Europe is known for faulty crisis management and this is just one of several instances where the region has come under fire. However, recently, it has been more than just their crisis response that has been called into question.

The European parliament pressed on with its month’s plenary session in Strasbourg, France on Monday despite the ongoing European travel crisis. They were met with anger and scrutiny. The EU is in the throes of a full fledged image crisis. The Greek and Belgian financial crises haven’t helped any.

So what should the EU do? Well, there is obviously no pill or quick fix for this, nor is there a clear path to take to image redemption. However, some basic do’s and don’t’s of image improvement:

• Admit when you’ve been wrong: People can identify with it and appreciate the honesty. But when you admit you were wrong, always couple it with a solution to the problem.
• Respond quickly to a crisis: People want to know that when bad things are happening, the government or company involved is aware and handling it. So don’t just respond quickly, let the public know you’re responding. Also, if you’re the first to respond, then you get to control the message. The worst thing you can do is let everyone else speak for you.
• Do some good PR for yourself: Instead of always taking a reactive approach to speaking with the media on an issue. Bring stories of your good works and positive news to the media. If you constantly remind people how great you are, they will remember that when something not-so-great happens.

What do you think? Does Europe have an image problem? What are your thoughts on how to fix it?

At the time, not all of the companies brought into the fold were also brought in to our existing marketing programs. But I can understand why, when Adobe acquired Omniture on September 15, Adobe would want to introduce itself to Omniture’s customers. I’m just not sure they went about it the right way.

I’m not an Omniture customer. I follow their news because staying abreast of analytics trends is relevant to my industry and to my clients. I’ve downloaded their whitepapers and have possibly attended a webinar in the past several years, but I’m not an Omniture client.

I received a joint Omniture/Adobe email this morning — more than a month after the acquisition — addressed “Dear Omniture Customer,” with the subject line, “Omniture is now an Adobe company.”

It made me laugh. Nope, not a customer. And this is old news. These days, I’m so attuned to stories breaking on Twitter, the thought of sending an email like this out even a few days post-acquisition would be a little beside the point.

But maybe I was being too hard. I examined the email further to determine if there was a more substantive rationale for sending it. Does the Adobe communications team want to whet my appetite with some exciting news, development road maps, or visions of what joining forces with Omniture will mean to me?

Eh…you decide:

By combining Adobe’s content creation tools and ubiquitous clients with Omniture’s Web analytics, measurement and optimization technologies, the company will be well positioned to deliver solutions that can transform the future of engaging experiences and e-commerce across all digital content, platforms and devices.

I read further and noticed that tucked away into the body of the email was this gem:

To best serve our customers, we may choose to integrate Omniture’s contact database, including your information, into Adobe’s database in the future.

Adobe/Omniture just sent me an email announcing that I was officially being opted in from Omniture’s database to Adobe’s database. But without using those words.

Why not just come out and say it? I’m not going to bite.

Clarity of message is such a key part of tech PR. Can we let the buzzwords die once and for all and just talk to people?

In summary: wrong target audience (from a company that should be experts at parsing lists). Incoherent, misleading message. Pointless email.

I checked out the PR blogs on Alltop (great resource) a few minutes ago to see whether I’m the only April Fools Day hater out there. Here are what a few other PR bloggers had to say on the topic:

• It’s like releasing some insignificant tech news during CES…you’ll get lost in the shuffle. The Crowded April Fools Market, Voce Nation
• [...] there’s really no need for April Fool’s Day this year. We’ve been living it every day for a while now. Let’s Skip April Fools Day This Year, Beyond the Hype
• Virtually anyone can post and get some exposure for even a false and misleading story these days. That should be a concern — and don’t think for a minute that there aren’t people out there trying to figure out how to do it and how to get away with it. April Fools and the My Bad Strategy, PR on the Run
• BusinessWire got in touch to say they weren’t accepting any tomfoolery and were on high alert. April Fool’s PR Foolishness; BusinessWire Won’t Play, PR Newser

The symbiotic relationship between PR and holidays isn’t going away. What I am suggesting is that April Fools Day, from a PR perspective, has officially jumped the shark. It’s no longer the wacky second-tier holiday no one else thought of. So use it at your own risk.

Image credit @karihanson

Cut to this afternoon. I’ve been getting the same annoying message for the past 20 minutes:

I checked, but so far it looks like it’s just me…and everyone else in our office. No incoming or outgoing emails = not good Google Apps PR.

Anyone else experiencing Google Apps (specifically, Gmail) hiccups?

