A standing joke we have with our doctor is to ask him who his doctor is. The assumption, of course, is that our doctor’s doctor just might be a wee bit smarter than our doctor. If you want to know who our doctor is, his name is Peter Sandman. Perhaps the most astute and thoughtful risk communications consultant in the […]
[By Nora Jacobs, Hennes Communications] The first car I ever owned was a ’57 Volkswagen that I bought for $100. Its most memorable features were a cloth sunroof and turn signals that flipped out of the side pillars like miniature wings. It was almost as fanciful as the Morris Minor I learned to drive on, […]
[By Thom Fladung, Hennes Communications] Saying “I’m sorry” can pay off – psychologically, because it’s the right thing to do, and literally, because it may get you or your business out of a tough spot while saving money and your reputation. Last month, I wrote about how an organization’s apologies also say a lot about […]
From our colleagues at CyberAlert: Should VW follow the standard PR/Legal Crisis Management Playbook? Wouldn’t you like to be a fly on the wall listening to discussions in the Volkswagen corporate headquarters about how to contain the fallout from the emissions testing scandal? You might imagine that VW executives are trying to develop strategies and […]
[By Thom Fladung, Hennes Communications] In 2010, The New York Times Magazine wrote about the explosion of public apologies – or, as the Times put it, the mea culpas, sometimes with very little mea. Back then, it was Gen. Stanley McChrystal, saying I’m sorry for talking ill of President Barack Obama in Rolling Stone and […]
[By Bruce Hennes, Hennes Communications] Earlier this year, Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream suffered through two bouts of listeria in their manufacturing plants, causing them to close their chain of retail stores until the problem was eliminated and they felt they could return product to the shelves with confidence. A few weeks ago, Jeni Britton Bauer […]
Matt Hodges-Long looks at the recent WHSmith ‘data breach’ story and explains how the retailer could have better handled its crisis communications. At approximately 00:17 on September 2nd the well-known British retailer WHSmith started to erroneously email its customers email addresses and telephone numbers to other customers in its database. We don’t know when WHSmith were […]
[By Howard Fencl, APR] In the ongoing story of the Duggar family sex abuse scandal, the TLC cable television network on Thursday, July 16 announced that “after thoughtful consideration, TLC and the Duggar family have decided to not move forward with 19 Kids and Counting. The show will no longer appear on the air.” The […]
[By Nora Jacobs, APR] When news of the Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream recall first broke in April, we lauded the company’s communication response . (If you missed that post, you can access it here.) We watched reports of the crisis in the following weeks and could only imagine what was going on within the company […]
For our money, we think Mary Long, writing for Digital Media Ghost, was 100% on-target when she wrote: “NBC could’ve easily fired its anchor, as credibility is inarguably key to the role, and he’s already admitted guilt. The cost to fire him wouldn’t be insignificant, of course, but it would be much less than the […]