Crisis Management – How to Appear Confident & Self-Assured, Even When You’re Not
Stereotypes are tough to challenge or break. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, executive director, school superintendent, hospital administrator, businessperson, consultant or one of a thousand other job titles, the usual, and unfortunate, model of gravitas and accomplishment is the 60-year-old, gray-haired male. Especially when it “hits the fan,” clients look for both the familiar, the trustworthy – […]
The Difference Between Tylenol and Volkswagen: The Imagination of Disaster
When someone added cyanide to Tylenol capsules in the Chicago area in 1982, killing seven people, Johnson & Johnson, owner of Tylenol was faced with an unprecedented crisis. How they handled that situation is still the gold standard for corporate crisis management. Today, the “gold standard” for how to not handle a crisis continues to be Volkswagen. […]
Online Comment Boards: Handling Negative Comments, How to Engage and Live to Tell About It
The second of two parts on how best to deal with online comments. Today: How to get involved and set the record straight. Previously: How to be prepared before the comments start. For years, as The Plain Dealer’s Online Editor, John Kroll spent time in the online comment boards attached to most news stories. He […]
The Jingeling Christmas Thing – How a Message Became a Tradition
[By Howard Fencl, APR] At our annual staff holiday luncheon this year, I did what I invariably do – dredge up a TV news war story and serve it up with our entrée. My TV news career stretches all the way back to 1978, so I have a few tales to tell. Because it’s the […]
Got Writer’s Block? 14 Writers Share How They Fight the Blank Screen
From Poynter: A few weeks ago I wrote about my bout with writer’s block, and how I needed a good “slap” to get over it. That got me thinking: how do other writers get over those moments (or hours) when the blank screen is so imposing? So I asked for advice from some very good […]
Florida Bar Laughs Off Nonsensical ‘Bar Complaint’
From TechDirt.com: Remember Patrick Zarrelli? Of course you do. He’s the dude bro, who claimed to run a “reputation management” service, who was hired by an attorney named Gary Ostrow to “clean up” his Google mentions. At issue were a bunch of blog posts from blogging lawyers mocking Ostrow’s ridiculous press release. Zarrelli seemed to […]
3 Ghosts of Crises Past — and Lessons Left Behind
[By Thom Fladung, Hennes Communications] Communications crises don’t take a holiday. We can’t predict what crises will break in the short time left in 2015, but is anyone willing to bet that there won’t be at least a few? And someone’s crisis probably will arrive at a profoundly inopportune time – say, the night of […]
Youthful Mistakes – and the Journalists Who Leap Upon Them
This is a memory I’ve successfully suppressed for years, but it came flooding back to me last week. When I was a college junior I submitted one of my short stories to the New Yorker. I don’t recall the specific story, but I remember it being well-received by my colleagues in our undergraduate workshop, which […]
The U.S. is Losing the Social Media War
From Time Magazine: Our adversaries are using our own technology against us—while we’re not allowed to use it to defend ourselves. Cyber or information-environment security is often in the news, yet most of our focus has been on theft of intellectual property, denial of service attacks, and assaults on personal privacy. Far less attention has […]
When an Icon Crashes, Is an Apology Enough?
[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, […]