Manifestul Lui Paul Holmes Despre PR-Ul Secolului XXI

8/8/2019 Manifestul Lui Paul Holmes Despre PR-Ul Secolului XXI

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The 21st Century Public Relations Firmby Paul Holmes

Its fair to say that from the perspective of the public relations business the first Internet

revolution was, for the most part, a missed opportunity.

Obviously, a great many public relations firms benefitedat least temporarilyfrom the

growth of the dot-com sector, and its hunger for hype. Publicity was the real product ofmany of the companies that emerged abruptly and disappeared just as suddenly when the

bubble burst, for in the absence of profits (or even, in some cases, tangible products) itwas publicity that convinced venture capitalists and other backers that these companies

represented an opportunity too good to miss.

But while many public relations firms were all too happy to supply the necessary hype,

those same firms were slow to take advantage of the other, perhaps more substantive,opportunity presented by the rise of the Internet. While it might be too simplistic to

suggest that one discipline could claim ownership of the new medium, public relations

failed to make a case for its rightful leadership in developing strategies to help clients

make the most of a new medium while the advertising industry argued that the Internetpresented companies with a new means of pushing product messages out to customers

(pop up ads, banners) and the direct marketing people seized on the notion ofrelationship marketing (because nothing defines a healthy relationship quite like a

flood of unwanted e-mails) to take advantage of the Internets ability to collect customer

data and e-mail addresses, the public relations industry sat largely on the sidelines.

It did so despite the fact that it was apparent even then than the Internet was in manyrespects a public relations medium. The Internet was about information and education,

not promotion, because it gave people unprecedented control over the messages to which

they were exposed.

It was about earning attention rather than demanding it. It was about dialogue rather andconversation rather than monologue. And it was about multiple stakeholder groups rather

than customers alone.

But the public relations industrys failure to assert itself (or its inability to convince

clients that it could offer anything beyond the media relations expertise for which it hadbecome best known) turned out to be not particularly damaging. After an initial burst of

activity that involved strategizing and designing the corporate web presence for clients,

most of the Internet work of the past few years has involved tactics and execution, lowmargin work that most of the big firms wont covet.

The Web 2.0, however, has the potential to change all that. Where the first Internet

revolution offered public relations the opportunity to add a new weapon to its arsenal, to

incrementally increase the array of tools available to build relationships with keystakeholders, the second Internet revolutionwhich has gathered pace during the past

year and was clearly the defining industry news of 2006has the clear potential to

revolutionize the practice of public relations and the business of the industrys leadingagencies.


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Last year, Time magazine named You its Person of the Year, arguing that the story of

2006 was about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. Its about

the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel peoplesnetwork YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace about the many wresting power

from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the

world, but also change the way the world changes.

Ad Age took a similar tack when it named The Consumer its 2006 Agency of the Yearand proclaimed: A brand has only ever been as good as consumers experience of it. The

difference today is that consumers have lots of ways of communicating those

experiences, and trust each others views above marketers overt sales pitches.Consequently, theyre influencing marketing strategy as never before.

Meanwhile, the annual Trust Barometer surveys conduced by international public

relations firm Edelman continue to show that in major markets around the world, people

increasingly find a person like you to be the most credible source of information: more

credible by far than paid advertising and even earned media coverage.

In an environment that bombards consumers with millions of (often conflicting)

messages each day, credibility is suddenly the most valuable currency of all, and the

greatest credibility of all comes from a sourceword-of-mouth, both online and offfew marketers had previously considered and most had considered dangerous and

unpredictable.

But companiesthe most sophisticated and savvy at any rateare coming to terms with

a new reality: that a new era is upon us, and in this new era they are no longer is controlof their brands the way they once were. A decade or so ago, it was still possible for

marketers (and those in the C-suite to whom they reported) to believe that their brandswere defined by what they said about themselves, in their advertising and their websiteand even their press releases; today, they must come to terms with the fact that their

brands are defined by what others say about them in private, after they have left the room.

Those conversations might be, as many marketers fear, dangerous and unpredictable, but

they are the new reality. They can wish for a return to simpler times, but wishing will notmake it so.

