By Jonathan & Erik Bernstein on March 2, 2011
The former inevitably leads to the latter One of the most common cause of crises (business and personal!) is making poor choices, a problem that can usually be corrected by training and communication. Sometimes, though, underlying conditions make standard crisis management nearly impossible. One issue that often surfaces in the world of big business and celebrity […]
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By Jonathan & Erik Bernstein on February 26, 2011
Social media has changed the way crisis management works The impact of social media on crisis management has been the story of the year, with the maturation of services like Facebook and Twitter sparking a massive surge in use that has literally changed the way we communicate. To help illustrate that, the professionals over at […]
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By Jonathan & Erik Bernstein on February 23, 2011
Actions speak louder than words during a crisis The way your organization communicates during a crisis is important, but how it fixes the underlying problem will be what determines its reputation in the long run. Those that choose to merely give lip service to an issue are playing with fire. In a quote from a […]
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By Jonathan & Erik Bernstein on February 20, 2011
Widespread use opens new crisis communications possibilities As a culture, we started becoming more aware of the power of social media during times of crisis, like when the Iran election in 2009 caused a furor, both on the ground and on Twitter. More recently, the Internet and social media played an important role in spreading […]
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By Jonathan & Erik Bernstein on February 18, 2011
Stakeholder trust can ease the impact of crises We all know by now that prior reputation has a major impact on the reaction of the public to crises. It’s been proven that, given a similar crisis, popular and trusted organizations take less of an initial fall than their counterparts. Why is it like that, though? […]
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By Jonathan & Erik Bernstein on February 10, 2011
Tell the whole story, or suffer the consequences There’s nothing the media loves to expose more than a cover-up. Any hint of things being less than kosher in the aftermath of a crisis will result in heightened scrutiny, and if there’s anything being hidden then someone out there will dig until it comes out. What […]
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By Jonathan & Erik Bernstein on February 7, 2011
Leaders must step up during a crisis Too often leaders are paralyzed during the crucial beginning stages of crises. When things start to heat up it’s important to keep control, or things can quickly get out of hand. In an article for the Harvard Business Review, leadership expert John Baldoni gave his advice for those […]
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By Jonathan & Erik Bernstein on February 7, 2011
Blogs provide a simple crisis communication solution Dark sites, fully built web pages held offline until needed, are known as valuable crisis management tools because they grant you the ability to react almost immediately to negative incidents. Taking that a step further is the idea of basing your dark site on a blogging platform, which, […]
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By Jonathan & Erik Bernstein on February 5, 2011
Get engaged and get protected As with many other aspects of crisis management, businesses are hesitant to invest in social media strategies because the returns are often difficult to quantify. Get caught up in a Web-based crisis, though, and you’ll be thanking your lucky stars for the protection. In a post on the SmartBlog social […]
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By Jonathan & Erik Bernstein on January 31, 2011
Often it takes nothing more than honesty to garner large shares of good will from stakeholders. Despite how vicious initial responses can be, people are surprisingly willing to forgive even major mistakes if they receive an apology and a simple explanation as to how the issue will be prevented in the future. In an interview […]
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Jonathan L. Bernstein, founder and Chairman of Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc. has more than 25 years of experience in all aspects of crisis management – crisis response, vulnerability assessment, planning, training and simulations.[Read more ...]
Erik Bernstein is president of Bernstein Crisis Management. Erik started with BCM in 2009 as a writer and subsequently became social media manager for the consultancy itself as well as for a number of BCM clients before moving to the president position.
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