Last week was wild! Client, model and good friend Dawn Montgomery had to deal with mounting pressure from both national and local media outlets as a result of a controversial ad from Akoo, a clothing line by Atlanta rapper, T.I. In a matter of days, more than 300 news articles were posted online about this issue. Everyone from CNN to Bossip.com were commenting on the story.

The best way to deal with any crisis or controversy is to tackle the issue head on-avoid the “no comment” approach. Having a skilled crisis communications team is not easy and it takes planning BEFORE an unfavorable situation occurs. Any organization, business or public figure not prepared to deal with crisis is constantly at risk. Risk management, issue anticipation and crisis communication programs should be a part of any public relations strategy.

But, let me be clear. Crisis management does not mean that an organization or its public relations team can manage outside influences-but what we can manage is the response.

Anyhow, check out Dawn Montgomery’s response amid this controversial billboard ad for the clothing line, Akoo:

Essence Magazine
EXCLUSIVE: Akoo Jeans Model Speaks About Billboard-Essence.com

Rolling Out
Model in T.I.’s Racy AKOO Jeans Billboard Calls the Outrage Hypocritical- RollingOut.com

Dawn also made an appearance on the Frank and Wanda morning show on Atlanta’s V-103 and CW 69 to discuss her involvement with this controversy.

More media coverage to come from Sister 2 Sister Magazine and the Loop 21.

From time to time, PR pros have to dabble in crisis management in order to protect their client’s best interest to the public. It can be a scary time because a failure in communication can do more harm than good. Don’t you just hate the “no comment” approach?

On yesterday, the blogosphere went nuts over a controversial ad by rapper, T.I.’s clothing brand, Akoo. My client, who is the model in the controversial ad, wanted the best PR approach to deal with this situation in order to protect her career.


I say deal with it by getting your point across. Don’t shun from making a statement about the situation, but be honest and clear. In crisis management, it is important to be open and candid in every message disseminated to the public. A lack of communication will be seen as an attempt to shield information. Communication is the hub of a crisis situation.

This morning, the model displayed in this controversial ad, will share her side of the story to the WVEE’s Frank and Wanda Morning Show in Atlanta, GA. Stay tuned…

The 41st NAACP Image Awards was held at the Shrine Auditorium on Friday.The event celebrated the achievements and performances of people of color in motion picture, television, recording, and literature.

Special honors were awarded to Tyler Perry, who received the Chairman’s Award for special achievement and public service; and songwriter/musician Wyclef Jean, who was honored with the Vanguard Award for his activism and “passion for social justice.”

Here is client and actor Romeo Brown as he poses in the press room during the 41st NAACP Image awards held at The Shrine Auditorium.

According to BlackVoices.com, the ’41st Annual NAACP Image Awards’ producers have announced actors Hill Harper and Anika Noni Rose as hosts of the ceremony, which will be broadcast live from Los Angeles’ historic Shrine Auditorium on FOX Feb. 26. Client, Romeo Brown, will be attending, so watch out for him on the red carpet!

“Anika Noni Rose and Hill Harper are a part of a new generation of Hollywood that embodies the spirit of the Image Awards,” said NAACP Hollywood Bureau Executive Director Vicangelo Bulluck, who serves as executive producer of the awards telecast. “Their talent and success is inspiring and adds a sophisticated glamour to the evening.”

Start conversations about the things you find interesting. Share updates, photos, videos, and more with Google Buzz.

Horray! A simple and cute video that explains social media in plain English. A key term that was used stresses the importance of communication “over time.” If you are looking for overnight success-keep it moving. Communication should be constant and consistent…okay enough chit-chat, watch the video:

This just in from one of my favorite media blogs, Journalistics

By Jeremy Porter

Reach – a journalist that shares links to their most recent content via an RSS feed, tweets or social bookmarking will get a lot more traffic to their posts than somebody that doesn’t use these tools. If you’re a journalist, and you’re not using Twitter to share links to your content, you’re missing a huge opportunity to engage new readers and ultimately strengthen the value you bring to your organization.

Feedback – whether voluntary through blog comments, thumbs up/thumbs down feedback, or solicited feedback from users, social media gives journalists more insight into how their community is interacting with the content they produce. It’s a two-way communication model that is relatively new to the world of traditional media. If I were a professional journalist today, I would love to have this type of feedback on the content I’m working so hard to produce every day.

Sources – there are literally millions of people using social media today. If I need a source for a story, they’re only a tweet away. You can’t beat this feature of social media. Journalists can dramatically expand the range of sources they can pull from for any story, while significantly reducing the effort required to find a qualified source quickly.

Measurement – some organizations share Web analytics data with their journalists, some don’t. If you use a blog with Google Analytics or an RSS feed like Feedburner, you have instant access to detailed statistics on your content. You can learn how readers are discovering your content, how they are sharing your content, and which articles or posts your readers love or hate the most.

Branding – social media enables journalists to develop their own personal brands. Journalists need to find new and innovative ways to separate themselves from the other journalists in their organization. Everyone is competing in the news environment, and those that leverage social media have a competitive advantage to build their personal brands in association with the outlets they produce content for.

