Coyote Blog

I know there are people who take the position that all PR is good PR, but really, do you really want newspapers running a photo spread entitled "Hookers Made Famous by [Fill In Your Name]"?

Over at Climate Skeptic, I take a quick look at the most recent Gavin Schmidt PR piece in the Washington Post, claiming that 2007 was, you know, really hot.

But I wanted to share two funny bits with you.  First, from the climate crowd who claims to have their science so buttoned down that we skeptics should not even be allowed to talk about it any more, comes this:

Taking into account the new data, they said, seven of the eight
warmest years on record have occurred since 2001

What new data?  That another YEAR had been discovered?  Because when
I count on my own fingers, I only can come up with 6 years since 2001.

Second, comes this bit of irony:  There are many reasons why satellites gives us a potentially better measure for world temperatures than surface temperature instruments.  They give us full global coverage (except the poles) and are free of urban and other biases.  So I have always wondered if the only reason that climate scientists defend the surface temperature record over satellites is merely because they don't like the answer satellites are giving (they show less warming than do surface temperature records).

But here is the irony:  The person who is arguably the strongest defender of land-based measurement over satellites, and who maintains what neutral observers feel is the most upwardly-biased surface temperature record, is Gavin Schmidt, who is ... wait for it ... head of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies at NASA.

Frequent readers will know that I don't think much of our County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.  Sheriff Joe gains a ton of PR for himself as the "toughest sheriff in America" and relishes in making jail conditions as miserable as possible.  Recognize that this is the jail that holds many people after arrest but before conviction. 

Now on to the figure mentioned in the Dickerson piece of 2,150
"prison condition" lawsuits since 2004. Anyone with two licks of sense
can go online at pacer.psc.uscourts.gov, or dockets.justia.com,
enter "Arpaio" into the federal court docket, then count the lawsuits
that name "prison conditions" as the cause. Count back to 2004, and as
of mid-December, that number was more than 2,150.

The same search for
the top jail custodians in L.A., New York, Chicago, and Houston nets a
total of only 43 "prison condition" lawsuits.

Remember, those 2,150
lawsuits against Arpaio are only in federal court. There are hundreds
more listed online with the Maricopa County Superior Court, at superiorcourt.maricopa.gov/docket/civilcourtcases/.....

                                       

"For the period January 1, 1993, to [November 29, 2007], the county
has paid $30,039,928.75 on Sheriff Department General Liability
claims," state the docs. "This figure includes all payments, attorney
fees, other litigation expenses, settlements, payments on verdicts,
etc."

Additionally, New Times
asked Crowley how much the lawsuit insurance policy that also covers
the sheriff has cost taxpayers. Crowley croaked, "The county has paid
for General Liability coverage for the period 3-1-95 to 3-1-08 total
premiums of $11,345,609.50."

Keep in mind that this
liability coverage figure is high, in part, because of all those
lawsuit payoffs to relatives of dead inmates.

From 1995 to 1998, the county paid $328,894 a year for an insurance policy with a $1 million deductible.                                       

Today,
Maricopa County pays a yearly premium of $1.2 million for outside
insurance with a $5 million deductible. For any lawsuit that costs $5
million or less, the county foots the entire bill. It's the best policy
the county can buy because of Arpaio's terrible track record.

Over the last week, I have heard about 20 commercials from our local prosecutor's office informing me that there is a web site I can visit with pictures of drunk drivers.  Uh, why?  Is this supposed to somehow help me, driving down a street at night, such that I might just recognize the oncoming driver from 300 yards away, despite his headlights, as being someone I saw on the web site?

Actually, no.  The prosecutor believes that the criminal justice system does not impose harsh enough penalties, so he is using his office and public funds to add an additional penalty not specified by the court or the legislature: Public shaming.  I was happy to see that Reason picked up this issue today:

Taking Thomas at his word, he is imposing extrajudicial punishment,
based on his unilateral conclusion that the penalties prescribed by law
for DUI offenses provide an inadequate deterrent

In addition, Mr. Thomas is very likely emulating the example of our self-aggrandizing county Sheriff, Joe Arpaio.  Sheriff Joe has built a PR machine for himself at public expense, in large part through extra-legal get-tough-on-criminals show-campaigns like this one. 

