Every company experiences a key employee leaving for the proverbial greener pasture. It happens. Boards have been known to kick CEOs to the curb. Think GE’s announcement last year that it was parting ways with John Flannery with the obligatory “we thank John for his significant contributions and long service to GE,” code for he …more
The news release was born on Oct. 28, 1906. Fast forwarding to 2015, organizations distributed roughly 762,000 news releases on wire services. Our back-of-the-envelope math figures 30 hours went into each news release at $200 per hour. The punch line — Organizations spent around $4.5B on the creation of news release back in 2015, a …more
The news release resembles a cockroach. It survives in spite of the odds that say it should have died long ago. PR pros recognize the pressure on journalists to write fresh stories that don’t rely on information in the public domain. And journalists aren’t exactly fans of the news release. A couple of years ago …more
In this era of mega venture rounds — think SoftBank feeding $535M to DoorDash to make sure you can receive that dish of soft-serve yogurt without ever leaving your lazy boy chair — one can become cavalier about a startup securing a measly $100M in venture funding. Fortune even wrote a story in August called …more
There aren’t many companies that crank out over $100B in revenue each year. GE is one of them. GE’s succession planning and consistency in leadership has been a Harvard Business Review case study. So when the company punts its CEO to the curb after a year and change on the job, it becomes big news …more
Google is once again in the news for a decision on China. According to the news report, Google is considering a move to re-enter the China market, this time with a search engine that capitulates to government authorities. With that as the backdrop, I thought it was worth dusting off a post from a few …more
Previous posts have discussed the use of communications to send a message to a very specific group, sometimes even an audience of one. For example, Intel decided to serve notice that those infringing on its x86 intellectual property will face consequences. Not wanting to come across as heavy-handed to consumers — this shot across the bow …more
By my count, 42 high-profile individuals have left the White House, most in a huff. And that’s not counting Omarosa. . Whether they were fired or they resigned, the outcome is the same with Trump finally landing on a metric where he can claim the No. 1 spot — senior staff turnover in the …more
The two agencies pen literally thousands of news releases for their clients each year, many addressing M&A. How tough can it be to apply this expertise to their own announcement? Of course, what the news release states doesn’t necessarily align with reality. As a public service, I’ve addressed the news release distributed over Business Wire …more
