If you decide to confront the media head on, you’d better have perfect manners and a healthy dose of respect for their power to shred a reputation to pieces. Unfortunately for them, the Lee County Electric Cooperative had neither, and instead has put on a display of crisis management gone awry in their battle with Fox 4, a local news station.
When Fox 4 did a news bit on a Facebook page called “LCEC Sucks,” the company should have used it as an opportunity to bolster its reputation by hearing out these upset (ex?) customers. Instead, their part of the piece was just one of a pair of major blunders, described in this quote from a CrisisBlogger post:
If you wait until about 4 minutes into the interview you will see the smiling PR person for LCEC make the case that having to deal with this issue and annoying reporters is making customer’s rates go up. Oh boy. I wonder what more important thing the head of PR is supposed to be doing than trying to put out a major reputation fire?
Then it gets worse because the organization decides to take the matter up the chain, to the station manager and threaten to go the station owner. Of course, Fox 4 was thrilled with this and make public to everyone the not so veiled threats if they didn’t improve their coverage.
It is the media’s job to expose things to the public, and it benefits them to do so in a sensational way. In approaching things with Fox 4 the way they did, the LCEC has damaged their relationship with a potential ally, along with their customers, potential customers, and stockholders.
The BCM Blogging Team
https://www.bernsteincrisismanagement.com/