If your company works with creators, influencers or brand ambassadors, or lets employees post from an official account, this case deserves a close read. The original mistake was small. The way it grew is the lesson.

What happened

According to Video Games Chronicle, a Behaviour team member gifted paid downloadable content, reportedly worth around $300, to TheBurntPeanut, a VTuber with a large audience and a reputation for deliberately provocative content. Players quickly objected, arguing the studio was rewarding someone whose content clashed with the game’s long-standing reputation as a welcoming space, particularly for LGBTQ players.

Then came the moment that turned a judgment call into a crisis. The streamer, apparently sensing the blowback, offered to give the content back so the studio wouldn’t take criticism. Someone on the team, posting under the official Dead by Daylight account, answered in all caps: “WE CAN TAKE THE HEAT! THEY ARE YOURS TO KEEP,” with a heart emoji.

Behaviour’s first statement went out on its smaller DbD Pulse news account. It said the content was granted “without receiving appropriate approvals,” that the team member’s comments did not align with the game’s values, and that “when concerns about this decision became apparent during the stream, we should have responded by looking into these concerns, not dismissing them.” It also condemned threats being made against employees. As VICE noted, that first statement didn’t say what would change or whether the content would be removed.

The reaction was harsh from more than one direction. Kotaku reported that people angry about the gift and people angry about the apology were both leaving negative Steam reviews. Polygon reported that some players uninstalled the game and requested refunds in protest.

Behaviour followed up with a much longer statement on the main Dead by Daylight account on X. It explained that team members saw a large audience watching a streamer new to the game and “moved too fast.” The decision was made “quickly and outside of our usual team discussions,” and the usual review of a new creator’s past content “was not taken into proper consideration.” The studio called the “take the heat” reply something that “crossed the line of appropriate responses from our brand.” According to Kotaku’s summary of that second statement, Behaviour removed the gifted content, said it is rewriting its guidelines for interacting with creators and who is permitted to do so, is changing its process for granting in-game content and currency, and will remove Creator Program members found to have violated its rules. It described action against the employee as a confidential internal matter.

What’s verified and what isn’t

The gift, the “take the heat” reply, both statements and the removal of the content are documented in Behaviour’s own words and widely reported. The dollar value of the content is a reported estimate. The streamer’s past behavior is a matter of dispute. Kotaku describes a well-known clip in which he announced he would use a slur and then played bleep sounds instead, an ambiguity that helps explain why people read the situation so differently. Behaviour has not said what discipline, if any, the employee faced, and it would be wise for observers to avoid assuming.

Who has a stake in this

The most important group is the game’s core community, especially the marginalized players who have long seen Dead by Daylight as a safe place to play. Close behind are the creators in Behaviour’s own program, who ended up fielding angry questions on the studio’s behalf. Behaviour itself pointed out that its creators were “on the frontlines of these conversations.”

The streamer’s large fan base is a stakeholder too, and many of them felt the studio humiliated someone it had just welcomed. Behaviour’s employees matter here as well, since the studio had to publicly ask people to stop threatening staff. And the gaming press amplified each turn of the story.

How the response held up

The second statement was strong. It explained the chain of events plainly, admitted a process gap rather than blaming one rogue person, and named concrete fixes. Kotaku even credited the studio for actually defining the values it said were violated, which most corporate apologies never bother to do. That is the kind of specificity that rebuilds trust over time.

The first statement is where the damage compounded. It was posted on a secondary account, which made it look smaller than the problem. It leaned on “without appropriate approvals,” which reads to the public as pointing at one employee, even though the official account is the brand’s voice no matter whose hands are on the keyboard. And it left the obvious question, “So what are you doing about it?”, unanswered for another day. When a statement raises more questions than it settles, people fill the silence for you, and in this case two opposing camps filled it with very different stories.

There is also a harder truth in this case. Once the studio had publicly endorsed a polarizing figure, any reversal was going to anger someone. Behaviour could not make everyone happy. What it could control was whether its position was clear, consistent with its stated values and explained once, thoroughly, instead of in pieces.

What Behaviour should do next

Follow through in public. Promised process changes are easy to forget once the news cycle moves on. A short update in a few weeks, showing the new creator guidelines and approval steps are in place, would show the community the second statement was more than damage control.

Support the creators who took the heat. The studio’s own program members absorbed much of the anger. Direct outreach, clear talking points and a channel for raising concerns would help repair that relationship.

Hold the line on harassment in both directions. The studio rightly asked people to stop threatening employees. It should apply the same standard consistently in its own spaces, including Discord and stream chats, so no group feels the rules only protect the other side.

Takeaways for your business

Vet before you endorse. Any time your brand gives something of value to a creator, influencer or partner, you are borrowing their reputation and lending them yours. A quick look at their past content should happen before the gift, not after the comments roll in. Speed is tempting when a big audience appears, but a five-minute check is cheaper than a week of apologies.

Decide who can speak for the brand in real time. Live streams, comment sections and Discord servers move fast, and the person typing is often a junior community manager. Write down what they can approve on their own, what needs a second set of eyes, and what tone is off limits when a conversation turns tense. A flippant reply on an official account is an official reply.

Treat early warning signs as information. The moment concerns surfaced during the stream was the cheapest moment to pause. Behaviour said so itself. Train your team to slow down when the audience starts raising red flags, even if the moment feels exciting.

Put your first apology where the problem is. If the issue played out on your main channel, the response belongs there too. A statement on a side account can look like an attempt to keep things quiet.

Own the mistake as an organization. Saying an employee acted without approval may be accurate, but audiences hear it as blame-shifting unless you also own the system that let it happen. Behaviour’s second statement did this well by admitting its processes weren’t “stringent enough.”

Answer “what are you doing about it?” the first time. If you can’t share every fix yet, say what you’ve already done, what you’re reviewing and when people will hear from you again. One complete statement usually lands better than two partial ones.

Expect that a polarizing situation won’t have a popular exit. When your company is caught between two passionate groups, aim for a position you can defend on your own values and explain it clearly. Trying to soothe everyone often satisfies no one.

If your team works with creators or runs live social channels and you’d like help building approval guidelines or a response plan before something like this happens, schedule a consultation with me.

The post “We Can Take the Heat”: What the Dead by Daylight Creator Gift Backlash Teaches Brands first appeared on Doug Johnson Consulting.

That doesn’t mean every meeting on your calendar deserves to live. It means the question leaders should ask isn’t “How do we have fewer meetings?” It’s “Which meetings actually help people learn, coordinate and speak up, and how do we make more of them work that way?” Here’s what the new research says and how I’d put it to work.

What the new research found

In September, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a working paper titled simply “Meetings”, by Harvard’s David Deming and Katrine V. Løken, Alexander Willén and Yaling Xu of the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH). The authors call it the first large-scale economic evidence on workplace meetings. They surveyed more than 9,000 Norwegian workers and linked the answers to government records on wages, occupations, employers and company finances.

The costs are real. The average worker in the study spends 4.7 hours a week in meetings, about 12 percent of a standard workweek. Combining meeting time with wages, the researchers estimate meetings account for about 14 percent of companies’ wage bills, or roughly NOK 88,000 (about $9,000) per employee per year. And they describe that as a lower bound, because it leaves out preparation, travel, follow-up work and the mental cost of switching tasks.

