 Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
Perhaps you noticed that there was a screwup at the Oscars last night. Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty announced that “La La Land” had won the Academy Award for Best Picture . . . and then had to backtrack, because there was a mistake. “Moonlight” was the actual winner.
After the mistake, many people behaved graciously. In what has to be the most heartbreaking moment of his career, “La La Land” producer Jordan Horowitz realized he didn’t receive his first Oscar, and then beckoned the producers of “Moonlight” to come on stage. Warren Beatty explained why he’d made the mistake — he’d gotten the wrong envelope.
But who was responsible for the screwup? It was PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the accounting firm that counts the votes and determines the winners.
PriceWaterhouseCooper’s statement is a model apology. Here’s PwC’s statement just after the event...
Donald Trump made piggish comments about women to Billy Bush, the cohost of Access Hollywood, in 2005. NBC released the video yesterday. The video makes clear that, at least in 2005, Trump considered bedding women as sort of a video game, one he plays to win with wealth and power. As Republicans began to distance themselves from the comments — and some from Trump — Trump apologized. His apology is a case study in how not to apologize. Here are some qualities of sincere apologies. - You take responsibility for what you did. - You are specific. - You don’t talk about how you got caught and whether that is fair. - You apologize directly to the people you hurt .- You find or offer ways to make amends. - You don’t justify why what you did is ok. - You don’t go off topic to avoid talking about what happened. Trump’s apology fails on every single element....
Nike has suspended the eight-year, $70-million contract it renewed in 2010 with tennis star Maria Sharapova after she announced yesterday that she had failed a doping test taken during the Australia Open in January, where she advanced to the quarterfinals. Porsche this morning said that is will “postpone planned activities” with the 28-year-old, Russian-born athlete. And Swiss watchmaker Tag Heuer said it would not renew a deal with Sharapova that expired at the end of 2015.
The banned substance in her system, meldonium, is a drug manufactured in Latvia that is not legally available in the United States. Sharapova said her family doctor had prescribed it for her a decade ago for several health issues. She admitted she had received an email on Dec. 22 announcing the ban but said she had not clicked through on the link....
Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn is gone. But on his way out the door, he described the company’s massive, deliberate fraud on his customers and the environment as an “irregularity.” That’s bullshit.
Here’s what happened: Volkswagen jiggered the software in 11 million of its diesel cars to conceal how much they polluted. “Clean Diesel” is a pillar of Volkswagen’s marketing. (My link is to a cached copy; for some reason, the original Volkswagen “Clean Diesel” page is no longer visible.)
Here’s an English translation of the video statement from Winterkorn, made Tuesday before he resigned under pressure. Bold italic indicates questionable terms and passive voice; the text in brackets is my commentary:...
A few years ago, my team and I were launching a leadership development program for a client. Just before we launched the pilot program, the company was hit with a high-profile scandal. A couple of rogue executives were caught playing around with the company’s finances and millions of dollars went missing. The ensuing scandal rocked this once-great company, leaving its reputation in tatters. The executives were charged.
When we kicked off the pilot session a few months later, the scandal quickly became the elephant in the room. It was clear the participants needed a forum to express their personal views on those events. We could feel their deep-seated anger, and we realized we had to bring it out into the open.
After hundreds of workers were killed in Turkey's worst-ever mining accident, Turkey's prime minister sought to downplay the disaster.
...Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan did a few things right in his response. He visited the site, comforted victims, and, according to The Telegraph, he “promised the tragedy would be investigated to its ‘smallest detail’ and that ‘no negligence will be ignored.’”
But then he violated a basic rule of crisis communications that must be adhered to when fatalities are involved....
The 5C’s of crisis communications detail the five critical traits all executives and spokespersons must convey during their press conferences and interviews.
I’ve written before about the dangers of uttering “quotes of denial,” in which the word “not” is placed immediately before a negative noun or adjective. The problem is that the defensive-sounding negative word or phrase tends to linger longer in the public memory than the word “not.”
So when Chris Christie uttered the phrase “I am not a bully” during his marathon press conference on Thursday, I knew it would be used against him. Sure enough, here’s the cover from this weekend’s USA Today Weekend...
“Many studies have already shown how important crisis management is for organizations,” Hong said. “This study shows that Facebook can be a valuable tool for public relations professionals when working to solve or lessen the severity of a crisis. Because Facebook is very personal for its users, well-thought-out crisis management messages can be effective at reaching users on a personal level, which is a powerful way to persuade people to a cause.”
Hong also found that Facebook posts written in a narrative style were more effective than posts written in a non-narrative format. Narrative style is chronological and focuses more on story-telling rather than fact listing.
“This indicates that the effect of narrative tone in organizational statements during crises increases perceived conversational human voice, which represents a high level of engagement and best communicates trust, satisfaction, and commitment to the audience,” Hong said. “This is an important practice for public relations professionals because perceptions that an organization is sincerely trying to provide timely and accurate information during a crisis can lead to not only more favorable attitudes toward the organization, but also perceptions of less responsibility the organization has for causing the crisis.”...
