Articles by Allan Jenkins

The good ship Ethan Allen rolled over the other day on Lake George, drowning 21 people.

This is when crisis communication comes into play. Where, if you are smart, you listen to your lawyers, listen to your heart and head, and start communicating. Actively.

When Alaska Airlines lost a plane a few years ago (1998-99, if I remember right), they had a new homepage up within 40 minutes of the pilot declaring an emergency. That page stated, bluntly, that one of their planes was missing, and presumably crashed. It had phone numbers to hotlines. Constant updates. A passenger list. Maps. Links to the FAA and the Coast Guard (the plane crashed in the Pacific). It had a press inquiries section, with contact information to the airline, and links to breaking news being published about the crash.

They updated it constantly in the first days. About a week after, they moved it away from the front page, but kept it going, and linked to it from the front page. And when investigators decided that Alaska’s own mechanic was at fault? They reported that, without spin. Read the rest of this entry »

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Last week, I wrote some about prediction markets at Desirable Roasted Coffee. These are markets where hundreds, even thousands, of participants, each armed with “some” knowledge, pool their thinking to make better predictions than pollsters, better decisions than “experts”.

(Note: Wikipedia’s Prediction Market article is a good starting place if you want to learn more, as is James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds.

But what applications do prediction markets have for business and PR practitioners? The evidence is thin to date, but last week, Google announced it’s using prediction markets to make better internal decisions:
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