Last year, after GlaxoSmithKline announced that it would be training its employees to

become brand ambassadors, to answer all the difficult questions ordinary Americans have

about pharmaceutical costs and safety issues, the CEO of a rival company was quoted inthe advertising trades expressing skepticism. Was it really safe to put the brand message

in the hands of ordinary, untrained employees, he wondered. How could companies hope

to control the message? Even then, those sentiments sounded hopelessly out of touch.Was there really a bygone age in which employees were not ambassadors for the brand,

in which they did not discuss corporate issues outside of their cubicles or factories or

labs? The choiceas smart companies understandis not whether employees becomebrand ambassadors, but how effective they are in that role.


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The opportunity this development presents to the public relations industry should be

obvious, because the process by which word-of-mouth operates is essentially the same

process public relations people have traditionally employed in dealing with media:identify individuals who have credibility and influence, tell them your story, and then

rely on them to tell that story to others.

But if the similarities between the process of generating word-of-mouth and traditional

public relations are obvious, they should not blind us to the differences. And while theopportunity presented by this change in the communications landscape is obvious, the

threat should not be ignored.

The new communications landscape will be differentand in many ways more

dangerousthan the terrain public relations professionals are used to.

From the perspective of clients, the new landscape will demand a degree of

communications authenticity. In the past, it might have been possible to get away with

marketing messages that projected an image disconnected from the reality of the brandexperience or actual corporate behavior. But the new communications environment is

predicated on almost absolute transparency. Employees, customers and community

members will have access to communications channels almost equal to that of the largest

corporations, and any inaccuracy or insincerity will be quickly identified as such andexposednot only undermining the companys message but produced the precise

opposite result from that intended.

We have already seen examples of this trend, from a blog covertly funded by Wal-Mart

to a YouTube video supposedly created by an ordinary citizen but in reality posted by apublic relations firm representing Exxon Mobil. In both cases, the fraud was quickly

exposed and the companies held up to ridicule and condemnation.

But fundamental honesty is merely the price of admission to the new communicationschannels. Companies that wish to leverage those channels fully will need to achieve true

authenticityan alignment of their marketing and corporate communications messages

with the values and behaviors and culture of their organization.

That means an external communications program needs to begin with an internalcommunications initiative. On the branding front, employees must be educated and

empowered to deliver on the brand promise; on the corporate reputation front, those same

employees must be made to realize that every interaction they have with other

stakeholderscustomers, the community, even shareholdershas the potential to impactthe perceptions of those stakeholders. Indeed, those stakeholders are far more likely to

form their impression of an organization based on such interactions than they are to rely

on the content of advertising and marketing messages.

It also means, I believe, increased emphasis on cause-related marketing and on corporate

social responsibility, two areas of activity that have the potential to forge deeper, more


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meaningful relationships between corporations and their customers and other key

stakeholders. But again, these programs will be held to high standards of authenticity.

Critics will be looking out for any indication of insincerity or misalignment between thecauses companies adopt and their day-to-day behavior. Exxons campaign to save the

tiger, for example, is unlikely to impress observers as long as it continues to blockmeasures to fight global climate changewhich has the potential to wipe out thousands

of species, some of them just as photogenic as the oil companys adopted symbol.

Nor can companies afford to be tokenistic: donating a few cents from every purchase to a

cause may be nice and generous but it is unlikely to resonate deeply with consumers

unless they see other indications that the company in question is committed to the cause.

That means companies need to consider everything from employee volunteerism tolobbying for public policy changes, and they need to commit to a cause for the long haul.

The best programsLiz Claibornes efforts to educate about and eradicate domestic

violence, or Avons fight against breast cancerhave been sustained for more than a

decade and given the companies involved a degree of ownership of the issue that canonly be earned over time.

In short, we have entered the era of DNA branding, when a companys marketing and

corporate communications absolutely must reflect their true genetic make-up.

And from the perspective of public relations agencies, the new communications

landscape will present other dangers.

For one thing, it will demand a degree of intimacy with the clients target audiences that

far surpasses anything that has been expected of them in the past.

To be sure, public relations has always demanded a knowledge and understanding of theclients business beyond that required by advertising agencies, for example, if only

because public relations people are expected to respond to questions from reporters,

rather than simply providing pre-selected information. But if public relations firms are toengage with non-traditional media, they will need to understand the psychographics of

their target audience as never before.

The first challenge will be identifying the more credible and influential opinion leaders,

those capable of driving effective word-of-mouth. It might be an over-simplification thatanyone with a reasonably up-to-date media directory could figure out where to send a

press release, but certainly anyone who took the time to read a dozen or so key mediaeasily identified based on circulation and contentcould figure out which reportersreally mattered.

