the point now, writes Wall Street Journal columnist Gerland Seib, that "it seems almost anachronistic to talk about a divide between government and business."

Perhaps the publicized angst about Obama being anti-business means the honeymoon that never really was is over.  What certain is that corporate PR is going to be more complicated than when all the talk about public-private partnership was mostly just talk.
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Send comments and links to scatterbox@stevensilvers.com

Like so many others, Google finally turns to TV ads

Google's decision to run television advertising is another vindication of the marketing medium that was supposed to have been made obsolete by the Internet age.

But as Advertising Age reports, "even Google is seeing the limits of search ads and YouTube."

It's amazing how even companies that grew to be huge success stories without commercials eventually come to decide they can't live without them. Case in point: Hershey's began running TV advertising in 1970 after relying on only word-of-mouth marketing from the day the company was founded in 1901.

Google's TV ads will promote the company's new browser, Google Chrome.  (Look for the Scatterbox review in early June.)
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Fear and Loathing in Lost Media

Bulldog Reporter notes how news companies hate that Google doesn't share the money it makes by selling ads tied to news blurbs it "scrapes" to create Google News.  Experts say it would take only a few lines of code to prevent Google from indexing content from the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and hundreds of the other sources it gleans from.

So why don't they?
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Internet scammers run like pigs to the Swine Flu trough

Washington Post blogger Brian Krebs reports that spammers and scammers are working overtime to profit from public fears of a Swine Flu epidemic.

Just days after the first headlines, more than two percent of all Internet spam tried to get people to click on hundreds of new Swine Flu-labeled sites selling everything from "survival guides" to fake prescription drugs.
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An official blog management process

If you're wondering what to include in your organization's social media strategy, take a look at the pragmatic evaluation-and-response approach outlined in this U.S. Air Force Blog Assessment Chart:

Click here for a PDF version of this chart.

Familiarity breeds admiration as Google becomes google.

Google was named the top US company in Reputation Institute's "Global Pulse 2008," a survey that measures consumer love for the world's 600 largest companies.

It's not surprising. Most Americans know what Google is. We know how to use Google. We've made it our search engine, home page, blog, photo editor, ad agency.

We've made it a verb.  And we cringe when politicians make it a noun. (As in, "Why, just yesterday I used the google.")

Faster than anything before it, Google is transcending its trademark to become common language -- like elevator, thermos and zipper. The company is trying to prevent this from happening. But you'll never hear kids say they're yahooing their homework questions.

Google is google.

You can look it up.
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