Q2. How should PR professionals/ PR agencies gear up to face these challenges?
Read up, familiarise yourself with the social media, and learn to participate. There are a few good sources of data on social media. Some of these are Social Media Club, Brian Solis (he is one of the founders of social media club, The Leading Edge), and the Bulldog Reporter blog I write.
Q3. Suppose today, a prominent blog has written something negative about your client, what is the best way to go about addressing this?
First and foremost – be sure you have online reputation monitoring in place so that you catch any comments like this right away. Getting to it early is vital.
Contact the blogger offline if possible and see if you can give them your side of the story. Be aware that whatever you say or email them will be ‘on the record’ and will probably be used in the blog. So think it through carefully before you respond.
If it is a genuine situation – the comment is verified and correct – you have to address how you will handle the issue. If it is not true you have to get your side of the story out as fast as possible in as many credible online news sources as you can. Be open and willing to talk to the blogger/s.
Q4. Some tips on developing a online crisis communications plan?
Have a fully functional online news room. Use RSS feeds. As with any crisis plan think it all through and plan for the worst possible scenario. Have you friends/allies/safe points in place before you need them. Identify the influencers in your space. Make contact and get to know then long before you need them in a crisis. Find the evangelists who love your products. Support them and help them to get their message out. Provide online tools for them to create positive content about you.
Q5. How do you measure the effectiveness of an online PR campaign?
As with any campaign you measure against your objectives:
- Search visibility
- Thought leadership
- Traffic to the site/newsroom
- Referred traffic from your RSS feeds
- Articles picked up on other sites
- Is your news being featured in online News engines like Yahoo News
- Is it showing up in Google in their Universal search results
- Online news coverage in other sites
- Social media coverage – digg, del.icio.us, etc.
- Blog coverage – positive
- Reaches from journalists – print and online
Download to read a case study on a successful online PR campaign.
Sally Falkow will facilitate a Workshop on ‘Strategic Online PR’, which will be held in Singapore from 20 – 21 September, 2007, and organised by Universal Network Intelligence. Those interested to have more information can email with subject code ‘SOPR-I’.