The Noggin Blog

By now, you’re probably past questioning whether a corporate reputation management function makes sense for your firm. After all, seven out of ten crisis-experienced board members say it takes anywhere from one to five years to recover from a reputational crisis.

Emergencies happen suddenly. They flare up, instantly posing a threat to life, critical infrastructure, and the environment at large. And once they get going, they don’t stay static. Emergencies are highly fluid events by definition.

If you take a bird’s eye view, the state of volunteerism seems pretty healthy. The volunteer rate in the U.S., for instance, stands at around 63 million people, roughly a quarter of the total population. And that’s only a few basis points down from the 29 percent that government statisticians recorded when they first started tracking rates of volunteerism back in the early 2000s. The importance of those volunteers to the health of the economy (not to mention the mission of their nonprofit organizations) can’t be overstated either. Some estimates show that volunteers contribute upwards of $150 billion in services.

Photo by MONUSCO/Sylvain Liechti  [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons 

Welcome to our newest blog series ‘Get to know Noggin OCA’. This series will highlight features of our enterprise resilience software platform, Noggin OCA, that help all types of business manage disruption, smarter. The next 4 blogs will focus on the key features that help organizations efficiently and effectively manage resources during an emergency. 

Photo by Matt More/FEMA  [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons 

Efficiently deploying resources in time-sensitive emergency situations isn’t easy. Just take search-and-rescue (SAR). Time is absolutely crucial in those operations, as the possibility of success rapidly dwindles with the passing of days, if not hours.

If you’re not in Marketing, you might have missed this stat. But according to researchers, a staggering 80 percent of adults are at least somewhat more likely to consider buying products and services recommended by friends, family, and authentic online consumers.

Think stress clouds your judgment and impairs decision making? Sorry, but if you’re not a neuroscientist, sociologist, or psychiatrist, you don’t even know the half of it. We're not any of those things, but we thought it would be worthwhile to dig into some of the research in the field. We want to share some of the findings, because they’re of particular interest to crisis management practitioners out there.

It’s not uncommon to hear senior business leaders refer to brand and reputation as if they were one and the same. Sure, there’re plenty of similarities. But there’re even more fundamental differences, such that mistaking the two distinct concepts can get your business into a lot of trouble.

The origins of the ongoing AT&T pay-for-play crisis reach back to October 2016. It was then, during the last weeks of the U.S. presidential election, that AT&T, the nation’s second-largest wireless provider and third-largest home internet provider, announced that it would be acquiring Time Warner, the world’s third-largest media conglomerate after Comcast and the Walt Disney Company.