But the benefits showed up too. According to NHH and SHRM, high-paying, high-revenue firms spend more on meetings, not less, even though their employees’ time is more expensive. Workers who spend more time in meetings saw faster wage growth and reported more on-the-job learning, and contact with more experienced colleagues was linked to stronger wage growth over time. Of all the activities the researchers looked at, including email, administration, individual work and training, meetings had the strongest association with later wage growth.

Meetings are not only a coordination technology, they are also an important channel through which firms facilitate learning and develop human capital.

David Deming, as quoted by SHRM

The authors are careful, and we should be too. They can’t prove that meetings cause better performance or higher pay. Successful companies may simply be the kind of places that meet a lot. Still, the pattern is clear enough that, as SHRM put it, the research cautions leaders against treating meeting reduction as a goal in itself. The authors’ own summary is my favorite line: meetings are “the broccoli of work – widely disliked, but probably good for us anyway.”

Not all meetings are the same meeting

The most common meeting activities in the study were planning, problem solving, information sharing and project coordination. That’s a useful way to sort your own calendar, because those four jobs aren’t equally suited to a room full of people.

A meeting that brings together people who know different things and need to make a decision or solve a problem is hard to replace with a memo. A recurring status update where one person reads numbers aloud usually can be replaced. SHRM’s summary makes the same point: the real question is whether a meeting solves problems, coordinates specialized work and develops people, or whether it’s covering for unclear processes and communication gaps.

The study also found that remote and hybrid workers attend more meetings than people who mainly work in the office. Løken suggested one explanation: formal meetings may be replacing the hallway and coffee-machine conversations that used to happen on their own. If your team is spread out, some of those meetings are doing the informal teaching and relationship-building that a shared office once did for free. Cut them carelessly and you may cut the learning with them.

Meetings are also where people decide whether to speak up

Two other studies published this month add an important layer. In the Human Resource Management Journal, researchers analyzing a nationally representative sample of 1,200 UK workers found that effective employee communication was linked to less employee silence, and that the link ran through managers actively asking for employees’ input. In other words, good communication systems help, but people speak up when their own manager invites them to.

A second, smaller study looked at skip-level meetings, where employees talk directly with their boss’s boss. Writing about his research for Phys.org, Samuel Blacher reported that 24 of the 25 software engineering managers he interviewed supported skip-level meetings that bypassed them. But in every case where managers felt negatively about how their company ran these meetings, they described problems such as dismissed feedback, poor follow-through or reluctance to speak openly. It’s an exploratory study and can’t be generalized, but the lesson is familiar: a listening session only works if people see that someone listened.

Put those findings together and you get a practical picture. Meetings are one of the main places where knowledge moves around an organization and where employees decide whether it’s safe and worthwhile to say what they know. A meeting that’s all broadcast and no conversation wastes both opportunities.

How to get more value from the meetings you keep

Here’s where I’d start if I were auditing a leadership team’s calendar this month:

• Sort meetings by purpose, not by habit. Label each recurring meeting as planning, problem solving, coordination, learning or status. Status-only meetings are the first candidates to move to a written update, a dashboard or a short recorded video.
• Protect the meetings that mix experience levels. The study linked contact with more senior colleagues to stronger wage growth. Make sure newer employees are in some of the rooms where decisions get made, not just the ones where tasks get assigned.
• Send the information ahead and use the time to talk. If people can read it, let them read it beforehand. Spend the meeting on questions, disagreement and decisions, which is the part you can’t do asynchronously.
• Ask for input on purpose. End agenda items with a specific question, such as “What are we missing?” or “What would make this fail?” Then wait for an answer. Voice doesn’t happen just because the floor is technically open.
• Close the loop. After a listening session, town hall or skip-level conversation, tell people what you heard and what you’re doing about it, including what you’ve decided not to do and why.
• Count the real cost. Before you schedule a recurring meeting, multiply the attendees by the hours. The researchers’ estimate didn’t include prep and follow-up, so yours shouldn’t ignore them either. If the value isn’t obvious, shrink the invite list or the time.
• Be careful with blanket cuts. Meeting-free days and calendar purges can help, but if they remove the conversations where people learn and raise problems, the time you save may cost you more than it’s worth.

The bottom line

Meetings aren’t the enemy. Bad meetings are. The research suggests that the organizations getting the most from their people are often the ones willing to invest time in bringing them together, and the newest studies on employee voice remind us that how leaders run those conversations decides whether the time pays off. The goal isn’t an empty calendar. It’s a calendar where every meeting has a clear job and people leave knowing more than when they walked in.

If you’d like help rethinking how your leadership team communicates, from meeting structure to town halls to the way managers ask for input, schedule a consultation. I’m happy to help you figure out which conversations are worth the time.

The post Before You Cancel Another Meeting: What New Research Says About When Meetings Pay Off first appeared on Doug Johnson Consulting.

On Monday, October 26, Instagram announced it is testing a format called Features that lets creators post horizontal videos up to 90 minutes long. If your business has been wondering whether a podcast, a webinar or a long-form interview series is worth the effort, this is a good moment to take a hard look at the question. Here’s what changed, what it means and how to decide whether your business should go long.

What Instagram Announced

Instagram head Adam Mosseri and Vice President of Product Tessa Lyons introduced three connected video tools in an announcement video, as reported by Social Media Today and TechCrunch:

• Features: horizontal videos of up to 90 minutes, aimed at formats such as podcasts, interviews, vlogs and comedy. Instagram tested them first with creators in Brazil and began a small U.S. test with select creators on October 26.
• Clips as Reels: creators can link up to eight short Reels back to the full-length video, so a viewer who likes a clip can keep watching the whole thing without leaving the app.
• Series: a way to group related Reels into episodic, topic-based collections, which Instagram has been testing since June.

According to Fast Company, the previous maximum for vertical Reels was 20 minutes, so this is a big jump. TechRepublic reported that Features will appear in users’ feeds and on the Explore page, and that Instagram is also testing ways to make live video easier to discover, including for people who don’t follow the broadcaster.

One important caveat: this is a limited test. Most businesses can’t post a Feature today, and Instagram hasn’t said when the format will be widely available. That makes now the time to plan, not panic.

Why This Is a Notable Reversal

Instagram has tried long-form video before. Its IGTV product launched in 2018 and was later discontinued. In the announcement, Mosseri admitted, “For a long time, I have been against doing long-form video on Instagram,” noting that shorter content drives more shares and DMs, according to TechCrunch. Lyons, who pushed for the change, told WIRED that one of IGTV’s core mistakes was that it allowed only vertical video, when “a lot of great long-form content is horizontal.”

The bigger strategy is about where people watch. The Verge noted that Instagram’s TV app, launched late last year, has expanded from Amazon Fire TV to Google TV, Samsung TVs and Apple TV. Lyons described the plan to WIRED this way: “TV becomes a great destination for watching long-form, horizontal content, and mobile becomes a great place for discovering that content.” Mosseri said the goal is to make short-form and long-form video “symbiotic.”

