There are a lot of prominent local folks with bad PR right now.

Carl Green at the PHA.

John Estey and John Matheussen at the Delaware River Port Authority.

Arlene Ackerman at the School District.

Is it because the press is acting more like vigilantes? Or is it because these people have just screwed up royally? Is there anything their public relations pro’s can do to turn the tide?

Probably not. At least not without significant and broad organizational buy-in. As the New York Times pointed out Sunday in an article that should be mandatory reading for all executives, the public doesn’t want clever spin; they want an acknowledgement of failure or weakness and they want true contrition.

So while lawyers for the School Reform Commission say it’s okay for Ackerman to get paid in advance for vacation days she does not intend to use, it isn’t okay in the court of public opinion. 

As we’ve pointed out here before, there is a very clear underlying question to every query you’re asked in a crisis communication situation – “Do you care?” When you run the Housing Authority and make over $300K but somehow can’t manage to pay your mortgage, it looks like you don’t care. When you don’t show up to work after people find out, it really looks like you don’t care.

In a crisis, you need to 1) Validate concern and 2) Show action. In each of these cases the organizations have failed to validate the concern that public money is being wasted (although DRPA did vote to change its governance rules – a step in the right direction).

The longer you drag your feet on validating the concern, the worse the crisis gets.

Just ask Tony Heyward.

The moment the media caught BP’s now former-CEO Tony Hayward relaxing on a yacht, complaining that he wanted his life back while workers struggled to contain millions of gallons of oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, everyone started to wonder how much longer Hayward would stay in charge.  After all, he had committed one too many public relations plunders and it seemed like only a matter of time until BP officials chose a replacement.

Fast-forward a month, and that’s exactly what happened, as BP announced on Tuesday, July 27^th that Robert Dudley, a 54-year-old American who had been with BP since 1998, would soon take the reins of the battered company.  It’s a smart move for BP–not only can the company create a fresh start, it can turn the dialogue from the past, from fault, to the future, to responsibility and how BP can move forward.

There is no doubt that BP hopes Dudley will be the company’s shining white knight.  After all, choosing an American, who was raised in Mississippi no less, was strategic.  In the face of this crisis, BP needs a leader who can connect and empathize with Gulf Coast residents—and that’s exactly what Dudley has started to do.

In his Tuesday morning public statement on ABC’s Good Morning America, Dudley appeared calm and confident.  He declared his “special affinity” for the Gulf Coast and not once did he seem impatient, as Hayward so often appeared.  He announced his top priority of sealing the company’s well and restoring the Gulf of Mexico. He also reiterated that BP will certainly work for as long as it takes to meet its commitments in the Gulf.

But Dudley took it one step further.

Too often in crises, companies respond to the incident by merely saying they will fix the problem, ignoring one of the public’s main concern: what they will do differently in the future.  Dudley addressed this concern head-on by proclaiming that BP will learn a lot from this “terribly tragic accident” and in “no question change” as a result of it.

Certainly Dudley’s announcement has momentarily given the American public hope that BP is committed to cleaning up the spill, but it will take more than a few carefully chosen words to truly clean up the mess BP has made.  Now that he’s validated concern, it’s time to show action. Good luck, Mr. Dudley, you sure have your work cut out for you.

“Hey you – yeah, you. How would you like to have hot coffee spilled all over your fingers and toes? Why don’t you try catching your breath after being thrown at the bottom of a bag and have junk piled high –right, smack on top of you?  Sounds pretty terrible, eh? You wouldn’t do it to yourself, but you do it daily to your technology. Feel pretty guilty? Well you should.  Luckily, it isn’t too late to make amends! Office Depot is providing you with an easy remedy to show your digital devices that you DO care after all, and will vow to protect us from here on out.”

Pretty funny huh?  These are the first words you read when you check out Office Depot’s new microsite, technologyapology.com, dedicated to teaching consumers how to treat there technology devices with care and concern.  Office Depot recently launched a CARAVAN® survey conducted by Opinion Research Corporation for Office Depot (NYSE:ODP), which found that “one in three working Americans is often required to carry tech items while traveling or on the go. However, forty-five percent of Americans have damaged or totally broken a number of their technology items including mobile phones (29%), ear buds or headsets (22%), PDAs or Smartphones (10%) and laptops (10%).”