Twitter‘s tweets-per-second numbers are usually fairly stable, with spikes happening here and there to varying degrees depending on what is trending and happening in the real world. On August 3, however, it had an unusually high per-second tweet peak – so high, in fact, that it set a new record for the social network. Now Twitter has posed the details on what happened complete with some bragging about its user experience.
The flood of tweets originated from Japan during a showing of Castle in the Sky, with viewers so enthused about what they were watching that tweets reached a sort of rapid crescendo, peaking out at 143,199 in a single second. This is in contrast to the average per-second rate the microblogging website sees of 5,700....
Allow me a moment of nostalgia for the classic liveblog. “Liveblogging” was this thing we used to do before the rise of Twitter and Storify, much like good old-fashioned blogging itself. You’d have a host and a bunch of guests all watching the same Web page together, and for an hour or so, they’d make magic.
I should confess: every now and then, I get a hankering for some of that old magic. I pour some good wine, dust off a CoverItLive console, and invite some friends over.* And every time I do, I’m reminded why genuine liveblogging — real-time, browser-based liveblogging — is still one of my favorite instruments in the modern journalism toolkit. I highly recommend it to you, for reasons I outline below. And I’ll also give you some pointers on how to do it....
So, you set out to create a website, accessible to the public, aimed at helping your employees budget. You have hopes of helping them out, but let’s be real here, you’re also looking to grab you some good PR in the process. Once you get started, however, you realize that there is no way a typical employee at your organization makes enough to live on, even with a second job, and leaving out minor expenses like food, water, and clothing…because those are luxury items, right?
Most of us would scrap the project on the spot, but not McDonald’s! The company, which has already run into a few stumbling blocks while getting acquainted with how the modern web works, must not have thought it was a problem because they went live. As could be expected, the company took a beating in the media, largely as result of the buzz generated following video, from the activists at Low Pay is Not Okay:
Just about every plan we put together these days includes aspects of social media crisis management. Presenting a variety of platforms and utilities that are perfect for communications, reputation management, monitoring stakeholder sentiment and a host of other specialized uses.
Add to that the fact that your audience is all but guaranteed to be both talking about and searching for information on your crisis via social media, and the question of whether to use social for your next crisis management campaign becomes a no-brainer.
|
Despite the enormous value social media yield governments in communicating with citizens, there is scant research on the extent to which local governments are actually using social media for crisis communication efforts. As local governments continue to face diminishing budgets stretched time, and human, and fiscal resources even for the management of daily operations, it is imperative to reveal how social media can maximize efficiency in crisis management. In addition, given the extraordinary growth in social media use over the past few years, it is also important to evaluate if and how governments are using this technology to communicate with publics during crisis and incorporating it into their crisis communication plans.
Using survey data collected from more than 300 local government officials from municipalities across the United States, this study examined social media use in a relatively unexplored context, local governments. It specifically addressed the adoption and use of social media tools for crisis communication and social media’s part in managing a crisis. Results indicate the extent of social media use, but not the number of tools used, is positively associated with local city officials’ assessments of their ability to control a crisis situation as well as their overall evaluations of the strength of their responses.
In September 2015 the Environmental Protection Agency found that many Volkswagen cars sold in the United States were equipped with software that could falsely improve the performance of diesel engines on emissions tests. This cheating was subsequently acknowledged by the car maker.Among the many issues at stake for the company was one of public perception. Anecdotal evidencate at the time of the incident suggested irreparable harm to the Volkswagen brand. So could Volkswagen recover in the short term in this regard? And, the broader question, how can you measure brand perception in times of scandal, particularly in an era where social media can cause negative news to proliferate and reverberate over time? In the absence of direct empirical evidence, we wanted to find a way to tackle this important issue. We began our research with some key questions: How does social media sentiment change as a consequence of a public relations crisis? How does the public react to recovery efforts initiated by the company? How do topics of conversation shift as a consequence of a brand scandal and subsequent recovery efforts?...
The diesel emissions nightmare at Volkswagen continues unabated as the German government orders the company to recall 2.4 million vehicles next year. To recap, the company has admitted to cheating on emissions tests on up to 11 million diesel vehicles worldwide. The global CEO has resigned, the new North American head departed before even starting, its share value has dropped by over 30% and VW Group sales have plummeted.
Some estimates say this could cost the company in the region of 35 billion euros, and all but destroy the consumer market for diesel vehicles.
This scenario has all the makings of a classic PR crisis, but so far most would consider VW’s communications efforts a fail. Weeks into the scandal consumers who purchased one of the diesel vehicles still do not know what, if any action they should take. Dealers are left scrambling on the front lines without the facts or even a narrative on VW plans. For employees, suppliers and shareholders there is also confusion around how the corporate parent plans to navigate through the crisis. Lawyers smell blood and are circling both in North America and Europe....