In plain terms, Instagram wants to keep viewers who find a great clip from wandering off to YouTube to watch the full episode.

What It Means for Businesses

Platform changes like this tend to reward organizations that already have the right kind of content. Three takeaways stand out.

The clip-to-full-episode funnel is becoming the standard model. Many businesses already post a short clip from a webinar, keynote or podcast and hope people follow a link elsewhere. Instagram is building that journey directly into the app. Whether or not you ever post a 90-minute video there, the lesson applies everywhere: your short content should be a doorway to something deeper, not a dead end.

Horizontal video is back. For years, many teams reshot or cropped everything for vertical screens. If the TV becomes a major viewing screen for long-form social content, landscape footage matters again. When you record a panel, an interview or a customer story, capture it in a way that works both wide and tall.

Monetization is still unclear, and that cuts both ways. Instagram hasn’t announced a YouTube-style ad revenue program for Features. A Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch, “It’s too early to share a long-term monetization model.” For a business, the goal usually isn’t platform payouts anyway. It’s attention, trust and leads. But it does mean you shouldn’t abandon a channel such as YouTube, where your long-form library can be found through search, in favor of an unproven test.

Should Your Business Go Long? Five Questions to Ask

Long-form video takes real time and money to do well. Before you invest, work through these questions with your team.

• Do you have something worth 20, 40 or 90 minutes? Long form works when the content is genuinely substantive: expert conversations, how-to walkthroughs, behind-the-scenes stories or event recordings. A stretched-out sales pitch will lose viewers quickly.
• Can you sustain it? A series with three episodes and a long silence hurts more than it helps. Pick a schedule you can keep, whether that’s monthly or quarterly.
• Where does your audience already watch? If your customers are active on Instagram, a Feature could reach them where they already spend time. If they search for answers, YouTube and your own website may matter more.
• Can one recording feed several channels? The most efficient approach is to record once and publish in pieces: the full conversation, a handful of short clips, an audio version and a blog post summarizing the key points.
• How will you measure success? Decide in advance what matters, such as watch time, inquiries or newsletter sign-ups, so you can judge whether long form is paying off.

How to Prepare Now

You don’t need access to Features to get ready. A few practical steps will put you in a strong position if and when the format opens up more widely:

• Audit the long-form content you already have, such as webinar recordings, conference talks and recorded interviews, and identify the strongest pieces.
• Start shooting new interviews and presentations in landscape with enough framing room to cut vertical clips.
• Practice building short clips that stand on their own but make viewers want the full story. A strong clip has a clear point, a hook and a reason to keep watching.
• Plan any long-form effort as a series with a consistent theme, which fits the direction Instagram is heading with Series.
• Keep your website and YouTube channel as the permanent home for your best long-form content, and treat any one social platform as a distribution channel.

The Bottom Line

The pendulum in social video is swinging. Short, vertical clips aren’t going away, but the platforms increasingly want full shows, not just highlights. For business leaders and communicators, the opportunity isn’t to chase every new format. It’s to build content substantial enough to deserve a viewer’s time, then package it so people can find it in the short form and stay for the long form.

That’s a production and storytelling challenge as much as a technology one. Interviews, podcasts and video series that hold an audience depend on preparation, structure and delivery, the same fundamentals that have always made broadcast content work.

If you’d like help planning a podcast, video series or content strategy that fits your business and your audience, schedule a consultation. Let’s talk about what your story could look like at full length.

The post Instagram Is Testing 90-Minute Videos. Should Your Business Go Long? first appeared on Doug Johnson Consulting.

The Kikiva Collection case is a sharp lesson for any company whose brand is tied to a recognizable founder, and for any leader who goes live on camera. It shows how a first response can turn a problem someone else created into one you own, and why each later apology has to work harder than the one before it.

What Happened

On October 9, Kia Buckley, the 24-year-old founder of Perth-based Kikiva Collection, was livestreaming on TikTok from her home while doing her makeup and chatting with viewers. According to B&T and news.com.au, her sister walked in and could be heard using the N-word. Buckley told her sister she was live, kept the stream going, and when viewers asked about it, told them her sister had actually said “what’s up, sissys.” (One student outlet, ECU Vanguard, describes the stream as an Instagram Live; the mainstream coverage identifies it as TikTok.)

Screen recordings spread quickly. ECU Vanguard reports that customers began posting videos of themselves throwing out their Kikiva gear.

On October 15, Buckley posted a written apology to her TikTok story, reported by PerthNow. She said she was “deeply shocked, disappointed and upset,” that she did not condone racism in any form, and that she had ended the live, spoken to the family member, and been told they felt “genuine remorse.” She said she hadn’t addressed it sooner because she had been recovering in hospital after surgery. The statement described a slur used “in the background off camera” but did not address her own on-air explanation.

That statement did little to slow the backlash. Around October 21, Buckley posted a tearful video apology, and the brand issued a separate statement on Instagram. In the video, quoted by PerthNow, she said, “I know I have handled this terribly, and I know my statement was wrong,” and apologized directly “for trying to cover up the racial slur.” The company statement said Buckley “unreservedly apologises for walking past a standard we should never accept,” added that “an apology isn’t enough,” and committed that everyone in the business, including Buckley, would complete cultural and historical learning, and that she would meet with Elders and community knowledge holders.

By then the damage had spread. Model Vimbayi Hakutangwi, who had worked with the brand for more than three years, ended the relationship, and B&T reports other collaborators and influencers, including a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, also cut ties or ruled out future work. News.com.au reports that both Buckley and the Kikiva accounts disabled comments across their platforms. All of this came just months after the brand opened its first physical store at Perth’s Karrinyup Shopping Centre in August.

What’s Verified and What’s Alleged

It helps to separate the record from the noise. The slur, Buckley’s on-air “sissys” explanation, the dates and wording of both apologies, the brand statement and the departures of named ambassadors are all documented in published reporting and in the posts themselves. Buckley’s own later video confirms she tried to cover up what was said.

Other claims are less settled. PerthNow notes Reddit users alleging that Buckley deleted comments about the incident in the days before her first statement; that remains an online claim, not something the company has confirmed. Buckley’s hospital explanation for the delay is her own account. And while reporting describes customers discarding products, there is no public data on sales impact.

Who Has a Stake

• Customers, especially those who felt the brand’s community included them and now question whether it does.
• Ambassadors and collaborators, whose own reputations are tied to the label they promote.
• First Nations and Black communities in Australia and beyond, who are most directly harmed by the slur and by attempts to brush it aside.
• Employees, who will carry the brand into stores and customer conversations while the story plays out.
• Retail partners, including the shopping center where Kikiva just opened, which care about who they host.

How the Response Measures Up

W. Timothy Coombs’ Situational Crisis Communication Theory is a useful lens here. SCCT starts by asking how much responsibility stakeholders assign to the organization. A slur shouted by a family member, off camera, could have been treated by audiences as something that happened to Buckley. Her instant cover-up changed that. The moment she told viewers it hadn’t been said, she moved the crisis from “something happened on my stream” to “I misled you about it,” which is the kind of preventable, high-responsibility situation SCCT says calls for full accommodation: a real apology plus corrective action.