UPDATE (Tuesday AM): Bob in California left a comment noting he had already been down for 4 hours (?!). Google made a formal apology on the Gmail blog. However, I wasn’t able to log into our corporate Google Apps account, either. Did Google downplay the severity of the outage by referring to it strictly as a Gmail problem?

I can’t remember reading one positive article on Windows Vista since its launch. Of the deluge of negative press I’ve come across, it’s my impression that Vista failed not because Microsoft didn’t communicate its worth properly, but because it was an inherently bad OS. So I approached Reisinger’s article with skepticism — sure, sure, blame the PR folks.

However, are you aware that Microsoft has already sold 140 million units of Vista? That it is more secure than Windows XP? And that most, if not all, of its incompatibility issues with XP hardware has been fixed? Maybe there is something to the idea that Microsoft hasn’t been touting its successes.

A CEO wildly veering off of product message points certainly doesn’t help:

Microsoft needs to stop talking about XP and Windows 7 and focus all of its efforts on reassuring customers that Vista is the only operating system they should care about.

In the past few months alone, Microsoft has championed the release of Service Pack 3 and Bill Gates has gone on record discussing how much better Windows 7 will be than Vista. By doing that, Microsoft has made customers forget about Vista and start thinking that it’s nothing more than a bridge between a known quantity in XP and a more efficient product in Windows 7.

I can imagine the horror the Vista marketing people felt at that moment. Windows 7 will be better?! Ouch.

Is anyone out there in blogland using Vista? Is this a PR problem or not? I’m interested in hearing your thoughts.

Although most CEOs will never be embroiled in this type of scandal, they can on occasion begin to show signs that they are too good for the constituents that the PR firm cares most about - the media. Here are five quick tips to prevent top executives from becoming drunk with power and prevent future public embarrassment

1. Always be gracious and accommodating. No one likes a difficult CEO. Some good ol’ manners go a long way in charming a reporter.

2. Be patient. Don’t expect reporters to know your industry. Take the time to understand their knowledge of the industry, your company and market. This can help guide the conversation and allow you to put your discussion in the proper context.

3. Treat people with respect, and never burn a bridge. Journalists wield the power of the pen. If you upset or offend an editor or blogger, they can immediately share it with their readers (i.e. your prospective customers). In addition, today’s  junior copy editor in an obscure trade pub might be a future editor of a column in a national business publication.

4. Remember that the reporter is doing you a favor, and not vice versa. On occasion, cocky executives start to feel that they are doing the media a favor by answering their questions. Nothing could be further from the truth. Journalists are giving you an outlet to advertise your services or products, an opportunity to communicate with prospective clients, a forum to discuss your views and a platform to position and brand your company.

5. Be honest and transparent. You don’t have to disclose corporate secrets, but you should be forthright and honest in every instance. Deceiving or misleading the media will always come back to haunt you.

Yesterday afternoon, I noticed a few tweets regarding Sarah Lacy’s keynote interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Sarah, a tech reporter for BusinessWeek, was universally panned — not necessarily for the content of the questions she asked, or for the answers she was able to squeeze out of the notoriously hard-to-read Zuckerberg. (As she notes from her Twitter account: in my book, getting mark to publicly admit to the yahoo deal, address beacon, and give news on changes in the platform and france equals successful interview.)

From where I sit, there seem to be two critique threads emerging:

1. She didn’t involve the crowd enough. In an audience teeming with bloggers hungry to ask their own questions, she held off opening the floor for a Q&A until the final ten minutes, an inarguably bad move.

2. Her interview style was more flirtatious than journalistic. This is the meme I find more troubling. Apparently instead of going for Zuckerberg’s jugular, she engaged him in a two-way conversation, often cutting him off to make a point. In the words of this commenter on the CNET post recapping the debacle, Sarah opted to play the “let me pretend to be your girlfriend” trick. She killed the substance of her questions by picking the wrong approach to posing them.

The commenter goes on to raise the larger question the tech establishment should be asking itself:

This points to love/hate relationship that geeks have with the women who try to invade their territory. Treat them with respect and genuinely act as one of them, and you get treated like Veronica Belmont or Cali Lewis. Fail to do this, and you get treated like Sarah Lacy.

There’s a whole category on Valleywag devoted to Valley Foxes — of whom Smoking Sarah Lacy is one. It’s easy to see that Sarah Lacy’s reputation as a “flirtational” reporter preceded her. Was this SXSWi keynote a disaster waiting to happen? Why did it catch anyone by surprise? And, if she really did get the goods from Zuckerberg, does it really matter how she did it?

