| If your company is going through a PR crisis, your first instinct is probably to worry about being caught in the middle of a media shit-storm. The prospect of negative coverage spiralling out of control is a scenario that can worry even the most seasoned PR pro. In fact, the effect of negative news on your company’s reputation is about three times larger than the effect of positive news. |
However, the solution to preventing damage to your reputation during an unforeseen PR crisis is actually very simple. It all comes down to within the way you handle your media inquiries and interact with journalists.
In this article, we’ll provide 3 practical tips on how to handle media inquiries and protect your reputation during a PR crisis. Let’s get started.
We could hardly provide tips about fielding your media inquiries without getting into the importance of building good relationships with journalists. Whether your company’s in business-as-usual or crisis-mode, the way you interact with journalists is a key part of managing how you’re portrayed in the media.
The core of the journalist’s job description is providing factual information on an event or happening. While it may not be their duty to help out PR professionals, that’s not to say that you cannot cultivate a mutually-beneficial, trusting relationship. In fact, 64% of journalists emphasised the importance of establishing a personal connection with PR professionals before pitching a story. The same goes for providing information during a crisis.
You should do the bulk of the heavy lifting in preparation for a potential crisis. That way, if you respond to a media inquiry of a journalist that you’ve built a good relationship with, they can trust that your version of the story is factual and accurate, potentially keeping your company out of the news.
However, it’s never too late to start forming new connections with journalists. If your company has just gone through a PR crisis, don’t forget to do your part and reach out to everyone who sent you an inquiry. Did they ask you for a statement or to provide additional clarification? Follow up with every journalist to keep the door open for future collaborations.
Building good relationships with journalists can seem like an abstract task. The good news is that if your company has a great process in place for responding to requests from the media, creating connections with journalists is often an added bonus. Here are 3 tips that will teach you how to handle media inquiries as part of your crisis communication strategy.
During a crisis, when your inbox is flooded with more requests than you can count, you won’t have time to ‘umm and ahh’ over word choice and phrasing. The modus operandi needs to be getting a simple response out with speed and accuracy.
If you’re not able to respond to journalists in time, media outlets may publish a non-factual version of events, resulting in negative publicity and a bruised reputation for your company. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to prevent this from happening and ensure that you can respond to all inquiries quickly and accurately – by writing an A+ holding statement.
Before a crisis is even in the picture, it’s important to prepare holding statements for different scenarios. What could your company go through? A cyberattack? IT outage? Or maybe a product recall? Come up with a statement for each scenario, including a well-crafted response in your company’s tone of voice to reassure your audience that you’re managing the situation effectively.
Then, during an actual emergency, all you’ll have to do is update the facts and send it on to journalists and media outlets.
We’ve all heard the phrase ‘preparation is the key to success’. As with most things in PR strategy, laying the groundwork in advance is a non-negotiable for crisis communication and acing your media inquiries.
Rather than hoping that someone in your team will show nerves of steel and step up in the heat of the moment, delegating tasks in advance will result in a much smoother crisis response effort. That way, less time is wasted and everyone will know exactly what they’re responsible for.
While putting together your ideal response team, it’s important to ask yourself several questions: Will you be working with a single spokesperson or several? Who will field phone calls? Who will respond to media inquiries? By getting those questions sorted in advance, you can provide media training to relevant stakeholders to keep your team on the same page and avoid conflicting conversations.
Consider this: Who are your experts in different crisis scenarios? You may even need to prepare different response teams for different types of crisis!
A single unanswered inquiry during a sticky situation can result in unfavourable coverage for your organisation. And if you’re not careful, that story can quickly gain momentum and spiral out of control, damaging your reputation in the process.
Perhaps you assumed that an out-of-office colleague would take the lead on a specific inquiry? Or you thought that you had already replied to a particular request? Whatever the case, it’s much easier to overlook a couple of critical requests when you’re fielding media inquiries manually.
By implementing collaborative PR software like Presspage Connect, all of your inquiries will be stored in one centralised portal, giving you a bird’s eye view of the requests coming in and the answers going out. You can easily track the status of every inquiry, keep your tone of voice aligned and assign the task of responding to a colleague, ensuring that all journalists that reach out receive the information that they are looking for.
That way you’ll always be the one in control, rather than giving individual media outlets the chance to decide your story.
When a PR crisis strikes, protecting your reputation will quickly become the most important task on the to-do. In the midst of this scramble, many companies forget about one important piece of the puzzle – how to handle media inquiries as part of their crisis communication strategy.
A great process is not only vital to building good relationships with journalists, but also to mitigating negative coverage and getting the facts to your audience.
With collaborative PR software that is specifically designed to help you respond to media inquiries quickly, accurately and consistently, you can safeguard your reputation, avoid critical mistakes and lead the conversation.