Moving Beyond Bad News: Jobster

If Jason Goldberg, CEO of Jobster, is wondering why HouseValues didn’t have to endure a blog swarm over layoffs while Jobster remains the poster child for inappropriate blog posts (made about a month ago), the difference can be found in their approach to crisis communication, inside and out.

Ian Morris did it 89 percent right. Goldberg did it 99 percent wrong.

As a result, from a communication perspective and not necessarily a product review, HouseValues is in a much better position to move beyond its recent bad news than Jobster. The difference is clear.

Whereas the Lukaszewski Group Inc. might call it mismanaging the victim dimension (the treatment of the victims will maintain or destroy trust) and I might call it demonstrating a lack of empathy for those who were impacted, the outcome is the same.

If you do it right, the public is satisfied and their interest wanes. If you do it right, your company might even find protection from having the issue resurface a month, a year, or ten years later.

In politics, it’s called inoculation: a clearly defined explanation of what happened, what was learned, and what was done to rectify the situation. With a good candidate, bad news can even be reframed as good news, all assuming they handled the bad news properly and actually learned something from the mistake.

Companies can move beyond bad news too, assuming the same. While this only touches on the surface, there are a few questions you can ask to guide yourself away from reliving the same bad story over and over again.

Did you acknowledge something went wrong? At Jobster, Goldberg never really apologized for his blog posts regarding the layoffs, which he still muses over today, even referencing that he blogs about what is on his iPod.

Did you apologize? At Jobster, Goldberg didn’t apologize for the posts that caused his former employees to wait on pins and needles through the holidays.

Do you offer explanation? While others have speculated on Goldberg’s behalf — that he was torn between keeping the layoffs under wraps and letting his employees know — he never really said.

What did you learn? It’s difficult to say whether Goldberg learned anything based upon his questions about blogging after the situation unfolded. Contrary, it seems he missed that the situation had little to do with CEO blogging and much to do about hinting at but denying layoff rumors.

Have you satisfied the public interest? If you want to move beyond bad news, you have to commit to regularly reporting additional information until no public interest remains. This includes all positive steps being taken to address the situation and any remedy for the victims. To his credit, Goldberg has done some of this by profiling former Jobster employees.

Did you verbalize empathy, sympathy or even embarrassment? There seems to be no time for that at Jobster, given that Goldberg and some crew have been too busy playing with the office’s new camcorder.

Did you seek outside consult? While Goldberg did ask people to hire his former employees, he remains dead set against turning to his public relations professionals for counsel, likening it to being “handled.”

Did you offer restitution? There seems to be little evidence that Goldberg has gone beyond community and victim expectations in order to remediate the problems.

Of the eight, Goldberg seems to have done one and a half, which was further overshadowed by bouts of arrogance, unpreparedness, and ignorance.

For example, as if he read a line right out of what not to do, Goldberg at one point asked (paraphrased, as this is actually a line from a Lukaszewski example): "Why are the bloggers interested in this anyway? It's nobody's business, but ours. They'll just get the story all mixed up; they simply can't get it right. We certainly can't let our employees talk about this!" One of Goldberg's actual posts is here.

In complete contrast, Morris at HouseValues sent a memo that details to employees (first) everything that will be done, why it will be done, and what measures are being taken to ensure the solvency of the company going forward. There is a certain amount of empathy and regret.

While it seems to me that the release that followed placed too much emphasis on the addition and promise of Barry Allen as chief financial officer and executive vice president of operations, among others, in order to bury the bad news of cutting its workforce by about 12 percent, its overall communication as summed by John Cook of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer — the internal memo, quotes to journalists, etc. — are just enough on par to avoid the ire of the public.

Case in point: "Today is a truly difficult day. And the departure of friends and colleagues is very painful for all of us," Morris said in the memo. "But the decisions we have made -- to focus 100 percent of our energies on the success of our real estate agent customers -- are the right ones and they will enable us to profitably grow HouseValues in the future."

All this seems to indicate, in my opinion, that HouseValues is in a better communication position to avoid reoccurring stories about layoffs. Jobster, on the other hand, continues to demonstrate a communication strategy that will be written about over and over again as how "not to do it." It will very likely be immortalized and will certainly resurface every time Jobster has even marginal news (let alone bad news) again.

Worse, despite hoping they could get over it, it is quite possibly too late for Jobster to regain any semblance of being credible with its communication. While the company may succeed, it will always have this dark piece of history lurking over its head.

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Pitching Public Relations: Monster

Jim Durbin was a recruiting blogger back when he was an account manager for staffing firms, but he says in his profile that the crazy success of blogging led him to start his own blog consulting company Durbin Media. Indeed, Durbin has about a dozen or so clients and the blogs look pretty darn good.

At Recruiting.com, he recently wrote a pointed post called How Many PR folks at Monster Does It Take To Send An E-mail? It's a spot on lesson for public relations professionals sporting a second job title, something like "spam e-mailer."