I will admit I don't even know who Essent Healthcare is.  I don't know if they do a good job or a bad job.  I do know that there is a blogger dedicated to sounding the alarm about Essent.  But there are such gadflies for nearly every major corporation.  But in this case Essent is making the classic PR mistake of trying to silence a blogger by taking expensive-to-defend-against legal action against the blogger.  Specifically, Essent is trying to force the blogger's ISP to reveal the identity of the blogger and his confidential informants, many of whom are employees of Essent likely to face retaliation (more here).

I made the point that this kind of thing always backfires, as publicity tied to such suits and the inevitable backlash from bloggers tends to greatly expand the audience of these small bloggers from a few people who are already disgruntled with the target company to a much wider and more damaging audience.

Case in point:  Look who is suddenly the #1 & #2 Google search return for "problems at essent healthcare."  Neither site was in the top 100 a few days ago.

I haven't really blogged about the Chinese toy recalls, not knowing much about them.  However, my first thought on hearing the problems described was, "aren't those design defects, not manufacturing issues?"  I had a strong sense that populist distrust of trade with China was being used as a fig leaf to cover Mattel's screw-ups.  Several of the recalls were for parts such as magnets that were small and could be swallowed.  There was no implication that the magnets fell off because they were attached or manufactured poorly, they were just a bad design.

I have worked in a number of large manufacturing companies that have plants and suppliers in China.  It was out responsibility to make sure the product that got to the customer was correct.  There is no way we would source a product from an independent foreign company, and have the product delivered straight to stores without inspection, unless we were absolutely damn certain about the company's processes, up to and including having full-time manufacturing people at their plant.

Well, I might have been on to something (WSJ$)

Toymaker Mattel
issued an extraordinary apology to China on Friday over the recall of
Chinese-made toys, saying most of the items were defective because of
Mattel's design flaws rather than faulty manufacturing. The company
added that it had recalled more lead-tainted Chinese toys than was
justified....

Mattel ordered three high-profile recalls this summer
of millions of Chinese-made toys, including Barbie doll accessories and
toy cars, because of concerns about lead paint and tiny magnets that
could be swallowed. The "vast majority of those products that were
recalled were the result of a design flaw in Mattel's design, not
through a manufacturing flaw in China's manufacturers," Mr. Debrowski
said. Lead-tainted toys accounted for only a small percentage of all
toys recalled, he said. "We understand and appreciate deeply the issues
that this has caused for the reputation of Chinese manufacturers," he
said.

Mattel said in a statement its lead-related recalls
were "overly inclusive, including toys that may not have had lead in
paint in excess of the U.S. standards. The follow-up inspections also
confirmed that part of the recalled toys complied with the U.S.
standards."

The other interesting thing here is just how important Mattel's relationship with China is, to have even issued this apology at all.  For such a massive and high-profile recall, Mattel came off very well through the succesful strategy of blaming China.  I know that parents I have heard talk about the recall blame China and have increased fear of Chinese products.  So it is interesting to see that Mattel feels the need to abandon this so far winning PR strategy.

Given my emails, I don't think I explained my first point in this post on Social Security very well:

If you are below 50 and in the top 40% of earners, do NOT expect to get
any Social Security benefits.  Live with it.  Up until now, wealthy
people have received SS retirement benefits as an expensive PR campaign
to convince everyone that SS is an insurance program, not a welfare
program.  Well, I have run the numbers, and it is at least 83% welfare.
The only alternative to defending these benefits will be to suffer
through substantial tax increases which will be disproportionately paid
for by the same richest 40% who would lose their benefits.  Given the negative rates of return that SS pays
on your payroll taxes, each extra dollar that taxes are raised will
only yield well under a dollar (present value) in benefits. So give up
on the benefits, campaign to keep taxes down, and start saving on your
own.

Let me try again.  When the crunch comes in a decade or so, the first thing that is going to happen is that the wealthiest people are going to lose their benefits.  Yeah, I know, not fair, but does it surprise you?  For years, Social Security advocates have desperately clung to the argument that Social Security is not welfare, it's insurance.  That is why benefits for the wealthy still exist at all.  But when crunch time comes, the wealthy, as usual, are going to get thrown overboard first.

