It’s risky enough when companies communicate to publics. All the research and planning in the world guarantees little. People are nothing if not unpredictable, and you never know what innocent aside might offend somebody and erupt into a full-blown controversy.

Just as the cover-up is worse than the crime, though, the response to controversy often causes businesses more grief than the original transgression. Whether it’s something the company did that rubbed somebody the wrong way or a revelation by a third party that sparks public indignation, organizations need to apply more care to the reply than to original messaging.

On this year’s September 11 anniversary, AT&T found itself subjected to criticism for what no doubt seemed like a somber and tasteful tribute. The image deployed over Twitter and other channels showed the twin beams, representing the lost towers, shining upward into the night. The problem: the image was displayed on the screen of a smartphone held in a customer’s hand on the other side of the East River.

No doubt surprised by the blowback, the company issued an apology—kind of. “We apologize to anyone who felt our post was in poor taste,” the company said. “The image was solely meant to pay respect to those affected by the 9/11 tragedy.”

So the image wasn’t in bad taste. AT&T was just sorry there were people who felt it was. At least, that’s the reaction a lot of people had to the apology. The anger sparked by the response led to a second apology, in which the CEO admitted the image “fell woefully short of honoring the lives we lost on that tragic day.”

That’s better, but a second apology shouldn’t have been necessary. When dealing with somethinig like raw emotions brought to the surface on 9/11, one of the key principles of crisis communciation applies: When emotions are at play, don’t be logical. It feels defensive and guilty. Those emotions are real, and companies need to speak directly to the emotions of the aggrieved public.

One of the best-ever responses to a crisis came from former JetBlue CEO Dave Neelman, who eschewed a script for a YouTube video in which he spoke from the heart, spontaneously, about how mortified he was over the events that sparked the crisis and what steps he was taking to make sure the airline never repeated its mistakes.

When it’s not an issue that brings out the risk aversion in people, though, there are other approaches companies can take. Fun ones.

For example, when UK feminine hygiene company Bodyform saw 84,000 likes and 3,500 comments on its Facebook page reacting to a post complaining that its TV spots suggest its products eliminate the symptoms of a woman’s period, they decided humor was the way to go. The very funny video they produced with an actress hired to play a fictitious company CEO, racked up more than 5 million views and lots of praise.

This week has brought us another classy response to good-natured criticism, this time from a video production company. Marina Shifrin’s video (below), in which she quits her job at Next Media Animation, has garnered more than 12 million hits. Unfortunately, stats are disabled on the video’s YouTube page, so I can’t guess at the view-to-share ratio, the best metric for assessing how viral a video is.

But the fact that she chose to quit in so visible a manner doesn’t speak well of the company, or the boss she accuses of caring only about views and not about quality. Who’d want to work at a place like that?

But the company fired back—brilliantly. No hard feelings, they said, but we think this is a great place to work. And they did it by adopting the style of Shifrin’s own video. The response (below) is up to almost 3 million hits and 300,000 views. It has been shared 200 times, giving it a view-to-share ratio of two shares to every 3,000 views. Not bad.

More to the point, people liked what they saw. While the comments on YouTube itself are mostly negative, the general response has been much better. Mashable, for instance, points out that “The clip even shows off the company’s rooftop pool and spa, making a great case for why someone might want to apply for the now-vacated position.”

When faced with criticism, the response is vital. Consider the circumstances and the audience, then craft something that will appeal to the emotions that fueled the criticism in the first place. Whether it’s heartfelt or funny, getting it right can mean earning some cred while putting the incident behind you as quickly as possible.