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Paypal co-founder/insanely rich guy Elon Musk isn’t afraid to defend his far-out ideas, be they successfully marketing an electric automobile or convincing rich people to move to his future colony on Mars.
But can he fight back against what CNBC calls “Tesla’s PR #EpicFail“? His auto company’s latest electric car, the Model S, won Motor Trend‘s car of the year award among a wave of very positive reviews, but The New York Times auto critic John M. Broder‘stest drive didn’t go so well.... 
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Atlanta Middle Schools did an excellent job at updating the public, via Twitter, during their January 2013 school shooting. Learn from their example here. Last Thursday, January 31st 2013, there was another shooting outside a middle school in Atlanta. A 14 year-old student was grazed by a bullet, and thankfully the wounds suffered were not life-threatening. Within minutes of the shooting, the shooter was disarmed and taken into custody. You can learn more about the shooting here. What truly impressed me about this crisis was the way Atlanta Public Schools leveraged Twitter to keep parents and the public informed. From their twitter handle, @apsupdate, Atlanta Public Schools...
Jeff Domansky's insight:
A good online crisis management study by Melissa Agnes.
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...So now that we’ve established being a chain restaurant in a social media world is hard, let’s talk about what makes it harder. The answer: Forgetting that your brand is what your customers say it is. I don’t know exactly what happened internally when the Applebee’s receipt was posted on Reddit last week. But I can guess. A group of smart C-level execs and communicators got together with Legal and analyzed the situation. And eventually, amongst other things, they established the following...
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Justin Case updates this high-profile crisis PR study...
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The star Notre Dame football player enmeshed in a scandal over his apparent relationship with a fictional woman has engaged crisis specialist Hiltzik Strategies.
Jeff Domansky's insight:
This story just keeps twisting and turning. Will be interesting to see if the crisis team turns things around.
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This was the week of not quite apologizing enough.
Lance Armstrong appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Network to explain 20 years of cheating, lying and cruel personal destruction of his truthful critics. He repeatedly said he was sorry for his conduct, but left the distinct impression that he was sorry mainly for getting caught. And his claim that he did not force his teammates into doping, among other continued denials, sounds like a crock.
Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o named the supposed hoaxer who created the fake Lennay Kekua persona who e-romanced the football star before tragically dying, and even before actually living. Te'o's story can be proved or disapproved in about 5 minutes with a peek at his cell phone records, yet university officials have not been curious enough to look at them. Nor did they refute two years of false stories about the star-crossed lovers until at least a week after learning of the hoax.
Yet the most shocking non-apology apology was buried in the avalanche of coverage about the disgraced athletes. The true disgrace belongs to Atlantic President M. Scott Havens, whose memo to colleagues about the magazine's ill-conceived online advertorial from the Church of Scientology fails just about every test of honesty, judgment and simple common sense.
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Unfortunately the truth is NOT enough for Lance, Te'o, Atlantic magazine...
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Lance Armstrong may have lied to Oprah Winfrey during his so-called confession Thursday night about his doping during the Tour de France bicycle race, investigators told ABC News today.
Armstrong, 41, admitted for the first time that his decade-long dominance of cycling and seven wins in the Tour de France were owed, in part, to performance-enhancing drugs and oxygen-boosting blood transfusions. He told Winfrey that he was taking the opportunity to confess to everything he had done wrong, including angrily denying reports for years claiming that he had doped.
Investigators familiar with Armstrong's case, however, said today that Armstrong didn't completely come clean. They say he blatantly lied about when he stopped doping, saying the last time he used the drugs and transfusions was the 2005 race....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Here's a comprehensive series of stories on the Armstrong issue. If you haven't had enough is worth viewing.
Anthony J. Cameron's curator insight,
September 10, 2014 1:11 PM
Lance Armstrong was one of the most dominant cyclist in Tour de France history that was stripped of his seven world titles for using PEDs.
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Through PR, all things are possible. Maybe.
Lance Armstrong's career as a public figure, it would seem, is over. After all, he did not one but several of the lowest things you can do in sports (and life, really): He cheated, he lied about cheating, he allegedly harassed and persecuted those who told the truth about his cheating—and worst of all, he became an international hero in the process. Now that the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency has found Armstrong on the wrong end of "conclusive and undeniable proof" of a decade's worth of performance-enhancing drugs, and he's been banned from cycling for life and stripped of his seven cherished Tour de France titles, the public's regard for Armstrong has tumbled from Superman status down to the depths of disappointment and scorn.