So how important is it to make sure that your corporate website – and therefore your crisis communications home base – is mobile-friendly? Pretty important.
And I’m not the only one who thinks so, Google thinks so as well.
Google has actually started to penalize websites that don’t provide mobile users with a mobile-friendly experience. This means that, in (and out of) a crisis, if your website is not mobile-friendly, not only are you making it harder for your stakeholders to navigate through your site and easily read your communications, but Google may be penalizing your website’s search engine rankings....
Filed under: The most WTF thing we've seen in months.
Urban Outfitters, purveyor of clothing and home goods, big-ass floppy hats and occasionally offensive T-shirts, has outdone itself with this product on its website—a "vintage" Kent State University sweatshirt featuring fake blood splatters.
In 1970, the Ohio National Guard fired on a group of unarmed anti-war student protesters at Kent State, killing four and wounding nine others. The sweatshirt sold out quickly, because there was only one. ("We only have one, so get it or regret it!" said the description.) Now it's listed on eBay by someone who says he/she will "give 50% of the profit to the Southern Poverty Law Center, who protect those who cannot protect themselves, often those who are victims of police brutality."...
A congressman was caught on surveillance tape kissing a woman (not his wife). His crisis management takes a page out of David Letterman's and Don Draper's playbook.
...Well, so much for that. According to Politico, Rep. McAllister’s staff said the congressman would no longer pursue an investigation into the leaker. It looks like he will have little to hide behind other than the de rigueur “I have let my family down and will try to do better” line.
Mining the mobile phone data from 10 million people over 4 years reveals the subtle changes that occur in the flow of information when disaster strikes, say network scientistsscientists.
...More interesting, however, is what happens next. It’s easy to imagine that the first thing the group of friends and relatives do next is contact other people to spread the news that a disaster has struck.
But instead, the next call they make tends to be straight back to the person involved in the emergency situation. This is completely different to the normal behaviour where the likelihood of returning a call is significantly lower. Indeed, a call made during a concert is less likely than usual to get a call back.
Liang and co conclude that the need for correspondence with eyewitnesses is more critical than the dissemination of situational awareness during emergencies.” In other words, the desire to want to find out more trumps the need to pass on what they already know. At least in emergency situations....
One of the smartest things a brand can do is to respond as quickly and intelligently as possible to negative social media publicity, which is exactly what Taco Bell did.
Whether it’s an unsatisfactory customer experience, a management mistake, product malfunction or an employee of a major fast food chain publicly posting photos of themselves licking Tacos there are many reasons a company can get bad publicity.Below, we share with you some simple PR techniques that may well be worth thinking about so that your company is ready when people start talking about you on a blog, Facebook or Twitter....
The key word in social media is social.
As such, it’s a two-way game. Brands and businesses that use channels such as Twitter and Facebook to simply broadcast their message rarely get the sort of results they would expect. Fans and customers want and demand to be heard, and brands that carefully nurture these relationships benefit from higher engagement levels, boosts in website traffic and sales, strong word of mouth marketing and customer loyalty.
But sometimes, despite our best efforts, things go wrong. So what do you do when the worst happens?...
Oprah Winfrey, one of the world’s richest women valued at over 2.9 billion dollars, was refused 3 times the opportunity to examine and purchase a 37 thousand dollar Tom Ford handbag. This happened at a posh upscale boutique in Switzerland.
The resulting news and social media backlash for the boutique involved and Switzerland itself (the country’s tourism office also apologized to her) was rapid and explosive, with negative commentary from news organizations, Facebook, Twitter, media publications and the like chiming in. Don’t be surprised by this! Anything that touches on deeply personal values (racism, gender equality, lifestyle, health, etc.) will quickly mushroom into an immense social media unconscious event. It will either become a social media dream or in this particular case…the ultimate social media brand reputation management nightmare.
This wake up call provides a powerful opportunity for businesses regarding their reputation management process. Not every business has a plan in place and for those who don’t know where to start, consider these 3 compelling reputation management tips....
The bombings at the Boston marathon were a tragic reminder that terrorism can strike anywhere at any time. Business Continuity professionals should be thinking about the effects of a terrorist attack and incorporate those scenarios into their plans.
Here are 5 benefits of using a mobile app for your internal crisis communications - and which industries and types of organizations would best benefit.
Intranets are a great tool for large organizations that have offices all around the country and the world, but what about when you have workers on the ground? Workers on the ground don’t necessarily have a computer in front of them at all times, but what they definitely do have is a mobile phone. Creating an app designed specifically for your internal (crisis) communications will allow you to:- Access and reach each and every member of your team, no matter where they are at any given time – and all at once...
|
PwC mistake taints the Oscars evening. Josh Bernoff says PwC made a "model apology" but the fact remains, it was a monumental screwup.