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Today’s panel features crisis communication consultant Melissa Agnes, founder and CEO of Agnes+Day; RedPhlag LLC CEO Gerard Corbett; and Cyrus Mavalwala, founder of Advantis Communication. This week’s topics included:

• How The Walt Disney Company has handled the death  of a child resulting from an alligator attack at their Walt Disney World property
• One of the most egregious examples of newsjacking in PR history
• Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn and the bizarre letter LinkedIn’s CEO sent to employees
• What to do when user-generated content goes bad
• A Facebook executive has predicted the end of the written word as Facebook posts will be all video in five years (and the imminent death of the period everywhere)
• Buffer’s CEO was excruciatingly transparent when explaining why the company laid off 11% of its workforce
• Dan York reports on the OCED Ministerial Meeting on the Digital Economy (and why it matters to communicators) and the internet Society’s survey on the future of the Internet

Connect with our panelists on Twitter at @Melissa_Agnes, @GerardCorbett, and @CyrusMavalwala.

Links to the source material for this episode are on Delicious.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

About today’s panel:

Melissa Agnes is a founding partner of Agnes+Day, a crisis intelligence firm. In her role, Melissa is a crisis management consultant and keynote speaker, has developed an international reputation for crisis management, planning and training by helping large global brands prevent and manage a wide range of corporate issues and crises. Her client list includes government agencies, cities and municipalities, healthcare organizations, energy companies, global non-profits, financial organizations, the public and private sectors and many others. Melissa is an international and sought-after keynote speaker and guest-lecturer.

Gerard Corbett is Chair and CEO of strategic communications consulting firm Redphlag LLC., Founder and Partner of Wise Counsel, and CMO of real estate tech startup Producers Forum, Inc. in Palo Alto. He also is an award-winning career coach, blogger and Past Chair & CEO of the 32,000 member Public Relations Society of America, having served as Chair and CEO in 2012. Gerry is a versatile branding, marketing, public relations and communications executive and coach having served four decades in senior marketing and communications roles at Global Fortune 100 firms and earlier in his career in aerospace engineering and information technology with Silicon Valley firms and NASA.

Living at the intersection of business and communication, Cyrus Mavalwala, ABC is an award-winning communication strategist, trainer and speaker who has been helping organizations achieve their business objectives for 20 years. After leading teams at global agencies, Cyrus founded Advantis Communications, a B2B PR and content marketing agency that delivers measureable value by integrating traditional, video and social strategies. He also co-founded Act Like An Agency to train communicators on how to evolve from tacticians to strategists within their organization. At the University of Toronto School for Continuing Studies, Cyrus develops curriculum and teaches social media strategy and communications management.

About Shel Holtz

Shel Holtz, ABC (Accredited Business Communicator), is director of Internal Communications at Webcor, a commercial general contractor headquartered in San Francisco. Before joining Webcor, Shel spent 21 years as principal of Holtz Communication + Technology. In addition to integrating technology into communications strategies, his expertise includes strategic communications planning, change management, organizational culture, business initiatives and communications research. Full bio