London Technology Public Relations agency | Social Media Strategy | B2B PR | Chameleon PR

The scandal devouring News International, and indeed, it seems, the entirety of News Corp., only grows and grows. The most recent revelations of the hacking of the most intimate and supposedly secure details of royalty and Prime Ministers has spread the contagion from the doomed, departed News of the World to other properties in the Murdoch empire. An organisation whose dominance of the media market and political agenda that seemed total only months ago is hobbled. Only Rebekah Brooks, it seems, is immovable, while everything around her totters.

In truth, Brooks may yet go: swept out by the torrent of public moral outrage, the grumblings of the News Corp. board or the tactical business need for appeasement through another public sacrifice as the crisis builds. But what then? The moribund BSkyB deal – booted into the long-grass of regulator reassessment by Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt – looks increasingly unlikely to succeed; some predict a News Corp. retreat from the UK newspaper market altogether. A sea-change in the fortunes of Murdoch, the landscape of the press and the entire public perception of the media seems inevitable. And along with it, other power-wielding groups such as politicians, regulators, industry bodies and even the police will increasingly feature in the spotlight of public opprobrium and re-assessment.

As journalistic ethics are scrutinised more closely than ever, how can PR firms, as participants in the way our media function, ensure they maintain the kind of ethical standards demanded by an increasing sceptical public newly armed with instant access to social and digital media? Just as the working practices of journalism and public relations share similarities, so too are our ethical considerations aligned.

But they are not identical. Journalists have a primary duty to serve the public; PR firms, their clients. Sometimes, journalistic duty has to transcend sectional interests, even – as we have seen in the downfall of News International – loyalty to proprietors or business. A PR firm could not, in good faith, act against the interests of its paying customers. Are we to judge one set of working ethics as superior to the other? Cross-sectoral comparisons are of little use; each sector should be assessed on its own merits and record.

Nonetheless, Public Relations cannot function outside the public interest. We are all part of the same society; we all benefit from markets that are transparent and free of distortion, and a public climate of institutional confidence rather than suspicion. On practical professional terms, journalists and PR consultants alike succeed – or fail – on the trust with which they are received by the world at large. They transgress that trust at their peril.

 

The recent media furore around the PR company Burson-Marstellar’s covert actions on behalf of Facebook against Google has generated more heat than light. But because of the high profile of the two West Coast Web giants involved, the practice of PR even hit the front page of the FT. In its wake there’s been lots of indignant harrumphing in the London-based media about so-called smearing and buckets of schadenfreude from PRs eager to gain what they see as competitive advantage by proclaiming they would never stoop so low as to plant potentially damaging information on behalf of a client or their employer.

Much of this professional posing is disingenuous. The reality is that in business – any business – you want to show your competitors in the worst light possible. That’s competition.  But overtly negative campaigning can backfire as it clearly has the potential to actually turn off the people who you are trying to convince that you are the good guys.  You need to consider carefully whether to use it as a tactic and always default to taking the high ground, lest you risk getting tarred with your own brush.

But to be effective a marketing campaign has to make its target audience understand the advantages of one product or service and disadvantages of another. Indeed, in media relations this may actually help the journalist understand the competitive ecosystem on which a company is trying to understand, analyse and report. If you are promoting the advantages of Open Source, for instance, it would be remiss not to have a clear explanation of the disadvantages of proprietary environments. The issue is how is that to be achieved?

After all, the UK press loves a bit of controversy not to mention negativity because it sells publications online or offline and so high tech PRs inform the media every day about unsavoury or previously hidden aspects of their client’s competitor’s activities or products. But technology  journalists or bloggers normally know exactly who they are talking to and understand their motivation. These are the `sources` that  journalists have always gone to great lengths to protect and so planting information in this way can get the result you want – copy that plays to your strengths and your competitor’s weaknesses – without the source being revealed. That’s a tradition that works very well for both sides

But in the Burson-Marstellar Facebook vs Google case it was the covert nature of Burson-Marstellar’s actions that was the problem.  Even if the information they were passing on was correct, hell hath no fury like a journalist or blogger misled.

The key issue is that the PRs actions should be transparent to the journalist or blogger – i.e. they know who you are representing so they can judge the veracity of what you are saying before editing it and presenting it to the public.  That’s the power of media relations – it’s based on the assumption that the journalist or blogger is a filter and the Western tradition is that is the filter that delivers truth and accuracy.

So Burson-Marstellar’s big mistake and why they are reaping the whirlwind of both flack and hack opprobrium is that they crossed this line.  They concealed the fact they were acting for Facebook and those they talked to now feel their professional reputations have been besmirched.  And as a journalist or blogger your prime currency is the ability to educate and inform correctly.  If you have been deliberately compromised in doing so by a third party that makes you very mad indeed. As Burson-Marstellar is finding out to its cost…

There is an old adage `there is no such thing as bad publicity`. But I doubt that Toyota, the car firm with a once glowing reputation for reliability and now feared for its defective technology, would agree as its market share plummeted. Remember also Sanlu, the Chinese company that hit the headlines for weeks on end by producing milk that poisoned many consumers in The People’s Republic? Now it is bankrupt and its senior management team are sitting in jail.

But where does this seemingly contradictory phrase come from? It’s easy to point, for instance, to exceptions that justify the rule. William Shatner’s records, the soon-to-be-outlawed footballer’s snood and even Kazakhstan. The country was ridiculed in the film Borat, its officials even complaining to the film producers for the slur on its nationhood. But in fact, although still not top of everyone’s preferred holiday destinations, after the film was released tourist inquiries to Kazakhstan increased four-fold.

But so much for the laws of unintended consequences and unforeseen results. The fact is that in the age of social media whoever you are mud sticks and sticks around forever. That means a company’s murky history can so easily be retrieved with a Google search or exposed on a customer complaint blog (will we ever forget Dell Hell?).

That means that it’s important to understand the difference between publicity – the random generation of coverage – versus public relations – the management of reputation by the selective targeting of audiences to deliver a measureable result. Nowadays if you want to build a positive reputation it is more crucial than ever to work on a well thought through and executed public relations strategy and don’t think that any old exposure will have the outcome you desire.

Never has the difference been more apparent than in the recent case where the founder of a US online optician tried to generate publicity by replying abusively to dissatisfied customers, and even – allegedly – threatening some of them with violence. He revealed triumphantly to the New York Times that his plan to provoke masses of complaints had pushed him to the top of Google searches for eyewear. I’m sure he thought he’d delivered a classic case of `so bad it’s good`- that is until he was arrested last December.

“A good reputation is more valuable than money.” Publilus Syrus, 1st Century BC