The decision to work with a public relations agency is one that must come from the top. As public relations is primarily a management activity, a company’s senior management, more importantly its decision makers, must be closely involved with agency selection.

As a client, you’re looking for the perfect marriage. But unlike meeting that special someone, it should not be left to fate. There should be romance, however. The right agency should be a near perfect match of personalities, capabilities and expectations. The right agency is that person you’re sure you’ve known your whole life. It’s not a chemical reaction; it’s because the right agency will know your needs and your industry like they’ve been working with you from day one. That’s what qualified consultants bring to the table.

Think long term. Many companies will attempt to leverage public relations in the near term. While a press conference can be a good way to introduce a new brand or product to a group of media, and will often be covered, an interesting product will not magically snowball into hot topic. It takes months, better years, to build rapport with the media that follow your industry. While you make think your product is the story of the year, so does everyone else. There are more stories out there than anyone has time for. Read the rest of this entry »

As serious as crisis and issues management was before the internet, handling potentially reputation-damaging situations has not been simplified by the rise of the internet, like many other things have been, but has been made even more critical. This is because the internet has greatly increased the speed and distance information can travel. And because of the democratic nature of the internet, it has also dramatically lowered the barriers to publishing.

A new discipline that has emerged to combat this threat is called SERM or search engine reputation management. SERM has formed out of necessity and is a combination of reputation management strategy as normally developed by public relations professionals and search engine optimization. It requires in an organization an ability to develop strategy and a relatively high level of technical knowledge to execute that strategy effectively.

The main battle ground for SERM is of course search engines. Search engines have not only filled an important role in how people use the internet, they have become the single most used way people access the internet. When someone searches for your company or brand or product, you hope that it will be high up in the search engine results in relation to your competitors. If someone searches specifically for you, you also hope that all of the results are positive. Read the rest of this entry »

Crisis communication, often considered the highest test of any communications team, is in essence reputation management. And in that sense, it is no different from how an individual is watched and judged by her peers in terms of integrity and honesty.

At the center of the issue is the fact that bad things can happen to any organization. Employees can commit crimes, food products can become poisonous, airplanes can fall out of the sky; life is inherently chaotic and prone to disaster. Human life is fragile. And even the most careful organizations can cause loss of property or life for the people around them.

Culpability is often a secondary issue and can often count little in public opinion. A tightly-knit social circle will often revel in news of infidelity or betrayal, regardless of the truth of the situation. It is the possibility itself that often finds the most traction in people’s daily conversations. Read the rest of this entry »