Posted on November 9, 2007 1:42 pm by Shel Holtz | Blogging | Channels | Crisis Communication
Business can take a lesson from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The presidential candidate has launched a new website called The Fact Hub, designed to provide an instant response to misrepresentations and misstatements of fact. According to an article in The New York Times, even Republican strategists are applauding the move:
Steve Schmidt, a former political strategist for President Bush who helped oversee…
Posted on September 18, 2007 9:35 am by Shel Holtz | Blogging | Crisis Communication
More and more, I hear communicators counsel their organizations and clients to maintain a “dark blog” in the wings, ready to be activated in the event of a crisis. Whether this is actually a good idea falls into that “it depends” category.
Blogging software, stripped of the elements that make it a blog (like comments and trackbacks), can be used to provide rapid updates as the…
Posted on September 7, 2007 12:55 pm by Shel Holtz | Crisis Communication | External | PR
Southwest Airlines finds itself in the midst of a rare PR kerfuffle thanks to the airline’s San Diego staff, which assumed the role of fashion police by escorting a young woman off of a flight to Tucson because she was, in their opinion, too scantily clad. (She was allowed back on the plane after objecting, but only if she covered herself with…
Posted on August 21, 2007 12:54 pm by Shel Holtz | Crisis Communication | PR | Skype
Skype has been the subject of much commentary and speculation since its outage last week, caused (according to the company) by millions of computers rebooting simultaneously after receiving a routine Windows update. Some have asserted that the two-day outage (the first of its kind since Skype launched) calls the service’s reliability into question. (For me, I wonder how reliable Ma Bell was…
Posted on March 6, 2007 10:34 am by Shel Holtz | Blogging | Crisis Communication | External | Media
Electronics retailer Best Buy is in hot water. Near as I can tell, they shouldn’t be. What’s gone wrong at the Minneapolis-based company seems to be a lack of coordination rather than the underhanded scheme that characterizes reporting about the crisis.
And it is a crisis, make no mistake. The company stands accused of maintaining a “secret” intranet that duplicates its consumer website but with…
Posted on February 28, 2007 6:04 pm by Shel Holtz | Crisis Communication | Media
UPDATE:: Jenny Dervin has clarified her comments in a post to the PRWeek blog; thanks to Rob Clark for pointing out in a comment to this post. The salient paragraph: “???Every industry has an ambulance chaser segment, and in crisis situations, this is the group that smells blood and goes in for the kill. I was addressing my comments to those…
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