[By Nora Jacobs, Hennes Communications] This past weekend provided the crisis communications profession with a Petri dish-like opportunity to study the way two almost identical organizations managed two almost identical situations less than two weeks apart. If we had devised an experiment using the scientific method, we probably could not have created a more precise […]
[by Howard Fencl, Hennes Communications] A video recently removed from Facebook shows law enforcement officers violently removing a passenger on a United Airlines flight from Chicago to Louisville right before takeoff. The flight was overbooked, and a United crew of four needed seats so they could get to Louisville, where they had a flight to work. Passengers […]
From our colleague, Richard Levick: Fox News’ slipshod handling of sexual harassment charges against former CEO Roger Ailes and über commentator Bill O’Reilly should serve as an object lesson for companies caught in Trump-era klieg lights — not to mention the indirect light these crises shed on their sponsors. In an era of one-party rule and […]
From Adele Cehrs, writing in Ragan’s PRDaily: Several large companies have taken out expensive ads apologizing for bad behavior. Over the last year, Samsung, Under Armour and Deutsche Bank have all issued full-page mea culpas in prestigious publications. Reasons include missteps by a spokesperson, an attempt to control the narrative and choosing to avoid a […]
By Nora Jacobs, Hennes Communications If you watched mainstream news early this week, or had your news feed set to the right coordinates, you no doubt saw that United Airlines became the latest victim of a Tweet storm on Sunday, after attendants on a flight from Denver to Minneapolis refused to allow two girls to […]
If you’ve ever attended one of our seminars on crisis management, we often talk about the power of apology. Real apologies; apologies that are authentic and true; apologies without qualification or the use of “weasel words” (e.g. “mistakes were made”). Perhaps no industry does apology better AND worse than the health care industry (hospitals, nursing homes, […]
From The Wall Street Journal & Deloitte: Engaging employees can have a significant impact on an organization’s ability to anticipate, prepare for and respond to an incident. Nonetheless, nearly one-third (29.8%) of respondents in a recent poll of more than 3,900 professionals believe that employees may be the most overlooked stakeholder when their organization is […]
From The Wall Street Journal Risk & Compliance Journal and Deloitte: At what point does business-as-usual turn into a corporate crisis? It’s not always clear, and executives might treat the first signs of a crisis—not realizing the magnitude—with complacency. Confounded by stress responses and human behavioral factors, an organization can lose precious time if executives […]
By Fiona Parker & Alec Peck: Data breaches are now so common that it’s hard to keep up. In any given week there are reports of attacks across all sectors and geographies. At the time of writing the Yahoo! data breach could potentially involve up to a mind boggling 1 billion users. By the time […]
[By Stephanie York, J.D., Hennes Communications] Companies and other organizations limit liability by insuring most, if not all, of their assets: buildings, furniture, vehicles, the health of employees, the health of visitors and more. And while some insurance policies now offer “crisis communications coverage,” allowing the insured to engage the services of a specialized firm like […]