As an online media marketing professional, I have heard countless times from organizations, executives, and even others in the marketing and PR field, that they often question whether or not to respond to negative media attention that their company or community group may receive. I was actually at a Christmas luncheon the other day and my fellow co-worker, the Marketing Director at our company, actually said that she thought we should have done nothing in response to some negative PR we recently received, and “Eventually it would all die off and go away!”
I’ll admit, upon hearing this, I almost dropped my fork and it took a great deal of effort to not respond with an “Are you crazy?!?!” comment. There were a few minutes of uncomfortable silence with everyone else around the table before we all resumed our previous discussions. As pointed out by David Meerman Scott and many other SEO and online marketing experts, the new rules of marketing and PR that exist out there today make it so we no longer have to rely on newspapers or TV reporters to get our quotes right and hope that they capture our comments correctly. We can respond ourselves. And what we all need to remember in today’s connected world, is that the conversations are going to happen with or without you, so all organizations can benefit from participating in the discussions. And in fact, when our company at first tried the “ignore-it-and-it-will-go-away” tactic, more stories continued to come out about it and the number of blogs dishing our management significantly grew.
It is important to note, is that if you are going to respond to negative publicity or online comments, blogs, etc. – it is in your best interest to respond in the same outlet where the conversation/article took place. Many of you have probably seen by now the YouTube video created by Dave Carroll called “United Breaks Guitars”. Instead of responding directly on the blogs and social media networks or commenting directly on the YouTube video that was created, United took a long time to respond and didn’t really deal with the issue. If they responded, they may have chosen to respond via a public statement issued in a press release or in a newspaper or trade publication but none of those would have addressed issue properly. Plus, the growing fan base that the “United breaks Guitars” video created, would never see United’s response or apology to Mr. Carroll. If a bad story starts in a blog post, do you just hope that no one picks up on it? I don’t think so. Don’t hide your head in the sand and hope your problems go away, because in today’s world, they won’t! In fact, it’s more likely that the problem will continue, your negative story will be shared with others and the problems will snowball into bigger issues and more PR headaches. You can’t afford to NOT participate and respond. A direct response can definitely keep a bad situation from getting worse, and you are letting the community and your customers know that at least you have heard what they have to say and are acknowledging a problem.
For more back-up ammo about the importance of responding to negative PR and a summary of how you should choose to participate in social media, view blogger Matt Singley’s article.
CEdge Social 