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So how important is it to make sure that your corporate website – and therefore your crisis communications home base – is mobile-friendly? Pretty important.
And I’m not the only one who thinks so, Google thinks so as well.
Google has actually started to penalize websites that don’t provide mobile users with a mobile-friendly experience. This means that, in (and out of) a crisis, if your website is not mobile-friendly, not only are you making it harder for your stakeholders to navigate through your site and easily read your communications, but Google may be penalizing your website’s search engine rankings....
Fans had made a to-be-published book by Paula Deen a top seller on Amazon, but the publisher, Random House, joined the list of business partners that have cut ties to the embattled chef....
The book deal was one of the last remaining lucrative business relationships for the embattled celebrity chef. Its cancellation came on a day when Sears, Kmart and J. C. Penney announced that they would stop selling products, including cookbooks, branded with her name. Since last week, the Food Network, Smithfield Foods, Walmart, Target, Caesars Entertainment, QVC and the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk have decided to suspend or sever ties with Ms. Deen after her admission in a legal deposition that she had used racist language in the past and allowed racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-Semitic jokes in one of her restaurants. Ms. Deen was deposed on video as part of a discrimination lawsuit filed last year by a former employee....(New York Times)
Food Network, Walmart, Caesars Entertainment…one by one, the many companies represented by Paula Deen are backing out on deals they’ve forged with the celebrity chef. The latest business to wash its hands of Paula Deen? Pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk.
The bad news continues for fallen idol Paula Deen, who, following allegations of racism, has been losing valuable deals left and right. Whether or not company leaders feel that Paula is actually a racist, they clearly do not wish to be associated with all the bad PR following this case.
In the Twitter era, marketers have to be extra careful that what they put on their websites isn't offensive, even intentionally. Extra, extra careful. It’s a lesson Target took to heart this week, apologizing for a product-naming discrepancy that some fuller-figured shoppers found offensive. The kerfuffle started when self-described “Digital Maven” Susan Clemens was shopping on Target.com and noticed an odd thing: The same style of dress in the exact same color was labeled differently depending on the size. The name of the color on the plus-size version was suggestive, and not in a flattering way. Clemens tweeted her discovery, quickly garnering dozens of retweets....
PR Coach Website & Blog Crash: Now What? | The PR Coach
...The Times pretty much disagreesin every respect. They stand by their story which said that the vehicle did not meet its own promises and that the battery failed, requiring the Model S make the last part of its journey on a flatbed truck.
It is not just "he said" vs "she said" however since Tesla published data captured by their onboard computer which seemed to back up some of what they claim....
...The first 90 seconds of the spot were fantastic. As a viewer, I learned some of the steps the nation’s leading beverage company is taking to provide us with healthier drinking options. It has more than 180 low- and no-calorie options, many of which have replaced higher-calorie offerings in school vending machines. It has created smaller, portion-controlled sizes as well as boldly stated the calorie count of each drink on its cans. It supports initiatives like the Boys & Girls Clubs that encourage kids and young adults to get active. These efforts have helped reduce the average calories per serving across the soda industry’s products in the United States by about 22 percent. That’s a fantastic story, if it stopped there. If Coca-Cola had admitted that overconsumption of its higher-calorie beverages has led to greater numbers of obese individuals while emphasizing its efforts to offer healthier beverage options, portion control and transparency in calorie counts, I’d applaud it (though would wonder why its message warranted a 90-second spot). But it didn’t admit the truth, and the ad didn’t stop there. At about the 90-second mark, Coca-Cola’s storytelling machine went off the rails. Instead of coming clean and admitting that it’s a source of the problem, it proclaimed that “all calories count, no matter where they come from.” The line was made intentionally vague because it implies something that is not true. While it’s true that all calories count, it’s untrue that they’re created equal, and that’s indisputable....
...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?...
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....
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...
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....
Lt. J. Paul Vance is described as ‘composed yet compassionate’ in handling media inquiries after the unthinkable tragedy in Newtown, Conn. ...Last Friday, Lt. J. Paul Vance joined this group after a lone gunman entered Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut and killed 20 children and six adults. For 15 years, Vance has led the public information office for the Connecticut State Police. His tireless work in the days after the shooting has won him praise from journalists, law enforcement officials, and PR practitioners.
Vance “has been doing a heroic job under terrible circumstances,” said Gil Rudawski, the crisis communication chief at GroundFloor Media in Denver. “He's running on adrenaline now, but exhaustion will set in soon.” ...
So many bad PR stories & PR fails to share The last several months featured buckets full of bad PR. Since I haven't done a roundup post for quite a while, it's time to share a BIG collection of 78 bad PR stories and 20 lessons we can learn from them. We saw marketing mishaps during hurricane Sandy, a bad mix of pizza and politics, social media missteps to make you blush, junk science, hubris, bullying online, “newsjack(ass)ing”, stupid PR stunts and much more. And we’ve gathered them all here for you. Just jump right in. So many bad PR lessons, so little time… [This post took a while to put together but the result is a real BIG snapshot of bad PR and lessons to learn from other PR fails ~ Jeff]
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Here are 5 benefits of using a mobile app for your internal crisis communications - and which industries and types of organizations would best benefit.