Instead of writing about Monster's contest, Durbin shares the pitch letter. If you want to read the whole letter, he published it in his post.

I won't post it here, but I will focus in a few highlights: there was no greeting, which is indicative of a spam e-mail (Monster should know better ... I mean, gee, at least buy a program that fills in the names); it's a social media release pitch that screams: try our game and write about it (they say let us know what you think, but they don't care unless he writes about it); and it closes with "public relations account executive," which is a sure bet as to the intent of the e-mail to begin with. It was a poorly written PR pitch.

Durbin did exactly what Monster wanted him to do, but not the way it wanted him to. He wrote a post on a well-read blog in the recruiting industry, chastising the e-mail. His response starts: "There are so many things wrong with this e-mail that I feel the need to correct you." Good for him.

You see, right now, public relations professionals are making a long overdue push into the world of social media and most of them are going to fail miserably if they do things to bloggers like they do with traditional journalists — send news releases and pitches that are impersonal, impractical, and irrelevant to what the blogger is writing about.

As editor of a concierge and hospitality trade publication a few years ago, I saw (and still see despite selling the publication years ago) mountains of poorly crafted public relations pitches that are supposed to attract my attention. My response (assuming I just didn't file the release or pitch letter in the trash) was pretty similar: if you have not read the publication, which is obvious based on the pitch you're sending me, why on earth do you think I'd publish it other than to let people know why I didn't want to publish it ... or, in other words, before you blast e-mails and faxes (which was the rage back then), you should really consider reading the publication or connecting with some concierges to build a relationship.

Sound familiar? It should. Durbin writes: "Before you blast off e-mails to bloggers, you should really consider joining the community, contacting them, or building a relationship."

Durbin might not know how some public relations professionals answer, but I do. Those who practice "spam pitching" profess that they are "too busy to read everybody's publication (or blog) and certainly too busy to cultivate a relationship."

Yeah, right. And every editor or writer on the planet isn't busy. Nope. They just sit in front of their faxes, phones, and computers waiting for someone send them a pitch that has nothing to do with what they write about ... so they can spend an hour or two figuring out a way to write about your client.

The most common response to this revelation? "Do you mean I should take them to lunch and then pitch them?"

Oh, you mean bribe them with food? Yeah, that will help. It will help you lose even more credibility.

Sure, there are some strategic uses for pitching a story under some circumstances, but most pitches are nothing more than a novice public relations professional unable to find a real story about their client. So, they call or e-mail with the hope that the writer just might.

If you're a blogger, get used to it because it's going to get worse before it gets better. As public relations professionals set their sights on social media, expect mountains of pitches to come your way. Nothing will change it. I've been telling public relations professionals not to spam pitch for years and they just don't believe me, until fine people like Jim Durbin teach them the hard way. Of course, even then, they still don't get it.

Turning A Corner: SCO

If you ever wondered whether there is a point of no return — a time when you lose control of your message forever — SCO might provide the answer. The company's primary message has been so public and so narrow for so long, it's difficult for anyone to see past it.

Sure, CEO Darl McBride wants people to look at SCO's new product releases — UnixWare and OpenServer, and the fledgling Me Inc. suite of mobile messaging applications. I don't blame him, but it's too little too late because everyone else wants to talk about what SCO wanted to talk about in 2003: its ongoing (and failing) lawsuits with IBM and Novell. Some journalists, like Bob Mims of The Salt Lake Tribune, even define the company this way: "SCO, best known for its ongoing US $5 billion federal lawsuit alleging that IBM leaked proprietary Unix code into Linux..."

From a communication standpoint, this illustrates why, sometimes, you have to be careful what you wish for. In 2003, McBride wanted the world to know that "SCO is in the enviable position of owning the UNIX operating system." But that was the year that SCO had so much news, it issued about 90 news releases and its "News About The SCO Group" page had at least that many entries. By comparison, in 2006, it issued about 30 new releases, but only a paltry five stories are included in the "News About The SCO Group" section, probably because all the rest are unfavorable and about the lawsuits.

Over at LWN.net, for example, the editor summed up a recent SCO conference call as: The answer is somewhat unsurprising: more of the same, with the main point being that SCO claims to own the Unix copyrights and believes that Novell is "trying to curry favor with the Linux community" by pressing its claims. SCO believes it will prevail on this point.

No, it isn't surprising, primarily because SCO has wrapped itself up so tightly in lawsuit communication, its executive team can no longer help themselves. You see, the conference call began with a statement that they would not talk about the lawsuit. But, of course, that was exactly what it was primarily about, with exception to some details about declining revenues and workforce reductions, which everyone except SCO seems to think is linked to, well, you guessed it, the lawsuit.

Which brings me back to the idea of reaching the point of no return. If SCO loses the lawsuit, assuming it can continue to operate with ever-diminishing returns, it seems to me it will be sunk. If, on the other hand, prevailing opinion is wrong, and somehow it wins the lawsuit, then it will forever be linked to winning a lawsuit no one seems to want it to win.

