There are many names for Reactive Earned Media Strategies, including News Bureau, Expert Commentary, Thought Leadership, etc. These tactics provide infinite opportunities to achieve Brand business objectives through Earned Media by leveraging established brand equity and expertise.
What does a successful Proactive Opportunistic Communications Strategy look like?
Let’s look at the “news cycle” around Boeing and the grounding of the 737s as our example. This unforeseen incident (Reactive) continues to deal a negative economic impact to airline carriers and the Travel Industry at large; and will for the foreseeable future.
Southwest Airlines received a preliminary settlement to begin offsetting losses caused by this Boeing “Issue.” Proactively capitalizing on this “Crisis,” Southwest announced they would allocate $125 million to help offset their employees losses in work hours and wages.
Reactive Situation + Proactive Brand Action/Solution = Positive Earned Media Globally
Proactively capitalizing on a “Reactive” situation that impacts the Travel Industry at large, created the Earned Media opportunity by which Southwest Airlines successfully delivered key messages including:
Southwest invests in their employees
Southwest has set the bar for how other airline carriers will be judged in this incident
Southwest is not to blame for all the flights they had to cancel
These situations come in all shapes and sizes and provide infinite opportunities to effectively achieve Brand objectives; if acted upon quickly and authentically.
In today’s digital Media world, Brands needs to be perpetually monitoring for the next opportunity. It may be a celebrity and/or influencer that mentions your Brand or a topic of interest in a post, interview, etc., that can be built on. Or, like Southwest, the next opportunity could come from an unexpected “crisis.
With Boeing, we examined a big news story and worked our way down. Let’s look at the opposite equation by exploring how this could play out with a regional opportunity. There are dozens of human-interest stories that run daily in media outlets. Some of these present an opportunity for the Brand to be the “solution” to an established “problem.” The focus of the story leverages the established problem and delivers the Brand provided “solution.” These evolving stories often get additional pickup nationally.
How does a Reactive Strategy based on Variables provide ROI for the Brand?
To answer this, let’s look at it from the Reporter’s perspective. First, the Brand is engaging on a topic in the news cycle that is of interest to the reporter’s audience; not a Brand-led pitch. Second, whether successful in generating a placement, the Brand builds an authentic foundation that will aid future outreach. In this way, a Brand’s proactive and reactive pitches will always be laddering up to the Brand’s business objectives.
Want to develop a Proactive Opportunistic Earned Media Playbook? Contact Riverbed MP for an exploratory conversation.
Next time, we will wrap up this three-part series when we “Analyze Competitive Brands.”
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