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...

A recent posting on The Big Money by freelancer Matthew DeBord made one of the most misguided assessments of crisis public relations that I have ever run across.  Calling it “PR’s evil twin” and “a black sorcerer’s art worth millions,” DeBorg claims that in the social media universe “crisis PR is no longer up to the job”—that the “dark art” is in meltdown.  He bases his conclusion on what he called “a veritable deluge of crises since 2008.”

In his attack DeBord is right about two things:  Read more...

• There have been many high profile crises in the past two years.

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...

If I were to ask you if your company or organization had a crisis plan, more than likely you would answer, “Yes.” That’s because managers are increasingly becoming aware of the need to be prepared when something goes wrong.

On the other hand, if I were to ask if your crisis plan stipulates detailed steps to be taken in each of a number of very specific situations at various levels of severity, I’d be willing to bet your answer would be “No.” That’s because far too many crisis plans are generic rather than specific in nature, that is, the plans refer to what to do in a crisis or emergency in general, as if one size fits all. Well, it doesn’t.  Read more...