By Josh Cline

In crisis public-relations – whether in a corporate or political context – there is an effective, recognized method to limit damage and salvage reputations. Former Congressman Anthony Weiner, to his obvious detriment, did not use it at all.

For those who may not know, the website BigGovernment.com published a report on May 28 stating that Weiner had sent a sexually-suggestive photo on Twitter to a young woman who was “following” him. On June 1, after the story had flooded the mainstream and digital airwaves for several days, the representative gave a series of interviews to media outlets about the issue.  Read more...

By Josh Cline

In social media, there is no such thing as “off the record.” And General Electric may have discovered this rule — but much too late.

On March 24, the New York Times published an article stating that GE had not paid U.S. federal taxes on the $5.1 billion in profit last year from its domestic operations. In response, the company’s PR account on Twitter started tweeting about the alleged inaccuracies in the story. (Interestingly enough, all of the tweets that day were on other topics even though the NYT story had just broke. The article was not mentioned by GE until their first tweet of the following day.)  Read more...

On April 20, one of the world’s most sophisticated off-shore oil drilling rigs exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and spewing an indeterminate amount of crude oil into the Gulf waters and onto the shores of Louisiana and neighboring states.   Most companies will never have to deal with a crisis of the magnitude of what is now being called simply the BP oil spill, but there are still many lessons about communication and public trust to be learned from this environmental disaster.  Read more...

Negative reputation management and crisis communications has always been important components of strategic communications. With the recent rise of user-generated content, however, the tactics to deal with these important communication challenges have changed.

A recent eMarketer post asks the question “how can you use social media to fix campaigns that don’t click with your targets?” How can you react to negative comments about your brand?

As the graph demonstrates, while direct engagement is still the most popular option (although this could be over the phone, e-mail, SMS, social networking sites, or other channels), other important methods to control your reputation online are also popular.  Read more...