But if disgraced heroes like Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Martha Stewart, and Tiger Woods taught us anything, it's that there's always a way to crawl back into the public's good graces—with the help of some powerful image-rehab magic conjured up by a trained professional, that is.
What, if anything, can be done to help rebuild Armstrong's image? Lance Armstrong, after all, isn't just a man. He's a marketable brand, too. Since it launched in 1997, his foundation Livestrong (formerly known as the Lance Armstrong Foundation) has raised more than $470 million for cancer awareness and research. So I asked four professionals in brand management, public relations, and consulting what advice they would give to Armstrong to help salvage what's left of Brand Lance...
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Here's some useful crisis PR and branding you should place from the experts to help Lance Armstrong refurbish his reputation... maybe.
Laura Killgour's curator insight,
March 13, 2013 12:34 AM
Brand management is important for any product and when that brand loyalty is ruined it will be hard get that loyalty back. I personally don't believe that Lance Armstrong should be rebranded as such, as he simply cheated and lied, his brand was based on what we thought was a remarkable story of overcoming cancer and then winning 7 Tour de Frances. He has lost the trust and loyalty he once had by many worldwide and to gain this back will be long and difficult. Going to Oprah to do an interview, I believe was a smart move, Oprah is seen as a trustworthy and very credible celebrity, therefore poeple would view her as getting the truth and maybe viewing Lance Armstrong in a different light. 
Holly Eden's comment,
March 13, 2013 4:12 AM
An idea i would like to add is that by communicating to the world through the likes of Oprah, the perception of Lance Armstrong as a brand may entice people to think twice. The use of IMC here is obvious, with direct marketing appealing to people to change their view on the Lance Armstrong brand. A personal example from my own experience of listening to Lance Armstrong on Oprah is that I respected him a bit more after the interview, therefore this shows my perception of the brand had changed.
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As I dug into NBC’s recent coverage of Boeing Co’s 787 Dreamliner jet, which had suffered its third mishap in as many days, I was ready for action. Here comes another blog post chastising corporate America for failing to be transparent in their PR missteps. But the story made me cool my jets....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Interesting point of view on the Boeing Dreamliner crisis
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If you haven’t heard of Health Management Associates (HMA), that’s ok, few would probably know who they are. That is unless you watched the 60 Minutes segment this past Sunday on how they are allegedly encouraging administrators and physicians at hospitals they own to admit as many patients as possible, in order to boost profits. The public company, headquartered in Naples, FL and whose shares are traded on the NYSE, “through its subsidiaries owns and operates (15) general acute care hospitals and other health care facilities in non-urban communities”, as reported on their Wall Street Journal company profile.
If you did see the segment and immediately wondered about a company response to the allegations, then one of your first instincts may have been to see what it was, and maybe (like me) you hopped on Facebook to see what they were posting, damage control, community engagement, etc. Here is a $5.1 billion company I thought, with a gigantic network and hundreds of thousands of patients moving in and out of their facilities every year. Surely they are on social media by now, taking advantages of its potential to reach out, interact, inform, and entertain their community. Instead, I found nothing. No social media presence at all. Zip.
If you click around their Web site it looks clean, informative, professional, and…missing something. The absence of social media channels for a company who clearly now has a crisis on their hands makes you wonder why they decided to forgo participation when the channel could have served them well in the wake of the 60 Minutes report....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Really good example of where social media could have played a valuable, positive role in a crisis...and didn't...
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Last Tuesday, I presented a workshop on social media crisis communications for the Virginia Association of Fund Raising Executives and I’m sharing the deck with you here.
We reviewed three different case studies from the American Red Cross, the Humane Society of the United States, and Komen for the Cure, pulling out dos and don’ts as we went along.
We ended the workshop by playing a “challenges/solutions” game inspired by an exercise in Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers (Amazon link).
I called it “What Could Possibly Go Wrong Next?!?” and presented two basic scenarios: a potential food poisoning at a Meals on Wheels and a United Way executive making a politically incorrect statement.
Some tables were asked to brainstorm what could go wrong next. In the meal delivery case, they came up with things like “someone died from the food poisoning” and “a volunteer knew the food was tainted.” In the scenario about the the gaffe, the challengers came up with things like “this wasn’t the first time he was caught on video saying something like that” and “big donors are pulling support.”...
[Kivi Leroux Miller shares useful social media crisis PR tips and group training ideas - JD]
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From
gawker
If this video of a PR disaster at a private party hosted by Shell Oil atop of Seattle's Space Needle last night seems too good to be true, that's because it is.
