In the old days, when a company was planning layoffs, it delivered the bad news to employees, and then—if it was smart—issued a press release to let the world know how many people had been laid off and why.<\/p>\n
These days,\u00a0companies concerned about crisis management and joining the “bad news” conversation online\u00a0will also\u00a0post the announcement\u00a0on their corporate blogs.\u00a0An article<\/a> in yesterday’s New York Times explained why companies must break the news first, before one of their employees or a competitor does.\u00a0<\/p>\n Elon Musk, chief executive of the electric-car company Tesla Motors<\/a> in San Carlos, Calif., said that he had no choice other than to blog about the Oct. 15 layoffs at the closely watched company \u2014 even though some employees had not yet been told they were losing their jobs.<\/p>\n Valleywag, a Silicon Valley gossip blog owned by Gawker Media<\/a>, had already published the news, and it was being picked up by traditional media reporters, Mr. Musk said. \u201cWe had to say something to prevent articles being written that were not accurate.\u201d<\/p>\n The article also mentions\u00a0Twitter.<\/a>\u00a0In my Special Report #52: How to Use Twitter for Business,<\/a>\u00a0I mention that companies\u00a0that don’t want to miss a beat,\u00a0like Comcast and Dell, use that site to monitor their brand online and sometimes even announce bad news.\u00a0Check out the cool tip<\/a>\u00a0from Brian Carter on how to search for your company’s name—or for anybody else you want to follow—now that Twitter apparently has disabled its search funciton. Simply use Search.Twitter.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n By the way, have you\u00a0created\u00a0Google Alerts<\/a>\u00a0for your company’s name and\u00a0URL so you know when somebody is discussing you online?\u00a0I want Google to deliver my alerts via email once a day. But if you tell Google you want the information “as soon as it happens,”\u00a0you can respond within minutes after someone has written about you.<\/p>\n What other ways does your company communicate bad news online, or respond who others who are talking about you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the old days, when a company was planning layoffs, it delivered the bad news to employees, and then—if it was smart—issued a press release to let the world know how many people had been laid off and why. These days,\u00a0companies concerned about crisis management and joining the “bad news” conversation online\u00a0will also\u00a0post the announcement\u00a0on\u2026 Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","iawp_total_views":2,"wds_primary_category":606,"footnotes":""},"categories":[606],"tags":[2,168,13],"class_list":{"0":"post-2304","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-public-relations","7":"tag-blogging","8":"tag-crisis-communications","9":"tag-press-releases","10":"entry"},"featured_image_src":null,"featured_image_src_square":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Joan Stewart","author_link":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/author\/jstewart\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2304"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2304\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41440,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2304\/revisions\/41440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}