Category Archives: opinion and insights

Spin is Dead. Long Live Crisis PR.

I must heap praise on my colleagues at Ketchum’s Global Corporate Practice for their insights made available through the 2013 Ketchum Leadership Communication Monitor.  Apparently, there are nearly 70,000 books available on leadership.  Yet, their work supplies much-needed data on the role of communications in leadership.

The Monitor covers much ground, but here I will stick to my knitting and probe its crisis management implications.

 

 KLCM:  Leaders are continuing to underperform on the very behaviors viewed as the most important to effective leadership – open, transparent communication, leading by example, admitting mistakes and handling controversial issues calmly.

J.D.:  In other words – spin doesn’t work.  As the findings suggest, good crisis PR usually applies a healthy dose of openness, leadership, humility and confidence.

 

Continue reading Spin is Dead. Long Live Crisis PR.

Who Owns Crisis Management?

I hope this is an obvious point — reputation management is just one facet of broader strategic crisis management.

Communications pros play an important part in the broader system, along with those in business continuity planning (BCP, which is a focus on minimizing business disruption), risk management (often a combination of insurance, legal, regulatory and fiduciary risk), and incident/security management (typically a focus on environmental, health, safety and security risks).

Which discipline should supersede and own this process?   Well, none.

A company’s senior leadership is ultimately responsible for a crisis – they own the system, whether they like it or not.  Sadly, far too many of these leaders adopt crisis management systems that cover only one or some of these disciplines. Continue reading Who Owns Crisis Management?

Don’t Die on the Vine

I’m far from being a technology early-adopter, but I think that Twitter’s Vine might catch on.  The service allows users to shoot only six-second audio/video clips, which are looped and can be shared through social media.  Its ease and forced brevity makes sense, since I believe people prefer a six-second update on some things, versus a longer YouTube clip.

If a picture is worth 1,000 words, well then a Vine must be worth 6,000.  Marketers, media  and celebrities are already swinging on the Vine.  Agencies like Ketchum are providing guidance.  And clever members of the public are already showing how artistic the medium can be.

Will the service spread and menace like kuzdu, or become an irritant like poison oak?  Time will tell.  Either way, the service may already have implications in accelerating crisis management situations and helping manage these situations.

In the spirit of the service, here are only six quick examples: Continue reading Don’t Die on the Vine

Online Crises: Only Six Social Solutions?

There is a lot involved in the decision-making process to determine how to manage a social media threat.   But for all of the required complexity, there’s typically only six solutions to choose from:  delete it, ignore it, monitor it, redirect it, respond to it or engage deeply on it.  

For a deeper perspective on this, check out my article placed in the Fall edition of The Public Relations Strategist, the quarterly publication of PRSA. Continue reading Online Crises: Only Six Social Solutions?

3 Categories of Social Media Risk

Are there particular industries or companies that attract a larger portion of “social media risk” than others?

A colleague of mine recently asked that question and I thought I would share a version of my response.

Rather than focus on vertical industries or specific brands/companies, it might be more instructive to look at three different categories of the types of anger or scrutiny that can snowball when pushed downhill by digitally networked communities. Here are three that I see regularly:

Continue reading 3 Categories of Social Media Risk