CIPR Influence - Q4 / 2017

INFLUENCE Q4 2017 www.cipr.co.uk

INFLUENCE

FOR SWITCHED-ON PUBLIC RELATIONS PROFESSIONALS

Q4 2017 ISSUE 8

IS NOTORIETY WORTH IT? | HOW THE BRITISH & IRISH LIONS ROAR | WHY EMPLOYEE ADVOCACY IS PR GOLD | WHAT THE ROMANS DID FOR COMMS

NOTORIOUS CLARENCE MITCHELL ON CRIME COMMS • COMMENTATORS WHO CROSS THE LINE

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INFLUENCE CIPR 52–53 Russell Square, London WC1B 4HP Tel: +44 (0)20 7631 6900 Fax: +44 (0)20 7631 6944 Email: info@cipr.co.uk President Jason MacKenzie FCIPR Chief executive Alastair McCapra Deputy chief executive Phil Morgan Editor Rob Smith CIPR EDITORIAL BOARD Avril Lee MCIPR Bridget Aherne MCIPR Rob Brown FCIPR Rachael Clamp MCIPR Dr Jon White Chart.PR FCIPR Louisa Bartoszek MCIPR Valentina Kristensen MCIPR INFLUENCE Published on behalf of CIPR

by Think, Capital House, 25 Chapel Street, London NW1 5DH Tel: +44 (0)20 3771 7200 Email: influence@ thinkpublishing.co.uk THINK EDITORIAL TEAM Content director Matthew Rock Deputy editor Gabrielle Lane (gaby.lane@ thinkpublishing.co.uk) Senior designer Sophia Haines Chief sub-editor Charles Kloet Group account director Jackie Scully Publishing director Ian McAuliffe ADVERTISING AND PARTNERSHIPS Mel Michael +44 (0)20 3771 7204 mel.michael@ thinkpublishing.co.uk

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COVER ILLUSTRATION: MATT HERRING

The views expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect those of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR). All information is correct at the time of going to press. The inclusion of adverts in this magazine does not constitute CIPR endorsement of the products and services concerned. © Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR). All rights reserved. Reproduction in part or in whole is prohibited without prior agreement of the CIPR. Please direct all requests to Think in the first instance.

WELCOME Step back to gain perspective

ed lines I spoke to a former colour the employee of Bell Pottinger landscape. in the run-up to Matthew From Brexit Gwyther’s article on industry negotiations ethics (see page 24). It was to North eye-opening. They spoke Korean sanctions, in 2017 of a highly competitive these vivid markers are atmosphere where the society’s attempt to bring only thing that mattered clarity to sometimes blurred was the bottom line. In subject matter: “Everything on their words, there was an this side is right, and everything awareness of “having to on that side is wrong.” As if it’s turn into something other ever so simple. than who you are in order Ethical boundaries in to survive” and “getting the The Bell Pottinger the public relations industry job done by any means”. have come under scrutiny While, of course, one scandal undermined in the wake of the Bell person can’t be said to the reputation of Pottinger scandal. I’m speak for everyone (and an industry that sure by now you’re all aware legal reasons and anonymity is paid to safeguard of the unpleasant actions of prevent me from giving that of others the South African division too many details), we can of Bell Pottinger, which led all empathise with the idea to widespread condemnation. of having to fit into a culture Since then, we’ve seen the company’s and achieve results as quickly as possible. expulsion from the PRCA, major clients It can be hard to step back and ask yourself fleeing and the rapid insolvency of one if you are comfortable with what your employer of the best-known PR agencies in the is asking you to do. Bell Pottinger’s rapid collapse world. The scandal undermined the reputation reminds us of the importance of professional of an industry that is paid to safeguard that practice in public relations for our clients, our of others. companies and ourselves.

The red lines that Bell Pottinger crossed when working for its client would be clear to anyone looking in from the outside. Racebaiting should not be part of any brief. How did it get to the point where so many inside the organisation couldn’t see that?

ROB SMITH Editor, Influence

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WHAT’S BEEN SAID ON TWITTER? Making myself have a break and reminding myself why I do what I do with the latest @CIPR_UK #Influence #coffeebreak #lunchtimereading @JenMorganComms

Love this insightful article by @GabrielleLane_ on podcasts @CIPR_UK #influence @jfoxlloydm

Never thought I’d say it but “Well said, George”! Insightful interview with Mr Osborne in @CIPR_UK’s #Influence mag. @timhudsonpr

Fantastic read @CIPR_UK #Influence mag! Great George Osborne and Arianna Huffington interviews and news about fake news. @saeedatcha

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MAG IN A MINUTE 7 INFLUENCE / Q4 2017 / issue eight / cipr.co.uk

CONTRIBUTORS MATTHEW GWYTHER P24

The BBC’s In Business presenter reflects on PR professionals’ tolerance for shady briefs: corporations will need systems in place that enable staff to decline to work on accounts for reasons of conscience

SARAH COOPER

EMILY HILL

PAUL SMITH

P53

P10

P44

Make a meeting less painful by tricking people into thinking it’s not a meeting

Communicationswise, the Remain camp detonates new bombs every day

Commonwealth Bank of Australia gave a masterclass in getting credit for tech innovation

BE AFRAID Immortality is a brand value for PRs keen to highlight the power of technology to a human audience that has always wanted a solution to death

FULL-TIME COVERAGE

For most sports brands, the weekly rhythm of matches and player interviews means a non-stop stream of coverage. How do you generate interest in a rugby tour when your major assets – the players – are not available to you?

You get creative

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LIFE AFTER BREXIT It’s easier to campaign for change than it is to promote an existing position. The pro-Remain campaigners are picking apart every Brexit argument at a grass-roots level

PAGE 39

TELL US WHAT YOU THINK

Crime, Milo, Leave, Remain... you’ve got to have a view: Tell us what you think of Influence at: @CIPR_UK influence@thinkpublishing.co.uk info@cipr.co.uk

CIPR PARTNERS

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THE INDEX: #BREXIT Most news stories that announced the referendum result were neutral, according to our analysis, while Boris Johnson generates coverage and immigration is a hot topic

4 Q4 2017 INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK

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COVER STORY ILLUSTRATION: MATT HERRING

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INSIDE STORY M&A analysts are using online employee recommendations to value companies, so it pays to curate the authentic feedback that your organisation gets on platforms such as LinkedIn

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DISENGAGED Employees pay attention to internal communications that reflect their higher purpose in working for an organisation, not their day-to-day responsibilities

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THE ATM ATE MY CEO Commonwealth Bank of Australia built a reputation as a leader in financial technology. When its tech failed, its previous comms successes cost the CEO his job

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COVER STORY HOW TO MAKE ENEMIES AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE Provocative opinions win attention for outspoken commentators and give media outlets large audiences. Then, as negative publicity increases, the platforms available to controversial voices decrease. This reduces the power and credibility of their communications – until they create their own channels, that is

DO IT BETTER + Comedian and ex-Googler Sarah Cooper pokes fun at meetings + How to get paid by clients + How to win new business + Much more

BREAK STORIES

PRESS HERE

ALARM BELLS Each agency has its own level of tolerance when deciding whether clients are worthy of representation. But, if you’re at all questioning your mandate, the PR strategy may be unethical

I DO NOT WANT TO RECEIVE YOUR EMAILS Consumers can withhold their data under the new GDPR legislation. Stay in line to protect corporate reputation

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PR UNDER FIRE

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49

34

NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH A Parsons Green victim, the McCann family’s PR, Greater Manchester Police’s head of corporate comms, and pioneering TV producer Jeff Pope on crime coverage

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ANATOMY OF A CAMPAIGN Squad announcements, news stories, video clips and collaborations with sponsors help keep the British & Irish Lions in the spotlight when they’re not touring

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THE BACK STORY There’s growing unease about the binary nature of much public discussion.

What happened to healthy disagreement and airing the opposing view?

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BE AFRAID

Immortality

BY GABRIELLE LANE. ILLUSTRATION BY EOIN RYAN

Humankind wants to live forever: immortality is the next big brand value INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q4 2017 7

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IMMORTALITY BE AFRAID our animal life is over.

Machine life has begun.”

So reads the headline of an article from The Observer that has been shared more than 32,000 times on social media in six months. The piece charts “the road to immortality” via a machine that replicates the human brain and keeps a version of us alive forever. The method is largely irrelevant: by weaving together Silicon Valley start-ups, teasing promises and optimistic launch dates (2030s), the story captured public attention. Humankind is obsessed with death. The biological imperative is to avoid it.

According to Thomas Metzinger, a professor of theoretical philosophy at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, technology has replaced religion as our preferred solution to death.

Indeed, tech firms are making “mortality denial” a product and immortality a brand value. “The aim of this form of promotion and branding,” he says, “is deeper and more efficient penetration into the marketplace.”

Immortality is an intriguing sell.

Consider Google, which in 2013 launched Calico to explore life-extending technology, with a multi-billion-dollar budget. Billed engimatically as a “company that will focus on health and well-being”, the press release included a statement of support from Apple CEO Tim Cook. Very little has been publicised since.

Discretion is essential in the medical research industry, explains Yuba Bessaoud, media and stakeholder relations manager at the Human Fetilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA). “It’s about finding the balance between being open and transparent with the press while allowing important work to be done legally without putting pressure on regulatory bodies.”

In 2016, HFEA granted permission for the editing of genomes of human embryos using the CRISPR-Cas9 technique, for research purposes. Bessaoud recalls the competing public perceptions of genetic engineering: “If you don’t approve an application like this, ‘you’re against science’; if you do, ‘you’re rushing into the unknown and approving techniques that will change human nature’.”

“

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We’ve seen blatant emotional manipulation on the theme of relieving suffering Medical research is “newsworthy by default”, he says. The job of the comms professional is to provide clarity. “Our aim is to temper the wilder excesses of imagination of some of the journalists, who understandably want the juiciest story possible,” says Bessaoud. Press releases for the CRISPR-Cas9 story simply confirmed an application for use of the technique and outlined the law.

In Bessaoud’s experience, science journalists want to report facts and maintain good relationships. “It’s harder to control the message with non-specialist reporters who are picking up the news of the day and turning it around in half an hour,” he counters.

“They probably haven’t called you in the first place. They are using secondary sources and filling in the gaps.”

Yet, when it comes to the fantastical nature of immortality and the capabilities of tech, Metzinger believes such sensationalism is desirable. “Silicon Valley explicitly speaks of ‘immortality technology’, of ‘mind-uploading’

and of a wonderful future organised by benevolent artificial intelligence,” he says.

He believes there is a larger audience for this kind of promotion in the US. “I think Americans will be open to a new ‘tech religion’, partly because it also appeals to their puritan conditioning and their strong optimism bias.”

In the course of scientific discovery, private organisations will come under more scrutiny for what they do say, argues Dr David King, who founded activist group Human Genetics Alert in 2000 to campaign against genetic engineering. “When it’s Google, which is seen as highly powerful and somewhat secretive, that heightens [the debate]. Part of the lesson the biotechnology industry learned from the GM food debate was that it’s a positive strategy for large organisations to have publicly funded scientists speaking out in favour of what they’re trying to do,” he says. “Companies such as Monsanto became demonised during the GM food campaign.”

In its first press release, Calico was referenced by Google’s then CEO Larry Page as a way to “improve millions of lives” in the context that “illness and ageing affect all our families”. That’s unsurprising, says King: “The credibility of science is about telling the facts and not going further than the facts. Yet, we’ve seen blatant emotional manipulation on the theme of relieving suffering.

When it comes to one campaign around mitochondrial replacement, we got a misleading description of mitochondrial disease… and use of the most extreme cases of families that have suffered.”

If Google and the other bodies said to be exploring life extension are following a tried-and-tested comms strategy, expect information to be drip-fed over time. “The general way that scientific and genetic policy-making occurs is that there’s an unwillingness to rule anything out and things proceed by gradual steps,” says King. “It’s when people see a step change that alarm bells start ringing.”

Is immortality a USP too far?

Ultimately, consumers will still want to believe in tech giants and their divine projects, insists Metzinger: “The human ego longs for immortality. Thereby arises the constant temptation to sacrifice intellectual honesty in favour of emotional well-being.”

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#LEAVE BACKLASH

AMBASSADOR TO THE EU SIR TIM BARROW GIVES FORMAL NOTICE TO EUROPEAN COUNCIL PRESIDENT DONALD TUSK OF THE UK’S INTENTION TO LEAVE THE BLOC

LIFE AFTER #LEAVE Britain may be headed for Brexit but pro-Remain communicators have captured the media narrative... or have they?

BY EMILY HILL

n 23 June 2016, Britain voted for Brexit. The shock result upset the status quo in the UK and EU, not to mention the entire PR world. But, while Vote Leave won the referendum

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battle, ever since it has seemed as if Remain is winning the comms war. Pick up a paper, turn on the TV or talk to your neighbours and many of the messages surrounding Brexit are negative. As Sven Hughes, CEO and founder of strategic comms agency Global Influence, says:

“What you’re hearing is a great deal of noise from the people who voted Remain, and they’re certainly getting a lot of coverage and headlines.”

So what is Remain doing right? And how come the victorious Leave camp seems to have suffered a PR slump?

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2

REMAIN’S PICKING APART EVERY POINT Lucy Thomas, co-founder and deputy director of the Remain campaign Britain Stronger In Europe, argues that her side is performing a vital democratic service in ensuring that the Brexit process is consciously picked apart in public. “The only question on the referendum ballot paper was: remain or leave?” she explains. “It is right that everything following should be properly scrutinised and tested, as there was no specific blueprint or plan that people voted for.”

1 REMAIN’S DEFINED THE NARRATIVE

According to Harry Readhead, director of content at boutique PR firm Right Angles, the Remainer strategy is “deceptively simple”. “It’s also one of the golden rules of good PR: define the narrative,” he says. “Anything remotely negative that has taken place since the vote has been ascribed instantly to the effects of the decision to leave the EU, while anything positive is said to have been ‘despite Brexit’.”

While the ‘Eurobarometer’, a public opinion poll produced by the European Commission, shows that positive sentiment towards immigration rose between November 2015 and November 2016, and reflected an upward trajectory from November 2014, a “rise in xenophobia” was reported more prominently across news outlets throughout 2016.

This negative interpretation of news issues “has been so effective that even convinced Brexiteers are starting to doubt whether they made the right call”, says Readhead.

Anything remotely negative that has taken place since the vote has been ascribed instantly to the decision to leave the EU, while anything positive is said to have been “despite Brexit” INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q4 2017 11

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4

THE LEAVE CAMP IS SATISFIED

LEAVE

51.9%

3 REMAIN’S RECRUITING

REMAIN

48.1%

53.4 %

ENGLAND

46.6 %

38.0%

SCOTLAND

62.0%

52.5 %

WALES

47.5 %

44.2%

NORTHERN IRELAND

55.8%

“It’s harder to run a campaign to shore up a current position than it is to campaign for change,” admits Paul Stephenson, the former communications director of Vote Leave and now a partner at Hanbury Strategy. “More interesting news stories say ‘The government’s failing on this’ than ‘The government’s doing an okay job’.”

Stephenson concedes that the Leave campaign’s resources have waned.

“Towards the end of our [referendum] campaign, people wanted to give money.

There’s not that same interest now. Would it help if we had 10 people monitoring the media like we did during the campaign?

Of course, but who is going to pay for that in the current climate when they have basically got what they wanted?”

DIFFERENT VOICES

Remain seems to have learned from the tactics of Vote Leave, which ran an unorthodox, grassroots campaign, making repeated guerrilla attacks on key Remain positions. No one appears to be in overall charge of the Remain message but, communications-wise, Remain detonates new bombs every day.

“I wouldn’t say there’s any one person or group controlling any messaging,” says Thomas. “There are many different organisations, such as Open Britain, Best for Britain, Scientists for EU and so on. There have also been several spontaneous sectoral campaigns growing organically as different issues arise in Brexit.”

The political fundamentals have not changed; there is no real chance of staying in the EU. And people still think through the prism of how they voted

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#LEAVE BACKLASH

GINA MILLER’S LEGAL ACTION MADE HER THE UNOFFICIAL STANDARD-BEARER OF THE REMAINERS

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THERE’S A REMAIN CAMPAIGN STAR If any personality is associated with holding Brexit to account, it is not leader of the opposition Jeremy Corbyn, or the Liberal Democrats, who have called for a second referendum. It is Gina Miller, founding partner at a wealth-management firm, and previously a complete unknown. In the immediate aftermath of the vote, Miller privately engaged Mishcon de Reya to challenge the authority of the government to invoke article 50 without reference to Parliament.

The ensuing court case led to an outbreak of mass hysteria best summed up by two Daily Mail front-page splashes that branded the judges in the case ‘Enemies of the people’ and called on Theresa May to ‘Crush the saboteurs’. This appalled not just Remainers but many of those who voted Leave. Miller was ultimately successful and a vote was held in Parliament. Remainers were delighted to have a figurehead who seemed to be actively doing something to interrogate Brexit.

