When Bad News Happens to Good Firms
Don’t go spinning out of control.
By Bruce Marcus
Professional Services Marketing 3.0
EDITOR’S NOTE: CPA Trendlines was privileged to have a long relationship with Bruce W. Marcus, who was ahead of his time in his thinking and practice in marketing for accounting. We are publishing some of the late expert’s evergreen work, which retains wisdom for the present.
Every election campaign produces, among other things, media myths and bad language. During the elections of the last two decades, the language was infected by a new myth called spin control. The phrase, which broke a speed record in becoming a cliché after the 1988 election, implies that a good media relations practitioner can control the nature and texture of a story in the press – can put the right spin on it to get the journalist to tell it the spinner’s way.
MORE: Why Accountants Should Be Nice to Journalists | When There’s a Leak in Your Firm | Eighteen Things Advertising Can Do for Your Firm | How and Why Client Service Teams Work | Manage Knowledge as a Marketing Tool | Secret Marketing Formula: Get One Client at a Time | Marketing a Fixed Position in a Moving World | How to Build a Marketing Culture | Have You Planned How to Service Your New Revenue? | Why Is Change So Hard for Firms? | Why Value Pricing Works
Exclusively for PRO Members. Log in here or upgrade to PRO today.
It’s just not so. For all that the myth implies, when it comes to the media, we propose – but others dispose. Thus it was, and thus it always shall be, so long as we have a free press.
But is the telling always accurate? No. Is it always fair? No. Sometimes, despite all of the public relations professionalism, and despite all the cooperation we may offer the media, the story comes out badly. Disaster, dispensed in the aura of a supposedly objective media, doesn’t merely strike, it reverberates.
READ MORE →
