IPRA Summit blog

Here is summary of key results from the interactive voting sessions: ipra-summit-2008-interactive-voting

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All over for another IPRA Summit — 2008 has to go down as a great vintage; I wish I had time to blog more, and apologies to the many great contributors who didn’t get a mention. Thanks to all the speakers who took part in video interviews between sessions. These will be online soon; please be patient as we have 20 full tapes to capture, edit and upload. Watch this space.

“The media generally favour the viewpoints of pressure groups and activists over those of commercial or governmental organisations.”

Strongly agree 43%

Tend to agree 30%

Neither 15%

Tend to disagree 9%

Strongly disagree 2%

Guy Cote, vice president media relations at tobacco group JT International SA, said companies should ignore pressure groups at their peril, but neither should they fall into the trap of paying them too much attention.
“Activists and journalists need each other and use each other constantly. In a context where newsrooms have fewer resources than ever, the use of a headline grabbing statement becomes more tempting than ever.”
In TV news, as a rule, 10 years ago the average news item was 2 minutes in length with 30-40 seconds for interviews and comment. Now it’s closer to 1 minute with 10-15 seconds for clips. In this context, pressure groups are easy to cover and if your decision-makers are media shy it is not easy to make them be proactive.
“To be fair not every group or every journalist is like that. Some are primarily concerned with informing rather than inflating emotion.”
Those who suffer are those who have difficult information to disseminate. Issues of scientific or technical concern suffer. In reality this kind of media coverage comes at a heavy price. The corporation being targeted may become reluctant to engage – “organisations under siege”. The pressure group itself becomes short changed.
There is a clear trend in news coverage — news reports describing cooperation as desirable by any party are down; news reports acknowledging consensus or progress towards it are down; news reports describing conflicting relationship are up.
“Beyond this emphasis on conflict over consensus – the focus on emotion is at the expense of substance.”
For instance, in coverage of the health reforms proposed by first Clinton administration, reports focused on who supported the bill and who not. The public was hard-pressed to understand what the bill was actually about because there was so little coverage of the content.
The landscape of pressure group influence is changing. Traditionally the game was to influence the government to come up with newer and stronger regulation. Their new resolve is to come up with direct corporate campaigns (bypassing politics — not lobbying government agencies or politicians). This is possible in part because of powerful new online tools.
What are the implications for corporate response to pressure groups?
The pressure to react has become even stronger, but targeted organisations have to be careful to see past the initial acrimony. These organisations are either given an opportunity for dialogue, or not. They are either included, or not. Either way, it is important not to weaken itself by responding in a reactive way.
“I am not saying that attention should not be paid to pressure groups. That would be ill advised or even stupid. I am not saying that if a crisis hits you should then disappear, on the contrary, you want to be available right away. Crisis communications principles do apply.
“On substantive issues, it is good advice to communicate on your own terms, choose the timing, the messages, and the best channels. Have other parties react to your point rather than you to theirs. It is an old rule, but despite the new channels, it has not changed.”

H&K Canada corporate communications chief and online PR guru Boyd Neil began by asking why it so important to protect your reputation when it is under fire from pressure groups. The answer: CEOs rank reputation risk at the top of the list of risks to their operation, exceeding political risk. (Economist Intelligence Unit).
The problem with reputation is that once it is damaged it is extremely difficult to rebuild and recover.
The ground is also changing, with a shift in the dynamics of pressure groups and activists. Citizens are worried and they are angry. Why? 41 of the largest economies in the world are countries. Exxon is bigger than Poland and Austria. WalMart is bigger than Denmark. Companies are not trusted, and the ability of groups to influence social change has risen as they mobilise and communicate effectively.
Four new forces are affecting communications programmes:
•    The desire to participate (the right to be involved, more directly than voting/buying).
•    User generated technology empowers groups and facilitates their involvement.
•    Expectation and demand for transparency (internet means no choice in this)
•    Change in who people trust. (Edelman Trust Barometer – trust in organisations has been replaced by trust in individuals. A person like yourself is the most credible answer)
It’s a new media world: competitive aggressive media, an exploding number of media sources, questionable but entertaining experts, immediate electronic delivery, armchair commentators. This means corporate communications people need a different mindset – a heightened sense of social sensitivity and a more rigorous assessment of “relationship risk”. Six suggestions for how to avoid this:
1)    Recognise the global nature of sensitivities
2)    Do an honest/daring risk assessment
3)    Identify pressure groups who may object
4)    Solicit interest in co-creation
5)    Be ready to make (selective) concessions
6)    Take their guidance and problem solve together
Trust is a function of many things. You can’t just sit down at a table and trust me. It is a function that arises all along the decision chain, through to co-creation.
In this new world: the principle for successful communication are simple.
1)    Keep your story simple
2)    Focus on dialogue
3)    Recognise the role of new digital tools.

“New and social media will be more in influential within 5 years than print and broadcast media”

Strongly agree 25%

Tend to agree 31%

Neither agree nor disagree 22%

Tend to disagree 20%

Strongly disagree 2%

Chris Satterthwaite from Chime Communications opened his vision for the future of online PR by recalling what makes the UK media environment so charged and unique.

“The UK is the most media-centric country in the world. It has more newspapers, radio stations, TV stations per head than any other. More money spent on advertising than anywhere. This is a media crucible. That is why we all feel like a fish in a goldfish bowl. Long before the advent of the internet we had media which scrutinise every aspect of life.”

“The internet is making the international media a bit like the madhouse that the UK is like in the last 15-20 years. This transparency, this scrutiny is a precondition of all communications.”

“Reputation is a social construct. If you don’t have two people you can’t have a reputation.”

Reputation is governed by what you say, what you do, and what other people say about you. The way you manage reputation is to reverse that order. Worry first about what other people say, then take issue with your own actions because they matter more than words, and finally look at what you say.

Online engagement: map, mine, monitor, engage – but don’t jump in and engage immediately, and generally don’t engage online. “Why engage with someone who doesn’t like you, publicly, in front of everyone else?” Meet them offline.

Can reputation be managed?

Perhaps reputation is an old fashioned term. It can be “governed”.

It’s indiviual. Not everyone has to be an extravagant performer like Virgin, though this approach is brilliant when it works. Find what is right for the company and be true to it.

Christophe Ginisty, founder of France’s number one specialist IT PR agency, shared his perspectives from explosive growth in online engagement in France, where 15% of the entire population runs a blog and more than two thirds read a blog daily.

Tracked the development of the Web from the original one-way “one-to-many” paradigm through the interactive “many to many” Web 2.0 format to his vision for Web 3: “one to whatever” model in which people design and customise their online environment.

“Web 3 will be a totally different approach from what we have today. People will be exactly building their own experience of the web.”

Three key drivers of this dynamic (diversity, singularity, and the crisis of trust in sources of information) will drive future developments: the end of traditional media; the end of traditional “websites” in favour of online services.

“I am totally convinced that websites will die and what will survive will be functions”. Google is not a website, Facebook is not a website – they are functions. Think not of creating a website, think of creating a function. The future will be a functionalities-oriented world, which is the ultimate stage of the user centric (and friendly) model.”

Darren Burns from Weber Shandwick China profiled “the good, the bad and the super ugly” of the world of social media in China – a massive online environment with 210 million users and 50 million bloggers. The online names are different but the categories are familiar from the English-language Web: blogs, social networks, video/audio sharing, photos and tags, consumer reviews. Bloggers are extremely influential can cause a lot of difficulties for companies in China, particularly when issues brew online and breakout into traditional media. For instance, Chinese portals have very popular crisis pages that archive negative coverage, particularly of foreign companies.