How HewlettPackardgate offers an opportunity for PR consultancies

OK, hands up, those of you that thought HP was the only company who went around snooping on customers, influencers or competitors?

The real assets of many large modern companies is intellectual property, locked up patents and in the heads of its employees - companies have physical security measures like CCTV, pass cards and sophisticated IT security systems.

Add to this mix the rise in industrial espionage (with an estimated 3,000 Chinese-owned US front companies engaged in industrial espionage) and white collar crime so it is a small jump to conducting pre-texting against employees.

I have worked for companies were security titans like Kroll have gone to do a background check on me before I came on the payroll.

So it was no surprise when I read this piece on Reuters about lots of other companies looking over their shoulder following HewlettPackardgate. An interesting angle on this was the assertion that much of it was driven by Sarbanes-Oxley internal investigations for securities or accounting fraud, employment and discrimination matters or worker theft.

This offers great opportunities for PR consultancies looking to provide crisis communications and post-event corporate reputation rebuild programmes.

Most of these companies will exasperate the damage to their reputation by closing down and letting the lawyers run things at first, they will then send out a couple of sacrificial lambs with a limited information - which will keep rotating on a media kebab spit. By this time they will then need to spend a lot of money to consolidate and retrieve the remains of their reputation.

"You can have your Watergate, but gimme some bucks and I'll be straight" - Fred Wesley and the JBs.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Branding crisis

Technology journalist Peter Coffee has written a great piece on Brand Identity is Precious where he points out some great examples of how technology and media players have made smart and dumb branding decisions. Coffee's article implies that getting maximum brand value is purely a structural thing:

• Sony shouldn't have its component businesses called Sony because of the blowback that can occur on the core electronics business
• PC makers shouldn't have given up 60 Billion USD to Intel with 'Intel Inside' and its interesting to see that there is no Intel Inside badge on any of Apple's machines

Coffee's article doesn't touch on the role that careful management of brand reputation before, during and after a crisis can help a brand resist the impact of crises.

Apple has easily weathered being battered on share options investigations and a battery crisis of its own. On the other hand according to a journalist that I spoke to HP has had a historically poor reputation with the media which as exasperated the crisis of trust that the company is currently experiencing.

Terror on the telly

Terror on the telly
Originally uploaded by renaissancechambara.

The foiled Al Queda operation has been dominating the media agenda. Like a bunch of brickies debating the previous evenings football, everyone's an expert but no one knows what's really going on and those that do aren't talking.

UK news coverage leaves little satisfaction at being informed and the wide variance of facts and details in the first editions of today's papers raises more questions than answers.

I did find this quote from the BBC Newsnight daily email newsletter amusing though:

Our political editor Martha Kearney is examining the political response, the public scepticsm and asks what exactly is John Prescott's role in this crisis.

As if Prescott wasn't in enough trouble already with his infidelity and car fetish, it looked when I first read it that the BBC was trying to blame him for Al Queda as well.

Sounds like Two Jags needs a decent Flak...