IS IT WORKING? For all Remain’s undoubted PR success, it is interesting to look at the latest polls to see how much effect all the coverage has had.

Sven Hughes points out that, at the general election in 2017, over 80% of voters backed pro-Brexit parties. This is because only the Liberal Democrats stood in active opposition to Brexit, and the party now holds just 12 seats. Although Theresa May did not win a mandate for a ‘hard Brexit’, he believes the election result didn’t indicate that the country as a whole had changed its mind in favour of staying in the EU either.

In fact, Paul Stephenson argues that, despite this great war of words, we’re all still positioned, intractably, wherever we happened to be in June 2016. “The political fundamentals have not changed. There is no real chance of the UK staying in the EU, the single market or the customs union,” he says. “There’s been a big argument [since the referendum] about soft Brexit and hard Brexit. It’s basically an argument about how long the transition is, but the destination is still the same. People still think through the prism of how they voted.”

UK GENERAL ELECTION RESULTS: JUNE 2017

CONSERVATIVE 42.4%

GREEN 1.6% UKIP 1.8% SNP 3%

LIB DEMS 7.4%

LABOUR 40%

Emily Hill is a freelance journalist and former commissioning editor at The Spectator INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q4 2017 13

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THE INDEX

BREX APPEAL HERE’S HOW THE MEDIA HAS COVERED POLITICAL DEVELOPMENTS SINCE THE EU REFERENDUM AND THE TRENDS TO LOOK OUT FOR WHEN PLACING STORIES

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How the referendum result was reported Between 23 June 2016 and 13 September 2017, there were 37,189 mentions of the EU referendum in the UK press. Across print and broadcast outlets, reporting was more impartial than some might claim: there were 11,694 neutral, 420 negative and 48 positive stories, according to sentiment analysis.

“Negative opinions following the kick-off of the Brexit negotiations were expressed most strongly in the regionals and trade press.

Stories highlighted concerns within the local economy and the business community,” says David Benigson, CEO and co-founder of Signal Media.

9,115 Print

521

Broadcast

BORIS JOHNSON

GINA MILLER

1,252

HEADLINES

83

745

ONLINE

54

340

PRINT

23

114

BLOG

6

53

BROADCAST

0

8

POSITIVE

0

44

NEGATIVE

0

582

NEUTRAL

31

2

The power of a media figurehead

48

Positive

11,694 Neutral

420

Gina Miller may have injected vigour into the Remain camp, but the launch of her legal challenge to Brexit received less coverage than Johnson’s speech after the referendum result. Miller generated 83 headlines across UK print, online and broadcast media, while Johnson was responsible for 15 times that number. While coverage of Miller was broadly neutral, 7% of the coverage of Johnson’s speech was negative.

Negative

The method: the number of headline and summary mentions of key Brexit events was analysed between 23 June 2016 and 13 September 2017.

Sentiment was analysed for print and broadcast sources only. The total headline and summary mentions per event were calculated at a story level (omitting, for example, syndicated content and second editions), while sentiment analysis was performed at an individual article level to ensure any changes of nuance (as a result of, say, amendments to syndicated content) were captured.

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BREXIT BRIEFING

Jeremy Corbyn

Donald Trump

3

Inflation

Theresa May

An article 50 news angle

Sky News

Regulation

Commentators at the ready: when article 50 was triggered on 29 March 2017, UK media outlets rushed to chart the rise and fall of sterling. Inflation was among the top-five topics featured within the 590 news stories about article 50. Inflation has only had the same level of prominence at two other times within Brexit coverage: when the referendum result was reported and when the first round of negotiations with the EU began.

Parliament

European Council

Donald Tusk

Financial regulation

Immigration

Labour Party

Corporate responsibility Conservative Party

Nigel Farage

TOP-FIVE TOPICS, PEOPLE AND ORGANISATIONS ACROSS 590 STORIES ABOUT THE TRIGGERING OF ARTICLE 50

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5

Hard versus soft Brexit

There’s consistency across media

It was May’s apparent move towards a hard Brexit on 16 January 2017 that really inspired debate, fuelling 1,711 headlines. The topic covered most by the media was the impact on immigration, followed by changes to financial and other regulations, and this gave organisations such as KPMG and the University of Sussex commentary opportunities.

Elsewhere, the Lib Dems’ pro-Remain election stance generated 262 headlines. They were given a platform for their views on corporate responsibility, immigration, welfare policy and austerity most frequently.

In accordance with the perception that the Leave campaign gets less attention now that its aims have been achieved, the Lib Dems’ pro-Remain election stance was given more coverage than the resignation from UKIP of prominent Leave campaigner Nigel Farage.

Blogs and online outlets have prioritised the key stories in the postreferendum news cycle in the same way as print and broadcast outlets.

TOP-FIVE TOPICS ACROSS 1,711 STORIES ABOUT THERESA MAY’S STANCE ON A HARD BREXIT

300

n

r

tio ula

250

n

eg al r

MENTIONS

m

ig

io at

ci

Im an Fi n Reg ul Corp o Au

ation

s te

rate r

rit

y

espons

Lib Dems’ pro-Remain election stance Nigel Farage’s resignation

200 150 100

i b i l it y

50

TOTAL

BLOG

ONLINE

PRINT

BROADCAST

Signal Media is a media-monitoring and market-intelligence platform that gives clients access to news from over 2.7 million online, print and broadcast media sources globally in 80 languages. It provides real-time alerts, translations and insights for informed decision-making.

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INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS AND THE BOARD

INSIDE STORY xxx

WHY YOU CAN’T IGNORE GLASSDOOR + BUILD AN EFFECTIVE LINKEDIN PRESENCE

GETTY IMAGES

When Colin Powell (right) had his emails hacked, it emerged that Salesforce uses online employee recommendations to make acquisition decisions

The virtual watercooler

For comms teams maintaining corporate reputation on Glassdoor and LinkedIn, it pays to shift from content creation to content curation

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INSIDE STORY n September 2016, former US secretary of state Colin Powell had his emails hacked.

The leak exposed the potential acquisition targets of CRM behemoth Salesforce. Powell was on Salesforce’s board of directors at a time when LinkedIn and Adobe were in its sights: the credentials of those and 12 other businesses were detailed in an attachment that had landed in his inbox that summer.

Analysts crawled over the message from Salesforce’s chief legal officer, which flagged the status of impending deals, including a $2.8bn buyout of Demandware that closed days after the email was sent. While annual revenues and profit margins constituted much of the data, it was the inclusion of a “95% approval rating” for Demandware’s CEO that should interest the comms pro.

That score, used by Salesforce to help size up the business, was taken from the Glassdoor jobs website, which shares reviews of companies by employees.

“The difference between Glassdoor and any other jobs site is its usergenerated content,” explains Glassdoor’s head of communications for Europe, Joe Wiggins. While job-seeking is the most common reason for using the site, it also allows current and former staff to rank companies on their culture, leadership, pay, benefits and career opportunities, as well as leave written comments on their profile pages.

“We have about 33 million reviews, covering 700,000 companies,” says Wiggins.

“Glassdoor is now in the mix with other social media platforms where you need to manage reputation.”

That’s true not least because a varied audience is using the information. Indeed, users could be making a crucial investment decision, says Wiggins: “The information is used by stakeholders in

I

ways we didn’t anticipate: this stuff now matters to your organisation’s bottom line.”

The same is true of professional network LinkedIn, on which 18 million companies shape their reputation by sharing content through their profile pages. Organisations such as L’Oréal are spotting the value of curating employees’ stories, rather than creating their own. Communicating a strong employer brand on the website is said to reduce staff turnover rates by 28% and the cost per new hire by 50%: over 23 million people use LinkedIn in the UK. Here’s how to harness the power of the employee anecdote.

WHO SHOULD MANAGE COMPANY PROFILES? Glassdoor estimates that 19% of its company profiles are maintained by communications professionals. “The profile is public, so it often falls in the bucket of corporate brand,” says Wiggins.

A free account on its website allows users to update company information, and to be notified about new reviews and respond to them. The last part is the most crucial: most often, HR and PR teams share this responsibility.

Glassdoor changes its own respondents depending on the type of issues raised: the CEO, chief of HR and SVP of sales have all replied to employee reviews. “It avoids cookiecutter responses,” Wiggins adds.

After reading seven or eight reviews, people will have made their mind up about your company, says Glassdoor’s Joe Wiggins

L’Oréal has had a unified international presence on LinkedIn for eight years and a central team is responsible for curating its employees’ stories through photos, videos, blogs and status updates.

This function sits under the control of the chief marketing officer for global HR, Carole Pasco-Domergue. “We have one global company profile with some individual brands attached. Within it we have ‘life’ pages for different departments or countries,” she explains.

“Our strategy is to be globally strong, but locally relevant.” National teams are enlisted to share stories at specific times and are given their own budget for media.

Again, interaction between HR and PR is common: up to 61% of companies work in this way.

HOW CAN I CONTROL THE MESSAGE? It’s best you don’t. Even on platforms where brands have the power to share their own material, “employee-generated content is more engaging than well-designed corporate messages”, says PascoDomergue. “Authenticity and transparency” are what

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make professional networks trusted and valuable as a communications channel.

“It’s real,” she says. “Perfection of the pictures and words is less important than what the content says about L’Oréal.

Our role is more about content curation than creation.”

“It’s the power of having employees who are ambassadors and who are happy to talk about that voluntarily,” agrees Wiggins. To protect its own integrity, Glassdoor “stands behind the employee”, and only removes between five and 10 per cent of all reviews for “not meeting community guidelines”.

A digital algorithm checks reviews for consistency and flags suspicious communications; the rest stand.

So manage your reputation by engaging and amplifying others’ views.

WHAT TYPE OF CONTENT DO I NEED? L’Oréal uses LinkedIn to showcase working life inside the organisation.

Stock images are banned in favour of real snapshots taken by employees, while career advice and tips are shared by the company’s in-house recruiters.

A popular topic is how inspiring L’Oréal’s leaders are: a video of CEO John-Paul Agon speaking at the Global Positive Forum about the changing culture of business is a prime example.

“We are not only products, we are not only services – we are showing that we’re a company where people are inspired and where people try their best. That’s super-important from a resourcing point of view and from a reputation point of view,” says PascoDomergue. “It’s a key differentiator between us and other companies.”

HOW OFTEN SHOULD I PUBLISH? L’Oréal publishes five global posts per day on LinkedIn and plans larger

This stuff now matters to your organisation’s bottom line JOE W IGGIN S

campaigns approximately three weeks in advance around an annual editorial calendar. “Every month has a big theme so that when the content comes together it has a sense and a philosophy,” says PascoDomergue. “The editorial calendar is built around internal and external events. You cannot put content out there without paying attention to how people are living right now. For example, September is intern season [in America] so we include content about what it’s like to start as an intern at L’Oréal.”

When it comes to Glassdoor, reviews require a speedy response.

Wiggins recommends sitting down weekly to decide who is going to reply to comments and how.

HOW DO I DEAL WITH NEGATIVE POSTS? Firstly, acknowledge the good ones.

“It’s a common pitfall to not respond, or to only respond to negative reviews.

You should respond to the good ones because it’s an opportunity to reinforce what people are saying,” says Wiggins.

FIVE TOP TIPS FOR EMPLOYEE ADVOCACY

1

WORK CLOSELY WITH YOUR HR TEAM Sixty-one per cent of LinkedIn company profiles are co-managed

by HR and communications departments; reputation-building spans corporate image and employee relations. Meet weekly to decide who is best to reply to employee comments and reviews on professional platforms.

2

ENCOURAGE EMPLOYEES TO LEAVE REVIEWS On average, people make up their mind about a brand after reading seven online reviews. Negative feelings usually elicit a stronger behavioural response, so motivate satisfied employees to share their stories too, to create a balanced picture. Rank Group sets time aside in focus groups for writing Glassdoor reviews.

3

REINFORCE GOOD FEEDBACK Don’t just spend time dealing with negative posts. Replying to good feedback reinforces the positive impression and makes it more likely that other employees will take time to interact on professional platforms in future.

4

LOOK FOR SYSTEMS THAT HELP CURATE EMPLOYEE CONTENT At L’Oréal, stock photos are banned on online networks. The organisation uses Olapic to source its own employees’ images. The content engine pools resources (such as iPhone images) from selected influencers to save time and boost quality. Think of it as manufacturing authenticity...

5

ENTER AWARDS Being recognised in a list of ‘best employers’ results in cumulative publicity,

as other companies will promote the list too. Glassdoor doesn’t take direct entries for its ‘Best Places to Work’ rankings, but its winners are chosen on the basis of employee-generated scores across categories. It promotes its winners for 10 months of the year, generating 100 media hits across the UK national press.

6

REMEMBER WHO’S WATCHING Internal approval ratings for CEOs and company culture are being used by financial analysts as an evaluation metric for mergers, acquisitions and investments. Reputation management on online platforms is crucial. Look for budget to unlock enhanced features on professional networking platforms.

These might include direct mailing capabilities (LinkedIn) or access to content performance stats to improve your work (Glassdoor).

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Research

UK & International

onepoll.com | @onepoll

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Your story powered

by OnePoll For more than a decade OnePoll has harnessed the power of research to provide insights and data that has led to more than 100,000 headlines across the media.

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08/11/2017 14:22

Carefully curate your company’s LinkedIn page, says L’Oréal’s Carole Pasco-Domergue – because you’re worth it

We wanted to emphasise that everyone in the company has a voice CA ROLE PA S C O- DOME RGUE

Then, to counteract any negative comments, you must get more stakeholders involved. “We know that jobseekers and others make up their minds [about a company] after seeing seven or eight reviews,” Wiggins reveals.

“Encouraging current employees to leave reviews is important.”

It’s a tactic used by Rank Group, which operates gambling brands such as Mecca. “We discovered that, primarily, only staff who had left the business and had something negative to say were actively going to Glassdoor to write reviews for Rank Group, which didn’t give a balanced picture,” explains communications manager Katie Napier.

“We realised we needed to educate our colleagues about Glassdoor and how to use it.”

Since June 2016, the organisation has staged focus groups where employees are invited to leave reviews; it posts the comments on TV screens around the office and asks all new recruits to share their feedback after their probationary period. “One of the most positive incentives we tried was with chocolate bars. We stuck notes to chocolate bars which read ‘Have a break and write a Glassdoor review’,” says Napier.

Overall, “the campaign has been hugely successful in attracting talent to our organisation and gauging internal feedback”, she adds.

HOW CAN I AMPLIFY OUR REPUTATION? Get creative. L’Oréal wants to be seen as “a family of employees that is always connected”. When its LinkedIn network topped one million members in early 2017, it rolled out the ‘One in a Million’ campaign, creating a miniwebsite where users could upload an image of themselves, apply a filter, explain what makes them unique, and, crucially, share all that within their own networks.

“We wanted to emphasise that everyone in the company has a voice and to echo their vision of the company overall,” says Pasco-Domergue.

L’Oréal also cherry-picked influencers among its workforce – those with a high number of followers on LinkedIn – and asked them to speak about their working lives.

More than 7,000 people visited the microsite in its first week.

Glassdoor lets corporate reputations be torpedoed at the tap of a screen. So get curating

ANY OTHER TRICKS? Look out for awards. Glassdoor publishes ‘Best Places to Work’ rankings, based on the scores on its website, in December each year.

“You don’t fill out an application form, and there’s no judging panel. It’s down to the accumulative effect of employees going onto the site,” says Wiggins. “It’s getting tougher to be named in the list.”

Glassdoor promotes its 25 top-performing companies for 10 months of the year, securing around 100 media hits across the UK national press. With each organisation in the list celebrating their own involvement, publicity is maximised.

“In 2016, the top three companies saw traffic to their profiles increase by up to 100%,” says Wiggins. “Any company that’s named will get attention.

We are getting more and more analysts asking for log-ins. If they are looking to put this information in their write-ups, it could affect whether they put a company down as a ‘buy’ or ‘sell’. Nothing is more important to the board.”

Profile-boosting posts on LinkedIn

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Tell me something I don’t know

Identify what drives your reputation across mainstream news and social media to fully understand your media profile.

Our analysis service delivers insights that give you a better understanding of the impact of your communications activity.

To find out more contact us: Marcus Gault | T 020 7264 4790

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@Kantar_Media kantarmedia.com

022_CIPR_Q4_2017.indd 22

08/11/2017 15:52

OPINION

DISENGAGED MESSAGE TO INTERNAL COMMS: your emails will only get read if you talk about the organisation’s purpose EWEN HALDANE nternal communications teams have a hard life. Newsletters are filed away unread, posters proclaiming company values linger awkwardly in stairwells, and all-staff emails risk being forwarded to unsympathetic columnists.