If you are in the wealthiest 40% or so, here is what it will take to save your Social Security benefits:  New taxes.  These taxes will either be additional payroll taxes or additional income taxes.  If they are payroll taxes, my guess is that the main tax increase will be eliminating the top cap on earnings subject to the tax;  in other words, most of the new payroll taxes will be on the highest earners.  If the new taxes are income taxes, then rest assured that they will be on the top 40% of earners, since it is the top 40% who pay virtually all of the income taxes in this country today.

So, to save your benefits, you are going to have your taxes increased.  And since Social Security, like every government program, is leaky, and since it pays a negative rate of return, you are going to have to pay present value of more than a dollar of taxes to save present value of a dollar of benefits.  That is a bad investment.  If you are still in your productive years, be ready to see your benefits go bye-bye and fight like hell to keep taxes down.  And save, save, save.

MaxedOutMamma has a pretty good overview post on the economics of funding Social Security and Medicare over the next 30 years or so. 

So the real issue is not
those fictional bonds in the surreal trust fund. The real issue is
whether the American taxpayer will be able to pay for all its current
programs as well as Social Security and Medicare without paying double
or triple the percentage in income taxes the American taxpayer is
paying now. Because that is not going to happen. Forget all this
jibber-jabber about moral issues. That is not going to mean a thing to
the man earning the equivalent of $28,000 today in 2023 when he is
asked to pay much more of that money so that some 67 year old with
several millions of assets can get his or her scheduled Social Security
benefits.

Nothing really new here, but the picture is always worth reviewing (she has lots of nice graphs showing the coming spending overhang).  Politicians' ignorance of (and ignoring of) this problem would shock me if I had any regard left at all for politicians.   I wanted to offer some random observations:

1. If you are below 50 and in the top 40% of earners, do NOT expect to get any Social Security benefits.  Live with it.  Up until now, wealthy people have received SS retirement benefits as an expensive PR campaign to convince everyone that SS is an insurance program, not a welfare program.  Well, I have run the numbers, and it is at least 83% welfare.  The only alternative to defending these benefits will be to suffer through substantial tax increases which will be disproportionately paid for by the same richest 40% who would lose their benefits.  Given the negative rates of return that SS pays on your payroll taxes, each extra dollar that taxes are raised will only yield well under a dollar (present value) in benefits. So give up on the benefits, campaign to keep taxes down, and start saving on your own.
2. If you have some control of when you you earn your lifetime income, try to earn as much as you can in the next 10-15 years.  After that, taxes are almost sure to go up substantially.  It would not surprise me to see top marginal rates back well above 50% again.
3. Democrats in Congress are pushing for new welfare programs, particularly socialized medicine, right now because they must understand that in 10 years, the window for major new spending programs will be closed.  The pressures in a decade will be for program cutbacks as costs really start to balloon, and I can't imagine that new transfer programs will be taken seriously as the old ones eat up a larger and larger part of GDP.  Of course, my point is that this is the last time that such a program would be politically feasible.  From a financial management point of view, we are past the point where adding major new social programs makes any sense.  In fact, adding such a program now would be like a guy who has gotten over his head and knows he can't pay his credit card bills taking his last money out of the bank and buying a plasma TV.

I have been reading and studying Karl Marx in the last week as a part of a European History course I am taking that focuses on the 19th century.  In the context of Marx, it was interesting reading the NY Times recent article on income inequality (the newspaper is not comfortable unless it has visited this topic at least once every week or so).  You might think that I would latch onto this quote from the Times (HT: TJIC)

The top 0.1 percent of earners"¦ now brings in 11 percent of the
nation's total income, triple the share that they did just a generation
ago.

And indeed, I have written on the implied zero-sum fallacy any number of times, including just yesterday.  Implied in this one sentence from the Times is what I call the "bubbling spring" theory of wealth, where wealth and income just sort of magically appear, like a spring out of the ground, and the rich are all those piggy people up front taking more than their fair share of the water.  Of course this is ludicrous, because it implies that if the wealthy made less money, then the poor would make more.  In fact, the reality is that if the wealthy made less money, then the nation's total income would be lower.

