INFLUENCE Q2 2016 www.cipr.co.uk
INFLUENCE
FOR SWITCHED-ON PUBLIC RELATIONS PROFESSIONALS
Q2 2016 ISSUE 2
RUSSIAN TENNIS PLAYER MARIA SHARAPOVA SPEAKS AT A PRESS CONFERENCE IN DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, 7 MARCH 2016
SPORTING ROLE MODELS / AVE UNDER ATTACK / TWITTER'S IDENTITY CRISIS / BETA PR
SORRY
CAN SPORT REGAIN OUR TRUST? WHY THE END IS NIGH FOR AVE
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CHINESE STATE PR: GROTESQUE OR MASTERFUL?
TIM PEAKE: HEAVEN-SENT PR
SENTIMENT ANALYSIS: YAY OR NAY? 03/05/2016 14:57
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INFLUENCE
INFLUENCE Q2 2016 www.cipr.co.uk
INFLUENCE
FOR SWITCHED-ON PUBLIC RELATIONS PROFESSIONALS
Q2 2016 ISSUE 2
RUSSIAN TENNIS PLAYER MARIA SHARAPOVA SPEAKS AT A PRESS CONFERENCE IN DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, 7 MARCH 2016
SPORTING ROLE MODELS / AVE UNDER ATTACK / TWITTER'S IDENTITY CRISIS / BETA PR
SORRY
WELCOME Let’s hear it for the visionaries who define the industry’s future
CAN SPORT REGAIN OUR TRUST? WHY THE END IS NIGH FOR AVE
CHINESE STATE PR: GROTESQUE OR MASTERFUL?
TIM PEAKE: HEAVEN-SENT PR
SENTIMENT ANALYSIS: YAY OR NAY?
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03/05/2016 15:04
CIPR 52–53 Russell Square, London WC1B 4HP UK: +44 (0)20 7631 6900 Fax: +44 (0)20 7631 6944 Email: info@cipr.co.uk President Rob Brown Chief executive Alastair McCapra Deputy chief executive Phil Morgan Editor Rob Smith CIPR EDITORIAL BOARD Avril Lee MCIPR Bridget Aherne MCIPR Rachael Clamp MCIPR Dr Jon White FCIPR Louisa Bartoszek MCIPR Valentina Kristensen MCIPR INFLUENCE Published on behalf of the 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 Deputy editor Hannah Baker Group art director Darren Endicott Sub editor Mike Hine Content director Matthew Rock Group account director Ruth Lake Publishing director Ian McAuliffe PARTNERSHIPS Helen Rosemier +44 (0)20 3771 7230 helen.rosemier@thinkpublishing.co.uk ADVERTISING Molly Matthews +44 (0)20 3771 7233 molly.matthews@thinkpublishing.co.uk
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his scenario fiction at the time. (You can of slow find a full version of Watts’ change ‘1998 seen from 1988’ on may be the Influence website.) altering. The While it’s always risky, acceleration those with the vision to has become so rapid that 12 anticipate the direction of months ahead is like a glimpse PR help shape its future. They into a new world, and any inspire others to innovate and PR practitioner who fails to find new ways to help notice the symptoms quickly practitioners and their clients. sees others driving past on Influence aims to bring you the inside track.” the most up-to-date ideas that This sentiment sounds all will help you develop your too familiar today – yet the skills and career. But while While it’s always above was written 28 years it’s good to keep pace with a ago by former CIPR president risky, those with the rapidly developing industry, Reginald Watts, who passed vision to anticipate we may fail to notice when away on 5 April. something has outlived its the direction Predicting the future is a usefulness. Surely that time of PR help shape thankless task. Every year, has now come for advertising its future we are reminded of those value equivalency (AVE) – misguided visionaries who though the debate on how PR dared to predict that cars/ can be successfully measured computers/Twitter would disappear needs to reach a satisfactory conclusion first. within 12 months. Then we all have a good We would appreciate it if you completed the laugh at how silly they were. Influence reader survey (see page 36). This is When I look through articles Reginald Watts your magazine and your feedback will help wrote for the The Journal of the Institute of us give public relations the platform it deserves. Public Relations, his vision of the future sounds like it had the benefit of hindsight. Artificial intelligence, the PC revolution, multi-channel television and the impact of smartphones – Watts predicted all of these ROB SMITH Editor, Influence in 1988. They must have seemed like science
T
“
ISSN 2397-4494
COVER IMAGE: GETTY
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WHAT’S BEEN SAID ON TWITTER? Received first copy of @CIPR_UK’s Influence mag. Impressed! Strong in design *and* content. Didn’t think they made ‘em like this any more @simonkinnearPR
Genuine wow moment opening @CIPR_UK #Influence mag today. Even smells good. Well done to the team
The new @CIPR_UK #Influence magazine; slick as hell and packed with cool content, cheers guys!
Very impressed with @CIPR_UK new Influence magazine. ‘Over the hill’ piece by @Georgepitcher is spot on
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MAG IN A MINUTE 7 INFLUENCE / Q2 2016 / issue two / cipr.co.uk
BE AFRAID Scary trends interpreted: The Chinese state’s strictly controlled messaging has left the country struggling to present itself as a resurgent nation
CONTRIBUTORS MIHIR BOSE P22
The award-winning journalist and author explores the dark side of sport – and the corruption, drugs and money tainting some of our sporting heroes
“THIS PRODUCT IS A GIANT PIECE OF S**T”
Sorry folks – buggy beta launches and minimum viable products are your future PAGE 39
OLIVIA SOLON
DAVID HOWELL
REBECCA SNOW
P39
P52
P65
The rise of Beta PR: “Over the past few years, we’ve started to see a desire for honesty over perfection”
Why sentiment analysis is now perhaps the single most significant reputational metric for PR
“I realised I was to be dressed as a dog… wearing a skirt. Whose ridiculous idea was the skirt?”
10
THE INDEX Exclusive new data on internal comms: 74% align comms strategy with business strategy; measurement and evaluation form the biggest skills gaps; businesses are creating annual comms plans
FEEDBACK
Reasoned response, angry disagreement, applause… tell us your reaction to Influence: @CIPR_UK influence@thinkpublishing.co.uk info@cipr.co.uk
CIPR PARTNERS
13
INSIDE STORY Traditional org charts don’t tell you how communication really flows; stop your senior leaders avoiding crisis training; and why Lib Dem leader Tim Farron can afford to get very radical
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CONTENTS
18
52
IN CONVERSATION Charlie Methven, founder of advisory firm Dragon, and Clare Parsons, co-founder of Lansons, on why their agencies are neither generalist nor specialist
SENTIMENT-TRACKING TOOLS When tracking sentiment, it’s not always apparent what people really mean. We assess some tools that will help practitioners in their analysis
22
COVER STORY SPORTING ROLE MODELS
32
MEASURING PR: WHAT COMES AFTER AVE? Could a new measurement framework tool sound the death knell for AVE? Or will the rise of behavioural science change the way we evaluate PR activities?
39
BETA PR Buggy beta launches and minimal viable products will make life horribly difficult for communicators raised in the era when it was all about crafting perfect products
Drugs scandals, institutional corruption and jail time for former stars – sport’s reputation is trailing. It’ll need an honest performance to bounce back. PR pros may want to tread carefully when trying to harness sport’s fading aura of purity and nobility
44
THE FUTURE OF TWITTER Is it time to say #RIPtwitter, with the tech giant’s flat user numbers and 10,000-character posts, or are social media commentators getting in a flap about nothing?
48
ANATOMY OF A CAMPAIGN Anthropomorphising machines, and how the European Space Station and British astronaut Tim Peake are bringing the universe to life through innovative campaigns
59
DO IT BETTER + Amy Cuddy and the science of great body language + Managing Online Reputation by Charlie Pownall + Is it ever ethical to pay a reporter for coverage? + How to optimise your website for search engines + Edgy accountants + Do PRs understand their insurance needs? + The worst day of my career (including furry dog suit)
66
THE BACK STORY Disruptive or just plain obnoxious? Why “disrupters” may be losing the battle for public trust with their relentless commitment to algorithms over the future of their communities INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q2 2016 5
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BE AFRAID
The Chinese state BY ELLIOT WILSON. ILLUSTRATION BY MATT MURPHY
Grotesquely stage-managed or a masterclass in coherent messaging? As China’s role in the global economy expands, and European governments struggle to speak with a single voice over migrants and other crises, should we seek lessons in old-school centralised PR? INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q2 2016 7
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THE CHINESE STATE BE AFRAID n February, China’s president Xi Jinping took time out from his busy schedule to meet senior editors and producers at China Central Television (CCTV), the People’s Daily and Xinhua newswire. At each stop he communicated a simple and unambiguous message: their primary job as journalists is to tell the news as the state sees it, to “safeguard” the Party’s authority and unity, and to serve the country’s political leaders “in thought, politics and action”. A British prime minister or US president touring London’s or New York’s media firms with this message would be laughed out of the building. But this is China. There is no history of investigative journalism, no broadcaster such as the BBC, with its remit to both convey and question its paymasters’ views. There is only the Party, a monolithic, vertical power structure whose interpretation of the truth is irrefutable. Gainsay it at your peril. This can be both a strength and a weakness. At its best, the Party combines the instincts of the Westernstyle politician with a direct and ruthless manner of decision-making. During the fallout from the global financial crisis, while Western governments reacted tentatively, the Party unleashed a stimulus package worth $586bn that shored up public trust and support, and saw China through the worst. State media effusively backed the Party.
and making a reference to the TV series House of Cards during a trip to Seattle.
I
ONE-WAY DIALOGUE It’s one thing to have a Soviet-style domestic public relations model that remains, in the words of James McGregor, chairman, greater China, at APCO Worldwide, “stuck in the 1950s”. The Party rose to power during Stalin’s waning years; many in Beijing still adhere to the ethos that the best way to control people is to maintain an iron grip on the flow of communication. Yet this is often counterproductive when dealing with a well-educated and media-savvy international audience. Beijing’s consensus-driven committee structure often struggles to respond to crises. Blank-eyed spokespeople parrot platitudes to hardened foreign journalists
A DIFFICULT SELL
Beijing’s consensusdriven committee structure struggles to respond to crises who want to know who (for instance) was to blame for the explosions that rocked the port city of Tianjin in 2015. Receiving no answers from public sources, they seek them elsewhere. Net result: the Party loses control of the message. “The Chinese government can be very intemperate or just plain tone deaf, and the reason is that it just does not have much familiarity with the outside world,” says Arthur Kroeber, managing director of economic consultancy GaveKal Dragonomics. This doesn’t make China a bad student. In fact, it’s desperate to learn from the best. Beijing has spent lavishly in recent years, funding national and regional propaganda schools. It is not rigidly autocratic, in that it allows its citizens to vent (just enough) spleen via microblogging services from Sina and Tencent, and permits financial publications such as Caixin to unearth corruption and eviscerate white-collar fraudsters. And when Xi Jinping heads abroad, he is careful to tailor his message to the local audience, praising Whitehall as the “mother of parliaments” during a UK state visit in October 2015,
PR gurus such as Harold Lasswell, Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann argued that democracy is mob rule, and that it is the responsibility of the elite to manufacture consent. “Those ideas have been adopted wholeheartedly by Beijing,” notes Anne-Marie Brady, a specialist in Chinese politics at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. One Beijing strategy has been to fund state media outlets that beam the Party’s message into millions of homes and hotel rooms worldwide. CCTV now has dedicated Spanish, Arabic, French and Russian news channels; China Daily publishes weekly editions for the US, Europe and Africa. In virtually every item, the Party is at pains to present China as a confident, resurgent nation. Transforming the likes of CCTV into a Chinese version of the BBC or CNN, news sources trusted implicitly worldwide, is seen as essential. But so far, these attempts have fallen flat. CCTV has paid to relocate highly rated news anchors. It employs 60 journalists and editors in Nairobi, and has bureaus in more than 20 African states, but has made little impact. “No one watches us,” says one CCTV Africa journalist. “We’re on cable, so hard to access, and the coverage is wooden and a bit shouty. And we struggle with the big-picture stuff, as China isn’t associated with being open or credible.” This is likely to become China’s biggest stumbling block. All rising superpowers boast some kind of consistent narrative. The Soviets liked to sabre-rattle, while Washington extolled the American dream. China has great cities and a fascinating history, but nothing that really dazzles the world. Even the meta-message about China’s rise is based on the Party’s desire to remain in power. “Its ethos is all about hard power, not soft power,” says McGregor. “To have soft power you need a message and philosophy, and China doesn’t have one.” Elliot Wilson moved to north-east China in 2001. He learnt Mandarin and worked as the bureau chief at AFX-Asia, Beijing INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q2 2016 9
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THE INDEX 1
No
Yes
60%+70%
CIPR’s State of the Profession report showed that 60% of in-house and 70% of agency practitioners play a role in developing business strategy
4%
Not privy to business strategy
Ye s
r
he
Ot
Do you have a documented channel framework?
7%
Other
re
Not sure
5%
su
2
10%
74%
t No
3%
heartened to read CIPR’s State of the Profession report, as it revealed 60% of in-house and 70% of agency practitioners play some role in the development of business strategy.”
% 18
communications is to help your company deliver its business strategy, so it makes sense for everything to align. “Although a small number, it’s concerning that some professional communicators aren’t privy to the strategy of their business. I was
No
“Every communications strategy should be aligned with business strategy and objectives. If it isn’t, you need to question why it’s being written. The purpose of
% 32
Is your communications strategy aligned with your business strategy?
47 %
Keep external comms separate from internal? Staff up internal comms with specialists? How to plug skills gaps? Rachel Miller, founder of communications consultancy All Things IC, runs her eye over the results of a CIPR internal communications survey
“A channel framework helps communicators keep focused and is a useful tool to aid conversations in your business. Being clear about what you’re using, when and why, ensures you have clarity about each channel’s purpose. It can also help you measure effectively, as you can refer back to the original information. As with your strategy, build in regular reviews. This is important to make sure it meets the needs of your business today.”
3
Do you have an annual communications plan?
63% Yes
37% No
“I’m delighted to see around two-thirds of respondents have an annual communications plan in place. Planning your work and mapping out what you are trying to achieve is essential. It’s the difference between working reactively (tactically) and working proactively (strategically). You’re
able to prioritise and ensure you have the right tools, time and resources, and budget in place. “It’s healthy to review your annual plan at regular intervals, because markets, situations and priorities change. The right plan of action 12 months ago may not reflect current realities.”
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OTHER
LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT
BUDGETING AND FINANCE
MEASUREMENT AND EVALUATION
PITCHING
QUALITATIVE DATA ANALYSIS
QUANTITATIVE DATA ANALYSIS
SEO
TIME MANAGEMENT
CONTENT CURATION
professionals have the required skills to perform their role. This has to be coupled with appropriate training, resources and the autonomy to perform in the role.”
CONTENT CREATION
SOCIAL MEDIA KNOWLEDGE: STRATEGY CREATION
“‘A mix of the two’ came out as the most popular answer. This topic is becoming increasingly noisy in the world of internal communications. It all comes down to whether
VIDEO CREATION
4
Should communications professionals be generalist or specialist?
STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT
INTERNAL COMMS
14% Specialist
7%
6%
72%
7%
4%
9%
Generalist
10%
41%
Other
Separate teams with separate skills
11% 26%
WIDENING SKILLS GAP
6
What are the biggest skills gaps in your team?
“Measurement and evaluation form the biggest skills shortfall in comms teams. This correlates with conversations I have had with peers and clients. More must be done to educate, inform and equip practitioners around measurement. It’s how you know whether what you’re doing is working, and how you prove your worth.”
