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It’s no surprise that interesting and unusual claims are often the most widely circulated articles on social media. Who wants to share boring stuff?
The problem, however, is that the spread of rumors, misinformation and unverified claims can overwhelm any effort to set the record straight, as we’ve seen during controversies over events like the Boston Marathon bombings and the conspiracy theory that the Obama administration manipulated unemployment statistics.
Everyone knows there is dubious information online, of course, but estimating the magnitude of the problem has been difficult until now....
In case you missed it, Bloomberg Businessweek published an intriguing story yesterday by veteran journalist Paul M. Barrett that ran with the headline “What It’s Like to Be Attacked by Putin’s Flack.”
The “flack” in question is Ketchum — more specifically D.C.-based partner Kathy Jeavons, who “heads both the Ecuador and Russia accounts” for the firm.
For the record, Jeavons did not personally attack or even contact Barrett. But a source did forward him a talking points document that the firm wrote for Nathalie Cely, Ecuador’s ambassador to the United States. The doc included both well-stated observations about Ecuador’s history with Chevron and suggestions for casting doubt on the credibility of Law of the Jungle, Barrett’s upcoming book on the lawsuit that accuses the company of abusing its relationship with the people of Ecuador....
Last week, an audio technician for the television program Cops was killed by friendly fire while filming a robbery at a Wendy’s in Omaha, Nebraska.
The Omaha police chief, Todd Schmaderer, delivered an almost perfect press conference—one that stands in marked contrast to the shameful media interactions in Ferguson, Missouri—that should be studied by PR professionals as a terrific example of how to communicate in crisis.
PR pro Dave Statter, who writes the excellent STATter911 blog (and wrote about this story first), called this “one of the most effective and timely presentations following a police involved shooting I’ve witnessed.”
He’s right. Chief Schmaderer did many things right in this press conference. Below, you’ll find the five things that stood out to me most....
A study by Brandfog found that 75 percent of Americans surveyed agree that CEO participation in social media leads to better leadership.
That’s up a remarkable 30 percent over the results in 2012. The survey also found that 77 percent of Americans said that C-suite executives who engage on social media create more transparency for the brand, and 80 percent agreed that social media has become an essential aspect of PR and communications strategy for C-Suite executives.
That is key, particularly when crisis strikes. It gives the CEO and the brand both the credibility and channel to manage a crisis response....
An Ecuadoran environmental group apparently started and promoted the hashtag #AskChevron, but Twitter users seem to believe the oil company created it.
The promoted trending topic on Twitter on Wednesday morning was #AskChevron, a hashtag similar to #AskJPM and #myNYPD, which resulted in social media disasters for J.P. Morgan and the New York Police Department, respectively.
Here’s the twist, though: Chevron seemingly has nothing to do with #AskChevron.
The company hasn’t tweeted the hashtag. Its Wednesday morning tweets, which were about its annual stockholders meeting, used the hashtags #Chevron and #stockholders, not #AskChevron.
The account that has tweeted #AskChevron the most is @thetoxiceffect, an environmental group based in Ecuador. The group has a promoted tweet with an image listing transgressions that “Chevron is guilty of”:...
The maker of ‘Watch Dogs’ sent an Australian news publication a safe with a copy of the game inside. When staffers got suspicious, they called the cops.
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.
2013 was a great year for social media but a somewhat forgettable one for online security, with a series of high-profile software glitches and exploits causing a lot of damage, both in reputations and finances, throughout the year.
Consider Twitter, for example. A hacked Associated Press (@AP) tweet that reported an explosion in the White House and an injured President Obama triggered an immediate collapse in the stock market costing hundreds of millions of dollars.
Sure, the exploit was quickly rectified and calm resorted, but the event shined a light on the sheer power of Twitter to move markets on news, even if it was falsified. Target, Amazon, NASDAQ and others also had major technical snafus in 2013, and this visual from Cast Software takes a closer look at last year’s biggest software disasters....
The 5C’s of crisis communications detail the five critical traits all executives and spokespersons must convey during their press conferences and interviews.
It seems like every Crisis 101 playbook now includes taking out full page ads in a cross section of national and metro dailies to publish an open letter from the CEO.
The tactic gives the company under siege the opportunity to control the narrative.
It can be effective as long as the company surrounds the open letter with other forms of communications, which was the case with Target and its CEO conducting aninterview on CNBC.
Still, we’ve seen how the open letter can add to the mess, as highlighted in “Letter to Toyota Customers Hits Pothole.”
With this in mind, let’s reverse-engineer Target’s try...
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?...
Apple's deal to take back non-brand phone chargers is not only brilliant crisis PR, it's a model for engaging consumers.
Apple has asked customers to trade third-party USB power adapters for a nearly half-off discount on its branded accessory. This comes after a Chinese flight attendant was reportedly electrocuted last month while using an iPhone as it was charging. The take-back program has been hailed as a brilliant PR move to defend Apple's brand, because it shifts blame to a charger unsanctioned by the company, though investigators haven't confirmed that conclusion.
There's a bigger idea here, though, that makes this program a model for brand engagement overall....
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The proportion of corporate directors who say their companies are monitoring social media for “adverse publicity” (a gentle euphemism) has increased from 32% in 2012 to 41% today, according to the latest Corporate Directors Survey from PricewaterhouseCoopers.
However, as these figures indicate more than half of corporate directors still believe their companies aren’t doing a good enough job of keeping an eye out for adverse publicity: 55% of the PwC survey respondents said their companies either aren’t monitoring social media efficiently, or aren’t doing it at all. That’s down moderately from 61% in 2012.
