Over my career, I’ve worked with countless CEOs — many of whom have correctly involved their Boards of Directors on matters of strategic importance.  And, to be sure, when large organizations face serious reputational issues, they often involve in-house corporate communications people and bring in external PR counsel.

But, I think a strong argument can be made that many serious issues could have been avoided or mitigated at the Board level before they rose to a crisis.  Corporate communications people have their fingers on the public’s pulse, so we can and do anticipate issues well and provide valuable insights into taking advantage of market opportunities.  The problem is: very few company Boards of Directors include executives with corporate communications backgrounds or expertise. This is a surprising and noteworthy omission.

Certainly, Boards benefit from the presence of executives with diverse corporate, financial and academic backgrounds.  And, many executives have solid instincts and experience dealing with communications/perception issues.  But, few of them are experienced in and attuned to identifying and addressing public perception issues at the early stages — when they are invariably easier and less costly to fix.

It’s difficult to find any public companies with communications executives currently on their boards of trustees (Yum Brands is a notable exception, but one wonders how active its board was in its Taco Bell subsidiary’s 2011 bruising battle with the plaintiffs’ bar).   Notably, among CEOs, only two — Brian Tierney (of Philadelphia Media Holdings) and David D’Alessandro (of John Hancock Financial Services) — immediately come to mind as having a PR background (vs. overseeing PR).

Would a PR person on HP’s Board have encouraged a more disciplined and thoughtful approach to  selecting CEO Mark Hurd’s successor?  Likewise, if a communications professional were on the Board at Olympus, what would they have recommended when’ CEO Michael Woodford asked the Board to investigate a series of acquisitions led by the company’s chairman?  Finally, though they eventually brought in outside PR counsel, how different would the recent fiascoes with Penn State and others have turned out if they’d had PR at the decision-making table?  I guess we’ll never know, but there are thousands of companies out there who would be advised to think more broadly when filling their next open Board seat.

There’s an old saying about not picking a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.  Of course, this is meant to suggest caution about doing battle with a member of the media.

But with most newspapers, radio and TV news in decline, along with the rapid ascent of bloggers, I think the saying should be updated to the headline of this post.

In this case, the PR firm sent a pitch to a blogger who didn’t care to receive it.  Blogger said so (in typical blogger way) and got a snarky reply from the pitcher at the PR firm.  Blogger (who, by the way, had over 160,000 followers — compare that to the readership of your average daily newspaper!) sent back another typical blogger reply (a bit flip and edgy).

This was followed by a foolish “reply all” from the PR firm (that included said blogger).  Well, after this bonehead maneuver (which nearly anyone could have done), the blogger apparently gave the PR firm VP a chance to walk his NSFW comment back, but, no, instead, he decided to double down on snark.

And, gee, what do you think the blogger decided to do about this whole exchange?  Publish it!

Sigh….

Setting aside how this reflects on the whole PR agency world, it was just plain dumb to think that this firm could do (inept) battle with a blogger and come out a winner.

So, what are the lessons here:

Lesson #1 — Treat respectable bloggers (especially those with six-figures worth of followers!) with at least as much respect as you’d treat a reporter from The New York Times.  If you have an issue with something they said, or wouldn’t include in their coverage, etc., sure you can address it with them, but….

Lesson #2 — Assume that anything and everything that you put in writing to/about a blogger will find its way to said blogger (and everyone who follows him/her…and so on….and so on).

Lesson #3 — Once you’ve done your damage, the only thing left to do is give an unqualified apology to the blogger (and the world), and give your staff some remedial training.

While the future of Netflix remains uncertain, Hastings’ letter provides some insights on corporate communications in the digital era.

For one, Hastings’ letter illuminates the need for genuine, transparent and straightforward communications. Corporate communications professionals can over think important communiques such as this or muddle the message with corporate-speak. Instead of talking about “solidifying our future,” “accelerating organic growth” or “shoring up our competitive position” (or any number of other overused corporate buzzwords), reconsider the approach.