49%
SOURCE: CIPR INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS SURVEY 2016
“It’s no surprise that ‘Separate teams with separate skills’ comes out on top, but it’s interesting that ‘Everyone works on internal and external comms’ closely follows. Anecdotal feedback reveals that small teams, or individuals, don’t have a choice and must integrate.”
33%
5
Are your external and internal communications teams integrated?
34%
Other
13%
The majority of those surveyed think comms pros should be a mix of generalist and specialist
30%
Not sure
13%
1%
26%
4%
11%
A mix of the two
35%
14%
Starting to merge
Everyone works on internal and external comms
Thank you to everyone who participated in the survey. Did anything surprise you? Email thoughts to influence@thinkpublishing.co.uk @CIPR_UK @AllthingsIC INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q2 2016 11
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Inspiring you to work differently An inspirational learning experience that has enthused me to tackle the challenges ahead. Chris Lee, Greater Manchester Public Health Network
30+ practical training courses to turbo charge your productivity, performance and career. Book online cipr.co.uk/training PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT – cipr.co.uk/training
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INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS AND THE BOARD
INSIDE STORY
THIS ISSUE
INTERNAL NETWORKS + CEOs AND CRISIS TRAINING + REBUILDING THE LIB DEMS
U Uncover hidden powerlines
IKON IMAGES
BY ROB SMITH
Have you ever looked up your boss on Facebook and been surprised at some of the connections you share? How on earth are they friends with Jenny from sales? How long has this been going on? INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q2 2016 13
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INSIDE STORY t’s tempting when thinking about the people who make up a company to see things in the rigid structure of an organisational chart. This may show lines of hierarchy within a company, but it may not reveal the truth of where power sits. There may be dozens of people between Jenny and the boss in seniority terms, so how come they’re sharing their holiday snaps online? Hierarchies don’t tell you who is at the centre of things – they never have done. The most important information in an organisation is the nature of its networks. Who likes whom? Who is trustworthy? To whom do people turn for help and advice? Who is central and who is on the peripheries? Employees, from the highest paid to the lowest, form networks. For internal comms professionals, it would be mighty useful to be able to tap into these. Enter organisational network analysis (ONA). ONA maps the social interaction among a workforce by asking staff who they frequently interact with in various situations. Now, Laura Weis and Adrian Furnham from University College London have combined network analysis with traditional psychometric and HR tools to answer concrete business questions. The results are turned into graphical representations that give a view of different types of relationships between employees (see right). The graphs, which resemble the synapses of a brain, are fascinating. They show how some individuals are brokers between departments; how trusted (or otherwise) some managers are; and how lowerranked employees are sometimes at the centre of important networks. ONA is designed to show whether an organisation’s structure is imbalanced. As a technique, it can provide vital insight for the internal comms team
ORG CHARTS – THEN…
I
The comms team could use ONA to work out how influential it is within the organisation
SENIOR VICE-PRESIDENT John
MARKETING
HUMAN RESOURCES
MANUFACTURING
Mary
Wayne
Gemma
SALES
SERVICE
ASSEMBLY
TESTING
Alan
Emma
David
James
Hugh
Melissa
Harry
Rachel
Arnold
Raj
Lewis
Lisa Alex
by identifying an organisation’s most effective communicators. “If executives want to implement change or make sure that a piece of information reaches everyone,” says Weis, “ONA will find the people who are proactive and seen as competent and trustworthy. It enables you to pinpoint the minimum number of people who are connected to the maximum number. In a company of 300, this might just be the 10 opinionholders who reach the most employees.” Dependent on what needs to be communicated, different people may be more or less important. For example, if the information is work- or processrelated, you’ll need to identify individuals who are influential for their expertise or competence. If the information is more emotional, informal or affective, you’ll want to identify people who are trusted and who offer social support. Often, influential communicators will be found in unexpected areas of the business and can be linked to others by equally unexpected factors. By bringing them together, you establish a further connection between them. “When identifying the minimum amount of people with the maximum impact,” Weis says, “it is often the case that these individuals are not only separated location-wise, but also in terms of their motivations, attitudes and goals. ONA allows you to bring these people together to strategically improve collaboration, which is critical to core
This set of colleagues do not have any access to the organisation's thought experts
processes, allowing alignment of cultural and process goals.” In other words, this technique aims to find those people, bring them in, align them and send them back – or, as Furnham puts it, “It’s the old Harold Wilson beer-and-sandwiches approach: find the really important trade-union leaders and charm them in Number 10. They all go back with the same message, as you brought them all together.” ONA can be used in a more targeted way by analysing, for example, the relationship between the comms team and the board to see what connections exist. “The comms team could, in this
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ORGANISATIONAL NETWORK ANALYSIS AND NOW Organisations and networks don’t work in the same way you'd expect them to l Thought experts l Colleague This area of the organisation is looking dangerously peripheral
Lewis
James
Lisa
John
Lisa is surprisingly connected to John
way, work out how influential it is within the organisation,” says Furnham. Once data such as this is available to the comms team, it can be used to influence key people. As long as the board is willing to take part in the ONA process, you can quickly find out whom each member trusts and listens to – valuable information for getting messages across. “If they are prepared to play the game,” Furnham adds, “then you may hear insight such as, ‘when it comes to a personal issue, they all go to the marketing man, but he’s completely ignored on strategy’. You’ll see a picture that is useful for working out whom you
ONA data can be used by comms teams to influence key people need to get to do what. You need to get the board involved, though, which can sometimes be a problem.” Weis adds: “You might not be able to influence someone directly. A comms team member might not have access to certain people, but you would be able
to see the people that person trusts and is influenced by.” Being told who is a useful contact within an organisation is a timehonoured part of onboarding, but has too often relied on flawed methods. “Intuitively, there will be some people, who have been around for a long time, who point you to certain people, and they might be right or wrong,” says Furnham. “ONA finds them.” As the aphorism goes, it’s not what you know, but who you know. Using ONA, it might be more accurate to say: it’s not who you know, but knowing who knows whom. INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q2 2016 15
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INSIDE STORY CRISIS TRAINING
Where’s the CEO? The most important people often fail to take part in crisis-training exercises. Big mistake our organisation is at risk if your senior management team is not fully prepared for a crisis. That’s the message from Regester Larkin CEO Andrew Griffin. At the end of 2015, the international crisis and reputation management consultancy published the results of a survey of 170 large companies and found that only 68% of them carry out crisis management exercises each year – and of those, only 45% involved their CEO. This lack of involvement can mean that the most important people in a real crisis are not crisis-ready. “A crisis is an experience that is felt throughout the organisation, yet it is leadership that is so often the key variable,” says Griffin. “Crisis management is all about taking, implementing and communicating big decisions while under scrutiny and pressure; and if the people who are tasked to do that are not ready, then the consequences are that the crisis won’t be as well managed as it could be.” Why does this happen? Paradoxically, crisis training and exercises are often seen as a risk, says Griffin. In the eyes of senior leaders, taking part could open them up to internal exposure and possible criticism: “If the value of crisis
Senior leaders fear taking part in crisis training could open them up to criticism
HOW TO PERSUADE SENIOR LEADERS TO TAKE PART IN CRISIS TRAINING You need to build senior leaders up to the bigger crisis exercises rather than putting them on the spot from day one. Get crisis preparedness on the agenda of senior leaders in a non-threatening way. If you’ve got zero engagement and then say to them ‘let’s have a crisis exercise’, you’re likely to get rebuffed. Use bite-sized chunks. Start off with conversations, best-practice sessions, case studies relevant to their industry, or maybe short desktop exercises where they can discuss what they would do in certain scenarios. Have milestones, such an annual crisissimulation exercise. Build around a key moment like that with desktop or awareness-raising exercises for different functions. When you have a crisis or a near miss, look back and review how you performed with the most recent processes.
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Y
preparedness is not sold correctly to senior leaders, then they fear it is a test in front of their peers.” Comms teams have a role to play in focusing senior minds on crisis awareness, even if it’s just getting people to watch the news or suggesting training. “Being seen to take a leading role in crisis management can show the comms function at its best,” says Griffin. Regester Larkin, for example, runs crisis seminars where they discuss crises that have played out in the media. High-profile cases always engage senior leaders, as does discussing why they felt some companies handled their difficulties better than others. A crisis is not something that happens every day – it’s a strategic or existential risk to your organisation. Getting senior management buy-in is crucial. The more the key people who will lead the response are seen to be involved, then the more other teams will get involved.
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TIM FARRON
ANONYMOUS Tim who?
iberal Democrat leader Tim Farron has an uphill challenge. As a keen fell runner, he’s probably determined to meet it, but he has a massive mountain to climb. Asked by GQ magazine about how he’d like to be remembered, Farron was blunt. “I won’t be,” he said. Farron speaks well, works hard and has great media skills. His problem is that much of the media has stopped listening. When the 2015 general election left the Lib Dems with a mere eight MPs, more than just the parliamentary headcount was diminished. Gone, too, was the automatic right to speak at prime minister’s questions. No longer could Lib Dem officials expect regular calls from journalists looking for quotes. And they also had to wave goodbye to regular slots on BBC’s Question Time and other leading political TV and radio programmes. The new leader of the Lib Dems faces a crisis of relevance. So much of politics is about being noticed, about getting through and being heard. Specifically it is about being heard on things that matter. But Farron also has a massive opportunity. Because so many politicians have been caught out
L
Along with a crisis of relevance, the party faces a crisis of place. Exactly where is it on the political map?
by storms of criticism over an errant phrase or sentence, many tend to self-censor and become bland. For Farron and the Lib Dems, the only breakthrough opportunity is to be vivid and bold. This suits Farron’s style. While the media is less interested in the Lib Dems, journalists are also less interested in nit-picking over their words. This means risk-taking is attractive and, oddly, less risky. In the past few months, there’ve been statements from the leader of the party on refugees, Syria and drugs. Work has been quietly going on that could lead to controversial, bold positions on all three. At the Lib Dems’ spring conference, for example, members voted in favour of a legal, regulated market in cannabis. But risk-taking statements on their own will not be enough. Along with a crisis of relevance, the party faces a crisis of place. Exactly where is it on the political map? Clear positioning is what Farron and his team will be hoping for. The 2016 elections are too early to be a test, so what should Farron and the Lib Dems do? Paula Keaveney, MCIPR, is a senior lecturer in public relations and politics at Edge Hill University, and an active member of the Liberal Democrats
WHAT SHOULD FARRON AND THE LIB DEMS DO?
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TAKE SOME VALUEDRIVEN RISKS It is actually easier to do this when the media searchlight is not constantly on you. Risks for the sake of it are not worth it. Risks grounded in liberal values are.
FIND A CLEAR POSITION The political marketplace can get very crowded. Parties without a clear position on the map get squeezed or ignored. Most locations can only house one lead brand.
ROCK THE BOAT ON SOMETHING When Charles Kennedy led the Lib Dems in opposing war in Iraq, the party rocked the boat. Farron must be clear, direct and challenging on appropriate issues.
LOOK ACTIVE
Farron knows all about this. He went to Brussels personally to campaign for funds for flooddamaged areas, making his views and commitment clear.
FINALLY, TURN DOWN SOME MEDIA Providing quotes for end-of-story lines does little to raise profile and can muddle positioning. Let Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and policies speak for themselves. INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q2 2016 17
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IN CONVERSATION
GENERALIST VERSUS SPECIALIST? What’s the best model for a PR agency? BY HANNAH BAKER. PHOTOGRAPHY BY LOUISE HAYWOOD-SCHIEFER
CHARLIE METHVEN Founder, Dragon
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CLARE PARSONS
Co-founder and chair, Lansons
A crisp spring morning in London. Sun streams into the reception of Lansons’ Farringdon HQ, where Charlie Methven, wearing a brown suede jacket over a dark blue suit, stands, mobile phone in hand, waiting to be interviewed. A former Telegraph journalist, Methven founded strategic advisory firm Dragon in 2011 after five years working as managing director of corporate public relations consultancy New Century. Dragon advises high-net-worth individuals and businesses, including financial and professional-services firms and luxury-goods brands. More unusually, as well as strategic communications and brand development, it offers asset raising and business development to its clients. Methven removes his jacket, before being directed upstairs to meet the photographer. He returns 15 minutes later and takes a seat on the sofa. Three women sit chatting behind the reception desk at the back of the room, which features a floor-to-ceiling glass cabinet packed with awards. A sculpture of official London 2012 mascot Wenlock stands in the corner. Clare Parsons, who co-founded Lansons with husband Tony Langham in 1989, enters the room. Lansons specialises in corporate, media and political communications in sectors including healthcare, transport, retail, consumer finance and technology. Parsons is wearing a black and white dress, belted at the waist. Introducing herself, she takes a seat beside Methven, who is leaning back against the sofa. She pours two glasses of water.
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HOW TO STAY RELEVANT Parsons Business is changing. We are living in a complex world, and if we are to remain relevant we need to be able to grow our businesses and move into the space ahead of our clients. If you look at our client spread, we are increasingly much broader – we have manufacturing, health, energy, masses of different businesses. Does that make us a generalist [agency]? I don’t think so. Methven [The term] ‘specialist’ may be slightly patronising – someone who doesn’t have the mind space to think about several different things at once. I totally understand that for someone to claim to be an expert at everything is not right, [but] I think you can have a high enough knowledge of lots of different things. Parsons As far as I’m concerned, you have to be excellent at whatever you do. We have diversified quite substantially [in the past 26 years]. Our whole diversification has been in change and employee engagement, which has taken us global; we’re now working out of Milan, France, Germany, Switzerland. It’s about transferable advice. Methven Our diversification is different in that we’re involved in areas that are not traditionally considered communications at all. We have a regulated entity that does asset raising, and a business-
development arm, which is about helping clients improve revenue in a more tangible way than communications would be able to pretend to do. I have a team of people who do not come from communications – they are from investment-banking, hedge-fund and asset-raising backgrounds. Parsons Do you see any further sort of potential diversification of your business in the future? You’ve got your niche and you know exactly what you’re going for. I just wonder whether, looking ahead five or 10 years, you see yourself going anywhere else? Methven Geographically much more than in subject matter. I’ve got a joint venture in Africa and a joint venture in Latin America, with local partners. WOMEN IN THE WORKPLACE Parsons Consultancies really need to allow people to find their voices. There
At many consultancies, men rule things… they may say through talent. I might say through lack of opportunity for women CLARE PARSONS
are more women than men at Lansons, which is unusual, and we are a partnership, so a third of the employees own part of the business. There are more women owning Lansons in terms of shares, and there are more women on all of our committees and boards. Methven Do women – or girls – make better PRs? Parsons I never call them girls. Methven Women, girls… anyway, in my experience they do. That’s a massive generalisation, because I have met some excellent male PRs and some hopeless female PRs, but I have had more brilliant female employees than male. Parsons I am involved in the 30% Club [the organisation lobbying that at least 30% of all FTSE 100 boards should be female] and I absolutely believe in diversity. There are certainly traits of empathy [in women] but [I wouldn’t want to suggest] they make better public relations professionals. I want men to feel that Lansons is a great place for them. Methven As one agency boss to another, I would even go further and say that the harder-working public relations people whom I have come across have been women. Parsons If you look at a lot of consultancies, you will see a heavy propensity for men ruling things, and they may say it’s through talent,
Both Parsons and Methven see a major trend for diversification within the comms industry
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IN CONVERSATION and I might say it’s through a lack of opportunity and too much unconscious bias in organisations against women. HIRING TALENT Methven From my graduate class at Oxford, I remember the very top people going into management consultancies and investment banks; the more vocational people went into medicine or journalism. There wasn’t a single person who wanted to go into public relations. Parsons At Lansons, we want [people with] entrepreneurial zeal. There isn’t any glass ceiling in consultancy and we are a meritocracy in that sense – if you’re good, you shoot through the ranks. Methven Should people come into public relations straight from university? Parsons It’s a difficult one. Our consultancy takes people who have left university or have been [working] in business for about 18 months. We train a massive amount of young people – in internships or to employ. Would I advise someone to do a communications degree? I believe it’s better to be in the industry a bit, but that’s only because I think, very often, consultancy people lose the breadth they need. Methven We don’t take people at such an early stage. There are only 20 of us and we don’t have the same resources [as Lansons] to be able to train people in that way. I encourage [people coming into the business] to try different areas. If they decide [a certain area] is where they want to make a difference, I welcome that. I force my public relations people to spend time with the asset-raising people, because sometimes public relations professionals don’t understand enough about the intricacies of money. Parsons We all have particular talents, and the fastest way to be successful is to recognise what those talents are. You don’t become a great long-distance runner unless you put the hours in. MANAGEMENT CONSULTANCIES Methven The public relations industry will be what it needs to be when it starts to piss off the management consultants. Parsons Management consultancies are trying now to diversify into everything else. With this notion of blurring lines [between communications businesses and management consultancies], I have
The public relations industry will be what it needs to be when it starts to piss off the management consultants CHARLIE METHVEN
to say I rarely call us public relations. We are reputation-management experts, and that can be small businesses or large. Public relations is often thought to be about media, but it is much more than that. For us, it is about supporting businesses – defending and building reputations. Methven We are in a slightly odd niche, because our niche is not [what] our client does, but the market they are aiming at. The problem is that a lot of public relations professionals have managed to box themselves in, and therefore half the industry, into a little pigeonhole called ‘media relations’. It’s the least interesting bit of what we do. COMPETITIVENESS Parsons [At Lansons] we are dealing with difficult problem-solving and managing risk, and that attracts a certain type of person. A generalist here who didn’t love the type of work we do wouldn’t flourish. If you combine an ability to put effort in with skills, you have a recipe for success. We should all be better listeners, especially young people in their early careers. A drive to be better will set you apart. Methven Competitiveness is a positive thing. If you speak to sportsmen, they love and respect their opponents because those opponents help them get better. My one desire for our industry is to attract more of these types of people.