But this is not what caught my attention.  What was new to me in my recent study of Marx was his writing on the tactics of socialist revolution.  Specifically, he spent a lot of time talking about the need to "proletarianize the middle class."  He knew that to have a successful socialist revolution, the middle class had to be made to feel marginalized and put upon by the system.  If he had lived long enough, he would have said that socialist revolution failed to occur in countries like Britain because the middle class became too large and too successful.

In this context, then, I found this quote from the Times most interesting:

There is now a big push in both Washington and state capitals to come
up with policies that can alleviate middle-class anxiety.

The author himself editorializes:

There is now a big push in both Washington and state capitals to come
up with policies that can alleviate middle-class anxiety. That's all
for the good. In fact, it is overdue.

What middle class anxiety?  The middle class is doing better than ever, except that there has been a concentrated media campaign by the Times and others, abetted by various politicians on the left, to try to make the middle class feel anxious and marginalized.  To the author's credit, he observes that while "Layoffs seem to happen more frequently than they once did," the actual evidence for increased volatility is really not there:

Only later do you come to the surprising part: there is the same
amount of variability now that there was in the 1980s and 1990s. In
journalism, this is known as burying the lead.

"Intuitively, you would think volatility is increasing," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, who along with Senator Jim Webb
of Virginia requested that the study be done. "But it isn't, which I
guess shows that the American economy has always been very flexible."

What the author does not explain is, if the increase in volatility is not real, then why do so many people believe it to be true?  The answer, of course, is that his employer, among others, have been pushing a PR campaign for years to convince the middle class that their lot sucks.  Why?  Well, read your Marx.

With Google headed off in nearly every direction at once in their product development, I wonder why they don't offer a service to corporations (and even individuals, like politicians) that seems much closer to their core business.  The service I have in mind is the Internet version of the old clipping service (where some PR folks would watch the papers and keep a file of articles about you or your company, bitterly clipped out of the papers).

Let's say I am Dell, and I would like to see what people are saying about be.  Well, if I search for "Dell,"  the first 30 or 40 hits are probably the same -- retailers and such.  What I really want is anything new that popped up in the search today vs. the search yesterday, and which might be buried hundreds of items down in the list.  This is something that a third party could certainly do, caching the search each day, but it would be a layup for Google.  I'd think this service would be pretty valuable, certainly saving money over having employees manually troll blogs and comment boards.  I can think of 10 ways right now this base service could be improved over time with more value-added services hung on the basic structure.  I could sell it to retailers as a way to uncover pirates or illegal channel activity.  You could even charge premium pricing for fast spidering, where the Google spiders go looking in certain places the client cares about more often.

If I have reinvented the wheel here, and someone is already doing this, let me know in the comments.

Every year about this time, the NFL earns itself some bad press for busting some small bar or local group for using the word "Superbowl" rather than that catchy phrase "the big game on the first Sunday in February down in Miami."  This year, the bad press honor goes to the NFL for shutting down a party at a church in Indianapolis for having a screen too large.  (Hey NFL!  I am breaking the law!  I have a 110" front projection TV, twice the "legal" 55-inch limit, and I am showing the game on it at my party.  HA HA HA!).  And by the way, what lapdog legislator wrote this law for them, and did he get Superbowl tickets for life?

Now, I understand the situation with copyrights - if you don't defend them vigorously and even-handedly, you can lose them.  I seem to remember Exxon or some other chemical company lost the rights tot he name Formica when they let it be used too generically for counter-top materials.  And the NFL PR people use this defense every year, saying "we really don't want to shut down these folks, but we have to." 

I don't agree that individual words should be copyrighted such that their use in a broad range of contexts should be illegal.  I am fine saying that I can't create another peanut butter and call it "Jif."  I will accept P&G has some sole right in this country to that use.  However, I don't think P&G can tell me that I can't advertise a "Jif party" feature their peanut butter.  In the same way, I am willing to grant the NFL exclusive use of "Superbowl" to describe a sporting event, but I don't think that should restrict me from advertising that people should come to my bar to watch the Superbowl.  And just to add one more example so I have a "threepeat," I don't think Pat Riley should have any ownership in that word.   However, since copyright law is not going to change tomorrow, I will offer up a more modest change.

