The week before last tech industry giant Hewlett-Packard announced its CEO, Mark Hurd, had resigned. A little digging revealed that he had falsified an expense report–clearly a transgression, but the consensus in the industry seems to be that it should not have cost him his job. A little more digging reveled a claim of sexual harassment.
Nonetheless, it was still just a claim.
This post from Engage PR, a boutique tech-focused agency in the bay area, breaks down a couple other factors to consider when evaluating the strategy of this announcement.
- Announcement came on a Friday afternoon
- The New York Times “blamed” the PR firm in the lede of its story
- HP needs to control the message by being proactive
- Part of being proactive is telling the whole story up front, lest you become a PR grease fire
Disclaimer: I wrote this post for my new agency’s blog. Rather than duplicating content here, I extracted my main points here and linked to the full post. Comment there if you wish, but this post is intended solely to spark discussion here on the PRSA-YP blog.