THE PLAYERS
Clare Parsons
Charlie Methven
Co-founder and chair, Lansons Founded Lansons in 1989 with husband Tony Langham. She also sits on the National Business Awards advisory board, is a trustee of HighTide Festival Theatre, and a member of the 30% Club
Founder, Dragon Founded advisory firm Dragon in 2011 after five years as managing director of public relations consultancy New Century. Prior to venturing into communications, Methven was a journalist at The Daily Telegraph
INDUSTRY TRENDS Methven There are some big trends going on in the industry and one of them is the improvement of in-house corporate communications. When I was a journalist, 20 years ago, a lot of communications wasn’t very good – it has improved across the board – but in-house communications was dreadful 20 years ago. That has changed radically and there are some really sharp public relations professionals going in house. Parsons It wasn’t just the in-house people; 20 years ago there were a lot of agency people who were quite flabby. Collectively we are getting better. I would differ to say that I believe there is talent in so many places and a great in-house team is an excellent asset to a business, but you need an external perspective as well. INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q2 2016 21
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SPORTING ROLE MODELS
BY MIHIR BOSE. PHOTOGRAPHY BY GETTY IMAGES 22 Q2 2016 INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK
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No three modern athletes could be more different than Victoria Pendleton, Maria Sharapova and Adam Johnson. The first is a double gold medalwinning Olympic track cyclist; Sharapova a Grand Slam tennis champion; and Johnson a footballer whose skills earned him 12 England caps and £60,000 a week. Yet they share one thing in common: they all are – or were – considered role models in society. Like all role models, their actions are meant to set a standard for the rest of us. So when Pendleton, who until 2015 had never ridden a horse, came a creditable fifth in her first race at Cheltenham, she showed how a determined, ambitious person can overcome the odds. However, when Sharapova, a former Wimbledon champion, tested positive for a banned, performance-enhancing substance, and Johnson was convicted of sexual activity with an underage girl, these disclosures revealed how our role models can let us down. After Johnson was jailed for six years, detective inspector Aelfwynn Sampson of Durham Police said: “Fame, celebrity and a position of power does not give you the right to break the law… In our footballobsessed region Adam Johnson had a responsibility to be a role model, a role he did not fulfil.”
Drugs scandals, institutional corruption and jail time for former stars – sport’s reputation has taken a pounding. It’s time to explain what’s been going on…
THE NEW GLOBAL ICONS In an increasingly sceptical world, sportspeople are courted by marketers to endorse their goods and services. The athlete is presented as a person of higher moral values. A great tennis shot from a seemingly impossible INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q2 2016 23
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SPORTING ROLE MODELS position becomes a demonstration of courage. A simple matter of superior sporting skill becomes a sign that we are in the presence of a greater human being. Sporting icons are filling the vacuum vacated by traditional role models such as church leaders, men of science and letters, and teachers. Religious language is commonly used when communicating sport: athletes are immortal or godlike; stadiums are sporting cathedrals. By contrast, governing elites are held in contempt, as the rise of Donald Trump in the US shows. Sport is also a common global language and experience that can be understood by people all over the world, regardless of language or culture. We identify with sporting heroes partly because we’re more inclined to talk about ourselves and why we are important. In The Social Animal, the American social commentator and author David Brooks points out that Americans of the present generation talk about themselves more than previous generations did: “In 1950, the Gallup organisation asked high school students, ‘Are you a very important person?’, and 12% said ‘Yes’. They were asked the same question in 2006, and the proportion was 80%.” The rise of the sportsperson as a role model is the biggest change in sport since many world games were codified 200 years ago, yet this has come about without any debate as to whether sports stars can bear the burden we are imposing on them. We are sleepwalking into a situation fraught with danger. We have conceded huge power to these role models without understanding the efforts they make to control the news agenda. SEIZING THE STORY Nowhere is media management so deeply entrenched and scrupulously practised as sport. Pendleton’s switch from cycle to horse came about because Betfair paid her an estimated £200,000 to ride. Betfair backed this up with such an effective public relations campaign that Pendleton became the story of Cheltenham.
THE GOOD…
Victoria Pendleton stole the day at Cheltenham 2016 with a fifth-place finish
Even after announcing her own downfall, Sharapova remained in charge of the story Betfair doesn’t sponsor Cheltenham but, by backing a sporting role model, it got more publicity than any of the races’ official sponsors. On the day of Pendleton’s race, many of the racegoers proudly wore Betfair scarves, turning what is normally Gold Cup Day, the festival’s blue-riband race meeting, into the Betfair Pendleton Day. Pendleton was, of course, selling a success story, but, for sporting role models, even a bad news story can be turned to good effect. When athletes fail drug tests, they normally go into hiding, claiming they know nothing about it and were victims of foul play. Maria Sharapova, expertly advised by her comms team, decided to hold a press conference.
What is more, she gave advance notice of the press conference, leading to feverish speculation that she was about to announce her retirement or at least reveal a new sponsor. Remarkably, even after announcing her own downfall, Sharapova remained in charge of the story. Her defence was that she had always been taking the drug, and only failed the test because she had been unaware that meldonium had recently been banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency. Sharapova was so successful in turning a doping offence into a more everyday story that she generated much sympathy, if not support. Adam Johnson and Sunderland also tried to manage the narrative. Johnson initially pleaded innocence, and his club allowed him to play even after the police had told the club’s chief executive, Margaret Byrne, much of the evidence that eventually damned him. Then came the truth. Initially, Byrne asked Sunderland manager, Sam Allardyce – who had no part in making the decision – to
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SPORTING ROLE MODELS explain why Johnson was allowed to play. Then new evidence emerged and she was forced to resign. In this instance, the judicial authorities took matters out of Sunderland’s hands, but that doesn’t always happen. Lance Armstrong nearly succeeded in outgunning the media. Even after being revealed as a drug cheat, he went on The Oprah Winfrey Show to control the news agenda. BACK PAGE NEWS, FRONT PAGE STORY Sports stars have been helped by a dramatic change in how the media reports on sport. Back in the 1970s, when I first started working for The Sunday Times, the paper devoted four pages to sport, but had a separate business section. Now all major papers have separate sports sections, and on certain days The Times and The Daily Telegraph even have a separate section on football; not all papers have dedicated business sections. It is not uncommon to see sports stories on the front page of the Financial Times or as the subject of Economist leaders.
Despite wielding such prominence and social influence, sporting icons and institutions are seldom held to account. While the governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney can be summoned to the House of Commons for a grilling, David Beckham (who hasn’t played competitive football for years, but is still one of the world’s most famous people) and his ilk are allowed to control the news agenda. You can only get access to them if you accept their terms. Even then, the interviews they give carry echoes of how the Kremlin managed the news in the Communist era. It’s not uncommon for sportspeople to demand – and get – copy approval before agreeing to an
Despite wielding such prominence, sporting icons are seldom held to account
interview. Often the article will carry a plug for the star’s sponsor, who probably facilitated the interview in the first place. I was reminded of such message control when doing an article on a major international sports event to be held this summer. The story was fascinating, as it gave me a chance to meet a 94-year-old who had won a medal in the same event back in 1938, beating a Nazi team sent to London to use sport to prove the superiority of Hitler’s ideas. At the same time, I met a present-day British competitor in the same event, which provided a wonderful chance to reflect on how sport had changed. Drugs was an obvious subject to discuss, but the public relations agency got very worried when I started along this line. And when my piece appeared, including a reference to drugs, the agency was very upset – even though my piece accurately reported the athlete’s view that, whatever may be happening in other sports, drugs was not an issue in hers. The PR agency
THE BAD…
Lance Armstrong tried to control the narrative of his disgrace with an Oprah interview
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SPORTING ROLE MODELS AND THE BEAUTIFUL
All smiles… but for the press David Beckham is near untouchable
could do nothing about the printed article in the London Evening Standard, but demanded that I remove it from the paper’s website as it was not the ‘soft focus’ interview they were looking for. I had to tell them that if they had wanted an advertorial they should have contacted the paper’s marketing team, not rung me. At least I got an interview. The big barons of sport, the rich men who own football clubs, never give any. We have simply never heard from the owners of Chelsea and Manchester City – Roman Abramovich and Sheikh Mansour – and many other owners of Premier League clubs. Mike Ashley? Schtum. Randy Lerner? Not a peep. Ironically, many of these owners are from the US, where the media gets fantastic access. There, even female reporters (!) are allowed to go into teams’ dressing rooms after a game. Before every Super Bowl, the players from both teams and the owners all make themselves available for interviews.
As more pages are devoted to sport, there is less scrutiny of sports stars In Britain, these same owners have found a culture that is instinctively more secretive. THE PERILS OF UNACCOUNTABILITY One of the great ironies of modern sports coverage is that, as more pages are devoted to sport, there is less scrutiny of sports stars and less understanding of what is really happening. This would be fine if sport were still a gentle amateur leisure activity, but it’s not. It’s a multibillionpound industry whose ‘role models’ are meant to ‘inspire’ our children. Most of the comment pieces by former and current sports stars are ghost-written. Until recently, some newspapers would add the name of
the journalist the star was talking to at the bottom of the article. Now, what is presented as a world-class player giving invaluable insights that only he or she could offer is usually nothing more than the star spending a few minutes talking to a journalist who then cobbles together a piece and puts the star’s name against it. This is a colossal deception of the reader. The Sunday Times’s investigative stories that exposed the FIFA corruption scandal and proved that Lance Armstrong was a cheat were only possible because the paper backed the journalists and took on the UK’s libel laws. Often such investigative journalism is frowned on by politicians. Armstrong was fêted as a hero by former US president George W Bush. When The Sunday Times started looking into corruption at FIFA, many political voices argued that the investigations would offend FIFA and harm England’s bid for the 2018 World Cup. For the politicians, what mattered most was that these sports administrators owned the rights to coveted sports events such as the Olympics and the World Cup. Hitler and Mussolini were the first to appreciate the political power of major sporting events. Now all politicians do. The World Cup and the Olympic Games attract vast audiences, particularly on television. In Queen Victoria’s day, political leaders used exhibitions to advertise national achievement, as Prince Albert did in organising the Great Exhibition. Today, ‘expos’ are two a penny and pass by unnoticed; only hosting an Olympics or World Cup can proclaim a nation’s pre-eminent status. When Rio won the 2016 Olympics, former president Lula of Brazil shed copious tears, describing it as the moment that Brazil reached the top table of world powers. Politicians will do anything to curry favour with the sports administrators who decide where the event will be held. During England’s bid for the 2018 World Cup, the British prime minister David Cameron made a nauseatingly fawning speech in welcoming then FIFA president Sepp Blatter, now
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SPORTING ROLE MODELS banned from football, to Downing Street. I even saw Nelson Mandela, the only truly saintly politician of our times, courting some of the sleaziest executive members of FIFA, one of whom was Jack Warner, now banned for life by FIFA and awaiting extradition to the US. In his quest for the World Cup, even Mandela didn’t mind who he kowtowed to. This change in attitudes is important. Clement Attlee loved cricket and was persuaded to have a telex installed in Downing Street when he discovered he could get cricket scores on it. But he never advertised his love for the game. These days, public figures see sport as a safe, wholesome and easy way to prove they are normal human beings like the rest of us. Politicians routinely use participation, or at least interest, in sport as a metaphor for their ability to do the job. Corporate bosses promote their ‘passion’ for rugby/cycling/ running and Manchester United on Twitter in order to humanise themselves. A guest appearance on the lunchtime Test Match Special
‘View from the Boundary’ interview is public relations gold. But if I were a PR professional, I would tread carefully in trying to borrow sport’s aura of nobility. While we should honour great sporting achievement and take pleasure from the success of sportspeople and teams, we should be wary of them telling us anything about society, let alone providing guidance as to how to run a good life. FIFA corruption scandals, cycling’s drug shame, Russia’s statesponsored doping, match-fixing in cricket, even rugby union’s numerous injury scares, have shattered the myth that all those who participate in games somehow occupy a higher moral plane.
If I were a PR pro, I would tread carefully in trying to borrow sport’s aura of nobility
The old world cannot be put together again. To provide convincing evidence that not all sports administrators are corrupt and all athletes cheats, we need politicians to recognise that sport cannot continue to self-regulate. It must undergo the reformation that Lloyd’s of London went through when it accepted that it had to come under legal control. And sports administrators and stars cannot go into knee-jerk denial every time a major scandal breaks, trying to brand every damaging story as a media witch hunt. If politicians don’t step in to regulate sport, and people in sport do not accept that athletes, like all human beings, are capable of wrongdoing, then sport will continue to make the headlines for all the wrong reasons, and the cancer of rotten role models will spread. Sport has to come clean, but it’s my hope that it can do so with honesty, openness and grace. Mihir Bose is an author and former BBC sports editor. Follow @mihirbose
MEA CULPA TIME USUALLY IT PAYS TO COME CLEAN WITH A DIRECT, HONEST ADMISSION. USUALLY...
HUGH GRANT “You know in life what’s a good thing to do and what’s a bad thing, and I did a bad thing”. Cue rapturous applause from the Tonight Show with Jay Leno audience. And with a flick of his floppy hair, Hugh Grant defused the global scandal engulfing him in 1995 after he was caught in a car, in a compromising position, with prostitute Divine Brown. Has there ever been a better mea culpa?
LORD BROWNE, EX-CEO OF BP “A newspaper group has decided that allegations about my personal life should be made public.” Lord Browne resigned from BP in 2007 after personal details were published. While Browne could have faced perjury charges, his was a dignifed statement. Nine years later, the idea that being gay could be incompatible with a business career seems ludicrous – Browne’s statement was the pathfinder.