Intranets are a great tool for large organizations that have offices all around the country and the world, but what about when you have workers on the ground? Workers on the ground don’t necessarily have a computer in front of them at all times, but what they definitely do have is a mobile phone. Creating an app designed specifically for your internal (crisis) communications will allow you to:- Access and reach each and every member of your team, no matter where they are at any given time – and all at once...
Happy, Friday. This week's Friday PR Picks and social media missives are loaded with crisis management, content marketing and communication insight.
We're featuring 9 valuable crisis management, 10 public relations posts and 14 must-read social media articles. Perfect for the long weekend.
The arrest of the animal hospital’s former employee for bestiality horrified the public, but Peak Communicators disassociated the clinic from the accused—and pushed a positive story instead.
Crisis management has changed significantly. If you are a corporate leader of a multinational company today, and aim to protect your reputation for the long term, you need to ask yourself two questions: are we ready and are we nimble? Are we properly organized and can we respond in time when faced with a crisis? If you still rely on manuals that are more than six months old and do not have social media at its core, both questions are answered. Millions of citizen journalists roam society every day, with phone cameras and Internet access at the ready. They capture and instantly transmit around the world what they witness-or think they witness. They pass along unverified "news flashes" from acquaintances. Their tweets and posts become stories, alongside news from more established sources. These reports, unregulated and uncorroborated as they are, can create irreversible damage when inaccurate and left unaddressed....
A lot of discussion and PR thought leadership have been focused on managing crises in this age immediate communications and networked audiences. However, a fascinating situation that’s unfolding right now between the New York Timesand Tesla Motors highlights the important opportunity brands have to tell their side of the story immediately and convincingly when they have a dispute with the news coverage, and it sure beats the daylights out of having a correction or clarification printed three days after the fact. Simply put, brands don’t have to take what they consider to be unfair or biased coverage lying down....
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)....
The star Notre Dame football player enmeshed in a scandal over his apparent relationship with a fictional woman has engaged crisis specialist Hiltzik Strategies.
The Notre Dame linebacker, Manti Te’o, fell into the media crosshairslast week after Deadspin.com published a thorough examination of Te’o’s relationship with a woman -- widely reported as an inspirational story because of her battles with cancer and death in a car accident -- it found did not exist.
He has denied knowledge that the woman and story were fabricated through social media. Notre Dame’s influential athletic department has backed his denials.
Hiltzik Strategies, the firm of former Democratic political operative Matthew Hiltzik, has worked crises for high-profile personalities like Katie Couric, baseball star Ryan Braun and singer Justin Bieber. He is representing Te'o and his family....
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.
Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/191476/the-truthiness-is-out-there.html#ixzz2IdlSIVT4
Nothing gets management's attention faster than negative media attention. Want to get a company's attention? Go public with your gripes. Few things prompt change in U.S. businesses as much as bad media attention does, new research shows. A study by University of Illinois business professor Michael Bednar found that negative media coverageprompts firms to engage in greater levels of strategic change than previously thought. "As the news media reports negatively about firms, that registers with executives," Bednar said. "And that, in turn, prompts executives to engage in larger-scale strategic change."...
The term “content marketing” has become so ubiquitous that its radical nature sometimes gets muted, but it has transformed traditional notions of public relations. Content-hungry audiences are less interested in the source of content as they are in the quality and utility of the content, and brands must now arm themselves with a deep well of material to fuel their social media efforts.
Eliza Anderson, global PR manager of Intrepid Travel, and a speaker at PR News’ Feb. 27 Digital PR Summit in San Francisco, is a seasoned pro at creating content for the brand's customers and the media. Just a month ago her team launched a blog to provide updates to Intrepid Travel passengers about the situation on the ground during the Bangkok riots, which was then picked up by the media.
In the following Q&A, Anderson, who leads communications at the adventure travel company headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, discusses her content strategy and offers a preview of her presentation at the Digital PR Summit. ...
... Thanks to Twitter, Facebook and a plethora of smartphone apps, newsrooms now have an entirely new toolbox available to them in breaking news situations. And here’s another one to add to the kit: Banjo. Banjo is an app that describes itself as “a social discovery service.” Available for iPhone and Android users, the app collects social media updates from a variety of networks in real-time and posts them according to geo-tag. You don’t have to “check in” or even be part of a network to see other people’s updates, which are shown on a map. In January, Andy Stettler used Banjo to clarify a breaking news situation. Stettler, an assistant online editor with the Lansdale Reporter, a Pennsylvania newspaper, heard reports about a possible “bomb device” at the King of Prussia Mall. His first thought was to check social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. Then he remembered to log into Banjo, which he had installed just days before....
A crisis of leadership at St. Louis University became explosive after trustees were caught red-handed saying one thing and doing another.
...A letter written by the head of the St. Louis University Board of Trustees asking fellow board members to remain mum on the advice of a public relations firm was apparently leaked to students Saturday, causing yet another uproar among faculty.
The newest imbroglio came just days after University leaders and the school’s Faculty Senate appeared to have called a truce. On Friday the parties released a joint statement vowing to increase communication amid a time of discord on campus. The statement said the groups intended to engage in “more frequent and effective communications throughout the University Community.”...
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Melissa Agnes notes the importance of a mobile-friendly website in a crisis.