Crisis Management

“Crisis” can mean different things to different groups says Dan Kneeshaw, Walmart’s senior director of global associate communications, digital and enterprise initiatives. Kneeshaw spoke on “When All Hell Breaks Loose,” a panel focusing on how brands mitigate crisis on social media, at the 2018 Social Shake-Up Show in Atlanta. Here are three steps to effective crisis management that Walmart holds close.

Brands and organizations can rest on their laurels no longer. Even darlings of the media and Wall Street, such as Tesla, are prone to crises these days. Katie Paine looks at how Tesla and founder Elon Musk and the White House Correspondents’ Association handled recent crises.

Twitter got out in front of its own crisis, emailing its business customers about a bug that stored account passwords, unmasked, in an internal log. The bug left Twitter passwords exposed, and visible, to everyone within the company. Still, its statements raised a few important questions.

A cardinal rule of PR is for companies to be as transparent as possible. But how much is that? It depends, of course, but providing almost no transparency when something is afoot can spell trouble. More specifically it can lead to someone telling your story for you. For a few months Nike has refused to be transparent about significant departures from its senior ranks. The NY Times also initially had closed lips about the departure of one of its top editors. Transparency isn’t easy.

As we say in This Week in PR , you could look at the Starbucks situation in several ways: for a brand with such a progressive stance on diversity and inclusion, it didn’t deserve to get blasted the way it

When you bring hundreds of communicators together over two days for a conference on PR Measurement in Philadelphia, it gets interesting in a way the founding fathers never anticipated. “It’s like one big therapy session… Continued

YouTube is once again in hot water for running ads on channels promoting disturbing content, a CNN investigation has uncovered. More than 300 organizations had their ads running on channels promoting Nazis and North Korean propaganda, to name two. For now, brands are still willing to take the risk.

As communicators know, crisis communication begins well before a crisis occurs. Southwest’s communicators demonstrated they were prepared for April 17’s fatal incident aboard flight 1380 from NY to Dallas. Beyond their technical competence, Southwest used several tactics to inject a human touch in its crisis communications.

Starbucks has had a rough week after an issue of racial discrimination at one of its stores in Philadelphia led to national headlines. In response, the company has gone beyond the traditional CEO apology and announced that it will close more than 8,000 stores across the U.S. for one day for antibias training among its employees.

Communicators can never be too prepared for a crisis, especially in the age of social media. Luckily, there are dozens of tools—many of them free—your company can leverage to assist in planning for and managing crisis communications swiftly and effectively. Barry Reicherter, executive vice president and senior partner/director of insights at Finn Partners, lists three key priorities for monitoring social before, during and after a crisis and an artillery of programs for each.