PR Strategies for Dealing With Not So Great Reviews

Headline: “Fashion Mash Launches Clunky Outfit-Sharing Site”

What do you do when a review or an article about your company or product is not as awesome as you hoped it would be?

Here’s what I did:

1. I took a deep breath. PR is not something you can control, but how you react is under your control.

2. I read the review again & made a list to separate out the constructive criticisms from any misunderstandings.

3. Looking at the feedback, I thought, “How can I learn from this?” This person went to the effort to look at my site and took the time to write about it. I immediately thanked them for their time and I added the valid critiques to our Fashion Mash to do list.

4. Is there anything I can do about the misinformation or misunderstandings? Not directly. They allowed comments on the review, so I put in my two cents. And I started asking myself, “Is there a way to prevent this next time?”

5. That turned into a re-examination of my pitch/cold-call/interaction to see what can be improved to better explain my website, Fashionmash.com. Unfortunately, this is just part of learning the pitch process and only practice with good mentors is going to help with this.

6. I looked at the positives. Yes, negative PR does have positives. I learned more about pitching and about things we need to change at Fashion Mash. I still got a LOT of traffic to my site. And I can apply my new lessons to the other review and PR fish in the sea.

7. Now its time to figure out how to let go. After thinking about all that, I was still worked up. Excited about traffic and sad about the review. So I called a friend and wrote about it in my blog.

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Tags: pr, strategy, review, public relations, tips