So here is my suggestion.  The NFL needs to offer a one time use license each year for a bar or other establishment to hold a Superbowl party and actually use Superbowl in the promotion.  The license would of course be non-exclusive, and would carry a myriad of restrictions on how you use the name, etc.   The license could be purchased for a price that would be cheap for a business, maybe $200, and could be purchased right over the web.  It would actually be easier, I think, to go after violators because the NFL could point to the existence of a legal licensing program the violator could easily have participated in.  I would think they could easily bring in a couple of million dollars, not to mention saving them enforcement money and PR headaches.

PS-  Welcome to the NFL intellectual property department.  I presume I included enough verboten uses of "Superbowl" to catch your search engine's attention.

PPS-  My Firefox spell checker (which I love!) does not have "Superbowl" in it.  I wonder, would the NFL consider it a copyright violation for a program to use the word "Superbowl" in its dictionary?

Readers of this blog know that I consider most campaign finance laws to in fact be carefully crafted incumbent protection acts.  Incumbents in major political offices get millions and millions of dollars in free advertising just from their day-to-day ability to get on the evening news.  This free publicity combined with strong name recognition means that upstarts often have to seriously outspend the incumbent to have a chance of defeating them.  So campaign finance laws act as a powerful protection device for these incumbents, limiting the amount upstarts can spend while in no way limiting the incumbents's ability to use their office (and taxpayer money) to shamelessly promote and publicize themselves.

And there is no one better at using elected office to shamelessly publicize himself than new NY Governor Eliot Spitzer.  So absolutely no one should be surprised at this:

Moving swiftly in his efforts to change the culture of
Albany, Governor-elect Eliot Spitzer said Thursday that he would
unilaterally stop accepting campaign contributions greater than
$10,000, which is less than a fifth of the $50,100 in individual
donations currently allowed by state law.

Mr. Spitzer also said that from now on he would refuse to take
advantage of several notorious loopholes in the state's campaign
finance laws that allow corporations and limited liability companies to
circumvent donation limits by contributing through subsidiaries and
other related entities.

Note that he only took these steps just days after he was elected governor the first time.  Spitzer knows that no one can probably offset the PR advantage he wields, but to be on the safe side, this is the opening shot to make sure that no future challenger is going to have the cash to threaten his position in office.

Generally, Eliot Spitzer irritates the hell out of me.  But I will say for one brief period in college, Spitzer, as the butt of a huge campus-wide joke, brought be great mirth.

I just don't know why conservatives are so afraid to let folks like Khatami speak in the US.  Sure, he is a lying dictatorial human-rights-suppressing scumbag, but so what?  Its good to let people like this speak as much as they want.  They always give themselves away.  There were counter-protests and lots of debate about Iran in the news and on the nets, and that is as it should be.

I suppose conservatives real fear is that the press will, as they sometimes do, throw away their usual skepticism and cynicism and report his remarks as if they were those of a statesman rather than a thug on a PR mission.  But that's a different problem, and not a good enough excuse to suspend free speech, even for a man who granted it to no one else in his own country.  (I have never bought into the "media bias" critique, either conservative or liberal, in the press, because this seems to imply some active conspiracy exists to manage the news to some end.  Rather, I think it is more fair to say that reporters tend to apply too little skepticism to stories with which they are sympathetic.  For example, many reporters think homelessness is a big problem, so they were willing to uncritically accept inflated and baseless numbers for the size of the homeless population, numbers they would have fact-checked the hell out of if they had come from, say, an oil company to whom they are unsympathetic or skeptical of.)

On the same topic, I don't know why conservatives are so worried about this story of an increase in students from Saudi Arabia.   It used to be that we had confidence that people from oppressive countries would have their eyes opened by living in the US.  We have always believed that intellectually, freedom was more compelling than dictatorial control, and would win over hearts and minds of immigrants.  Our foreign policy with China, for example, is counting on engagement to change China.  Have we given up on this?

