Pete Blackshaw: Defending Against Negative Blogs

Nielsen executive, book author and Ad Age columnist Pete Blackshaw is astounded by the number of brand managers who still have no coherent strategy for dealing with negative blog posts. For brands that may look to defend themselves when bloggers get their hands on something potentially damaging, the most important question that Blackshaw believes you should be asking yourself is "what are we doing to empower the influencers to get your side of the story out"?

In fact, this is a recycling of the old adage that I still hold dear to my heart, "content is king". Thus, if you don't have content on your site that addresses some of the negative claims about your brand circulating the web, don't expect bloggers to be creating it for you. Do your homework, find out what it is about your brand they're negatively buzzing about, and determine the validity of the buzz. The tricky part is dealing with situations where the negative buzz is valid and you don't have a plan in place to correct the issue; at that point it's a more serious product/marketing issue that needs to be brought to senior leadership for review.