Author: moneknows

#PRFAIL: NAVAL YARD TRAGEDY HAS SOUTH FLORIDA IT CONTRACTOR CONNECTION – While this is the time that I normally devote my blog to the month of Fashion Week events in New York, London, Milan and Paris, I had to take a pause from the fashion world to do a post on an example of how a PR release can make a horrible situation worse.

Most employment in IT is contractual as it is temporary in nature. The scenario usually is a company has an IT related issue that needs a solution. The company doesn’t have a high enough level of IT expertise in-house or does not want to have the expense of having an onsite IT department, so they do a call for vendors and contract out for the provider of the solution. The contractor who they select, in turn, subcontracts out to a staffing agency for the actual employee needed to work on the solution. Once that solution has been achieved or there is a reduced need for service, there is no need for that IT worker any longer. This cycle of contracting is proof that the days of having one job you work for entire professional career are way over.

In this case, the Naval Yard Tragedy, Hewlett Packard, the computer provider for the Naval Yard, has fired one their subcontractors, South Florida based The Experts for what they is the Experts failure to properly vet Aaron Alexis, the Navy Yard shooter.

The Experts, of course, says they did meet “contractual obligations” and should not be held at fault. The full press release is here.

Immediately after reading it , anyone can ascertain that a tragedy of this level should not have a snarky, cold sounding, formulaic press release that gives off gigantic, tsunami like waves of defensiveness.

The bottom line is there is more than enough blame to pass around and concentrating assigning blame is counter-productive. The goal of good PR is to transform a bad situation into a situation that is transformative in a positive way.

Hopefully, other IT staffing companies will pay heed, check on their checks and balances and pay more attention to PR.