The Official Assura Blog

Hat tip to Breitbart.tv: From Santa Cruz, CA comes this report of a restaurant that is shut down because of a communicable disease that seems to have made around 80 people sick thus far.

Watch the YouTube clip for the story.



There are a couple of things wrong with the handling of this incident:

1. The Santa Cruz County Health Department isn't releasing the name of the restaurant. It's tough to contain an outbreak without facts.
2. The restaurant in question is refusing to respond to the media. This is the wrong approach because the media have already started to write the story. They will do this with or without the restaurant. The right thing for the restaurant to do is to respond with some key messages about how they are handling the situation. Now the story is out of their control, and now the public perception is that they are being evasive.

The media have a saying: "feed the monster". Every single day, the media have to fill up so much time or so many column inches of space. Make no mistake about it, they will write the story with or without a response from this restaurant.

It will be interesting to see how this restaurant's future plays out. As a colleague of ours always says, "no comment is never an option".

Labels: Crisis Management

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