Leadership Lessons Of COVID-19
A crisis can bring out the best and worst in us — and in our leaders. In the weeks since the Coronavirus shutdown, Americans have experienced a crazy-quilt of messages from leadership at federal, state, and local levels. There are communications lessons about crisis leadership crisis in nearly every example. So far, Congress has been […]
Read MorePR In The Time Of Coronavirus
It’s a tough time for business leaders. The rapid rise of public health warnings about COVID-19 and the ripple effects of the pandemic and our coping strategies pose a particular challenge for any organization, especially its communicators. The news cycle is dominated by the spread of the coronavirus and its repercussions. The effect on employee […]
Read MoreCorporate Reputation And The Whistleblower Culture
As a PR person, I’ve always been fascinated by the complicated psychology of whistleblowing. Lately it seems particularly relevant. Tom Mueller, who interviewed over 200 corporate whistleblowers for his book Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud, proclaims this “the age of the whistleblower.” Look at Theranos – the health tech unicorn that […]
Read MoreCrisis PR Lessons From The Iowa Caucus
As every politics fan knows, the Iowa caucuses mark the official start of voting in a given election year. Because of its first-in-the-nation status and a quaint, complicated caucus system (or maybe in spite of it), Iowa has an outsize impact on news and social media coverage. Newspapers camp out there, journalists embed with campaigns, […]
Read More10 Rules For Keeping (PR Agency) Clients
For a PR agency, what’s better than winning a new client? Keeping the ones you have. Naturally, any good PR firm wants to do both. But it costs a lot more to find a new client than to keep (and grow) current ones. Research by Bain & Company shows that boosting customer retention rates by […]
Read MoreThe PR Winners Of 2019
For most experts in public relations, it’s easy to identify episodes where companies or individuals made mistakes, often making a bad situation worse. But what about the successes? Those are harder to assess. They may be about the brand that punches above its weight, one that makes a comeback against the odds, or even the […]
Read MoreThe PR Losers Of 2019
Who had the worst PR of 2019? Yes, it’s that time of year when we evaluate the mistakes, stumbles and train wrecks of public reputation over the past 12 months. There’s lots to choose from, including fresh blunders by the usual suspects like Uber and Facebook. But for this post we’re focusing on truly terrible […]
Read MoreUnpacking The Away PR Disaster
DTC luggage company Away replaced Steph Korey as CEO just days after a PR trainwreck of an article by The Verge exposed its punitive work culture. Korey will be kicked upstairs to take an Executive Chairman post and former Lululemon executive Stuart Haselden will step into her old position. To be clear, Haselden’s hire must […]
Read MoreCan Big Business Save America?
We seem to be in a crisis of confidence. Public faith in many institutions – organized religion, Congress, and the news media — has eroded over four decades. According to Gallup, only the U.S. military has enjoyed a fairly consistent upswing in public confidence since the 1970s. The change seems particularly acute lately in our […]
Read More