On Monday, the company revealed to investors the loss of 800,000 subscribers over the course of an already dismal quarter that involved a widely unpopular price increase and a failed plan to split its DVD and streaming services into two. Not surprisingly, stocks plummeted.

So now is an opportune time for those of us in the industry to consider, what can Netflix do and what can we learn from the situation? Here I’ve laid out four best practices for PR and marketing professionals to consider when strategizing on how to win back customer loyalty.

1. Damage control. With the damage done, Netflix must embark on a major marketing campaign to both ensure the retention of current customers and win back those that have been lost. Yes, customer acquisition will be important, but it is the current and lost subscribers that will prove most beneficial to the company’s bottom line in the months to come. When experiencing a similar situation, focus marketing efforts on stopping the bleeding, which means getting back into the heart of your customers. Re-address consumer needs, if it has seemed to suffer, and aim to deliver them more effectively than the competition. This can be done  with a new campaign or with offering ways to save on current products, but you need to do something that will entice the consumer to come back
2. Re-build the brand image. When we think Netflix, we think red envelopes and premium content. Yet both of these associations have taken a beating in the past year with the Quickster snafu and termination of the Starz contract. What does the brand mean now, and what is the emotional connection to the consumer?  Come up with a new way to draw the user in. It could be packaging technology in a new, more convenient way or providing users with premium content. But whatever you do, make sure people will enjoy the upgrade and that you publicize it as much as possible. That way they see your brand as offering more for the money, rather than cutting services
3. Look forward, not backward. We all make mistakes. Yes, that means even successful businesses and entrepreneurs like Netflix and Reed Hastings. While Hastings’ apologies have largely fallen on an unsympathetic audience, the company must stop side-stepping and commit itself 100% towards shaping the future of media consumption. That means also changing the conversation. When in a similar situation, stop focusing on what went wrong, and move towards changing the conversation so people will think of something new if they think of your damaged brand
4. Encourage the bigger picture. We are moving towards a streaming culture. While Netflix’s price hikes are an iffy move, I do support the company’s dedication to invest more in streaming. I think that in the end, we will all be happier with more choices when it comes to the content we crave, available with the technology we want. That means streaming directly to our TVs, iPads and laptops, whenever and wherever we are. Find the positive in the current situation, and make sure people know that these will improve services. That way customers can understand your company’s somewhat questionable move

Have you ever had to deal with a PR/marketing crisis? What did you do to change the conversation?

Tech blogging has become way too controlled by PR agents. You might not realize it, but the top blogs are contacted by PR folks dozens of times per day. This is why you’ll see 15 stories all appear on Techmeme at the same time. All with the same news. Only a few of whom slow down to ask “is this really useful.”

See, we’ve all learned that getting out in the first two minutes is worth a lot of traffic. Particularly if you are writing about an Apple news release.

Watch on Wednesday afternoon as the press, er bloggers, all file the same news story, albeit each with a different sensationalized headline. I’ve played that game and done it as well as anyone.

If you decide not to play that game then you stop getting invited to the coolest events. It’s how the game is played and it ensures that the bloggers all turn into a bunch of news junkies who love talking about the latest Yahoo rumors.

For what it’s worth, I’m glad Scobleizer will be getting back to its “look at this cool stuff!” roots. And I think every blogger can take an important lesson from his post: blog because you love what you write about, not because you need to prove your street cred by adding the umpteenth comment to the same story everyone else is already discussing.

Arrington’s frustrating customer service phone calls that-get-nowhere with Comcast lead him to tweet and then blog about his frustration. Read it, it’s great.

But if Comcast has not wisened up to improve their customer service department, they have cleverly entered the social media realm and have appointed a specific person to monitor and track the “tweetosphere” and “blogsphere” to see what customers are saying, to communicate with them and take action.

So this CTO (Chief Twitter Officer, I love that term) guy caught Arrington’s tweet and within 20 minutes he got a call from Comcast who sent a team to Arrington’s house to fix his Internet connection. Viola!

How cool. I don’t know about you – I suspect your experiences may be pretty similar – but I have spent hours on many exasperating customer service calls to Verizon, Optimum, HP, Dell (to name a few) with a person who is either not qualified or knowledgeable enough to help me, or there is a communication gap between us, and understanding each other is quite a feat (thanks to the glories of global call center outsourcing). The problem can takes days to get sorted out.

And what d’ya know? Arrington’s story snowballed from a small Twitter tweet into a huge online conversation. Jeff Jarvis from Technorati Buzz Machine blog, the Techmeme blog and all Arrington’s other influential tech buddies picked up on this and, of course, blogged.

The story is also nicely covered in Catharine Taylor’s blog in the SocialMedia Insider.

So, corporations: Take note and prick up your ears, be proactive and jump into the social media world. This just may be the most burgeoning and powerful (and probably the cheapest) tool to:

(a) Communicate with your customers
(b) Mitigate negative PR
(c) Increase your branding
(d) Advertise
(e) Grow your business
(f) Improve customer support and satisfaction
(g) All of the above

Need I say more?

