Justin Case You Were Wondering

TweetShare  You may think the Pilgrims and Indians invented Thanksgiving, but you’d be wrong. I’m here to tell you that it was the NCAA and NFL. I don’t know about you, but I am like a kid in a candy store at this time of year. Starting Thursday, for the next four days, I will [...]

You can almost guarantee it with the same certainty you can say the sun will come out tomorrow. Start discussing crisis/issues management with a group of corporate communicators and someone is going to ask, sooner or later: “How do you know when to respond to a complaint about your brand?”

Heather and I are very excited to bring you the first episode of PR 2.0 Chat TV. It’s been a long time coming. We had to figure out how the heck we were going to be able to record our Skype calls, find time to record them, then I screwed up the lighting in my office, yada yada (insert other user error). But we finally made it and are hoping you’ll help us make the show better as we move along.

What do you want your brand to stand for? That’s the first question I would ask Etsy’s PR team if I had the chance to talk with them about the best way to handle the “hate cards” issue — it’s not a PR crisis at this point — with which they are faced. If you aren’t familiar with the controversy, Shel Holtz offers a thorough explanation in this recent post. Shel tells the story of Jonathan Mast, a friend of ours, in his post and how Jonathan has tried to get Etsy to remove cards being sold on its site that appear to make fun of down syndrome — Jonathan’s daughter has DS. Since Shel wrote the post, a new set of cards congratulating women for being raped have been posted for sale.