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Lesson 2 Identifying the Problem or Goal
Preparing for the Negative and Positive
If your legal team wins a lawsuit that was brought against the company in civil court but your company’s sales plummet because the public is outraged over its perceptions of the company’s actions, then you lose the case in the court of public opinion. That can be just as damaging as a multimillion-dollar civil court loss.
Hopefully, most of the situations you prepare for in advance, at least those that are negative, do not ever happen. That doesn’t mean you are wasting time preparing for the unlikely. Those unlikely scenarios have tripped up more than one organization.
And not all communications challenges are negative. If you work in public relations at a university with world-class faculty, you know there will be opportunities to take advantage of good news and promote it better and further than it might travel on its own.
If you have a researcher in astronomy who is on the short list for a Nobel Prize, you have a couple choices:
- Sit back and wait to see if he is announced as the winner this year. Wait for the news media to call him, and see what kinds of coverage they give to the researcher and your school.
- In the days leading up to the new Nobel Prize winner announcements, get some good photos and video of your potential winner to have on hand if needed. Develop some stories and biographical information about him. Line up administrators of the university who will be ready and willing to do news media interviews if he is named the winner. Review the potential winner’s social media sites to make sure the right kinds of things appear and nothing negative exists that might spring out of control in the sudden glare of the news media. If there are some concerns, talk with the faculty member so he has time, if he is inclined, to make changes.
If you are on the communications team promoting a candidate for office and know he or she is a military veteran, you can take advantage of news media looking for angles to cover on Veteran’s Day. This may be especially true if your opponent in the race is not a veteran. Or if your candidate has a strong platform position on helping people find jobs in a bad economy, you might target a related announcement on the day new employment figures are released by the federal government. And it is an Election Day staple for television news cameras to cover a candidate and the candidate’s spouse and children going to the polls early in the day to cast their ballots. Free, last minute publicity on television news stations for the rest of Election Day is an opportunity no candidate should pass up.
Good advance planning can help you identify positive news opportunities like those mentioned above and then make the most of them.