“Before the rise of social media, public relations was about trying to manage the message an entity was sharing with its different audiences. Now, PR has to be more about facilitating the ongoing conversation in an always-on world”.
So said Adam Lavelle, chief strategic officer, iCrossing US, speaking at a meeting of America’s chief PR associations, including The Public Relations Society of America, for the industry has decided to devise a fresh definition for itself.
Social media, including blogs, Facebook and Twitter have unquestionably and radically transformed the relationship between the public and the organisations communicating with them.
Traditional PR involved a one-way monologue that usually went in one direction – from the top down. Now, we are seeing a new-fashioned PR that embraces two-way conversations. The industry has been shaken up and introduced to new terms such as earned media, word of mouth marketing and buzz marketing.
A search for a new definition of public relations seems long overdue. An updated level of standardisation might help both PR practitioners and the public to get to grips with PR in the age of social media, and may have helped to prevent some of PR’s most memorable recent blunders. Anyone remember BP’s mishandling of online reputation following the Gulf of Mexico oil spill? Or ChapStick repeatedly deleting negative comments about its ads from its Facebook page, a move which backfired to the extent that complaints actually soared? More »
Australian airline Qantas has been rapped for its ineffective social media response to the recent grounding of its fleet over a pay dispute.
Tweets posted by the company have been slammed as wooden, corporate and lacking in empathy, according to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald.
“Qantas will reimburse the difference between the cost of the new ticket (in same cabin of travel) and value of the refunded Qantas ticket,” read one remarkably concise tweet, failing to offer a human voice at a time of major chaos and upset for many customers.
Word has it that although Qantas generally demonstrates successful Twitter marketing, the social media team had been effectively “gagged” by senior Qantas staff with a corporate message to deliver, yet little experience of using Twitter.
In response, numerous Twitter accounts have surfaced with the sole aim of blasting Qantas, with chief executive Alan Joyce bearing the brunt of the flack. More »
You may have 10,000 happy customers but it only takes one motivated, IT literate one to turn feral and as generation Y matures, there’s only going to be more of them.
Assuming the website is legitimate and can’t be taken down through legal means – or negotiated with, there is still something you can you do.
The main issue is stopping negative sites appearing directly under your main brand site in Google search results. SEO focused content creation can push the offending site far away enough from the main search results to have little associative impact on your brand.
Adding content about your brand is a good thing to do in any case, not just building a bulwark against attacks but establishing the brand as a thought leader in their respective field and providing material for social media marketing.
In that sense, the famous phrase ‘publish and be damned’ perhaps needs reversing for the online world – ‘publish or be damned.’
A new survey has revealed that 33% of global chief corporate communications officers (CCOs) say that their company is not prepared for a social media based reputation threat – a worrying statistic as the report adds that 34% of CCOs say that their companies experienced an online reputation threat during the past 12 months.
Findings from the annual survey ‘The Rising CCO’ III, indicate that as online threats to corporate and brand reputations have increased, so too has the importance of communications officers possessing the necessary crisis management skills. 61% of CCOs currently consider crisis management skills as important, compared to only 33% in 2007.
Social media is identified as the most critical challenge as well as the greatest opportunity in the year ahead, with 54% citing social media experience as key for communications staff. Social media and blogging are expected to be the fastest-growing functions in communications departments in the next 12 months, rising from 28 percent in 2008 to 41 percent in 2010. More »
New research has revealed that UK business leaders have been slow to adopt Web 2.0 applications such as social media, blogging, collaborative platforms, web mail, and content sharing tools, to benefit their companies.
The report, commissioned by antivirus software company McAfee, titled “Web 2.0: A Complex Balancing Act, reveals Brazil, Spain and India lead in adoption of Web 2.0 technology for business, while adoption was lowest in Canada, Australia, the US and the UK.
The research highlights that although organisations see the potential value in Web 2.0 tools, companies are unsure about allowing employee use of the technology in the workplace, with 60% of companies surveyed concerned about loss of reputation as a result of Web 2.0 misuse.
