Many a times, even much bigger and well established individuals and companies experience negative publicity, which is either termed as malicious or otherwise based on true happenings. When individuals of high reputation in the society believe that their respective publicity is infringed by competitors, it turns out that the competing factor is well familiar with both the strengths and weaknesses of the victim and will thus embark on executing strategies to defame the victim as a whole. In bigger companies, competition and poor disaster management are the most facets which lead to negative imaging of the victim company altogether.
For instance, when the BP Oil Spill occurred, it was clear that the firm, despite of how established it was, failed to put stringent and effective disaster management policies altogether. The spill attracted so much publicity, especially that its top officials particularly the Chief Executive Officer, Tony Hayward, was heard making retrospective comments about the Spill altogether. The company experienced negative publicity in the sense that most media channels and stations aired the matter to the world altogether. It is believed that the phenomenal spill affected the routine operations of the firm, so that losses formed bulk of the day. The spill was also compared and contrasted with the controversial Exxon’s case thus the publicity (Coombs, 2007).
In my opinion, the firm could have prevented the negative publicity by formulating a crisis management strategy, which was to be updated at least annually (Coombs, 2007a). With this strategy, the firm could have prevented the situation from getting to the worse side of it all. Secondly, the aspect of social media marketing will have been another facet which when deployed would diminish the negative reputation it already has. Deploying the facet of social media marketing meant the firm assigns a public relation officer to deal with the matter on Facebook page and Twitter accounts altogether. This ensures that the organization speaks in one voice (Carney & Jordan, 1993). The third facet is the deployment of Search Engine Optimization tools (SEO). In this strategy, the company contracts a firm which replaces the negative content on the Google first page to the last pages so that when the public searches for the information through the Internet network, they are only made to find the positive contributions of the company.