When Hastings said, “I messed up. I owe everyone an explanation,” it resonated with customers, investors and other key stakeholders more than standard corporate verbiage.  Of course, the message usually isn’t as simple as “I’m sorry.” In fact, outlining what the company is doing to remedy the situation is just as important as acknowledging missteps. For Hastings, it was as simple as, “Here’s what we’re doing and why.”

Secondly, the fact that Hastings delivered this communication through Netflix’s corporate blog is also telling. The vehicle enabled the company to be as conversational as possible and provided a platform for customers, employees, investors and others to comment and provide feedback. To date, there are more than 24,000 comments and more than 32,000 people have “liked” the blog post on their Facebook page. While many customers remain angry and frustrated (understandably so), others applauded Hastings’ letter and supported the new direction of the company. Regardless, their voices are being heard.

Striking the right balance between making CEO communiques conversational and human – yet direct and actionable –  can be a difficult assignment. While Netflix has a long way to go to win back customer  trust and repair its corporate reputation, this letter is a promising step in the right direction.

As earnings season ramps up this fall, here are ten best practices for strengthening your next earnings press release.

1. First and most importantly, use the earnings release as an opportunity to reinforce corporate key messages. Interweave key points about the company’s strategy, competitive differentiators and investment merits throughout the press release.

2. Remember that there’s always more to the story than just the finances. Were there major customer wins, product launches, geographic expansions or strategic partnerships formed during the quarter? Did the company recently file its IPO? Highlight those in the context of how they are driving financial results and supporting the company’s overall strategy.

Financial stakeholders closely evaluate all components of a quarterly earnings release.

3. Make the CEO/chairman’s quote quotable. This sounds easy enough, right? Unfortunately, many press releases miss the mark on this. Carefully consider the tone and word choice, and remember that the quote may be cherry-picked by reporters and utilized in media coverage (especially if the company doesn’t hold a shareholder conference call or conduct media interviews on earnings day).

4. Be transparent about shortcomings and outline how the company is taking actions to correct any issues. Work closely with finance and operations to fine-tune these important and delicate messages.

5. To the extent it’s possible, go easy on the “legalese.” Lawyers will most certainly need to be involved in finalizing the press release, but opt for clear, concise language versus something that reads like a contract.

6. Use bullet points to highlight key themes and financial metrics from the quarter at the beginning of the release. With stakeholders’ limited attention spans, this approach will prominently position your key points in a succinct manner right from the start.

7. Within the parameters of disclosure rules, articulate the company’s vision and plans for the future. Stakeholders want to know where the company is headed and reinforcing this through multiple channels (including earnings releases) builds confidence.

8. Make it a team effort. Work closely with legal, finance and investor relations teams to ensure the press release meets all stakeholder needs while also leveraging each department’s respective areas of expertise.

9. Leave yourself enough time. Start the press release development process early. With so many departments involved in drafting and finalizing the press release, the review process can become unwieldy. You’ll thank yourself later for having additional time.

10. Start fresh every quarter. Always reflect on the process and content of the press release and examine what can be improved next quarter. In many ways, every quarter is a fresh start.

The first is from today’s Wall Street Journal.  The story focuses on a Corporate Executive Board Co. (CEB) study of 4,300 employees exiting 80 companies, most with more than $2 billion in annual revenues. The study indicated that more than 75% of these employees wouldn’t recommend their employer to others — an astonishing number — and, according to the CEB, the highest percentage in at least five years.

The other seemingly-unrelated development is a proposal by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that would have the effect of dramatically accelerating the speed with which labor unions could hold elections.  The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups have expressed concern (and initiated legal action), stating that this change tilts the labor-management dynamic too far in labor’s direction.

So, why should companies be concerned?  Even though support for and membership in labor unions is at historic lows, and many industries have historically been poor or non-existent targets for labor unions, the fact that more and more corporate employees are disgruntled makes them an incredibly-attractive target now.  Couple this with the possibility that the unions may be able to launch an accelerated run on a companies’ workforce, it’s probably only a handful of companies on Fortune’s “Best Place to Work,” “Best Companies for Working Mothers,” and similar lists that can afford to be complacent.

