THE IMPORTANCE OF NEGATIVE NEWS - · PDF fileTHE IMPORTANCE OF NEGATIVE NEWS ... Twitter, SnapChat and other social media networks may need to ... analysis and sharing tools

THE IMPORTANCE OF

NEGATIVE NEWS TRACKING CR I S I S M A N AG E M E NT I N TH E AG E O F V I R A L M E D I A

There is no crisis management today without a full understanding of how to use new media to listen to conversations around your brand in real-time, and understand what you do and don’t need to respond to. Chris Syme Author of Listen, Engage, Respond blogs

“

CRISIS MANAGEMENT IN THE AGE OF VIRAL MEDIA

Controversy swirling around a non-profit’s spending, backlash to a film industry organization’s nominee selection process, Congressional hearings over a banking and financial services company scandal and a contentious election season riddled with regrettable, off-the-cuff remarks—2016 has proven a challenging year for PR crisis management teams, and it’s not over yet. “You need to be prepared for today’s media culture, in which a tweet can become newsworthy and a news interview can become tweet-worthy,” says Brad Phillips of Phillips Media Relations—and he’s certainly right. In the digital age, a robust crisis management strategy is a necessity for small and large organizations alike. Is your current strategy optimized for the velocity of today’s news cycle?

Experts Weigh In During a recent webinar, Preparing for the Storm: Tracking Negative Media Coverage Before It Sinks Your Brand, we gained insights into what a modern PR crisis communications process should look like. Take a look at what we learned—and see how it compares to your current crisis management approach.

LexisNexis.com/MediaStorm 800.628.3612 @LexisNexisBiz LexisNexis.com/BizBlog

Wordsworth Communications partner and senior counselor Joe Shields shares his own experience working on a political campaign in which a local 16-year conservative incumbent found himself facing a primary challenge by a conservative party activist. The well-connected opponent and his surrogates made extensive use of social media and the comments sections of traditional media early on, taking advantage of the fact that the incumbent candidate was featured in the news well before more visible efforts like paid and earned media or direct mail campaigns had begun.

Through monitoring, the incumbent’s PR team gained a clear sense of the direction the opponent’s campaign would take—to attack the incumbent on spending. This enabled them to plan a re-election campaign that focused on how the incumbent’s county actually ranked second to last among 35 jurisdictions in spending per capita. By having conducted a threat appraisal, the campaign was able to adjust its messages and spending, and address the potential attack before it was made. The result? The incumbent won re-election by a 10 percent margin.

How to Prepare for a Crisis

Political Campaign Media Monitoring:

Red, White & Who?

The day-to-day activities that you engage in before a crisis occurs are, in fact, what enables you to respond effectively post-crisis. Organizations—and their PR practitioners—need to establish a two-pronged approach.

Threat AppraisalYou need an established process for daily threat appraisals. Understanding the buzz across all media channels allows you to stay abreast of emerging issues so that you can tackle potential problems before they turn into an avalanche of negative news.

Use of a comprehensive media monitoring and analytics solution aids in this type of environmental scanning, allowing you to quickly analyze a complete range of media channels and identify and evaluate potential threats. The alternative—a manual process of combing through alerts from multiple platforms, verifying sources, combining relevant data and correlating your findings—makes it difficult to achieve a cohesive view in a timely manner. And when it comes to crisis management, timeliness matters.

“In a race that frankly a lot of people expected us to lose, our ‘canary in the coal mine’ approach of monitoring and identifying the threat early allowed for action, rather than reaction, and helped to deliver a wonderful victory.” Joe Shields Partner and Senior Counselor Wordsworth Communications


How to Prepare for a Crisis

[continued]

Pre-Crisis PlanningWorking in conjunction with the threat appraisal is crisis planning. What steps should you take?

1. Define your objectives to clarify your monitoring focus. Gone are the days when organizations only needed to follow news broadcasts on the three major networks and a handful (or two) of publications to stay alert to potential crises. The number of platforms you may need to follow is growing exponentially. In the digital era, Facebook®, Twitter®, SnapChat and other social media networks may need to stay on your radar—even if your organization isn’t a regular participant on those platforms.

2. Prioritize the topics to follow: This can be your industry, organization, prominent voices within your organization or products you sell. You can tap into subject matter experts to help you identify these topics, and those subject matter experts will prove equally important when it comes to dealing with a crisis effectively.

3. Listen before you leap. Dr. Abitbol notes that some organizations make the mistake of responding hastily. “Before joining the conversation, organizations need to understand the climate and conversations surrounding the issue at hand to respond effectively,” he says.

4. Cultivate brand advocates through active engagement. Organizations that take part in conversations in good times are more likely to earn support from stakeholders in bad times. If you wait until a crisis, it’s too late to build good will.

5. Empower your PR efforts with tools to match your strategy. If, for example, you operate on a global scale, you need a media monitoring and analytics platform that captures a global perspective and allows for monitoring and analyzing across multiple languages.

“You can switch on your wipers when rain strikes your windshield, but in crisis communications, that’s too late. You have to monitor and understand cloud formations to navigate around the risks.”Thomas Stoeckle Global Head of the Valuation and Insights LexisNexis UK



“A lot of companies understand the need to monitor but lack an organized and proactive strategy.”Dr. Alan Abitbol Assistant Professor of Public Relations University of Dayton


Determining the Appropriate Response

in a Crisis

In the grand scheme of things, a crisis is a brief moment in time. If you have a solid pre-crisis strategy in place, then your next consideration is managing your response in the critical hours, days, or weeks after that moment.

