PR Companies, Are You Doing Crisis Comms?
I've been in PR and journalism for around 6 years now. Alot has changed in that time, with so many big stories hittting the news and Twitter, from #sachsgate to #notw.
Note how I mentioned Twitter. One of the biggest changes has been social media. With communications between our clients and their customers happening in real-time, our jobs are no longer to just push messages out but to listen to the response, analysing and managing the conversations taking placing on social networks about client brands.
Suddenly, the job description requires UN peacekeeping experience. Take Edelman, a New York-based PR firm, as an example. Edelman are one of the biggest PR firms in the world; I'm a huge fan of their work. They were recently called in by Rupert Murdoch to manage the damage done by the News of the World (or #notw on Twitter) scandal. They're no longer there just to promote NewsCorp. They're firefighting on the front lines of Twitter and Facebook, trying to reverse the brand damage done.
It's a tough job. Even though we develop crisis communications and reputation management plans for every client, we can't predict the nature of social media sandstorms. So every incident has to be viewed on a case-by-case basis. Well-thought plans can only act as frameworks because we're dealing with angry humans with microphones e.g. the unpredictable.
But it also presents a huge opportunity to PR firms. Having seen the damage done by stories such as #sachsgate (when two BBC presenters left lewd voicemail comments on a British actor's voicemail) and #notw, companies are now willing to pay for brand protection. And not just multinational brands like Starbucks but even consumer-facing business from local cafes' and restaurants to accountancy firms.
I was really lucky to enjoy a stint as Product Manager with a company that built a reputation management tool. I was employee #1 at RepKnight and I got to help shape the first iterations of the product. RepKnight monitors the web (blogs, websites, newsites) and social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Tumblr) 24/7 for conversations about clients brands. It's one of the few products with access to the Twitter Firehose, Twitter's exclusive stream of every Tweet ever published in real-time. What I really love about it is that, compared to competitors, we made it so simple to use that the PR execs I knew didn't need to call in their IT guy to show them how to use it. It was built for people, like me, more comfortable with pen and paper than clunky technology. I need to give a big shout-out to RepKnight's Lead Designer, @davehedo, for this.
I'm curious to find out if other PR companies are taking advantage of the opportunities afforded by tools like @RepKnight. Have you had an epic Twitter sandstorm to deal with yet? How did you deal with it? How did you measure the success of your efforts?
And if you want to find out more about RepKnight (disclosure: they're a TechFluff & Co client but only because I love the product and team that much I took them with me when I left), contact their lovely Business Development Manager Roisin Chambers (@roisinchambers) on email: roisin@repknight.com.