Crisis Management

While many readers likely will never need to react to the type of crisis described below, the principles discussed can apply to a wide variety of crises. These include having crisis procedures in advance, updating and practicing them regularly and keeping emergency information handy, including third-party contacts, media and influencers. While the author works in a part of the country that is prone to the natural disasters described below and so raises the importance of crisis preparation, surveys show brands large and small lack plans for management of any kind of crisis. They do so at their peril.

When a massive, five-alarm fire broke out on a Saturday evening in busy Gilbert, Arizona, a Phoenix suburb home to nearly 250,000 residents, the Gilbert Fire and Rescue Department partnered with Gilbert’s Digital Communications Department to take a teamwork and technology approach to communication and community outreach. Here’s how they did it.

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.

Whatever one’s stance is regarding United’s decision to uphold its dress code policy, one thing is clear: United’s response has been swift and consistent across channels. Responding and listening in a crisis, though, are two very different—and sometime disconnected—things.

Rarely do I mess with cookies, except to eat them. But an experience over the last two weeks with a furniture retailer had me clearing the cookies from my computer. So annoyed was I by… Continued

Our weekly roundup of stories, trends and personnel moves in PR and communications. This week we feature a story timed to International Women’s Day, a reminder about why communicators need to monitor employees’ social media accounts 24/7 and a fond remembrance of Finn Partners’ Anne Glauber.

A video showing Uber CEO Travis Kalanick lashing out at an Uber driver put the company back in the media spotlight. Rival ride-service company Lyft might consider saving some money and suspending all advertising expenditures—Uber’s CEO might as well be on their payroll.

The blame for the Moonlight/La La Land mix-up seems to be falling on PwC, caretakers of the Oscar ballots, whose carefully guarded “ballot briefcase” tours the nation each year on its way to Hollywood. The accounting firm tweeted an early-morning statement, but has otherwise remained quiet on social media.

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.

“Not every incident needs a response, but incidents that are ignored can lead to a bigger crisis.” This crisis management advice comes directly from Ernest DelBuono, senior strategist for strategic communications firm Levick. At its… Continued