[By Thom Fladung/Hennes Communications] In the years I was helping run newsrooms, one of my least favorite experiences was being in the news. Odd sounding, I know, in that I spent 33 years putting people, businesses and other organizations in the news. Hypocritical? Perhaps. Almost always, though, if one of my newspapers was in […]
By Thom Fladung/Hennes Communications Any business leader who’s been caught in a hailstorm of criticism after an internal matter went viral must have had a surge of schadenfreude watching the Google diversity memo controversy. Google leadership was immersed in a crisis over an internal memo in large part because, well, people could Google it. Beyond […]
By Thom Fladung, Hennes Communications The Court of Public Opinion is now in session. In fact, it’s always in session – on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media outlets. The practice of litigation communications or litigation public relations is young, as legal and communications matters go, emerging in the early 1980s, according to many […]
By Thom Fladung, Hennes Communications The axe that hovered for weeks finally fell on Wednesday as 21st Century Fox announced that Bill O’Reilly would not be returning to Fox News Channel, the cable news outlet O’Reilly helped build, in the wake of a string of explosive sexual harassment claims, broken by the New York Times. […]
[By Thom Fladung, Hennes Communications] Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Your reputation is at risk on Twitter and the risk may be triggered by the President of the United States of America. Of course you’ve heard that one. You’ve probably seen the tweets and the stories that followed about New Balance and Nordstrom and Toyota […]
By Hennes Communications Welcome to the Golden Age of confirmation bias. An ancient phenomenon, confirmation bias — the tendency of people to seek out information and points of view they agree with – has references stretching back to Greek historians. As we wrote about a year ago, confirmation bias and its close cousin “the backfire […]
[By Thom Fladung, Hennes Communications] The internet has democratized communications, allowing for a free flow of information unlike anything we’d ever imagined. The power once exclusive to big publishers and media moguls now is held by individuals, who can reach thousands of readers in an instant. And you can thank Section 230 of the Communications Decency […]
[By Thom Fladung, Hennes Communications] How fast is social media at reporting on events – including events that your organization might consider a crisis? Faster than you. Consider a situation involving a school in Westfield, N.Y., that we stumbled upon. Here’s the first paragraph of a story from the Westfield Republican: “Parents need to realize that […]
[By Stephanie York, Hennes Communications] Legal cases in the court of law take a long time to develop, file and litigate – years in many instances. Cases often move at an agonizingly slow pace … through written discovery, motions, depositions and court appearances. The Court of Law is intentionally methodical, governed by strict rules, and overseen […]
[By Thom Fladung, Hennes Communications] At Hennes Communications, we often tell clients that they have an attorney for the Court of Law. But they have us for the Court of Public Opinion. And those two courts often require different – and at times conflicting – strategies. Attorneys have persuasive arguments for tailoring a strategy completely around […]