If you’re in charge of a business of any size right now, outside of the health and well-being of everyone you know, the one thing that’s on your mind is how your company is going to come out of the current quarantine … or if it will come out of it.
In politics, there is a saying that all politics are local.… Read the rest
One of the biggest mistakes I ever made in the business of communications happened to me when I was a young account executive at a global PR firm. My client was the CEO of a logistics company. To describe him as tough-as-nails would be an understatement.
He’d taken on investor groups, regulators, unions and competitors with a bare-knuckle approach to business.… Read the rest
If you haven’t noticed by now, there’s an advertiser boycott template and it goes like this. Activists select a television show, a radio program, a network, or a show host to boycott, and then they wait for something they can use as a justification for the boycott they have planned all along.
The goal is to get the show cancelled, the host fired and an opposition voice silenced.… Read the rest
It’s been a few weeks now, and I’ve seen the usual pattern among some PR consultants in various media taking Boeing to task.
I’ll get to the predictable PR narrative in a second, but if you need an update on the situation, there have been two plane crashes in the past five months that have been blamed for missing certain safety technologies on the Boeing 737 Max, a successor to the highly common Boeing 737 aircraft.… Read the rest
In my experience, clients who’ve already come under attack by activists and the media before tend to be more understanding of the situation than you might expect. They are usually much more open to counsel, and they also tend to be more accountable and transparent than they are portrayed.
On the other hand, I’ve also had the chance to work with some organizations that until a particular crisis situation, they had been considered media darlings.… Read the rest
Let’s say your organization doesn’t have a Facebook page or a Twitter presence. You may assume you probably can’t get into trouble on social media. Such an assumption would be a mistake. Here is a quick rundown on five ways in which social media could erupt to bite you if you are not prepared:
What do you do if a resident of an assisted living facility “elopes” and no one can find him? Or when caregivers are accused of possibly mistreating patients and residents?
These are just two of the hypothetical scenarios we had to address recently when we helped an assisted living facility update its crisis communications plan and conduct media coaching for senior leadership.… Read the rest
If you Google the term “social media crisis,” or even the term, “brand crisis,” you’ll probably find no shortage of advice columns or online videos on how to see your organization through a crisis. Typically, the authors or presenters are social media experts or marketing gurus.
What they usually are not are crisis communications veterans. In all too many cases, they may not have even handled a single crisis for a client.… Read the rest
When it comes to the media and protestors alike, protests can be big business.
Media coverage of protests tends to generate consistently high ratings, page clicks and readership, which attracts more ad revenue. And when it comes to the protests themselves, in an increasing number of cases there is more than meets the eye. In some instances there is the stated reason for the protest, such as a common environmental or a safety concern, and then the unstated reasons that may better explain why someone was willing to make an investment of thousands if not millions of dollars to prop up the protestors.… Read the rest