Measured against that, the first apology fell short. It arrived six days later, framed the slur as something in the background, and said nothing about the false explanation that most people were actually angry about. When the original misstep is a cover-up, an apology that leaves the cover-up out reads as a second one.

The second round was much stronger. Buckley named exactly what she did wrong, took responsibility without qualifiers, and the brand paired the apology with specific commitments. “An apology isn’t enough” is the right instinct. The weakness is that the commitments are inputs, such as training and meetings, with no timeline and no public way to measure them. Disabling comments is understandable as a way to protect staff from abuse, but it also signals that the brand is talking rather than listening, at the exact moment it says it wants to listen.

What Kikiva Should Do Next

• Put dates on the promises. Say when the training will be completed, who is delivering it, and when the company will report back on what it learned.
• Let the community speak first. If the meetings with Elders happen, the most credible update will come from the people Buckley met with, with their permission, not from a branded post.
• Reopen the conversation carefully. Moderated comments or a direct feedback channel would show the brand can handle criticism rather than shutting it off.
• Reach out to departed ambassadors privately. Not to win them back publicly, but to acknowledge the position the brand put them in.
• Separate founder and company channels for a while. Let the company account carry operational updates so every post doesn’t restart the founder story.

Takeaways for Any Business

• Your first words are the crisis. Under pressure, the instinct is to minimize. A simple “That’s not okay, and I’m ending the live” would likely have ended the story that night.
• Never deny what people can replay. Anything said on a livestream is recorded by someone. A denial that video can disprove turns a bystander into the subject.
• Apologize for what people are actually upset about. Ask what your stakeholders are reacting to before you write the statement, and address that first.
• Speed matters, but completeness matters more. A fast, incomplete apology forces a second one, and each round costs credibility.
• Founder-led brands need a plan for the founder. If your company’s identity runs through one person’s personal accounts, build a live-content protocol and a crisis plan around that person, including who can step in when they can’t.
• Corrective action needs to be visible and measurable. Training and listening sessions are good starts. Deadlines and public follow-up are what make them believable.

Kikiva may still recover. Small brands with loyal communities sometimes do, if the follow-through matches the words. But this case is a reminder that the hardest crisis to manage is the one you create in the first ten seconds of reacting to someone else’s.

If your business relies on a founder, influencers or live content and you want a plan for those first ten seconds, schedule a consultation and let’s build it together before you need it.

The post A Slur on a Livestream, a Cover-Up and Two Apologies: Crisis Lessons From Kikiva first appeared on Doug Johnson Consulting.

If you lead a business through a restructuring, you may face the same choice: say something now with incomplete information, or say nothing until every decision is final. There’s a way to communicate early without leaving your people in limbo, and this month’s headlines show both what works and what doesn’t.

What Companies Are Saying Right Now

On October 1, Nike CEO Elliott Hill said changes to the company’s operating model “will result in fewer roles,” with decisions on affected roles coming in “2027 and beyond,” according to CNBC. Business Insider reported that Nike said it doesn’t yet know how many roles or which locations will be affected. Hill wrote, “I want to acknowledge that news like this creates uncertainty,” and promised that “we will communicate directly, act with transparency and treat people with respect.”

On October 12, Kroger CEO Greg Foran told staff the company plans to cut 3,000 corporate jobs over the next three years, CNBC reported. Then eBay CEO Jamie Iannone told employees the company is cutting 9% of its jobs, its second round of layoffs this year, in a memo obtained by Reuters and summarized by Ragan. His memo said the company’s “strategy is working.”

Overseas, National Australia Bank announced plans to cut 2,500 roles by June, including 1,500 before Christmas. Employees told ABC News that entire teams must reapply for a smaller number of their own jobs.

Each of these announcements may have made sense to investors. Employees read them differently.

Why the Waiting Is So Hard on People

When Meta said in April that it would cut 10% of its workforce the following month, Business Insider reported that internal forums filled with anxious posts, and one person described the stretch ahead as “28 days of hell.”

Denise Rousseau, a professor of organizational behavior at Carnegie Mellon University, told CNBC that a long heads-up causes “a lot more anxiety than a sudden dropping of the hammer,” though it “does give employees more options.” She also called the more common approach, telling people on their last day, “very dysfunctional.”

Peter Cappelli of the Wharton School pointed out a practical risk for the business. Vague warnings rarely push out the people a company would choose to lose, because weaker performers have a harder time finding other work. Your best people, who can find another job quickly, are the ones most likely to leave.

That lines up with Edelman’s new Trust at Work research. Trust in direct managers fell from 79% in 2024 to 72% this year, and trust in CEOs fell from 70% to 66%, both record lows in Edelman’s tracking. According to PRovoke Media, 79% of executives said management always tells employees the truth, while only 46% of associates agreed.

That last gap is the one I’d want every leader to sit with before sending a restructuring memo. You may believe you’re being open. Your staff may be hearing something else entirely.

What to Say When You Don’t Have the Answers Yet

Early notice can be the right call. Many workers would rather know a change is coming than be blindsided. The problem comes when the early message offers nothing to hold onto. Here are some ways to give people something useful even when the details are still being worked out.

• Separate what has been decided from what hasn’t. People can handle “we don’t know yet” far better than they handle a message that sounds like it is hiding something. Say plainly which questions are still open.
• Put a date on the next update and keep it, even if the update is “no new decisions this week.” A missed update gets filled with rumor almost immediately.
• Be as specific as you honestly can. Sarah Rodehorst of Onwards HR told Business Insider that flagging the departments, locations or roles most likely to be affected helps workers judge their own risk. If some groups are clearly not affected, tell them.
• Say why the cuts are happening, and say they reflect business conditions and not people’s abilities, if that is true. Outplacement executive Laura Labovich suggested employers say exactly that and allow employees to take interviews during work hours.
• Match your tone to the news. Opening a layoff memo with “our strategy is working” may be accurate, but employees who just lost coworkers will hear it a certain way. Lead with the people affected and then explain the strategy.

Your Managers Will Carry Most of This Message

Electronic Arts offered a useful example this month. Its memo announcing the closure of the BioWare studio, as quoted by Ragan, told employees they could “speak directly with your leaders” about what the changes mean for their teams, and that a global town hall would follow in November.

Sending people to their managers is smart. Most employees will ask their own supervisor before they ever email the CEO. Ragan’s point, and I agree with it, is that this only works if those managers are briefed ahead of time with the same talking points and an FAQ. Otherwise five managers give five different answers, and the inconsistency becomes the story.

Before any announcement like this, I’d give managers the memo a day early if you can and walk them through the hard questions they’re likely to get, including what to say when they don’t know the answer. “I don’t know yet, and here’s when we’ll find out” is a perfectly good answer from a manager. A guess is not.

What Smaller Businesses Can Take From This

Most of my clients aren’t Nike or eBay. A local company with 30 employees doesn’t have investors to reassure, and it doesn’t need to announce anything to the market. That gives you an advantage. You can talk with people face to face, and you can do it before the rumor mill starts.

