This Sunday New York Times piece hit every crucial tenet of crisis communications. It was 5,000 words of wisdom and illustrates the need for worst case scenario planning in advance with a team that knows the personalities good and bad. It’s true that sometimes the best crisis communications isn’t making everything better but rather making things less worse … BP oil spill, Toyota gas pedal, Goldman Sachs and Tiger.
In Case of Emergency: What Not to Do
By Peter S. Goodman
The New York Times
WHOEVER suggested that all publicity is good publicity clearly never envisioned the wave of catastrophe engulfing high-profile corporations over the last year, laying waste to some of the most meticulously tailored reputations on earth.
Toyota, celebrated for engineering cars so utterly reliable that they seemed boring, endured revelations that its most popular models sometimes accelerated for mysterious reasons. The energy giant BP, which once packaged itself as an environmental visionary, now confronts the future with a new identity: progenitor of the worst oil spill in American history. And the Wall Street icon Goldman Sachs, an elite player in the white-collar-and-suspenders set, found itself derided in Rolling Stone as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Last month, Goldman agreed to pay $550 million to settle federal securities fraud charges.
“These were real reputational implosions,” says Howard Rubenstein, the public relations luminary who represents the New York Yankees and the News Corporation. “In all three cases, the companies found themselves under attack over the very traits that were central to their strong global brands and corporate identities.”
Click here to read the full article