Some commentators have even heralded the imminent demise of internal communications, reasoning that many existing teams just haven’t got the memo yet – or, if they have, they haven’t read it.

It’s a strange conundrum. Around 75% of employees feel little or no sense of engagement at work, according to business consultancy Gallup.

Some even report feeling that their own jobs are pointless. In the face of such an employeeengagement crisis, we might expect internal comms to be considered mission-critical. Surely, of all departments, it is the guardian of culture. And, if culture eats strategy for lunch, isn’t internal comms also the guardian of long-term corporate success?

I

John F Kennedy asked a janitor at NASA what he did. The answer, “I’m helping to put a man on the moon”, shows that staff at all levels can feel deeply engaged

THINK PURPOSE So what can be done? Common suggestions are to make communications shorter, or focus on video, a CEO blog or the corporate social network. But these suggestions, valid as they are, focus on form rather than function.

The story of John F Kennedy asking a janitor at NASA what he did and receiving the answer “I’m helping to put a man on the moon” exemplifies how it’s possible for employees at all levels to be engaged with a company’s deeper purpose. With few exceptions, every business aims to improve people’s lives in some small way, however humble.

Companies may, for example, help people find a sense of order (through products), feel a sense of calm (through places) or manage money (through services). External comms teams know this.

Similarly, employee engagement, which should be the primary concern of internal comms, doesn’t always come from knowing the profits derived from the goods produced, but from understanding the good that’s arisen from the profits made. Employees won’t necessarily be motivated by how many medicines a pharmaceutical company has sold, but they may be motivated by understanding how many lives have been saved.

We all need to take pride in things greater than our meagre individual achievements. If many of us are struggling to find that pride in a corporate identity, no wonder some are looking towards national identity instead.

At those companies willing to invest in articulating their purpose to employees as ambitiously as they market their products to customers, internal communications should be set to thrive, not decline.

Ewen Haldane is business director at The School of Life INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q1 2016 23

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ETHICS

Alarm Bells

Many PRs will have faced ethical dilemmas. If there’s a positive in the Bell Pottinger debacle, it’s that PRs will now consider what they’re about to do even more deeply...

BY MATTHEW GWYTHER

on’t all gasp at once, but here’s a good word about Bell Pottinger, the PR agency that collapsed after it was found to have contributed to inciting racial tensions in South Africa.

Around nine years back, as editor of Management Today magazine, I received an invitation from Bell Pottinger (BP) to travel to Sri Lanka to meet the then president, his brother (the defence minister), and a Tamil-Tigerturned politician by the name of Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan, as well as to tour an eco-garment factory in Colombo used by both M&S and Abercrombie & Fitch. I rapidly said yes.

The country was at the time locked in a vicious, long-running civil war, and my colleague from The Economist and I asked President Rajapaksa – a large, intimidating figure – tough questions.

We both produced thorough articles.

I recall this episode for several reasons. First, the events in Sri Lanka were important, scantily covered by the media but of note to a broad audience.

Second, without BP’s agency, we would not have been able to cover the story.

Third, many comms businesses would not have gone anywhere near the Sri

D

Lankan regime. Fourth, this was before the brutal end to the civil war with the Tamil Tigers that sullied the reputation of the Sri Lankan government. In those pre-Isis days, the Tigers were number one on the CIA’s list of the most dangerous terrorist groups in the world.

They had killed Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and their conflict against the Sri Lankan regime lasted 26 bloody years. As far as I was concerned, BP got me access to important principals who were able to put their side of the story, which I then placed in the balance.

BP is now no more (see box overleaf), but the repercussions of its demise within the comms industry have been considerable. Some even wondered aloud whether the future of the whole industry was at stake. PR entrepreneur George Pitcher said of the community’s shocked response that “they look like a bunch of pimps throwing up their hands in horror at the moral turpitude of their highest-earning whore”. PR has become the story, with the inevitable appalling reputational mess.

SO WHAT NEXT? PR now faces a number of questions, such as: who gets taken on and declined as a client, and why? How can the comms industry influence wayward

behaviour and toxic strategies within clients? Will BP’s experience mean other PR agencies become more risk-averse or, conversely, might this be a positive moment, when PR begins to see itself as a profession and behaves accordingly?

Neil Bennett, CEO of PR agency Maitland and a former business journalist, is very familiar with the moral dilemmas presented by some clients: “Our last one was last week. We were approached by someone from abroad, it was political and the money trail was opaque. We passed. It happens between six and 12 times a year. The pattern is always similar and very large amounts of money are involved.” (BP’s reward from the Guptas was said to be an eye-watering £100,000 per month.)

Bennett says he has even terminated ongoing contracts: “I did it twice last year when we began to feel uncomfortable with our role. The first was fine, but the second threatened to sue us.”

But Bennett does not favour rules governing who is and who isn’t allowed PR representation: “That’s dangerous territory. Every agency has to decide its own level of tolerance. The key, though, is not who your clients are – it’s what you do for them.”

“The instinctive part of our brain is there to guard our survival,” says the

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ETHICS

Alarm Bells

Many PRs will have faced ethical dilemmas. If there’s a positive in the Bell Pottinger debacle, it’s that PRs will now consider what they’re about to do even more deeply...

BY MATTHEW GWYTHER

on’t all gasp at once, but here’s a good word about Bell Pottinger, the PR agency that collapsed after it was found to have contributed to inciting racial tensions in South Africa.

Around nine years back, as editor of Management Today magazine, I received an invitation from Bell Pottinger (BP) to travel to Sri Lanka to meet the then president, his brother (the defence minister), and a Tamil-Tigerturned politician by the name of Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan, as well as to tour an eco-garment factory in Colombo used by both M&S and Abercrombie & Fitch. I rapidly said yes.

The country was at the time locked in a vicious, long-running civil war, and my colleague from The Economist and I asked President Rajapaksa – a large, intimidating figure – tough questions.

We both produced thorough articles.

I recall this episode for several reasons. First, the events in Sri Lanka were important, scantily covered by the media but of note to a broad audience.

Second, without BP’s agency, we would not have been able to cover the story.

Third, many comms businesses would not have gone anywhere near the Sri

D

Lankan regime. Fourth, this was before the brutal end to the civil war with the Tamil Tigers that sullied the reputation of the Sri Lankan government. In those pre-Isis days, the Tigers were number one on the CIA’s list of the most dangerous terrorist groups in the world.

They had killed Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and their conflict against the Sri Lankan regime lasted 26 bloody years. As far as I was concerned, BP got me access to important principals who were able to put their side of the story, which I then placed in the balance.

BP is now no more (see box overleaf), but the repercussions of its demise within the comms industry have been considerable. Some even wondered aloud whether the future of the whole industry was at stake. PR entrepreneur George Pitcher said of the community’s shocked response that “they look like a bunch of pimps throwing up their hands in horror at the moral turpitude of their highest-earning whore”. PR has become the story, with the inevitable appalling reputational mess.

SO WHAT NEXT? PR now faces a number of questions, such as: who gets taken on and declined as a client, and why? How can the comms industry influence wayward

behaviour and toxic strategies within clients? Will BP’s experience mean other PR agencies become more risk-averse or, conversely, might this be a positive moment, when PR begins to see itself as a profession and behaves accordingly?

Neil Bennett, CEO of PR agency Maitland and a former business journalist, is very familiar with the moral dilemmas presented by some clients: “Our last one was last week. We were approached by someone from abroad, it was political and the money trail was opaque. We passed. It happens between six and 12 times a year. The pattern is always similar and very large amounts of money are involved.” (BP’s reward from the Guptas was said to be an eye-watering £100,000 per month.)

Bennett says he has even terminated ongoing contracts: “I did it twice last year when we began to feel uncomfortable with our role. The first was fine, but the second threatened to sue us.”

But Bennett does not favour rules governing who is and who isn’t allowed PR representation: “That’s dangerous territory. Every agency has to decide its own level of tolerance. The key, though, is not who your clients are – it’s what you do for them.”

“The instinctive part of our brain is there to guard our survival,” says the

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PR UNDER FIRE BREAK STORIES

PRESS HERE

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PR UNDER FIRE BREAK STORIES

PRESS HERE

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NEWSNIGHT ’S KIRSTY WARK GRILLS AN IN-DEMAND LORD TIM BELL ABOUT HIS ROLE IN THE GUPTA DEAL BBC

founder of a successful, fast-growing, mid-range financial consultancy. “And so, just like when we fall in love, we know it when we see it. The same goes for assessing potential clients. If it feels dodgy, if it sounds implausible, if you have to spend a lot of time justifying it to your colleagues, it’s probably not right.”

In the BP case, it’s shocking that no one questioned the original mandate, says Robyn de Villiers, chairman and CEO of Burson-Marsteller Africa. “I don’t know who wrote the Oakbay brief [the fateful campaign was conducted for the Gupta family’s Oakbay Investments] but anybody here would have known how dangerous such stirring-up of racial tension is.” There are lessons here about being outside your zone of familiarity, and how much it pays to have local connectivity and insight.

“It isn’t that the Guptas and Oakbay should not be represented by anyone – a PR can help them rebuild trust – but the actual brief had no moral compass and that isn’t acceptable,” says de Villiers. “I think any professional services company would find it difficult to go near them now.”

For the PR sector to recover its poise, it must look at how it is perceived by the wider business community, says Sarah Hall, author of FuturePRoof, and CIPR’s incoming president: “We have to address any misgivings about the quality of our practice. The industry may be negatively associated with organisations like Bell Pottinger and publicists like Max Clifford but they are not reflective of the wider workforce. We need to trumpet the value of PR and celebrate best practice.

“Bell Pottinger may well have thought it was big enough to weather the storm but history tells a different tale. It’s a warning to any management team that places profits ahead of people and purpose.”

The overall effect of the BP affair may prove positive, says de Villiers. “When you have leaders from companies like Investec and Richemont expressing their strong disapproval, this shows that CEOs take the work that our industry does on corporate reputation very seriously,” she says. “We want senior people to

Bell Pottinger is a warning not to place profits before people and purpose understand our work and what we do.

We still don’t do well telling our own story and this has put us in the spotlight.”

Public relations must, in the end, strive for professional status, which, says Hall, depends on “barriers to entry and widespread ethical competence”.

She adds: “High-quality professional judgement comes from being able to apply a code of conduct to everyday work. Expertise on its own is not enough.

This is why our industry bodies are so important in the drive to professionalism.”

“A HUGE REPUTATIONAL HIT” What’s clear in the BP case is that self-regulation through the PRCA (the Public Relations and Communications Association) has worked. A complaint was made against BP by South African opposition party the Democratic Alliance, the complaint was investigated, and the agency was expelled from the PRCA. But there is more at stake here than the fate of one agency – particularly for those entering the PR industry. They are

classic millennials, keen on purpose, sustainability and doing ‘the right thing’.

Many will also be considering careers in accountancy, the law or management consultancy. They don’t want to work for companies they disapprove of. Agencies and corporations will need systems that enable staff to decline to work on accounts for reasons of conscience.

And individuals must show leadership by constantly adhering to professional standards, as well as remembering the value that the profession brings. “I think we can alter corporate behaviour that the public will find unacceptable,” insists Bennett.

“The Bell Pottinger affair has dealt us a huge reputational hit,” says a former PR group chairman who preferred to speak off the record. “They were always an extreme example of that sort of work, at which they were operating at the sharpest of ends. Tim [Bell] had his USP – the lawyer’s cab-rank rule that everybody has the right to representation and to get a fair hearing. But he also made it known that he would take on work that other people wouldn’t.

“But I don’t think we should get prissy about all this. We just have to get on with it, trying as hard as we can to do the right thing in an imperfect world.”

THREE CONCLUSIONS I draw three conclusions from the BP saga. Firstly, comms has grown up a lot in the 30 years I’ve been on the receiving

26 Q4 2017 INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK

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ETHICS

NEWSNIGHT ’S KIRSTY WARK GRILLS AN IN-DEMAND LORD TIM BELL ABOUT HIS ROLE IN THE GUPTA DEAL BBC

founder of a successful, fast-growing, mid-range financial consultancy. “And so, just like when we fall in love, we know it when we see it. The same goes for assessing potential clients. If it feels dodgy, if it sounds implausible, if you have to spend a lot of time justifying it to your colleagues, it’s probably not right.”

In the BP case, it’s shocking that no one questioned the original mandate, says Robyn de Villiers, chairman and CEO of Burson-Marsteller Africa. “I don’t know who wrote the Oakbay brief [the fateful campaign was conducted for the Gupta family’s Oakbay Investments] but anybody here would have known how dangerous such stirring-up of racial tension is.” There are lessons here about being outside your zone of familiarity, and how much it pays to have local connectivity and insight.

“It isn’t that the Guptas and Oakbay should not be represented by anyone – a PR can help them rebuild trust – but the actual brief had no moral compass and that isn’t acceptable,” says de Villiers. “I think any professional services company would find it difficult to go near them now.”

For the PR sector to recover its poise, it must look at how it is perceived by the wider business community, says Sarah Hall, author of FuturePRoof, and CIPR’s incoming president: “We have to address any misgivings about the quality of our practice. The industry may be negatively associated with organisations like Bell Pottinger and publicists like Max Clifford but they are not reflective of the wider workforce. We need to trumpet the value of PR and celebrate best practice.

“Bell Pottinger may well have thought it was big enough to weather the storm but history tells a different tale. It’s a warning to any management team that places profits ahead of people and purpose.”

The overall effect of the BP affair may prove positive, says de Villiers. “When you have leaders from companies like Investec and Richemont expressing their strong disapproval, this shows that CEOs take the work that our industry does on corporate reputation very seriously,” she says. “We want senior people to

Bell Pottinger is a warning not to place profits before people and purpose understand our work and what we do.

We still don’t do well telling our own story and this has put us in the spotlight.”

Public relations must, in the end, strive for professional status, which, says Hall, depends on “barriers to entry and widespread ethical competence”.

She adds: “High-quality professional judgement comes from being able to apply a code of conduct to everyday work. Expertise on its own is not enough.

This is why our industry bodies are so important in the drive to professionalism.”

“A HUGE REPUTATIONAL HIT” What’s clear in the BP case is that self-regulation through the PRCA (the Public Relations and Communications Association) has worked. A complaint was made against BP by South African opposition party the Democratic Alliance, the complaint was investigated, and the agency was expelled from the PRCA. But there is more at stake here than the fate of one agency – particularly for those entering the PR industry. They are

classic millennials, keen on purpose, sustainability and doing ‘the right thing’.

Many will also be considering careers in accountancy, the law or management consultancy. They don’t want to work for companies they disapprove of. Agencies and corporations will need systems that enable staff to decline to work on accounts for reasons of conscience.

And individuals must show leadership by constantly adhering to professional standards, as well as remembering the value that the profession brings. “I think we can alter corporate behaviour that the public will find unacceptable,” insists Bennett.

“The Bell Pottinger affair has dealt us a huge reputational hit,” says a former PR group chairman who preferred to speak off the record. “They were always an extreme example of that sort of work, at which they were operating at the sharpest of ends. Tim [Bell] had his USP – the lawyer’s cab-rank rule that everybody has the right to representation and to get a fair hearing. But he also made it known that he would take on work that other people wouldn’t.

“But I don’t think we should get prissy about all this. We just have to get on with it, trying as hard as we can to do the right thing in an imperfect world.”

THREE CONCLUSIONS I draw three conclusions from the BP saga. Firstly, comms has grown up a lot in the 30 years I’ve been on the receiving

26 Q4 2017 INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK

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ETHICS

end of its story offers. PR is now well ensconced in the marketing services fabric.

Many notable firms operate within one of the large international conglomerates, such as WPP. With such high-profile, publicly listed entities come extensive rules about behaviour – codes of ethics. This has forced the industry into line.

Secondly, rival professional services outfits now have their tanks on the comms industry lawn and are targeting what they see as highmargin work. Law firms in the area of libel and defamation, seeing a drought of work, have moved across into ‘risk’ and ‘reputation management’. Deloitte has a ‘crisis and resilience department’, and recently acquired the PR company Regester Larkin. PRs would do well to be aware of the competitive threats in their market.

Thirdly, it’s also important to note that the Guptas destroyed not only a sizeable PR company but also did serious reputational damage to both KPMG and esteemed management consultancy McKinsey. Any professional services company getting too close to the Guptas was going to come out badly, although it was the PR agency that suffered the most.

Why? I’d venture that the industry is not treated with the same respect as most of its counterparts. PR is an easy target and, sadly, often its own worst advocate, preferring to dwell out of the limelight – hidden in the shadows, even.

But I strongly believe that business, more than ever, requires good counsel: a straight and honest voice with the benefit of not necessarily being part of the body corporate.

It’s alarming how even mature and very large businesses perceive both themselves and the world through a glass, darkly. They need help to see things clearly and in 20/20.