GOOGLE MIC DROP “Well, it looks like we pranked ourselves this year. Due to a bug, the Mic Drop feature inadvertently caused more headaches than laughs. We’re truly sorry.” Google’s April Fool ‘Mic Drop’ button failed as a prank, and the apology struck the wrong note, too. As Forbes put it, “It’s like if an electric company decided to pull an April Fool’s prank where it sent power surges through all your outlets.”
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MEASUREMENT
Measuring PR: what comes after AVE?
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MEASUREMENT
For years the communications industry has debated the use of advertising value equivalency (AVE), which persists despite obvious deficiencies. But will a new and interactive measurement tool finally kill off AVE? Or is chasing a single, catch-all solution a fool’s errand? And what does the future hold for a sector set on proving its worth? BY HANNAH BAKER. ILLUSTRATIONS BY VÉRONIQUE STOHRER
n 2011, US PR strategist Shonali Burke began working on a campaign for USA for UNHCR – a non-profit organisation helping people displaced by violence, conflict and persecution. The organisation wanted to increase awareness of the plight of tens of millions of refugees across the globe and raise funds by selling small blue keys to highlight that displaced people do not have a key to their own home. Burke’s first steps were to work out the campaign’s measurable objectives, so she asked how many keys USA for UNHCR wanted to sell; the goal was 6,000 in 12 months. Burke then agreed on a strategy that involved recruiting and developing an online community of digital influencers, dubbed ‘blue key champions’, to promote the issue and write blog posts. She also organised a 12-hour ‘tweetathon’ in the lead-up to World Refugee Day, tracking how many tweets included #bluekey. As a result, more than 6,000 keys were sold; 113 blue key champions were recruited; the initial ‘tweetathon’ increased traffic to the campaign microsite by 169% on just one day (there were more than 1,000 tweets); and the organisation was provided with a list of prospective donors. In short, the campaign was a success. There’s one thing Burke is quite clear about: at no point in evaluating her campaign did she use advertising value equivalency (AVE), which calculates what editorial coverage would cost if it were a piece of advertising. “How would AVE have helped?” asks Burke. “The client didn’t ask for it, but even if they had, we wouldn’t have used it. Donald Trump is supported by a large number of Republicans saying that it’s okay to build walls around the USA – does that make that right? No. It’s the same with AVE.” Like many PR professionals, Burke is tired of debating the issue that hovers like a persistent dark cloud over the profession, occasionally unleashing a monumental downpour. PR professional and Forbes contributor Robert Wynne caused a Twitter storm after writing a white
I
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MEASUREMENT paper on the benefits of AVE earlier this year: “I obviously touched a nerve… only in the PR industry can you write a chapter demonstrating PR is at least five times more valuable than advertising and get criticised.” Daring to counter the view that AVE is a tired, out-of-date measure, Wynne believes that practitioners should listen to clients, not committees: “If [clients] want to pay someone to figure out an outcome based on suggestions and recommendations, great. If they want to benchmark versus the cost of advertisements, that’s fine as well.” Data from media-measurement company Kantar Media reveals that Wynne is not alone. Of the company’s 1,000 analysis clients (95% of Kantar Media’s evaluation clients are in-house professionals), 25% are still requesting AVE figures. “It ain’t dead yet,” says Marcus Gault, managing director of Kantar Media. “The metric is flawed, but it’s delivered at no cost and it’s understood by noncommunications people. You get a more valid metric by valuing coverage according to the quality, but clients often demand AVE for budgetary reasons or continuity within their organisation,” he explains. Stephen Waddington, chief engagement officer at global PR agency Ketchum, is not impressed: “People who are addicted to drugs will be after drugs, but it doesn’t mean we should supply them.” ALTERNATIVE METRICS In recent years, the industry’s leading bodies – including CIPR, the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC) and the Public Relations Consultants Association – have made great strides in dissuading practitioners from using the AVE metric, from penalising awards submissions that include AVE to developing the Barcelona Principles (see box, page 35). These principles, drawn up at AMEC’s 2010 summit in Barcelona and revised in 2015, are guidelines for measuring PR campaigns. They are used, says Ketchum chief executive David Rockland, who led their development, by the likes of General Motors and the
AVE is flawed, but it’s delivered at no cost and is understood by non-comms people UK Cabinet Office. “It’s not a formula; PR measurement is complicated. This is not a one-size-fits-all, simple thing to do,” he says. One of the principles states that AVE figures “are not the value of communications”. So what is? The Government Communication Service Evaluation Framework – a PDF guide that can be used when planning activity and setting metrics to track success – is, arguably, a catch-all measurement solution (see diagram, page 37). The document sets out the different disciplines within communications – internal, stakeholder, marketing, media and digital – and asks users what metrics they want to track in each area. “These are just typical metrics, but, in almost every case, you would be able to select some metrics from those that will be applicable to your campaign that will provide good outcome figures,”
explains Elayne Phillips, head of insight and evaluation, Prime Minister’s Office and Cabinet Office Communications, who was involved in leading the development of the framework. An early demonstration of its application has been in measuring the effectiveness of the government’s 5p carrier bag campaign, launched in October 2015, which aims to reduce consumption of plastic bags in English supermarkets by 80% in 12 months. There was a 78% reduction in singleuse carrier bags in Tesco stores in the first two months alone. “The focus has to be about what you want to actually achieve and making sure communications is contributing to those results,” adds Phillips. Sandra Macleod, director of Reputation Dividend, instinctively mistrusts the one-size-fits-all concept: “I have yet to see one universal solution for measuring PR’s contribution. Understanding where you are at the start of the campaign and how things have changed because of professional PR is what people need to think about.” All good businesses have a planning process to reach their end goals – and it should be the same with PR, says Waddington. It is crucial to set out objectives at the start of a campaign and align metrics to those goals. Campaigning to get a planning application through a local authority is just one example: “You need to persuade the local community of the value of the application. How do you measure if your campaign is successful? You look at the number of objections you receive and the support you get and, ultimately, whether the application is accepted or not,” he explains. The most compelling way to persuade clients to ditch AVE, according to Waddington, is to ensure the contribution made through PR corresponds to the goals of the business in financial terms. Burke agrees: “Talk to clients about how they can make money for the business.” NEW INDUSTRY FRAMEWORK In June 2016, at its international summit in London, AMEC will launch a new interactive measurement tool. Richard Bagnall, chief executive of PRIME
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MEASUREMENT Research and board director of AMEC, who is leading the project, says the tool is a development of the social media monitoring frameworks that the organisation created two years ago. “We were telling people to think about their objectives and the channels they were planning to use, then set targets for each channel and measure across that. But we realised that practitioners shouldn’t just be looking at social media; campaigns need to be measured across integrated media, which is paid, earned, shared and owned.” The integrated communications measurement framework (ICMF), which will be free to use, allows users to fill in their own campaign details, set objectives and build a measurement plan in advance, offering tips and support along the way. The framework has been through an iterative and exhaustive testing process, explains Bagnall, who has been working with a group of international experts, including in-house and agency professionals, measurement vendors, academics from Henley Business School and the University of Technology Sydney, and members of the Cabinet Office. “It’s a way of putting in different data points from across your organisation and your suppliers in one consistent story,” explains Bagnall. “We’ve had input from as broad a church as we can, because if people keep reinventing the wheel and coming up with different approaches, all you end up with is a marketplace that’s confused.” But will AMEC’s framework finally kill off AVE? “AVE won’t go away overnight,” says Bagnall, who would like to see more education within the sector around meaningful measurement approaches. The framework, he says, is “better but not an AVE killer on its own”, because it isn’t an instant answer to the success of a measurement programme, it’s not a single number and it still involves users having to plan, tailor and measure against bespoke objectives. Consultant and professor at Henley Business School and Cardiff University Jon White doesn’t think it matters much if the industry waves goodbye to AVE or not, saying the measure is too flawed
to be taken seriously. “In our attempts to understand the value of what we are doing, [AVE] is a calculation that can be done, but, of the calculations that you can carry out, this is really not at all useful, because of the shaky assumptions on which it is based.” He is more interested in looking at results in terms of behaviour: “You can do a much more thorough statistical analysis to find out from people who have changed their behaviour what the influences were on the change of behaviour reported or observed.” He admits he is bemused by the Barcelona Principles and is sceptical of AMEC’s work, believing the organisation has a “vested interest” in tying the PR industry to a particular approach to measurement. “Because [AMEC] is all about measurement and evaluation of communication,” he says, “it is not going to be so helpful when it comes to understanding how PR works
AVE is really not at all useful, because of the shaky assumptions on which it is based BARCELONA PRINCIPLES
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
2.0
Goal setting and measurement are fundamental to communications and public relations Measuring communication outcomes is recommended versus only measuring outputs The effect on organisational performance can and should be measured where possible Measurement and evaluation require both qualitative and quantitative methods AVE [figures] are not the value of communications Social media can and should be measured consistently with other social media channels Measurement should be transparent, consistent and valid
to bring about behavioural change. [AMEC] sees PR as a communication practice, rather than as a practice that makes use of communication to bring about changes in relationships. It is only one contributor to the debate on measurement and evaluation and is too narrowly focused on communication.” MEASURING BEHAVIOUR Orin Puniello had never worked in PR when he joined Ketchum’s New York City office in 2015. A specialist in research, statistics and analytics, he’d previously been employed at Bloustein Center for Survey Research at Rutgers University in New Jersey – and was brought in to ‘beef up’ Ketchum’s statistical-analysis offering. Responsible for the design and execution of predictive analytic modelling, Puniello applies behavioural science – the study of human behaviour – to PR through the use of sophisticated statistical analysis. The idea is to understand how someone’s purchasing habits, reputation or behaviour are affected by different combinations of variables: channels (such as Twitter or print media), messengers (the people doing the talking) and messages (what’s being said). “My job is to look at causal relationships and find out why something is happening,” explains Puniello. A large US healthcare institution engaged Ketchum to track brand reputation and optimise communications strategy. Applying statistical analysis to data he gathered through surveys, Puniello was able to work out that, if the client’s visibility in daily newspapers increased by 10 percentage points from 11% to 21%, the likelihood of travelling to one of the client’s healthcare centres could increase from 7.95 to 8.05 on a 10-point scale. “I was able to show the client which channels were most positively impacting their reputation and explain what people’s key behaviours were as a result of viewing the client via different channels,” says Puniello. “[Behavioural science] allows you to say to your client: ‘if you want the best bang for your buck, here’s who you INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q2 2016 35
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MEASUREMENT need to say what, in what place, to get that to occur,’” explains Rockland, who believes behavioural science is one of the greatest and most rapidly growing aspects of PR measurement – and far more valuable than AVE. The examination of human behaviour has been carried out in other industries for several decades, but was only brought to the fore in communications in 2008 with the publication of Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness by US academics Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. Simon Maule, director of communications agency Linstock, is a fan of the book and passionate about using behavioural science to measure communications, believing it provides a much richer understanding of how people think and act: “It’s about trying to get inside people’s heads. If you want [people] to do something, what are the barriers preventing them doing that?” Maule believes the public sector is particularly adept at using behavioural science, pointing to how HMRC played with different ways of asking people to pay them: “In the past [HMRC] was very officious – ‘you must pay or you will be fined’ – but now it’s more personal. It uses friendlier language and talks about
SOLUTION
easier ways people can pay. The result? People are paying more quickly.” Behavioural science may be a highly effective form of measurement, but most industry professionals do not have a background in statistics (Puniello is studying a PhD in survey research alongside his day job). So is it realistic to expect agencies and clients to develop behavioural change-induced targets? There are simple ways to relate behavioural science and PR activity, says Maule. One of the easiest is to observe people’s behaviour before and after a campaign. “Do some social listening, because then you’re listening to actual conversations, and conduct interviews with people afterwards to try to gauge what’s happened,” he advises. It’s also just one tool in the measurement arsenal. “[Behavioural science] should be used with other approaches. I’d never recommend that it’s just used on its own,” adds Puniello. AVE may not be dead, but it is not the answer to evaluating PR. The industry is working hard to develop new, effective tools to evidence the value of comms. The ICMF, and others that will inevitably follow, may not be the last word in the evaluation debate, but they are useful milestones on the profession’s journey towards leaving AVE behind.
AVE may not be dead, but it is certainly not the answer to evaluating PR
GOVERNMENT COMMUNICATION SERVICE EVALUATION FRAMEWORK MODEL
Organisation/policy objectives Communication objectives
Campaign evaluation and further insight to inform future planning Ongoing insight to inform delivery and future planning
STAGES: THINGS YOU NEED TO DO, TRACK AND/ OR ACHIEVE
METRICS & MILESTONES METHODS
Inputs
Outputs
What you do before and during the activity (eg): • Planning • Preparation • Pre-testing • Production
What is delivered/target audience reached (ie): • Distribution • Exposure • Reach
Outtakes
Outcomes
Organisational impact
What the target audience thinks, feels or does to make a decision (ie): • Awareness • Understanding • Interest • Engagement • Preference • Support
The result of your activity on the target audience (eg): • Impact • Influence • Effects: - Attitude - Behaviour
The quantifiable impact on the organisation’s goals/KPIs (eg): • Revenue • Costs reduction • Complying actions (attitude/behaviour change) • Retention • Reputation
Select the right metrics from the framework to help you measure and evaluate the performance of your integrated communication activities Use a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods (eg surveys, interview feedback, focus groups, social media analytics, tracking)
Select the right business KPIs to track performance of your integrated communication activities against your organisation’s goals
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ESSAY
“This product is a giant piece of
S**T The thought of building a communications plan around a fundamentally flawed product may fill your heart with dread, but – sorry folks – buggy beta launches and minimum viable products are going to be your future BY OLIVIA SOLON. ILLUSTRATIONS BY BRETT RYDER INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q2 2016 39
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ESSAY n February, Slack founder Stewart Butterfield retweeted an article that quoted a Q&A he had done with MIT Technology Review. In the interview, he described his incredibly popular team messaging app as “terrible” and “just a giant piece of shit”, adding that “there’s always room for improvement”. The article was dated November 2014, but Butterfield noted in his tweet that “this is still as true now as it was 16 months ago”. Butterfield’s words are the stuff of PR nightmares: the CEO, or the client, telling the whole world that their product sucks. But it’s equally possible that this wasn’t a CEO gone rogue, but a smart move that’s indicative of an emerging trend. “In the 1980s and 1990s, business was all about creating the perfect product and scene,” says futurist William Higham. “But, over the past few years, we’ve started to see a desire for honesty over perfection.” The transparency of the internet and social media means people no longer believe in perfection. We’ve been able to peer behind the curtain to see the heavily contoured makeup it takes to achieve Kim Kardashian’s glossy veneer, the warts-and-all confessions from an army of YouTube vloggers, and the countless social media gaffes from individuals and brands. “A lot of the people who are successful and popular now are imperfect,” says Higham. “The idea of spin and airbrushing is not working anymore.” In fact, a 2014 study from US advertising giant JWT found that 85% of millennials felt that flaws make people more authentic, with 63% saying they even like to buy flawed goods. Smart brands are increasingly taking advantage of this willingness to accept flawed or incomplete products, using careful communications and feedback mechanisms. And it seems to work: in the 16 months since the CEO slagged off his product, Slack has grown its number of daily active users from 300,000 to 2.3 million. What does all this mean for communications professionals trained to launch perfect products and
I
subjugate dissent? How will they cope now that they’re expected to handle imperfect or developing product launches – beta versions of software, apps and video games, as well as Kickstarter prototypes and other minimum viable products? A QUICK HISTORY LESSON Beta testing originated in the software industry to test products among a small group of users to flush out bugs, find out what features people love and hate, and tweak the product accordingly before releasing it to the masses. This process used to be carried out on the down-low, with the developer’s PR team keeping quiet until the release candidate was ready and a ‘big bang’ launch strategy could be executed. In recent years, however, the betatesting phase has gradually become seen as a communications opportunity and, with the right approach, a powerful marketing and sales tool. “Alpha and beta launches have been around for years, but they used to be targeted to a really small community,” explains Heather Delaney, vice president, North America, at Dynamo PR. “They are now going to a much wider audience, especially with the rise of crowdfunding. People love the idea that they are part of the development process of a product.” One sector that’s really pioneered the beta preview is video games, particularly as titles have moved online. “About 10 years ago, a game was basically being released as a finished product, because it was a packaged product,” explains Stefano Petrullo, a video game specialist and founder of Renaissance PR. “However, in the past few years, games have become increasingly complex, particularly multiplayer online games, which means it’s almost impossible to build products effectively without allowing a load of people to test them.” Large betas become a necessity, and key fans and journalists are invited to participate. Of course, with betas come bugs, which can make the game difficult to play. “As long as you are upfront about where you are in the development cycle and what the known bugs are,
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ESSAY journalists and players understand,” says Ed Zitron, founder of consumer tech public relations firm EZPR. It’s also important to make sure that reporters know they are previewing and not reviewing the title. “Otherwise it’s like a waiter bringing you a steak that’s still mooing,” Zitron adds.
