From Victoria Cross, writing for ContinuityCentral.com: Fight, flight, freeze… or film? Evolutionary science tells us that when faced with a potentially dangerous situation, our sympathetic nervous system is activated and a primitive ‘fight, flight or freeze’ response kicks in. Our body is subsequently flooded with adrenaline and we are poised to make an unconscious decision […]
From Madelaine C. Lane, writing for the Grand Rapids Business Journal: It’s a story we see play out all too often on the evening news: An organization or one of its employees is hit with a search warrant, subpoena or a civil lawsuit. Before the receptionist, communications director or CEO can turn around, a microphone […]
By Thom Fladung/Hennes Communications Even in this era, when the news barrage can be numbing, the report that Jeffrey Epstein had apparently hanged himself in jail and the immediate flurry of conspiracy theories took a run at qualifying as “shocking.” The least surprising element: Much of it started and played out on Twitter. In an […]
Q. What do I do if the media wants to talk to me? A. Start by asking yourself what you think when you read or hear that the subject of a story – particularly a story in which others are critical of the person or the person’s organization – says “no comment” or that the […]
From John Schwartz, writing for the New York Times: Don Guckert’s job is keeping the buildings on the University of Iowa’s charming campus up and running, and safe. His most important lessons came from the worst days of his career, in June 2008, when the waters of the Iowa River washed across the campus, causing […]
From Dan Hill, writing for CommPro: From U.S. presidents to NFL quarterbacks, I’ve studied their signature facial expressions—looking for the patterns that indicate success. Maybe you weren’t the first choice for the C-suite corner office you now have, but surely you weren’t the 199th overall pick for the job (like the New England Patriot’s Tom […]
By Nora Jacobs, Sr. VP, Hennes Communications If you are able to access it, this article from The New York Times provides a riveting account of the firefighting strategy that saved Notre Dame cathedral from collapse in April. If you are not able, the story recounts the heroic measures response teams took to extinguish the […]
Q. How do I know whether I should respond to a negative social media comment about our organization? A. We’ve worked with several clients recently that faced the challenge of negative social media posts going viral, attracting thousands of comments and shares and threatening the reputation of the organization involved. Before it reaches that crisis […]
From CommPro, written by Dr. Nick Morgan, Author: Most of us think of charisma, or executive presence, as something mysterious and elusive that certain executives are born with or are trained to achieve in some executive school we haven’t been invited to. We all know we need that mysterious quality when we’re in front of […]
By James G. Robinson, writing for the Columbia Journalism Review: A central irony of the newsroom is that while many journalists’ decisions are made with readers in mind, the audiences for their work often remain unfocused, imagined abstractions, built on long-held assumptions, newsroom folklore, and imperfect inference. This is not particular to journalism. Writing, like […]