Good PR according to Taylor Swift – it’s ‘what people say about you when you’re not in the room’

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So, I was at the Taylor Swift gig last Friday at Wembley Stadium – either I’m a fan or I have a tween and a teen who are, or both…you decide.

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It’s called the Reputation tour after her last album and, as she talked about the name, I thought she gave the best definition of public relations that I’ve heard in a long time. Of course she didn’t call it public relations – not many do any more – but she talked about reputation as: ‘what people say about you when you’re not in the room ‘.

Most of the definitions of public relations from various industry bodies are quite stiff and go something like ‘the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics’. I’m picking on the Chartered Institute of Public Relations here but you get the point. Not very memorable and quite dry.

Taylor’s version though strikes home the power of PR over other marketing disciplines. Get your reputation management right, get people talking good things about your business when you’re not even in the room and you can avoid all that Bad Blood, get it wrong though, sour your reputation, and you’ll never Shake It off.

Social media – in or out?

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Pub chain Wetherspoon recently announced it was closing its social media accounts. Convinced staff were being side tracked by Facebook and its social media mates, the CEO also added a more general social commentary that too many people spend too much time living their lives online (rather than tucking into a large mixed grill at the Moon and Sixpence in Milton Keynes perhaps?).

Does he have a point? And, as a business is it worth taking the risk?

Pint Beer Glass on WhiteYes, and no. Yes, I’m sure there are many who feel that too much time is spent online but no, in that I’m not sure that switching off one of the primary customer communications channels will do a business any favours.

Ostrich approach
In today’s world, it’s the equivalent of an ostrich sticking its head in the sand. You might not be able to hear anything or see anything, but it’s going on out there and you’ve just given up the opportunity to right any wrongs.

There are many positives of having an active social media approach, not least the chance to actively engage with clients and customers but also to help shape your business’s personality.

In the short term, exiting social media might relieve the business of a job of keeping its social media accounts up to date, but in the long term  your reputation might well suffer for your social silence.

Time for ‘Total Communications’ (just like Total Football, but without the ball, and you don’t have to be Dutch either)

Talking to your customers, Talking to your employees

Footballer types will be familiar with the Dutch concept of Total Football, pioneered by the great Dutch footballer Johann Cruyff. It was a method of play that meant any player could interchange with another in any position on the pitch. Characterised by space and movement (he says, channelling his inner Alan Hansen punditry), it was a philosophy that unified the whole team.

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Communications shouldn’t be any different.

If you think about every single touch point that a business has with its customers, suppliers, employees, and other stakeholders, how consistent are the communications? For instance, it’s all well and good publishing a beautiful new website that embodies the ideas of plain and simple English, but all that good work is undermined when a business renewal letter is sent to a client that is full of ‘herewiths’ and ‘thereofs’ and other intelligible dirge.

What do the signs in your reception say about your business? What about the all staff email from the CEO? The language used on a trade stand? Brochures? The company’s LinkedIn profile? Even the sign off at the bottom of each employee’s email? Employee benefit statements?

You get the idea…every single communication point must not only be consistent in terms of its language and execution but must almost be identifiable with another. There is no point the group communications or marketing team pioneering an approach to communication if it’s not adopted by the facilities department, customer services, sales, HR…

Call it Total Communications.

Cruyff turn anyone?

A train crash of a radio interview

Communicating in a crisis, Working with the media

A nice interview yesterday saw the Managing Director of Customer Experience at the Rail Delivery Group – Jacqueline Starr – face-up to John Humphrys on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. Well, nice for the beleaguered rail passenger but I suspect that Jacqueline Starr won’t be buying her media relations team their morning coffees and croissants any time soon.

Hauled on to the show to discuss a Times story that found out of 50 rail journeys it was possible to get a cheaper fare on 33 of them than that advertised (and if you haven’t investigated split ticketing before, I’d strongly recommend you take a look), Starr rather walked into Humphrys’ gleeful clutches with a performance big on media messaging but rather lacking in substance.

image for screen-400The alarm bells rang when Starr’s first response was to laud how the “rail industry is very successful in meeting customer demands”.  Things got worse when she then fed Humphrys that awful line about how “customers are at the heart of everything we do”. I can almost see that A4 of key messages given to Starr beforehand.

All well and good to prepare some messaging but you cannot simply hope to paper over a genuine issue with some  platitudes that no one, least of all someone as tuned into PR hogwash as Humphrys, is going to roll over and accept.

Towards the end of the interview, Starr finally admitted to the issue and agreed it wasn’t acceptable. Why not do that from the outset? The rail travelling public is a cynical bunch and is never going to buy some stale soundbites about customer service.

Fair play to Starr for fronting up in the first place but a bit of empathy and, when you’ve been caught out, a good dollop of contrition and a commitment to put things right might have kept things on the rails and are what the travelling public (and John Humphrys and his ilk) want to hear.

Hide and seek: communications for the curious

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If curiosity killed the cat, then there were a lot of dead felines at the Chelsea Flower Show recently. And why? The brilliant Antithesis of a Sarcophagi garden exhibit designed by sculptors Gary Breeze and Martin Cook; a block of granite concealing within its monolithic maw a beautifully planted garden – only evident through a few tiny viewing holes.

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Anything to see here?
The genius of this exhibit made fine work of one of the oldest tricks in the book – delayed gratification. Don’t give everything away at once; make them work for it. It’s amazing what people, even a future king and queen, will do if they’re significantly intrigued. In this case, garden lovers queued around the block – sorry – for up to 45 minutes just to see what secrets the granite block was hiding.

Make them work for it
There’s a lesson here for the corporate communicator. We’re all used to making information as readily available as possible but why not, on occasion, make the audience – external or internal – work a little to find out what you want to tell them? Don’t show everything at once, keep the real find hidden and make them do a little work for it.

It goes against the grain to hold something back but if somebody has to make an effort to find something out, chances are, the message they take away is likely to be all the stronger for it. The catch? You will need a very good hook to entice your audience to go the extra distance and take matters into their own hands.

What’s your ‘granite block’?
Perhaps you don’t have a 44 tonne block of granite handy but if you can come up with a hook to do the same thing – a brilliant headline, a great image, a task to perform, an irresistible challenge – and entice your audience to go and find out some more, the results could be more effective than simply dishing it all up on a plate.

Sometime less can really be more.