Over the past few years, we’ve started to see a desire for honesty over perfection
PREPARE FOR A BUMPY RIDE Launching betas doesn’t always run smoothly. The 2014 beta launch of Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Unity was notoriously problematic, with glitches that meant parts of characters’ faces would disappear and players would encounter invisible walls that blocked movement within the game. Problems were compounded for the publisher by negative publicity around the axing of female characters for cost reasons. All of these problems were identified during beta testing, but weren’t fixed in time for the launch date. So Ubisoft took the drastic decision to delay the review embargo until 12 hours after the launch of the game in a bid to mitigate damage to first-day sales – a move that was incredibly unpopular among journalists. The launch was such a disaster that Yannis Mallat, chief executive of Ubisoft Montreal & Toronto, had to publicly apologise and offer players free content. Petrullo, who was working at Ubisoft at the time, is more forgiving: “Yes, there were problems, but I believe that it became a bit of a scapegoat for a general industry problem. Ubisoft did an amazing job of reacting and addressing things when they were going wrong. The biggest mistake is saying nothing.” With more recent Ubisoft beta launches, such as Tom Clancy’s The Division in January 2016, it made sure to send a full list of known issues to the media. BEYOND GAMING Outside gaming, open betas have become common in the wider software industry – part of the move towards web-based ‘software as a service’. Perhaps the most famous example is Gmail, which was in ‘beta’ for five years after launching in 2004, despite gaining hundreds of thousands of users. Daniel Nye Griffiths, associate director at Albion Drive, explains the rationale:
“If something has a ‘beta’ label on it, and is also being offered without charge, there’s an encouragement to be tolerant of service outages or bugs. “However, [Google] was also sending a message about how the software market was changing. If your service is web based and constantly being amended, it’s hard to know what a release candidate would look like.” Google eventually switched Gmail and other Google Apps out of beta in 2009, but mostly for reasons of perception – to make it clear to enterprise clients that the offerings were mature enough to migrate to. “Even then, there was a sly joke built in – it was possible to re-enable the beta through Gmail Labs, which had no effect but to return the ‘beta’ flash under the logo,” smiles Nye Griffiths. STARTUPS Startups and early-stage companies face a particular set of communications challenges around betas and launching imperfect products. First, it’s essential to control the size of the beta-testing group, because it’s hard to deal with a massive influx of users. “You don’t want everyone to rush to download your product – it’s likely to have bugs and you’ll be unable to deal with the bandwidth,” explains Cathy White, communications and marketing manager at startup accelerator Seedcamp. Again, honesty is the best policy. “You need to be very clear about saying ‘beta’ and make sure that the people you speak to understand what you are building for the future.” She suggests desk-side briefings with selected, trusted journalists, whose readerships are geared towards the early adopter. “Give them something they are happy to play around with because they know it’s not the finished product.” In some cases, it makes sense to launch a PR campaign before there is a beta product to play with – something startups like to do to show traction when they are seeking funding rounds. When this does happen, PR professionals can focus on highlighting the pedigree of the team behind the product, combined with videos and INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q2 2016 41
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ESSAY
We accept that some of our plans will be flawed. By engaging early with customers, we’ll improve them
other materials that illustrate the company’s mission. This publicity can be used to invite beta testers to sign up through a dedicated website. “You can then measure the traffic to that site and capture data about all the potential users you are appealing to,” says White. One startup doing this is Mondo, a new type of bank designed for the mobile generation. “It’s a better current account that’s on your smartphone,” says founder Tom Blomfield. Mondo started talking to customers in November with a group of 3,000 ‘alpha’ testers who were given a prepaid debit card before the company became a full bank. “From day one, we were really open with our customers, sharing designs, wireframes and videos of how it would work,” explains Blomfield. Mondo opened up a community forum where users could chat with designers, hear about plans and give feedback. It then used PR and social advertising to drive people to a waiting list. There have already been more than 45,000 sign-ups. “We accept that some of our plans will be flawed. But, by engaging really early with customers, we’ll improve them, while building a loyal customer base,” Blomfield explains. HARD THINGS Hardware has traditionally been much more secretive. Companies tend to work on a product behind closed
doors for several years; prototypes are considered trade secrets and it’s a disaster if one makes it into the press. This happened when an Apple employee left the unreleased iPhone 4 in a bar in Silicon Valley, and the phone was sold to tech blog Gizmodo. While Apple’s approach to product launches hasn’t changed much, there are hardware companies experimenting with beta-like approaches. OnePlus, for example, carefully controlled and constrained its sales channel for the OnePlus One smartphone when it launched in 2014. Anyone interested in buying the phone had to request an invitation. This helped the company manage its supply chain – like app developers managing their server load. But it also created a sense of exclusivity, like the early Gmail accounts. From a communications perspective, it provided opportunities that most mass-released phones didn’t have. The company launched pop-up shops allowing people to touch and play with the phones and get buying codes. Hardware ‘betas’ are becoming more commonplace with the rise in crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter, where pre-orders for a product need to be obtained off the back of a mere prototype. The open nature of these platforms means that the audience might be less knowledgeable about the beta process, so their expectations need even more careful management. Over-
promising and under-delivering can lead to PR nightmares such as Zano, a micro-drone company that raised £2.3m and then failed to deliver a functioning product. The company behind it went bust after shipping just 600 of the 15,000 orders and was skewered in the media. “We advise the creators to honestly respond about the challenges they are facing,” says Delaney, who works with a lot of Kickstarter companies. When it works, there can be incredible social engagement. “Consumers love the idea that they are the reason the product is being sold, and that there is a USB port that’s black and not white. It’s huge,” she adds. Working with so many startups using Kickstarter has opened up an entire new service area for Dynamo PR. “In general, in PR we don’t have any ability to influence the design of the product. But with crowdfunding, we are part of the small early-adopter community,” says Delaney. So when, for example, a new 3D-printer project comes along, Delaney and her team will have seen many other campaigns where users have requested certain bits of technology to be integrated or where there have been challenges with hitting shipping dates. “We’ve seen so many projects that we know what works and what doesn’t,” she explains. The company has now started to advise on product development. Brands can no longer be aloof from the public – they need to create a communications channel starting much earlier in the product cycle. As Higham puts it: “So much trust has been lost between consumer and brand, it’s essential to try to claw that back.” Olivia Solon is a San Francisco-based journalist specialising in technology INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q2 2016 43
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SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYSIS
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What’s up @twitter? With user numbers falling and the platform’s share price plummeting, could Twitter actually be finished? BY MATTHEW ROCK
ig events break on Twitter. Stories and crises develop. Leaders and celebrities make announcements, statements and swift rebuttals. When Kanye West wanted to tap up Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for $1bn, he didn’t contact him via Facebook; he tweeted him – perhaps the strongest possible sign of Twitter’s pre-eminence among the world’s influential. For public relations professionals and the media, Twitter is a spider’s web-meets-beehive: a place where they can weave a delicious, intricate mesh of sticky and enduring relationships. As a result, in-house communications teams, PR agencies and consultants have spent thousands of hours in Twitter workshops learning how to attract a journalist’s interest in 140 characters; how to snuff out a story with just the right blend of clarity and blandness; who to follow; how to entice them into following you; which influencers trigger real change in a market; and how long it’s reasonable to wait for a response to a DM. All this explains why the comms industry has got itself so animated about Twitter’s recent travails: flat user numbers, disappointing revenues, accumulating losses, haemorrhaging staff, parachuting co-founder Jack Dorsey back into the CEO’s seat, and, of course, the heretical decision to enable 10,000-character posts. The #RIPTwitter hashtag did a roaring trade in response and led to the unimaginable, existential worry: what if Twitter is on its last legs? Influence decided to seek the counsel of the comms industry’s wisest owls. One swallow does not a summer make [enough bird gags – Ed] and, according to our panel of experts, one
B
set of crappy results doesn’t spell the end for Twitter. “Greedy, short-term investors are doing their best to ruin Twitter, but it isn’t yet a busted flush,” insists international public relations adviser Stuart Bruce. Twitter’s core problem, of course, is that its performance is relentlessly measured against Facebook’s. At times, the two social media giants have enjoyed comparable stock-market valuations, but now the discrepancy is vast, not to say humiliating: $300bn-plus for Facebook and a meagre $10bn for our chirrupy friend. But the comparison feels increasingly inadequate. Facebook is a force of nature, a sales and advertising behemoth; Twitter, by contrast, is a close-knit nexus of influence, what the New York Times journalist Farhad Manjoo calls “the nerve centre of the world’s journalists, politicians, activists and agitants” with “an unrivalled capacity to influence real things in the real world.” In reality, Twitter’s commercial performance isn’t too shabby. Revenues have topped $2bn and, while it still racks up half-a-billion-dollar losses, it has a $3.5bn war chest that just might enable it to make a blinding acquisition to turn its fortunes around. Periscope, which only cost Twitter $86m, could be ‘the One’, and $3.5bn will buy Twitter a fair few decent startups, just not at WhatsApp valuations. QUALITY, NOT QUANTITY Hard-nosed investors may have kicked off about Twitter’s ‘flat’ user numbers, but most emerging companies wouldn’t sniff at a consumer base of 300 million from which to build a profitable business. Anil Dash, chief executive of ThinkUp, has commented: “Maybe Twitter is not meant to be the most popular band in
the world. Maybe it’s meant to be merely Pearl Jam and not U2.” Stuart Bruce uses a more meejah analogy: “Can’t Facebook be for the masses and Twitter for the few? The Economist doesn’t need the same mass readership as The Sun.” Long term, this is the rub: does Twitter aspire for ultra mass-market penetration (a billion users is the bellwether number in social media land), or can it successfully monetise its classier, more influential user base? Here, it’s worth drilling into the profile of those users in more detail. On page 46, courtesy of Lissted founder Adam Parker, is a graph based on data of the 2.53 million accounts Lissted rates as having a high likelihood of being influential. Over to ex-accountant Parker to explain: “It shows the proportion of [the 2.53 million most influential] users who have tweeted in the past 90 days, broken down by how many years they’ve been on the platform. “You can see that almost 90% of the accounts are active on this basis. The proportion is also fairly consistent across profile age – suggesting the vast majority of key users are still active.” A software company lives and dies by the quality of its current product, the strength and relevance of new features coming through, and that ineffable sense that its app is ahead of the pack. In many ways, Twitter still has that special magic. Its core features – tweets, retweets, hashtags, follows – are now part of our language and, more importantly, determine how we see the world. And the insights that Twitter can reveal – through trends, follower numbers and Twitter analytics – are the closest thing we have to a barometer of current interest. But some new features have caused people to lose faith in Twitter. INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q2 2016 45
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Emotionally, it’s in hyper-sensitive territory. Any changes to Twitter’s product sets off alarm bells, especially among journalists and the PR community, whose jobs require sensitivity to the details of messages, editing and intellectual ownership. “Twitter is popular with journalists because of its (largely) public nature,” says Parker. “Posting in the public domain is just what they do, and they want to get attention for their stories – whereas, for many people, the risk involved with posting on such a platform doesn’t appeal. The more private nature of Facebook, and even
ACTIVE v INACTIVE INFLUENTIAL USERS BASED ON TIME ON TWITTER 25
Active Inactive
% OF TOTAL
20 15 10 5 0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
YEARS ON TWITTER ‘Active’ defined as users who have tweeted in the past 90 days. Data: 2.53 million public (non-protected) Twitter accounts rated by Lissted as being influential
9+
LinkedIn, sits better – even if this privacy is only a perception. This makes the public nature of Twitter both its greatest strength and its most significant weakness.” NEW TWITTER On 5 January, after the 10,000-character story broke, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted a ten commandment-style message pronouncing Twitter’s core values. He’s got even more feisty since. Dorsey even set himself five tasks: refine the service; cater to influencers; curb abuses; play more video; build an app army. But what do comms experts think Twitter needs to do? Here, in full, are Parker’s three big recommendations: 1 More effective policing of the community. Frequent stories about people attacked by trolls, spammers and bullies can't help user growth. Some investment has been made in this area, such as Twitter’s creation of a Trust and Safety Council and its updated harassment reporting tool. 2 Cut down on follow spam. Have you ever been followed by the same account multiple times? You know the ones; they follow you, and then if you don’t reciprocate, they unfollow you. A week later they follow you again and the whole sorry story repeats itself. It’s a tiny minority of users who implement these tactics to try to build their follower
GETTY IMAGES
Moments and the algorithmic timeline both feel a bit copycat and, well, not quite Twitterish. Given that many users see their profiles as intrinsic to their personal brand, such changes, even if only cosmetic, can seem significant. So when Twitter announced that it would enable 10,000-character posts, there was a feeling that it had crossed the point of no return. Actually, observes Bruce, “the whole moving to 10,000 characters thing is a bit of a red herring. The tweets you see will still be 140 characters, but the idea is that links will take you to a place still within Twitter’s walled garden, rather than to a third-party site.” It’s hardly sacrilegious for Twitter to want to hang on to the eyeballs, and the conversations, data and insights that it derives from those eyeballs. It’s pretty much the same commercial logic that all the major social media players apply to their traffic. As Parker observes, “The extended option means users could choose to post that content directly, rather than on a blog platform. “Twitter is already used to share links to longer-form content elsewhere; is clicking to expand so different to clicking on a link?” What’s different about Twitter (and, to a degree, LinkedIn) is that it’s both an open and (in many cases) a professional platform. Unlike Facebook, where your updates are typically confined to your friends, on Twitter anyone can see your tweets and tweeted links.
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SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYSIS number. Lissted’s data suggests only 100,000 users (0.03 per cent) account for potentially 15–20% of the platform's following relationships. Twitter should have more stringent limits on the number of accounts you can follow. After all nobody can truly follow the tweets of 100,000 others. 3 Improve access to communities. A key strength of Twitter is the groups of experts you can find related to pretty much every industry, profession and topic you can think of. In my opinion Twitter focuses too much on promoting celebrities and not enough on these niche communities. It needs to provide new and existing users with simple and effective ways to ‘plug into’ them, both within the platform and outside. Parker has enjoyed success by building community-based Twitter feeds (such as @politicsUKTD and @EducationUKTD) that distil into one account what’s being talked about by around 1,000 influential voices in a community. He’s now even doing daily email digests summarising the content shared by community influencers. This kind of data-driven innovation could unlock Twitter’s commercial potential – for itself and for agencies who specialise in Twitter. SO @PRPEOPLE #WHATDOYOUDONOW? Some PR professionals may have assumed that, as long as they’d mastered Twitter and Facebook, they’d ticked the social media box.
