It’s becoming fashionable to take a bite out of Apple. There was Jean-Louis Gassée’s scathing article in the Guardian. There was Jon Gruber (of Daring Fireball) damning Apple with faint praise: blaming the media for cherrypicking the news to weave a narrative about Apple’s slow demise. I expect the chorus to grow louder before it weakens. Blood in the water, and all that.

Apple doesn’t do itself many favors. Its trenchant secrecy used to seem cool – and I daresay it would still be considered cool – if not for the fact that a) competitive technologies are legitimately “catching up” to the iDevices and, b) the company’s accounting tricks seem increasingly slinky and mean-spirited.

Bloomberg reported: “Apple avoided as much as $9.2 billion in taxes by financing part of a $55 billion stock buyback with debt rather than offshore cash that would have been billed by the U.S. government.”

Juxtapose that legal money laundering with the typical mindset of the prototypical iConsumer. I daresay most of Apple’s biggest fans are Obama supporters, and certainly the media tastemakers skew more liberal. At some point the corporate accounting chicanery will sound a discordant note that continues to toll. “These guys at Apple? These are not good guys. They are not pro-American. They’d go to any length to avoid paying taxes that would benefit America’s defense, infrastructure and education. And worst of all, sin above all sins: their tech is now only on-par with everybody else.”

In other words: not cool. Not anymore.

What do you do about this if you work at Apple PR?

Find out my suggestions on the SHIFT Communications blog.

Todd Defren
SHIFT CEO

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When we sat around a conference table and battled through the process of defining our values a few years ago, SHIFT changed as an organization – we now had criteria that helped us define what it meant to be a SHIFTer and helped guide us through decisions, whether it was about our people, clients or services. We had a roadmap in a way we never had one before – sure, the instinct had been there, but now it was tangible and the fact that those values have lived far beyond a poster on a wall, is something we all take tremendous pride in as an organization.

Want to see what we did with those values? Read the rest on the SHIFT blog and join us as we celebrate the first 10 years of the agency’s life, with many, many more to come!

Over on the SHIFT blog, we’re looking at the strategy for extinguishing the fires when your brand is ablaze. Knowledge, speed, and ownership are the three keys that will help you get things under control quickly with effective crisis communications.

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Measuring PR and earned media has always been something of a challenge in the past, but thanks to digital marketing and metrics tools, it’s easier today to find the impact of PR, even with businesses that have significant offline components. In this series on the SHIFT blog, we’re looking at 7 different ways to see how PR is improving the performance of your digital marketing and sales programs for organizations of all kinds. Take a look at the whole series, just finished today:

1. Sales/business goals
2. Marketing metrics
3. Social media
4. Search marketing
5. Paid advertising
6. Primary research
7. Standard media metrics
8. Analysis and conclusion

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