How owned media can help protect your brand when a crisis hits

In the video below I explain how building a strong owned media foundation can help your brand during a crisis. 

TRANSCRIPT:

Having a strong owned media presence and having built an audience over a period of time can really play into your hands if your brand takes a reputation hit and something happens and you’re in crisis and issues management mode.

I’ll give you a really terrific example. This is crisis management done really well today, and it’s a company called Buffer.

Buffer is a social media scheduling tool. I’ve used it for years and years. They’re just such a terrific company in terms of the content they do, and social media and everything they do well. So check them out on that score.

But this is a number of years back. They got hacked. And if you’re a social media scheduling tool, what’s the very worst thing that can ever happen to you?

You get hacked and then all of a sudden, your clients, from their social media channels, are sending out some stupid spammy diet pill ad. It could not be a worse situation to be in.

So what they did, because they’ve got a blog, because they’ve got an audience across social channels, the CEO jumps straight onto it and started blogging. And they were blogging again and again and again.

You can go in and check it out. Everything’s still up there. So they live blogged and they kept updating as they were trying to work out what was going on. And they let people know.

And they were talking to people on social, and everything about it was good.

But had they not have the blog in place, had they not built their audience before they actually needed it, they would’ve been in a world of hurt.

So my advice is always be: owned media. Build a strong base of owned media. You are the media channel in this regards. Don’t put out a press release necessarily, it’s going to take too long.

Today, if you’re going to take a reputation hit … if crisis hits … you need to be on your own channels, you need to be blogging about it and you need to have good social channels with an audience already on it.

Build your audience before you need it!