The Role of Negative Public Relations
Negative Campaigning is important and vital for business and politics .
Those who conduct negative political campaigns sometimes say the public needs to know about the person he or she is voting for, even if it is bad. In other words, if a candidate’s opponent is a crook or a bad person, then he or she should be able to tell the public about it.
Campaign organizers who invest their fortunes in negative approaches do so with considerable research to support the merit of their spending. In a 1996 study, researchers concluded that "the informational benefits of negative political ads possess the capacity to promote political participation, particularly among those otherwise least well equipped for political learning." Their testing found citizens who were aware of negative advertising were more likely to vote than those who didn't express recollection of such ads.
Negative ads are more memorable than positive ads when they reinforce a preexisting belief and are relevant to the central issues of a marketing campaign .
Disadvantages of publicity
Two major problems arise from the use of publicity: timing and accuracy.
Timing: Timing of the publicity is not always completely under the control of the marketer. Unless the press thinks the information has very high news value, the timing of the press release is entirely up to the media—if it gets released at all. Thus, the information may be released earlier than desired or too late to make an impact.
Accuracy: A major way to get publicity is the press release. Unfortunately, the information sometimes gets lost in translation—that is, it is not always reported the way the provider wishes it to be. As a result, inaccurate information, omissions, or other errors may result. Sometimes when you see a publicity piece that was written on the basis of a press release, you wonder if the two are even on the same topic.
Thus in publicity, there is a loss of control of content, which is there is no way of ensuring that the viewpoint of the company is reflected in the published article.
Lack of control over how your releases will be used, and frustration over the low percentage of releases that are taken up by the media.
The impact of negative ads increases over time, while positive ads used to counteract negative ads lack the power of negative ads . Research also suggests negative campaigning introduces controversy and raises public awareness through additional news coverage .
PR managers can use either reactive PR strategies to counteract online fake news regarding an organization, or communication stratagems to temporarily transform the organization served into a potential source of fake news.
The existing typology of reactive public relations strategies from the literature allow us to discuss the challenge of using them in counteracting online fake news.
Each reactive PR strategy can be a potential solution to respond to different types of online fake news.
Although these possibilities seem to be extensive, in some cases, PR managers can find them ineffective. In our view, this cluster of reactive PR strategies is not a panacea for managing fake news in the online environment and different strategic
approaches may be need, such as communication stratagems.
In this context, communication stratagems consist in using organization as a source or as a vector for strategic creation
and dissemination of online fake news, for the benefit of the organization. We conclude that within online environment PR
managers can employ a variety of reactive PR strategies to counteract fake news, or different communication stratagems
to achieve organizational goals.