While a quarter of organisations monitor how staff use social media, almost one in three have not introduced a social media policy in the workplace.
40% of companies found that Web 2.0 tools had led to increased productivity and better results from marketing, and 75% had increased their use of the technology in order to develop new revenue streams for their organisations. More »
BP has got to the stage in its reputational decline where it is not just a falling stock but a laughing stock, with 7 million views of this spoof video so far and climbing, making a mockery of BP’s own videos of the containment effort.
The NetBase Brand Passion Index, which measures the intensity of consumer passion for brands among users of online communities reveals that consumers of a golfing bent are most passionate about Callaway a golf club brand.
TaylorMade is the next most loved brand, followed closely by Wilson and Nike.
While Nike Golf and Callaway are the subject of an equal amount of chatter, Nike is merely liked while Callaway inspires real passion.
Despite the negative publicity, Tiger Woods does not appear to impact the passion level for the Nike Golf brand. In fact, golfers express little negativity towards any of the major brands.
Titleist gets the least amount of love, but is still generally liked. Personally I hate them, keep losing the pesky things! More »
I remember dating a budding actress at university who at some point in our ultimately doomed relationship, pulled out a square, white chequebook with old fashioned writing on it – very different to the animal patterned Nat West ones most students were sporting in those days. I remember being impressed and slightly intimidated by it, as I was by her if I’m honest. She explained it was a Coutts chequebook –the Queen’s bank – that her Stepdad had given to her.
At that time in the late eighties, Coutts had a rock solid, exclusive reputation which any self- respecting yuppie wanted a piece of. Legend had it that you needed half a million in cash minimum before they’d consider letting you in the door. As with many of the aspirant financial clubs of the eighties, the lack of information available about them just added to their mystique and cache.
Just as the red Porsches and matching braces have all but disappeared from the City, so the era of such corporate reputations, locked tight in a marble clad safety deposit boxes, have gone. It’s not just the high profile Madoff, Enron and Lehman scandals that have shaken public belief in financial institutions but on a micro level, through the internet, reputations now rise or fall on what customers are saying online. More »
The influential parenting site, Mumsnet, is playing an increasingly active part in social debate, with George at Asda becoming the first retailer to seek approval from the site’s members before putting a potentially controversial product on its shelves.
Whatever we think of this as a PR move – and it’s an interesting one – it serves to underline the impact that key social networking sites can have on brand reputation. Mumsnet receives more than 1m unique visitors each month. Its discussion boards attract about 20,000 comments daily. Even the upcoming General Election has been dubbed the ‘Mumsnet Election.’
George at Asda, Boden, House of Fraser, Mothercare and Start-rite have all signed up to the site’s ‘Let girls be girls’ campaign, after members expressed concerns about products on sale in high-street stores. It aims to get retailers to agree to end the ‘premature sexualisation of children though their products and marketing.’
Writing in his Editor’s comment this week, Gareth Jones of Marketing magazine is sceptical as to whether Asda’s decision represents an intelligent PR coup. “Mumsnet is a hugely powerful force that brands should seek to harness but, in this case, it seems George at Asda may be going a step too far,” he says. More »
Microsoft has knocked Google off its top spot in the 2010 Business Superbrands survey.
Google, ranked first in the two previous surveys, changes places with Microsoft who were in fifth spot last year.
New entries to the top ten include BlackBerry, 42nd last year and British Airways, back to eighth from its worst position last year – 36th. Rival Virgin Atlantic however, also appears, above BA, in fourth position.
Revealing the fall-out from the financial crisis, the list of the top 10 biggest fallers includes UBS and Morgan Stanley, with the Royal Bank of Scotland falling out of the top 500 altogether.
Proving that a re-brand can have a positive affect Aviva, More »
“Before the rise of social media, public relations was about trying to manage the message an entity was sharing with its different audiences. Now, PR has to be more about facilitating the ongoing conversation in an always-on world”.
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