In a small shop, everyone notices when the owner starts closing the office door more often. Silence gets read as bad news. If changes are coming, a short, honest conversation with your team usually does less damage than weeks of whispering in the break room.

Whatever size your organization is, the promise you make in the first message is the one people will remember. Nike told its employees it would communicate directly and act with transparency. Over the next year, its people will be measuring every update against those words.

If you’re planning a restructuring or another difficult change and want help shaping what you’ll tell your team and when, schedule a consultation and we’ll work through it together.

The post Layoffs Are Coming, Details Later: How to Talk to Employees When You Can’t Say Who or When first appeared on Doug Johnson Consulting.

If your business has a Facebook page, an Instagram business profile, a WhatsApp channel or an ad account, you are about to agree to something new. On October 30, Meta’s updated commercial terms take effect, and they give the company permission to send automated crawlers to the websites associated with your business and pull content from them. There is no opt-out. Under the terms, the only way to say no is to stop using Meta’s products for business.

Most small and mid-sized businesses will never read those terms. That’s understandable, but it’s a mistake. Your website is the one digital channel you actually own, and this change is a good reminder that the platforms you rent attention from get to write the rules. Here’s what changed, what’s still unclear, and what I’d do before the end of the month.

What Meta’s new terms say

Nieman Lab first reported the change on October 15. The new language authorizes Meta, or anyone acting on its behalf, to use “web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents” to access, index, cache, analyze, collect and crawl the domains and web pages “associated with your products or services.” The original version went further and said Meta could use “any content” from those sites to “provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain” its products.

The terms cover business accounts broadly: accounts that manage pages and groups, run ads, send marketing messages or use Meta’s business dashboard. According to Nieman Lab, the update notice read, “If you do not agree to the updated terms, please stop all access or use of our Products for business or commercial purposes.”

After a quick backlash from publishers and legal experts, Meta quietly revised the wording. As Ars Technica and Engadget reported, the company removed the word “train” and the phrase “any content.” The revised terms now say Meta may “periodically pull updates” from those sites to “provide, develop, improve, research, and maintain advertising and business products,” and to protect the integrity and security of its products.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a statement that the crawling terms apply only to Meta’s ads and business products and don’t change how Meta uses web crawlers:

As always, content owners can use robots.txt to signal their preferences. This is not about scraping news sites, and these updates don’t give us new rights that supersede those preferences.

Meta statement, as reported by Ars Technica

Why experts are still uneasy

The revision didn’t settle the concerns. In a follow-up from Nieman Lab, legal experts said the narrower language still leaves a lot of room. Media attorney Matt Topic noted that “business product” isn’t a defined term and said, “I think ‘develop’ is broad enough to include ‘train.'” Cornell Law School professor James Grimmelmann said the “develop…advertising and business products” language is “still broad enough to drive a truck through.”

The robots.txt point matters too. That’s the small file on your website that tells crawlers what they may and may not visit. Following it is voluntary. University of Wisconsin law professor Benjamin Sobel told Nieman Lab that the clearest fix would be for Meta to commit in the terms themselves to honoring robots.txt. As of the Ars Technica report on October 20, Meta hadn’t added that language. Ars also reported that Meta confirmed it didn’t notify users when it changed the wording, which only adds to the confusion.

Publishers are pushing hardest. The News/Media Alliance, the UK’s News Media Association and the European Publishers Council have all urged regulators to step in before October 30. But this isn’t only a news industry story. A restaurant, a law firm, a manufacturer or a nonprofit with a Facebook page is in the same position: its website is now “associated with” a Meta business account.

What this means for an ordinary business

For a lot of businesses, having Meta read your website won’t feel like a threat. If you sell products, you probably want Meta’s ad tools to understand them. Better product information could mean better ads. That’s the trade Meta is offering, and for some companies it’s a fair one.

The bigger issue is control. Many companies have spent real money creating content: buying guides, research, case studies, training material, original photography. Before October 30, you decided who got to use that work and on what terms. After October 30, if you keep a business presence on Meta’s platforms, you’ve agreed to terms that let Meta crawl it for purposes it defines broadly. You can disagree with that, live with it, or limit what’s exposed, but you should make the choice on purpose.

There’s also a communication lesson here. Meta announced a significant change, rewrote it under pressure without telling users, and left the key question about robots.txt unanswered. Whether you think the change is reasonable or not, that’s a textbook way to lose trust. If your organization ever has to change its own terms with customers, do the opposite: explain the why, flag revisions plainly, and answer the hard question before someone else asks it in public.

What to do before October 30

None of this requires panic, but it does deserve an hour of attention. Here’s where I’d start:

• Find every business account you have with Meta. Check Facebook pages, Instagram professional accounts, WhatsApp Business, ad accounts and Business Manager. Note which website domains are linked to each one. Old pages run by a former employee or agency count too.
• Read the terms yourself, or have counsel do it. I’m a communication consultant, not a lawyer. If your website holds content you license, sell or consider proprietary, this is worth a short conversation with your attorney.
• Review your robots.txt file. Meta publishes a list of its web crawlers, including user agents such as meta-externalagent and meta-externalads. Decide which, if any, you want to block, and remember that blocking some of them can affect how your links preview when people share them.
• Put your most valuable content where it belongs. Anything you’d never want reused, such as paid resources, client materials or internal documents, shouldn’t sit on public pages anyway. Use logins, gated downloads or a private portal.
• Check what your website actually says. If Meta’s tools will be drawing on your site to describe your business and build ads, outdated prices, old staff bios and stale service pages become a bigger problem. Clean them up.
• Rebalance toward channels you own. Your website, your email list and your direct customer relationships aren’t subject to someone else’s terms. Platform changes like this one, and Meta’s recent limits on organic link posts for some Facebook pages, are a steady reminder not to build your whole strategy on rented ground.

The bigger takeaway

Every platform you use for marketing is a business partner with its own interests. Most of the time those interests line up with yours: they want your ads to work and your customers to stay engaged. But when the platform changes the deal, the terms change for you whether you read them or not. Smart digital strategy means knowing what you’ve agreed to, deciding what you’re willing to share, and keeping the most important relationships with your customers on channels you control.

If you’d like help reviewing your digital presence, deciding what belongs on your website versus social platforms, or explaining a policy change to your own customers, schedule a consultation. I’m glad to help you think it through.

Photo at top: the Meta entrance sign at 1 Hacker Way in Menlo Park, California by LPS.1, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped and resized).

The post Meta Will Soon Crawl Your Business Website. Here’s What Changed and What to Do Before October 30 first appeared on Doug Johnson Consulting.

Supreme, the New York streetwear label, pulled a Mike Tyson tribute hoodie from its Fall 2026 collaboration with British designer Martine Rose days before release. Then Tyson’s lawyers told Rolling Stone that Supreme had changed the approved artwork without permission. As of this writing, Supreme has not responded publicly. If your company puts a partner’s name, face or reputation on its products, this case is worth studying closely.

What Happened

On Monday, October 12, Supreme announced the collection. According to Complex, it included a zip-up hooded sweatshirt with an image of Tyson and the words “Undisputed heavyweight champion of the world,” surrounded by national flags. One of them was the Palestinian flag.