And, when 23% of people in a recent poll think even travel agents should be nationalised, we have problems. Were I a high-profile high-net-worth individual, a fat cat atop a FTSE 100 company, or at the helm of an exciting young start-up, one thing’s for certain: I’d want my consigliere by my side most of the time.

BY ROB SMITH

hether it’s card sharps in old movies or magicians on Britain’s Got Talent, we’re all familiar with the idea of distracting an audience from what’s really going on. But distracting voters from allegations of undue influence on a government? Then it becomes much less entertaining.

The relationship between the Gupta family and South African president Jacob Zuma (above) had long been controversial by the time that Bell Pottinger took up a £100,000-per-month contract in January 2016 with the family’s subsidiary, Oakbay Investments.

Following investigations by numerous journalists, it came to light that the brief was to create fake bloggers and social media accounts portraying the Gupta family as victims of a racist conspiracy involving ‘white monopoly capital’, in order to deflect from any scandal that might be associated with the family.

Accusations of stoking racial tension in a country still coming to terms with apartheid soon followed, as did the departure in August 2016 of Bell Pottinger’s founder, Lord Tim Bell, who claimed that he was unhappy with the handling of the account.

His version of events remains disputed and rumours of a power struggle with the firm persist. This summer saw a concerted campaign to highlight BP’s activities with the Guptas.

In July 2017, CEO James Henderson issued an “unequivocal and absolute” apology for the “inappropriate and offensive” social media campaign, but by then the writing was on the wall.

The opposition Democratic Alliance party lodged a complaint with the PRCA. Following an investigation, the trade body expelled BP in September, citing evidence that BP’s actions inflamed racial discord in South Africa.

By this time, major clients were abandoning ship and the end was not far away. In September, one of the best-known PR firms in the world was no more.

W

GETTY

Matthew Gwyther is a presenter of BBC Radio 4’s In Business and former editor of Management Today

Bell Pottinger’s demise: a potted history

Rob Smith is editor of Influence INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q4 2017 27

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end of its story offers. PR is now well ensconced in the marketing services fabric.

Many notable firms operate within one of the large international conglomerates, such as WPP. With such high-profile, publicly listed entities come extensive rules about behaviour – codes of ethics. This has forced the industry into line.

Secondly, rival professional services outfits now have their tanks on the comms industry lawn and are targeting what they see as highmargin work. Law firms in the area of libel and defamation, seeing a drought of work, have moved across into ‘risk’ and ‘reputation management’. Deloitte has a ‘crisis and resilience department’, and recently acquired the PR company Regester Larkin. PRs would do well to be aware of the competitive threats in their market.

Thirdly, it’s also important to note that the Guptas destroyed not only a sizeable PR company but also did serious reputational damage to both KPMG and esteemed management consultancy McKinsey. Any professional services company getting too close to the Guptas was going to come out badly, although it was the PR agency that suffered the most.

Why? I’d venture that the industry is not treated with the same respect as most of its counterparts. PR is an easy target and, sadly, often its own worst advocate, preferring to dwell out of the limelight – hidden in the shadows, even.

But I strongly believe that business, more than ever, requires good counsel: a straight and honest voice with the benefit of not necessarily being part of the body corporate.

It’s alarming how even mature and very large businesses perceive both themselves and the world through a glass, darkly. They need help to see things clearly and in 20/20.

And, when 23% of people in a recent poll think even travel agents should be nationalised, we have problems. Were I a high-profile high-net-worth individual, a fat cat atop a FTSE 100 company, or at the helm of an exciting young start-up, one thing’s for certain: I’d want my consigliere by my side most of the time.

BY ROB SMITH

hether it’s card sharps in old movies or magicians on Britain’s Got Talent, we’re all familiar with the idea of distracting an audience from what’s really going on. But distracting voters from allegations of undue influence on a government? Then it becomes much less entertaining.

The relationship between the Gupta family and South African president Jacob Zuma (above) had long been controversial by the time that Bell Pottinger took up a £100,000-per-month contract in January 2016 with the family’s subsidiary, Oakbay Investments.

Following investigations by numerous journalists, it came to light that the brief was to create fake bloggers and social media accounts portraying the Gupta family as victims of a racist conspiracy involving ‘white monopoly capital’, in order to deflect from any scandal that might be associated with the family.

Accusations of stoking racial tension in a country still coming to terms with apartheid soon followed, as did the departure in August 2016 of Bell Pottinger’s founder, Lord Tim Bell, who claimed that he was unhappy with the handling of the account.

His version of events remains disputed and rumours of a power struggle with the firm persist. This summer saw a concerted campaign to highlight BP’s activities with the Guptas.

In July 2017, CEO James Henderson issued an “unequivocal and absolute” apology for the “inappropriate and offensive” social media campaign, but by then the writing was on the wall.

The opposition Democratic Alliance party lodged a complaint with the PRCA. Following an investigation, the trade body expelled BP in September, citing evidence that BP’s actions inflamed racial discord in South Africa.

By this time, major clients were abandoning ship and the end was not far away. In September, one of the best-known PR firms in the world was no more.

W

GETTY

Matthew Gwyther is a presenter of BBC Radio 4’s In Business and former editor of Management Today

Bell Pottinger’s demise: a potted history

Rob Smith is editor of Influence INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q4 2017 27

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08/11/2017 11:03

How to

MAKE ENEMIES and

INFLUENCE PEOPLE

Striving for notoriety is one of the simplest and most provocative of all publicity techniques. But what’s the price of infamy?

BY ANDREW LOWRY. ILLUSTRATION BY MATT HERRING

n 2009, the Heene family of Colorado made headlines around the world when they claimed that their sixyear-old son had flown away in a weather balloon. A media frenzy ensued, the story occupied 34 of the top 40 Google searches, and news networks around the world breathlessly followed every development.

There was one problem: it was nonsense. The boy was hiding in their garage the whole time. Both parents went to jail for wasting police time after admitting the hoax’s goal was to “make the Heene family more marketable for future media interests”.

Only slightly chastened, the family last surfaced in 2015, attempting to sell their children as “the world’s youngest metal band” – to global indifference.

Whatever the ethics of their stunt, it didn’t work.

A fun, only-in-America story? Maybe, but it holds lessons for any comms professional. Attention can be achieved by almost any means, but it won’t necessarily last – and, while notoriety

I

can easily be gained, it’s usually a castle built on sand.

Cut to 2017, and any number of media personalities are figuratively sending their kids up in balloons – only, instead of bagging a reality TV show, they’re seeking real political influence.

From Donald Trump’s Twitter rampages to the rent-a-gob circuit on the news channels, the constant courting of outrage has gone from a popculture PR tool to an acknowledged shortcut for pundits seeking to build their profiles in the most competitive media marketplace in history.

However, this is a risky strategy, and few who have adopted it have found lasting success.

“Trump has obviously been the master of this,” says Mark Borkowski, author and founder of the Borkowski agency. “The genie is out of the bottle.

There are a host of people who in recent years have hit upon this kind of extremity to cut through the noise and impact upon people. The question is how sustainable this is.”

And so we come to the spectacular flameout of Milo Yiannopoulos.

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THE PURSUIT OF NOTORIETY

GIVE A COLUMN INCH AND HE’LL TAKE A MILO Born Milo Hanrahan in 1984, Yiannopoulos bounced around the London media scene, under various names, before parlaying his digital skills into a blogging position at The Telegraph.

Milo’s relationship with the title ended in 2011 after a disastrous collaboration on a start-up awards scheme. The Kernel, a tech site he launched in 2011, also ended badly. Lawyers got involved.

By this point, Yiannopoulos had gathered a large audience on social media, building a persona as the cattiest troll around, merrily holding feuds with all who engaged with him, and particularly targeting the left and feminists. In 2014, ‘Gamergate’, a global online war over misogyny in the gaming industry, saw him adopt the cause of young men, battling their supposed oppression by ‘social justice warriors’.

It’s easy to forget that, in the early days of social media, this kind of notoriety often went unchecked.

“There might not have been the kind of oversight that print [media] had at the time, and he was free to whip up controversy as he liked,” says Iain Martin, Yiannopoulos’s colleague at The Telegraph.

“This [controversy] was tolerated at the time, mostly – to be honest – because there just wasn’t the institutional memory around online publishing, and the relationship between our print and online presences [at The Telegraph] was vague and poorly defined. The brand on paper INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q4 2017 29

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THE PURSUIT OF NOTORIETY

It’s easy to shout something that will really annoy people, from either end of the political compass, but you don’t want to feature people whose sole agenda is that is this venerable old mainstay, but at the time it was a lot more swashbuckling online.”

Most of all, in the midst of an existential crisis caused by the internet, media outlets felt they needed ‘clickbait’.

Edgy looked like a sure-fire route to traffic and revenues. “[Yiannopoulos] did get several slaps on the wrist, but it was mostly because of him and his followers behaving badly on social media,” says Martin.

Yiannopoulos was soon heading across the Atlantic. Hired by Breitbart, his apparent gift for articulating the anger of emasculated young men and his undoubted flair for extravagant rudeness was noticed by the Mercer family, key funders of the Trump campaign.

Yiannopoulos had a talent for grabbing attention. From orchestrating Twitter harassment of comedian Leslie Jones (nude pictures were put online) and writing articles with headlines like ‘Would you rather your child had feminism or cancer?’, and ‘Birth control makes women unattractive and crazy’, to visiting US colleges on an outspoken personal tour, he soon became one of the figureheads of the alt-right. After he took to calling Donald Trump “daddy”, the Southern Poverty Law Center called Yiannopoulos “the person who propelled the alt-right movement into the mainstream”.

As a PR campaign, the underlying mechanics will feel familiar: playing the media at its own game, attentiongrabbing stunts and quotes that are guaranteed to be picked up. Even the visuals were on-brand: Yiannopoulos calls himself “the most fabulous supervillain on the internet”, and

dresses like it, sporting a peroxide blonde quiff and a sharp suit.

So it was little surprise when, in 2016, Simon & Schuster took the bait, awarding Yiannopoulos a $250,000 book deal.

The publisher probably expected some controversy, but was perhaps taken aback by its intensity. Some writers pulled their books from other imprints, while the Chicago Review of Books announced it was boycotting reviews of Simon & Schuster publications for 2017.

Then, in February 2017, the whole edifice came crashing down. After an old podcast interview surfaced in which Yiannopoulos defended child sexual abuse, his contract was cancelled. His book, self-published over the summer, went on to sell just 60,000 copies in six weeks in the US and 1,500 in the UK: not the kind of figures a publisher would want from a $250,000 outlay.

KATIE HOPKINS DO YOU THINK COMMUNICATORS HAVE AN ETHICAL OBLIGATION TO CONSIDER THE INTERPRETATION MADE BY THEIR AUDIENCE, AND THEIR AUDIENCE’S ACTIONS? For me, as a communicator, my obligations are to reflect the truth as I see it – which can only ever be my truth. It’s not called ‘news’ or ‘factual reporting’. I would never take accountability for any acts or thoughts that people have, because I feel quite harmless.

We’re in a new phase for the media industry; the news media is compressed and the amount of things we are able to say is so narrow.

I believe there is a whole world of people out there who either are like me or have opinions different from me who feel like they can’t speak out, so I feel that’s part of my job now.

HOW DO YOU PICK THE TOPICS YOU COVER? My preference is to see what’s going on for myself and write about it. I went to Sweden to walk the ‘no-go zone’; I spent 48 hours in Calais at the migrant camp; I went from Libya across the Mediterranean charting

THE TAMING OF THE TROLL Yiannopoulos is arguably the most flamboyant practitioner of a particular kind of provocation. You’ll see it practised by former Apprentice candidate Katie Hopkins, columnist Richard Littlejohn and radio presenter Jon Gaunt. Yiannopoulos also happens to have parlayed his notoriety into prominence within an American political movement. But, and this is important, when the mainstream came calling, his endless stone-throwing and years of being a wind-up merchant caught up with him.

“With people like this, we know we’d get ‘hate clicks’, but… the product [isn’t] any good,” says a commissioning editor at a major newspaper, who asked not

I would never take accountability for any acts or thoughts that people have, because I feel quite harmless

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She was, in her own words, “direct” and “obnoxious” on The Apprentice. Today, Katie Hopkins is a Twitter provocateur and outspoken columnist for Mail Online the migrant boats through southern Italy. I like to go and talk to people.

Most importantly, I look at my own little life… When I feel my heart go, that’s my favourite stuff. I’ve become much more political.

WHAT ARE YOUR PREFERRED COMMUNICATION METHODS? Radio is my preferred platform.

I loved my radio show [LBC]. Do I regret the tweet that caused me to lose my radio show? Yes. Radio felt like such an honest platform because you let listeners go for it and allow yourself to change how you think. On Twitter it’s about using a limited space to make a significant impact by being clever. You have to think about how you can use Twitter to create something that’s used by others and that makes your near-rejecters acknowledge it.

WHY DON’T YOU HAVE PR REPRESENTATION? I don’t wish to present anything that isn’t me. My own personal PR is that I tend to surprise people because I’m not what they thought. I did the Jeremy Vine radio show What Makes Us Human? and it really worked. As I walked down the road afterwards, people couldn’t [reconcile] the stories and the voice on the radio with this ‘villain’. Every panto needs a baddie!

Katie Hopkins is the author of Rude (Biteback Publishing; £9.99) www.bitebackpublishing.com

MATT WRITTLE

DO YOU THINK THAT YOUR NOTORIETY DECREASES YOUR LEVEL OF SOCIAL INFLUENCE? Some people will say I’m controversial for a living, some people will say I’m a parody and some people will downright hate me. That’s exactly what they’re entitled to feel.

DOES THIS REJECTOR GROUP GET SO BIG THAT YOU ARE NO LONGER VIABLE CURRENCY OR RELEVANT? If that’s the truth and I write myself out of the media space, as a 42-year-old woman, that is okay. There are a lot of things we can do in life that are far more significant than peddling our missives in the media game. More likely, the spaces for voices like mine will increase and this phase of censorship will pass.

That will be a long way from corporations like the BBC: we’ll find our own methods of communication.

to be named. “It’s easy to shout something that will really annoy people, from either end of the political compass, but you don’t want to feature people whose sole agenda is that.

[Features should offer] opinions and analysis, not two minutes of hate.”

Indeed, none of the editors I spoke to about this article said they’d be keen on commissioning Yiannopoulos, despite the online attention it would give them. These were all pillars of Her Majesty’s press, however. Others may take a different view.

“Publishers who measure success only in terms of social media engagement are likely to feel pressured to produce work that provokes a passionate response,” says media commentator Ian Burrell.

Hamish Thompson of Houston PR says that “people are jaded; they almost want to be goaded into a response, and it’s very easy [for commentators] to play up to that”. But, over time, this has two negative implications.

The first is the reputational impact of degenerating ethics. “I think the more cynical out there are certainly incentivised into this ethical race to the bottom,” says Thompson.

And, eventually, that shock factor gets diluted: “The danger is only in becoming predictable,” Thompson adds.

“People like haters,” says Borkowski.

“It’s a way to build a brand but, leaving aside the morality issue around only spouting negativity, I don’t see any level of bad publicity as sustainable.

Someone else will come along and be prepared to go even further. It’s all part of the game – that’s what many of these people see it as. They’ll shed their moral compass, if it ever existed in the first place, but goodwill always prevails in the end.”

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08/11/2017 14:22

THE PURSUIT OF NOTORIETY

KERRY-ANNE MENDOZA

DO YOU THINK THAT YOUR NOTORIETY DECREASES YOUR LEVEL OF INFLUENCE? We wear ‘notorious’ as a badge of honour.

We’re approved of by the people that it’s important for us to be approved of by, and we’re upsetting the right people, such as powerful individuals and institutions.

There are moral absolutes – you can’t be half in favour of human rights or equality.

HOW DO YOU PICK THE TOPICS YOU COVER? Journalists pitch stories that are of interest to them. We’re looking to plug gaps in the media conversation and amplify the voice of civil society – NGOs, campaigners and activists – by putting them on our website and in our podcast. We have a section for science and technology, and an environment section, and we mostly deal with politics.

We’ve also just launched the Investigative Journalism Fund, where writers pitch and we fund long-form journalism.

WHAT COMMUNICATIONS METHODS WORK FOR YOU? We knew we needed to start with written journalism. The average reading age in the UK is nine; we make sure the language of our articles has a reading age of eight, so that anyone can read them and understand what’s happening. It’s a social-mediadriven outlet so the headlines must function as adverts, with a sense of urgency and purpose. They need to be as widely relatable as possible. Our podcast is a weekly news round-up. Each week has a theme and we talk about our stories in greater depth.

