New Crisis Management Book: The Essential Crisis Communications Plan

Crisis Communications Plan

The Essential Crisis Communications Plan
Simplifies Creation of Customized Crisis Management Plan

Crisis and Issues Management Veteran Tim O’Brien Condenses Decades
of  Crisis Management Experience into a Real-time, Step-by-Step Handbook

Pittsburgh, PA, August 2, 2023 – Crisis communications and issues management veteran Tim O’Brien’s new book, The Essential Crisis Communications Plan: A Crisis Management Process that Fits Your Culture, is unique in the world of communications-centric books in that it is an actual crisis management plan readers can quickly adapt to their own operating cultures.… Read the rest

Remembering Camp Ketchum

Ketchum

During the ten years I spent at global PR firm Ketchum, one of the things I benefited from was the firm’s commitment to professional development. In addition to gaining the experience of working with some of the world’s leading companies and organizations as clients, on some of their more challenging problems, if you worked for Ketchum, you knew you were an investment.… Read the rest

Media Relations: The Best Clients I Never Got

Media Relations

When interviewing for what would have been one of my first PR jobs, the CEO of a hospital asked me who I knew in local media. She wanted to find out if I brought a network to the job that would help her organization. Because I had worked in radio, TV and newspapers prior to this, while I knew most everyone in town, I also knew that didn’t matter.… Read the rest

March Reminds Me of the Need to Act

St. Patrick's Day

March is a month of birthdays in my growing family, so much so, that we now combine the celebration of a bunch of birthdays into one day. Of course, March 17th is Saint Patrick’s Day, always an important day on the calendar in my family since I was a kid. But as I’ve said before, not as important as July 4th, from a love-of-country point of view.… Read the rest

Tech Workers: Nothing is Off the Record

media coaching

With all of the recent media attention on Silicon Valley, layoffs, economic troubles and oftentimes rogue employees talking to reporters, I came across something called the Tech Worker Handbook, which apparently is an online guide to help tech workers navigate media relations, legal issues, surveillance, and telling their own stories to the media or others.… Read the rest

Public Relations: How to Use Tactics to Get to Strategy

PR Strategy

Back when I worked at The Big Agency, I as in charge of the executive visibility program for the CEO of a major national consulting firm.  We had established a general strategy, a message platform, complete with over-arching themes, and had built the program primarily around two tactical areas: speeches and bylined articles.

To any experienced public relations pro, this is nothing fancy.… Read the rest

Five Ways to Change Someone’s Mind

persuasion

For as long as I’ve been in the business of public relations, the Holy Grail of communication is being able to change someone’s mind. To persuade that person.

To be sure, there are no full-proof techniques or magic tricks, but it is possible. As you might suspect, there are a couple of foundational ingredients you need before you can do so.… Read the rest

Public Relations: Don’t Just Articulate…Resonate

PR messaging

One of the more common problems I’ve seen when it comes to public relations messaging is that while many messages tend to contain all of the right information and make all the right points, they don’t resonate with people.

More to the point, their creators are great at articulation, but they don’t know how to make those same messages relatable to the targeted audiences.… Read the rest