I thought the city of Washington DC had declared a "Crime emergency" because there was too much crime.  Apparently not, since they have created a whole new class of criminals:  16-year-olds who are ... shudder ... out and about after 10PM.

D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey said yesterday that the city had to
set the new 10 p.m. curfew for youths 16 and younger because of
"irresponsible" parents who don't control their children.

"You shouldn't need a curfew if you've got parents who are
responsible," Ramsey said on Washington Post Radio. "But unfortunately
we've got some parents here that are totally irresponsible. Their idea
of raising a kid is throwing a kid out of the house and letting them
straggle back in at 2 o' clock in the morning."

Hat tip to Reason's Hit and Run, which had this comment:

It's not that city officials want to play parent to every kid in the district. It's just that, gosh, turns out law enforcement professionals are better parents.

I hate to think what ideas this will give our local stormtrooper Joe Arpaio, the Sheriff with the largest PR budget in the nation. 

Props by the way to Phoenix New Times reporter John Dougherty, whose longstanding reporting on Sheriff Joe is reminiscent of the tough, confrontational local reporting of old.  Of course, there's no room for that in the milquetoast pander-to-the-local-pols reality of big-city newspapers today, so Dougherty is relegated to the local alternative paper (which may not be fair -- I don't know Mr. Dougherty -- he may prefer to be where he is).   Sheriff Joe is popular here in Phoenix, so the Arizona Republic (the big paper here) panders to him rather than risk confronting a popular figure.  The fact that one of Sheriff Joe's family helps run the Arizona Republic's editorial page may also have something to do with it.

ABCNews is running a series on some interesting documents found among released Hussein-era Iraqi government docs.  I am not going to react to them in terms of how they affect the decision to go to war, in part because we have no idea how representative 6 or 7 damning documents are out of thousands that we have not yet been shown (a similar problem the Enron jury will soon face).  Also, for reasons below in the footnote**.

My main reaction to these revelations was "wow, how badly does the Bush administration suck at communication?"  After taking three years of criticism over exactly some of the issues addressed in these documents, and presumably others we have not yet seen, the administration just sat on this stuff and refused to release it?  Clinton's folks would have had one of these presented each morning of every day for a year to the press with a little bow around it.  I am flabbergasted that there are so many conspiracy theorists who think this administration has some special Karl-Rovian-mad-science to orchestrating events.  To me, their PR successes look more like Peter Sellers accidentally avoiding numerous assassins in The Pink Panther Strikes Again.

** In the end, I think the Iraq invasion will be looked at as "worth it" historically if its effects resonate beyond Iraq, e.g. it provides a beacon of democracy around which other democratic elements in the middle east coalesce and grow stronger.  If Iraq turns out to be just about Iraq, the world will be well-rid of a nasty dictator but the US will have spent a great deal of its available armed forces and treasure and influence and prestige on a single screwed-up dictatorship, while ignoring tens of others who also brutalize their people and who also support terrorism.  Against this definition of success, the recently revealed documents don't do much for me one way or the other.  They do, however, strongly effect my opinion of Russia.  Why Bush continues to give Putin a pass is beyond me.

I missed it last week, but apparently the CEO's of a number of major US airlines took the PR offensive last week to beg for more government subsidies and pension bailouts.  Reason's Hit and Run has the roundup.  They observe that the Senate was open to their pleas:

But luckily for the money-squandering dullards, there are enough members of
the Senate Commerce Committee who apparently believe certain businesses are too
colossally incompetent to fail:

The Commerce Committee's ranking Democrat, Sen. Daniel Inouye of
Hawaii, agreed: "If we do not begin to solve the problems plaguing the air
carriers, we will see more failures in coming months and certainly more jobs
cut."

Because what is the federal government if not a
guarantor of full employment at lousy companies?... If Inouye and his fellow
hacks were serious, they could start by privatizing airports, allowing vigorous foreign
competitors to own more than 50 percent of U.S.-based airlines, and letting
the failures actually fail, for starters. But that would take a belief in free
airline markets we haven't really seen since the Carter Administration.

