Hoyt Neal

As Sun Tzu said in ‘The Art of War’: “Attack is the secret of defence; defence is the planning of an attack.” The decision whether to be reactive or proactive in your litigation PR strategy is to a great extent a false one in practice. For example, you may decide to keep quiet unless the other side goes on the PR offensive. But all good journalists seek balance in their stories as far as possible, and in particular like to get the view of the other side of a case, as well as encouraging rebuttal comments from those who will be criticised, so you will get an early warning of the impending attack when you or your client are asked to comment. Then you can deploy the full force of your carefully prepared reactive PR strategy, preemptively turning the fire of the attack back on your opponent, either killing their article or shaping it to your own messaging. Sometimes no comment at all really is the best comment, but usually only when you are either losing hard or winning big. But these

Since Bitcoin’s conception in 2009, it’s fair to say the scope and popularity of cryptocurrencies has soared exponentially. Not only have over 1,658 new cryptocurrencies emerged, but blockchain has been the catalyst for many new organisations of different business functions to trade virtually with the benefit of decentralisation. And yet, cryptocurrencies continue to be an outlier in the financial services sector, with many investors shunning the platform in favour of more traditional means of trading. The question remains, how can the crypto industry as a whole address this gap in public perception?  The biggest challenge that crypto’s struggle to overcome without professional help is market positioning. This should be the first step in any PR or marketing strategy, yet this is something often overlooked or put on the backburner. Effective positioning not only helps define who you (or your brand) are, but who you want to reach in your marketing efforts. Once a particular target

Reality: winning the reputation war will help you win the legal battle. Your client’s reputation may be more valuable than the matter you are litigating over, or at least the other side’s reputation may be. So winning in the court of public opinion is just as important, and sometimes even more so, than winning in the courtroom. But the courtroom and the outside world are connected for two important reasons. Firstly, because it is of fundamental importance that justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done; and secondly because judges and jurors, no matter how impartial, urbane and sophisticated they may be, do not in reality sit in a vacuum, but ride the bus of popular culture to a greater or lesser extent, whether they like it or not. In other words, there are two conversations going on: one inside the courtroom to persuade the judge, and the other outside the courtroom to persuade the public. But the reality is that these two conv

We live in a world in which the internet has the potential to amplify defamatory communications unparalleled in human history. Plainly, the internet vastly expands the reach and impact of online defamation, invasions of privacy, and bullying—all with the very real possibility that such cyber attacks are accessible in perpetuity. Today, the challenge becomes even identifying who are often anonymous online attackers, convincing internet service providers and websites to provide relief, and assisting clients in orchestrating reputation-preserving counterattacks. Like Dorothy’s admonition to Toto, we clearly are not in Kansas anymore for as has been said, GoogleTM is not simply a search engine—it’s a reputation engine. For the many early years, the mantra was today’s newspaper is simply tomorrow’s birdcage lining, that a good reputation will stand the test of the occasional private attacker. However, protecting reputation and rights is ever so different in the online world of billio

Several years ago, a friend’s house was vandalized while she was at work. Watching her deal with the aftermath and live with the fear of it happening again inspired me to install a home security system. When the company representative showed up at my house to sign papers and begin installation, he asked when my house had been robbed. I replied that it had never been robbed. He looked at me in stunned silence. Shaking his head, he said, “In all my years working for this company, I’ve never had a new customer who hadn’t just experienced a break-in.” Isn’t that ironic? Millions of dollars are spent in promoting security systems, yet the vast majority of us wait until we’ve experienced a break-in before preparing for it. Don’t we all have the tendency to react to a crisis instead of planning for it in advance? If you are a business owner or manager, you know instinctively that your company will face a crisis of some kind in the future. Whether from internal forces like a disgruntl

Crises are often misdiagnosed. They almost always arise as conflicts, not communication problems. Since the issue or topics might be playing out in the media, some leaders will identify the crisis as a communication problem and are tempted to treat it as such. But crises are solved through operational decisions, not just PR bandages. You might have a great statement or press release, but that is not going to build back the factory that blew up or fix the quality issue that led to the product recall,. Crisis management is a series of deliberate decisions the company makes to dampen the broader impact of what they are facing. It isn’t just communications. It is about an opportunity make the company better, strengthen relationships with the customers that matter most, improve the operations, and even solidify the alignment and positive dependencies between sales and marketing that will serve the organization well into the future.

Crisis management is a containment discipline.  Crises take many forms without warning or incident. From a wayward executive to natural disasters, from criminal tragedies to nationwide product recalls. Sometimes they start as an incident with the potential to become an impacting crisis. Other times, they originate as a full-fledged crisis and our intent is to prevent it from becoming a disaster. Often times, crises are caused, or at least fueled, by motivated adversaries - those companies, groups, or individuals with a position that is counter to your own. Sometimes they are expected and sometimes unexpected. Any company finds motivated adversaries among their competitors. In the first few hours after a crisis, you have to communicate. You can’t allow a vacuum to be created. In today’s rapid-fire media landscape, conventional and alternative news outlets will fill the vacuum with whatever they believe to be true or worse what fits their preconceived narrative, and that can l

In a world where there are tens of millions of Google and website searches per minute, protecting one’s online reputation can be critical. Your reputation and perhaps your business could depend on it. Notwithstanding the broad protection for statements of opinion and regulatory immunity, there are still several steps anyone can take to address and possibly eliminate highly negative and false reviews. My top strategies are the following: Examine Your Online Footprint : Regularly review your online profile—in other words, Google yourself and regularly check online review websites like Yelp so as to identify what, if any, negative reviews are out there about you. Respond : Consider posting a response to the negative review so that users can learn the true facts. Contact the Sites : You can contact the site and ask that the information be removed or corrected. To do this, you should locate the site’s privacy policy and terms of use. In this current climate where sites li

We live in a world in which the internet has the potential to amplify defamatory communications unparalleled in human history. Plainly, the World Wide Web vastly expands the reach and impact of online defamation, invasions of privacy, bullying and even revenge porn—all with the very real possibility that such cyber attacks are accessible in perpetuity. Ever increasingly, lawyers are playing a counseling and litigation role in protecting clients from the posting of negative information and reviews that otherwise might live on in the blogosphere forever. This changing world thus alters the traditional role of lawyers who heretofore were hired to write threatening demand letters and pursue lawsuits against the alleged perpetrators (and repeaters) of such informational wrongdoing. Today, the challenge becomes even identifying who are often anonymous online attackers, convincing internet service providers and websites to provide relief, and assisting clients in orchestrating reputatio