For decades, businesses have been able to excerpt a fair amount of “control” over a message, and in some markets they still can and do. Yet this is changing. With the prevelance of Social Media and the Web as a whole, people can share audio, text and video very quickly. This has broad implications to a PR team or agency managing negative coverage over a story. So how do you deal with that inevitability? Not bother with a Social Media strategy?

I often ask a client “do you stop going to networking events and parties because someone may have an opposing view on an issue?” The answer is no. As people, we have skills we’ve developed professionally to handle situations that become contentious in social settings. A company is an entity as well, through it’s brand. It just has more moving parts and many brains. Negative commentary is inevitable with Social Media today.

Having to deal with negative coverage in Social Media is an issue we’ve seen a lot lately. It seems to be the largest roadblock to developing a Social Media strategy in many cases. In large part, we have found this is due to the fact that a company focuses on “marketing” as it’s primary conversation with the public, and most marketing is a very one-way effort; “telling” versus “conversing”, which is two-way. This isn’t the fault of business. It’s because the mediums most of us are familiar with are one-way; TV, radio, print. Social Media and the ability of anyone to begin a conversation is a new frontier for many businesses.

The fact is, a company doesn’t sell products and make profit from negative issues. Bad publicity leads to senior management firings, board changes, stock price drops, shareholder anger and lost sales and profits. In an increasingly transparent world, Social Media can have broad implications.

But the fact is, negative commentary will happen. Whether a company has a Social Media strategy or not. It’s just inevitable. It’s more than likely that most negative commentary will be minimal, localized and can be simply monitored. But it can also rapidly become an issue that spills over into Traditional Media (i.e. Rogers and the iPhone in Canada and AT&T in the U.S.) and Rogers had no Social Media strategy to deal with an online petition that hit Traditional Media and forced the company to lower its pricing.

Our view is that all businesses should have some plan for Social Media, whether it’s simply monitoring on a regular basis or deciding to actively engage in developing a conversation with its stakeholders. Accept that some negative issues may come up, but find a way to turn them into a positive. There are plenty of case studies. What are your views on the inevitability of negative coverage and what should a company do?