Monday, January 27, 2014

National Compliment Day, how-not-to-do Crisis Management & Building your media profile


“You look great, honestly!”
The saying goes, “Men insult each other all the time but don’t mean it – women compliment each other all the time – but they don’t mean it either!”  Ouch!  Did you know this Friday is ‘National Compliment Day’ – in the US anyway!  So there’s a marketing idea for you – create a special Day – but remember to make sure it’s relevant to your brand .  In this case a US brand – Honesty Tea - is taking advantage of this day to pay compliments to strangers – on and offline as far as I can gather.  A nice idea which evolved from their sampling activity when they give a compliment with each sample of tea! However, note they surveyed 2,400 people to get solid facts and figures to back up this activity! http://www.prdaily.com/marketing/Articles/15980.aspx
Crisis Management – how not to do it
I think we all agree that Rehab have made a situation much worse by refusing to disclose the Group CEO’s salary.  They obviously thought that if they kept their heads down and refused to divulge her salary that the crisis would blow over once the media shifted its focus elsewhere.  But they’ve become the main story.  And the charity’s reputation gets even more battered.  So the Crisis Management lesson here is - however painful it is to hold your hands up and admit your mistakes, it really is the only option.  The cover-up is always the bigger crime – and other people are much more forgiving of mistakes than of arrogance, procrastination and/or an apparent indifference to public opinion.
Building a Media Profile
Two sites worth looking at as a way of increasing your media profile are HARO (Help A Reporter Out) www.helpareporter.com and Media Diplomat www.mediadiplomat.com  Reporters who are writing articles on a variety of topics and industry sectors post up requests for information/input.  Sign up for emails from both sites and check out Media Diplomat’s LinkedIn group.  These sites are particularly useful if you trade or want to trade overseas. Media Diplomat was founded and is run by Paul Dixon, a UK PR & Communications consultant while HARO is more US-based – but both feature queries from around the globe.



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