It’s time to get back to basics
Every time your business does what it said it would do, you build your reputation
In the business of public relations, it’s our job to manage the reputations of our clients. This sounds quite grand, and a bit like we’re creating intriguing personas for them, scheming out ways to make them look good to the media.
What we do is far simpler than that, actually. It’s the strength and value proposition of the product or service that the client offers that will decide how strong any PR campaign or project will ever be — PR is certainly not about putting lipstick on a pig, because no amount of lipstick (or even an excellent PR strategy, brilliantly executed) will change the fact that a pig is a pig.
If you want build a reputation for having a great product or a great service, you’ve got to actually offer those, before you appoint anyone to tell your story beyond your immediate scope of influence. This is why we won’t take on any client whose offering we don’t trust, or whose objectives we don’t understand.
Furthermore, if the client is not clear on the business objectives they want to achieve through working with a PR agency, there’s also little point to even engaging with them. Just as any growth of your business needs to be carefully thought through, with a timelined strategy applied, so too does the appointment of a public relations or reputation management need to be thought through.
The budget issue
This is always a tricky one, because many people think that appointing a public relations agency shouldn’t cost as much as working with an advertising agency. They’re right— it shouldn’t. Public relations costs less than advertising, and arguably achieves greater impact.
But take a step back and consider whether you would want a cost-cut- ting attorney managing your legal reputation — or would you rather go with the best you can afford? Would you want your accountant to give you the “lite” package when she’s assessing your company’s financial status — or would you want the real picture, painted with all the possible information to hand?
Much of what we do is in the background — we cannot do our jobs without proper research, without loads of internal communication and planning before we even present an idea to our clients, and without years of studying and experience behind us.
Ask: Who do you want to communicate with?
Appointing a public relations agency is about so much more than appointing an agency to positively influence your reputation in the media — indeed, those that believe that what we do is all about spin and getting good press have lost touch with how the profession has evolved.
What we can do — and what we should be doing — is providing clear, concise, honest answers to the questions that stakeholders ask in before they have to ask them.
What do you want to achieve by appointing an agency?
I l ove the story that Alastair Campbell, director of communications and strategy for Tony Blair, tells. Apparently Campbell thought that Bill Clinton was the greatest strategic communicator he had worked with, much to Blair’s chagrin.
Campbell asked Clinton, long after all his bad press around the Monica Lewinsky affair, how he had managed to focus on some pretty complex and potentially cataclysmic events on the world stage, while his personal life was being pilloried in the press.
Clinton answered: “I had a simple objective — survival. My strategy was to get up every day, focus on the things I could do, because I was the president. And my tactics were to make sure that the people knew that is what I was doing. That sustained me throughout.”
Telling that story is a way of emphasising the important point that reputation management is all about having objectives, a strategy to achieve those objectives, with tactics being the mechanisms you use to do that.
To be blunt, having an article appear in a top magazine is not an objective, just as trending on Twitter is not an objective. These are tactics — and you must understand what your objective is behind those, before you set out to achieve them.
And start by making sure that all the executives in your organisation have a common vision of what the business’s objectives are — you would be surprised by how often the decision-makers all have different views of this.
What are the right tactics?
E v e r y c l i e n t , e v e r y c a mp a i g n demands different tactics, and it was long ago that we called bullshit on the press release and events club that still seems to think that you can influence the outcome of a conversation by distracting protagonists with pretty, shiny toys.
Designing a campaign to trend on Twitter is not a good tactic. How does that translate into sales for your organisation (because we’re all selling, at the end of the day, whatever it is that we’re taking to market)?
Another f a v o u r i t e C a mp b e l l anecdote as his answer to a political leader who asked how he could do the right thing and stay popular. Campbell’s answer was: “You do the right thing” — but you do it within a clear strategic framework, engaging the public in a sustained way, running co-ordinated messaging systems so that over time, people understand what you are doing, and they become more reasonable in their analysis. Every time you do what you say you’re going to do, you build your reputation.
We’ve seen this in effect in our work with fastjet, the low-cost pan-African airline. When we first engaged with them, the media controlled the conversation, and there was very little good news making it through beyond the spin. We’ve spent the last three years helping to build the airline’s reputation, and it has become one of East Africa’s most trusted airlines, carrying more than one-and-a-half million passengers in that time.
This isn’t because of all the great public relations work that’s been done. It’s because fastjet has focused on communicating its goals (delivering on-time flights at low fares), achieving them (in three years it has expanded to offer flights to five countries), and telling people about them (through building mutually respectful relationships with media).
How do you measure reputation management?
You measure the performance of your sales team, of your product development team — so it’s clear that you need to measure the performance of your public relations team. There are a number of ways to do this, floating around the industry. One way is to count the pieces of media coverage; another is to apply various formulae to calculate the media value of any coverage.
But in a time when reputation management is about so much more than column centimetres and the size of images in print, I would argue that while these provide a modicum of measurement, the best way to measure the success of any project or sustained campaign is to identify their impact on your business.
Has your communication strategy positively impacted your business? Has it helped you achieve your business objectives? Has it done so to a significant degree? And does the continued success of your business depend on continued communication with all stakeholders — whether they are the media, your customers, your channel, or your shareholders?
Affirmative answers to those questions mean that your communication objectives have been met through the implementation of a sound strategy that uses appropriate tactics.
And that it’s time to get back to work to achieve even more!