To be sure, during the downturn, many companies had little choice but to put in such steps as pay freezes, hiring freezes, benefits cuts and staff reductions.  But with many companies now sitting on records amounts of cash, the unions can and likely will exploit the dichotomy of “employees who’ve had to sacrifice” with “companies sitting on millions.”

What can prudent companies do?  Of course, it begins with communications — outlining for employees what the company’s business and financial prospects look like and dealing head-on with any cost cutting measures in which employees bore the brunt.  Why did you do what you did and how long do you anticipate leaving these changes in place?  What other expenses (esp. those that didn’t directly affect employees) did you cut?

Do you still communicate top-down only or do you allow for upward and omnidirectional communication?  Are your front-line supervisors adept at communicating? Are you listening to what your employees (and ex-employees) are saying about you on social media?

Beyond that, a prudent review of HR practices is called for.  Are you still benchmarking with competitors to make sure your compensation and benefits practices are in line?  Did you allow your managers to forgo performance reviews?  Do you provide for 360 reviews?

Given the ongoing uncertainty in the economy, some of these steps may seem like luxuries to some companies.  But, with the alternative being the departure of more of your best and brightest, along with the specter of unionization, can you afford not to?

We’ve spent time in noisy newsrooms, met production deadlines, attended news conferences and even been on the receiving end of a PR person’s pitch or press release. And, we’re all the better for it.

Certainly, majoring in PR will give you the strong fundamentals necessary to succeed in our business. However, having a journalism degree and/or having spent time as a journalist equips you with a certain skill set that goes far in PR. A recent report on Ragan’s PR Daily offered this assessment on how a journalism background can be a strong asset for PR professionals.

Here’s my take:

It teaches you to meet deadlines. Virtually all careers have deadlines. However, nowhere are deadlines more prevalent than in the fields of journalism and PR.  In a given day, we’re juggling various deadlines for clients, colleagues and publications/news websites. Journalists are taught early in their careers to be efficient, thorough and on deadline, and these skills are vital in PR.

It makes you skeptical (and this is a good thing). When thinking through a media strategy for a particular client issue or situation, we approach it from as many different angles as possible. Journalists are trained to be skeptical and are well-versed at poking holes in corporate news stories. Armed with the knowledge of how reporters think and question, will make your media strategy rock solid.

It hones your writing muscle. According to a 2010 Journalist Survey on Media Relations Practices conducted by Cision, 60 percent of reporters and editors complained that the materials they receive from PR professionals are written like advertising, not journalism. Writing media materials from the perspective of a journalist will ensure your pitches and press releases more concise, informative and, most importantly, newsworthy.

It improves your media relations skills. Trading war stories about nights spent at the city news desk can take you far when building media relationships. One of my colleagues, a former broadcast news producer, was recently working with a seasoned, hard-nosed business reporter on a feature story. Once the reporter learned that my colleague was a former producer and had been “in her shoes,” their interactions became even more productive.

There’s no questions that a journalism background can be a strong asset in public relations. Given the symbiotic relationship between the journalism and PR professions, PR pros have a lot to teach journalists, as well.  Of course, that’s a topic for another day.

Where the discipline of crisis communications gets far less buzz is crisis prevention. The typical focus is so much on reacting effectively to a media crisis that business leaders (including a surprising number of PR counselors) often short change, if not entirely neglect, the all-important steps that should be taken to prevent an issue from escalating into a PR crisis in the first place. As the old saying goes, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Several of my colleagues and I presented on this very topic earlier this year at a series of seminars hosted by risk management leader Chartis Inc. (formerly AIG).  We spoke to hundreds of in-house risk managers and insurance brokers about the importance of reputation risk management and how it’s an essential component of enterprise risk management (ERM). It was a terrific invitation by Chartis, particularly because it signaled that the world’s leading risk management experts understand the important role reputation management and PR risk mitigation play in the risk management mix. In other words, the experts at Chartis “get it” and see real value in helping their clients get it too.

So, how should organizations mitigate reputational risk? What can be done to head off seemingly unpredictable threats?