I’ll leave the sexist subtext for another blogger to tease out of this story. (Exhibit A: Dig a Tech Girl). In the meantime, I await Sarah Lacy’s official, non-Twittered response.

Updated: Looks like Sarah’s BusinessWeek cohorts have her back: Facebook CEO Admits Missteps totally sidesteps the controversy. The lines separating journalism and PR just got a little blurrier…

Updated again: The video emerges. I haven’t watched it and probably won’t get to until much later in the day. I wonder if what I see will totally undermine this blog post.

For my colleagues in the office, its quite funny that the cable guy has been to my house three times in one week. Thanks Cablevision! (Maybe the fourth time’s the charm because it still doesn’t work.) Or the fact that the new plasma TV I bought from Circuit City turned out to be a returned item that was used and scratched and didn’t even turn on when I took it out of the box. I have also had a month-long email argument (because they won’t talk with you on the phone) with Yahoo Shopping! (My husband has a Yahoo Store, BabyRide.com, and his Yahoo Shopping account suddenly shut off December 13th. Today we received an email saying we’ll just have to wait 28 days until the system will allow us to turn on our account again. I can tell they are really empathetic that the business lost tens of thousands of dollars in revenue during the busiest time of the year.)

Unfortunately, its not only the giant, nameless, faceless corporations that are disappointing. It’s the web design firm (whom I can’t name yet because the project is still incomplete – but, don’t worry, we are only four months past our target launch date!), my account manager at one of the big wire services that didn’t answer any of my emails or phone calls for three months… Ah, the list goes on. After a recent fight with one of these incompetent vendors, Leslie and I tried to conjure up the name of a single service provider that we had been completely, or even mildly, satisfied with. We could not name a single one. How pathetic. (Not the service providers, but we are the ones that are pathetic for putting up with it.)

As a company, we would never treat our clients the way we allow ourselves to be treated. On a weekly basis, I receive calls from PR firm refugees that have been driven out of the companies that they have been paying tens of thousands of dollars to on a monthly basis. The tales of cruel and unusual punishment that they share with us make me question why they would stay with a firm for so long that clearly did not deliver what they promised, takes them for granted and charges them exorbitant fees for college interns working on their accounts. It’s unimaginable, yet it happens every day.

I know that we over service every client that we work with, we bend over backwards to make our clients happy, we treat our clients with respect, we operate our business with integrity and we deliver value on a daily basis. Our business is based on ethical practices, honesty and transparency with our clients, and a genuine, vested interest in our clients’ success.

2008 will be our sixth year in business. We are a small firm, with a big heart. Although we may not be the largest or most profitable public relations firm out there, I am extremely proud of what we have accomplished for our company, our employees and our clients. I hope that we will continue our ‘modus operandi’ and that we will find more firms with the same commitment to true customer service.

The case was lost Sept. 19 when a driver for a Boston-based contractor failed to follow company procedures when loading it onto his vehicle, according to a statement e-mailed Wednesday by Laura Sudnik, spokeswoman for Iron Mountain Inc.

Even if you have never resided in the state of Louisiana, “Anyone who has completed a FAFSA and included a Louisiana postsecondary institution as an institution to which FAFSA data should be sent” may also be affected.

A few thoughts:

• Are there so many data breaches these days that large news outlets don’t blink when they hear of another one? Surely there are a lot of parents, and students, in the New York City area who may be interested in knowing that their names, social security numbers, and financial information may be compromised — merely by clicking “yes, send my FAFSA to Tulane.” Will The New York Times pick this story up?
• I understand why Iron Mountain wouldn’t want to call attention to the data breach on their website. But, still, as someone who may be adversely affected by their mistake, it annoys me to visit their home page and not see the data breach mentioned. When there is a safety recall for a food product, or for a toy, aren’t companies legally bound to acknowledge and spread news of their mistake? Is identity theft somehow less of a consumer risk that spinach that may or may not contain e. Coli? Shouldn’t Iron Mountain be the first to admit their error and work overtime to resolve it, using all the tools in their arsenal — including their website?
• How come my alma mater, Loyola University, hasn’t sent out an email blast to all of its alumni yet? My personal email address is registered with them, and they contact me frequently via direct mail as well. What role should the universities most affected by this breach play in alerting students? If I were on the university communications staff, I would do more than post a press release to the rotation that eventually leads — 4 clicks in — to this page.

We use many tools to monitor news of data breaches and laptop theft on behalf of our clients in the computer security industry. But you can always count on good old word-of-mouth networks to alert you of the news that affects you personally, before the story hits the headlines. Thanks, Mom. I’ll be keeping an eye on this (and calling Experian shortly).