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Hurricane Katrina – Five Years Out

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Crisis communications comes in many forms.

Five  years ago, I watched in disbelief as my hometown of New Orleans — the city that saw every hurricane as a chance to party and who named a noxious pink tourist drink, “The Hurricane” — got very serious, very fast about a hurricane named “Katrina.”

I remember days of not [...]

BP Public Relations Missteps Continue, More Lessons to Learn

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As if BP’s crisis response mistakes mentioned in a recent post weren’t enough, apparently their public relations disasters continue as more oil pumps into the saturated Gulf Coast.

Newly released documents reveal BP’s standard crisis response strategy to be “accentuate the positive, downplay the negative, tell everybody they’re sorry, they’re gonna fix it, they’re gonna [...]

BP's Gulf Coast Oil Spill PR Blunders Offer Crisis Response Lessons

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Wow. The BP PR team just can’t get it right. Even fifty days plus after one of the worst environmental disasters in history, the BP crisis communication strategy (if there is one) continues its downward spiral and never ceases to surprise me.

Recently, the Christian Science Monitor reported that BP has been buying up top [...]

Social Media to the Rescue

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More than ever, the world is turning to social media in times of crisis to share and find information. The devastating earthquake in Chile and subsequent tsunami warnings are perfect examples of social media’s power during a disaster. The world turned to Twitter and Facebook for real-time information about the earthquake and tsunami warnings [...]