The video is a hoax, but a very good one!
The story went that this video was shot by an Occupy Wall street protester named Logan Price who infiltrated a private party called "New Frontiers" thrown by Shell to celebrate the impending expansion of offshore drilling operations into the Arctic. Shell set up a replica of the Kulluk oil rig that will be doing the drilling and invited the widow of the man who designed the rig to symbolically "tap the arctic" and fill her glass with liquor poured from the top of the model rig. But, whoops, the pump malfunctioned and spewed all over her. Now that's symbolism!
"if Shell can't even handle a three-foot replica of a rig that pumps booze, how is the company going to fare in the Arctic deep?" laughed Tree hugger. The story was also picked up by the Seattle Post Intelligencer, Gothamist and our geeky cousin Gizmodo.
[Badvocates target Shell in a hoax that keeps on giving. Wonder if it is truly effective? - JD]
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Foxconn Technology Group has denied claims from a Chinese worker's rights group that it uses child labour in any form.TechEye has been reporting how Hong Kong-based nonprofit Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM) complained that Appletipped off Foxconn that the inspectors were coming and executives assigned child workers elsewhere....
There is no doubt that Foxconn is indeed taking things seriously. The Foxconn spokesperson comes from none other than spin masters Burson-Marsteller, which is a global public relations company which specialises in dealing with enormous PR disasters....
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In PR one of our guiding principles ought to be: You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all...
In fact we increasingly live in a world – fuelled by the ease of expression offered by social media – in which publics can be outraged about everything and anything at the click of a Tweet.
Not only are PR practitioners faced with an increasing number of digital grumpies, but they demand instant gratification. If it has taken them just a few minutes to set up a Facebook group, organise an online poll or start a Twitterstorm, then the clicktivists expect a positive PR reaction in nanoseconds....
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The way we see it, the three biggest potential PR fails for a social network are service dropouts,unannounced changes in service conditions or privacy breaches. Flickr, the extremely popular photo sharing service owned by Yahoo that is not in any way threatened by the rise of Instagram, is now dealing with every social company’s PR nightmare: due to a software bug, the company unintentionally celebrated its ninth birthday by making thousands of users’ private photos publicly visible for nearly three weeks (while they didn’t appear in Google searches, they were visible to all other users)....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
A sobering online crisis management study.
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I’m really not a fan of the phrase: “you have a problem in social media”. It’s a phrase the online industry uses to describe companies who are having a rough time in the social space and, while it’s superficially accurate, it’s entirely misleading in its simplicity. The phrase is misleading because it speaks to the social media outcome and not the business issue that caused the problem.
This ascribes the blame to the wrong party and the ensuing remedies are then applied in the wrong areas. It’s not a new phenomenon, treating the symptom instead of the cause, yet the mistake continues to be made. You don’t have a reputation problem — the actual problem likely lies somewhere in your product, your business processes or your service delivery....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
This really thoughtful post gets at the heart of the online crisis management challenge.
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How should you select the right spokesperson in a crisis? This post gives you two ways to pick the perfect spokesperson.
Although this book focuses on teaching you how to become a better spokesperson, there may be circumstances when you should select someone else to communicate during a crisis. That’s because the person who you choose to communicate during a crisis tells the public a lot about your handling of it.
If you select someone too high on the corporate hierarchy chart, the public will conclude that the crisis is bigger than it originally thought. If you select someone too low, the public will conclude that you’re not taking the crisis seriously enough. When forced with a similar decision, I generally advise clients to err on the side of going too high rather than too low....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Brad Phillips suggests two ways to pick the right spokesperson in a crisis.
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...this case will continue to raise further discussion and awareness about the power of a reputation as well as the implications of what happens when you are involved in a crisis. Social media will continue to be a platform where people come together to voice their opinions about a variety of topics ranging from brands to people.
This is a growing issue in sports – as fans and the rest of the public, we want athletes to achieve impossible expectations in their sports while also presenting themselves in a positive image among their key audiences. However, are these expectations not realistic and can any athlete meet up to them? What about the role of the PR person who is representing these clients – if we know that the image if false, what is our professional and ethical duty?...
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Karen Freberg explores the challenge of expectations of professional athletes and the implications for crisis managers.
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The "Tour de Lance" apology spin didn't go exactly as Lance Armstrong must have hoped. Before Armstrong's interview with Oprah Winfrey aired, we said that he had just one chance to get the apology right. Oops.
