Any business, at one point, will face some sort of a public relations crisis and the way you respond can either give you a much-needed image boost or significantly damage your brand, ultimately alienating your customer base and business partners. Especially in this day and age, when news goes viral almost instantly, organizations need to […]
Chris Britton writes: Target is a great place to shop. I love going there, and I bet many of you do too. But I also find the company fascinating because over the past few years it has provided huge debating points for those of us who make a living managing issues and crises. Until United […]
A Conversation on Company Crisis Preparedness with former Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis, from Boss Magazine — Every business leader thinks and rethinks their business strategy, weighing the strengths, analyzing the weaknesses, pondering the opportunities and scrutinizing the threats. But when it comes to a company crisis, how many are applying that same due […]
From Michael M. Grynbaum at the New York Times: “I’m sorry.” Two simple words, not so simply said. On Wednesday, the public representatives of two embattled American institutions — United Airlines and the White House — found themselves on national television grappling with a delicate and increasingly common ritual of the corporate and political worlds: […]
By Stan Carey: Writing in 2012 about the nature of apologies, I said that being sorry is about more than just saying the words, “but the words, as an explicit admission of wrongdoing or shortcoming, can be an important part of reconciliation.” With a non-apology the aims and effects are wholly different. The person delivering […]
From Deloitte: No matter the crisis—a billion-euro loss, a breach that leaves millions of customer records at risk or a major airline accident with the CEO on board—organizations can take steps to weather the storm, according to Jeremy Smith, global leader of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited’s Crisis Management practice. But instead of aiming merely for […]
[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 […]
From the Wall Street Journal’s Risk & Compliance Journal: No matter the crisis—a billion-euro loss, a breach that leaves millions of customer records at risk or a major airline accident with the CEO on board—organizations can take steps to weather the storm, according to Jeremy Smith, global leader of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited’s Crisis Management […]
[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 […]