Well, I think I’m gonna be tweeting from now on – good and bad – on my next Verizon/Optimum/HP/Dell experience.

Maybe I’ll finally get some service. Although, granted, I’m not Michael Arrington…

 One of the articles, For the Smartest Interns, A Golden Opportunity, quotes Matthew Zinman, founder of the Internship Institute, an organization that provides employers with resources to implement successful internship programs. According to Zinman, “A lot of the top students are smart enough to know that they can get a better experience at a smaller company……. These students ask themselves, ‘Is it worth having a big company name on my resume versus what may be the greater opportunity with a smaller, less-known company on my resume?’”

Often young applicants forget that they should be interviewing the prospective employer as much as the employer should be interviewing them. Asking questions about the type of work you will be doing, who you’ll be working with, if you will have client work, writing assignments etc. can help an intern make a better decision and determine the real value of an internship above and beyond a name on a resume.

Since not everyone gets as excited about Tech PR as I do, I also like to include myself in the cool geek category. Anyway, we thought this ad was spot on. If you’d like to read the full text, download this file: Geek Ad from G4 TV Large.

1. ANR
2. API
3. CDMA
4. CRM
5. DNS
6. DSL
7. GIF
8. GPS
9. GSM
10. GUI
11. HTML
12. HTTP
13. OS
14. RSS
15. SAAS
16. SEM
17. SEO
18. SOA
19. SSL
20. TCP/IP
21. USB
22. VNR
23. VOIP
24. VPN
25. XML

Good luck! Click here for the Technology Acronym Challenge Answer Sheet.

The immature team at Affect Strategies played out a few of their television-related fantasies. (David as an ESPN sportscaster, Katie with her own cooking show on the Food Network and Leslie as host of Masterpiece Theatre.) You can see the embarassing photos on Flickr.

(Tech Thursdays will be a regular event, once a month in NY. If you’d like to come out to the next event, drop me a line and I’ll add you to our mailing list.)

The paper’s Technology home page is usually where I start my day at the office. From there, I usually get hooked into a Blogrunner headline or head into the Bits blog.

Today, Saul Hansell posted two really thought-provoking posts on the merger in Bits: An Offer Yahoo Can’t Refuse, and the follow-up, Microsoft is Building a Spaceship out of Spare parts. The latter features one of the best geeky similes I’ve read in a long time:

For Microsoft, trying to build a new Internet portal-search engine-advertising network-cloud computing company will be trying to make a new interplanetary spaceship out of an old Soyuz capsule and Skylab while hurtling through the cosmos. The parts are temperamental; the systems are delicate; and the risk of catastrophic failure is ever-present.

Another New York Times blog, Dealbook, describes How Microsoft Could Go Hostile. They also have a good rundown of previous high-profile tech acquisitions in The Biggest Tech Deal Ever, Sort Of.

I’m really interested to see how this shakes out — and, more importantly, how that benefits (or hurts) both marketers and Microsoft/Yahoo end users. Bits and Dealbook are resources I’ll continue to refer to as the story progresses.

Although the most popular videos on YouTube sometimes seem to be aimed at entertaining catatonic teens, there are real opportunities for business value in every interaction. Although there is  of discussion in the PR industry around the death of the press release at the hands of search engine optimization/marketing, I don’t buy into that. (However, it may mean the death of AP Style in the press release.)

In 2007 we already saw a few CEOs use YouTube as the platform of choice to issue public apologies, quiet public dissent and launch new products. Could it be that YouTube will be the new format of the press release in 2008? 

Sheldon Gilbert is the founder and CEO of Proclivity Systems, the developers of  the Proclivity platform, and one of our clients. Proclivity is a predictive engine that can anticipate and forecast consumer shopping behaviors online - essentially predicting what people are going to by, when and at what price.  He is profiled in this month’s Men’s Vogue in a section called ‘Life Studies’ in an article entitled The Start-Up CEO (p. 164).

Although the story includes details on the company and it’s flagship product, Proclivity Mail, the outlet is still Vogue. Sheldon participated in a photoshoot with photographer Julian Dufort, and was dressed to the nines by fashion editor Justin Arroyo. The writer, Michael Mraz, explored Sheldon’s personal history from his birth in St. Lucia to his studies at Yale and the career path that led him to write an algorithm that became the foundation of the company’s technology. He also had Sheldon share some of his favorite objects from his past and present to be included in the story.

Although Vogue may not be a direct path to Proclivity’s target audience, it has a broad circulation and reaches are large number of influencers in the fashion industry. (Proclivity is focusing on large online retailers as part of its sales efforts.) In this case, leveraging Sheldon’s dynamic background, personal appeal and fashion sense, made him a great fit for Vogue. Surely, a product-focused pitch would not have gotten the editor’s attention.