Streetwear accounts quickly pointed out that the vintage graphic behind the design, inspired by Tyson’s well-known Jeff Hamilton jacket, carried the Israeli flag in that spot. Before the release, Complex reported, the hoodie disappeared from Supreme’s lookbook and preview pages. When the collection went on sale in stores and online on Thursday, October 15, the rest of the line was there, including other Tyson pieces. The hoodie was not.

That day, Tyson’s attorney, Mitchell Schuster of Meister Seelig & Schuster, gave Rolling Stone a statement. Tyson’s team, he said, “approved artwork inspired by his iconic Jeff Hamilton jacket solely to celebrate boxing history.” He went on: “Without authorization, Supreme altered the approved design, embroiling Mr. Tyson in an unrelated political crisis. This modification constitutes a material breach of contract.” He added that Supreme had ignored “repeated demands” and that Tyson’s lawyers would “take all necessary action to protect his name, likeness, and legacy.”

Supreme did not respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment. Rose hasn’t commented either, according to Complex. TheGrio reported on October 16 that no lawsuit had been filed.

What’s Verified and What’s Still Alleged

Online, this story has mostly been argued as a fight about the flag. It helps to separate what is known from what people are assuming.

• Verified: the hoodie was shown when the collection was announced, it carried the Palestinian flag where the vintage source graphic had an Israeli flag, and it was not part of the October 15 release.
• Verified: Tyson’s legal team publicly accused Supreme of breach of contract, and Supreme has not answered press requests.
• Alleged: that Supreme changed the design after Tyson’s team approved it and then ignored repeated demands. Those are claims from one side of a contract dispute.
• Unknown: who made the change, whether Tyson’s team ever saw the final artwork, and why Supreme pulled the item. Reports that store staff were told to remove stock came from a streetwear social media account, not from Supreme.

As TheGrio noted, Tyson’s complaint is about approval rights, not the politics of the flag. That distinction gets lost online, and it’s the piece business leaders should pay the most attention to.

Who’s Watching

Several groups are reading Supreme’s silence in different ways, and each wants something different.

• Customers on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian debate. Some read the pull as a political statement, others as giving in to pressure. With no explanation, each group writes its own.
• Tyson and his team, who have already gone public and have a commercial reason to protect his image. Rolling Stone noted he is also the subject of a new four-part Netflix series, so his name is getting extra attention right now.
• Martine Rose, whose own label previously sold Artists for Aid T-shirts raising money for humanitarian relief in Palestine and Sudan, according to Complex. Her reputation is tied to whatever Supreme says next.
• Future collaborators. Supreme’s identity depends on putting cultural figures on its clothes; Rolling Stone mentioned André 3000, NBA YoungBoy and Tyler, the Creator. Every artist, athlete and agent weighing a deal with Supreme is watching how it treats a partner in a dispute.
• Store and customer service staff, who get the questions about where the hoodie went.

How Supreme Has Handled It So Far

Pulling the item quickly was defensible. If there was a real dispute over approved artwork, selling the product anyway would have made both the legal and the reputational damage worse.

The trouble is everything around the pull. The hoodie vanished without a word to the customers who had seen it in the announcement. That left a gap, and Tyson’s lawyers filled it. Once a partner’s attorney becomes the first and only voice in a story, the company has lost control of how the facts are framed. Right now the only version on the record is that Supreme changed a design without permission and ignored its partner.

Silence can be a reasonable choice when a matter may end up in court, and lawyers often recommend it. Still, there’s a difference between declining to discuss a contract and saying nothing at all. A brand can keep the legal details private and still explain a product decision to its customers.

What Supreme Should Do Next

• Issue a short, factual statement. Confirm the hoodie won’t be released, say the company is working directly with Tyson’s representatives, and avoid arguing the contract in public.
• Pick up the phone. If Tyson’s team really sent repeated demands without an answer, the first fix is a direct conversation, not a press release.
• Coordinate with Martine Rose first. A statement that blames the designer, or one she contradicts, would turn one dispute into two.
• Stay out of the flag debate. Supreme’s customers hold strong views on both sides. Its statement should be about the product and the partnership, not the conflict.
• Give frontline staff one simple answer for customers who ask.
• Find out where sign-off broke down. Whatever a court eventually decides, a partner says an approved design changed before launch. Supreme needs to know how.

Lessons for Any Business That Works With Partners

Most companies will never sell a Mike Tyson hoodie. Plenty of them, though, put someone else’s name on their work: a sponsor’s logo, an influencer’s face, a co-branded product, an athlete or speaker in a campaign. The same risks apply.

• Approval means the final version. Get written sign-off on the exact asset that will go public, and require fresh sign-off for any change, even one the creative team considers minor.
• Flag the sensitive details before launch. Flags, symbols, religious imagery and political references carry meaning well beyond the design. Have someone outside the creative team review them.
• Put crisis communication in the contract. Decide ahead of time who speaks first if something goes wrong, how quickly each side will respond to the other, and whether either party can go to the press alone.
• Answer your partner before you answer the public. Tyson’s lawyers say their demands were ignored. True or not, a partner who feels unheard is far more likely to call a reporter.
• Don’t mistake quiet for safe. When something disappears without explanation, people invent the reason. A brief holding statement costs very little.

Supreme may have good answers to every question in this case. Nobody outside the company has heard them yet, though, and the longer that lasts, the more the story belongs to someone else.

If your organization works with partners, sponsors or talent and you want a plan for what to say when a collaboration goes sideways, schedule a consultation and let’s build it before you need it.

The post Supreme’s Pulled Mike Tyson Hoodie: What Happens When Your Partner Tells the Story First first appeared on Doug Johnson Consulting.

On AI in particular, four in ten employees told BCG their CEO has not been transparent enough about how AI will affect their roles and career opportunities. Just 15% of CEOs worry that their approach to AI could erode employee trust.

That is a wide gap. The good news is that most of it can be closed with better communication, and a lot of that work starts with the next memo.

What the BCG research found

BCG surveyed 645 CEOs of companies with at least $100 million in revenue, along with 500 nonexecutive employees. A few of the findings stood out to me:

• Nearly 70% of CEOs believe employees trust them to put employee well-being first when deciding how to fund major priorities. Only 36% of employees said the same.
• Half of the employees whose trust went up because of how their CEO handled AI said they’re more willing to go above and beyond than they were three months ago. Among employees whose trust in their CEO’s AI leadership eroded, fewer than 10% said that.
• 58% of CEOs said they are not concerned about rising employee disgruntlement.

That second point is the one I’d show a CFO. Trust shows up in effort, and effort shows up in results. Matthias Tauber, a BCG managing director and senior partner, put the problem plainly: “CEOs assume that since employees hear their words, that’s enough to build trust, but employees also judge CEOs by their actions.”

Other research points the same direction. The Institute of Internal Communication’s IC Index 2026, based on a survey of 5,000 UK employees at organizations with 500 or more people, found that half of employees do not trust their CEO or senior leaders. Only 49% agreed the reasons behind organizational changes are clearly communicated to them. And most employees said they have ten minutes or less a day to engage with internal communication at all.

