Crisis Management in the Age of Social Media

Introduction

I spent over 40 years in the public relations business, both as the leader of a major agency and the chief communications officer of a large insurance company. I witnessed and managed dozens of crisis situations over that career. And, I’ve seen “the golden hour” of crisis management turn into “golden minutes.”

Now I teach a course on crisis management at New York University. My students selected a current crisis to review and wrote case studies analyzing the situations, evaluating the quality of the response based on the principles we had discussed in class. Each is given credit for their contributions later in this introduction.

Here’s the assignment the students were given:

Analyze a crisis recently in the news. You may choose ...