The uproar around Twitter has shattered such complacency. “The days of your social media strategy being limited to Facebook and Twitter are over,” says Daniel Tyte, executive director at Working Word. “That was probably unhealthy and limiting anyway. Find your audience online, whether that’s on LinkedIn or Instagram, and experiment with reaching them in new ways. It’s only through play that you’ll perfect it.” Andrew Smith, managing director at social media trainer Escherman, says Twitter’s travails should make PR professionals think about how Twitter operates as a means of directly reaching relevant audiences, and how it works as a communications medium with journalists. “On the former, Twitter will be allocated as much attention as is appropriate given audience usage. On the latter, it could argue that it is business as usual. Journalists and media outlets still constitute the largest group of verified accounts. “So long as Twitter continues to have a role influencing real things in the real world, it will continue to play a very important role in the world of PR.” Twitter is still with us (phew), @Jack’s in charge and has a vision, and many of world’s most influential people still inhabit the network. For now, Twitter’s storm may have blown itself out, but the calm may only last until the next big set of numbers.
THANKS TO THE PANEL AT INFLUENCE HQ The days of your social media strategy being limited to Facebook and Twitter are over. Find your audience online, whether on LinkedIn or Instagram, and experiment with reaching them
PR adviser Stuart Bruce sits on the organising committee for the World Communication Forum in Davos
Adam Parker is head data chef and founder of Lissted and CEO of media intelligence company RealWire
Andrew Smith is a social media, analytics, SEO and PR trainer who runs Escherman, a digital comms consultancy
Daniel Tyte is executive director at Working Word and co-chair of CIPR’s Social Media Panel
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How ESA brought space to life
A natural communicator, Tim Peake was a godsend for the European Space Agency. But Britain’s first government-funded astronaut is not the only recent comms triumph in space travel BY STUART CLARK. PHOTOGRAPHY BY NASA/ESA 48 Q1 2016 INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK
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ANATOMY OF A CAMPAIGN n 15 December 2015, all around the world, people watched a Russian Soyuz rocket blast off into space. It was carrying British astronaut Tim Peake. For most, it was pure spectacle, but for the European Space Agency (ESA), which funded the mission, there was way more riding on it than the career of one astronaut. The UK is one of ESA’s member states, yet for decades it has stubbornly opted out of funding human space exploration, preferring instead to channel money into robotic space probes. Attitudes began to thaw when the science community itself began lobbying for access to the International Space Station (ISS). In the background was a growing interest in commercial space tourism, with potential passengers willing to pay good money to travel to the edge of space and, eventually, beyond. All in all, it seemed inevitable that the UK would need some human expertise in space, and the best way to do that was to buy into the human spaceflight programme at ESA. Enter Tim Peake. He was selected in 2009, beating 8,000 other candidates. Although he isn’t the first Briton to travel into space – that honour goes to Helen Sharman in 1991 – he is the first government-funded Briton in space. “In the UK, Tim’s mission was the first really visible one to take place since the government began investing in the ISS,” says Juan de Dalmau, head of ESA’s communications office in the Netherlands. “The selection board in 2009 chose the right person. Tim is a natural communicator. He always knows how to find the right words and always reminds people that none of his mission would be possible without European cooperation.” This is particularly important for ESA at this moment in time. The ISS project will not last forever. Hence, ESA and the other international partners such as NASA are already looking for a new astronaut project. ESA favours an international effort to land astronauts and rovers at the Moon’s south pole, where conditions are good for a crewed base. But to do that, it needs continued commitment – and funding.
O
Tim Peake's space-walk selfie
“We are hoping that the UK government will be happy to continue investing in human spaceflight after the ISS,” says de Dalmau. This political angle was a major consideration for ESA when Peake’s mission was announced two years before the launch. At that time, ESA began collaborating with the United Kingdom Space Agency to conduct a publicity campaign that focused on education and inspiring the next generation to take up careers in STEM subjects – science, technology, engineering and maths. Now, thousands of schools around the country are involved in running projects and experiments. Sometimes these mirror what Peake is doing on the ISS. CAN YOU HEAR ME, MAJOR TIM? As clearly focused on education as the campaign has been, there are also routes for Peake to communicate with the general public. “We are investing heavily in social media,” says de Dalmau, meaning that there is now a realisation at ESA that social media is an essential part of any publicity campaign. Erica Rolfe also knows this. Part of the ESA web portal team, she is based in Frascati, Italy. She is the chief online publisher for the agency and the person behind @esa on Twitter. Rolfe’s company, EJR-Quartz, supplies ESA with about a dozen people in editorial/ web-publishing roles. Her team has been involved in the social media for all the astronaut campaigns since ESA Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli, the first ESA astronaut to tweet from space. “In terms of social media, the astronauts are crucial,” says Rolfe. Hundreds of thousands of people follow each of ESA’s astronauts on Twitter and Facebook during their missions. Peake himself has just under 500,000 followers. He keeps them updated every day with photos and messages about life in space and the science experiments of his mission. He also interacts with his followers by quoting song lyrics using the hashtag #spacerocks and inviting people to guess the name of the artist and the song title. It’s so popular that ESA now has a Spotify account where it posts each astronaut’s playlist of favourite tracks. None of this is officially scheduled into the astronaut’s time. INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q2 2016 49
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ANATOMY OF A CAMPAIGN “It eats into their private time, but when they come back we get a lot of feedback that they felt very supported by it,” says Rolfe. “They do see all the messages even if they don’t answer them. Messages are sent all day, every day. It is overwhelming.” A glance at #TimPeake confirms this. Seemingly every minute, a new message rolls in from a child, a parent, a schoolteacher or a member of the public. Human spaceflight editor Julien Harrod compiles a summary of all the best messages and publishes them on Peake’s blog every week. ROSETTA: THE HUMAN SPACECRAFT But what do you do if you haven’t got an astronaut to promote a mission because it’s a robotic spacecraft? Simple. You anthropomorphise the spacecraft. On 12 November 2014, the world held its breath as a robot the size of a washing machine dropped towards a comet. If the landing was successful, the science would tell us about the origin of our planet, its oceans and potentially about the origin of life on Earth as well. This was ESA’s Rosetta mission. Rosetta was the ‘mothership’ that stayed in orbit around the comet, while the Philae lander descended to the surface. Scientifically, the stakes could not have been higher, yet this alone had not guaranteed high levels of public engagement in the past. So what was different about Rosetta? In large part, it was social media. The Rosetta campaign was led by Markus Bauer, ESA’s science and robotic exploration communication officer, and Mark McCaughrean, senior scientific advisor, working closely with ESA operations in Darmstadt, Germany, the centre of all the action for both wake-up and landing. The @ESA_Rosetta Twitter account was run by Emily Baldwin, ESA’s science editor, while the @Philae2014 account was run by Karin Ranero, science editor for the German Aerospace Centre, which built the Philae lander. “Rosetta was the first campaign in which social media was integral. In the past, the campaigns were defined and then some social media was added; this time, the science communications team really built it into the plan from the
Tim Peake (far left) with the rest of the Soyuz TMA-19M crew
If the mission failed, the world would know at the same time that ESA did
beginning. That was a critical element, because it meant that there was material specifically designed for social media and competitions designed to involve the public,” says Rolfe. In particular, a series of cartoons were produced that explained the key milestones of the mission by portraying Rosetta and Philae as parent and child. In addition, first-person Twitter accounts were created for the two spacecraft. These stayed silent until both missions ‘woke up’ from a lengthy, power-conserving hibernation. For Rosetta, wake-up occurred on 20 January 2014. At 10am GMT, the spacecraft began a pre-programmed series of tasks to wake up. The public was encouraged to join in with a shoutout to #WakeUpRosetta. It would take seven hours to know if the spacecraft would wake up from its two-year hibernation. A day of panel discussions and press conferences was held and streamed live over the web, all leading up to the agonising wait for the first signal. If the mission had failed to wake up, the world would know at the same time that ESA did. With the world watching, social media seemed the perfect plan to announce success.
THE COMMUNICATORS BEHIND THE ASTRONAUTS ERICA ROLFE CHIEF ONLINE PUBLISHER Erica Rolfe was in the right place at the right time: “I was an editor freelancing for ESA right at the moment when the internet started.” She partnered with Cees Walen, an IT technician at ESA, and together they began creating websites for the agency’s science directorate. The first launch they covered live was in 1993. “No one knew what to expect,” Rolfe says. They arranged for the mission’s manager to send them updates from the launch site. She wrote the text and Walen published on the server. “We were doing a sort of live blog before anyone even knew what a blog was.” Soon they were asked to cover other science missions until the diversity of topics and the workload gave birth to their company, EJR-Quartz, in 1998.
DANIEL SCUKA EDITOR FOR SPACECRAFT OPERATIONS Since joining EJR-Quartz for ESA in 2004, Daniel Scuka has noticed an explosion of interest in how spacecraft are flown and controlled. He partly attributes this to social media channels, which allow a broader range of people to connect with things they are interested in, rather than relying on traditional media. He also believes that the ongoing efforts of people such as Elon Musk and Richard Branson to develop private space capabilities have fostered a growing interest in spaceflight that feeds back into curiosity about ESA. “People really want to know how this stuff works,” he says. “With Rosetta, we finally got to the point where the people in the control room had attained meme status. That would never have happened without [social media].”
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ANATOMY OF A CAMPAIGN
SPACED-OUT COMMUNICATIONS 10 SCIENCE LESSONS
ExoMars 2016 launched in March – will it prove another comms success story for ESA?
“ESA planned that the very first message from Rosetta (‘Hello, world!’) would be on Twitter, in all the different languages of the agency,” says Rolfe. As soon as the mission director confirmed the signal, the tweets went out. SPACE TALK One of the most effective anthropomorphising tools was when Rosetta and Philae tweeted to each other, allowing their followers to see conversations that reflected what was happening in the control rooms. “The main Twitter conversations were sketched out in advance. We knew which milestones would make good opportunities for conversations,” says Baldwin. So these were planned in draft form and approved by the managers, but there was always the need for fast responses and to react in real time to unexpected events. This was never more obvious than when the awkward landing left Philae with only three days of battery power, meaning that the lander was going to hibernate again – and soon. “Karin and I were in constant Skype contact. We only realised that we would have to do our final Skype conversation a few hours in advance. This was something we thought we would have time to plan later in the year. Now, we had to do it on the fly,” says Baldwin.
People had become emotionally involved in the spacecraft By this time in the campaign, the job required more than just conveying a good representation of the truth. “People were emotionally involved in the spacecraft by this stage, so we had to find a way to do it in a heartwarming way. It ended up being quite heartbreaking in the end. We were sad writing the tweets, especially Karin,” says Baldwin. In the end, Philae’s final communication was rather touching: “I’m feeling a bit tired, did you get all my data? I might take a nap…” The extraordinary success of the Rosetta campaign means that, around ESA, the mission represents more than the moment it landed on a comet. “When landing was confirmed, and a #cometlanding Google Doodle appeared, it felt like ESA had also landed on social media,” says Rolfe. The trick now is to repeat the success with the next mission. The same team that worked on the Rosetta campaign has been working on ExoMars. As the name implies, the mission is to Mars.
1. Identify your intended audience and work on how best to reach them 2. Include social media as a unique channel in its own right, with unique content, rather than a way to simply promote other content 3. Plan and sketch out Twitter (and other social media) milestones and potential conversations in advance 4. Continue with regular planning meetings to deal with evolving situations as they occur 5. During the campaign, expect there to be unexpected situations 6. Maintain open lines of communication to reach consensus and deal with unexpected situations 7. Be crystal clear on who signs off on content and publications 8. Anthropomorphising can add drama and emotion to complex subjects 9. Add an inspirational dimension to help educate the next generation 10. Nothing beats knowledge. Proper scientists lead ESA’s comms
It launched on 14 March 2016 and will arrive at the Red Planet seven months later. It will deploy a short-lived lander to the surface and then begin orbiting the planet looking for traces of methane, a gas that has been seen on Mars before and could betray the presence of microbial life there. Yet no one on the ESA communications team believes that it will generate the same level of interest as Rosetta’s historic landing. After all, there have been plenty of missions to Mars in the past. “We have to manage expectations for this campaign,” says Baldwin. Nevertheless, she will run a first-person Twitter account for the spacecraft after launch. “I will certainly be interested to see what the reaction to this account is compared to Rosetta.” So will everybody else. Stuart Clark is a science journalist who writes ‘Across the universe’ for The Guardian, and is a consultant for New Scientist @DrStuClark INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q2 2016 51
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I want a I JUST HAD A burrito BURRITO, IT WAS
You are doing an awesome job of totally screwing this up
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SENTIMENT-TRACKING TOOLS
WHEN TRACKING SENTIMENT, IT’S NOT ALWAYS APPARENT WHAT PEOPLE REALLY MEAN… BY DAVE HOWELL
n 2013, Argos introduced its new digital concept stores, complete with 60-second ‘Fast Track’ collection. It was a dramatic upgrade to Argos’s familiar high-street look. As it rolled out the new stores, Argos wanted to stay attuned to what its customers felt. Would they embrace the new stores? For its answer, the company didn’t turn to traditional market research. Instead, working with Brighton-based analytics firm Brandwatch, it undertook sentiment analysis based on a library of rules, created using natural language processing (NLP), to understand how shoppers felt towards its stores. “Using social insights, we can understand which stores are performing well for customers and identify areas for improvement,” says James Finch, Argos’s customer and digital insight manager. Argos discovered that customers missed printed catalogues. So, today, a number of Argos digital stores still carry catalogues. Whether you’re a high-street retailer, financial-services company or chain of garages, sentiment analysis – usually conducted in real time and supported by bucket-loads of historic data – has become perhaps the single most significant reputational metric. How are people feeling about our brand? What’s causing shifts in sentiment? What can we do to stem negative spiralling? Questions such as these reverberate around comms teams and public relations agencies. However, sentiment analysis is hard and fraught with the possibility for error. Tiny misreads can result in large and mistaken conclusions. Nuances of language, sarcasm and the fact that different people use the same
I
words to convey different meanings make it devilishly difficult for algorithms to conquer sentiment analysis. At the moment, anyone wanting to draw exact conclusions about a campaign or media coverage will probably still insist on some human linguistic analysis. Context is everything. The sentence, ‘My bank does a great job of stealing money from my current account with high charges’ would mark the word
Sentiment analysis has become perhaps the single most significant reputational metric WHY BOTHER WITH SENTIMENT TRACKING? FIVE REASONS
1
You can analyse brand reputation to determine the health of a brand, especially after a new product or service launch
2 3
Negative sentiment can indicate a pending crisis
Use sentiment as a market research tool to sense-check whether or not a new product or service will be well received
4
Marketers can use sentiment to track and analyse the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns – are they reaching their intended audiences?