A live example from Simon & Schuster

You can watch this trust gap play out in real time at Simon & Schuster. Publishers Weekly reported on October 7 that employees were gathering signatures for an open letter to CEO Greg Greeley stating “strong opposition” to using Skan AI or similar software that analyzes workplace activity.

The letter’s language shows what people assumed. It described a technology that “tracks employees’ keystrokes” and warned it would “further degrade trust in leadership.” It also noted that trusting company leadership was already one of the lowest-scoring categories in the company’s internal Gallup survey, year after year.

Greeley’s October 6 memo to staff, shared with Publishers Weekly by a company spokesperson, said some teams were exploring AI to cut administrative work like “duplicate data entry, approval chasing, manual status reporting.” Then he wrote this: “To be clear: no decision has been made to use Blueprint or any other productivity-monitoring or workflow-analysis tool, and there is no company-wide rollout underway or under consideration.”

That is a good sentence. It’s specific, it names the tool, and it puts a limit in writing. I don’t know the internal timeline at Simon & Schuster, and I’m not going to guess at it. But the episode shows something I see in a lot of organizations. Once employees hear “AI” and “workflow analysis” in the same breath, many of them will hear “surveillance” and “layoffs” unless leadership has already told them otherwise. A clear memo that arrives after people have formed that picture has to work much harder.

What to do before your next AI announcement

I spent 14 years in broadcast media, and radio teaches you quickly that dead air never stays empty. Listeners fill it, usually with the idea that something has gone wrong. Employees do the same with silence about AI. Here’s how I’d advise a leadership team to get ahead of that.

1. Answer the question people are really asking. For most employees, the question is some version of “What happens to my job?” Say what is changing and what isn’t. If some answers aren’t settled yet, say that too. If you can’t promise something, don’t imply it.
2. Put the limits in the first message. If a tool will not be used to rate individual performance, say so in writing on day one. Greeley’s “To be clear” line is the right kind of sentence. Use it early, before anyone has to ask.
3. Brief managers before the all-hands. Frontline managers get the hallway questions, and the BCG and IC Index numbers suggest employees don’t automatically take the CEO’s word for it. Give managers a one-page Q&A and a day to absorb it so they aren’t hearing the news at the same time as their teams.
4. Show something people can check. Share a pilot team’s actual results, or publish a short policy on what data the tool collects and who gets to see it. This is Tauber’s point about actions. People believe what they can see.
5. Write for a ten-minute day. If most employees have ten minutes or less for internal communication, the first two sentences of your memo carry most of the load. Lead with what changes for them. The strategy rationale can come second.

Test your own read on trust

The hardest lesson in the BCG data is that the person most confident about employee trust is often the CEO. There’s a simple reason for it. Executives hear from people who report to them, and those people tend to soften bad news on the way up.

So build in ways to hear the unfiltered version. Add two or three AI-specific questions to your next anonymous pulse survey, such as whether employees understand how AI will affect their role and whether they believe what leadership has said about it. Hold skip-level conversations where a vice president sits down with front-line staff without their direct manager in the room. Ask your managers what questions they’ve been getting that never make it to the town hall.

And pay attention to quiet. A town hall Q&A with no hard questions about AI usually doesn’t mean everyone is on board. Sometimes it means people have decided it isn’t safe or worthwhile to ask. The IC Index found only 49% of UK employees agree people can share their opinion without fear of negative consequences. If your people are in that other half, a polite room is telling you something.

The companies that come out of this period with their workforce still on their side will be the ones whose leaders told people the truth early and then did what they said they would do.

If you’re planning an AI rollout or another big change and want help shaping how you’ll talk with employees about it, schedule a consultation and let’s work through it together.

The post CEOs Think Employees Trust Them on AI. Most Employees Don’t. first appeared on Doug Johnson Consulting.

Since August 31, every website in Google Search Console can choose to keep its links and content out of Google’s AI Overviews, AI Mode and the generative AI features in Google Discover. We’re six weeks into that worldwide rollout, so this is a good moment to make the call on purpose instead of leaving it at the default. My advice for most businesses: stay in, and change how you measure search.

What Google changed

The new Search generative AI control sits under Settings in Search Console, according to Google’s Search Console help documentation. Every property is included in AI features by default. You can exclude a property instead, and Google is plain about the result: “You won’t receive any traffic or impressions from these features.” A property can also inherit whatever setting its parent domain uses.

Some of the fine print is worth knowing before anyone touches it. Google says the control “isn’t used as a ranking or inclusion signal affecting other parts of Search,” so opting out of AI answers isn’t supposed to hurt your regular listings. It has nothing to do with AI training, either. That’s a separate control called Google-Extended. And once you change the setting, give it a few days. Google says most content drops out within one to two days.

Google also added a generative AI performance report. It shows how often links to your site appeared in AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page, country, date and device. One catch, which Search Engine Journal pointed out when the rollout finished: you get impressions, not clicks.

Google didn’t do this purely out of goodwill. On June 3, the same day it announced the control, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority imposed what it called a “world first” requirement that publishers get tools to keep their content from powering AI features like AI Overviews. Google’s own announcement acknowledged it was working with regulators, the CMA among them, and it tested the control with UK site owners before taking it global.

Naturally, Google also argued for staying in. It says AI Overviews has more than 2.5 billion monthly active users and AI Mode has passed one billion monthly users, and that it has added more inline links and website previews to get people clicking through.

The traffic worry is legitimate

Business owners aren’t imagining this. The Pew Research Center looked at browsing data from 900 U.S. adults in March 2025. When people saw an AI summary, they clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits. Without a summary, it was 15%. Links inside the summary itself got clicked in just 1% of visits to pages that had one.

That data is more than a year old, and Google has redesigned its links since. I’d read it as a direction, not a forecast. Still, when the answer is sitting on the results page, fewer people need to come to yours.

Now read this line from Google’s documentation before you flip the switch. If you exclude your site, “Content from other sites will still be available in those features, and it may appear similar to yours.”

So the answer doesn’t go away when you opt out. You do. Somebody asking Google about your product category or your service area still gets a response, and a competitor, a review site or some forum thread ends up speaking for you.

For some organizations, exclusion is a reasonable choice. If you’re a publisher and the content is the product, or you sell paid research, or you’re in the middle of licensing talks, being summarized for free may cut into the business model. I get that. A local service company, a manufacturer, a consultant or a retailer is in a different spot. For them, getting cited in an AI answer is close to what showing up on page one used to be.

Where I’d start

Whichever way you go, somebody should own the decision. Here’s what I’d have a team do this month:

• Find out what your Search Console property is set to right now, and whether it’s inheriting from a parent property. If an agency, a web developer or IT runs the account, ask who’s allowed to change it.
• Open the generative AI performance report and see which pages Google is pulling into AI features. Like it or not, those pages are now some of your most visible public statements.
• In the regular Performance report, look for pages where impressions hold steady but clicks drop. That usually means an AI answer is handling the question before anyone visits.
• Publish things only you can say. Google’s updated guidance leans hard on unique, non-commodity content. Original data, firsthand expertise, honest pricing explanations and local knowledge are a lot harder to replace than generic advice.
• Clean up your facts. AI tools will summarize whatever is on your site, including the old hours and the service page that contradicts another service page.
• Build an audience you own through email, a podcast, video or plain old customer relationships. None of that depends on a search results page, and every visit you do get should ask people to stay in touch.
• Track leads, calls, inquiries and branded searches next to traffic. Visits alone won’t tell you whether visibility is turning into business.