WHAT COMMUNICATIONS TECHNIQUES DO YOU USE ON TV? You must speak in the way your audience speaks, without using jargon, so that they can engage with you, and always be conscious of the context of what you’re speaking about – issues are interrelated and often what’s missing is a holistic approach.

ADRIAN SHERRATT

Kerry-Anne Mendoza edits left-wing online newspaper The Canary, whose stated aim is to disrupt the status quo in the UK. In her own words: “Disruption means conflict. We are pointing fingers.”

WHAT COMMUNICATIONS OPPORTUNITIES HAVE YOU TURNED DOWN? I was invited on a TV panel to have a debate with Katie Hopkins. It’s not because I don’t believe Katie has the freedom to air her personal opinions, but the moment you put people in adversarial situations you get gridlock. I don’t think holding sensational [panels] is the most productive way to share views.

AS THE CANARY BUILDS A SUBSCRIBER BASE, IS THERE A WORRY THAT YOU’RE PREACHING TO THE CONVERTED? Our audience is 15 million readers a month so we’re not a niche outlet. Not only do we reach people on our own outlet but we’ve now got that conversation into the established media. We made a platform so big it became ‘unignorable’.

Visit The Canary at www.thecanary.co

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08/11/2017 11:34

NOTHING BUT THE

TRUTH

Who tells the story in the information storm that follows a major incident? The police, the media, victims and families all want to communicate their version of events. But it’s the truth that often ends up the loser. This is crisis planning in the raw...

WORDS MATTHEW ROCK

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Police and emergency services gather at Parsons Green Tube station. Social media made efforts to control the flow of information more difficult for the authorities Right: forensic experts inspect the makeshift bomb aboard the Tube carriage

REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

CRIME COMMS

The victim’s story Greg Hannan, Parsons Green On the morning of 15 September, Greg Hannan took a different route into work.

For the previous few weeks, Hannan (not his real name) and his girlfriend had been staying with friends while they got their bathroom done up, but that day he was back to travelling from west London to his job in sales.

While his Tube train was waiting at Parsons Green, a fireball tore through the carriage where he was sitting.

Bewildered, Hannan managed to stagger out of the train and jumped down onto the track. In doing so, he injured his ankle but was able to pick his way out of the station. There, although it

was only minutes since the explosion, the emergency services were already getting into gear. A triage centre had been set up in the nearby Côte brasserie, and Hannan was immediately helped into it by a passer-by.

“At first you think weird thoughts,” says Hannan, speaking about the day for the first time to Influence. While waiting in the triage centre that had been set up in the nearby restaurant, he started contacting friends and colleagues to say that he had, he thought, been caught up in a terrorist incident. “My friend on the phone said to me ‘It’s not on the BBC yet’ and I just remember thinking ‘Does he think I’m lying?’”

Only minutes later, and before the incident had been reported in the mainstream media, a friend sent Hannan a picture of the bomb. “I thought: ‘No, this can’t be – it’s too early for someone to have a picture.’ But it turned out it was the bomb in the Lidl bag.”

The ‘citizen media’ didn’t take long to get to the story. “When I came out of the station, it was like TV; there were just fire brigades and everything, and people with their phones. The journalists got there so quick; I think a lot of them were just freelance or people looking for things to go viral.” Hannan’s brother also got there quickly from his job in the City. “He could tell who the families were as they were the only ones there who didn’t have their phones out filming,” says Hannan.

“Controlled chaos” soon took over.

A police cordon was quickly established, and a call went out for anyone in the neighbourhood with medical expertise, prompting dozens of volunteers. In no time at all, the 17 injured people inside the Côte had set up a WhatsApp group to update their loved ones waiting outside.

While waiting in the Côte, Hannan first became aware of efforts to control the information flow. “They were cagey. They weren’t saying anything about the bomb

until the fire brigade came up to me and said: ‘We’ve found a device and it is a bomb, but don’t worry – we’ve tested it and there’s nothing toxic in it.’”

However, when he arrived at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, it was clear this was a terrorist incident. “It was the most surreal thing,” Hannan says. “I had a doctor and nurse waiting for me in the car park. It was like the president being shot – you just get rushed through.

It was wall-to-wall armed police and I had my own armed copper. We went through to the doctors. At this stage it was still no names, just my number – the doctors aren’t allowed to know your name. I had this big brown envelope; all my information was in it and the copper held it at all times. They were like: ‘He doesn’t have a name; he’s part of the major incident.’”

Downstairs, Hannan’s brother was on lockdown in a family liaison room and his girlfriend had sneaked through the police cordon by claiming she worked at the hospital – “apparently they’re just paranoid about journalists coming through”, says Hannan.

Hannan doesn’t want any personal publicity. His mum still doesn’t know he was involved, despite some long-lens images of him being carried into the ambulance at Parsons Green appearing on one mainstream news site. He’s had “zero advice” from the authorities about how to handle any media interest.

Indeed, he’s left with a strange sense of ‘Did that really all happen?’. “I’ve been looking at the media intently, and it’s as if people are killing the story. It’s all gone very quiet,” he says.

There may, though, be one lasting legacy: “It was like this big worldwide incident that I was thrown into, and what’s weird is this guy who may go down for attempted murder – my name will be on the charge sheet. I’m a victim of that; officially someone’s tried to kill me. That’s really surreal.”

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CRIME COMMS

The police PR Amanda Coleman, head of corporate communications at Greater Manchester Police For police comms professionals, there’s one key consideration when a major incident takes place, says Amanda Coleman, head of corporate communications at Greater Manchester Police: “What information do we need to get out to preserve and protect lives?”

When something of the scale of the Manchester Arena attack happens, events move phenomenally quickly.

When Coleman started her police career 18 years ago, many overnight incidents wouldn’t get picked up by the media until the following morning; the first call after the Arena attack came in within 10 minutes, and social media activity was instantaneous.

One of the first priorities is rumour management. There’s a growing trend, especially in murder and sex-abuse cases, for suspects’ names to crop up on social media. This misinformation can spread quickly, and can trigger reprisals, compromise the anonymity of juvenile offenders and derail a whole investigation. So the police must respond fast. “We’ve had to remind people that they could be in contempt of court by mentioning names on Twitter or Facebook,” says Coleman.

For the police, the objective is to quickly become “the trusted voice”. “We need people to feel that we’re in control of the situation,” says Coleman. This will sometimes be about communicating to a specific, affected local community.

“Our watchwords must be honesty, speed, integrity, authenticity and keeping people at the heart of communications.”

In the weeks following the Manchester Arena attack, Coleman’s 33-strong team was pushed to its physical and psychological limits. Because of the nature of comms work, they had to understand very distressing details.

The responsibilities were 24/7. Night shifts became the norm. Emotion filled the city. Eventually, it all took its toll.

“I’ve always thought I was invincible,” says Coleman. But this was different.

“People said to me: ‘You’re functioning, but you’re not quite you.’” For the first time, she turned to her employer for trauma counselling. Other members of her team, seeing their boss wasn’t hiding how she was feeling, followed suit.

Coleman was helped by having previously done resilience training, but she is concerned about the mounting pressures faced by police comms people: “There is now such a span of work, stretching from behavioural change campaigns to dealing with relatively minor offences such as burglary, through to operational preparedness for a major terrorist incident. Without access to professional help, many people may be pushed to the edge.”

Heightened tensions and emotions in Manchester following the Arena attack put police comms staff under serious strain

The family spokesman Clarence Mitchell Few criminal cases have caught the public’s imagination like that of Madeleine McCann, the little girl who was taken from her bedroom while on holiday with her family in Portugal in 2007. Over 10 years on, almost any news relating to her disappearance will still command column inches. “It is, in the truest sense of the word, a unique situation,” says Clarence Mitchell, spokesman for Madeleine’s parents, Gerry and Kate McCann.

Mitchell is a veteran correspondent who spent 20 years covering highprofile crimes for the BBC, including cases such as the Soham and Milly Dowler murders. And he has concerns about how the police and the media will work together in the future.

The relationship is always one that “has a degree of creative tension about it”, he says. On the one hand, the police can be reactive and defensive, “partly because they are not necessarily privy to the full facts”. On the other, the tabloids can operate to their own rules.

Mitchell saw this vividly in 2007 in the toxic mix of legal constraints on the Portuguese media, a feeding frenzy among UK tabloids, and an insatiable demand for news about the McCann case. “Material claims, unsourced and 99.9% of the time untrue, were leaked to the Portuguese press. That material was then picked up by the UK media

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out there and, as they couldn’t get any balancing sources or confirmation, they would simply rerun it. Then the following day the Portuguese press would pick up the UK running of the original nonsense.” It was, says Mitchell, “a spin cycle of rumours”.

What’s needed for the police-media dynamic to function properly is good journalists with open channels to senior sources. In the Dowler case, say, Mitchell became a conduit for a third party who had information but didn’t want to talk directly to Surrey Police. “It led to the stage where there was a police search of woodland, where I was on the phone with the third party giving me information.”

Post-Leveson, there are tight controls on what even senior officers can say to the media, as well as a new generation of journalists who aren’t covering the courts or making regular calls to the police, fire and ambulance stations. As a result, and here Mitchell chooses his words carefully, “an awful lot of ignorance can display itself to the police”. Young journalists, under the pressure of a rolling news cycle, can end up “demanding a quick response and not understanding the nuances of a story or the care that perhaps needs to be taken”.

The results can be unedifying. “It’s a press officer with limited information talking to a journalist with even less information. It doesn’t yield anything useful for either side,” says Mitchell.

REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

Gerry and Kate McCann hired a spokesman to help deal with the intense media interest in the disappearance of their daughter

Jeff Pope is a master of sensitively dramatising true crimes, such as the murder of Rhys Jones by Sean Mercer (pictured)

The dramatist Jeff Pope What makes Jeff Pope’s work so compelling is the freshness of the events he dramatises. Just as a gruesome new story begins to wane, Pope’s factual dramas emerge to cast new, dappled light on the events and the people involved.

The Oscar-nominated Philomena, The Moorside, Little Boy Blue – these are genuinely pioneering dramas that help us see our world with fresh eyes. Right now, Pope is working on dramatisations of the Hatton Garden heist, which took place in 2015, and the murders committed by Stephen Port in Barking in 2014 and 2015.

The proximity of the events means their dramatisation must be handled with great sensitivity. “How soon is too soon?” asks Pope. “Good question. It’s a gut feeling. I’m largely guided by those closely affected: how do they feel?”

In making Little Boy Blue, about the shooting of 11-year-old Rhys Jones in Liverpool, Pope worked closely with Rhys’s parents, Melanie and Steve.

He knew they were interested in a TV programme. “The family wanted to keep Rhys’s memory alive, to tell his story.”

But Pope always insists on retaining editorial independence and control.

While he worked with the Jones family on the script, the final decisions about what to include remained with him.

The drama isn’t in the criminal; it’s in the impact of that crime

The 2017 BBC drama The Moorside depicted the response of the community in Dewsbury to the disappearance of nine-year-old Shannon Matthews in 2008. (It turned out the whole incident had been faked by her mother, Karen.) This was a delicate subject; the West Yorkshire community had become tired of being characterised as feckless benefits cheats.

In the end, Pope’s drama seemed to strike a fair balance. The Daily Telegraph review of the series said “The Moorside proves TV is finally taking the working class seriously”, while Pope himself acknowledges that “we may have been fairer to Karen Matthews than some women on the Dewsbury estate”.

Pope learned to tell great crime stories while working as a reporter on the Ealing Gazette. “You’re looking for an entry point and a high-profile event that has already achieved a power in our consciousness,” he says. “And the drama isn’t in the criminal; it’s in the impact of that crime. You need a way to ask an audience to imagine themselves in a situation and how they would react.”

This new genre is already throwing up serious ethical and PR issues. After the BBC’s recent Three Girls (not one of Pope’s projects) about the grooming of girls for prostitution in Rochdale, Greater Manchester Police, already bruised by previous failed investigations, expressed concerns that the series might inflame racial tensions in the area and incur additional policing costs.

Maybe the police and media will always co-exist in a state of dramatic tension...

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03/11/2017 12:10

ANATOMY OF A CAMPAIGN

ANATOMY OF A CAMPAIGN

How the Lions find their roar You’ve no full-time talent on your books, no permanent stadium, and you only appear every four years. But you do have iconic status…

Welcome to the world of the British & Irish Lions, and the unique set of challenges facing Dave Barton, head of communications

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hen, on Wednesday 31 May, the British & Irish Lions were greeted in Auckland with a traditional Maori welcome, all eyes were on the 41-man squad. How would they respond? Would they even respond? When the players broke into the Welsh hymn Calon Lân, it felt supremely appropriate – but it didn’t happen by accident.

Rewind a year or so and Dave Barton was taking on a complex task as head of communications for the British & Irish Lions. Arriving from a similar post at the Rugby Football Union, the brief was: “To promote and protect the reputation of the British & Irish Lions as the world’s best-loved touring team.”

W

For most sports brands, the weekly rhythm of matches and player interviews means a non-stop stream of coverage.

For the Lions, however, it’s much harder to stay in the public eye.

“The only asset is the brand,” says Barton. “The challenge was to come up with a strategy not just for the tour itself, but for the Lions as a business.”

So how do you generate interest in the tour when your major assets – the players – are not available to you?

You have to get creative. “We looked at what the Lions mean to people, what the team’s history is, what its real DNA is – iconic moments going right back to 1888. It then becomes about leveraging whatever is around,” says Barton.

Social media was integral, particularly video – “a reflection of what people want

now”. The team researched and diarised times in the year leading up to the tour when there was a hook for archive footage. On International Joke Day, say, they’d bring out a clip of a player telling a joke on the bus from a previous tour.

The Oscars, always a big night for speeches, was a good time to remind people of Lawrence Dallaglio’s ‘sacrifice’ speech or Jim Telfer’s rousing ‘Everest’.

“There’s a lot of planning around what is happening in the world,” says Barton.

“We were always asking what might make us relevant today.”

The digital function was integrated into the comms department. “So often digital is treated as a commercial function,” notes Barton, “but it is a fundamental editorial channel for managing your message and narrative.”

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THE LIONS’ MOUTHPIECE

Clockwise from left: the Lions and All Blacks celebrate a historic tie in the test series; Dave Barton puts the comms plan into action; Taulupe Faletau does his part for the PR strategy by scoring a try

Results were impressive. Between November 2011 and June 2013 (the period prior to the 2013 tour), there were nine million views of Lions’ videos. In the corresponding period before the latest tour (November 2015 to June 2017) that leaped to 62.5 million views – an uplift of 694%.

THE FOUR PILLARS OF WISDOM Four tactical pillars made up the bedrock of the comms team’s plan: ‘hero moments’, ‘rugby moments’, ‘Lions drumbeat’ and public relations.

Each had a primary purpose.

“It was important to have a strategy that looked at all the strands of the business,” says Barton. “Everything was linked to one of these tactical pillars. This helped ensure there was no wasted activity.”

The real headline-grabbing events were the hero moments, those times when the Lions could expect to be back-page or even front-page leads – for example, when the squad was

announced or got together for the first time, or, of course, the tour itself.

The rugby moments kept the Lions relevant between tours. Speculation on who might be selected, with domestic and international rugby matches being viewed through a Lions lens, kept the red jersey topical even when a tour might seem a long way off to the average fan.

These moments were also an opportunity to work with partners and sponsors. “We made a real commitment and plan to integrate sponsor activity,” says Barton. “The Lions is a unique brand but it is not cheap to run a Lions tour.”

A huge 75% of the Lions’ revenue comes from sponsorship. Broadcast rights belong to whichever union the squad is playing in – New Zealand, Australia or South Africa – as do the ticket sales.

The Lions video channels became a platform to showcase key sponsorship and partner activity. Mini-series, including Standard Life Investments’ Lions Watch, QBE’s The Team Behind the Team and Land Rover’s Tracking the

Lions, contributed to 2.4 million video views across Lionsrugby.com and Lions social media channels.

KEEPING SPONSORS INVOLVED For the 2017 New Zealand tour, the Lions had 17 partners, sponsors and suppliers, each with different perspectives and goals. Some, such as kit-maker Canterbury, had long-standing relationships with rugby in general.

For others, such as principal partner Standard Life Investments, this was a whole new venture, and the comms team worked alongside the commercial partnerships team, led by Anna Voyce, to ensure everyone was pulling in the right direction.

“It is imperative that you are aligned with the sponsors that come onboard,” Barton says. “My first day was when the Standard Life Investments deal was announced. They had been worldwide partner for the Ryder Cup and this was their first venture into rugby. We worked very closely with them to make sure INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q4 2017 41

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ANATOMY OF A CAMPAIGN

Clockwise from left: Lions head coach Warren Gatland faces the media scrum; assistant coach Rob Howley takes his turn in the spotlight; Peter O’Mahony captained the Lions for the first test match before being dropped for the second test in favour of tour captain Sam Warburton; comms pros may well find the off-pitch digital statistics just as interesting as the on-pitch ones

The Lions give access behind the scenes because we know that is the thing that helps sustain the brand. It’s what people want that the directions were aligned between the two brands.”

