Tag: crisis management

We live in a hyper-connected world, where news travels fast, and social channels amplify even the smallest incidents. While this has advantages, it has also made businesses more vulnerable than ever. Today, a PR crisis can quickly snowball into a major issue for businesses, damaging their online reputation and bottom line. This significantly impacts a company’s brand image, customer trust, and stakeholder relationships. In addition, the effects can be felt for years because “the internet does not forget.” In this article, I will try to explore crisis triggers and the impact of PR crises on real-life businesses. Hopefully, you’ll pick ... Read more

A crisis is an event that threatens your company’s ability to conduct business. Crises could be expected or unexpected. For example, if you’re planning to lay off employees, it’s fair to anticipate some form of crisis. However, in most cases, crises are unexpected, leaving brands playing catch up and they can be very difficult to deal with.  Here is the crazy thing, though. According to a 2021 PWC global crisis survey, 95% of business leaders had anticipated that a global crisis was imminent in 2019. I will let that sink in but – less than 35% had implemented a crisis ... Read more

I speak a lot to student and marketers alike about social media crisis management as I believe it can have a huge impact on a brand’s reputation and share price if you get it wrong. Even today I am amazed at how many brands just pass the social media content to the most junior member of the team. Everything is fine and dandy until the shit hits the fan and things start to unravel – this is usually when the PR team are called in and start to earn their wages and all of a sudden they start getting listened ... Read more

It has been a truly torrid couple of weeks for consumer giants Samsung. In an instant world, even minute issues can spiral into a PR disaster, so when a major clanger is dropped- damage can be cataclysmic. And this has very much been the case this past couple of weeks. The Galaxy Note 7 was the cornerstone of Samsung’s range—and a product bursting into flames is pretty much a worst case scenario already, before even adding a failed initial recall. But is such an incident fatal to a brand, or can Samsung survive it unscathed or perhaps even come out ... Read more

The last couple of months have been rather choppy for children’s tech brand VTECH. Two months ago its online app store was hacked and personal data of more than 4.8 million adult customers and 6.3 m children was allegedly stolen causing a major customer outcry. The APP store has been down ever since, until this week, when it sprung back up. The company has apparently upgraded its security in the two months it has been down, but unfortunately in a major PR Fail it also updated its Terms and Conditions and buried a few things in there that have caused ... Read more

This is my review of a book called Managing Online Reputation: How to Protect Your Company on Social Media which is a book is written by Charlie Powell and produced by Palgrave Pocket Consultants. I read it over the Christmas holidays whilst watching far too many movies and drinking too much beer, it is one of the first books that has been outreached to me, that genuinely interested me, as I felt the outreach was well targeted because I love online crisis management and cover it quite a lot here on the blog. Charlie Pownall used to be the regional managing director at Burston Marstellar amongst ... Read more

In the news this week the tiny difference between ‘Taylor & Sons Ltd’ and ‘Taylor & Son Ltd’ has ended up costing our Government £9 million – so I guess that’s me and you too. Yes the Government had a major crisis on its hands after a typo – albeit a very important one – cost the taxpayer a sum of £8.8m because it resulted in 250 workers sadly becoming unemployed. The high court has ruled that Taylor & Sons will be awarded the hefty sum after a civil servant had mistaken the firm for the actual liquidised Taylor & Son. ... Read more

The CEO of Air Asia and owner of QPR Tony Fernandes faced his biggest challenge last month when an Airasia flight was sadly reported missing. On December 28th at 7:24 hours Airasia reported the QZ8501 flight from Surabaya to Singapore had lost contact. Updates were shared with the media throughout the day and just two days later unfortunately it was reported that the aircraft had crashed over the Java Sea and some debris had already been found. With more than a hundred passengers and crew on board Fernandes was forced into the front seat as Indonesia was seen to depend ... Read more

Last month I was quite shocked to stumble upon an article about a couple who were actually fined for leaving a negative review on TripAdvisor. Tony and Jan Jenkinson, had been on their way to Oxford to visit family, when they stopped off at a Blackpool hotel to split up their journey. The couple then felt they received a poor quality of service at the hotel and in turn wrote a negative review on Tripadvisor. So everything sounds pretty standard so far, right? Wrong. The hotel then decided to take £100 off their card as a fine for this review. ... Read more

I have been writing about online crisis management for years because as you know I do love a good crisis and helping out is one. It’s actually the topic I covered in Share This Too last year and more recently in an article for E-Consultancy. Anyways I have come across this fine infographic on the topic and although I don’t like everything I thought it was rather interesting.