These days, your good name can be damaged within a matter of minutes.
It can happen if a blogger posts an entry about you, your company or non-profit, on the Internet. Minutes later, it’s picked up and either repeated or referred to on four other blogs. The next day, you start getting email messages from friends and business contacts, asking if the nasty rumor they heard about you is true. Then customers start calling. And before long, the rumor has spun out of control and you start losing business.
What to do? Crisis manager Judith Hoffmann says PR-savvy companies regularly search the Internet to learn what people are saying about them–good and bad. And when they find the source of the rumor, they devise a plan for either confronting it, ignoring it, or monitoring it.
How you react could mean the difference between whether the rumor finds its way onto the front page of your local newspaper, or simply dies.
Judith shared her strategies on what to do and how to do it during a teleseminar titled “What To Do When Someone Damages Your Good Name“.
For 17 years, Judith was the manager of public affairs for a chemical manufacturing company that made one of the smelliest chemicals known to man. Consequently, if an operational upset caused an odorous release, she had to deal with upset neighbors as well as the media. With microphones in her face and reporters digging for a story, she managed many crises including a bomb threat, an overturned railcar, and an employee injured on site. So she can really show you how to get off the hot seat in a crisis.