Online Public Relations Thoughts

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is vowing to move ahead with a Jan.6 riot investigation even if Republicans boycott the process.  The two sides are increasingly nasty to each other.  The GOP is moving to boycott the probe after Pelosi denied two Republican congressmen seats on the committee.  Pelosi has vowed to move ahead with or without the elephants.  The perception is that of quarreling children.  "I'm taking my ball and going home."  "Yah, we'll play without you."  President Biden is seeking bipartisanship in the two houses, but his quest seems fruitless for the time being.  The two sides have taken positions welded in iron and are talking past one another without listening.  They aren't communicating.  They are posturing, and it is a bad example for the American public.  Communications requires a measure of civility when there is a balance of power.  That is sadly missing in Congress.  

In the tech world, developing a standard that everyone subscribes too, and more importantly honors in development, is hard.  There is always an urge to fiddle, to adapt it to one's own devices although that makes them incompatible with others' equipment.  That's why it is cautiously heartening to see Amazon signing on for an open-source standard for home speakers.   Amazon might not have invented the field but it made it popular and a highly useful device that takes the place of a number of household tools from alarm clocks to weather stations to information resources to music and more.  Amazon's move is not just good business but smart PR.  It knows what customers need and is willing to give it to them rather than sitting on its technology and refusing to accommodate. 

Toyota, a major sponsor of the Tokyo Olympics, has pulled all of its advertising for the games and its CEO will not attend the opening ceremony.  This is a stark message to organizers that Japan is not ready for world athletes and the games should not go on.  Olympic officials are not listening, however.  They are plunging ahead into what is becoming an abyss of COVID testing and positive results.  No one is happy -- not the public, not the competitors, not the sponsors nor advertisers, not the organizers who are watching their carefully planned games, already a year late, fall apart in the 11th hour.  It is a PR disaster for the Japanese and a costly one as well -- tens of billions of dollars spent for no return.  The games are going on because of the sunk cost, but few will attend because of the virus.  Athletes will compete in empty stadia and officials can only watch with deep regret.  

NASA has done it again with a video of a flyby of Jupiter and its largest moon, Ganymede.  The animation of stills is scored to music and includes lightning flashes in the clouds of Jupiter.  It is a beautiful rendition, which humans might never see for themselves given the distance to Jupiter and hazardous conditions of being there.  The scientific value of the video is less than its publicity worth.  It is a reminder to the public once again that NASA is doing extraordinary work in deep space and has the images to prove it.  NASA in its existence has become a master of publicity and public relations.  It has capitalized on its many missions, the space station, the Hubble telescope, rovers on Mars, astronauts and more.  It has built a massive body of scientific research and discovery.  And, because it must fight annually for its budget, it has been a relentless communicator to the public to gain support.  The agency is a credit to America and will go down in history as one of the most successful government organizations ever established.   

The US Surgeon General is asking Americans to combat misinformation about COVID shots.  He says errors and lies about the vaccination and virus are a critical danger to citizens. His call is a recognition that health authorities have gone as far as they can to persuade reluctant individuals to get the jab.  Now it is time for personal influentials to step up and deliver the message.  It is disturbing that credibility in health authorities is so low among many Americans.  They won't listen to their doctors nor to government nor to any expert opinion.  Talk about forcing or penalizing them to get vaccinated have spurred outrage.  "The authoritarian state is infringing on my personal freedom."  The Surgeon General's efforts at publicity in the public interest might reach some skeptics but it is unlikely to be many.  Those who resist will only accept the message if they become ill and are hospitalized. 

This news organization wrote an early obituary for Pope Francis, confidently predicting he won't last another five years and reciting his achievements and failures in his job.  One must admire the chutzpah if not the accuracy of the article.  The best revenge for the Pope is to outlast the predictions and continue to do his job.  There is little a media relations practitioner can do to stop such articles.  The reporter has the freedom to speculate, and so he has.  It takes patience and serenity to endure and continue on.  A leader should put Monday morning quarterbacking in perspective.  Anyone can be a critic without the pressures of accomplishing anything.