Chapter Six of "Real-Time Marketing & PR" is about communicating with the media on their time rather than one's own--in other words, at their convenience. The author gives a personal example where he didn't call a journalist back as soon as he could have, and ended up missing an opportunity to have a quote featured in a significant article the journalist published. He uses this to reinforce his point that one can't interact with the media simply when it's convenient, but rather has to engage them whenever the opportunity arises in order to both promote products or services and handle crises better.
As an example of the latter, the author cites the case where Amazon removed copies of "1984" and other novels from their customers Kindle accounts (the copies were illegal due to copyright issues) without telling them why. While negative sentiment grew more and more over social media, and news outlets published stories, Amazon still failed to respond until a week after the event when an apology was finally offered (which many customers seemed to accept). Had Amazon simply apologized and explained the situation earlier, the crisis could have been averted.
I think the chapter makes a lot of good points. The media are not there for companies' convenience, so they'd be naive to think it a good strategy to only engage them when it's convenient. The media are quite powerful and influential, and one would be wise to take whatever opportunity is given to get better coverage.
No comments:
Post a Comment