3 PR lessons from Amazon’s battle with The New York Times
The e-commerce giant fired back at a Times article more than two months after it was published. Keep these lessons in mind when faced with negative publicity.
Better late than never—or, maybe, better never than late.
This week Jay Carney, senior vice president of corporate affairs for Amazon, posted a counterpunch to a scathing story about the online retailer that ran Aug. 16 in The New York Times. That piece, posted on Medium, resulted in a response from the Times on that same site.
The sniping match has caught public relations pros’ attention.
Here are three PR lessons to be learned from these recent events:
1. Social media can provide a platform to defend your organization.
A key frustration for many PR pros before the advent of social media was the difficulty in combatting inaccuracies and negativity in news stories. A call to an editor may have resulted in a correction printed in the bottom left corner of an inside news page, or a fleeting mention on an evening broadcast, but it how could that undo what previously had been written or said?
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