Los Angeles, October 26, 2020 – Veteran Los Angeles television journalist Jeff Michael has joined strategic communications firm EKA as a Joint Venture Partner.

Michael brings his more than 35 years of news reporting, anchoring and producing to EKA, adding his expertise to the firms media relations, litigation support, crisis communications and political campaign management capabilities.

“Jeff Michael is one of the most respected names in journalism and he brings world-class talent and a wealth of knowledge and experience to our team,” said Matt Knabe, Managing Partner at EKA. “It is a major coup for us to get someone of his caliber and experience and we are excited to have Jeff join the EKA team.”

Michael has been a respected presence in Los Angeles and throughout Southern California for three decades. He brings with him the unique background of leading teams at KCBS/KCAL, KTTV Fox 11 and ABC 7 Eyewitness News. Michael’s distinguished career in journalism includes numerous awards and accomplishments. He is the recipient of multiple Emmy and Southern California Radio & TV News Association awards and is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists and the Television Academy.

Organizations need to ensure that their messages are clear and on point and have a compelling story to tell. Michael will play a crucial part in working with clients on media relations strategy.  In addition, utilizing this background, he will also serve as an expert witness regarding media practices.

About EKA

EKA is a strategic communications firm specializing in lobbying, public affairs, crisis communications and litigation support. EKA’s roster of over 150 clients includes companies such as Enterprise Rent-A-Car, LegalZoom, AT&T, BNSF Railway, Westfield, Association of Deputy District Attorneys, Waste Management, and Coca-Cola. For more information visit www.ekapr.com For more information visit www.ekapr.com

Eric W. Rose (213) 741-1500 x 525 or Eric@ekapr.com

Amid the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, McDonald’s is changing the rules for how corporate America handles a crisis. Earlier this week, the company sued disgraced former CEO Steve Easterbrook to recoup stock options and other compensation. The hamburger giant alleges Easterbrook had sexual relationships with three employees and awarded stock shares to one of them. The suit seeks to recoup millions in severance it paid the former chief.

Click here to read the full op-ed by EKA Partner Eric Rose and Thom Weidlich.

 

EKA partner Eric Rose was quoted in a recent UpCity article entitled “Common Web Design Mistakes And How to Avoid Them: According to the Experts”:

The most common mistakes I see are (1) too much information on a page, (2) websites that do not display properly on smart phones, (3) when websites are updated, an inconsistent look and feel and (4) poor typeface and too much whitespace. And it goes without saying that if visitors can’t understand what a companies website is about in a matter of seconds, they will leave the page.

Click here to read the complete article.

EKA partner Eric Rose has co-authored a new article published at Medium  with Thom Weidlich:

Our first post about communicating the COVID-19 pandemic noted at least two canceled music festivals weren’t planning to provide refunds, which we said would probably lead to another round of crises. The refund issue is now raging in the worlds of sports and recreation. Some companies are handling it better than others.

Click here to read the complete article.

Alex Cherin, a Partner at EKA was quoted in the Long Beach Business Journal discussing the Port of Long Beach.   In the story, “Coronavirus slows down trade, FMC forms teams to tackle supply chain issues” Alex says key productivity metrics, including truck turn times and container moves per hour, remain at pre-COVID related impact levels and have even exceeded them in some cases.

Click here to read the complete story.

EKA’s Alex Cherin was quoted in a recent article at Food Logistics regarding Port of Long Beach activity during the COVID-19 shutdowns:

As far as the sector as a whole, State agencies and municipalities alike have recognized the essential nature of the maritime sector and transportation workers have been specifically deemed “essential” in recent guidance provided by the federal Department of Homeland Security, the State of California and both the Cities of Los Angeles and Long Beach. “The fact that some of these productivity measures seem to have weathered the storm and that maritime workers are being recognized as an essential part of the economy during these times is a bright spot for sure,” said Alex Cherin, Executive Director of the California Trucking Association’s Intermodal Conference.

Click here to read the complete article.

EKA partner Eric Rose was quoted in a recent ABC News piece on charges being brought against actor Jussie Smollett:

But Eric Rose, a partner in the public relations firm Englander Knabe & Allen, said that how the actor responds to the latest charges could determine whether he can recover.

“The public is extremely forgiving and allows people to make mistakes, but you have to own up to your mistakes and apologize in sincere fashion, and he has done none of that,” said Rose, who specializes in reputation management and crisis communications. He said he doesn’t believe Smollett’s claims of innocence.

Click here to read the complete article.

By Eric W. Rose

Even the best organizations and the most admirable people have small moments or mistakes they aren’t very proud of and wish that they could erase. Most of us think of ourselves in holistic terms: we work hard to make a positive impact, and we assume that the small detours we sometimes take along this route will be no more than a footnote in our online story.

That assumption in the digital age is wrong.

The internet is a vast reservoir of content stored on countless websites around the world. These sites can be written and launched by anyone, as there is virtually no regulation. And that’s not even taking social media into account.

