This content was reviewed in August 2024.
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. PR and crisis management experts at the Federation of Small Businesses share what 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 sales to your 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 media platforms
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 issue a holding 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.
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 advisable to face up to the situation, apologise, and explain what you’re doing to put things right.
If questioned by the media, it is always best to refrain from saying 'no comment'. Journalists might just make their own assumptions about those questions you are not prepared to answer. If you are the CEO/MD of the business, you should also be prepared to make yourself available to do press interviews and handle stakeholder questioning. You should always try to answer questions calmly and sensibly and get across the messages you want.
Crisis management is a test of leadership – it is vital the most senior person in the organisation is seen to be the voice of the business during a crisis, so as the CEO or MD, you should always be the frontline spokesperson fronting up media and stakeholder questioning. It would be ill-advised to delegate this role to a less senior employee or to an external PR representative.
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 on other social media platforms. You could write articles related to your business or industry, or you could put together press releases about positive news at your company to help deflect the focus from the negative articles.
Consider responding to negative comments on social media platforms or review sites by messaging customers. Customers might not expect this and will respect you and your business for doing so and trying to understand an issue better. Tread carefully when doing this and think about what you should say to avoid making things worse. Other things can help too, such as briefing 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 receptive to criticism and always seeking to improve.
Protecting 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.