In a time of crisis

As we all may know by now, Valley City, North Dakota, was recently dealing with major flood threats. There is still a threat since the river is over the flood level, but it was dealt with very well. Just recently, Friday the 17, the sewer system gave, leaving many businesses within a four-block radius with water in their basements. Shortly after that, Mayor Mary Lee Nielson came onto the radio and announced what happened. And what was going to change for the next month. Life as Valley City knew it was thrown back in time, but with electricity.
All non-essential businesses were asked to shut down. The only thing open were the clinics, hardware stores, gas stations and grocery stores. From Friday until Wednesday, the whole town was basically dead. Not being able to use water, well you can use it - you just cannot drain it. Everyone was suddenly coming up with creative ways to rid of their wastewater. And let me tell you, working at a gas station/farm store, we saw a lot of how people were planning to rig up their washer, sump pump the water out of the tub, and so on. Luckily, for Valley City, and after a business owner made a big deal about what is essential and what is not, all businesses were allowed to open back up on Wednesday the 22. However, they too still had some water restrictions, and the residential people were still on their no draining orders. If you were to enter Valley City now, you would see porta potties on every block. I do believe it was about 500 of them that they brought into town.
The reason I'm writing about the Flood of Valley City and all that came with it is because this is a violent natural crisis. So I started looking for things that deal with crisis communication, and I came upon an article about crisis communication kits and what you need in them. The article/web site is entitled "7 Must-have Elements in Every Crisis Communications Kit". It discusses how all businesses should have a kit and a plan ready to go. The seven items that should be included are as follows: 1) A list of the members of the crisis management team; 2) contact information for key officers, spokespeople, and crisis management team members; 3) fact sheets on the company, each division, each physical location, and each product offered; 4) profiles and biographies for each key manager in your company; 5) copies of your company, division and product logos, your press release format and the scanned in signature of your CEO on disk; 6) pre-written scripts answering key questions that you have generated through your crisis scenario analysis; and 7) contact information for each of your key media contacts both locally, nationally, and if appropriate, key financial press and analysts.
As I assume, Valley City's leaders probably had it all figured out - and dubbed the mayor to be the spokesperson. Overall, they seemed to handle this natural crisis pretty well. Handling things quickly, getting info out to the public as soon as new news arrives.

A music video site...supported by advertisement

I found an interesting article on MSNBC.com, entitled "YouTube, Universal partner in music video site". According to the article, YouTube and Unviersal Music Group are teaming up on a music video venture. They are going to have about 10,000 videos available to watch for free, thanks to advertising. Their website for this is going to be Vevo.com, on which they will be sharing all the revenue from the ads. Evenutally, there will buttons linking the videos to a buyable location (which will be Amazon.com Inc and Apple Inc's iTunes). As the article states, a good portion all of music revenues from these sites go to the labels.
Why this is a really good idea: YouTube is already very popular amoung all sorts of ages. It is the place you go to find clips of movies, funny videos, or even music videos. So why not dedicate a whole site to music videos? Universal Music already offers site visitors a chance to watch videos as well. Universal has 19 different labels under them right now, some of which including A&M/Octone, Interscope Geffen A&M, Motown Records, UMG Nashville and Verve Music Group.
However, YouTube has had some problems with record labels that resulted recently in Warner Music disattaching themselves from YouTube. Warner Music pulled all of their music off of YouTube since they did not feel they received fair payments for themselves or their songwriters and artists. Another bad deal for YouTube is the $1 billion lawsuit that Viacom Inc. has against them because of infringement rights. Viacom Inc. runs BET Networks, MTV Networks and Paramount Pictures.
For YouTube, they may want to get their act straightened up if this deal will run smoothly for both YouTube and Universal. Although, according to the article Universal will be the big spenders in this whole venture, I doubt they want to lose out on this whole ordeal. But overall, I think this idea is really cool, its not always easy for people to get to a tv and watch MTV or VH1, for example, so this will help out a lot for those who like to watch music videos.

Now the suspect is Pistachios?!

So far this year we've had a peanut butter recall, which would be the second time peanut butter has been recalled in two years. Reasoning for being recalled? Salmonella. Salmonella is the most frequently reported case of food borne illnesses, according to the USDA. Two years ago the peanut butters that were the guilty parties were Peter Pan and Great Value. Even now, right on Peter Pan's website it states that "We’d like to assure you that Peter Pan Peanut Butter is safe to eat and no varieties of Peter Pan Peanut Butter have been recalled. ConAgra Foods, the maker of Peter Pan Peanut Butter, has confirmed that none of the ingredients used to make Peter Pan Peanut Butter come from any location operated by Peanut Corporation of America, the company that has recalled peanuts and peanut ingredients."

However, this year it was King Nut, and according to sources, this brand isn't sold directly to consumers. It may have also been in products in your cupboards. A news release right on the main page of their website date January 12, 2009 (two days after the recall) states: "We issued the recall after learning that salmonella had been discovered in an open container of peanut butter with our label. We also made it clear that we do not manufacture King Nut peanut butter nor do we supply any ingredients for the peanut butter. We are simply the distributors." A paragraph later their news release read: "(King Nut peanut butter is distributed to food service companies in Ohio, Minnesota, Michigan, North Dakota, Arizona, Idaho and New Hampshire.)" Companies that had to recall items because of King Nut's peanut butter were Little Debbie, Hy-Vee, Perry's Ice Cream and Kellogg's.

But now there is another salmonella scare. Pistachios. You know, those shelled greenish colored nuts. Which are usually a popular snack and help improve cholesterol according to California Sungold.com. They also are useful in a lot of other things, such as being good in plants as drainage chips.

So what is so wrong with them?!?! Well, according to the article on MSNBC.com, investigation started on Thursday from a California nut processor to its sister plant in New York, where inspectors last month found cockroaches and rodent droppings. The FDA is investigating the nut plant Setton Pistachio of Terra Bella Inc, Calif. Setton Pistachio recalled 2 million pounds of pistachios according to MSNBC.com.

For all the guilty parties involved in the peanut butter incident and now the pistachio incident, this is not good PR at all! I personally may never want Peter Pan peanut butter ever after knowing they were recalled. Same goes for pistachios, and they are good!, after all is said and done and they figure everything out, Setton's sales may go plummeting down. It is going to take a LOT of work for them to get out of the rut they're going to be in. Take another look at what Peter Pan's website had on it front web page, they are going to have to assure assure assure people that nothing is in their products.