Dr. Abitbol suggests that leveraging Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT), developed by Timothy Coombs, can help you determine an effective strategy.1 SCCT states that the key to effective crisis response lies in understanding the degree of reputational threat a crisis poses. Three elements influence how stakeholders, the public and the media view an organization during a crisis.

2. Crisis history digs into whether an organization has faced similar crises in the past. If it has, the reputational threat increases. One important consideration here: a similar crisis within the same industry can raise the reputational threat risk. The reason: heightened expectations that the organization should have learned from the prior crisis.

3. Prior relational reputation takes into account how an organization is viewed in terms of its treatment of stakeholders and the public in the past. Building a solid, favorable reputation helps organizations maintain their reputation in times of crisis.

1. Initial crisis responsibility relates to an organization’s role in the crisis. Reputation threat levels vary based on the type of crisis.

Victim crises—natural disasters, rumors, workplace violence or product tampering—in which stakeholders and the public see the organization as an injured party.

Accidental crises—industrial accidents or product recalls due to technology or equipment failure and negative stakeholder claims—in which stakeholders and the public attribute a moderate level of blame on the company but concede the crises are not intentional.

Preventable crises—human errors leading to accidents or product harm and legal/regulatory misconduct by management that leads to injuries—in which stakeholders and the public affix blame directly on the organization.


Based on your assessment

Your crisis management approach can take one of four approaches—deny, diminish, rebuild or reinforce. Check out these examples of how organizations successfully navigated the media storm using each approach.

MEASURING THE VALUE OF YOUR PR & MARKETING

DENY

When a lawsuit alleged that Taco Bell® was deceiving customers with a seasoned beef recipe that was only 35 percent beef, the company denied the claim. It also published the ingredients—88 percent beef, 12 percent secret recipe—going so far as to list the components in the secret recipe.2 Fans rallied with vocal support across social media.

DIMINISH

Twitter erupted after a tweet about #gettingslizzerd was sent by the Red Cross®. The organization reduced its impact with a humorous acknowledgement of the error. After discovering that a personal tweet was mistakenly sent through the Red Cross account, the organization tweeted, “We’ve deleted the rogue tweet but rest assured the Red Cross is sober and we’ve confiscated the keys.”3

REBUILD

When cyanide-tainted Tylenol led to deaths in 1982, Johnson & Johnson focused on two problems: protecting consumers and rebuilding trust in the Tylenol brand. The company denied responsibility, but also publicly apologized, quickly recalling the products and compensating the families involved.4 The response is often cited as a textbook case on effective PR in a crisis.

REINFORCE

Valentine’s Day 2007 was anything but sweet for airline JetBlue. When an unexpected ice storm turned into a major operational failure, JetBlue acknowledged its shortcomings right away. Rather than blaming the weather, JetBlue’s CEO apologized to the customers impacted by the cancellations and delays, offered compensation, put new operational strategies in place and created a Customer Bill of Rights that received widespread, positive media attention.5



LexisNexis, LexisNexis Newsdesk and the Knowledge Burst logo are registered trademarks of Reed Elsevier Properties Inc., used under license. Other products or services may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. © 2016 LexisNexis. All rights reserved. NBI01449-0 1016

1 http://www.instituteforpr.org/crisis-management-and-communications/2 http://wave.wavemetrix.com/content/no-nonsense-crisis-management-well-received-taco-bell-fans-00700 3 http://mashable.com/2011/02/16/red-cross-tweet/#n40pN_oyPSqK 4 http://www.ou.edu/deptcomm/dodjcc/groups/02C2/Johnson%20&%20Johnson.htm 5 http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/jetblues-valentines-day-crisis 6 http://www.bernsteincrisismanagement.com/crisis-management-quotables-storms-tempest/ 7 http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-susan-g-komen-20140108-story.html8 http://www.businessinsider.com/pr-train-wrecks-2010-10?op=1/#-oil-spill-2010-12

For More Information LexisNexis.com/MediaStorm 800.628.3612 @LexisNexisBiz LexisNexis.com/BizBlog

As the saying goes, “Into each life, some rain must fall.” But in today’s always-on, multi-channel media landscape, a drop of negative news can develop into a torrent of bad publicity in the blink of an eye. A product failure, a service outage, an errant tweet—we’ve seen it happen to major consumer brands and small businesses, non-profits and academic institutions and film stars and politicians. Any hit to your reputation can quickly impact your bottom line—witness the 22 percent decline in donations to the Susan G. Komen Foundation following a controversial decision to

LexisNexis Newsdesk® brings together a comprehensive, global content collection with powerful media monitoring, analysis and sharing tools. Offering both licensed and open Web content—from print, online and broadcast news to blogs and social media channels—LexisNexis Newsdesk enables near real-time monitoring of your brand voice and helps you identify trends sooner. In addition, LexisNexis Newsdesk allows you to analyze mountains of media data in just a few clicks and generate data visualizations that can be shared organization-wide via alerts and newsletters.

After nearly 40 years providing solutions that help organizations harness the power of information, LexisNexis® remains dedicated to developing innovative tools to support data-driven decision-making. Our commitment extends beyond comprehensive content and outstanding search technology to world-class client service support, ensuring that our clients gain maximum insights—and value—from LexisNexis solutions.

Conclusion “Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempest.” 6

Epicurus

cut off Planned Parenthood funding7 or the 55.32 percent drop in BP’s stock value following the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill.8 With a robust pre- and post-crisis strategy and the right tools, PR professionals can help organizations confidently navigate through any media storm that comes their way.

THE IMPORTANCE OF NEGATIVE NEWS - · PDF fileTHE IMPORTANCE OF NEGATIVE NEWS ... Twitter, SnapChat and other social media networks may need to ... analysis and sharing tools

Documents