When you are as badly damaged as Lance was going into the interview, your only hope for salvation is to demonstrate that you are truly completely sorry -- not that you got caught -- but for what you did....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
The wheels come off Lance Armstrong's reputation management show...
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After more than a decade of vehement denials, Lance Armstrong finally came clean last night in an interview with Oprah Winfrey about his use of performance enhancing drugs. Early reviews leaned negative: Forbes said "Lance Armstrong admitted a lot of wrongdoing during his 90-minute interview with Oprah Winfrey tonight, but he did almost nothing to win back the sympathy of the world." CNN host Piers Morgan took it one step further, posting on Twitter that Armstrong was a "sniveling, lying, cheating little wretch...I hope he now just disappears."
Armstrong's recent tribulations have been of particular interest to me for two reasons: first, because of my past work as a presidential campaign spokesperson, where fighting off rumors and mitigating media crises is a daily part of one's job; and second, because in 2004, when Lance mania was at its peak and half the world was wearing yellow Livestrong bracelets, I became the executive director of the Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition. In the world of bicycle advocacy, Armstrong (whom I met once) was almost a saint: the talent of Michael Jordan, the charitable commitment of Angelina Jolie, plus a dash of come-from-behind, survivor heroism....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Former political strategist Dorie Clark shares several good insights into the Lance Armstrong affair.
My take? No true remorse = a PR fail and little chance at redemption.
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A note to readers: While most of the PR failures we write about are unfortunate, they are also amusing (on some level). This one, however, cannot be categorized as anything but horrifically insensitive, bordering on cruel.
Relatives of the victims of last summer’s movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado recently received invitations from Cinemark USA to attend the reopening of the same theater at which their loved ones lost their lives. The invitations, which were sent just after the holidays, urged recipients to “reserve [their] tickets” for an evening of remembrance and a movie to follow.
In response, family members sent a strongly-worded letter to Cinemark in which they expressed anger and outrage at the company’s lack of compassion, calling the invitation “disgusting”. They also noted that Cinemark representatives never reached out to offer their condolences; the company even rebuffed requests to meet with family members without lawyers present. The letter admonishes the reopening celebration as a “thinly veiled publicity ploy” and calls for a boycott of the theater....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
It's hard to imagine a more insensitive, poorly conceived and predictable PR fail than this one. It happens so often when marketing departments act first and think later.
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The trouble with breakthrough technology is that sometimes it breaks. Boeing is going through some turbulent times at the moment due to anomalies with their new highly-anticipated, much-delayed 787 Dreamliner aircraft. On Monday an empty Japan Airlines 787 parked at Boston's Logan Airport caught fire - apparently caused by malfunctioning batteries. Tuesday a different JAL Dreamliner preparing for takeoff had to abort its trip due to a massive fuel leak.
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Will be interesting to watch this crisis management scenario play out...
ben bernard's comment,
January 9, 2013 11:51 PM
thanks ! http://www.scoop.it/t/direct-marketing-services my newly made scoop.it :)
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Darden Restaurants, Inc. — owner of Red Lobster and Olive Garden — is battling back negative press attention in light of its October announcement that the company will use Obamacare as a reason to shift to part-time employees.
On Tuesday, the company released a statement revising down its prediction of profits, which led to a huge drop in stocks. Darden attributed the change to the negative attention around its stance on Obamacare, and promised to deal with the health care reform law “in ways that work for our employees“...
[PR failjust keeps on ticking ~ Jeff]
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The authors note that the CEO is typically seen as the most credible source of information in a crisis but not the most objective.
Amid today’s real-time media landscape, crisis response elicits more interest and involvement by stakeholders who are not directly affected by an event. As members of the public weigh in on a crisis response via social media, their comments can spread as quickly and influence perceptions as much as those of the company, CEO and others directly involved.
Comms pros are faced with a limited set of strategy choices in many crises, including: Apologize?
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Another day, another trial by Twitter.This time for South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley when a blogger falsely reported she was under investigation by the IRS.
...A big headache for an elected official, a sad reflection on lazy media under pressure to break stories in real-time and a timely warning for reputation managers near and far.
...So how can you manage a future online reputation crisis? Here are eleven tips to help you survive the next one....
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...The bottom line is: In this set us free world of social media and virtual protests, nonprofits need to have a crisis management strategy ready to go and be nimble with responses....
[Beth Kanter's advice and case studies are worth reading - JD]
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This bad PR tale gets curiouser every day.