Today, when someone makes a small mistake that is documented; an off-color comment that can be recorded with a screen-shot; gets one customer complaint that is somehow magnified beyond its reasonable scope; or when one’s reputation is defamed on any of these countless, anonymous, disparate sites, the information is easily found via search engines. Damaging information or images, no matter how actually incidental to the overall image or life’s work of the individual or business, are only a few clicks away…and last forever.

There is no less forgiving god than the one we call technology.

The internet has changed the way that reputations are made and destroyed. As recently as 1998, before Google was created, if you wanted to research a person or a company, you’d have to visit the basement of a library or other institution that kept microfiche or microfilm of old newspapers. A lot of great investigative journalism and historical research has been done just that way over the years, but the work required painstaking effort. With today’s technology, which allows anyone to enter a few key search terms, you can instantaneously find out something (even by mistake!) that would have been difficult for a professional detective to find as recently as two decades ago.

More than that — journalists had editors, fact-checkers, and publishers. A story or picture that made it into most papers needed to have some semblance of truth. While we may have once thought the internet would keep the system honest by outsourcing reporting to every citizen, employee, and customer, we now see that the wild west has more outlaws and vigilantes (some of them not even human) than it has good Samaritans.

A Q3 2019 study from Five Blocks study showed that people use Google/ web searches as their first mode of research 44.1% of the time when deciding whether or not to do business with a certain company. This outpaces checking a company’s own website first (33.6%), its social media (13.6%), its Wikipedia page (4.7%), or other resources.

This means that a business with overall good results in real life can be plagued, overnight, by the online fallout from an unfounded rumor or a small error that makes its way onto Google page one, takes on monstrous proportions, and has stakeholders or potential clients panicking. Clearly, this type of crisis needs intervention because those online results, like some infections, can stick around for as long as you let them.

Repairing a damaged reputation is time-consuming and expensive. Under U.S. federal and most state laws, courts have routinely held that a plaintiff is entitled to recover costs incurred in performing various forms of damage control, when the actions must be taken in response to false statements, including those made online. Courts have found that plaintiffs in defamation cases — both spoken (slander) and written (libel) — can recover the costs of creating a reputation repair program.

Someone expressing a negative opinion, or even relating an embarrassing anecdote about a person or a company, is not the same as making a false and defamatory statement and can often not be handled legally, but nonetheless may require attention online.

The costs of cleaning up reputational damage on the internet are often very high. Due to the ever-changing search engine algorithms, damaging information can unexpectedly resurface in top search results. Most clean-up efforts, therefore, require proactive work as well as ongoing monitoring and maintenance to ensure that the harmed party’s reputation is restored permanently.

When examining a reputation repair strategy, we typically examine how far the harmful material has spread across the internet and social media, the required steps to clean up the damage, and what corrective actions and monitoring will be needed.

Here is some of our best advice, from the trenches:

Be the online you wish to see online. Think three times before you post anything on social media that someone can take out of context and ruin you with, should they be motivated to do so.
Focus proactively on your owned digital properties — your sites and social media — and keep them updated, true, interesting, relevant, valuable, and easy to find. The stronger your default online presence, the harder it will be for a temporary storm to knock it down.

Also, hot tip: Avoid using identical content on multiple sites (ie: the exact same blurb on your company About page and on LinkedIn) because it provides a less compelling experience for users, and Google will therefore discount and demote one of these properties.

Engage your customers online in a way that encourages those with good experiences to leave good reviews. Complainers are usually sufficiently motivated by their anger. Satisfied clients need to be more motivated by their satisfaction. This “true balance” requires effort on your part because of… human nature.
Work together with a PR and communications team, and with the digital reputation wellness experts they recommend, to tell your real story — hopefully in advance of a crisis. These specialists can make sure that the often-irrelevant negative result/s do not hijack the narrative.

To do this, they may use technical solutions such as wiki data and schema mark-up, which are like maps to help Google find what’s truly most pertinent to your overall story. This is especially helpful to help differentiate between you and someone with a similar name, for example.

Ideally, these digital experts will optimize all the various (not always obvious) platforms available to ensure that the best real content about you — including stories placed by the PR team — is promoted naturally.

Beware of digital reputation firms who tell you to fool Google by generating enormous amounts of content on a large number of sites, including publishing fake information. It will have limited success, and worse than that — it harms the reputation of our whole industry. How’s that for “meta”?

There is some good news: there are steps companies can take preemptively. The better prepared you are in advance, the more mindful of your holistic brand story, and the more resources you regularly devote to “balanced online health,” the less it will probably cost you to fix your reputation should the worst happen. You will also endure less aggravation in the real world, from problems spun in the anonymous corners of a virtual one.

Eric W. Rose is a nationally recognized crisis and reputation management expert and a partner at Englander Knabe & Allen.

EKA was mentioned in an Ethics Commission report:

The commission’s Highest Paid Lobbying Firms list was headed by Englander Knabe and Allen (including three6ixty), which received $2,044,356.

Englander Knabe and Allen is described on its website as a strategic communications firm that is paid by multiple sources for various lobbying activities, according to Ethics Commission documents.

Click here to read the complete article.