5
Identify and cultivate key brand influencers and advocates for future campaigns
‘great’ as positive, but that would clearly be a misread in the context of the sentence. The phrase ‘damn good’ could be interpreted as positive and negative simultaneously. None of this prevents super-smart geeks training super-smart machines to have a go at sentiment analysis – uberVU via Hootsuite, for example, accesses real-time data from more than 100 million sources in more than 50 languages across more than 25 social networks and other platforms. Brandwatch, Attensity, Crimson Hexagon and Synthesio all have automated sentiment-analysis features. They rely on assigning a measurement to the positive and negative words that are used, and then placing them into a context for greater and more accurate sentiment identification. The tools are evolving almost daily, blending big data, semantic understanding and artificial intelligence. These, in turn, will feed into machine learning so that, eventually, all marketers may be able to automate sentiment identification in campaigns. In 2014, Facebook ran an experiment into what it calls ‘emotional contagion’. Specifically, it looked at how a positive or negative sentiment can be amplified by other members of a group, and how a sentiment can be reinforced across just one social media network. The study showed how the ripple effect of “emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods”. One initial message, seeded on one social network, can grow and influence others across multiple networks. To borrow an analogy from physics, sentiment analysis is the gravitational wave of communications, shaping and expanding reputation. No wonder the industry is taking it so seriously. Dave Howell writes about technology for TechRadar and others, and is author of The Small Business Guide to Apps INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q2 2016 53
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SENTIMENT-TRACKING TOOLS
alva
Salesforce Social Studio When Salesforce acquired Radian6 in 2011, the company added a powerful set of social media monitoring and analytical tools to its already marketleading platform. The Social Studio component of Salesforce is where sentiment tracking is located. Named as a leader in its market sector by G2 Crowd, the level of sentiment tracking has continued to be developed. Having access to reliable tools within Salesforce, and then the ability to expand these with Radian6 and Social Studio, is a great advantage for PRs and marketers. By adding its Buddy Media publishing application, and an insight dashboard, marketers can track their activity and the reaction it gains from target audiences. The simple way that information is presented to the user is one of Salesforce’s strengths. However, critics have pointed to a limited range of functionality. Sentiment is just one metric that can be tracked with one of the pre-built widgets that
form Salesforce’s platform. Users have complained that these widgets have little or no ability to customise or further interrogate data that is presented. The roadmap for the development of Social Studio in particular should ensure more customisation is possible, and add an increased opportunity to drill down into the data collected.
If you already use Salesforce and were a previous Radian6 user, you’ll be familiar with this tool out of the box. However, Salesforce has chosen to divide all of the main features and functions you would use on a daily basis into separate areas of the application. Data is clearly presented, but more integration is needed to make this multifaceted tool the marketing powerhouse it could be. salesforce.com/uk
The alva Reputation Suite consists of three applications: alva Live, alva Alerts and alva Insights. The company’s approach is to monitor all publicly available content to give the truest picture of an organisation. The alva apps monitor more than 80,000 news sources, including print and broadcast outlets, three million blogs and forums, and 100-plus social media platforms. This is probably the most comprehensive contentmonitoring system available. Carlsberg used this kind of insight to analyse how its reputation is impacted by its exposure across the media. Drilling deeper into the analytics, it is possible to understand on a daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly basis the directional trend for a company’s reputation and, most importantly, the events and issues that are causing reputation changes. Alberto LopezValenzuela, founder and CEO of alva, says: “Our scoring is based on an algorithm combining sentence-level sentiment scoring, influence weighting by source and measures of likely reader recall rate. Our algorithm goes beyond traditional tone analysis, as we score perception of
entities (companies, issues or any specific entity), and within an article we can have multiple sentiment scores for multiple entities. Having correlated our sentiment scoring over time with business KPIs such as sales, retention and share price, we are highly confident in the accuracy of our approach.” Sentiment as part of reputational intelligence is a key strength of the alva suite. Partnering with Santander, alva was able to deliver a 15% improvement in reputational performance with key stakeholders. The bank also receives earlywarning alerts of emerging reputational risks and can quantify their impact; and it consolidates all suppliers into one provider, reducing management time.
Alva offers strong reputational intelligence to brands through its breadth of media monitoring, vast array of data and sentencelevel analysis. alva-group.com
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SENTIMENT-TRACKING TOOLS
Synthesio
Brandwatch Sentiment tracking and analysis is a powerful component of Brandwatch. Sentiment has been a focus for analytical applications over the past few years but, as Joel Windels, Brandwatch’s VP of inbound marketing, told us, sentiment is now itself being put into context: “I think the age of having sentiment analysis as a differentiator has passed, at least for now. A few years ago, there was a real battle between technologies. Terms such as NLP, machinelearning, hybrid and rulebased classifiers were commonplace, and vendors seemed to constantly up their accuracy estimates. In my view, most of that hype has gone now, and lots of the people working with social data face the reality that the technology isn’t perfect.” The ability to customise the user interface and create rules that display only the information you want to see makes Brandwatch Analytics a powerful application. “Consider the phrase ‘Bacardi is cheap’,” says Windels. “Depending how the brand hopes to be perceived, this could either be positive or negative. For us, the solution is giving brands like Bacardi the option to craft rules and tailor the system to present the results in a way that’s meaningful to them. Quite
often this also moves beyond simple positive and negative towards something much more granular, such as value perception, trust or even excitement.” Brandwatch has become a market leader in the mediaintelligence sector because, while it offers a cutting-edge data analysis package, it also recognises that sentiment can be highly subjective. Its pricing structure is based on the number of mentions your business wants to track and the level of historical data you need. Its Signals feature can give early warning to marketers and customer services when sentiment is changing. And keep an eye out for the forthcoming Audience feature, which will “identify and engage the right people and understand the networks and audience segments they influence”.
Brand reputation is constantly on a knife edge. Spotting sentiment trends is vital, and Synthesio is on a rapid product evolution to satisfy an increasingly demanding user base. It recently announced Synthesio Beam for realtime social-intelligence tracking, as well as a major overhaul to its application, Synthesio 3.0. The new Synthesio is all about placing historical data in context with current trends – and enabling realtime interaction. Listening is taken to a whole new level. Beam-generated reports present what can often be granular data in easily understandable formats. Synthesio is appropriate whether you are using social for customer care, brand advocacy or sales opportunities, says Leah Pope, vice-president of global marketing at Synthesio. “Integrating our social intelligence and analytics platform with the Hootsuite socialrelationship platform will equip users with the most comprehensive set of social tools to fuel smarter
programs,” she claims. “This integration will help teams across all departments provide strategic, personalised and targeted content, as well as increase their social customer-care capabilities.” Synthesio uses NLP as the basis for its sentiment tracking and analysis. For Synthesio 3.0, this has been completely rebuilt and now supports 70 languages in 220 countries. When you become a customer, the company will work with you to create your own bespoke dashboard.
Synthesio designs and performs detailed queries on datasets. The Listen tab creates queries and displays them in visualisations that aid comprehension and show the link between keywords and sentiment. synthesio.com
Brandwatch is a great tool for delivering the information marketers need, but you still need to spend time learning and contextualising sentiment. brandwatch.com
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SENTIMENT-TRACKING TOOLS
Meltwater
Sysomos Sysomos enables businesses to track datasets across their social media environment. On sentiment, the platform claims a high accuracy rate, which it tests using thirdparty applications. It supports more than 50 languages, and sentiment is also tracked within the context of a brand’s influencers/advocates. Sysomos has recently expanded its reach with Optimize, which enables you to measure and interpret a campaign’s results; and Influence, which offers tracking features so that you can monitor community influencers. These are
powerful tools that can also be used within the wider intelligence platform and its core applications Sysomos Map and Sysomos Heartbeat.
Meltwater’s tool for marketers consists of several components: Monitor, Discover, Engage and Analyse. You can use the real-time dashboard to set up content filters to include date, geography, language and sentiment. The firm sees sentiment analysis as “more a clientby-client measure than an overall algorithm,” says Heidi Myers, marketing director. “We are developing machine learning – meaning that, when a client goes through a media search and manually rates the articles as positive, negative and neutral, when the search resaves, it will learn how the client perceives articles
moving forward. This is based on the themes of the articles and the keywords that surround the client’s brand name, for example.”
Meltwater offers masses of data tracking so you can see how coverage is being perceived. Asking the right questions and then spending some time analysing the results will reveal the impact of sentiment. meltwater.com/uk
If Twitter is your main social channel, Sysomos will be very useful. It gives accurate answers to specific questions. sysomos.com
AND THE REST... MEDIA PLATFORM+ precise.co.uk Media Platform+ (MP+) offers a ‘Real-time Interactive Presentation Layer’, a live visual analysis of the topics, themes and issues driving your coverage. MP+ components include Social, Analytics and Connect.
SENDIBLE sendible.com Sendible can track many data sources and has great dashboards. More than 200 modules are built in, so you can create all manner of reports. Sentiment analysis highlights mentions and where attention is needed.
SENTIMENT sentimentmetrics.com Sentiment, founded in 2007, has oodles of tools to allow the tracking and analysis of social media-based content. Collaboration, content management and reporting are just some of the many features available.
VISIBRAIN visibrain.com/en A Twitter specialist, Visibrain’s tool is sophisticated enough to offer granular insights by post time, content or source. Detailed semantic analysis allows you to reveal data that may otherwise have gone unnoticed.
ATTENSITY attensity.com A new version of the DiscoverCore customer intelligence platform was launched late last year with customer insights in context, and an improved NLP that can be customised based on specific dictionaries.
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It’s what professionals do. Build the knowledge, skills and confidence to meet tomorrow’s challenges with CIPR CPD. · Flexible and easy to use online platform · Personalised dashboard · New goal setting area · 900 activities to choose from · Reports to track your progress Log your learning goals by 31 May to earn 5 CPD points.
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03/05/2016 16:13
THE BUSINESS OF PUBLIC RELATIONS AND COMMUNICATIONS
DO IT BETTER THIS ISSUE
BODY LANGUAGE CASH FOR COVERAGE SEO ESSENTIALS BAD DAY AT THE OFFICE
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George Osborne offered a tour de force of bungled body language at his party's annual conference
The science of great body language BY MATTHEW ROCK
my Cuddy springs lightly onto the stage. She’s petite but, as befits a classically trained ballet dancer, there is a grace and core strength about her movement. She gets a rapturous welcome from the roughly 400 people who’ve taken time out from busy days to be in her presence. I’m next to a middle-ranking manager and an HR executive from a big sugar business; they are serious Cuddy groupies. We’re all here to learn about body language and ‘presence’, and on these topics Amy is the undisputed queen. In 2012, as a relatively obscure Harvard academic and social
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psychologist, she gave a TED talk that, even by TED’s grandiloquent standards, was a game changer. Her talk has been viewed more than 32 million times (and counting). The only talk with more views was given six years previously by the education guru Ken Robinson. Amy is in London as a guest of the London Business Forum, promoting her book, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges. Her main point is that the body and the brain work in harmony; each sends signals to the other. Stand proud and powerful, and you will feel proud and powerful – and others will see you in that way; shrink and wrap yourself in a tangle of legs and arms, and you’ll become, and be INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q2 2016 59
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DO IT BETTER BODY LANGUAGE seen as, introverted and self-doubting. Inevitably, Cuddy gives a masterclass in presence and presentation. Although suffering from a cold and taking regular sips of water on stage, she even does this with aplomb. There’s nothing strident about her manner. Her large, graphic slides have the audience scribbling notes and snapping away on smartphones. In the most striking part of her presentation, Cuddy shares images of victorious sportspeople just after they’ve triumphed. All have their arms uplifted and spread out in a V, head thrown back, chest expanded, often with fists clenched. Intriguingly, says Cuddy, even congenitally blind competitors adopt this pose at the moment of triumph; all humans have it hardwired as the physical expression of power. Making the powerless feel powerful is Cuddy’s purpose in life. She’s best known as an advocate of ‘power posing’ – standing, legs apart, chest puffed out, and with arms lightly touching the waist. Do this in front of a mirror before a
LET'S TALK ABOUT READING... MANAGING ONLINE REPUTATION by Charlie Pownall “Did you see [so and so] on Twitter the other day? They got destroyed. That could have been avoided if they’d read Charlie Pownall’s book. “He takes a hands-on approach, looking at lots of examples of successes and failures, including the inside track on a few famous cases – but best is his practical advice for preparing for outbreaks of Twitter rage. Who hasn’t spent a sleepless night over the next morning’s notifications? “Pownall gets you thinking about online reputation and how the different stages of a crisis might play out – and how it’s important to react but not overreact. I sleep better as a result.”
Making the powerless feel powerful is Cuddy’s purpose in life meeting or any event that you’re anxious about, and your body will convey to your brain that it is confident, powerful and ready to kick ass. George Osborne memorably and hideously mangled the power pose at the Conservative Party conference in 2015. Standing four-square, legs akimbo, in front of the party faithful, he intended to look prime ministerial; the effect was more odd giraffe in a dark suit. It was a giant misread, says Cuddy. Her techniques are not designed for public platforms, but as everyday posture adjustments to get you in the best frame of mind. Get into the habit of sitting upright, throwing your shoulders back and unfurling your legs. Your brain will soon register that it’s housed in a positive frame. Cuddy has had a huge influence on thousands, maybe millions, of people. She receives countless emails and tweets saying that she’s changed their lives. “Something binds them all,” she writes in Presence. “All have felt powerless in the face of great pressure and anxiety, and all discovered a remarkably simple way to liberate themselves from that feeling of powerlessness, at least for that moment.” She starts her presentation by inviting audience members to consider their postures. Are we relaxed, upright, open? It’s a brilliant technique for getting us all to focus on where we are, to be truly present at the event. She then asks us to think of a time when we’ve felt anxious
and under pressure – a pitch, a job interview, an uncomfortable appointment. These are the everyday life events that she wants to transform. Rather than leaving such occasions with regret (“I wish I’d remembered to say…”), she wants us to feel that we’ve embraced the moment and made the most of it. Cuddy tells the story of a bit-part actor who went up for a major audition. He was overwhelmed by the quality of the other actors going for the part, so he psyched himself up by power posing in front of the mirror in advance. Afterwards, the actor’s father asked him how the audition had gone. “It was awesome,” the actor replied. “You mean you got the part?” “I don’t know yet, but I nailed the audition.” As Cuddy puts it: “When we are truly present in a challenging moment, our verbal and non-verbal communication flows.” By contrast, when people are not fully present in a situation, they give off asymmetric signals: their words say one thing, and their body says another. Think of the corporate spokesperson communicating an iffy set of results with a fixed grin and an unconvincing focus on the positives. It’s difficult to say one thing when you actually believe another, because lying is hard work. “We’re telling one story while suppressing another,” writes Cuddy in Presence, “and as if that’s not complicated enough, most of us are experiencing psychological guilt about doing this, which we’re also trying to suppress. We just don’t have the brainpower to manage it all.” We Britons find it hard not to be cynical at Cuddy’s all-American style of presentation, but she delivers it with science, warmth and simplicity. She is a genuine psychology superstar whose ideas appeal all over the world. And in an age when we’re generally selling ourselves (rather than a product), our body language and presence is increasingly our meal ticket. Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges by Amy Cuddy is published by Orion Books. She was speaking at a London Business Forum event. Visit londonbusinessforum.com
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CASH FOR COVERAGE
Is it ever ethical to pay a reporter for coverage? BY GAVIN B HARRIS s it ever okay to pay for editorial? Or should you advise clients or employers to advertise if they want total control over messages? Debate has raged since a story about a freelance journalist and contributor to Forbes who allegedly asked a public relations agency for cash in exchange for coverage. Anecdotal evidence suggests some journalists are asking for cash for editorial coverage, on top of their regular fee. Some publications, particularly trade press, are increasingly asking for paid advertising to guarantee editorial. Added to that, sponsored content is becoming much more widely used. So, to say the line between paid and editorial coverage is becoming ever more blurred is an understatement. This raises some critical ethical issues for PR practitioners. I wrote a blog on the subject for Influence Online (influence.cipr.co.uk), in which I argued that, if you want editorial coverage, you should always earn it on merit. Yes, we’re getting paid to deliver a message, but editors and journalists decide if it’s worthy of their audience’s attention. Not us. But that doesn’t mean public relations professionals won’t increasingly find themselves in situations where they are asked for payment for ‘editorial’ coverage for clients. How should PR practitioners handle these situations? The key point is to make sure your actions always adhere to CIPR’s code of conduct. It states: “Members of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations agree to: a) maintain the highest standards of professional endeavour, integrity, confidentiality, financial propriety and personal conduct; [and] b) deal honestly and fairly in business
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with employers, employees, clients, fellow professionals, other professions and the public…” Thus, any efforts to offer, agree to or facilitate payment in exchange for coverage would be a clear breach of the code, as it’s neither honest nor fair and lacks high standards of professional integrity. The full code of conduct includes examples of best practice surrounding areas of professional integrity, transparency and managing conflicts of interest. Or you can contact CIPR’s ethics hotline (see below). “Gaining coverage on merit is comfortable territory for PR practitioners,” says CIPR president-elect Jason MacKenzie. “There’s also a place for clearly signposted native content. Editorial impartiality is fundamental. When a journalist is paid by both sides,
let’s call it what it is: a conflict of interest. PR practitioners and journalists must maintain integrity with absolute consistency.” Whether the public understands news gathering and the role of PRs in media relations is another issue altogether. Improving the public’s understanding of what PR is, how media relations work to shape media output and how advertising affects this process is an issue that public relations hasn’t addressed adequately yet. Perhaps there are too many PR practitioners who, for obvious reasons, don’t want the public at large to understand the influence they exert on media coverage? I hope not. Gavin B Harris is a freelance PR manager and copywriter. Follow him @gavinbharris
FOR TIPS ON AVOIDING ETHICAL PITFALLS… CIPR ETHICS HOTLINE For advice on any ethical issues, contact Martin Horrox, CIPR’s regulatory consultant, on 07974 964639 or at martinh@cipr.co.uk
ETHICAL BEST PRACTICE Laura Sutherland FCIPR and Gavin B Harris are producing a CIPR bestpractice guide covering the difference between earned and paid media coverage
and further tips on how to deal with being asked for payment. It will be available on the CIPR website, and launched at PR festival The PRofessionals in Edinburgh this June. INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q2 2016 61
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DO IT BETTER
How to optimise your website for search engines BY COLIN KELLY ome would have you believe that search engine optimisation (SEO) is some sort of mysterious science best left to those experts who promise to make you ‘number one on Google within seven days’ with a twinkle in their eye. I think SEO is a series of largely common-sense considerations that anyone can put into practice to help their website, or content within it, reach a bigger and more lucrative audience. At the risk of upsetting some of my SEO-obsessed colleagues, Google agrees with me, telling us to focus “first and foremost on what’s best for visitors to your site”. But the search giant also recognises that some organisations might benefit from outsourcing SEO to an expert and provides hints and tips on selecting a good one.
