Gimme Some Truth

I live in a very black and white world. There is the truth and there is everything else. It ties into my not being a good liar. I'm horrible at covering my tracks, so telling the truth means I don't have to invent a second story to cover the first one. It makes life a lot simpler.

But now we have 'alternative facts.'

By now you've heard about White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer and his statement that President Trump's inauguration crowd on January 20, 2017 was the largest ever. This flies in the face of demonstrable evidence that it wasn't. It seemed like if he was saying it was true, it automatically was.

There are three things that are needed for good PR to happen. Transparency, trust, and truth. When we aren't dealing with the truth, everything else just flies right out the window. I've felt that the White House press secretary's job is all about PR-- presenting the administration's side of the story within the parameters of the truth.

Now that the truth was handled somewhat loosely, for whatever reason, trust is lost. What are we supposed to believe? We've been lied to before, so why should we accept what's being said as truth?

Nine years ago, Dr. Mohammed A.S. El-Astal wrote an article asking whether honesty is an absolute PR value. In my mind, it is. But it's a fascinating question. From the synopsis on the IPRA website:

"IPRA members were discussing recently, via yahoo-groups.com, a UK debate among PR practitioners where a motion that ‘PR has a duty to tell the truth’ was defeated by 138 votes to 124."

On the surface, that seems a little disturbing. However, Dr. El-Astal did a little research (synopsis here) and found that honesty is not as scarce as it may seem. He found that respondents’ ethical judgments on four hypothetical practices tested in the study, regardless of their cultures and religions, were consistent with the IPRA Codes of Conduct as well as the literature written on honesty. The four practices were: 

1. Telling the public a lie on a matter of no real importance to protect the reputation of the institution you are working for; 
2. Telling the public a lie on a matter of real importance to protect the reputation of the institution you are working for; 
3. Telling the public a lie on a matter of no real importance to protect the reputation of and employee working in the institution you are working for; and 
4. Telling the public a lie on a matter of real importance to protect the reputation of and employee working in the institution you are working for. 

Dr. El-Astal's work found that, "...respondents’ ethical judgments on the four hypothetical practices tested in the study, regardless of their cultures and religions, came consistent with the IPRA Codes of Conduct as well as the literature written on honesty. Briefly, honesty outweighed all other considerations." 

So it's helpful and reassuring to know that honesty and truth were still held in high regard nine years ago when this research was done. Judging by what has been said since last Saturday, that's still true even when people are playing fast and loose with facts. 

It makes me hopeful that the truth is still out there. Hopefully the trust can be rebuilt because it's currently in shambles.

Blue Bell

At the end of 2016 the wife and I took a trip to Houston to see Kansas State play Texas A&M in the Texas Bowl. We're both big KSU fans, and we had a great time hanging out in the team hotel.

One gentleman we met was a cousin of a friend of ours. He is a member of the bowl committee and also an executive with Blue Bell Ice Cream. Our friend asked him how the recall was going, and he said they were just getting their product back out on store shelves at 100%. My thought was that this was in reference to the listeria outbreak of 2015 in which three people died. I didn't need any real clarification.

I've seen a couple of things since then. Blue Bell's largest plant, in Brenham, Texas reopened in November of 2016. It was a pretty rough time for the company, as they laid off over 1,400 full-time and part-time workers, or about 37% of the workforce. Another 1,400 were furloughed. A second thing is that there was a second though smaller recall in late summer 2016. They're just now getting things back up to speed and getting their product back into store freezers.

I've also seen a writeup from the Arthur Page Society that indicates the lack of a clear crisis communications plan as well as the lack of a Chief Communication Officer. This gets into Excellence Theory, specifically where they talk about the lack of a communications professional in the C-Suite. It seems simple to a PR type such as myself, but many times a company's crisis situation is made worse by executives with no PR backgrounds.

The Arthur Page report says Blue Bell hired a PR firm after the listeria outbreak, and seemed to have very little in the way of active PR at the time of the outbreak. Blue Bell chose to make their website the primary point of contact. Their Facebook account suddenly saw more activity once the outbreak was common knowledge and they created a Twitter account to help communicate during the time of crisis.

The more points of contact you have, the better, though it sounds to me that their concern had more to do with company protocols and not public relations, though the PR activity/response needed help.

Dr. Grunig, originator of Excellence Theory, has a good point in that if a PR pro has a respected voice in the boardroom, this may have gone differently. But Blue Bell is a Texas thing, and Texans have a heaping dose of state pride. That is, they really like being Texan. That and Blue Bell has been around for over 100 years, so they had a bit of a reputation. So statewide the damage might not have been so bad from an image restoration perspective. It might be a slightly different matter nationally.

Blue Bell's real work is in progress-- gaining back their reputation after the three deaths, personnel layoffs, furloughs, and pay cuts, lost revenue, as well as suppliers further down the food chain that needed Blue Bell's business. Lots of people were adversely affected by this, and it'll take time.