Companies are increasingly told they have to respond right away in a crisis. But there’s still a right and a wrong way to do it. GE isn’t quite getting it right.

Today, in a marketing culture driven by short-form, shareable content – not to mention short attention spans – it all comes down to using the right words.

Today’s CEOs face a much more volatile and dynamic universe of internal and external stakeholders and are increasingly caught in the middle – forced to choose a side. In this new era, the public and media will increasingly look to CEOs to voice their positions on a widening range of issues.

It seems that apologies are in the headlines every day. For any company, apologizing is one of the hardest things to communicate – there is no instance where the words you use are more important than when your company has (or is perceived to have) something to apologize for. Because how a company crafts an apology can make or break their reputation.

Language in polling matters. Saying “welfare” versus “assistance for the poor,” for example, can elicit drastically different reactions even if they mean the same thing. Lee Carter talks with Fox and Friends about how phrasing can significantly impact the results of polls.