Don’t leave this to the web team

It’s tempting to hand this setting to whoever runs the website. I’d push back on that. I spent 14 years in broadcast media, and I see this as a media relations question.

An AI answer is earned media. Your content gets quoted, condensed and put in front of an audience you didn’t pay to reach. Treat your site the way you’d prepare for a press interview. Know your key messages, say them clearly, and make sure the claims you care about most are accurate and easy to check. Clear writing gives AI tools, and the people reading their answers, a reason to point back to you.

If your team wants a second set of eyes on your search visibility or your website content, or wants help building an audience of your own, schedule a consultation. I’m happy to talk it through.

The post Should Your Business Opt Out of Google’s AI Answers? What the New Search Console Switch Means first appeared on Doug Johnson Consulting.

One caution up front: the most serious allegations are still under investigation, and the line between verified and alleged matters.

What Happened

On Sunday, October 11, Korean broadcaster MBC reported that workers at DN Automotive’s automotive battery plant in Ulsan had repeatedly received chelation injections shortly before mandatory medical examinations, according to The Korea Herald. Chelation binds heavy metals such as lead so the body can excrete them. The injections were allegedly presented to workers as “vitamin shots.” The concern is that the treatments lowered workers’ blood lead levels ahead of required health screenings, hiding how much exposure they actually had.

The story did not start this week. According to Yonhap (Korean), the allegations were first raised in February at a press conference held by the Ulsan branch of the Korean Metal Workers’ Union and a workplace safety education center. The Elec reports that the Ministry of Employment and Labor received a whistleblower report in late January, conducted a special inspection from March 23 to April 17, found 68 violations of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and ordered a partial work stoppage of lead-handling processes from April 21 to May 7. On August 13, the ministry asked police to investigate the company on suspicion of obstruction of business, and the Ulsan Metropolitan Police Agency is handling that inquiry. A joint committee of nine outside experts, nominated by labor, management and government, was established on October 8.

On October 12, President Lee Jae Myung ordered a thorough investigation. His spokesperson said the president called the alleged practice “a grave violation of human rights that can never be tolerated,” per The Korea Herald, and directed authorities to examine whether similar practices have occurred at other workplaces, according to Yonhap. That same day, DN Automotive posted a statement under the name of President and CEO Kim In-hwan apologizing and pledging cooperation, reported by the Seoul Economic Daily.

Verified vs. Alleged

Leaders reading crisis coverage should get in the habit of sorting claims into two columns. Based on reporting so far:

Established by official action or the company’s own words:

• The labor ministry found 68 workplace safety law violations at the plant, referred them to prosecutors and, per Yonhap, imposed fines of 46.2 million won.
• The ministry referred the company to police over the pre-exam injections, and police are investigating.
• A nine-member outside expert committee has been formed.
• The company has publicly apologized and committed to cooperate and to accept the committee’s findings.

Alleged and still under investigation:

• That injections were described to workers as vitamin shots.
• That the timing of the injections was intended to conceal blood lead levels from mandatory exams.
• The exact extent of workers’ exposure. The presidential office said lead concentrations exceeded permissible limits by more than fivefold, and the president ordered investigators to verify exposure levels.

It is also worth noting the company’s position. According to MBC’s reporting as cited by The Korea Herald, DN Automotive has denied forcing workers to receive the injections, maintaining that the treatments were voluntary. Earlier, per Yonhap, the company said it managed employee health using internal standards stricter than the legal requirements.

The Stakeholders

DN Automotive now has to address several audiences at once:

• Workers and their families, who are the people most directly affected and who need information about their own health above all else.
• The labor union, which raised the allegations publicly and now sits alongside management and government in the improvement process.
• Regulators, police and prosecutors.
• The national government, now engaged at the presidential level.
• Investors, customers and the Ulsan community, all watching whether the company can be trusted.

Assessing the Response Through SCCT

Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT), developed by W. Timothy Coombs, ties the right response to how much responsibility stakeholders assign to the organization. Crises in the “preventable” cluster, where an organization is believed to have knowingly put people at risk, generate the strongest attributions of responsibility. SCCT recommends rebuilding strategies for those situations: full apology, corrective action and, where appropriate, compensation. If the allegations here are confirmed, this case sits squarely in that cluster.

Measured against that standard, the October 12 statement does several things well. It opens with a direct apology rather than a denial. It names a value the company failed to live up to: “We deeply regret that we failed to thoroughly uphold the principle that employee safety and health come first.” It commits to cooperating with investigations, health examinations and epidemiological surveys, and, importantly, it promises to accept the conclusions of an outside committee rather than grading its own homework.

There are also gaps. As the Seoul Economic Daily observed, the company “did not offer a detailed explanation of the allegations.” Its acceptance of responsibility is conditional: “If the findings show that the company bears any responsibility, we will accept it fully.” Lawyers will understand that phrasing; affected workers may hear it differently. And the apology arrived months after the allegations first surfaced, following a period in which the company’s public stance was that the treatments were voluntary. When an organization moves from defense to apology only after national media and the head of state weigh in, audiences tend to wonder whether the change reflects conviction or pressure.

What DN Automotive Should Do Next

• Put workers’ health information first. Affected employees need clear, direct communication about independent medical testing, what their results mean and where to get care. That message should reach them before it reaches the press.
• Reconcile the record. The company’s earlier “voluntary treatment” position and its current apology need to be explained in plain language. Silence on that question will be filled by others.
• Make the outside committee’s work visible. Commit publicly to releasing its findings and to a timeline for each corrective step.
• Communicate on a regular schedule. Steady updates show the company is not waiting for the next headline to speak.

Takeaways for Business Leaders

Having spent 14 years in broadcast media, including work overseeing public relations, I have seen how quickly a story that has lingered in local or trade coverage can become a national one. A few lessons apply well beyond battery manufacturing:

• Treat early warnings as the crisis. A whistleblower report or a union press conference is not a nuisance to be managed. It is the moment when an honest response costs the least.
• Never frame a health issue as a messaging issue. If what you tell employees about a procedure does not match what the procedure is, no communication strategy will survive the gap.
• Prepare for the apology before you need it. Know in advance who speaks, what you can say while investigations are ongoing and how to balance legal caution with human accountability.
• Invite independent eyes. Accepting outside review is one of the strongest credibility signals available to an organization under suspicion.

The DN Automotive story is still unfolding, and investigators, not commentators, will determine the facts. But the communication lesson is already clear: trust is easiest to protect long before the cameras arrive.

If your organization wants to stress-test its crisis plan, prepare spokespeople or think through how you would respond to a situation like this one, schedule a consultation. Preparation is always less expensive than recovery.

The post When ‘Vitamin Shots’ Become a Crisis: Lessons From DN Automotive’s Apology first appeared on Doug Johnson Consulting.