I cringed the other day while listening to
Tom Martino’s radio show during which he adamantly insisted that consumers NOT buy a certain brand of PC.
Tom Martino, as you may know, touts himself as a friend of the consumer and works to fight rip-offs and con-artists.
As
I listened to him rip this company to pieces, I envisioned a
hard-working PR person like myself strategizing about how to respond to
what was, no doubt about it, flat-out negative PR.
The Media Insider blog is
running an article today on responding to negative press.
The article talks about the reaction of the Mount Horeb Mustard Museum in Wisconsin after
Reader’s Digest profiled it as one of “Five Museum Not to Plan Christmas Around.”
If you ask me, this might be one perfect example of the idea that “any publicity is good publicity.”
How
often does the Mount Horeb Mustard Museum get mentioned in the Reader's
Digest? Would we even know it existed if not for that
article? In any case, the museum took some steps to respond to
the Reader's Digest that seem to be working.
As PR people, responding to negative press is undoubtedly part of our daily lives.
We’ve all cringed while reading inaccurate reporting or a negative review including our company or our client.
The
new medium of blogging has created a new avenue to respond to,
requiring new strategies and tactics to effectively control the “buzz
machine.”
Some are even tagging bloggers as more dangerous and influential than mainstream press.
So how do we respond to and react to negative “press” in the blogosphere?
While I don’t think the rules have been written yet, it seems clear to me that listening and monitoring is the first step.
Thoughts?
Three new blogs have just been announced as part of the Weblogs Inc. Network today. The three blogs, all worthy of note, are Droxy.com (which will focus on satellite and digital radio), FlashInsider.com (which will focus on Macromedia Flash) and The SAS Blog (which will focus on SAS the company).
Blog networks have really picked up steam lately. It seems that between Weblogs Inc. and Corante, there is a new network blogger being named every few days who will specialize on a certain topic.
Among the bloggers who’ve been recruited by Weblogs Inc. for this
series of new blogs is Seattle’s own Glenn Fleishmann who will lead up
Droxy.com. Fleishmann has established himself as a “must-know” for PR
professionals in the wireless networking space with his Wi-Fi Networking News blog. I imagine that he’ll continue to have such a following as he takes on satellite and digital radio with this new blog.