To that end, a brand book was produced following a review of the 2013 tour to Australia, detailing the Lions’ core values and what they stand for, as well as how they are perceived by the players and media, among others.

“We have a language and tone that is respectful of others and our values,” explains Barton. “It’s important to align this and other brand elements with our supporters.”

THE PRE-TOUR WARM-UP As the tour approached, Barton and the team sat down with Warren Gatland, the Lions’ head coach, to decide how to approach New Zealand – a country where rugby is a religion.

As a native New Zealander, Gatland understood what the tour meant to the host nation. “The country is rightly proud of its rugby tradition and heritage,” says Barton. “It was important for us to be good tourists, on and off the field.”

This wasn’t just about delivering songs at Auckland Airport, one of four (practised often) from each of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. On the first Friday, two days after the squad arrived, they visited 12 schools, hospitals and retirement homes. “It was important to us to get out into the community in New Zealand, rather than be siloed away in a bunker and not engaging,” says Barton.

All events were planned carefully with the players, coaching and team operations staff to make sure no one had to spend too long in the spotlight.

“You need to keep a record of who did what and when and what type of media it was – TV, press, online and so on,” says Barton. “It’s important to make sure no one gets burned out and everyone gets their face out there.

“When you’ve got 41 players and six coaches, it enables you to avoid media overload and share the responsibilities around. Gatland and Sam Warburton, the captain, inevitably will front up team announcements and post-match interviews – that’s part of the role – so he would be one of the most-used players.”

Media duties didn’t stop with interviews or photo opportunities.

Being on the other side of the world has in the past made it more complicated to get Lions news to the European audience, but this time the integrated

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THE LIONS’ MOUTHPIECE

digital strategy gave the team more options. Instead of announcing team news at press conferences, in 2017 news was timed – 7am in New Zealand and 8pm in the UK – to get maximum post-supper digital pick-up back home.

“Anyone out in New Zealand will hear about it anyway so it was important to promote things back here and in the 186 countries where interest was registered on the Lions channels,” says Barton.

WHAT GOES ON TOUR DOES NOT STAY ON TOUR Former Lions player Brian Moore invoked the tourist mantra in his 2015 memoir, but these days the aim is to make sure as many people as possible know what is going on during the tour.

This meant video, and lots of it.

A three-person film-production crew was fully embedded with the squad and filmed more than 300 hours of footage, including equipping players with microphones in training, and using drones.

“The Lions give access behind the scenes because we know that is the thing that helps sustain the brand. It’s what people want,” says Barton. “There is no worry about it being intrusive for the players as the crew are very experienced rugby and Lions people and they do it in a fashion that does not get in the way.

“The players know and trust nothing will go out that they don’t want to. There is massive trust between the players and production team,” says Barton.

And so begins a virtuous circle that takes us to the next 18-month run-up, to South Africa 2021. “You’ve got a comms team of nine or 10, half of whom are producing video and images. This gives us a bank of footage that will form the USP for the next tour,” says Barton. … 2021?

In keeping with the Lions’ respectful values, Barton is full of praise for the rest of the comms team: Shane Whelan, Christine Connolly, Brendan Cole, Marcus Casey and Jenni Burke, as well

as Luke Broadley, seconded from the Welsh Rugby Union. In addition, the team was complemented by content agencies that “get the Lions”, such as LiveWire Sport, Sportsbeat, Inpho Photography and video agency Stamp Productions.

“None of us is as good as all of us and we are fortunate to have a great comms team,” Barton says. “They are talented and dedicated, and we wouldn’t have achieved successes without their hard work and commitment.”

No chance of a break, though. The next tour’s comms plan is already under way, with the team making sure the Lions don’t stray too far from the public eye.

“In the short term,” says Barton, “there is Lions Uncovered, a behind-the-scenes film that will give a unique insight into the tour. Next year is the 130th anniversary of the Lions, and we will also push ahead with the Players Club, which has been formed to recognise the contribution and unique connection of every player who has pulled on the Lions jersey. So there’s lots to get stuck into.”

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BANK CRISIS PR

Commonwealth Bank of Australia built its reputation as an industry leader on its advanced tech capabilities. Then the involvement of its smart ATMs in a $77m money laundering case brought the bank to its knees and claimed the CEO’s scalp

BY PAUL SMITH

ig news sometimes has small beginnings.

That was certainly the case in Australia in early August when news desks received a seemingly anodyne media release from AUSTRAC, the country’s financial intelligence and regulatory agency.

“AUSTRAC seeks civil penalty orders against CBA” was the heading of a notice revealing that the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), the country’s largest bank, and indeed its largest listed company, was in big trouble.

AUSTRAC stated that criminal gangs had been using CBA’s high-street cashdeposit machines to launder money for years, capitalising on a basic software error that meant the ATMs failed to flag suspicious transactions. This oversight led to a direct contravention of the bank’s obligations under anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing laws, and had enabled at least $77m to be funnelled through accounts without question.

For most organisations, such a blunder would have been a costly embarrassment, but not the kind of crisis to bring them to their knees.

And yet, within weeks, the bank’s high-profile CEO, Ian Narev, had fallen on his sword.

So what went wrong? This is no straightforward tale of a company handling a PR crisis badly. In fact, in many ways, CBA followed the playbook to the letter. This is, rather, an unusual situation whereby the bank fell victim to its earlier comms successes.

B

TECH APPEAL In the face of new challenges from global tech innovators like Google

and Facebook, CBA, the biggest of Australia’s Big Four banks, had managed to convince customers and the market that it was the undisputed king of banking technology.

The money laundering case is still in the midst of court proceedings, so CBA’s PRs “politely declined” our invitation to discuss how they fostered this image.

But the bank’s rivals were more accommodating, expressing their grudging appreciation of how CBA transformed itself into a tech titan.

“Their PR leadership on technology and innovation was viewed positively by all of us, and it wasn’t just smoke and mirrors because they were also delivering and definitely had a lead,” says a senior corporate communications executive at one of CBA’s rivals, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Between 2007 and 2012, CBA invested billions of pounds in upgrading its creaky internal core banking systems, and the rival PR executive concedes it conducted a masterclass in getting credit for it.

“The aim for their comms team was to show how that huge investment was delivering for their customers, and how it was going to translate to tangible outcomes,” the executive says. “There

Criminals used CBA’s cashdeposit machines to launder money for years

is a lot of reputational value that can come from communicating that.”

And communicate it they did.

Exploiting the charisma of the bank’s chief information officer, Michael Harte, a Kiwi who courted media attention like no banking executive before or since, CBA staged regular technology launches and investor briefings. And, to ensure CBA’s announcements got noticed in journalists’ swamped inboxes, Harte would send text messages to those with whom he’d developed a relationship.

“This one’s a biggie” would be enough to guarantee that big-name business writers would at least take a look.

In 2012, CBA wowed the market with a mobile payment app called Kaching, which offered many of the features that Apple Pay users became familiar with years later, and which was heavily promoted across print, media and radio.

CBA’s PR team cleverly ensured all of this consumer-facing innovation referred back to the investments it had made in upgrading its core systems.

“Customers are demanding a new banking experience that puts the world’s most advanced technology at their fingertips – whether it’s in a branch, on the street or from their smartphone – and for those touchpoints to work together, not independently,” Harte said in the release.

A media release from April 2014 also captures the bank’s tone: “Commonwealth Bank continues to lead its rivals in the mobile banking and payments space, today announcing three new innovations that extend the capabilities of its mobile wallet offering and give businesses access to world-class mobile payment technology.”

This image of CBA was lapped up by consumers and the investment community alike, and Harte became a regular presence alongside Narev at company results presentation days.

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BANK CRISIS PR

James Eyers, banking editor at Australia’s leading business newspaper, The Australian Financial Review, says CBA made an art form of promoting its tech prowess to reporters and, as a result, was left fighting an uphill battle when its technology failed and left it exposed to scandal.

“There was a constant stream of technology-related launches, presentations and tours for the media, including of its ‘innovation labs’,” he recalls. “CBA was technology storytelling first. The other banks have adopted a more outward-looking and open philosophy to innovation, but CBA has always been very keen to promote its internal abilities.”

Indeed, for his first public speech as CEO in 2012, Narev appeared at a Trans-Tasman Business Circle event, which was simultaneously broadcast live on Sky News. His communications team prepared an address in which he laid out his vision for a technologydriven “bank of the future”.

“Although everybody thinks we spend all our time at the head of the organisation talking about what to do with a specific rate, the vast

CBA made an art of promoting its tech, and faced an uphill battle when it failed

majority of our time is spent on longer-term issues and... how this big institution needs to respond at scale to technology changes,” Narev said, referring to his frequent conversations with “tech guru” Harte.

The smart ATMs themselves, which were ultimately to become so handy for money launderers, were unveiled in that same year, with Harte appearing alongside Narev at an investor briefing to add tech gravitas.

Again, despite the ATMs being a consumer-facing innovation, allowing customers to deposit cash and see it instantly in their accounts, the PR messaging referred to the bank’s investment in complex internal systems.

It said it was able to handle instant deposits (unlike its rivals at the time) because it had installed software that enabled “real-time banking”.

CEO Ian Narev will step down in 2018, a victim of his firm’s tech prowess

“With real-time banking at the core, we have enabled instant transfer of value between parties. We aren’t holding money for days; we know our customers don’t want this. We know banks and others are disliked for this,” Harte explained. “If you don’t have rich relationship data and real-time services, you cannot lead the market and you cannot change the game.”

Then disaster struck.

CRISIS STATIONS Once the AUSTRAC announcement was made on a Thursday afternoon, CBA immediately put out a statement saying it needed time to digest the lengthy report.

Rather than duck for cover, Narev was served up to selected media, including Eyers, for an interview on the Sunday morning.

“This response was much faster than CBA’s past scandals relating to financial planning and insurance, where it took Narev longer to respond,” Eyers says.

“However, the focus of all of the news stories on the Monday was on his admission of the bank’s mistakes and his explanation that the reporting failures were due to a ‘coding error’.

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GETTY IMAGES

As CIO, Michael Harte helped create CBA’s reputation as a titan of banking tech

“In reality, this was only part of the story, with the main focus of the regulator’s case being on other alleged failures in reporting suspicious transactions, which were not related to the coding issue at all.”

This was a problem. “CBA has not been the only Australian entity to fall foul recently of technology issues…

CBA’s issue here is more around corporate leadership failure and hence the subsequent reputational issues that follow,” says Curtin Business School marketing lecturer Bridget Tombleson, who previously worked in PR at a number of Australian banks.

In the days after the interview, the bank announced it was removing the bonuses – worth millions of dollars – of all its top executives.

“In reaching this conclusion, the overriding consideration of the board was the collective accountability of senior management for the overall reputation of the group,” the bank’s statement read. “Mr Narev retains the full confidence of the board.”

But six days later the bank’s chairman, Catherine Livingstone, issued a media release on the

“CEO succession process”, which revealed that Narev would retire by the end of the 2018 financial year.

THE RIGHT RESULT? Tombleson thinks CBA handled the money laundering scandal itself reasonably well from a PR perspective. It recognised that it had broken trust with its customers, who had grown to believe its technology was rock-solid.

She even suggests the loss of the bank’s CEO could be deemed an acceptable outcome: “A crisis of this scale is a threat to the confidence of both stakeholders and customers, so ending the tenure of the CEO is not surprising, as new management offers an opportunity to boost that confidence.”

Eyers, however, believes CBA misjudged the public’s expectations.

With a breach of trust like this, he says, the public and media needed to see those directly responsible held to account.

“The action by the chairman to reduce bonuses was a necessary response given calls for accountability, but it

was a blanket approach applied to all current executives, rather than action against the particular bankers who had responsibility for the alleged failures,” Eyers says.

EVERY PR FOR THEMSELVES Whether or not CBA’s response was optimal, a couple of things are clear: CBA had pushed the speed of innovation, and, in the aftermath of AUSTRAC’s revelations, there was a noticeable lack of support from rivals in the form of any statements about fraud being an understandable risk of using new technologies.

“I think some people in rival banks may have seen the money laundering scandal unfold with a small sense of schadenfreude,” Eyers says. “However, it could also have been a case of ‘There but for the grace of God go I’.”

Paul Smith is technology, media and telecoms editor at The Australian Financial Review, and has reported on CBA’s technology strategy for more than a decade INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q4 2017 47

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08/11/2017 11:04

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02/11/2017 16:15

NEW DATA RULES

I DO NOT WANT TO RECEIVE YOUR EMAILS

7 concerns for reputation-makers in the new General Data Protection Regulation

BY ARDI KOLAH

n 1999, marketing guru Seth Godin wrote: “Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.”

These words summarise the way all private-, public- and voluntary-sector organisations will be expected to process personal data in future.

I

From 25 May 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will apply across the EU. It will fundamentally change how people share information about themselves, and their preferences, with organisations that process their personal data. Here’s why.

1

IT GIVES CONSUMERS THE POWER IN THE PROCESSING OF PERSONAL DATA We are being asked to reboot our thinking about data protection and privacy for the digital age.

The concept of personal data has been given a makeover and now covers almost anything that can identify you and me – not just your name or the MAC address of your mobile but even the football team you support. All of this is now protected personal data.

Under the GDPR, we’ve also now got more power to shop around using our personal data. We can compare prices online by sharing our bills for things such as electricity and gas. We can save money by switching suppliers.

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We’ve got more power to access personal records being held about us and make sure that they’re up to date; if they aren’t, we have the right to get them changed. This includes adding more information so that the record isn’t inaccurate.

At the end of the day, we will have far more power at our disposal and many more options. Our ultimate power will be to give and take back consent to the processing of our personal data.

2

THE CORNERSTONE OF THE GDPR IS THE PRIVACY NOTICE All companies – large and small – must up their game if they want to do business with us. And that means we’re entitled to a privacy notice that spells out in ordinary language what they will do with our data and how they will make sure no harm or damage will happen to us as a result.

Regardless of the legal grounds for processing data, we are all entitled to receive a privacy notice. It is an absolute right under the GDPR.

important not just in terms of regulation, but also in terms of reputation and creating competitive advantage.

The GDPR applies to all organisations in the private, public and voluntary sectors that process personal data, irrespective of whether that processing takes place in an EU member state or in any other country.

The regulation imposes a ‘risk-based approach’ to processing personal data, never forgetting that people own it, and organisations control and process it.

From an operational perspective, organisations must make sure they know how to mitigate the risks of processing data, reducing them to a residual risk that’s acceptable for what they do in their industry or sector.

Organisations will be expected to have appropriate technical and organisational safeguards in place to reduce these risks.

Our ultimate power will be to give and take back consent to the processing of our personal data Organisations that ignore all of this could face a significant fine – as much as 4% of their global annual turnover, or €20m, whichever is greater.

Worse still, they could be slapped with a ‘stop order’ that will effectively stop them from running their business, as they won’t be allowed to continue to process customer data on a temporary or permanent basis.

3

ORGANISATIONS MUST ANALYSE THE RELATIVE RISKS OF THE DATA THEY’RE PROCESSING The GDPR was created to replace previous data-protection and privacy laws. However, for organisations, it’s

4

THE KEY COMPLIANCE PRINCIPLES ARE TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY Recording what you’ve done to mitigate the risks in your processing activities is

YOUR RIGHTS UNDER THE GDPR

Article 18: To request the data controller to restrict the processing of your personal data.

Article 17: To request erasure of your personal data.

Article 16: To request rectification of your personal data.

Article 20: To request a copy of your personal data to be transferred between data controllers.

3 2

4

Article 21: To object to the data controller processing your personal data.

5 1 Article 15: To request electronic access or copies of your personal data (where the system allows).

6

7

Article 22: Where the data controller processes personal data and one of the technical measures is automated decision-making, the data subject has an additional, seventh fundamental right to object to this type of processing.

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NEW DATA RULES

important for two reasons. First, it’s about transparency. Second, it’s about accountability. These are two rivers that flow through the GDPR and should also flow through every organisation that needs to comply with it.

Should you have the misfortune to have to deal with a personal data breach after 25 May 2018, having applied the principles of transparency and accountability will serve you well. It’ll be much easier to understand what happened, take positive action quickly, and protect your customers from any further harm or damage to their personal data.

This type of responsible behaviour will be acknowledged by the supervisory authority (in the UK, the Information Commissioner’s Office) when taking a view on the level of culpability for a data breach.

Where lessons haven’t been learned from previous data breaches or near misses, organisations will not be able to expect any mercy.

It’s not just about the fines but also the damage that doing nothing or not enough can cause to an organisation’s reputation in the eyes of its customers and stakeholders. Breaches can lead to a loss of trust and confidence all round.

