Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

A lot of discussion and PR thought leadership have been focused on managing crises in this age immediate communications and networked audiences.

However, a fascinating situation that’s unfolding right now between the New York Timesand Tesla Motors highlights the important opportunity brands have to tell their side of the story immediately and convincingly when they have a dispute with the news coverage, and it sure beats the daylights out of having a correction or clarification printed three days after the fact.    Simply put, brands don’t have to take what they consider to be unfair or biased coverage lying down....

If you haven’t heard of Health Management Associates (HMA), that’s ok, few would probably know who they are. That is unless you watched the 60 Minutes segment this past Sunday on how they are allegedly encouraging administrators and physicians at hospitals they own to admit as many patients as possible, in order to boost profits. The public company, headquartered in Naples, FL and whose shares are traded on the NYSE, “through its subsidiaries owns and operates (15) general acute care hospitals and other health care facilities in non-urban communities”, as reported on their Wall Street Journal company profile.

If you did see the segment and immediately wondered about a company response to the allegations, then one of your first instincts may have been to see what it was, and maybe (like me) you hopped on Facebook to see what they were posting, damage control, community engagement, etc. Here is a $5.1 billion company I thought, with a gigantic network and hundreds of thousands of patients moving in and out of their facilities every year. Surely they are on social media by now, taking advantages of its potential to reach out, interact, inform, and entertain their community. Instead, I found nothing. No social media presence at all. Zip.

If you click around their Web site it looks clean, informative, professional, and…missing something. The absence of social media channels for a company who clearly now has a crisis on their hands makes you wonder why they decided to forgo participation when the channel could have served them well in the wake of the 60 Minutes report....

This was the week of not quite apologizing enough.

Lance Armstrong appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Network to explain 20 years of cheating, lying and cruel personal destruction of his truthful critics. He repeatedly said he was sorry for his conduct, but left the distinct impression that he was sorry mainly for getting caught. And his claim that he did not force his teammates into doping, among other continued denials, sounds like a crock.

Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o named the supposed hoaxer who created the fake Lennay Kekua persona who e-romanced the football star before tragically dying, and even before actually living. Te'o's story can be proved or disapproved in about 5 minutes with a peek at his cell phone records, yet university officials have not been curious enough to look at them. Nor did they refute two years of false stories about the star-crossed lovers until at least a week after learning of the hoax.

Yet the most shocking non-apology apology was buried in the avalanche of coverage about the disgraced athletes. The true disgrace belongs to Atlantic President M. Scott Havens, whose memo to colleagues about the magazine's ill-conceived online advertorial from the Church of Scientology fails just about every test of honesty, judgment and simple common sense.

Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/191476/the-truthiness-is-out-there.html#ixzz2IdlSIVT4