But identifying bloggers who drive online conversation is much more difficult. They will

not necessarily be the ones with the greatest number of page hits: their actual audience

might be quite small. To find them, public relations people will need to spend time with


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the target audience, often tracking back stories to their original, perhaps obscure, sources.

And identifying offline influencers is probably even more challenging.

Public relations people will therefore need to become expert in studying social networks,developing tools (as some already have) to help them map the complex relationships

between traditional and non-traditional media, to identify authorities who are quoted orcited most often, to understand how and why stories that first appear in relatively obscure

venues can have as much influence over time as an article on the front page of The WallStreet Journal.

And for another thing, the new communications landscape will be far less forgiving of

clumsy, misdirected, or dishonest pitches on a clients behalf.

In the past, the penalty for ineptitude in public relations was typically nothing worse thanthe failure of a desired story to appear in print. The relatively low cost of failure

encouraged some practitioners to use a shotgun approach rather than a sniper approach:

rather than taking precise aim at specific media, a release was often distributed to asmany reporters as possible, in the hope that while the vast majority of them would simply

consign it to the circular file, a handful might need something to fill some space and the

clip count would go up.

To be sure, reporters might find the deluge of off-target press releases frustrating. Theymight make broad-brush generalizations about the ineptitude of the public relations

industry at a trade association meeting, or perhaps even devote an occasional column to

several of the worst examples. But the risk to the agency was low.

But in the Internet age, the rules are different. Bloggers are unlikely to show PR people

the same degree of professional courtesy they have come to expect from the mainstreammedia.

Badly-written press releases are likely to become fodder for mocking blog postings. (It

would be no surprise to see sites emerge that aggregate such complaints, perhaps evenranking PR agencies by the number of negative comments their work generates.) And any

communications that seems to be deceptive or manipulative is likely to trigger a brutal

hostile backlash.

What this means for public relations firms is that the difference between good PRpractice and bad PR practice is likely to get far wider and far more obvious than it ever

has been in the past. The age of transparency has implications for the public relationsagency business, and the key one is that there will be far fewer places for inept or evensimply mediocre practitioners to hide.

One obvious effect of that development is that peoplewho have always been the key to

success in the PR agency businesswill be more important than ever.


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The public relations industry has long provided a prime example of how the value chain

works: firms that are able to attract and retain and develop the best people will, over the

long haul, be in a better position to attract and retain and develop the best clients, whowill in turn deliver the profitability that firms require in order to grow. Simply put, good

people are the foundation upon which successful public relations firms are built.

But in this new environment, firms will need to find exceptional people if they are to

stand out from the competitionbecause the competition will not just be other PRagencies. As the value of traditional media advertising diminishesa result of increasing

costs, increasing clutter, and diminished credibilityad agencies will be looking for new

areas in which to grow, and challenging public relations firms on their own turf. Andsome of the high-level, high-margin strategy work in helping companies build authentic

reputations and credible brands is likely to appeal to management consultants and other

professional service firms.

One thing all these potential competitors have in common is that they have historically

paid better than public relations, a fact that gives them a significant advantage inrecruiting top talent.

Moreover, the ideal candidates to help grow the public relations agency of the future will

possess rare and perhaps even contradictory qualities.

For example, it should be clear that anyone dealing with the blogosphere should be

blessed with exceptionally good judgment, since any lapse is likely to carry severe

penalties. Such judgment typically comes with age and experience, which suggests that

firms will need more senior people and will need those senior people to be more activelyengaged with the media.

But at the same time, the blogosphere is a young mediumand this is an generalization

that may be unfair to some senior practitionersbest understood by youngerprofessionals. So firms will need to find either young people with exceptional judgment

and wisdom beyond their years, or senior people with tremendous enthusiasm for the new

and exciting.

The need for authenticity suggests that another set of apparently contradictory attributeswill be required: intense specialization and broad generalization.

Specialization will be necessary because of the greater degree of customer and

stakeholder intimacy required. Clients will expect public relations professionals tounderstand the web of influence that surrounds their companies and products and servicesand are unlikely to be willing to fund a lengthy learning curve. So practitioners will need

to bring a level of familiarity to each assignment that can only be achieved through

immersion in a sector or issue.

