Stories by KATIE PAINE

Katie Paine takes a look at what’s ahead in 2018 and sees a sobering return to reality, with more realistic measurement leading the charge. She also sees more bots in our future as well as fewer choices for those companies seeking help with measurement.

Our regular crisis measurement guru Katie Paine considers crises of 2017 and selects the crisis of the year. Can you guess which brand has the dubious distinction? Hint, the brand was handed an awful situation, partly through its own negligence, and then sat on the situation for several weeks before announcing it to the public.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is eating crow as the situation with Russian ads on Facebook has amounted to more than the nonsense he called it initially. Equifax, of course, has committed nearly every error possible in terms of its early crisis management to its summer data breach. Katie Paine grades the two brands’ crisis response efforts.

Katie Paine grades the crisis response of Merck, whose CEO took a stand against the President that eventually led to the downfall of two White House advisory groups, and Kapersky Lab, which whiffed when its integrity was questioned.

In her latest installment of Image Patrol, Katie Paine looks at how USA Gymnastics is handling its sexual scandal and contrasts it with Bell Pottinger’s mishandling of its crisis concerning an account from a South African company with ties to that country’s president.

You don’t have to look far to find examples of people and organizations screwing up. So as tempting as it may be to pile onto Uber’s woes or the latest airline mess, Katie Paine uses this edition of Image Patrol to look at the follow-up to crises. What you do is very important, but so is how you respond, ie, the way people and brands say they’re sorry – or don’t.

There were many examples last month of organizations screwing up and resulting in crises badly handled. We could have piled on PwC for the Oscars, but given that Hollywood obsessed about it for weeks, it was hard to find much more to say. And of course, we would have loved to weigh in on the great leggings-on-United kerfuffle clinging to Twitter as, well, leggings do. But frankly, in these times, all that seemed trivial compared to a couple of serious crises plaguing America’s military.

In today’s personality-driven culture, it’s sometimes hard to sort out whether it’s the guy at the top who causes a crisis or the culture he has created within the organization. Either way, most of the time, a crisis starts at the top. But in 2017, one could make the case that cultural and social norms are exerting a greater influence than the people in charge. The crises we’ll examine here, PewDiePie/Youtube/Disney/Google and Uber’s latest, we would argue, owe as much if not more to changing norms than to corporate leadership.

Although Twitter has been around for a decade, never in its history have 140 characters had the power and influence they’ve enjoyed since Nov. 9. Sure, when the Pope began tweeting, it made headlines but it didn’t move markets the way @realdonaldtrump has in the last few months. One outlet estimated that one 140-character screed about Lockheed Martin cost the company $28 million per character.

There were so many candidates for Image Patrol this month, and with the year ending we decided to forego the usual comparison of two brands and instead create the ultimate image disaster list for 2016. This PR News Pro premium content is offered to you free in the spirit of the season.