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Let’s assume you’re doing it yourself. While the principles of good SEO apply across all search engines, I’ll refer specifically to Google, since it is likely to account for the vast majority of organic searches relating to your website. There’s no point creating content no one sees, and there’s no doubt that today’s PR professionals can make themselves more attractive to employers and clients by demonstrating an awareness of SEO principles. BUT WHAT SHOULD YOU FOCUS ON? Less is more I remember being disappointed when I realised that innovative, creative writing doesn’t go down too well with search engines. My first website homepage included about 500 beautifully written words about my business. But by saying so much, I diluted what Google thought my page was about. It might have been a good read for humans, but the
FIVE ESSENTIAL SEO RESOURCES
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GOOGLE KEYWORD PLANNER This free tool gives you insight into what people search for online and the precise words and phrases they use.
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SEO SPIDER TOOL This is a free download that crawls your site and reports back any broken links, missing metadata, duplicate content, slowloading pages and other
issues that might cause Google to rank your site lower. A variety of these exist online, but be sure to choose one that is safe and contains no malware.
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GOOGLE WEBMASTER ACADEMY A series of short courses that help you understand how Google Search works and make changes to your site to improve its performance.
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CIPR’S PR AND SEO WORKSHOP Learn from CIPR’s subjectmatter experts in an interactive, full-day course with plenty of opportunities to ask questions and receive personal feedback.
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‘HOW SEARCH WORKS’ YOUTUBE VIDEO Google’s Matt Cutts offers a brief, basic introduction to what happens when you conduct a Google search.
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SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION
There’s no doubt that public relations professionals can make themselves more attractive to employers by demonstrating an awareness of some basic SEO principles
machine that I was relying on to bring them there didn’t know what my site was about. Content is only half the battle There’s also the design and the code sitting in the background. The structure of the site, the domain name, page titles, the menu structure, all the accessibility and how the page actually performs on a technical level – all of that has a huge impact on where Google ranks your site. In an ideal world, PR professionals, editorial teams, web designers and management should all work in unison. GET OTHERS TO LINK TO YOUR SITE Don’t assume that SEO involves sitting staring at a computer screen for hours. One of the most effective steps you can take is to persuade other organisations to link to your site. Google puts a big emphasis on academic institutions, chartered institutes, the mainstream media and other respected and influential organisations – pick up the phone, or take them out to lunch. You might also consider guest blogging and in return have that blog link to your own site. Good SEO is about making a series of small changes which all add up to a bigger result. I’ve scratched the surface here – just think what we could achieve in a full-day CIPR SEO workshop. For more information and workshop dates, visit cipr.co.uk/training/pr-andsearch-engine-optimisation
FIVE QUICK SEO TIPS
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VIDEO IS YOUR FRIEND Remember, Google owns YouTube, and there’s plenty of evidence that it prioritises its own assets in its search results. So if your website isn’t where you want it to be, hosting somes video on YouTube might help.
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DON’T OBSESS ABOUT SEO Google would rather you concentrate on quality content. Give your audience what they want and the rest will take care of itself, the theory goes. If you go too far with SEO, you may get penalised.
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DO YOUR RESEARCH Think about the people who don’t know about your organisation yet. What are they typing into that search box? Those are the words and phrases you need to optimise your site for.
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MOBILE FIRST A website that displays properly on phones and tablets using responsive design earns a gold star from Google and will rank higher than an identical site that doesn’t work as well on mobiles.
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USE THE ANALYTICS A high website ranking and a large number of visitors is nice, but what do you actually want people to do on your website? Google Analytics is a free tool that helps track each visitor as they move around your site. Used correctly, it can provide some very valuable business intelligence.
THIS ARTICLE IS WORTH FIVE CPD POINTS Every member of the CIPR is encouraged to participate in continuing professional development (CPD), helping you grow your skills and be prepared for future challenges. To find out more about CPD and how to log your points, visit cipr.co.uk/content/cpd
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DO IT BETTER ACCOUNTANCY / INSURANCE
Accountants are edgy, too BY MARK ROWLAND THEY ARE CONTENT CREATORS Jonathan Amponsah’s accountancy practice The Tax Guys creates free downloadable content, available through its blog, which is pushed through e-newsletters and social media channels. The firm has also produced YouTube videos and a ‘millionaire calculator’, which will tell you how many years it will take you to hit seven figures. “I’ve just finished writing a report on the new dividend tax, which we’ll give away through the website,” says Amponsah. “I’m sure we’ll get some leads from that.”
THEY CREATE CHAMPION CLIENTS Patrick McLoughlin is founder of Accounting for Growth – a company helping professional services firms streamline their communications strategies. He has more than 20 years’ experience helping accountants and businesses grow by attracting their ideal clients. He says that the best firms understand the power of good word-ofmouth promotion, which is more powerful in the age of social media.
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THEY ARE THOUGHT LEADERS AND PUBLIC SPEAKERS More and more accountants are embracing blogging and LinkedIn. Elaine Clark has steadily built a following through her regular posts. She is also an active conversationstarter on Twitter. This has had huge benefits from a PR perspective: Clark has appeared on Radio 4’s Money Box Live and has featured on several lists of the most influential and innovative accountants. “It’s all about finding your
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Mazuma Money's Sophie Hughes and Lucy Cohen
own voice and your social media personality,” she says. Mark Lee has taken things a step further. As well as running two blogs, he also writes motivational e-books and has become a popular public speaker for the professional services. He advises accountants to tap into appealing elements of their personalities to help stand out from the competition: “Accountants deserve to be more successful and less stressed. They can do that if they can recognise what makes them different.”
THEY ARE USING THE LATEST TECH Mazuma Money offers monthly subscription packages starting at £22 a month (though they still calculate costs on a quote basis). The company, founded by childhood friends Sophie Hughes and Lucy Cohen, takes a leaf out of the tech world with its friendly tone and simple service: clients send documents in a physical or digital ‘purple envelope’ and their completed accounts are returned a few days later. The company recently launched an app; clients can take pictures of receipts and documents on their phones, and it all goes straight to Mazuma.
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HOW WELL DO PRS UNDERSTAND THEIR INSURANCE NEEDS? Professional indemnity (PI) insurance protects businesses from the financial and reputational damage caused by mistakes (actual or alleged). If a client accuses you of negligence and the claim goes to court, the insurer steps in to cover the damage and your defence costs. An increase in regulation and directors’ public exposure are key reasons for PI insurance’s growth. Kerri-Ann Hockley, head of customer service at CIPR’s partner broker, PolicyBee, says: “Professional people are increasingly aware of risk, and are very conscious of the fact that even spurious claims can cause real problems.”
Litigation can be seen by some as a shortcut to a fat compensation cheque, and it’s no exaggeration to say that a negligence claim against you, regardless of validity, can wipe out both your reputation and your bank balance. And while you can’t always stop claims happening, you can make them a little less devastating with some basic self-preservation.
SIGN OFF. It’s an accepted legal precedent that your client takes responsibility for your work when they sign it off. This doesn’t stop claims, but it does help sort out who answers the awkward questions.
TERMS AND CONDITIONS. Using your T&Cs to set out who’s responsible for what, and when, helps manage clients’ expectations.
INSURANCE. Prepare for a worst-case scenario. Backdate to cover your past work (retroactive cover). Ask your broker for guidance.
SUBCONTRACTORS. If you need a freelancer to help complete a project, make sure that person has PI insurance, as your policy won’t cover them.
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BAD DAY AT THE OFFICE
ADVERSITY CHECKLIST
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Be prepared to say sorry, especially if you have made a mistake. We all make mistakes. It really takes the wind out of an angry client’s sails. Make sure you have a solution ready. It’s no use lamenting the disaster, crying and declaring you’ll never work again. Show your ingenuity and sort it out. Put your airs and graces in a little bag and shut them away. Sometimes you just have to do stuff that you don’t like. It won’t kill you and may make other people very happy. Finally, don’t be too precious about those endlessly amended press releases and web content the client just wants to ‘tweak’. Be flexible, but not a walkover. A good PR could have a second career in the diplomatic corps.
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The worst... day of my career BY REBECCA SNOW y anyone’s standards, the day had not started well. An irate magazine competition winner had failed to read the small print of the terms of their prize. So had we, as it turned out, and the situation was spiralling. Legal action had been mentioned. Sometimes, the only thing to do is hurl money at a situation, and that’s what we did. That, and an excruciating faceto-face meeting to soothe, placate and back-pedal. Thinking things could surely only get better, I ploughed on with my day, mildly bruised but undeterred, to discover I was pencilled in to ‘help out’ on a photo shoot later in the afternoon. Fine by me! Until I realised I was to be dressed as a dog. Not just a dog, but a dog wearing a skirt. Whose ridiculous idea was the skirt? Oh, it was ours, and the client loved it.
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Heaping humiliation upon humiliation, I wrestled myself into a slightly mustysmelling pile of faux fur, sweat already prickling my brow, and chafed my way towards the local town hall. All the usual suspects were there. Local mayor? Check. Client? Check. One photographer from the local paper. Sadly, check. Now, I’m not a shirker; I’ll do my bit and won’t let pride spoil a good photo opportunity. But even at my lowest ebb I have standards. After posing in what I felt was a series of ‘fun dog poses’ firmly on my two human feet, the portly photographer yelled, “Can we get the dog
I’m not a shirker; I’ll do my bit. But even at my lowest ebb I have standards
on all fours?” Thinking perhaps my canine costume was obscuring my vision and I’d failed to spot the real dog, I remained standing. After all, I wasn’t actually a dog, was I? The shout came again, this time lightly laced with provincial-town aggression. I realised the photographer was talking to me. At this point, something inside me broke. I carefully removed the head of my costume and explained calmly that I wasn’t actually a dog but a fully functioning human being, yes, with character flaws, but certainly not an animal, and no, I wouldn’t get down on all fours. Nothing was going to make me squat at the feet of the local mayor. One anguished glance from our account manager and the look on the face of my client and I was on my knees faster than you could say ‘Bonio’. I was weeping inside that polyester inferno. The day didn’t improve; it went on to involve a sordid buttock-pinching incident, an over-familiar client, a suspected perforated ear drum and red faces all round. I’ll spare you the details. But every disaster has a flipside, the main one being the hilarity the stories bring at a (much) later date, but also the fact that, eventually, you can take pretty much anything PR throws at you. INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q2 2016 65
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THE BACK STORY Disruptive or obnoxious?
ur previous phone call had been interrupted, but now my father wanted to pick up again. “You were telling me about these new companies that don’t sound very nice; I think you called them ‘obnoxious’ or something.” Actually, I’d been trying to convey the notion of ‘disruptive’ businesses transforming markets with their digitally fuelled models and low operating costs. My father (an 81-year-old retired bank manager) had, however, been transported back to a childhood when being a disrupter meant sitting at the back of the classroom, making a fuss and spoiling things for everyone. Techie types and digital cheerleaders like to talk blithely about ‘creative destruction’ and how accelerated market change is yielding extraordinarily productive results. Such people are entirely comfortable with compressed industry lifecycles and the idea that a sector could have been and gone within a matter of years, if not months. The thing is, many people still think that disrupters are rude and annoying. Sure, down the line, when the ‘transformative’ business has morphed into a really useful, intuitive service, they might be more tolerant, but right now the disrupter is a nuisance. I’m reminded of my dad’s slip of the tongue every time Amazon is accused of being an unpleasant employer; or Google of anti-competitive practices; or Apple of industrial-scale tax avoidance. It feels as if the new digital economy is losing the fight for public trust. For a while, we believed the slogans about ‘democratising’ markets and liberating the consumer, but these organisations increasingly come across as moated modern institutions with a strategy of silence and a lot of lethal lawyers. For journalists, the process of getting information from a big tech company such as Uber is inhuman and forbidding. It’s very difficult to identify named people with contact emails. Usually, you have to fill in an online form outlining the nature of your interest and what type of story you’re writing. Then you wait for an indeterminate period before getting a templated response. The obvious response to such journalistic preciousness is: get over yourself; they’re trying to bring the same automation and efficiency that they advocate to their own communications processes. And I do get that. But I also observe an alarming distance between the behaviour of many such
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Martin Lewis gives his digital ventures a reassuring accessibility
Right now, the narrative of Britain’s digital economy is only about destruction
Matthew Rock is an occasional City AM columnist who’s been writing about entrepreneurship for the past 25 years
companies and the instincts of the man in the street. MoneySuperMarket seemed to recognise this need for a softer public image when it bought MoneySavingExpert and acquired some of founder Martin Lewis’s man-of-the-people approachability. But proper businesses have more than a thin overlay of accessibility. Proper companies underpin communities, as the ongoing crisis in the UK steel industry shows. They are the backdrop of people’s lives, the social drumbeat of villages and towns. Where Street in Somerset was once the centre of Britain’s shoe manufacturing, now it’s home to Clarks Village, an outlet shopping centre. A new chapter is being written by a traditional employer. Right now, the narrative of Britain’s digital economy is only about destruction: we must sweep away the old, dispensing with ‘legacy systems’ and ‘outdated practices’. Where’s the new story, the vision of today’s disruptive models as tomorrow’s social glue? Stop telling me about your algorithms, and tell me about your commitment to the future of your communities. The moment a disrupter starts painting a more vivid picture is the moment I correct my dad.
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03/05/2016 16:07