An obvious yet too often overlooked first step is investing in building a positive reputation. This means companies and executives need to (continuously) make deposits of “goodwill,” by proactively engaging media, in addition to employees, communities, customers, advocacy groups well before any issue arises. The absolute worst time to try to make friends is in the midst of a crisis.

Another critical and often neglected step it to track and act on early warning signs, such as spikes in employee turnover, increases in complaints from customers, investors, community groups, etc., unusual or negative activity percolating on social networks/blogs, more aggressive activist attention, etc. In most of the crisis scenarios our team has encountered over the years, we eventually learn that there was indeed a warning sign (if not several) that went ignored.

Savvy organizations also regularly and officially audit reputation risk, looking inside and outside the company to assess and prioritize potential threats, similar to how they examine operational and financial risks. This work, while too seldom completed, is at the heart of truly effective reputation management. Knowing your vulnerabilities is more than half the battle.

So, while there’s no doubt it’s important to hone crisis response skills, it’s equally, if not more important, to commit to mitigating reputational issues before they snowball. An “ounce of prevention” really can make the difference between a manageable issue that’s resolved without incident and a full-blown reputational crisis that can cripple a business.

Many clients lean on ad equivalencies for public relations campaign measurement. The client may have a very metric-driven culture or simply a desire to quantify the results of their investment in public relations. The problem with this approach is the assumption that the value of an article and the value of ads are equivalent, and that calculating the value in this way gives you an accurate measure of ROI.

Courtesy of Louise Docker

As an advertiser, you have complete control of the ad’s message and its placement. And it’s fair to assume that you’d publicize your company’s positive attributes. In public relations, we publicize our mostly B2B clients’ positive attributes, and we consider placement as well, weighing the sophistication of our clients’ customers, which publications are most likely to influence customer decisions and what type of story would deliver our client’s message in a decision-influencing context.

The message in an article and an ad may wind up being the same, but there are fundamental differences in who is delivering the message and how it is received. The major difference is that a successful PR placement is delivered through a story that carries the implicit, independent endorsement of an outlet, editor and author trusted by the reader. Reducing ROI to an ad value equivalent fails to capture this difference and thus the true value of earned media. What is the alternative then?

Effective measurement of public relations requires clear program objectives as well as research and customer engagement before, during and after an initiative. What are your communications objectives? How aware are customers and potential customers of your messages around these objectives? How well do they understand what you are trying to say? How does their awareness, attitude and understanding change between the start and end of an initiative? It is also important to link PR back to business outcomes. What impact has the initiative had on sales, subscriptions, client engagements and/or enrollment compared to pre-campaign benchmarks?

Are answering these questions and providing a broader view of a campaign’s effectiveness as easy as scratching out some ad equivalency calculations? Certainly not. Companies often cite a lack of time and resources necessary to research and mine data to gauge the effectiveness of a campaign. Also, the results do not yield that desirable apples-to-apples comparison of ad, marketing and PR spend.

However, what this approach lacks in simplicity it makes up for in a truer understanding of program effectiveness and insight into how campaign’s can be improved moving forward.

Over the course of two sessions, Edward M. Bury, APR, BOMA/Chicago’s director of marketing and communications, and I shared strategic and tactical advice to commercial real estate executives mulling over the now seemingly “age old” question: can social media work for me and my building/organization/company?

While social media isn’t necessarily appropriate for all industries and companies, it’s at least worth investigating. The following is a step-by-step to getting started. Reputation Partners deployed a similar social media strategy as we helped BOMA/Chicago launch their social networking presence (including the organization’s new blog, The Elevator Speech).

Step 1. Listen
If someone in the marketplace was talking about your company or brand, wouldn’t you want to listen to their conversation? Actively monitoring social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube gives you an opportunity to gauge how your industry, competitors and key stakeholders are utilizing these channels. It’s also key to determining how your company can differentiate its voice amid all the social media chatter.