But practitioners will also need to be generalists, because the age of authenticity alsomeans the breakdown of traditional barriers between communications disciplines. If


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brand communications are expected to align with corporate behavior, then traditional

differences between marketing and corporate communications are increasingly

meaningless.

More and more, it is difficult to plan for a new product introduction (or to develop a new

campaign for an established brand) without thinking through the implications forcorporate reputation or even public policy. Certainly, that is true in sectors under intense

scrutiny such as healthcare or food and nutrition or energy and the environment. At thesame time, it is increasingly rare to see a corporate social responsibility or reputation

building initiative that does not have as one of its objectives an increase in either sales or

customer loyalty or some broader marketing benefit. Without a tangible pay-off, suchprograms will not be funded indefinitely.

In this environment, it is increasingly difficult to draw a clear distinction between

marketing and corporate communications and public affairs. Consider the decision earlier

this year by Merck & Company to stop lobbying for the mandatory adoption of its

cervical cancer vaccine. Was that a marketing decision, a public affairs decision, or acorporate reputation decision? The answer, obviously, is yes. It was all three.

And if the traditional dividing lines between corporate and marketing and public affairs

programs are beginning to blue, the traditional distinctions between corporate andmarketing and public affairs professionals will be increasingly meaningless. Marketing

PR people will be expected to understand the corporate reputation and public policy

implications of the product programs they develop; corporate counselors will have tothink about whether their programming helps drive sales; policy experts will need to

think not only about winning legislative battles but also about the impact of those battles

on long-term corporate reputation.

Finding people who can combine youthful enthusiasm and good judgment, specialist

knowledge and broad generalist perspective will be critical to the success of the 21st

century public relations agency.

Another critical factor in the success of the 21st century public relations firm will be

accountability.

There is nothing new about the argument that public relations agencies need to be more

rigorous in their approach to measuring and evaluating the impact of their activities. But

there is a new urgency to the argument, because of the critical juncture at which the

industry now finds itself, and there are new tools at our disposal to realize the ultimateobjective.

Within the industry, individual academics, agencies, and associations have all been

engaged in important work that helps to address some of the key questions regardingpublic relations measurement, from the relative credibility (and value) of earned media

coverage versus paid media to the appropriate portion of the marketing budget that

should be assigned to public relations (more, according to most of the marketing mix


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modeling work we have seen) to whether the business impact of specific public relations

activities can be predicted.

But perhaps the most intriguing opportunity for the public relations industry waspresented by management consultant Fred Reichheld in his book The Ultimate Question.

Reichheld and his colleagues retained a research firm, which went to thousands of

customers in six industries (financial services, cable and telecommunications, personal

computers, e-commerce, auto insurance and Internet services). It asked questions aboutsatisfaction and then it tracked the purchase behavior of those customers.

They discovered the one question a company can ask its customers that links so closely to

their behaviors that it provides a practical surrogate for behavior. The question is one that

has been used in customer satisfaction surveys for decades: would you recommend thiscompany (or product, or service) to a friend of colleague? By subtracting the number of

detractors (those who give a company 6 out of 10 or less) from the number of promoters

(those who give the company a 9 or a 10), a company can arrive at what Reichheld callsits Net Promoter Score, a measure of how well it is generating loyalty.

Public relations should be encouraging clients to monitor their Net Promoter Scores

constantly and to measure the impact of public relations (and other communications)

programming upon those scores. Its a measure that fits the changing mission of publicrelations and the new emphasis on non-traditional media and word-of-mouth, and it is

one that ought to work to the benefit of an approach that focuses on building relationships

rather than simply delivering messages.

If you dont understand why, consider the likely impact of an advertising campaign on

the number of promoters or detractors for a company or a product. Then consider theimpact of an authentic cause-related marketing program, or a corporate social

responsibility initiative that makes a real difference to an issue that consumers care about.

The technological and societal changes sweeping the world right now present the publicrelations agency business with an unprecedented opportunity. Seizing that opportunity

will not be easy, but the rewards will be enormous.

end

Note: This manifesto has been added to The PR 2.0 University Reading List.

http://thepr2.0universe.com/2007/05/04/a-manifesto-for-the-21st-century-public-relations-firm/
http://thepr2.0universe.com/the-pr-20-university/http://thepr2.0universe.com/the-pr-20-university/

Manifestul Lui Paul Holmes Despre PR-Ul Secolului XXI

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