It has always been hard to get airlines to just go away.  Pan Am hung around forever, as did TWA, through bankruptcy after bankruptcy.  My guess is that politician's unwillingness to let airlines fail has only increased with the advent of frequent flyer miles - no congressman wants all of his well-healed constituents calling the office and complaining about the 300,000 United miles they just lost.  By the way, have you ever noticed that frequent flyer mile holders are the only creditor of airlines who consistently come out of bankruptcies whole?  Even the worker's defined benefit pension plans get a haircut before frequent flyer mile holders.

Legacy airlines are really backwards in their practices - for example, many of their supply chain processes are reminiscent of the auto industry in the 60's and 70's, in part because airlines are sheltered from foreign competition while auto makers for the most part aren't.  I used to work in the aviation industry, and the opportunities there are tremendous, but no one in the industry will even listen.  The "not invented here" attitude was invented in the airline industry.

And while the management of these firms is backwards, you also have to deal unions a share of the blame.  Union supporters often accuse companies of "union-busting".  I have never heard the term, but in the case of airlines, one might be able to accuse the unions of "company-busting".  Unions hold out and strike for outrageous salaries and benefits and work rules that far outstrip what similarly skilled people make in other industries.  By the way, unlike conservatives, I don't have some deep seated hatred of unions.  In a free society, workers can try to organize to increase their bargaining power.  I do have problems with the way the US government, through legislation, tilted the bargaining table in the unions' favor, but that is a different story. 

For some of these reasons, and others, I was flabbergasted that local company America West would purchase USAir.  When there are so many planes and gates for sale on the market, and cities are begging for new competitors to enter their airline market, why would you buy yourself a load of trouble in the form of legacy union contracts and frequent flyer obligations?  It is noteworthy that Southwest has never bought another airline, and prefers instead just to buy assets out of bankruptcy.

Over the last several days, more revelations have emerged that the Bush administration seems to be spending unprecedented amounts of taxpayer money for third party PR support of administration policies.  There is nothing that makes me madder than politicians using my money to help cement their own position in office.  For all the majesty of the office, the President is still the taxpayers' employee, and we should expect an honest accounting of his performance and programs.  What makes this even more ridiculous is that the US Presidency is the greatest bully pulpit in the world -- no one gets more of a chance to get his/her point of view into the public domain than the President.  But Bush is generally a crappy communicator, so he has squandered this opportunity and is forced into paying others to speak for him.

Often business people like myself lament that the government needs to be run like a business - meaning more focus on efficiency and productivity and process improvement.   But there are a number of ways the the government is NOT like a business.  The key difference is that a private company can, at the end of the day, give outsiders the brush-off.  As a private company (with no public stock float) I don't have to tell anyone anything about the decisions I have made or why I made them.  I am not only allowed but expected to pay money (in the form of PR, sales, advertising, etc.) to  put a public spin on my products and services -- this is called marketing.  The government, of course, is not supposed to do this.  They have an accountability to everybody.  (actually, even CEO's of public companies are not supposed to do this either, at least with their shareholders, but they do).

The Bush administration wants to believe they are still running their own private business, rather than a public trust.  They have used 9/11 and the war on terror as excuses to pull a veil of secrecy over decision-making, data, and even mistakes that often have little to do with national security.  They have set a number of unsettling precedents around managing their public image, and their payments for PR and good press fall into this category.

Two different inputs recently have gotten me thinking about public relations and the web, and just how far behind the technology curve many PR departments may be.

The first input was a comment I got on one of my posts that I wrote while on vacation last month.  In this post I mentioned that I would be heading for Disney World for our traditional family reunion, but that growing crowds on Thanksgiving week would probably force us to try a different week next time.  I got a comment from someone who sounded like a Disney employee, recommending a better week.  Now, it turns out that it was not a Disney employee, just a helpful reader (one of my loyal 34 or so).  But it got me to thinking.  Are corporate PR departments keeping up with the web?  If Disney was not doing stuff like this, why aren't they?

The second input was this post in Reason's Hit and Run blog.  They point out TIVO efforts to manage the use of the TIVO copyright to ensure that they do not lose the rights to the name.  (Though the article mentions Xerox and Kleenex, my understanding is that Formica actually came the closest to losing its copyright on that name due to overuse as a generic term for, uh, whatever Formica is).  How can companies possibly keep up with their trademark usage on the web?

