Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

There are always potential problems which you can mitigate using a proactive PR campaign.

An example is the Oracle/PeopleSoft stuff going on over the past year or so. As soon as Oracle announced that they planned to buy them, PeopleSoft's customers became concerned that Oracle would not maintain the PeopleSoft products. This is reported to have had an impact on PeopleSoft's sales. And it made it challenging for PeopleSoft to hire top talent (and they risked an increase in staff jumping ship). This was a takeover, not a merger, so was not as amicable a combination of companies as yours is, but is good as an example of what could happen.

External - What happens to each company's products, do the customer contact points change, how the changes will affect the customer, etc. are all items which need to be communicated. This doesn't necesarily have to be a traditional PR campaign with press releases and such, but could be a communications campaign using your internal lists or just putting a process in palce for the contact points within your customer to go out and contact the customers and let them know what is hapenning.

Internal - the impact on each employee. If there will be layoffs, don't beat around the bush - announce, do it, and move on - this wil allow gthe remaining employees to stop worrying and get back to work.