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Case Studies

A Case Study in Crisis Communication & Management

Wednesday night: MAC Strategies receives call from medium-sized (50 employees and six offices around a large state, not on the East Coast) professional services client about on-going attacks in the city’s news media. Media is reporting on the local prosecutor potentially filing a crippling criminal charge against the client. E-mail exchange captured by prosecutors is a key issue. One hour free consultation.

Thursday - Friday: Client contacts MAC Strategies’ references and hires MAC Strategies. We are in touch with client’s attorneys and client and devise a tentative plan to mitigate news reports and not incite prosecutors. We are in touch with the news media and negotiate more balanced and accurate stories.

First Weekend: Message creation, role-playing for interviews, trading communications with attorneys and researching all news reports, depositions and scenarios. Preparing for conversation with primary news media and developing positive stories for SEO and social media with Mike Costigan’s team. Our SEO practice partner immediately goes to work pushing up good stories on web search engines about our client. We work with the client to strengthen the client’s web site and provide better placements for social media like Facebook, Twitter and blogs.

Monday – Wednesday: MAC Strategies has “off the record” conversation with city “paper-of-record” to provide contextual information and correct incorrect allegations. All kinds of news media are contacted to correct false information but newspaper is primary driver and we develop the strongest relationship with the reporters and editors. SEO team steps-up campaign to push up good stories about client and push down misleading and false stories on the search engines, like Google, Yahoo, etc. MAC Strategies is working with client to gather more information and create a calendar of ongoing business events to show the public and officials the client has strong community support and a strong ongoing business. We also want to make sure the prosecutor sees the client as cooperative – we work in support of the legal team’s strategies. MAC Strategies works with client for internal messages to help employees and gives everyone instructions for holding statements and what to do when the news media calls. MAC Strategies team is working for client an average of 5-8 hours each day as the situation is constantly changing.

Ongoing: MAC Strategies team creates a mid-term and long-term plan to support client’s criminal and civil legal cases, works with legal team, spends days negotiating favorable media stories or mitigates negative stories with reporters and their editors, helps devise a long term communications plan to position client as socially and professionally responsible statewide with potential employers and professional trade associations.

Client begins winning new business contracts again and MAC Strategies team publicizes successes through a rebuilt client web site that is more “searchable” and supports all of client’s PR and even government relations needs which assist business development.

(Many specific actions concerning this case are not listed here)

A Do-Over on the Grandest Scale

A world-renowned international conglomerate was facing a tremendous challenge: How to keep its aircraft from being grounded by Congress. Such action would have forced hundreds of pilots out of business and severely tainted its brand. Instead we changed government and public's fast negative impression of the airplane. Congress didn't vote to ground the plane, and sale of the aircraft has increased even though it has been out of production for more than 20 years.

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Saving American Manufacturing

One of the nation’s largest hand truck manufacturers was experiencing the biggest crisis of its 62-year existence in 2008: Being forced to go out of business because the Department of Commerce granted an incredibly low tariff to an international competitor. This company’s issue reflected liability for all of America’s hand truck manufacturers and, indeed, would set a precedent for Commerce’s actions in China and elsewhere. But in less than 12 weeks the company convinced Commerce to change the low tariff of 383.6 percent!

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