September is National Preparedness Month
[By Bruce Hennes, Hennes Communications] Thankfully, those of us who live in Ohio don’t have to cope with forest fires, earthquakes, tsunamis, droughts or hurricanes. Tornadoes? We get a few, but thankfully it’s usually decades between devastating twisters. Ohioans do get localized flooding, bridges do go out, fires happen – and if you give a […]
Jeni’s Ice Cream Issues an Apology
[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 […]
How to Proceed When Your Spokesperson is a Dud
[By Bruce Hennes, Hennes Communications] For decades, clients have come to Hennes Communications to learn how to communicate better with reporters, stakeholders and the public. The gold standard is when a speaker says the right thing and delivers it to their intended audience in an interesting, conversational manner. To do that, we often spend as much […]
Crisis Communications – How Not To Do It
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 […]