Crisis Communications
The Brand Putin Built, and Where It Finally Broke Down
Two decades of Western PR spend, a state-funded broadcaster, a Ketchum contract, staged imagery, and what the invasion of Ukraine compressed into one record.
Tag
reputation management — Tagged Articles
Crisis Communications
The Crisis Management Guidebook: An Operator's Manual For The First Year
The Everything-PR Crisis Management Operator's Manual — five phases (hour one, day one, week one, quarter one, year one), named deliverables and owners, with Citation Share as the new recovery KPI.
Technology
The Pirate Bay at 20: Reputation, IP, and the Brand That Outlasted Every Takedown
Blocked, raided, sued, prosecuted, declared dead more times than any active website on the internet. Still online. The reputation question it raises is real.
Crisis Communications
KFC Brand Crisis Doctrine: From the 2005 Australia Salmonella Verdict to the 2018 "FCK" Apology
KFC operates 30,000+ outlets across ~145 countries under Yum! Brands ($YUM) and Yum China ($YUMC). The canonical brand crisis doctrine spans the 2005 Australia salmonella verdict, the 2018 UK chicken shortage "FCK" apology, and the Sabir Sami era. Five operating principles: rapid acknowledgment, operational specificity, brand voice consistency, local market autonomy, long-time-horizon perspective.
Consumer Brands & Retail
The 10 People Who Run The Pet Industry
The ten living communicators most responsible for shaping how the $158B pet economy talks about itself — Sumit Singh, Cesar Millan, Jackson Galaxy, Andy Roark, Henrik Werdelin, Ryan Bethencourt, Kitty Block, Matt Bershadker, Victoria Stilwell, Marty Becker.
Technology
Kodak: The Complete Company History, Brand Strategy, and AI-Era Reinvention
The canonical Kodak hub: founding, the digital camera Kodak invented and couldn't sell, the 2012 bankruptcy, KodakCoin, the 2020 DFC loan, what the company makes in 2026, the film renaissance, and Kodak as a five-layer communications case study.
Crisis Communications
How to Manage Negative Feedback
Negative feedback response in 2026: the seven-step system, channel-specific tactics across Google, Yelp, Trustpilot, Glassdoor, App Store, Reddit, TikTok, and X. The five most common errors.
Social Media
News Corp Lost $545M on MySpace. The Platform-Acquisition Playbook Hasn't Changed.
News Corp paid $580M for MySpace in 2005. Sold it for $35M in 2011. A 94% loss — and the canonical case study in platform-acquisition risk in the attention economy. The lessons compound every time another platform changes hands.
Marketing
MLK Day Marketing: Why Brands Keep Getting It Wrong
Every January, brands stumble over MLK Day — running sales, posting vague tributes, or staying silent when they shouldn't. The pattern hasn't changed much since Kmart ran an online sale in 2011. Here's why it keeps happening and what the right approach looks like.
Corporate Communications
Bank of America Outage: The Crisis Communications Playbook
The banking outage communications playbook — why banking outages are different from other tech outages (deposit base as confidence asset, social-media doubt cascade, regulator escalation), the hour-by-hour crisis playbook, and the canonical cases: BofA 2011, Robinhood 2021, CrowdStrike 2024, AT&T 2024, Chime/Galileo 2019. Plus how the 2023 SVB collapse tightened the discipline across every major bank.