The end is nigh: Is spin over? In ‘Brand Anarchy: Managing Corporate Reputation’, Steve Earl and Stephen Waddington urge companies to stop worrying about control.

Be honest: we’ve called it public relations for years, when it has really just been glorified media relations. Things are changing though.

Media fragmentation and the rise of Internet-driven communication is returning public relations to its roots as a means for an organisation to engage with the public in a two-way process. But the public relations industry is locked into systems and processes that have become industrialised over the past 50 years. It can’t go on that way.
 

You’re no longer in control

It is no longer possible for a brand to control or dominate a media agenda. Arguably it never has been, although you’re about to read about one communications practitioner who once retained an iron grip on the media. The simple fact is that the public relations and communications practitioners are no longer in control, or have what they thought was control.

Alastair Campbell is best known for his role as former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s spokesman, press secretary and director of communications and strategy from 1997 to 2003, having started working for Blair in 1994. We had the opportunity to talk to Campbell when we were writing Brand Anarchy: The Future of Corporate Reputation.

According to him, it is no longer possible to control a media agenda. The style of communication planning that characterised his tenure in Downing Street no longer works. But with a handful of newspapers, fewer broadcast outlets and limited online publications, it used to be far easier to set and lead a media agenda. In the mid-1990s, a hit on BBC News coupled with a splash in The Sun and The Times would ensure that a story dominated the agenda for at least 24 hours. Blair’s first election win in 1997, and subsequent re-election landslide in 2001, were built on this command and control approach to communications.


Snagging the attention of the BBC and national newspapers helps, of course, but there are dozens of other influential channels that have equal clout and are vying for the same audience. “It used to be fairly straightforward working out how to dominate the agenda – get yourself on the main news, and big in a few of the papers,
and everything else would flow. But companies and individuals in the public eye have had to adapt to a totally changed media landscape in which the old rules no longer apply in the same way,” says Campbell.

The way media is digitising, and the pace at which it has already happened, has changed the game for those wanting to be out there connecting with the public. It now means understanding all media channels, knowing which will be most potent, and how they can work in unison. And it means letting go of the belief that ‘the agenda’ can be controlled.

“The agenda is being set as much by those who consume the media – and respond instantly – as those who are trying to exert that control.” says Campbell. “This means public relations techniques have to adapt constantly. Digital media and, in particular, social media have injected new requirements for transparency, detailed story planning and genuine dialogue with the audience. Now, the audiences can get involved in the editorial coverage of the issue – they can talk back, and sometimes their responses can be more interesting and more newsworthy than the initial point. Information must be both authentic and delivered with full appreciation of how the audience is most likely
to react.”

We have entered the era of permanent campaigning. Campbell cites five organisational communication themes that demand a fundament shift in communication style to what he calls ‘authentic campaigning’.

The influence business

This new media landscape is much more challenging for communicators. The major shift in the last decade that underpins almost all of Campbell’s themes is technology. This new media is social and, as Campbell acknowledges, it is participatory. This is the basic premise that provides the basis for Philip Sheldrake’s book The Business of Influence. Sheldrake is an engineer turned public relations practitioner who brings a refreshing perspective to organisational communication.


In The Business of Influence, Sheldrake challenges his readers to reconsider the way influence flows around an organisation. In his reframing of organisation communication he identifies six primary influence flows:
• Our influence with our stakeholders
• Our stakeholders’ influence with each other with respect to us
• Our stakeholders’ influence with us
• Our competition’s influence with stakeholders
• Stakeholders’ influence with each other with respect to our competitors
• Stakeholders’ influence with our competition

Sheldrake’s contention is that the first flow (our influence with our stakeholders) and the corresponding third flow (our stakeholders’ influence with us) are well understood and these are the typically the areas where an organisation will invest the majority of its marketing and sales effort. But technology has made the second flow critical to the management of the reputation of an organisation and your markets online.

Your stakeholders are using the Internet to find each other and communicate about your organisation online. You need to find those conversations as they will almost certainly
provide incredible insight about your organisation and you may decide to be part of those conversations. Equally, technology makes it easier to track your competitors and their influence on your stakeholders and vice versa – influence flows four, five, and six. Organisations must also track these conversations and be aware of their reputational impact.

The public answers back

Just as with conventional media, brands cannot be expected to answer every question, or to be available to everyone at the drop of a hat. But there is an expectation, and it is in their best interests, to be fully aware of the risks and rewards associated with what they choose to say and how they choose to behave. There is a growing expectation from customers that if your brand engages online in any way via social media, that is carte blanche for entirely transparent dialogue with the public.

You’re either engaged or you’re not, just like it not being possible to be half-pregnant. Gone are the days of being able to keep customers at arm’s length through centralised call centres with lengthy ‘on hold’ queues, with other contact points deliberately kept opaque. Instead, brands have to learn that customers will approach them using social media, and that the way those approaches are handled may be visible to the whole world.

Now that print media is in decline and the Internet has enabled communication with audiences directly via digital media and, ultimately, direct participation within communities, the public relations industry is attempting to modernise and reinvent itself. Shedding the shackle of media relations will be critical to the future success of the public relations industry.

The future of PR is about moving beyond the messaging broadcasting of media relations to a level of engagement, and ultimately to audience participation with the brand’s story.

Beyond engagement

While engagement gets them looking and listening, you need to go further to build a more successful kind of influence, one that can be the engine room of brand reputation. Once you have engaged your audience you need to build a relationship based on empathy. A brand must truly understand the needs of its audience and respond accordingly. This is participation: a real, sustained and organic conversation between the brand and its audience in which the brand responds directly to the needs of its audience on the audience’s terms.

The ‘conversation’ at the centre of that participation may take place internally within an organisation; it might happen via a social network such as Twitter or Facebook, or via a form of branded media such as a blog, plus in conventional media too. Wherever and however it happens, building a rapport with your audience won’t be easy. Relationships are rarely straightforward.

But it is worth the effort. The benefit of truly participating with your audience is incredibly powerful for brand purposes. It is the root of fostering respect and ultimately building the right reputation, insofar as you can command it.


Is it possible to have such an intimate relationship with an audience? We think so. Every bit of evidence points to the fact that consumers are fixated with media in its many forms, and that brands are of persistent interest to them. Social networking is now one of the biggest occupations on the web. We’re approaching the position where more people are on social networks than aren’t, and still subscriber numbers continue to grow.

Consumer backlashes are frequently predicted around privacy issues on social networks such as Twitter but consumers appear to have accepted that handing over personal data is the price that must be paid for access to services online. Your customers are openly volunteering and sharing their personal information in far more detail than you’ll find in any customer questionnaire.

About the authors

Steve Earl and Stephen Waddington have worked together since the popular rise of the Internet and the dawn of digital media. They’ve helped brands such as the Associated Press, Cisco, The Economist, IBM, Tesco and Virgin Media Business to manage their
reputations.

Their views are formed from 20 years spent working in one of the most competitive media and public relations environments in the world. Most recently they launched the award-winning Speed Communications, working with clients across conventional, digital and owned media. Both were journalists who turned to public relations and so have seen from both sides the massive upheaval in the
media we consume.

In Brand Anarchy, they draw on insight from opinion-makers and shapers such as Greg Dyke, Alastair Campbell, Seth Godin, David Cushman and Philip Sheldrake to explore how reputations can be better managed and the new challenges that the
future of media may bring.