Posts Tagged ‘News of the World’
How not to defend SOPA and PIPA: In the face of perceived threats, open and honest communication should be in the final cut
In what looks like a desperate attempt to rescue SOPA and PIPA, President and CEO of the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA), Chris Dodd, issued an in-your-face statement regarding planned outages and protests related to the respective legislation.
Do
dd’s going to succeed in doing nothing but further alienating individuals from supporting the MPAA.
You’d think the Netflix and News of the World debacles would cause some to pause and think as they strive to create dialogue.
From a public relations perspective, the MPAA deserves to have its say about what it sees as its side of the story, but, calling protests “pranks” and lumping in Wikipedia users (and others) as “corporate pawns” is utter madness.
Wikipedia’s embraced the protests and this undermines Dodd’s accusation of corporate Big Brothers’ manipulating naive users for their own greedy ends — as does the support of one of the founding fathers of the Internet. Vint Cerf sent an open letter to congress opposing SOPA.
One reader on the TechCrunch Website posted the following (and you can also see the MPAA’s statement here):
I’m the rightful copyright owner of the phrase “corporate pawns”. MPAA is illegally using this phrase and I demand their website … be removed from DNS and blocked from the Internet. (Failing) to do so will cost me greatly and I will not be able to hire (the) 100,000 U.S citizens that I have promised.
Touche!
The problem the MPAA has is, if they believe furthering open and honest communication with stakeholders occurs through berating, name-calling, and out-and-out subterfuge (investigate the sweeping powers of SOPA and PIPA, and you’ll discover their Draconian dangers), then someone’s mind is plainly misfiring.
While Dodd’d like all parties to work cooperatively, his language is an affront to that happening. The MPAA avoided addressing the invasive aspects of SOPA and PIPA.
Big mistake.
In a world where information travels through portals at the press of a button, and information is accessed at speed, it’s harder and harder to persuade audiences if you’re using less than honest communication.
In fact, substandard practices do more harm than good.
The entertainment industry has been heavily criticized for acting like a dinosaur in the face of immense, rapid change.
Dodd’s indignant approach to conversation on the subject will lead to nothing more than severe reputational damage for the MPAA.
The MPAA will undergo (is undergoing) serious criticism because of this news release. Good luck to them in recovering an already tarnished brand.
Also: Check out the explosion on Twitter over SOPA – 2.4 million tweets and counting
Reputation, the new transparency and exploding cigars
News Corporation’s brand goes “boom”
People the world over recently got a look at the inner workings of News Corporation, its culture and levels of corruption. Some have labelled alleged criminal activity as that usually found on film screens and in novels. Elements of the story are truly stranger than fiction.
Murdoch’s media empire is definitely taking more than a couple of body blows. Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post are just a few of the properties News Corporation holds.
With more than 10,000 hacks into people’s private lives, the News Corporation story created a climate of outrage. People, even on the periphery of concerns regarding privacy, reacted through social media. They want boycotts. Murdoch has been physically jostled on the street, and he seems to have lost some of his composure and his air of supreme confidence in the wake of the scandal.
With all the recent news regarding mobile phones, and Apple’s being branded as “Big Brother” by privacy advocates over location-based tracking issues, not to mention Facebookgate, the News Corporation story is registering high on the shock, dismay and outrage meter.
The Guardian’s relentless pursuit of information in the case revealed that “pinging” journalists at News of the World and The Sun may have incorporated elements of the police, private investigators and mobile phone companies to literally sniff out individuals through triangulation techniques. Sounds like a privacy advocate’s worst-case scenario regarding mobile technology.
How would Philip K. Dick have reacted to the bribing of employees in agencies that hold (and are supposed to protect) personal data? Truth approaches fiction. Money may have passed back and forth between journalists and the police in shades of cartel noir. The News Corporation story has withdrawn a veil of secrecy, and people were revolted by what they saw, read and heard. The public verdict of guilt is already a “done deal”.
Murdoch’s business, because of alleged strong-arm tactics and an attitude of “any political means necessary”, may suffer greatly. Advertisers, investment funds and shareholders don’t want to associate themselves with a brand that fills the public with loathing. Reputation has always been key to an organization’s ability to recover share price after a major market decline – just as reputational issues have often led companies’ shares into a downward spiral.
The scandal has generated some interesting questions:
• Will Britain impose reforms? Prison sentences?
• Will the public outcry for an investigation into elite politics and the media win the day?
• Has awareness of the scandal (worldwide) led to thoughts of the dangers of media abuses? Will awareness lead to substantial change?
• Are cloak and dagger meetings between governments, journalists and lobbyists (to name just a few participants) going to disappear?
• Will people continue to forgo security and rights to privacy so that they can download the latest app?
Lastly,
• Will companies understand that corporate reputation and transparency issues are here to stay and that best practices when it comes to respecting privacy rights and using new location-based technologies are important?
It’s been said before but the best kind of crisis management avoids crises in the first place.
Recent history has provided many corporate darlings who’ve become vilified. It will be interesting to see how the News Corporation scandal turns out and how it affects the company. Since incorporating best practices into strategy regarding privacy issues acts like preventative medicine, companies would be wise to position themselves as exceptional stewards of their customers’ information.
After all, exploding reputational cigars can go off with the power of an H-bomb.
Further reading:
How did they hack everyone’s phones?
How reputation affects shareholder opinions: Bad news for (the younger) Murdoch
Reputation matters … Some of the ever-widening ramifications of the News Of The World scandal
Related articles
- News Corporation: An old new scandal (economist.com)
- FBI Launches Inquiry into Phone Hacking (magickaydiary.wordpress.com)
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