In response to this recklessness in technological device care, Home Depot has launched the “Technology Apology Contest,” where professionals can formally apologize to the technology that they have mistreated in the past and vow to protect it going forward with a 100-300 word apology. 

This microsite is peppered with humorous videos, and a fact sheet about how to protect your technological advices. What’s interesting is that none of these suggestions are really that innovative—they tell you things like keep your hot coffee away from the computer and don’t let pets get near these devices. And if you look a little closer, you will see that the prize for the contest is a messenger bag for your laptop designed to protect all your technological devices. So really, this is all a marketing tactic to get you to buy their bags—and it kind of works.

This microsite is essentially a page out of the PR 101 handbook and it’s not a shabby effort!  All of a sudden Home Depot is positioning itself as a thought leader in the technology protection industry—breaking out from the walls of the home building industry to provide specific products to protect our prized laptops, cell phones and iPads.   They’ve even gone so far as to launch a survey proving technological device neglect, identifying a crisis they are helping to solve further, solidifying their role as an emerging voice in the technology protection conversation. Great job Home Depot—your microsite is funny and interesting! And in the increasingly wired world we’re living in (as I look at the cracked cell phone sitting on my desk), you’re now a place I may look to for more than just a can of house paint.

General Stanley McChrystal and his staff have succeeded in shaking up how the war in Afghanistan will be run.  It came, however, at the cost of their jobs.  Michael Hastings, a reporter from Rolling Stone Magazine got the opportunity of a lifetime when a volcano eruption grounded him in France with the general and his staff for an extended road trip to Berlin.  They granted him unprecedented access to the inner workings of the high command.  Ultimately, their sharp, uncensored rhetoric lost McChrystal his job.

The assignment, as executive editor Eric Bates laid it out, was a simple profile of the general.  Hastings goal was to give the audience a look at the strategy in Afghanistan through the eyes of its architect.  Hastings wrote that story, but for some reason, McChrystal and his staff in no way censored their average day-to-day banter when the reporter was around.  They made no stipulations as to which conversations could and could not be used in the article, and even seemed to direct their snide comments about officials towards Hastings that they may be included in the story.  What was the logic behind this?  Was there any?  Did anyone stop and say, “We could all get canned for this?”  The reporter found himself asking the very same questions.  In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Michael Hastings seemed to indicate that the general and his staff seemed to have some sort of agenda…that they wanted to shake things up a bit.

So from a PR standpoint, why and how did this happen?  Hastings posited that McChrystal’s press advisors might have accepted the request in order to expose the situation surrounding Afghanistan and the strategy therein to a new demographic.  This is a perfectly sound reasoning to have Rolling Stone come in and do a profile.  The blunder occurred in not monitoring or prepping General McChrystal on how to behave and what to say around the reporter.  One would think that a seasoned military man would know what is acceptable rhetoric and what crosses the line, but as Hastings pointed out in an interview, “When war becomes your life, it makes it difficult to create good policy.”  Perhaps it also prevents you from realizing when you are walking head first into a PR disaster and potentially the end of an otherwise illustrious career.

The city of Chester has a dual image – one touting the future, the other mired in its tumultuous present – and tensions between both sides are coming to a head this month.

On the one hand, the future: A brand-new soccer stadium, touted as the centerpiece for a $500 million riverfront revival. Feeding off of World Cup fervor, PPL Park – home to the Philadelphia Union MLS team – is slated for a sold-out inaugural home game on June 27. The energy and anticipation is palpable from the Sons of Ben, the Union’s fan club.

On the other hand, the current state of Chester: four homicides in eight days. A state of emergency issued, with beefed up police patrols and a 9pm curfew in high-crime areas. Chronic issues of crime, poverty, and unemployment. A population in steady decline, reduced to nearly ½ of its peak population in the 1950s.

Which image of Chester will prevail — will the energy and excitement building up along the waterfront spread beyond the river bank and into a city desperate for change? Or will the city’s woes creep towards the newly christened stadium and tarnish the hoped-for revival? To be sure, the underlying issues are far more complex than simply being a public relations problem, but the tone of the news coverage in the weeks and months ahead will play an important role in determining which image of Chester will prevail.