• Legal Issues
• Legal issues–especially investor-related legal issues–generally have specific requirements for what you can talk about, when you should discuss it, and how you need to distribute the news. If your lawyer advises you send a press release, don’t quibble.
• Corrections
• If you made a mistake in a previous public statement, it’s probably best to issue the correction in the same manner. No one likes eating ‘umble pie, but own up to the mistake and try to move on, and you’ll be better off than if you let the impression that you’re dishonest fester in your audience’s minds.
• Urgent news
• If your disaster is a real-life honest to goodness breaking news disaster of the “we need to recall our product before it kills someone” sort, alternative measures of PR may not be the solution you need. The wire services work hard to get your news out to journalists as quickly and accurately as they can, so you might as well make use of that skill set and stick by the traditional method.

Those are the three big areas of disaster where you definitely want to make sure that you’ve put a lot of thought into your decision before ruling out a press release as your method of communication. So when is it more appropriate to look at alternative measures?

• Community Management
• There are times when you’ve done nothing illegal and you don’t have immediately pressing lifesaving news. Maybe you’ve made a mistake less in the “we issued a factually incorrect statement” way and more in the “we screwed up” fashion. Press releases are a very impersonal tool to try and repair a relationship with your community. Look at a more direct means of communicating, then. One example I may talk about in a later post is using an open letter to repair community relations.
• Customer Service
• This is related to “Community Management”, but with a key difference. One of the nightmares that social media has brought to the average executive in a company is that social media means that if one of your customer-facing employees is having a bad day, you can quickly find yourself having a social media-driven PR nightmare. An example of this is the recent Ocean Marketing meltdown that more or less illustrated the perfect storm of “employee having a bad day” and “social media PR disaster” I’m talking about here. This wasn’t an example of a mistake made at the corporate decision-making level, and issuing a press release (which N-Control, the company represented by Ocean Marketing, did end up doing) isn’t going to fix the problem. When you’re trying to correct a customer-centered issue, take a customer-centered approach and talk to them in the same arena that they’re already in.
•  When Another Company is Involved
• Disaster management PR is tricky enough when one company is involved; when you have two or more, it gets even trickier. In that respect, whether you’re dealing with a public disappointment over an announced contract that fell through or you’re trying to put some spin on the fact that one of your big clients just elected to not renew a long-running contract with you, using channels other than press releases can help you maintain some control of the story without escalating the issue into a press release war. Those may be kind of fun to watch from the outside, but they look anything but professional.

At a macro level, it comes to this: public-facing disaster PR is frequently handled best via methods other than press releases. When you have other outside issues influencing your method of discussion, though, you would be ill-advised to ignore them.

It sounds an awful lot like social media PR to me.

It’s something I have to get off my chest. I run a social media marketing firm, sure. But many of the skills that I use, either in advising clients or in using the various channels, reads like what you should do when you’re being a responsible public relations representative who’s reaching out to a journalist to pitch a story.  Everyone’s a potential source of a sudden massive Twitter revolt, so you need to treat everyone you encounter online as if they had the potential to direct the attention of a hundred thousand potential clients at your brand. With that thought in mind, here’s a quick primer on how to convert those traditional PR skills into social media marketing ones.

• Participate in the dialog: Don’t try to hijack it.  In the social media world, you can’t try the old “interruption marketing” techniques.
  • Think of it like: Don’t be the guy who tries to pitch how your company has a useful slant on every story that’s trending.  When you’re using social media monitoring tools, only enter in conversations that your brand can be expected to engage in.
• Be useful: Posting the same link a dozen times a day? Not useful. Posting a dozen links a day to insightful articles & commentary? Useful. Just make sure that you know what your following considers “useful.”
  • Think of it like: Don’t pitch off-topic. Journalists hate it and the general public hates it, too.
• Be respectful: Everything you say on social media channels can be read, quite possibly, for the rest of your brand’s life. Make sure that you’re not saying things that you might regret in a week, a month, a decade, or even later.
  • Think of it like: Being respectful.
• Nurture relationships: There are thousands of people out there who are crucial nexuses in the ebb and flow of your industry’s conversation. Find them. Friend / follow / verb them. Nurture the relationship, because you never know when you’ll need it.
  • Think of it like: How you develop relationships with a good reporter. Citizen journalism is where a lot of the conversation’s moving to, so be prepared.
• Establish authority: Your brand needs a single voice that everyone knows that they can go to when there’s an urgent question. Social media is a slippery beast, and you can easily have eight different employees all messaging on your brand from different sources. Make sure that it’s obvious which outlet is the official one, and let your employees know when they should feel free to answer questions about the brand and when they should refer the questions to you.
  • Think of it like: Every company that’s large enough needs a communications policy. This is just an extension of that. Think long and hard about limiting all communications on social media channels; they’re rapidly becoming as essential to whole swathes of the population as email is, and surely you don’t think that employees shouldn’t have email?

Compared to someone with a background in broadcast media advertising or in outdoor sales, a PR pro has a huge leg up when a client or member of your business is looking for someone to ride herd on social media. Make use of your people skills, communications expertise, and dive right in!

Related articles by Zemanta

• G5 Social Media Best Practices (slideshare.net)
• How to measure your social media marketing campaign ROI (mediapress.co.za)
• Social media advertising comes of age, gets regulated (thenextweb.com)
• The 9 Immutable Laws of Social Media Marketing (slideshare.net)
• Time and ROI are the greatest social media marketing concerns (smartblogs.com)
• Racepoint Labs Sets New Standard for Integrating Social Media into PR Programs (eon.businesswire.com)
• StrongMail Takes a Measurable Approach to Social Media Marketing with Industry’s Most Comprehensive Solution (eon.businesswire.com)