Corporate Crisis Communications | Making the most of what to say when words mean the most.

When corporations and organizations deal with a crisis, contingency planning is required and is something that must be done long before the crisis hits.  As often is the case one manmade corporate crisis will cause a domino effect as was seen recent when Fidelity Investments sacked two executives on the heels of Hollywood’s latest sexual harassment epidemic.  However the two cases illustrate different contingency planning processes, the Hollywood studio had very little in the ways of succession planning for such crises whereas a stolid Boston bank was prepared to easily remove rogue players. When corporations and organizations deal with a crisis, contingency planning is required and is something that must be done long before the crisis hits.  As often is the case one manmade corporate crisis will cause a domino effect as was seen recent when Fidelity Investments sacked two executives on the heels of Hollywood’s latest sexual harassment epidemic.  However...

Another week and another communications nightmare emerges from the White House.  Of all the things CEO’s must do the most difficult has to be addressing the loss of a colleague, executive or member of a company.  Multiply that difficulty by 10 if you are the leader of the Free World and that loss is an active duty military member killed in action.  For the past few decades the call from the President of the United States to the Family would be a somber ritual devoid of partisan politics, drama and disdain, but nowadays that’s not the case with the latest Trumpian tantrum . Regardless of the specifics surrounding Trump’s recent call to the widow of a soldier killed in Niger - it isn’t hard to believe an unartful articulator-in-chief botched a routine Presidential duty.  On many levels he is a cautionary tale, but this latest debacle should hit home for any Communication Manager, PR Executive or Communications Graduate Student. Bereavement is brutal and it i...

Pamphlets, bulletin boards and broadsides are nothing new in the scrum of American politics; we have warred internally, with foreign powers and have struggled for centuries to find the balance of what makes us.  Do we stand or do we kneel, do we love it or leave it, do we protest or prostrate – all questions that have been stoked by an amateur band of “media” practitioners operating sans the benefit of editorial or peer review.  As facts emerge about last year’s Presidential election, evidence is slowly emerging that foreign powers would line Mark Zuckerberg’s pocket to frenzy the Soylent Green and sway an election. Social media are like no other media source, they can reach millions in an instant and activate people to move for good or bad.   The speed and reach social media have is greater than traditional media because it lacks an editorial board – people can say pretty much anything they want as long as it abides by broad user agreements and “codes of c...

News of hacked databases, email servers and financial institutions happen so often only the most egregious cases make headlines.  However, when they do occur, the scrutiny, attention and reputational damage brought about by such a breach can do real harm to a company.  Recently a breach of this magnitude occurred when Equifax determined 145 Million customer accounts were hacked after they failed to install security patches on their internal software. As bad as the breach itself, Equifax, a large credit reporting agency, did not contain the damage very well.  News accounts clearly showed that they ignored warnings from Federal agencies of their vulnerability and never adequately explained why or how this oversight could occur.  To add insult to injury, shortly after the news of the data breach was released, Equifax began an aggressive email campaign cross-selling their identity theft protection tools.  As bad as their tone-deaf response to why the hack ...