crisis communications

Reading time: Just over 1 minute If you ever do any media interviews it’s essential that you learn how to dress for TV. Here are some important tips… Are television cameras on their way to you? Here’s some advice about what not to wear. Avoid wearing white or black. Yes, I know you will sometimes see TV […]

Reading time: Less than 2 minutes If you ever have to do a difficult media interview I urge you to follow one essential tip: embrace silence… I used to work for a daily newspaper. Mostly, I edited, but every once in a while, I had the chance to write. In those days, I didn’t enjoy writing

Reading time: Less than 2 minutes Customer service is a big problem for many companies but it never fails to surprise me when I encounter it as a consumer… I’m a serious cook, and I recently subscribed to a paid service called Raw Spice Bar. For $6 dollars per month ($10 in Canada, where I

Reading time: Less than 1 minute In a crisis, it’s always wise to help your people on the front lines… If your company is facing a crisis you’re probably attending lots of high-level strategy meetings. Perhaps your job is to produce the key messages. Or maybe you have to handle the employee communications side of the

Reading time: Less than 1 minute Donald Trump’s Iowa results carry an important message for corporate communicators — and they’re about more than just politics… I find American politics to be almost endlessly interesting. Never more so than when there are crazy, high profile candidates such as Donald Trump. I have little respect for the man,

Reading time: Less than 2 minutes It shouldn’t  surprise anyone that there are many problems at UBC. It’s a large school with more than 59,000 students. But how does the university handle these problems? Aye, there’s the rub…  What exactly is going on at my alma mater, and the place my three adult children are now

Reading time: Less than 1 minute Groucho Marx defined politics as “the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.” Many of the leaders in the recent Canadian federal election might be likely to agree… I am not a political consultant and this post will not share

Reading time: Less than 2 minutes Unless you live in Vancouver you may not be aware of the UBC presidential crisis that’s occurring right now. Even if you live here, however, the scale of it is hard to believe… I once made a bad hiring mistake. I was 20 years old, working at a weekly

Reading time: Less than 2 minutes When people are busy they sometimes feel as though they don’t have time to plan. Here’s why that idea is so wrong-headed… If you work in media relations, I know you’re busy. This is not so much because I know the field to be intense and demanding, which it