Negative PR

Any company can receive negative PR at some stage in its business lifetime, even if it does everything right. That doesn’t mean you should ignore it if it happens to your company and hope it will go away.

This blog explains that there are things you can do to counter the effects of negative PR to control bad publicity and show your business in a more positive light.

Understanding negative PR

Negative PR or publicity can take different forms in business, involving harmful published information, which can affect anything from a company’s sales to its reputation.

Different types of negative PR about your business could include:

• Bad press about your company in the news, online, in newspapers or on television
• Poor reviews about your products or services on adviser sites and online forums
• Complaints and negative comments about your business on social channels

Countering such bad PR and publicity about your business involves aiming to reduce and neutralise that negative information. And this starts with your initial response.

Choosing the right response

When you receive negative PR, how you respond is essential to countering it. Firstly, you should respond quickly to help stop any negative publicity from getting worse. Negative PR about your company can spread fast, such as through word of mouth or as more journalists cover a story and create more bad press.

However, if you respond quickly and put together and distribute a press release or statement, for instance, you can control how the story develops. To help with this, it’s important to have a PR crisis plan in place. You can learn more about this in our guide, Putting together a PR crisis plan together.

When you respond, it’s also important to keep calm and not overreact . A sudden, unprepared reaction might result in you saying or doing something that only gives the press more mileage to keep running with negative news stories about your business. It might also cause you to take your eye off other important daily business matters, which still need to be dealt with.

It’s also essential that you’re honest and decisive in your response. If your company is at fault for some negative PR, such as a defect with one of your products, it’s wise to face up to the situation, apologise, and explain what you’re doing to put things right.

If questioned by the media, it’s advisable to refrain from saying no comment. Journalists might just make their own assumptions about those questions you’re not prepared to answer. You should also be prepared to make yourself, or a member of your team who you’ve named as your company spokesperson, available to do press interviews. This way you can answer questions calmly and sensibly and get across the messages you want.

Creating positive company messages

Another way to counter negative PR is to aim to generate positive messages about your business. This can come down to aiming to produce as much positive content about your business as possible, which could help push down rankings of bad PR on Google and social. You could write articles related to your business or industry to go on blogger sites. Or you could put together press releases about positive news at your company to help deflect the  focus from the negative articles.

You can also consider responding to negative comments, like on social or review sites, by messaging customers. Customers might not expect this and will respect you and your business doing so and trying to understand an issue better. But it’s important to tread carefully when doing this and think about what you should say to avoid making things worse. Other things can help too, such as prepping your staff to give positive messages in your shop, over the phone or when mingling at networking events.

You should aim to use any negative PR as an opportunity to make things better in your business. Whether this involves fixing problems in production, addressing customer service issues, or improving your product or service offering, you can create and strengthen the message that, even at the worst of times, your business is good and decent.

Helping you create positive PR about your business

There’s a lot to think about when countering negative PR in business, from how you respond, to the messages you create about your company. But with the right expertise, advice and support you can ensure your business is seen in the best possible light.

With our expert services in PR crisis management, we can provide you with the advice and support you need to effectively handle negative PR, so you can focus on what you do best – running and developing your business. The membership service includes access to:

• Advice on how to deal with and mitigate negative publicity
• £10,000 of insurance to assist you during a major PR crisis
• Advice on your media communications, including how to put together a press release and distribute it to the media

If you’re interested in learning more about this service and how it can help your business today, please visit our FSB PR/Crisis Management web page. The service is included as standard with our Business Essentials membership. Please take a look at our package comparison page to find out about benefits this and our other membership packages.