Step 2. Assess Vehicles
There’s a common misconception that you need to be on every social networking channel to be successful. This is far from accurate. For example, if your target audiences aren’t actively using Twitter, it’s probably not the right vehicle for your company. Consider your overarching communications objectives and how these different vehicles can help you meet these goals. Also consider the staff allocation and support needed to manage these vehicles on a daily basis.

Step 3. Launch and Market
Before you formally launch your social network presence, it’s important to populate the vehicles with content (pictures, video, status updates, etc.) before you officially “go-live.”  This will give new followers an immediate opportunity to view and react to content. Once you’ve launched, it’s equally important to market your social networking presence. Emails, newsletters, website and email signatures, as example, are all effective ways you can spread the word.

Step 4. Engage, Monitor & Track Value
This is the final – and most important – step in the process. There’s one catch: this step never ends.

Engage with your followers and create a dialogue about important developments in your industry. Ask questions. Share opinions.  Interact with people/companies that are both familiar and unfamiliar to you. Build goodwill by congratulating/commending others. Hint: if you’re constantly talking about yourself and your company, you’re probably not engaging enough.

Monitor these sites consistently. They are like small children; never leave them alone unattended for an extended period of time.  Effective monitoring will also aid in both reactive and proactive engagement with others.

As you manage and grow your company’s social networking presence, continually track the value it’s bringing. While quantitative measurement is important, we also make sure to evaluate key items such as: are we engaging with the right influencers? Has this increased awareness about the brand? Is this supporting our overarching communications strategy and goals?

While social media isn’t the solution to all of your corporate communications and marketing needs, it’s an effective tool when used thoughtfully. Based on the turnout at BOMA 2011, we’re encouraged to see that the commercial real estate industry is beginning to embrace the power of social media.

Typically it is a run of the mill complaint: a product doesn’t work, a service didn’t meet expectations, an agreement was violated.  But what is most frustrating is that often the issue stems from the trappings of bureaucracy –the complaint got passed off one too many times and the customer eventually got  mad enough to go to the media (when it could have easily been handled to the customer’s satisfaction internally).  And if you’re extra lucky, the customer is so mad they get the reporter to agree that a story about their complaint is warranted.

So what do you do?  You lord over your customer service department (or other applicable team) until they appropriately (if not generously) fix the situation, communicate the fix and apology to the customer and reporter, and pray this stays a one day story.  Remember, the customer is always right – especially if they go to the media.

Or if you’re like this company, maybe you’ll take a different approach.

The Cliff Notes background: tourist goes snorkeling; tour boat leaves without him; tourist spots another boat, swims to safety; tourist relived to no longer be shark bait but is pretty ticked about the situation; tourist demanded an apology; the apology (and accompanying restaurant gift card) wasn’t found to be acceptable; somewhere down the line, the aggrieved went to the media.

The company response?  The full link to a blog post detailing the situation is here, but I’ll call out this gem for readers here as well:

“The fact that this guy [Ian Cole] talked about this shows that he’s just seeking self-exposure, and wants to be portrayed as a hero, you know, a survivor,” Col Mckenzie said. “There’s no lesson to be learnt from this. He is just making a mountain out of a molehill, and trying to maximize his own self-exposure. It’s just bullshit. He was never in any danger. It was just like being left behind on a beach.

“I mean, his demands were unreasonable. He wanted a written apology. I think his requests were morally reprehensible,” Col Mckenzie said

Alrighty then…

Now we all can admit, from time to time we’ve all dealt with complaints/issues against our company or clients that were bunk.  But to actually go on record, tell the world a guy who was left in the middle of the Great Barrier Reef is “making a mountain out of a molehill” and demanding a written apology was “morally reprehensible?”  Now that is worthy of some kind of award for being perhaps the most tone deaf response ever on record.

At the end of the day, companies are often judged more on their response to adversity than to the actual issue itself. Even if the tourist has ulterior motives, the company just played right into an attorney’s hands (the response fits the description of a company with lax standards, in my opinion).  Moreover, you have to believe this will have a lasting effect on future bookings.  Ever see “Open Water?”  Not exactly the brand image you hope to promulgate via media outlets around the world when you’re in the snorkeling business.