Brandjack News

By Quentin Langley

The problem is this: if you have thousands of critics and you are just a single organisation, how can you engage?  How can an overstretched PR department monitor and keep up with the social media conversations taking place all over the world?

And if Jeff Jarvis is right, that there is an inverse relationship between control and trust, where does that leave the role of PR planning?  The traditional PR plan, with its key messages and clear discipline is precisely what people engaged in social media will no longer trust.

The first thing to say is that engagement in social media is still, very much, a PR function, not a sales, marketing or advertising function.  If you are aggressively engaged in sales, you will soon be blocked or hidden from people’s feeds.  That is not why people engage in social media.  It is all about two-way interaction.  It is about conversation.  An advert is, by its nature, a one-way phenomenon.  This is all about the management of reputation.  This is where PR has always been:  using media relations and sacrificing control for credibility.

But it remains the case that the disciplined management of messages won’t work.  You can’t evaluate social media in the way you evaluate media coverage in the dead tree and broadcast media.  You can read the FT and see if your messages were included in the editorial copy.  That is a mediated channel.  If your message is in, it persuaded the editor, and it carries that weight as a result.  It is precisely because you don’t control the medium that people find it credible.  On Twitter, of course you can always get your messages out, but will people believe them?

There is only one way, and it is risky.  Only the best-run organisations can engage in this way.  It means relaxing control, but gaining credibility as a result.

For example, what would happen if BP allowed all its staff, world-wide, to engage freely in social media conversations about the company?   And I mean freely.  If you ask 100,000 people to engage on Twitter, and then give them three key messages to deliver, you will be spotted as a spammer in a heartbeat.  You need to encourage your staff to engage honestly.  It is that honesty that will come over.

Firstly, a great many people would be saying right now that they were embarrassed to be working for BP.  Good.  Admitting that is the first step to earning a right to be heard.  At very best, BP was the victim of an unlucky accident, and people are understandably embarrassed by the way it has turned out.  Some people would be critical of management decisions.  Some people may believe – and they may be right, I wouldn’t know – that the company unacceptably cut corners.  People would (legitimately) ridicule an environmental plan that tried to address the needs of Pacific sea life.  Others would no doubt chime in that they thought the company had done all it could reasonably be expected to do.  There would be a debate, and an honest debate about this would put BP in a better light than the current fiasco.

Where  BP has been found  lacking is in honesty and engagement.  For example, Tony Hayward was asked, when giving evidence to Congress, if BP had been cutting corners on safety for the sake of cost, he said no.  This may be a very silly question, but it is also plainly not an honest answer.  BP weighed up the costs and the benefits of various safety measures.  There must have been additional safety measures they could have taken, but chose not to because of cost.  This is absolutely normal.  It is what all businesses, governments, charities, and individuals do.  It is what every driver does when deciding that it would be ludicrously expensive to get the brakes checked every morning.  To deny that BP made decisions on the basis of cost is utterly silly, and cannot be believed.

After Shell experienced severe reputational crises in the 1990s it engaged in a strategy of ‘burden sharing’.  It held round-table discussions with a series of special publics – journalists, academics and campaigners – and engaged in genuine discussions with them about key problems.  Should a multi-national engage in a country with a brutal dictatorship?  Will boycotting such countries help or make things worse?  From the outside it can seem as though decisions are simple, and motivated purely by greed, but this is almost never the case.  Since Shell began its ‘burden sharing’ campaign, technology has plainly moved on.  Today any such campaign would be intimately linked to social media. 

But the real challenge of the brandjacking world is this: if you are really prepared to trust your staff, and allow them to engage with others, then you need to first engage with your staff.  You cannot use your staff to parrot the corporate line, but nor can you leave them answering legitimate questions with “I dunno.  Nobody tells me anything”.