Job Security – in times of trouble, it’s the journalists with the largest and most loyal readership that should be kept on staff. This isn’t always the case, but it can’t hurt to have a huge social media following on top of reader survey data that says your content is the best. Journalists that drive the most traffic and readers enable the media outlet to realize more revenue opportunities. For this reason, social media goes a long way towards promoting job security for journalists – if leveraged to its potential.

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER- New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — Three weeks after Curtis Kimball opened his crème brûlée cart in San Francisco, he noticed a stranger among the friends in line for his desserts. How had the man discovered the cart? He had read about it on Twitter.

For Mr. Kimball, who conceded that he “hadn’t really understood the purpose of Twitter,” the beauty of digital word-of-mouth marketing was immediately clear. He signed up for an account and has more than 5,400 followers who wait for him to post the current location of his itinerant cart and list the flavors of the day, like lavender and orange creamsicle.

“I would love to say that I just had a really good idea and strategy, but Twitter has been pretty essential to my success,” he said. He has quit his day job as a carpenter to keep up with the demand.

Much has been made of how big companies like Dell, Starbucks and Comcast use Twitter to promote their products and answer customers’ questions. But today, small businesses outnumber the big ones on the free microblogging service, and in many ways, Twitter is an even more useful tool for them.

For many mom-and-pop shops with no ad budget, Twitter has become their sole means of marketing. It is far easier to set up and update a Twitter account than to maintain a Web page. And because small-business owners tend to work at the cash register, not in a cubicle in the marketing department, Twitter’s intimacy suits them well.

“We think of these social media tools as being in the realm of the sophisticated, multiplatform marketers like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, but a lot of these supersmall businesses are gravitating toward them because they are accessible, free and very simple,” said Greg Sterling, an analyst who studies the Internet’s influence on shopping and local businesses.

Small businesses typically get more than half of their customers through word of mouth, he said, and Twitter is the digital manifestation of that. Twitter users broadcast messages of up to 140 characters in length, and the culture of the service encourages people to spread news to friends in their own network.

Umi, a sushi restaurant in San Francisco, sometimes gets five new customers a night who learned about it on Twitter, said Shamus Booth, a co-owner.

He twitters about the fresh fish of the night — “The O-Toro (bluefin tuna belly) tonight is some of the most rich and buttery tuna I’ve had,” he recently wrote — and offers free seaweed salads to people who mention Twitter.

Twitter is not just for businesses that want to lure customers with mouth-watering descriptions of food. For Cynthia Sutton-Stolle, the co-owner of Silver Barn Antiques in tiny Columbus, Tex., Twitter has been a way to find both suppliers and customers nationwide.

Since she joined Twitter in February, she has connected with people making lamps and candles that she subsequently ordered for her shop and has sold a few thousand dollars of merchandise to people outside Columbus, including to a woman in New Jersey shopping for graduation gifts.

“We don’t even have our Web site done, and we weren’t even trying to start an e-commerce business,” Ms. Sutton-Stolle said. “Twitter has been a real valuable tool because it’s made us national instead of a little-bitty store in a little-bitty town.”

Scott Seaman of Blowing Rock, N.C., also uses Twitter to expand his customer base beyond his town of about 1,500 residents. Mr. Seaman is a partner at Christopher’s Wine and Cheese shop and owns a bed and breakfast in town. He sets up searches on TweetDeck, a Web application that helps people manage their Twitter messages, to start conversations with people talking about his town or the mountain nearby. One person he met on Twitter booked a room at his inn, and a woman in Dallas ordered sake from his shop.

The extra traffic has come despite his rarely pitching his own businesses on Twitter. “To me, that’s a turn-off,” he said. Instead of marketing to customers, small-business owners should use the same persona they have offline, he advised. “Be the small shopkeeper down the street that everyone knows by name.”

Chris Mann, the owner of Woodhouse Day Spa in Cincinnati, twitters about discounts for massages and manicures every Tuesday. Twitter beats e-mail promotions because he can send tweets from his phone in a meeting and “every single business sends out an e-mail,” he said.

Even if a shop’s customers are not on Twitter, the service can be useful for entrepreneurs, said Becky McCray, who runs a liquor store and cattle ranch in Oklahoma and publishes a blog called Small Biz Survival.

In towns like hers, with only 5,000 people, small-business owners can feel isolated, she said. But on Twitter, she has learned business tax tips from an accountant, marketing tips from a consultant in Tennessee and start-up tips from the founder of several tech companies.

Anamitra Banerji, who manages commercial products at Twitter, said that when he joined the company from Yahoo in March, “I thought this was a place where large businesses were. What I’m finding more and more, to my surprise every single day, is business of all kinds.”

Twitter, which does not yet make money, is now concentrating on teaching businesses how they can join and use it, Mr. Banerji said, and the company plans to publish case studies. He is also developing products that Twitter can sell to businesses of all sizes this year, including features to verify businesses’ accounts and analyze traffic to their Twitter profiles.

According to Mr. Banerji, small-business owners like Twitter because they can talk directly to customers in a way that they were able to do only in person before. “We’re finding the emotional distance between businesses and their customers is shortening quite a bit,” he said.