Back when I worked for a large corporation, we had PR people, either in or out of house, who would provide us with weekly news summaries of where the corporation was in the press.  This was particularly helpful to those of us in marketing, who wanted to make sure we saw all the reviews of our product (so we could use the good ones and refute the bad ones).

In the world of the Internet, this approach seems hopelessly dated.  In the "old days" I used to walk to school 20 miles each day in the snow, up hill both ways  (sorry, always feel like I am channeling my dad when I say "in the old days") the media might have 10  or 15 mentions of our product every two weeks.  Now, on the web, there might be 10 or 15 an hour. Every day employees may be talking about the company in a chat room, customers may be commenting on the company in some place like epinions.com or in Amazon reviews, blogs may be posting on the company, and authorized or unauthorized vendors may have set up shop to sell the company's products online.

How does  a company keep up with all this?  If I was a large company, I would be actively searching the web for key words associated with my company and competitors, looking for new posts or entries or reviews or even whole websites.   Employees spilling secrets in a chat room?  Need to tell legal.  New web site selling our product? Send it to marketing to make sure they are authorized and are using our trademarks and product descriptions correctly.  Blogs posting on us?  We might want to add our own comment to the post.

What we need is the modern technology version of the clipping service.  The technology would probably be pretty straight forward - a company wouldn't even have to build it's own search engine - it could just take a full snapshot of the Google results one day and compare those results to a search the next week, and look for changes.

Or, better yet, why doesn't Google provide this service to corporate accounts itself?  After all, they do need something to justify their sky-high PE ratio, maybe this would help.  Wouldn't Exxon pay $50,000 a year for this service?  Heck I pay D&B several hundred dollars a year for a credit watch service on my company's credit rating, I would certainly pay some hundreds a year for a PR watch of my small business and my competitors.

UPDATE:

One company that seems to be doing something ike this is BuzzMetrics.  Link courtesy of RatherBiased.com

A comment I got on one of my posts on Friday got me to thinking about corporate PR departments and whether they are really keeping up with the web.  In this post I mentioned that I would be heading for Disney World for our traditional family reunion, but that growing crowds on Thanksgiving week would probably force us to try a different week next time.  I got a comment from someone who sounded like a Disney employee, recommending a better week.

Now, I don't know if they were an employee, or whether they found the post by accident or through an active search program.  But it got me to thinking.  Are corporate PR departments keeping up with the web?

Back when I worked for a large corporation, we had PR people, either in or out of house, who would provide us with weekly news summaries of where the corporation was in the press.  This was particularly helpful to those of us in marketing, who wanted to make sure we saw all the reviews of our product (so we could use the good ones and refute the bad ones).

In the world of the Internet, this approach seems hopelessly dated.  Every day employees may be talking about the company in a chat room, customers may be commenting on the company in some place like epinions.com, blogs may be posting on the company, and authorized or unauthorized vendors may have set up shop to sell the company's products online.

How does  a company keep up with all this?  If I was a large company, I would be actively searching the web for key words associated with my company, looking for new posts or entries or even whole websites.   Employees spilling secrets in a chat room?  Need to tell legal.  New web site selling our product? Send it to marketing to make sure they are authorized.  Blogs posting on us?  We might want to add our own comment to the post.

So I got to thinking - was that Disney that found my site?  If so, is this what they are doing to manage their online PR?  And if not, why aren't they doing it?  You wouldn't even have to build your own search engine - just take a full snapshot of the Google results one day and compare those results to a search the next week, and look for changes.

Or, why doesn't Google provide this service to corporate accounts itself?  They need something to justify their sky-high PE ratio, maybe this would help.  Wouldn't Exxon pay $50,000 a year for this service?  Heck I pay D&B several hundred dollars a year for a credit watch service on my credit rating, I would certainly pay some hundreds a year for a PR watch.

UPDATE #1

See comments below - the original commenter apparently not a Disney employee.  Never-the-less, the idea still excites me.  A company like Disney rests almost completely on its reputation - why isn't someone out on the web every day monitoring what is happening vis a vis their company?