Hyatt Hotels is making all the wrong moves in its PR disaster that is spreading across the country.
The Hyatt Regency Boston, the Hyatt Regency Cambridge, and the Hyatt Harborside fired 98 housekeepers on Aug. 31, replacing them with $8-an-hour employees from Hospitality Staffing Solutions. Many had been cleaning rooms at the chain’s hotels for more than 20 years and earned about $15 an hour.
The criticism unleashed at Hyatt Hotels has been unrelenting and merciless, fueled through social media channels. The Consumerist, Executive Nomad, and the Harvard Business Review (Lessons From Hyatt: Simple Ways to Damage Your Brand)  have weighed in, along with national news outlets, since the story broke on Sept. 17. Facebook groups have cropped up to “Save the Hyatt 100.’ On Tuesday, Massachussetts Governor Deval Patrick threatened a government boycott of the hotel chain. Taxi drivers are boycotting Hyatt and the protests have spread to Chicago.
Hyatt originally stonewalled any inquiries into its actions. Lately they have become belligerent in fighting what they consider outside intrusions into their business affairs. Public relations cannot fix a company or right wrongs. In this case, top Hyatt executives who are calling the shots are doing deep damage to the brand and probably costing the company many millions over the pittance they are saving over the ’Hyatt 100.’Â
USA TODAY: Reader to Hyatt Hotels: “Shame on you” for outsourcing housekeepers
“I understand first-hand how difficult it is to manage through the current economic challenges without compounding the disruptions the times have caused,’’ Massachussetts Governor Deval Patrick wrote. “But surely there is some way to retain the jobs for your housekeeping staffs, as other hotels have done, and to work with them to help the company meet its current challenges, rather than tossing them out unceremoniously to fend for themselves while the people they trained take their jobs at barely livable wages.’’
Hyatt faces other challenges: Union workers stage sit-in to protest cuts to Hyatt’s health insurance coverage
LaFrances Rowell, 26, is taking chemotherapy for breast cancer and is supporting three children, ages 1, 2 and 7, but it was no question that she would join 194 other unionized hotel workers and their supporters in sitting in the street Thursday at the height of rush hour in front of the Park Hyatt hotel on North Michigan Avenue. The union workers are protesting Hyatt Corp.’s attempt to negotiate cuts in their health-insurance coverage. They also fear other hotels will follow Hyatt’s lead.
Twitter scams are proliferating like wildfire on the Net- 100FOLLOWERS A DAY! they promise – and this one, 
The rapid demise of traditional media is fueling a new media stream, most notably on Twitter, chronicling day-by-day media death blows. The merciless axe fell today on Conde Nast’s slick business mag Portfolio, launched two years ago during boom times with lots of fanfare and a big budget. Peter Kafka, wsj.com ‘All Things Digital’ 
I have a bad habit of waking at four in the morning, stumbling to my computer and scanning the news. Something, somewhere, is happening in the middle of the night and I need to know what it is before I can go back to sleep. It’s the digital insomnia syndrome. When I am afflicted, increasingly these days I head to 
That’s the message you’re supposed to get from the cover of the New Yorker that has the Obama campaign PR machine in a tizzy over how to react. I am a New Yorker, not necessarily a New Yorker reader. To me, the cover is obviously satirical and not much more radical than some previous New Yorker covers, so what’s the big deal?
Thomas Jefferson is believed to be the first to coin the term “public relations” in 1807, during the seventh annual address to the joint session of the U.S. Congress. Jefferson faced rising aggressions with the British that would eventually lead to war. As the third President of a fledgling republic Jefferson understood that public perception was critical to success of a mass ideal and managing relations with constituents was a key component to his job.
Much is underway at the new Murdoch-owned Dow Jones: Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones staffers will be consolidated at the News Corp. building in midtown Manhattan, 
snag a wider audience. The Wall Street Journal, along with USA Today, is truly a national newspaper that is not anchored to one locale (Wall Street being a state of mind). The New York Times has made a play for national prominence through a distribution agreement with Starbucks but it will always be perceived as a New York paper.
other words and concepts. It produces diagrams reminiscent of a neural net so you learn how words associate. Fun, for anyone in PR who still writes.
