I suggested to the recently elected CEO that it might be wise to develop a new strategic approach that more closely matched his probable tenure rather than to revise the current plan by establishing an optimistic set of principles and ideas that wouldn’t pass the straight-face test, no matter how sincerely they were developed.  The meeting immediately got down to business.

Because of the explosive nature of social media, developing a monitoring strategy and putting it in place as part of a crisis plan is essential. Of course, you could attempt to handle this monitoring yourself or assign it to someone on your staff. Or you could take advantage of companies like BrandProtect and Risdall.com, which provide reputational monitoring services.

A former TV anchor-turned PR executive ruffled a lot of feathers by admitting that he posted opinions on websites and blogs using a phony name while being paid by the controversial construction project company to do just that. A lot of folks, including the New York Times, have their shorts all wrinkled up about this behavior.

Advising others on the issues, problems and situations that truly matter is one of our most challenging professional activities. It takes a special breed of individual to counsel those who do important work affecting the lives, lifestyles and well being of other people, organizations, cultures, even societies.

In 30 years, I have seen only one satisfactory correction by a news outlet, and that was because the reporter was arrested and jailed for hacking an executive’s e-mail. If you want a satisfactory correction, remember the yo-yo factor… you’re on your own.

When bad things happen to good organizations, the people in charge often stall, delay and deny, doing everything except those very actions that most people would recognize as the “right” thing to do. By considering the behaviors with the most potential to affect the organization directly, we can identify a list of weaknesses that those in trouble tend to exhibit before, during, and after a crisis occurs.

This week’s news is again full of the relentless legal, political, and adversarial pounding British Petroleum (BP) continues to receive as a result of its huge and disastrous spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Strategy is a mindset, a way of thinking about decision making, work issues, even a wide variety of life-related issues.

I keep hearing communication colleagues pining for set of rules for social media like those in legacy journalism i.e. critical thinking skills, validated sources of information and quotes, insertion of editorial judgment steps, off the record conventions and ethical principles.

According to Booz & Company, the problem is “coherence”… the new buzz word. They have even developed a Coherence Test which yields a score designed to help business leaders determine, apparently, just how incoherent their businesses are strategically.