Throughout the 2016 Republican National Convention, the Cleveland Division of Police did a stellar job managing the crowds and conflict—all while reinforcing its actions and reassuring citizens on social media. Tensions ran high among both residents and convention attendees, but in addition to separating and protecting protestors, police also kept people informed online. Dispelling rumors […]
[By Bruce Hennes, Hennes Communications] Cleveland was certainly in the national spotlight last week when the Republican National Convention was held on the shore of Lake Erie. Tensions were high when the convention commenced on Monday, July 18, especially because of the shootings of the police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana just a few days […]
By Thom Fladung Hennes Communications The 2016 Republican National Convention hadn’t yet ended in Cleveland when the questions started from old friends in St. Paul, Minnesota. The first I noticed was a tweet from Rachel Stassen-Berger, the St. Paul Pioneer Press Capitol bureau chief, on the morning of July 21, the RNC’s final day: “Has […]
[by Howard Fencl, Hennes Communications] If you follow this newsletter or attend one of our crisis management and communications seminars, you understand the urgency of getting your side of the story out in the first media news cycle. If you’re not ready to quickly roll out your messages when a crisis strikes or an issue […]
The media love to tell “horse race” stories. And if you’ve been watching/reading about the presidential race over the last year, you’ve seen a lot of them. While horse race stories are certainly legitimate storytelling “frames,” we’re not sure democracy is best-served with an overabundance on that particular frame. From Poynter in a piece written by […]
When a police officer fatally shot her fiancé, Philando Castile, during a traffic stop in a Minnesota suburb, Diamond Reynolds responded the way she knew how: She calmly live-streamed the aftermath of the event, reciting on Facebook Live what happened in the car seat next to her. In doing so, she punctuated a national paradigm […]
[By Nora Jacobs, Hennes Communications] If you want a recent wonderful example of an organization doing well by doing good, you need look no further than West Virginia’s Greenbrier Resort, which was at the epicenter of that state’s recent historic flooding. West Virginia was declared a federal disaster area after torrential rains swept through the […]
Cameron Knight figured Saturday would be a good day to catch up on some weekend work. Barring any breaking news, he planned to finish a Memorial Day story and a piece on the anniversary of the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire. As the breaking news reporter at The Cincinnati Enquirer worked, he listened to the […]
A brand’s worst nightmare: product recall. For brands in the food industry, customers’ health and safety are on the line and any recall situation can turn bad. Every brand should treat a recall situation as a crisis – even if nothing bad has happened yet. Taking the right steps in a recall situation can help protect your […]
[by Howard Fencl] Here’s another wake-up call – in dollars and cents – for the many Pleistocene-era Luddites in organizations who treat social media as a newfangled afterthought in crisis management: U.S. ad spending on internet platforms will exceed ad buys on broadcast for the first time in 2017, according to a recent PwC report. […]