Ho hum. Sometimes when you win, you lose anyway. And that, to me, is the point of no return. You can have your day in court, but it's a short day when winning costs everything else. Addictions are like that.

Making The Times: Jobster

There are many reasons for a CEO to be excited when his or her company makes the pages of The New York Times. Unfortunately for Jason Goldberg, it was for all the wrong reasons.

Just when Goldberg probably thought that all the flack about posting was over, Damon Darlin of The New York Times decides to rehash the 20-some day old news. The article is titled "A Boss Takes to His Blog to Deny, Then Confirm," which pinpoints the original problem for those few who still don't get it. No, it wasn't that he had a blog or writes about foodie sites. It wasn't about whether his "handlers" check his posts or that sometimes he considers capital letters optional. It was all about hinting at the inevitable when it was clearly the wrong thing to do.

The reason I say this is unfortunate is because a lot of people in the recruiting industry seemed excited about Jobster's new features. Forty-one people voted for his write-up covering the Jobster's new features at Recruiting.com. I was one of them, mostly because I've been covering Jobster for a few weeks now and secretly hope, er, not-so-secretly hope, that it can patch up the hull of its ship and sail on to better things.

But unfortunately, it seems some journalists have different ideas, preferring instead to make Goldberg the poster CEO for inappropriate posts in contrast to Jonathan I. Schwartz at Sun Microsystems. Darlin even cited Goldberg's own words as to why this has come up once again: "It’s the nature of Web 2.0 and new media that if you don’t embrace openness, it will come back and bite you.”

Ouch. Shakespeare could not have written a better foreshadow.

As Jobster remains a living case study, I'll post some notes on "moving beyond bad news" when you actually have some good news ahead (this Friday). I mean, Exxon got over it. And while the handling of Jobster's layoffs were deplorable, they were nowhere near as bad as Valdez. Unless you were laid off, I suppose.

Personally, I'm starting to think Goldberg should take his own advice and hire a public relations professional from his job bank. It seems to me they need someone on the inside who really knows this stuff, inside and out.

Not everybody needs someone inside. For many, a consultant or outside firm is perfect. For Jobster, a company that relies so heavily on daily blog posts as a preferred method of communication, inside could very well be a "must have." Besides, his current public relations team couldn't even get The New York Times to write up something nice in between Darlin's post show commentary. Post show? Right, we're saving that one for after the Superbowl.

Breaking All The Rules: AdAge

As the 20th century was coming to a close, Advertising Age (AdAge) launched a major chronicle, the history of the era's advertising industry. It's a remarkable piece of work that can be seen online and contains the top 100 ad campaigns and people, along with the top 10 jingles, slogans, and icons.

I have shared segments of it in my public relations class for several years, under the auspices that public relations needs to work hand-in-hand with advertising (or vice versa if you prefer). The other reason I share it is simple. I like to show public relations professionals what they miss out on because for all the "rules" they have to follow, the best in advertising does not.

No, I am not talking about "rules" like whether or not there needs to be a call to action (although, I suppose, maybe there doesn't need to be). I'm talking about rules like those parodied in a Communication Arts classic article "Nine Ways To Improve A Volkswagen Ad," which, not coincidentally, targets the very ad that AdAge calls the best in history.

Here's an example: rule Number One from the classic parody touts the idea that we must always "think positive" in advertising. Applying this rule to the Volkswagen ad is easy enough: instead of the headline "Think Small," the headline should be "Think Big." And so on goes the list of rules, until one of the best campaigns in advertising history is nothing more than a shell of its former glory because it ends up looking like everyone else. In a previous post I link to the 2006 version of the Volkswagen parody, which uses Apple and Microsoft. The idea is the same.

I guess it's for this reason, my background in advertising, I also prefer the term "process" to "formula" with the distinction being that one guides you through strategic thinking (like a core message) while the other is nothing but a bunch of rules. The net result is that my favorite answer to most broad communication questions is "it depends." Because it really does depend.

For me, everything becomes more clear when it is applied to a single case study, because the answers are frequently different in one case study than another. Blogs, for example, are much like that. Lots of people are trying to invent formulas as to what makes the best blogs better than average blogs. The answer is actually pretty simple: the best blogs have a strategy. Everything else, whether it's online chat or cluster maps or anonymous comments, depends entirely on each specific blog.

If you don't believe me, perhaps you'll believe Bill Bernbach (1911-1982). Bernbach never read a blog, but there's a reason he emerged as No. 1 on AdAge's 20th century honor roll of advertising's most influential people. "Rules are what the artist breaks; the memorable never emerged from a formula," he said.

That's good enough for me. But just in case it's not good enough for you, take a look at all 100 campaigns featured by AdAge. They all have one thing in common. They all broke whatever rules were being enforced at the time. The same holds true for businesses in general, I suppose. The biggest success stories always seem to be innovate ideas no one else is doing.