Facebook PR Exposed

Nick Confessore, one of The New York Times’s better-known investigative reporters, appeared on MSNBC’s “All in with Chris Hayes” within hours of The Times publishing its bombshell exposé on how Facebook dealt with the Russian crisis. The story was aptly titled “Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis.” Its verdict: FAIL. After six…… Continue reading Facebook PR Exposed

Facebook’s Short-Term PR Has Longer-Term Consequences

  In her eye-opening piece this week, The Guardian’s SF reporter Olivia Solon opens the curtain on the draconian efforts by Google, Facebook and presumably others to muzzle their employees from speaking publicly about their company’s doings. Aptly titled “‘They’ll squash you like a bug’: how Silicon Valley keeps a lid on leakers,” Ms. Solon…… Continue reading Facebook’s Short-Term PR Has Longer-Term Consequences

Blood Simple: A Photogenic Stanford Dropout

I have been a long-time fan and somewhat regular attendee of the New York Tech Meetups where month after month ten entrepreneurs take the stage to showcase their tech-driven startups before a most discerning audience of coders, students, VCs, journalists, entrepreneurs, etc. Mostly missing from the mix, however, are PR professionals who would be charged with…… Continue reading Blood Simple: A Photogenic Stanford Dropout

My Bet Is On Fantasy Sports

I’m sure you heard the news this week that one of the three American heroes who foiled that terrorist plot aboard a Paris train was himself stabbed in a late-night altercation on the streets of his hometown of Sacramento, CA. No, it wasn’t a terrorist attack, and yes, he’ll survive. Reading the story further, we…… Continue reading My Bet Is On Fantasy Sports

The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of Lilly Pulitzer

Anyone who’s taken high school trig may remember the sine graph that shows a repeating wave measured on a horizontal axis. (Bear with me here.) Maybe that year, you also took physics and came across Newton’s third law of motion: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” In the PR world, and…… Continue reading The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of Lilly Pulitzer

New Fronts in Crisis Management

Not too long ago, positive change inevitably occurred following an embarrassing news report of a company behaving badly, e.g., shafting its employees out of their justly earned wages. This no longer is the case. The politicization of the low income worker has made such corporate malpractice a talking point wherein the lowest wage workers are…… Continue reading New Fronts in Crisis Management

U.S. Takes Heat From Sony Hack

I wrote about the Sony cyber-attack when company execs’ emails first emerged in the public domain. At the time, the PR narrative was starting to shift away from “Sony-as-victim” to “SONY’s dirty little secrets.” The hack was so audacious, it eventually prompted an unprecedented retaliation by the U.S. government. As we all know, the story went through an…… Continue reading U.S. Takes Heat From Sony Hack

The Streisand Effect

In the last two days I noticed a couple of tweets alluding to something called “The Streisand Effect.” I wondered if this could be that warm sensation I feel when listening to Ms. Streisand’s mellifluous renditions of “People” or “On a Clear Day?” No! NYU”s Jay Rosen tweeted this: Pugnacious political blog in Ohio goes…… Continue reading The Streisand Effect