Reputation Management and Digital Strategy

Musa Capital

Musa Capital is an international boutique private equity firm based in South Africa.

Their Problem

When they approached us, Musa Capital was being sabotaged by malicious negative publicity generated by mining executives of a mining company with interests in the platinum belt.

For two years 2008-2010, the mining directors, in cahoots with mainstream media players, went on a media smear campaign to discredit Musa and its directors. This was done to prevent Musa Capital from playing a financial advisory role to a poor community that held the mineral rights and majority shares in the mining company.

The media blitz succeeded in sullying Musa Capital’s public and online reputation, impacting the company’s standing as a financial service provider and threatening its financial services license. We were brought in as crisis and reputation managers because of a proposal we summited to the directors, highlighting our strategy and abilities to mitigate the crisis their then incumbent PR agency was struggling to handle.

Our Solution

Before we engaged with Musa Capital as a service provider, we were able to get them right of reply for a set of 20 interview questions posed by the Mail & Guardian. The initial intention of the Mail & Guardian was a scathing article, planned for publication within a day of the interview being sent to Musa Capital.

As a result of this right of reply opportunity, for the first time since the negative publicity began Mail & Guardian printed a story with a Musa Capital perspective to shed light on the allegations. This piece began the process of reversing the malicious reports that had persisted for 2 years.

We advised Musa Capital to let us create a public facing brand that would be highly visible. In this way, they avoid the potential for adversaries to smear them as a crooked company lurking in a shadowy underworld.

We advised the directors of the company to be more visible by appearing on TV commentaries for financial programmes on Bloomberg and CNBC. This aimed to demystify them as individuals, showcase their expertise and credentials, while simultaneously positioning the brand in the public psyche.

We advised them to control their own information by creating a new website that would serve as their broadcast centre to answer to allegations, disseminate information to the press and public.

We designed and developed their website according to Google Webmaster and Google AdWord guidelines. The site had a video feature for Musa Capital to project the true character and personality of their brand and break the false perceptions that had been generated.

We used the website to corroborate their heritage, expertise and story by showcasing previous successful funds, advisory mandates and relationships with highly successful portfolio companies, in which community funds had been invested profitably.

We told the good Musa Capital story, via multiple platforms as we helped them build better media relations with journalists.

We wrote to the press ombudsman to challenge the malicious media pieces and won.

We created social media assets to remove all the negative articles from the SERPs.

We created online assets that would allow Musa Capital to generate their own corroborating network of brand-building associations, to tell a holistic Musa Capital story and dominate the SERPs on Musa Capital-related searches

Through SEO (Search Engine Optimization) we made Musa Capital discoverable by rank for key industry search words in Private Equity.

When we started working with Musa Capital, they had just been raided by the Financial Services Board who where threatening to cancel their license. Seven years later [2018] Musa have been vindicated, retained their financial services license and elevated their standing in the industry.

When we met Musa Capital they were running one investment fund. Within three years of engagement they had more than 5 funds on their books.