Is international PR agency, Edelman’s annual trust barometer to be trusted?

Or, more to the point, can a PR firm that opts to work with News International be trusted on the subject of “trust”? This is the stance that influential MP and Murdoch-mitherer, Tom Watson, asserted on Twitter this morning – on the day Edelman launched its 12th annual trust and credibility survey.

Watson’s challenge to Edelman led to this exchange with its EMEA CEO, Robert Phillips:

Which led to Phillip’s response (large type) and Watson’s accusation (small type), based on Edelman’s News International connection:

And Phillips’ somewhat indignant plea to Watson:

And a final volley from Watson in return:

So, is Watson right? Is handling PR for News International to be treated as a similarly unethical assignment as – say – representing repressive regimes? And does it destroy your credibility as a communications business?

Only Edelman and NI knows how the conversation went when the deal was being struck, but Watson’s suggestion that working for NI is de facto unethical – ergo Edelman is unethical – is too simplistic and no doubt reflects his own visceral feelings towards Murdoch and co.

If a fly on the wall in the Edelman/NI negotiations told us that the job briefed by the client was to “get us off the hook, spin it any way you want to, but don’t tell us how to run our business,” then Edelman would have to ask itself if this was a gig it wanted.

However, if that same fly reported that the client acknowledged the mess it had made, was willing to make amends to the victims and was committed to a thorough overhaul of its business practices and culture for its own survival and the public good, that’s a different story.

Just as most offenders get the chance to rehabilitate themselves, so companies and organisations deserve the opportunity to put the past behind them and build a new, responsible and ethical paradigm. And if a PR firm is part of a genuine and concerted effort on the part of that company to demonstrate its contrition and willingness to change, then why not? After all, creating good will and understanding among its publics are laudable aims for a company and its PR advisers. According to political commentators Watson, himself, is not averse to the use of PR consultancy.

Tom Watson is not alone in being appalled and disgusted by the endemic corruption and wrongdoing we now know existed in News International. But once the punishment has been handed out, is there no room for second chances?

Does anybody care about having a good reputation in football?

Any casual observer of the so-called “beautiful game” would presume that football or footballers have as much connection with the notion of corporate reputation as an earth worm does.

After years of attempting to kick racism out of the UK game, high profile players for major league clubs are becoming associated with that most repugnant of behaviour. Is it unrealistic to expect respectful on-pitch relations from our footballers, or are they simply too stupid to recognise as acceptable what the bulk of society did long ago?

And, this week, the match between Iberian titans, Madrid and Barcelona – a fixture that’s become predictably ill-tempered – outdid itself for pointless, farcial, reputation shredding bad behaviour.

Spanish sports commentators labelled the performance by Madrid as ”treason against their own history”, saying that manager Jose Mourinho “threw away all Madrid’s history and instead insisted on a lamentable match from which he got no benefit for Madrid. It was all bad: the result, the play, the violence.”

What does this matter, in a sport where – despite money and scandal overflowing in equal measure – fans continue to show up and sponsors back the big teams?

Trusty Twitter friends came forward with their own views:  asked whether it mattered if football clubs had a good or bad reputation, veteran communications professional, @NigelSarbutts, opined “To the fans, sort of; to sponsors, more so, but it’s still trumped by pragmatism. Brands queue up to sponsor any Premier League side I’d say. It’s just ad space.”

Corporate communications expert, @domburch, felt reputation fundamental, even in football: “Of course. Attracting new talent (back office as well as players), new fans, sponsorship – all dependent on your reputation.”

Former Staniforth colleague, Ghida Basma – whose Masters degree dissertation focused on reputation in football, says that the reputation of players can’t help but have a correlation on the reputation of the club.

Interestingly, a 10-year-old piece of research suggests that clubs with a reputation for foul play tend to be penalised by referees more, based on a predisposition in the official’s brain that players for a notoriously “dirty” club must be up to their usual tricks. Yorkshire PR man, Anthony Devenish, says: “Leeds takes flack as ‘dirty Leeds’, thanks to the 70′s team. Their rumoured motto? ‘Let’s get blood on our boots’.”

In other fields – business, politics, the military and, more recently, in tabloid journalism – taking a reckless attitude to reputation has a variety of tangible effects, among them imprisonment, loss of trust, collapsing share price, corporate closure and so on.

Surely, the workings of  world’s most popular sport and building and maintaining a good reputation are not mutually exclusive concepts?

