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The Week in PR

October 3rd, 2016 by
The reviews were a bit better for Wells Fargo after CEO John Stumpf’s second visit to Capitol Hill in as many weeks. The pre-hearing sentiment on the Hill was a bit better than it had been for his earlier visit to the Senate Banking Committee. Preceding his Sept. 29 visit to a House banking panel the CEO, on Sept. 27, voluntarily agreed to return $41 million of unvested equity and to forego his 2016 salary during an independent board investigation.

The Week in PR

September 26th, 2016 by
A look at the top stories of the past week in PR. This week including the not-so-friendly visits to Capitol Hill by Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf and Mylan's Heather Bresch. Other stories include Facebook's goof on how it measures time viewing videos, Finn Partners's growth spurt and a new tech chief for APCO Worldwide.

The Week in PR

September 19th, 2016 by
A recap of the week's news in PR, including announcements about people. The lead item looks at how Twitter might have found itself a good niche live streaming NFL Thursday Night games. Another item notes that Heather Bresch, CEO of EpiPen maker Mylan, this week will be in the hot-seat on Capitol Hill explaining how her company can justify raising prices of the life-saving device by some 400%.
You saw the headlines Sept. 8 and 9 discussing the record payment of $185 million Wells Fargo made to regulators. The basic details surrounding the reason for this fine also are well known: Some 5,300 bank employees allegedly created an estimated 2 million bogus bank and credit card accounts. Some were started with fake names. Others used identities and funds of unsuspecting Wells Fargo customers. The 5,300 employees were fired during the past five years, the bank said. How can the bank rebound from this hit to its reputation? We asked a specialist in crisis PR and one in reputation management. Both stressed honesty, transparency and accountability.
More than a billion people watch countless hours of video every day on the platform, making it one of the largest social networks around. But YouTube’s biggest flaw is that it’s never felt very social. That’s all about to change. YouTube announced the public beta for a new feature called “Community," which aims to make the platform a much more socially engaging destination.
At its Platinum PR Awards luncheon in New York on Oct. 19, PR News will induct four communications campaigns into its Platinum Hall of Fame. The Hall of Fame honors communications campaigns or initiatives that have become inspirational benchmarks for other communicators. These are campaigns that have had a larger cultural or business impact than even their creators might have imagined.
Wells Fargo became part of a club Sept. 9 that it had no interest in joining. For want of a better term, we'll call it a crisis club, although the media and PR practitioners use that word too loosely when describing smaller issues and dilemmas. Full disclosure: The crisis club exists only as a conceptual construct. Sort of like the fake Wells Fargo accounts.

The Week in PR

August 15th, 2016 by
This story has two parts and both are germane to communicators. Facebook said it’s working against ad-blocking software, making it more difficult for users to block ads. Basically Facebook says it will be making it more difficult for ad-blocking software to decide what is an ad and what is not. The social media giant also has updated its ad preferences features, allowing people to tell Facebook not to send them ads from particular companies.
The root cause of most scandals is institutional belief in infallibility. For the Catholic Church, papal decree established it in 1870, and as the award-winning movie Spotlight so clearly illustrated, it is still a part of the Church’s culture. For politicians, winning elections seems to convince them that they can get away with anything (think John Edwards and Mark “hiking the Appalachian trail” Sanford). In corporations it generally comes from a narcissistic CEO. We’ve noted this corollary in numerous columns: the more ego-driven the leader, the more likely the corporation is to suffer a PR crisis.