How to turn a bad article around

For those in the public relations and investor relations business, there's always a fear when reporters and financial journalists take a story about a client and run with it.  This challenge is even greater in today's fast paced world of internet based journalism, where many people with broad backgrounds are publishing blogs, research notes and various other opinion pieces on investments with tangential relationships to facts.

For old media, you could always talk to the reporter, or even to the editor to get a correction, or refute the assertions in an article, or in cases of factual errors, force a correction.  In the wild west of internet news, these options are often unavailable, so it may take some creative thinking to resolve a problem.

Recently we were faced with a not-so-complimentary blog post about one of our clients that appeared on a major investment blog site.  Since the blogger used the clients stock ticker, the article appeared with all manner of other headlines on the stock quote pages of Yahoo! Finance and other sources, so at least we were quickly made aware of the article.  The blog post basically made some assertions and interpreted some facts in ways that made the company and its management team look unprofessional, but also like their interests weren't aligned with shareholders.

Rather than post a rebuttal or try to make the blogger look bad, we decided instead to engage the author, the first step being to send him an e-mail through the blog site explaining who we are and that we'd like a chance to discuss his article further.  He eventually responded and we began a constructive conversation via e-mail, and had a chance to respond to each of his assertions and provide the company's perspective on the issues he raised.  We offered some other facts that he had missed which altered the tone of his original piece, and we explained a number of factors that he didn't seem to understand in his original article.  He was so impressed that he asked if we would approve of him publishing his questions and our answers in the next installment of his blog.  How could we refuse?

Now, rather than a negative article and frustrated management, we told our story to investors and his readers and have started a new relationship with a member of the internet-based media.