A guest post by Tom Maddocks of Media Training Associates

In the era of the TV news ‘soundbite’, the idea of a long political speech appeared to most of us be very old-fashioned, something that would never catch the interest of people with today’s near-zero attention span.  Many would continue to make this argument, pointing to modest audiences even for the leaders’ speeches at the October party conferences.  Yet elsewhere, public speaking appears to be gaining a renaissance, with more and more presentations now being streamed across the web – the popular TED talks being just one example – these have gained over 1.5 million followers on Facebook.  Others (including all the Presidential candidates in the 2008 US election) have used Ustream.tv to stream themselves live over the internet.  In the UK the RSA has made innovative use of the visual opportunities in its RSA Animate series – see http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/videos/

Could more organisations in the public, private and third sectors be making use of these opportunities to find an audience?  To succeed, you don’t need high technology – some of this stuff is recorded with very basic equipment – but if you are representing your organisation, you do need to be able to sound interesting, and look professional.  Increasingly when we run media training courses we find an element of coaching for appearing on videos or webinars is essential, even for people who think they’ll ‘never be on TV’.  So good old-fashioned presentation skills are as important as ever.  Convey energy, convey passion, convey enthusiasm, and ensure you have relevant and engaging content.  Get to the point – whatever your platform it’s usually best to take a leaf from TED’s book and keep presentations, videos etc to 20 minutes maximum -  a lot less for some topics.  Don’t let yourself appear nervous by letting your eyes wander around – if talking direct to camera, keep them to camera.  Finally, remember to smile and convey warmth, so you can really make a connection with your audience.

SEO, according to marketers questioned for the above research, has the biggest impact on lead generation. But what does that SEO actually constitute and is it made up, either partly or mostly, of PR activity?

It’s not a question that’s ever answered in Webmarketing123′s State of Digital Marketing Report. More of that later. In the meantime, what else does the research tell us?

Clearly, the metrics of success are firmly focused on tangible returns: for marketers across B2B and B2C, it’s far more about generating leads and making sales than anything else. Taking the B2B marketer in particular, the lesser objectives include building brand awareness (15%), generating site traffic (11%) or building online communities (5%). Curiously, the latter is even less important for the B2C community (2.8%). What was once considered a desirable digital outcome, certainly of social media, seems to be have been relegated to an uncommercial own goal.

But when identifying what these marketers consider the most important measure for digital marketing – i.e. sales – our B2B and B2C cousins are surprisingly close (62% and 68% respectively). Bearing in mind the comparatively more protracted and complex journey for B2B buyers, it’s a revelation that those selling B2B are looking for such high sales conversions via digital alone.  While I can see it as a vital part of building reputation, understanding and consideration along the B2B procurement pathway, I’m sceptical about its ability to close the deal.

Which brings me back to SEO and impact.

Achieving a high, organic search engine ranking takes more than one technique – some delivered better by SEO specialists, others by professional generators of compelling and insightful textual content. Yes, I’m talking about PR people. But PR doesn’t get a mention in the report. Does that mean PR has become a subset of SEO and, if so, are SEO specialists qualified to advise clients about and generate material hitherto done by PR people?

The lines are blurred and, what seems increasingly apparent, is the need that SEO and PR people have to collaborate; after all, if gaining a high search engine ranking has the biggest impact on a client’s lead generation, the tools to do it are not necessarily the province of one discipline alone.

Update: since posting the above, I found this excellent post by Lance Concannon on the SEO/PR dilemma and how it needs to be worked out for everyone’s benefit.

Where are online marketers spending their digital cash to maximum customer effect right now?

This interesting, US-focused infographic - just produced by Californian marketing company, Webmarketing123 – paints a picture of B2B and B2C online marketers’ current digital strategies.

Any surprises?

There’s a report that goes with it too; we’ll take a look and give you our view later.

I saw two turf-braking stories today about football clubs putting the social into soccer.  The first was about Manchester United appointing an agency to design and build a digital platform to provide a social network for fans around the world.   The club has identified a target of more than 500 million fans – more than double the number of registered twitter users – so why not have a network just for reds.  FlickedIn anyone, InOfftheBlogPost, OnMeHeadBook perhaps?

The slight problem is United’s reputation for real engagement.  The club has looked at Facebook and Twitter bans for its players more than once. What is United”s motivation?  ”Social network? I think they mean fan club or more accurately, sales database” quipped Nigel Sarbutts of BrandAlert.

Step up to the spot then Jaguares de Chiapas, a club in the Primera División de México.   They’ve registered all of the players on twitter and they’ve added their twitter handles onto the back of the players shirts.  In social media terms and as a PR story in general; “back of the net”.

It doesn’t always take big names or big budgets to reach your goal.  Innovative ideas and real creativity have no substitute.  As they say in the in the Estadio Victor Manuel Reyna in Chiapas “in football as in life, 140 characters are enough to decide which side you’re on”.

Attention marketers – if you want to be a chief marketing officer (or marketing director on this side of the Pond), then be warned: “the market is moving faster than the function”.

So says Jon Iwata, IBM’s senior VP of marketing and communications, who shared his thoughts in Harvard Business Review’s recent “Changing role of the CMO” webcast.

Based on the findings of an IBM Global CMO Study, he was joined by his counterparts at Yahoo – Elisa Steele – and at Schneider Electric – Aaron Davies – to examine how the most senior marketing role has changed and what the future holds.

