24.06.2008 MAW|Blog - Obama fights PR fire with fire

US Presidential candidate Barack Obama has employed a crack team to monitor his online reputation and guard against blogs and websites referring to him as ‘unpatriotic’ or a ‘Muslim’. 

One American poll showed that 13 per cent of US voters believe he is a Muslim while Obama’s rating on the ‘patriotic’ issue is markedly lower than either Hillary Clinton’s was or Republican candidate John McCain.  A survey showed that 61 per cent of voters saw him as patriotic, compared with 76 percent for Mrs Clinton and 90 per cent for Mr McCain.

Obama is worried that if comment on these subjects takes hold online, the power of the web could lead to serious reputational harm and damage his prospects of becoming the first black US President.

While Obama’s actions were clearly newsworthy, he’s not the first big name to take direct action to guard against the threat of negative online publicity from blogs and less mainstream web sites.

A number of large UK corporates now employ similar teams who spend their days trawling chat rooms, blogs and social networking sites looking for disgruntled customers or potential negative influencers who could be chipping away at their brand and reputation.

Their brief is to engage these dissenters and try to resolve their issues.  Some of the more enlightened companies have empowered their online scouts with unlimited resources and instructions to turnaround dissenters at any price. 

As Dell found to its cost recently, letting bloggers rant on about their bad experiences online can have a crippling effect.

In 2005 blogger and media commentator Jeff Jarvis triggered an avalanche of criticism of Dell’s customer service after his $1,600 computer went wrong.  The company share price took a dive after the story was taken up by similarly dissatisfied punters across the net. 

Michael Dell, the founder, recently ousted his CEO and retook charge in an attempt to turn around its customer service.  Jarvis said “There were thousands of people who saw the story and said ‘me too’”

Websites Digg.com, Reddit, Newsvine and Stumbleupon add to the snowball affect by finding such stories and letting readers vote on them.  One website; usersubmitter.com pays people to submit stories and pays users to give them the thumbs up.

PR professionals need to address such issues.  PR is principally concerned with reputation, so in an age when potential customers can be one Google click away from a stream of negative opinion about your brand, PRs who concentrate on the printed press and exclude blogs are potentially negligent. 

Blogs are very capable of making it onto the first page of Google search results for your brand and if bad comment appears there, it might as well appear on the front page of a national newspaper in terms of the potential impact it could have. 

Once something appears in print or online it is, in effect a matter for the public record – it is ‘on the record’ and may be treated as ‘fact’ by other journalists and commentators researching the story. 

As with all ‘bad press’ fire-fighting PR’s need to make a judgement on whether is it better to tackle the ‘fact’ and try to correct it or leave it be, so as not to pour more petrol on a smouldering fire.  The message from the Obama camp and leading corporates is that increasingly, it just isn’t safe to leave on-line fires unattended.