PwC found a similar story in regards to social media strategies for applications like marketing, research, and internal communications. Thus 40% of respondents said their companies are leveraging social media for strategic goals, while 54% said their companies’ efforts to leverage social media are insufficient or nonexistent; both figures are unchanged from two years ago....
Ketchum’s staff members who provide public relations advice to Russia must avoid being seen as defending acts contrary to American interests while still providing some luster for a lucrative client.
In 2006, executives from the public relations firm Ketchum flew to Moscow to secure an account that has since been worth tens of millions of dollars.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had hired Ketchum to provide advice on public relations before the nation hosted the Group of 8 meeting in St. Petersburg. At the time, Mr. Putin “cared a great deal about what other leaders, especially presidents, thought about him,” said Michael A. McFaul, a former United States ambassador to Russia who now teaches at Stanford.
Times have changed. The escalating conflict between Russia and Ukraine has turned relations with the United States as frosty as they have been in years. Last week, President Obama said that as a result of the economic sanctions imposed on Russia, the country “is already more isolated than at any time since the Cold War.” And the United States ambassador to the United Nations called Russia’s actions in Ukraine a “threat to all of our peace and security.”
When Common Ground PR announced Monday that it would be providing “short-term assistance” to the city of Ferguson, Missouri, online sleuths quickly began looking into the firm.
Clashes between the mostly white police force and people protesting the police shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, an African-American man, have had a racial charge to them. That led Talking Points Memo and others to question why the city had hired a PR firm that appears to have no black people working in it.
Wednesday afternoon, the president and CEO of Common Ground, Denise Bentele, issued a statement addressing those concerns and answering why the firm stepped up....
I shared this message with Target’s team members moments ago. As I told them, the truth hurts, but it can also set you free.
To say that the last five months at Target have been difficult is an extraordinary understatement.
The data breach we suffered rocked consumer confidence and ignited a nationwide discussion about phishing, cyber-security and the realities of living in today’s data-enabled world. Thanks in large part to social media, it looks like this will have been one of the most covered business crises in American history.
And just last week, our CEO stepped down after six years in position and 35 years at Target. His departure has already spawned over 6,000 articles wondering and speculating about what happened.
You’d think that these two incidents alone would create enough pain to last a brand a lifetime but one of the most challenging things that has happened, in my opinion, have been reports, some attributed to unnamed team members, that paint a picture of a culture that is in crisis. When a recent post on a well-known blog called me out by name, it only felt right that I should respond....
This was the worst media apology I’ve ever seen.
LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling—who was caught on tape telling his girlfriend not to be photographed or attend basketball games with black people—attempted to apologize during an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
Sterling did apologize. But he also took the opportunity to attack Magic Johnson for getting “those AIDS” and made new racist remarks by claiming that wealthy African Americans “don’t want” to help their own communities like Jews do...
New NBA Commissioner Adam Silver was handed a high-profile test that would determine whether or not he would establish himself as a leader. Did he pass?
...That may have seemed like an obvious decision to make, but it was more complicated than it appeared. For example, Dallas Mavericks Owner Mark Cuban seemed to oppose a lifetime ban due to the “slippery slope” such a precedent would set. Other critics also wondered if the comments—which were made in private to a romantic partner—should have led to his removal as a team owner.
I understand those concerns, but I’ve been thoroughly impressed with the NBA’s handling of this incident. The League’s crisis management worked, and the NBA did almost everything right in terms of communicating with the press. The press conference itself was also handled well: A press handler, presumably an NBA staffer, selected the questioners and counted down when they would take only two more questions. Press conferences rarely run as smoothly....
Chances are, sooner or later you will find yourself caught in a social media wildfire, or at least see smoke in the distance. Are you prepared to fight the fire? I asked seven of the leading social media crisis experts, “what is the most important weapon you need to fight a social media crisis?” With their answers, you can build a full arsenal to manage any negative event you face....
But our real heartburn came with what happened next. Apparently, Sablonski held a news conference but instructed the media not to take video of her face. Amazingly, they complied and only showed the back of her head.
The Sup's explanation for the bizarre order was that the story was not about her -- and therefore her face was unneeded...
Cleveland Browns fans looking for some action on Super Bowl Sunday found their antagonist in Purell. The hand sanitizer brand took to Twitter during the game with a taunt about how the Broncos looked as bad as the Browns.
By early Monday morning Purell had pulled the tweet, apologized on Twitter and on the website of Cleveland’s major newspaper, and promised that nothing like that would happen again.
And Purell wasn’t the only corporate Twitter account using the Super Bowl as pretext to tweet its foot in its mouth: MSNBC ran into trouble for a racially charged message about a Cheerios ad. The frequency with which companies tweet apologies can make it seem like they’re not doing much of anything else on social media.
There’s evidence to back this up. A study published recently by Ruth Page in the Journal of Pragmatics, which covers linguistics, looked at the way we apologize on Twitter, studying 1,183 apologies issued by corporations, celebrities, and normal folks between 2010 and 2012. The first finding: Corporations apologize a whole lot. Corporate accounts used the word “sorry” at 8.6 times the frequency of individuals, while the words “apology” or “apologize” pop 7.4 times more for corporations and the word “regret” is used a whopping 37.5 times more frequently in corporate tweets. The study filtered out nonapologetic uses of these words....
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....
“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....
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Very interesting book at how rumors circulate and how difficult they are to control.