reputation management

All that’s needed is to watch the news for a few weeks for people to know that crisis can happen with very little warning. Natural disasters – flooding, earthquakes, tornados, and blizzards offer little or no warning for communities, but at the same time, those communities are aware of what natural calamities could befall their town or city. Living in the mountains may mean the possibility of earthquakes or blizzards in the higher elevations. Living near large waterways means the chance of flooding and maybe tsunamis, and of course, the flat areas like Kansas do not refer to themselves as... Read More >

Financially, the numbers at SeaWorld theme parks continue to fall. Attendance really hasn’t picked up much either. This has led to a recent announcement that the company will be eliminating more than 300 jobs across 12 parks nationwide, as well as its corporate headquarters in Orlando. The company says this will be a combination of layoffs and the “elimination of vacant positions” … though how many of which was not provided to media sources. While the layoffs only represent about three percent of the company’s permanent workforce – many workers are temporary or seasonal in the parks – this is... Read More >

Print media is hurting. Ad sales are down, subscription revenue is down, and the medium is adjusting to a world with much more competition for printing daily news. Fingers are being pointed in every direction as desperate business holdings hope to try to keep some papers profitable while others are going belly up, sending hundreds to the unemployment line every time. Some have called this is an inevitable shift, but that doesn’t help the many people who are hurting or out of work. Nor does it let management off the hook for contributing to the demise or struggles of certain... Read More >

Goodwill Omaha was struggling under the weight of increasing media scrutiny of its management structure and payroll. Change was not only coming, it was becoming necessary. There comes a point when the only way to change the direction of a company is for the leadership to be shuffled or to have the person on top step away and allow some new, fresh ideas a place to bloom.Several recent media reports coming out of Nebraska offer a glimpse into what this looks like and how a painful separation, especially if it’s voluntary, can mean good things for the future of a... Read More >

When you think about hate speech on Facebook, generally the assumption might be that it’s coming from users aimed at other users. Everyone’s familiar with the inevitable devolution of the comment thread. Where someone says something, someone else takes offense, and suddenly everyone is evil incarnate. You know, Godwin’s Law. But German authorities have begun a hate speech investigation into allegations that may surprise many users – complaints against Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The allegations come from attorney Chango Jun, whose complaint includes not only Zuckerberg but also other Facebook executives such as CEO Sheryl Sandberg, as well as European executives... Read More >

For decades a large part of the U.S. federal budget has been attributed to military spending and development. It’s not a secret. But information was released recently about how much of their budget is about PR, and what some would call the propaganda machine. The sad truth is that the current annual budget for PR in its various forms – public employees and private contractors – for the government is over $1 billion. About 63% of that was spent by the Pentagon is accounted for by PR. Interestingly, only 40% of the PR employees of the government work for the... Read More >

Muck Rack reports on their website that they are the easiest way to contact journalists and bloggers with a story for your organization or PR clients. For their customers they provide alert notifications, track your content and who shares it, as well as the different sites that include it on their social media pages, and help you establish lists of journalists that match your content. They also allow you to build a portfolio of your best and most successful content in one place, easily shared with your customers, journalists, bloggers and others wanting to know what you are doing and... Read More >

North Carolina won’t blink. No matter what businesses and events have threatened to pull out, and which ones have already made good on those threats, state lawmakers have refused to back down from what others have described as their “controversial” laws. When the NCAA relocated the men’s basketball regional tournament to South Carolina, that was just one more in a long line of penalties the college sports association has leveled against the state for its stand on social issues. This comes after the announcement, made last month that the NCAA would pull seven other championships out of the basketball state. These... Read More >

When a scandal rocks a higher education institution, the scandal tends to become two-pronged, the event that caused the scandal, and the subsequent outcry over the use of public dollars to pay for PR firms to clean up the mess. Funds allocated for public relation at a higher education institution are typically geared toward marketing materials given to potential students. But an increasing amount is now spent to deal with the damage done to the school when a scandal hits. School Crises Recently it’s been the University of California at Davis when peaceful student protesters were pepper-sprayed to end the... Read More >

Using a PR firm when in the middle of a crisis is not uncommon, but when it comes to spending public funds, it needs to be handled in a way that allows the public to understand and agree with the decision to do so. If an agency is spending over $100K for outside PR and legal consultants when they have internal agencies to handle that type of work, and when the agencies are also in the process of cutting services, closing offices, and laying off staff, then there’s going to be an uproar. Reflect on that before hiring outside help... Read More >