5

IF YOUR DATA ACTIVITY AFFECTS INDIVIDUALS IN THE EU, THE GDPR WILL APPLY Although the GDPR is an EU regulation, its impact will be felt around the world.

It has a much wider territorial reach than the previous EU directive and the Data Protection Act 1998 that implemented it in the UK. The GDPR applies to a data controller or processor that’s processing personal

Although the GDPR is an EU regulation, its impact will be felt around the world

data in the context of the activities of an establishment in the EU. And this is irrespective of whether that processing takes place in an EU member state or elsewhere. So a call centre or cloud service provider in India that’s processing the personal data of individuals in the EU will be subject to the GDPR.

6

CASE STUDY: DON’T BE THE NEXT TALKTALK The 2015 data breach at TalkTalk did huge reputational damage. Reports in Reuters, the Financial Times and The Times called the company “careless” and criticised it for threatening customer finances. The story broke in October 2015 and an analysis of media sentiment over a 12-month period by analytics firm Alva suggested positivity declined by 43%.

TalkTalk incurred the highest fine to date (£400,000) from the Information Commissioner’s Office, lost customer confidence and trust, and suffered a dramatic drop in its share price.

Perhaps the worst thing about this story is that it all could have been avoided. Human error was a root cause, and that’s a training issue, not just a technical one.

Doing nothing isn’t an option. This kind of behaviour will be seen as an aggravating factor under the GDPR. Continuing to learn from mistakes and near misses will be standard practice in the future, if it isn’t already.

Sadly for TalkTalk, it has yet to learn its lesson: in August 2017, it was fined £100,000 for a further data breach.

THERE COULD (JUST COULD) BE REPUTATIONAL UPSIDES Think about the new regulation as an opportunity to build deeper relationships with customers, clients, supporters and employees.

For companies and organisations in any sector, the GDPR provides a way of building trust and confidence in the digital world, where this may have been eroded or destroyed in the past. When it comes to processing personal data, this can now be done in a highly transparent and accountable way, which will help prevent harm or damage to the personal data in future.

Gone are narrow self-interest and the ruthless pursuit of profit at the cost of taking risks with personal data. In their place is putting the rights, freedoms and interests of your customers first.

7

THE DATA SUBJECT HAS SEVEN FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS Once the data controller has started personal data processing, there are seven fundamental rights that can be exercised by the data subject (shown opposite). The overarching principle in the GDPR is the data subject’s right to check the accuracy and completeness of the personal data that is being processed by the data controller.

This legal right extends to correcting their personal data and adding to it in order that the processing doesn’t affect their rights, freedoms and interests.

Ardi Kolah runs the top-rated GDPR transition programme at Henley Business School and is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Data Protection & Privacy INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q4 2017 51

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08/11/2017 14:22

THE BUSINESS OF PUBLIC RELATIONS AND COMMUNICATIONS

DO IT BETTER THIS ISSUE

GETTY IMAGES

HOW TO GET CLIENTS TO PAY YOU FIVE WAYS TO WIN NEW CLIENTS WHAT THE ROMANS DID FOR PR HOW IPROVISION CAN HELP YOU

A MEETING AT GOOGLE, WITH NO DISCERNIBLE EVIDENCE OF ANYONE ENJOYING IT

How to make meetings seem less like meetings Think the tech world is all beanbags and free lunches? This is what happened when a Google and Yahoo staffer became a comedian and shared her thoughts on working life

BY SARAH COOPER

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DO IT BETTER eetings are painful.

From the moment you get that calendar invite, a thousand knots tighten in your neck and a wave of indigestion hits your stomach. You could skip the meeting but, let’s face it, that would be career suicide.

Scheduling meetings is no different.

Whether it’s waiting for people to respond to your meeting invite, fielding questions about the lack of an agenda or other people adding themselves to your meeting even though they weren’t invited, the entire process is dreadful.

In short, I can’t think of a single pleasant thing about normal meetings.

But, with a little work and creativity, pleasant meetings are possible.

One way to make a meeting less painful is to do whatever you can to trick people into thinking it’s not a meeting.

Everyone will still know deep down that it’s a meeting, but little tricks will make them subconsciously expect something different, enjoyable and maybe even productive.

Here are three fun tricks for making your meeting seem less like a meeting even though it’s definitely a meeting.

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CALL IT SOMETHING ELSE Avoid using the word ‘meeting’.

Calling your meeting by a different name will throw people off the scent.

Here are some fun alternatives: • Huddle • Brain dump • Brain date • Powwow • Pulse-check • Fun time • Extravaganza • Rally • Forum • Tea time • Summit Calling your meeting by another name is a quick and easy way to make your meeting more pleasant. Take this success story from Mick Feeble: “I got into an argument with my team a few weeks ago because they wanted to call a twoday meeting a ‘sprint’, but it was more like a ‘summit’, because we weren’t sure

we could actually design anything.

But nobody wanted to use the word ‘summit’ because nothing ever happens at summits except talking and coming to no conclusions. So then we were trying to decide what else to call it.

The words ‘powwow’ and ‘hootenanny’ and ‘clambake’ were considered. In the end, we agreed to call it a summit and got nothing done.”

Take some time to consider what your meeting should be called and it will go a long way towards making everyone hate it less.

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GIVE YOUR CONFERENCE ROOMS FUN NAMES The practice of giving conference rooms cool names dates back to 1976, when it also didn’t work. One key to picking names is to make sure they follow a consistent, fun theme, so that no one will ever realise this is where their happiness will go to die.

Here are a few conference room themes you can use for your office, together with some example names: Lofty goals you’ll never achieve: • Singularity • Time Travel • Respect of My Father • Revenue Geniuses who are smarter than most of the people on your team: • Buddha • Plato • Einstein • Seinfeld Team qualities: • Lack of Commitment • Avoidance of Accountability • Inattention to Detail • Lost Motivation Random buzzwords: • Game Changer • Innovation Hub • Disruption • Uber for Conference Rooms

Meetings drove Sarah Cooper to comedy

Some of the biggest tech companies in Silicon Valley have taken time to give

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MEETINGS YOU’LL LOVE

The Google X research lab depends on quirky ideas. Hence a meeting room that looks like a padded cell

did over the weekend. This will send everyone into a silent panic while they come up with something interesting, even though they spent the whole weekend binge-watching Netflix.

• Zero to five: at the end of the meeting, ask everyone to rate the meeting from zero (closed fist) to five (spirit fingers). When everyone gives a five, you can clap, even though the meeting really sucked.

• Mood charting: create a chart where the x-axis is time and the y-axis is mood (‘sad’ to ‘happy’). Ask everyone to get up and show what their mood was throughout the week. This is also a great way to see who on your team needs therapy.

• Values award: give an award to the person in the meeting who best exemplified the company’s values in the past week. This works especially well when company values include accidentally hitting ‘reply all’ on emails.

The practice of giving conference rooms cool names dates back to 1976, when it also didn’t work

Google tricks staff into thinking they’re going somewhere fun by naming rooms after Tube stops

their conference rooms interesting names and obviously it’s a major reason for their success.

Just think of what Facebook employees are able to accomplish in a conference room called Sub-prime Mortgage or how much more creative Etsy employees are when they meet in Fleetwood Mac and Cheese, or Ace of Bouillabaisse.

Taking the time to give conference rooms cool names is well worth it.

3 London comms agency Karmarama subtly reminds staff not to balls anything up

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CREATE FUN MEETING RITUALS Making up fun rituals for your meetings will force people to have fun. These little rituals can change how you start or end the meeting, where people sit, stand or crouch, and even who has the power to speak. Here are some ideas: • Personal sharing: start the meeting by asking everyone to share what they

• Meditation: begin the meeting with a three-minute meditation session. This often leads to everyone falling asleep throughout the entire meeting, which is actually more productive than the meeting would have been.

And there you have it. Three great ways to make your meeting seem less like a meeting even though it’s definitely a meeting. Some of you might be wondering if these tricks won’t just lead to an even greater sense of disappointment when people realise that they are, in fact, in just another meeting. And the answer is yes. Yes, it will.

Good luck!

Sarah Cooper is a comedian and the author of 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings: How to Get By Without Even Trying, published by Square Peg (£10) INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q4 2017 55

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DO IT BETTER

Can’t pay, won’t pay The multifaceted business of communications demands slick invoice management and cooperative clients. Late payments can be fatal to any business, but disaster can be avoided

BY MATT BALDWIN

esearch conducted by insurer Zurich earlier this year suggests that over 50% of all SMEs are owed money by clients and customers.

It estimates that some £45bn is owed to small businesses, with one in five firms owed more than £25,000 and one in 10 a staggering £100,000. Our industry is no different.

If left unchecked, late payments can lead to cash-flow problems and put unnecessary strain on the relationship between a client and agency. While it may not always be possible to make

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WHEN CLIENTS DON’T PAY

a client pay promptly, there are some simple practical steps that can help.

GET IT IN WRITING The starting point of any business arrangement is a sound contract that includes clear payment terms and conditions. All too many agency instructions – even in the legal and accounting sectors – are not accompanied by a clear clientagency contract.

Perhaps this is due to the mistaken belief that a heavy-handed document might blight the honeymoon period, but we recommend the CIPR client-agency agreement as a good starting point: it’s ideal for smaller agencies and can forestall client grumbles because it is an industry standard.

Alongside that contract should sit a clear outline of what the agency is to deliver, including a breakdown of agency fees and services bought in that are to be recouped. Clients do not want unwelcome surprises when it is time to pay.

DEFINE PAYMENT TERMS The standard 30-day payment term for invoices is under increasing scrutiny. Many local authorities and public bodies make a commitment to pay SMEs within 14 days of receipt of an invoice, and are good at sticking to that promise. Many larger companies, however, slip into a 60- or even 90-day payment schedule. This is not fair on smaller suppliers.

Sometimes agencies will ask for payment or part-payment up front, or offer a small discount on the invoice amount for prompt payment. I do not like either approach; I believe a client should pay for what has been agreed at the right time.

PROVIDE REPORTS Every invoice should be accompanied by a detailed report of what work has been undertaken in the past month (if on a retainer) or over the specified time period for projects. Do include a breakdown of time spent if the client

requires it. This not only provides immediate clarity for the client, but also an invaluable reference should a problem arise at some point in the future.

STEADY WITH THE ‘EXTRAS’ One potential stumbling block is invoice ‘extras’. In this age of bundled phone and broadband contracts, a client might rightly query any such charges. It is efficient to make these part of the service fee, along with other incidentals like photocopying, magazine and newspaper subscriptions, and media databases, as it allows the client to

Overpromising leads to disappointment and payment problems know exactly what they will be charged.

The fee charged to a client should reflect the cost of doing business – if it doesn’t, perhaps it is time to review those costs.

Services that are bought in for a client, such as media monitoring, filming or print work, should be charged back to them. Travel, however, is one expense that can raise eyebrows. Is first-class rail or air travel really appropriate? If so, make sure your client understands and appreciates, in advance of booking, that they will be charged for it.

HEAD OFF PROBLEMS The competition to win new business can all too often lead to overinflated promises of what you can achieve for a prospective client, leading to disappointment and possible payment problems later. You must be alert to client expectations: if they are asking the impossible, tell them so.

It can help to speak to a would-be client’s other providers for an informal reference. Sometimes the warning bells are so loud that they are impossible to

ignore, and in these situations it may be best to walk away.

MAKE FRIENDS WITH ACCOUNTS It may sound blindingly obvious, but invoice on time and then chase payment once it’s due. Both are simple yet often ignored rules.

More often than not, late payment is down to human error – maybe the invoice has been lost or it is sitting in someone’s in-tray while they are on holiday. A polite email or call can often move things along, and regular contact can stop problems escalating.

At the same time, make friends with the client’s accounts department. Some businesses deliberately pay late to juggle cash flow; others may simply be slow to deal with admin. Either way, accounts payable can help, and copying them in on all invoices means they have ammunition if the original invoice is stalled elsewhere. Find out too, if there are set days when that department makes payments, and then tailor your invoicing procedures accordingly; it could iron out delays.

DOWN TOOLS If a client does not pay, don’t rack up more fees in the hope that they will settle at some point in the future. Tell the client that work is on hold pending payment. They might not like it, but doing so could prompt payment.

The last resort is legal action. A good first port of call is the CIPR legal helpline (free to members). There are specialists out there who can help too.

REMEMBER...

Timely payment is crucial, and making it happen needn’t be as hard as you think.

It pays to trust your gut when meeting a potential client and to be ready to walk away before committing time and resources. There will be other clients.

Matt Baldwin is MD at professional services PR consultancy Coast Communications. Reach the CIPR legal helpline at cipr.co.uk/content/policyresources/business-and-legal-advice INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q4 2017 57

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CORNELIUS ALEXANDER, DAVID ALEXANDER, ROSEM CATHERINE ARROW, ANTHONY OLABODE AYODELE, J JANE BINKS, CATHERINE BISSELL, BEN BLACK, SHARO BOTHWELL, JASON BRANNAN, LORNA BRANTON, BRITT AMANDA BROOKS, CHRIS BROWN, ANTHONY BULLICK NIALL CALDWELL, TRACY CALVERT, KORAY CAMGOZ, DO CHRISTOPHER CHILTON, WILLIAM CHURCH, LISA CLABER COLEMAN, GEORGE COLEMAN, JONATHAN COLLETT COPE-BALCHIN, MARK COTTON, JONATHAN CROSS, NICHOLE CULVERWELL, JANE CUMMING, NICOLA DAVIES, J ALAN DUERDEN, HELEN EDWARDS, SALLY ELLSON, ST MARTIN FLEGG, KAREN FLOYD, YVONNE FLYNN, CLAI RANKIN FROST, PAT GAUDIN, DANIEL GERRELLA, SOPH GRIER, NEIL GRIFFITHS, SANDRA GUSTUS, MARIA HADJI HAMILTON, CHRISTOPHER HARRISON, SAMUEL HARRISO HERN,SUJARDAHERRING,CHRISHOLLY,PETERHOLT,JAN LAURIAN HUBBARD, TIM HUDSON, KATHARINE HUGHES BEN JEFFREYS, CARON JONES, LISA JONES, ANDREA KE XIAONINGKONG,ANNE-MARIELACEY,DANIELLARGE,EM CHRISTOPHER LOVE, LINDA MACKENZIE, JASON MAC MALOUF,MARKMANN,KATIEMARLOW,TRICIAMASKELL, JULIE MCIVOR, MATTHEW MCKAY, KATHRYN MCKEE, DA RACHEL MILLER, JACQUELINE MILLS, JORIS MINNE, EL MORGAN,RACHELMOSS,PAULMYLREA,WILLIAMNICHO ROBERT OKUNNU, MARK OLIPHANT, RACHAEL O’REGAN KATRINE PEARSON, SYLVIE PENDER, KRISTIE PERROTTE, R JACQUELINE PURCELL, CHLOE PURCELL, WENDY RAESIDE REVELL, KATE REYNOLDS, ADAM RIDDELL, RACHEL RO SANSOM, ANJU SARPAL, LAURA SCOTT, EMMA SHEA, JE SHURETY, CLAIRE SIMS, ALAN SMITH, MICHAEL SMITH, STONE, LAURA SUTHERLAND, SALLY SYKES, MAXIMILIAN JANET TAYLOR, MATT TEE, ABHA THAKOR, SHEENA THO TOMOS,MARTINTURNER,DANIELTYTE,ELIZABETHUNDE EDWARD VENNING, BEN VERINDER, STEPHEN WADDING AMYWARDLAW,JASONWASSELL,JANEWELLS,JONWHITE MARTYNWILLIAMS,SHARONWILLIS,JULEWILSON,SUEWO 11197 200 Chartered INFLUENCE 058_059_CIPR_Q4_2017.indd 58 DPS ad v6.indd 1-2

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OSEMARY ALLISTER, ALAN ANSTEAD, MATT APPLEBY, ELE, JENNI BARKLEY, ANDREW BARTLETT, HILARY BERG, ARON BLEESE, VINNY BOLINA, TIM BORRETT, NICOLA BRITTANY BRESLIN, LORRAINE BRIDGES, KEVIN BRISCOE, LLICK, OLIVIA BURROW, LAURA BUTCHER, JADE BYRNE, OZ, DONNA CASTLE, JENNIFER CAVEN, MEILYR CEREDIG, ABER, JON CLEMENTS, MATTHEW CLEMENTS, AMANDA LLETT, LINDSEY COLLUMBELL, ANDREW COOPER, AMY OSS, DAVID CRUNDWELL, HOLLY CUBITT, LEE CULLEN, VIES, JO DELBRIDGE, CHARLOTTE DIMOND, SINEAD DOYLE, N, STEPHEN FALLA, KATE FIELDING, LIAM FITZPATRICK, CLAIRE FOSTER, LEA FOUNTAIN, SUSAN FOX, ALISON OPHIE GIBBS, NEIL GIBSON, LORNA GOZZARD, SIMON ADJIGEORGIOU, SARAH HALL, MATTHEW HALL, DAVID RRISON, MICHELLE HARVEY, RICHARD HAYNES, GARETH JANEHOWARD,MICHAELHOWARD,RICHARDHOWAT, GHES, JUSTIN JACKSON, ZAFAR JAMATI, HAYLEY JAMES, EA KENNEDY, KATHRYN KIRK, MARCOS KOMODROMOS, E,EMMALEECH,TRUDYLEWIS,SAMANTHALIVINGSTONE, MACKENZIE, MAURICA MACKLE, EVA MACLAINE, ALEX KELL,STUARTMCBRIDE,JULIEMCCABE,MELMCDONALD, EE, DAWN MCLEAN, NANCY MENDOZA, DAVID MILLAR, E, ELLA MINTY, ANNE MOIR, PHILIP MORGAN, JONNY ICHOLS,PAULNOBLE,PENNYNORTON,JAYO’CONNOR, EGAN, EMILY OSBORNE, RACHEL OWEN, CLARE PARKER, TTE, RACHEL PICKEN, SARAH PINCH, ERIN PORTSMOUTH, ESIDE, DEBORAH REGAL, KIM REGISFORD, DEE REID, JANE L ROBERTS, LINDA ROLF, DAVID RUSSELL, CHARLOTTE EA, JENNIFER SHEEN, STEVE SHEPPERSON-SMITH, KATE MITH, ANNETTE SPENCER, GILL STEPHENSON, RICHARD MILIAN TATTON-BROWN, GARY TAYLOR, CHRIS TAYLOR, A THOMSON, ALISON TOBIN, MARIA TOCHER, KATHRYN UNDERWOOD,FRANCOISEVANBUUREN,KIMVAUGHAN, DINGTON, PETER WALKER, SARAH WALKER, TIM WALSH, WHITE,ANDREWWHYTE,JOHNWILKINSON,JANEWILLIAMS, UEWOLSTENHOLME,DAVINAWYPER,ROBERTYELDHAM. 058_059_CIPR_Q4_2017.indd 59

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DO IT BETTER

Five ways to win new business The simple tricks one agency used to recession-proof its business

BY VICTORIA TOMLINSON ost PR people go into the industry because they are good at writing, organising events and building relationships. None of these talents necessarily make you a good salesperson.

