Crisis Communications

Jamie Dimon is glad it’s Facebook Friday. After a week where JPMorgan Chase revealed a $2 billion trading loss, saw questions about the reputation of the bank and its CEO mount, experienced a drop in financial value and heightened attacks from the pro-regulation camp, was sued by shareholders, and became the subject of an FBI investigation, the man is probably longing for a day off and a stiff drink. With the IPO happening, he can take a breather.

“For a bank viewed as a strong risk manager that never reported a loss throughout the financial crisis, the errors are embarrassing, especially in light of Dimon’s public criticism of the so-called Volcker rule to ban proprietary trading by big banks, and could lead to more heat from Washington on the sector,” wrote CNBC. Yikes.

The question now is what can be done to turn things around.

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Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

Among the many companies sponsoring this year’s Summer Olympic Games in London is BP, which is trying to use the event to further distance itself from the Gulf oil spill. And, in the process, proving that a company in a crisis just might throw anything out there in the hopes of cutting free from an atrocious reputation that’s sticking like a barnacle to the bottom of a ship.

But it’s hard to shake the Gulf spill when you hear stories about the devastating mutations in marine life, the ongoing legal battles, and see pictures like the one above, one of many just recently released by Greenpeace. (More here.)

Turns out, BP wasn’t the only energy company that thought an Olympic sponsorship would be a good corporate reputation tune-up. But what these companies could be doing is bringing down the Games rather than improving their images.

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Patti Hart, a Yahoo board director who helped with the decision to hire CEO Scott Thompson, will announce today that she won’t seek re-election following the eruption over Thompson’s resumé shenanigans. The company will also create a three-person committee that will look deeper into the hiring process.

The trouble started last week when activist hedge fund Third Point uncovered an inaccuracy on Thompson’s CV. Since then, they’ve called for his ouster and, when that didn’t happen yesterday, an investigation and greater transparency. Hart’s resumé was also called into question.

Thompson himself has apologized to employees for the brouhaha.

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Popchips, makers of the quite delicious popped (not fried) snacks, made a very distasteful ad starring Ashton Kutcher that the company founder is now apologizing for after a very swift and negative Internet reaction.

The ad, which is strangely set in some sort of dating service situation, opens with Kutcher, the brand’s “president of pop culture,” in brownface and a dhoti doing a very bad Indian accent. Immediately, people took to the Web to tell Popchips that the ad is racist.

Keith Belling, the CEO and founder of Popchips, has now issued an apology, saying the ad was supposed to be a “light-hearted parody” and the company “did not intend to offend anyone.” (No word from Kutcher at this point.) Reports say the ad has also been pulled from all of Popchips’ online pages, but you can still catch a glimpse of the character in this ad, which is also still on its Facebook page. The campaign cost the company $1.5 million and Alison Brod Public Relations is handling the PR duties, according to The New York Times.

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Finally, we’ve got a statement from Mary J. Blige about the ad she made for Burger King’s chicken snack wraps, which sparked a ton of controversy and backlash.

In a statement (that doesn’t appear to be on her website) Blige, says the ad was unfinished and doesn’t include a dream sequence that had previously been discussed. “But, if you’re a Mary fan, you have to know I would never allow an unfinished spot like the one you saw to go out,” she said.

Further statements from Burger King support Blige’s comments, with the company saying there was a “lapse in communication” somewhere along the way that led to the ad being released in the form we all groaned at. The company has offered its apologies to Blige.

OK… We have to agree with the corp comms expert that Ad Age spoke with on this issue. Something about this explanation sounds fishy.

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With Keith Olbermann promising a lawsuit following his dismissal from Current TV, the network has hired crisis PR experts Fabiani & Lehane.

The two PR pros, dubbed the “Masters of Disaster,” are known for their high-profile work. They helped Lance Armstrong throughout the doping scandal and worked with the Clintons during their various issues with Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky. Chris Lehane has a previous relationship with Current co-founder Al Gore.

In his statements released Friday, both on Twitter and on Politico, Olbermann says that the “claims” made against him by Current and its founders (Gore and Joel Hyatt) will be shown to be untrue “in the legal actions” he plans to file.

[via The Hollywood Reporter]

After reading our post on the controversy over “pink slime”/”lean finely textured beef,” a representative from the beef industry emailed us with a response.

Dan Casey, general manager at Nor-Am Cold Storage, told us we’ve got it all wrong. Nor-Am is a refrigerated warehouse where beef, pork, and poultry are packaged and ice cream is repackaged. Customers include big meat businesses like Cargill and Tyson.

“It’s not filler which would by USDA regulation require ingredient labeling. It’s beef 100%, about 20% more than ‘beef’ served at Taco Bell. It’s not made from scraps, but trimmings. This is a commodity not garbage. You have probably eaten it,” he wrote to us.

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Mashable has posted a short clip from the incident on a Las Vegas-bound JetBlue flight in which the captain had what some are calling a “panic attack.” The clip shows a relatively calm scene. Passengers are, of course, looking to see what’s going on, but it’s not the chaos one could imagine.

On the other hand, there’s this clip on ABC News that’s really frightening, not just for the passengers, but for the pilot, Clayton Osbon, who is clearly distraught. He has been suspended and is now getting medical attention while in FBI custody. This is barely two years after a JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater decided he had enough and decided to quit his job via the plane’s emergency exit ramp.

What the heck is JetBlue doing to its employees? Read more

Reactions to Greg Smith’s censure of the “new” Goldman Sachs have fallen into a few categories. Some went the funny route, like The Borowitz Report, which joked that only the “finest sociopaths” work at the firm and “announced” that LRA leader Joesph Kony would be replacing Smith. Darth Vader announced he was leaving the Empire. And Don Draper explained why he’s quitting cigarettes.

Some tried to show a little sympathy for Richard Siewert Jr., who only just started his job as the head of comms at Goldman and is already up to his eyeballs. A lengthy memo went out from Goldman execs Lloyd Blankfein and Gary Cohen (we wouldn’t be surprised if Siewert had a look at it), that gets credit from Dukas PR CEO Richard Dukas for being a measure better than the initial statement.

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The one percent is turning on itself!

“To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money,” writes Greg Smith in the New York Times opinion piece that has got Goldman Sachs trending on Twitter. After 12 years with the company, Smith, an executive with the financial powerhouse, tendered his resignation with the op-ed, saying that the company is so “toxic” he can’t identify with it anymore.

“The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years,” Smith goes on to say, describing a company that once worked with integrity, humility, and care for its clients. But no more. Now, it’s all about making money, no matter what.

“It astounds me how little senior management gets a basic truth: If clients don’t trust you they will eventually stop doing business with you. It doesn’t matter how smart you are,” he says. Preach!

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