And the kick-off point was the CMO’s job to “close the gap between [a company's] desired corporate character and reality”. Iwata quoted no less a figure than Abraham Lincoln to make the point that “Reputation is the shadow, character is the tree.” In other words, how  a business is perceived externally is only as strong as the truth underpinning what that company actually does rather that what it claims to do.

Steele highlighted that we’re living in the “age of accountability” in which the volume of conversations about brand and customer experience hit CMOs where it hurts! But the availability of data and analytics means marketers who are not exploring the “science bit” are unable to support company growth in the way they should. As Davies metaphorises, “customer data is a gift, if you unwrap it correctly”. Perhaps masochistically, he also suggests that – for the marketer – “failure is a gift as well”.

Coming, inevitably, to social media and the CMO, Iwata describes IBM’s approach as empowering people to be good and responsible with it – especially as the collective number of IBMers on LinkedIn (300,000, apparently) and their 1st order contacts constitutes a larger community than visits IBM.com every day. The combination of people and the content they create is a real opportunity, says Iwata, while Steele describes the social media-induced “collapse of the marketing funnel”. And despite the fact that social media ROI remains hazy, Steele feels that, intuitively, it’s the right thing to be doing.

Iwata acknowledges the obstacles at policy level in companies when it comes to social media, with finance heads fearing leakage or disclosure and HR balking at any online criticism of management. But, he says, “you can’t just use it [social media] for listening and co-creation but turn it off when people are criticising or saying things that make you uncomfortable”. Conversely, he sees social media as an investment that pales (in cost terms) compared to traditional marketing approaches.

But the effectiveness of using social media has “not been fully cracked”, according to Iwata, adding that “Web 2.0 is still in the mode of sending messages to individuals”.

However, traditional marketing still has its place, according to these leading marketers: Davies, despite calling digital “the wallpaper in many organisations now”, says there is “a place for everything still”, citing his experience of a 50/50 split of online and traditional marketing in China right now.

Leaving the final word to Jon Iwata, his advice for those aspiring to be future CMOs is “stretch yourself into new spaces”. After all, it’s the character of your company that’s at stake.

A function of the social web is that journalism, is fast becoming an interactive form.  Most of us of a certain age spotted that The Stone Roses had announced at a press conference they were reforming and our reactions were mainly good, some bad, others indifferent.

Step forward one  Sam Wolfson a journalist who writes mostly about music for the Guardian, NME and a slew of popular culture mags and sites.  In The Guardian Music blog he wrote today a piece entitled “The Stone Roses didn’t soundtrack my generation – please shut up about them”.  He went on to say that he wasn’t even born when the Stone Roses released their debut album in 1989 and bemoaned having the music and legend “rammed down my throat”.   My beef wasn’t that he didn’t like the Roses  (one truly great record, not so much live) but rather his sloppy journalism.  He described New Order who formed in 1980 from the ashes of Joy Division (we all know that, right?) as being the offspring of the Stone Roses…who formed in 1983.  He starts a paragraph with ‘but’.

Well, I wasn’t the only one vexed.   In just eight hours the post has attracted 120 comments – some longer than the original article and most more entertaining or better informed.  Have a read.

Tesco, Sainsbury’s, ASDA? That is the question on so many consumers’ minds at the moment.  Where will customers get the most out of their money and which shop offers the cheapest deals?

Competition for shoppers’ cash has become increasingly aggressive as economic uncertainty, wage freezes and high inflation have squeezed consumer income.

A couple of weeks ago we saw that following the announcement of slow growth from the UK’s largest supermarket chain Tesco, the company would launch an aggressive £500million ‘Price Drop’ campaign meaning 3,000 price cuts on its products, including milk, vegetables, fruit and bread.

Soon followed ASDA with a knee-jerk marketing campaign, pushing its continuous promise to be 10 per cent cheaper than any other supermarket, and now Sainsbury’s. Tomorrow we will see the launch of their ‘Brand Match’ campaign, a technology Sainsbury’s has invested in allowing customers to compare prices of their branded products in their baskets to the same products in Tesco and ASDA.  From this Wednesday, Sainsbury’s will issue customers with coupons to the value of the difference between its branded goods and those of its rivals. This has been launched exactly two weeks after Tesco’s campaign.

“The launch of Brand Match across the UK represents a revolution in retail and is fantastic news for hard-pressed shoppers,” said Sainsbury’s commercial director Mike Coupe.

In saying all of this, it has been announced today that ‘cheaper’ supermarket, ALDI, has seen a growth of 25% share over the 12 weeks leading up to October, the complete opposite of Tesco, which is seeing slow growth. Morrisons is currently the best performing supermarket out of the ‘big four’.

It will be interesting to see which of these campaigns will really lure consumers into spending at each of the supermarkets and if we will see a bigger growth in the cheaper supermarkets such as  ALDI, LIDL and Iceland.

We don’t often embed ads at PR Media Blog but this is wünderful. From Müller and our friends at TBWA.