Whether you have climbed the ranks in a large PR agency, you run your own agency or you are working freelance, self-promotion is a key skill. In the early days of my agency, we secured business by networking and winning tenders. When the recession hit, this was no longer enough, even though we had a considerable number of connections.

We had to learn sales skills.

These are the five steps that have helped our business the most.

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Being clear about the work we wanted The first step in any sales activity is to know what you are good at and the type of work you want to do.

This will constantly change depending on the expertise of your team, the work you have been doing and how your clients have developed.

If you are not clear about your strengths, there is a danger that you will take on any kind of work, and do a poor job of it. Saying ‘This work is not for us’ can be just as important as saying ‘Yes’ for building a good reputation and winning repeat business.

Undertake this self-evaluation regularly. At Northern Lights, we

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have a lot of clients that work in the artificial intelligence, engineering technology and STEM industries. This has come about by chance over time, but we have gained a considerable understanding of relevant markets and issues, as well as contacts, all of which we can use in the future.

Once you’ve identified your skills, check if your company and personal branding showcases them. Of course you need to update your website, but also consider refreshing your team’s social media accounts. Could you reflect your knowledge in the online biography sections?

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Creating a list of target clients When you are clear about what you want to sell, build a list of potential clients who might need your skills.

Consider using LinkedIn strategically.

For example, if you have a target list that includes Coca-Cola, Sky TV and Google, ask your employees to search their professional networks and see who they know at these companies. While my agency has never worked with any of these businesses – we specialise in B2B rather than consumer PR – a quick search shows I have senior, first-degree contacts in all of these organisations whom I could approach.

Once you have mapped connections to your target companies and agreed who should contact them, request a meeting. The aim is to understand their

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Awareness

Interest Decision Action

priorities and whom you should speak to about new opportunities.

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Visualising a sales funnel This is simple: sales needs constant work. You need to continue to approach a wide range of contacts because, at any time, only a small percentage of them will be aware of what you do, have a need and budget for it, and decide to appoint you (as illustrated by the sales funnel above).

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Staying in touch with contacts It is said that it takes seven touches to sell. This means you need to connect with someone seven times before you secure any business.

Of course, ways to keep in touch include meeting someone at a networking event, inviting them to a meeting or emailing them, but blogging on issues that could be of interest to your target audience can also demonstrate your expertise in a helpful and engaging way.

Post these blogs on your LinkedIn profiles, send emails with a link to some of your most important contacts, or ask some of your target audience to do guest blogs to amplify your message.

I am constantly amazed by how many times I meet someone at a networking event and they pick up on a point I wrote about months ago. It’s an instant way to make conversation and start a relationship on the right foot.

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You need to continue to approach a wide range of contacts as, at any time, only a small percentage of them will be aware of what you do, have a need and budget for it, and decide to appoint you

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Finding compelling ways to explain what we do We were persuaded by the sales training that we received as a business during tough times to start sending out our own regular e-newsletters to potential and existing clients.

To help us frame our content, Nick, our trainer, asked us this: “Do your clients know what you are doing differently to a year ago – and why wouldn’t you want them to know?”

We in the comms industry need to do all of those things we help our clients with, including publishing our own e-newsletters, blogs and white papers. Valuable insights at regular intervals will ensure that we demonstrate our expertise and help to attract new business.

Victoria Tomlinson is chief executive of Northern Lights. She has led the agency’s move into digital, operating in the UAE and developing services for business leaders THIS ARTICLE COUNTS TOWARDS CIPR CPD CIPR CPD is a free online platform where you can plan, track and record everything you do to keep your knowledge and skills up to date.

Structure your development and work towards becoming a Chartered PR Practitioner. Visit cipr.co.uk/mycpd

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DO IT BETTER

What did the Romans ever do for PR?

“A good reputation is more valuable than money,” wrote Latin author Publilius Syrus.

Here’s how the Romans conquered PR

BY NICK PROCTER

rom Hadrian’s Wall to the banks of the Euphrates, the Romans knew how to get their message across. So what can PRs learn from ancient Rome to make audiences lend them their ears? Here are nine campaign-planning tips.

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GATHER DATA AND GET ORGANISED The Romans knew the importance of research. The first census, in approximately 6AD, was aimed at maximising tax revenues by finding

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SPQR PR

PR pros can emulate Caesar by delivering strong narratives that feature real people talking about how they have benefited from an organisation’s work

so on, so that you can exploit them if you need to.

And maximise the value of existing technologies too. Julius Caesar made excellent use of available channels – while also creating new ones – to deliver messages to his target audiences, establishing the first public newsletter for Roman citizens, and posting copies in the busy Forum to maximise readership.

He also wrote the first campaign biography, The Gallic Wars, to publicise his military exploits and persuade the people he would make the best head of state. It was the ancient equivalent of a prime-time TV interview.

Rome. PRs should, similarly, make sure their brand reflects their purpose – and maybe even use a few emojis.

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PRIORITISE STORYTELLING Caesar’s orations were memorable, emotive and persuasive – just like effective comms. Content that tells a story, that is character-driven and that is delivered by someone the audience believes in will resonate the most and achieve its strategic objectives.

PR pros can emulate Caesar by delivering strong narratives that feature real people talking about how they have benefited from an organisation’s work.

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out more about the population.

The principle is the same for PRs: know your audience by developing customer insight, investigating demographics, looking at segmentation and undertaking stakeholder analysis.

Then you can fully engage with them.

ALAMY

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INNOVATE Whether it was quick-setting concrete, war machines or innovative battle tactics, the Romans embraced new ideas to gain an advantage.

Make sure you know about virtual reality, the internet of things and

BUILD FROM THE GROUND UP Great Roman military strategists studied the terrain and committed resources accordingly, adapting their tactics to suit each situation. So must PRs. That could mean being hyperlocal with PR channels: try targeting smaller newspapers, parish magazines, community radio stations, place-based websites, blogs, social media groups or Twitter hours.

And create content that fosters an emotional connection, such as a sense of belonging to a place or a community.

The Roman empire stayed strong for so long because it had the ability to communicate to the masses and bond society together.

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SIGNPOST YOUR VALUES The Romans understood how signs and symbols convey meaning to reinforce a message. Caesar, say, used a range of hand gestures when communicating to large crowds, while architecture, such as Trajan’s Column, symbolised the civilising influence of

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THINK BREAD AND CIRCUSES Roman rulers provided free food and entertainment to win the public’s favour. There are two lessons for PRs here. First, Roman rulers gave the people what they wanted, and PR teams should do likewise; discover your stakeholders’ needs and expectations, and meet them. Second, think brand recognition. Roman rulers made sure the people always knew who was providing their chariot races, public feasts and holidays.

KEEP AN OPEN MIND Don’t be insular. Embrace ideas from others. The Romans successfully imposed their culture on conquered peoples but they also adopted ideas from others, mainly the Greeks. Continually strive to improve by seeking out best practice.

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TAKE YOUR DESTINY INTO YOUR OWN HANDS The internet has disrupted the media filter for PR messages, and some organisations’ own communication channels have larger audiences than traditional newspaper outlets.

Like Rome cutting its losses and pulling its legions from Britannia, if your content isn’t breaking through in some publications, it might be time to expend less energy on media relations, and reprioritise your target media or concentrate more on your own channels.

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REMEMBER REPUTATION IS EVERYTHING In battle, Rome’s legionnaires would do anything to protect their eagle standard, which symbolised the empire. Reputation, embodied by brand and logo, is similarly valuable to modern organisations. You are your organisation’s shield and the guardian of its brand, and you should strive to protect and enhance your organisation’s reputation in everything you do.

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DO IT BETTER

Iprovision: your personal support in times of crisis If you’re struggling with illness, unemployment or disability, PR charity iprovision can help

BY ROB SMITH crisis plan is something every PR professional has to hand. No sooner has the share price dipped than they smoothly implement their well-considered plan, everyone’s job is saved and the CEO gives the whole team a huge pay rise. That’s the theory anyway…

But, while planning and preparation are key to solving crises at work, disaster doesn’t strike only in the office.

Unexpected events can lead to tough times for anyone, but workplace pressure often means that planning for a change in personal circumstances is a low priority.

Since 1965, iprovision, formerly the IPR Benevolent Fund, has supported CIPR members past and present who face hardship, whatever the cause. It provides grants to help with specific needs, respite care and care break costs, as well as support and advice.

“We are proud of the way we have been helping IPR, and then CIPR,

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members for more than 50 years,” says vice-chair Annette Spencer. “But we want to do more, and raising our profile with members is a vital part of that.”

Indeed, while raising money is a crucial part of iprovision’s work, as all of its income – enabling grants – comes from donations, raising awareness is also key: many practitioners aren’t aware of what help is available.

If you were at the CIPR Excellence Awards ceremony this year, you will no doubt have seen the roulette tables that iprovision brought along. “A lot of our recent work has been around profileraising, and our successful casino night at the Excellence Awards is an example of that,” says Spencer. “Yes, we made some money to help with our grants and loans, but we also got in front of a huge number of members who were previously unaware of how we might be able to help them, their friends or their colleagues if they have problems.”

Here are three stories of people whom iprovision has helped over the years.

Find out more about iprovision at cipr.co.uk/content/our-organisation/iprovision

HELPING SOMEONE LIKE YOU… COPE FINANCIALLY DIANE*, 45 Changes to the welfare benefit rules left Diane, mother of two sons with special needs, in a difficult financial position after the breakdown of her marriage.

She had been working on a freelance basis to accommodate her domestic

responsibilities, but the work had dried up, and her search for more work was proving unsuccessful. She also had problems with her car, and her boiler needed repairs. Iprovision was able to make a grant, as well as give Diane advice about getting back into the workplace.

“Iprovision was a lifesaver,” says Diane.

“The support, both financial and practical, enabled me to move forward more easily in extremely stressful times. Sometimes we all need help, and at that time I was struggling to see a way through. I cannot thank iprovision enough.”

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HELP IN HARD TIMES

HELPING SOMEONE LIKE YOU… FIND AND KEEP EMPLOYMENT CHRIS, 46 Chris had been out of work for some time and was struggling to get interviews. Iprovision was able to provide employment advice, through a package consisting of 7.5 hours of face-to-face time with a career coach.

This helped Chris to identify his strengths and weaknesses, put together a good CV and work through a strategy for finding a job. Chris also had access to online HR platform Chiumento24 for 12 months.

“My coach is really good and gets me thinking about new and different things, so it is really helping,” he says. “The sessions keep me motivated, and I can make plans with my coach for the time between sessions.”

HELPING SOMEONE LIKE YOU… PROTECT FAMILY TIME GILLIAN, 41

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Gillian, a successful PR consultant with young children, was diagnosed with late-stage cancer, requiring major surgery, and debilitating chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

As she and her husband, her principal carer, were both self-employed and couldn’t work, their income collapsed and their home was at risk.

Iprovision was able to help with the mortgage repayments, funding a helper and other essential costs, allowing the family to be together at home in Gillian’s final months.

*NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED IN THE INTERESTS OF CONFIDENTIALITY. IPROVISION OPERATES A STRICT POLICY OF NOT DIVULGING SENSITIVE INFORMATION AND ALL IDENTIFYING DETAIL IS REMOVED FROM APPLICATIONS BEFORE THEY ARE CONSIDERED BY THE TRUSTEES.

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THE BACK STORY Since when did we become so adversarial?

ou will know Clint Hill from the grainy footage.

Hill is the Secret Service agent who jumped onto President Kennedy’s car in order to protect the First Lady, just after the fatal shots were fired in Dallas, Texas, on 22 November 1963.

Hill was interviewed recently about President Trump’s decision to release papers concerning Kennedy’s assassination. He was asked specifically whether, in his view, the decision would finally douse the conspiracy theories or would add fuel to the fire.

Without a pause, Hill replied: “Well, I think both will happen.”

Dialectics – the reasoned process of embracing multiple Why isn’t it okay for organisations, and opposing points of view in or arguments, to contain dramatically different views? order to arrive at the truth – is sewn into our civil discourse. You see it in parish council meetings, in parliamentary debate – it’s present in the very craft of good journalism. If you layer enough different, It’s become considered positions on top of one another, you fruitless usually build up to a solid outcome. to discuss Having interviewed several thousand senior leaders, I’ve noticed that the best ones welcome emotive the idea of opening up conversations about different issues like views. (And they don’t then just nod and say: Brexit or “Hmmm, interesting.”) They rarely ‘shut down’ abortion. positions. This synthesising of complexity will, You won’t they know, generally bear fruit.

Twitter, sadly, seems to have the opposite effect. have a I recently got caught up in a local controversy in discussion west London about the CS9 Cycle Superhighway.

– only The proposed cycle route will, some say, be safer ferocious for cyclists and reduce pollution; many residents, businesses and institutions argue that it will have squabbling adverse effects. There are useful views on all sides. and pointLike many others, I took to Twitter to voice scoring my own opinion – I see some potentially adverse impact on access to the Catholic church on Chiswick High Road, near to where I live (and cycle). The response was rapid, nasty and personal.

GETTY

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As the story developed, it quickly became clear what was going on. This is just a numbers game: in social-media dialectics, success is amassing enough reactions, ‘likes’ and retweets to get your side’s position to the top of that particular hashtag’s ‘Top’ feed.

There’s nothing necessarily new in trying to win an argument by sheer volume, but I wonder whether for the enlightened comms professional there’s an opportunity to take a different tack. I sense a growing unease about the binary nature of much public discussion.

As The Telegraph journalist Charles Orton-Jones says: “Are we becoming more divided? I think so. It’s become fruitless to discuss emotive issues like Brexit or abortion. You won’t have a discussion – only ferocious disagreement and point-scoring.

The Tudors regarded it as a sin to be of a political faction. Even in the 1970s there was a spirit of bipartisanship in politics.”

James Delingpole might be surprised to be cited as a voice of reason, but I’m struck by the way the polemical journalist (Twitter description: “Still right about everything”) retweets pretty much everything that’s said about him, however vile. I admire this even-handedness. It’s even a possibility that the comms strategists within this current beleaguered government have decided that the circumstances of Brexit are so unique that it could actually be beneficial if the public hears a cacophony of disharmonious voices.

With something as complex as Brexit, why maintain the charade that everyone’s on the same page?

They clearly aren’t, but maybe, just maybe, the process of honest, robust disagreement might lead to a reasonable result.

Share your reasoned reactions or just violently disagree with Matthew Rock: @matthewrock

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