PR Matters

The Do Be, Don't Be Guide to a Good #Reputation | #publicrelations

As communications professionals, we all have our favorite books on PR and reputation management, many of which can be found discussed on PR Daily, among other professional media sites. But what about a simple, clear-cut, no-nonsense, easy peasy, lemon squeezyguide to creating and maintaining a good reputation? Not so many, perhaps. Here’s an attempt in a series of Do Be, Don’t Be pointers to…

No matter how thorough your review and evaluation of an agency to ensure it meets all of your requirements before you appoint it to support you, inevitably there are risk factors involved in a client-agency relationship. Sometimes an agency’s appearance – what they say and do – and their credentials – can be deceptive. It’s important to be aware of the tell-tale warning signs of an agency’s incompetency, before it is too late to avoid damage to your company’s reputation.

Here are the top five warning signs to consider, to help protect your company and ensure your agency is delivering effectively.

1. Bad copy.

They send for your review as a matter of course draft or final copy that has errors in grammar, punctuation and/or spelling. And/or, the copy is poor in style, the message unclear and/or it fails to deliver on the brief.

Your agency team should be brimming with professional wordsmiths. And the leader of that team should ensure that all copy sent to you meets all of the prerequisites for professional delivery: it should be reviewed and corrected for errors and style issues before sending it to you. There is no excuse for any of these warning signs to occur. 

If they occur from the outset or happen occasionally, please don’t hesitate to let them know and get their assurances such mistakes won’t happen again. Draw a line (one that has consequences, even to billing, if you get your contracts to cover this – something seriously to consider).

After all, if such care isn’t taken, it has been known for highly embarrassing written mistakes to land in the hands of clients, potential clients, journalists, investors and other individuals and groups that matter to you and your company.

At the very least, such errors can make you and your company a joke and, worse, bring disgrace or trigger hostile reactions from one or more of your stakeholders. And you’ll be the one with the bulls eye target on your forehead, not your agency.

2. They kiss your arse instead of telling you like it is about reputation management issues.

No honourable, ethical agency or counsel should be sycophantic to you when you have hired them to be honest, constructive and upfront with you. (However – and sadly -many do.)

Whether or not you sound them out, if there are potential or real issues your company is facing in terms of reputation, business activities and marketing, it’s vital that your agency understands from you that you expect them to speak the truth and recommend actions to address the concerns and protect your company’s credibility.

If you don’t take their advice, fair enough – that’s your loss and risk, but they should be playing Devil’s Advocate and letting you know in no uncertain terms of the reputational risk issues you face or may face and ways in which to avoid them or propose solutions to address them.

3. ”I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” – Douglas Adams, renowned SF author

All requests for action you make of your agency, whether by phone, face-to-face or Skype should be confirmed by them in writing. And – even if you don’t set a deadline – they should ensure they check and confirm with you a date and time for delivery.

It’s vital for mutual, up-to-date understanding that your agency must always confirm all actions in writing and maintain an ongoing action/to do list for you.

The list must identify the following:

brief summary of the action

who is responsible

date and time for delivery.

4. In a crisis/emergency situation, response time is everything.

Your agency must be ready to respond to and engage with you in a timely manner.

Put it this way: if your company was a person and was seriously injured, you’d rightly expect an ambulance to respond in a matter of minutes, not hours.   We all know every minute counts in such a crisis situation. In many cases and for any number of reasons, companies face their own serious risks.

Given most agency teams will have a minimum of three staff supporting you, you should be able to get hold of at least one member of your agency team at all reasonable times for normal requests.

However, you should ensure there is a crisis communications set of contacts shared between all members of their team and yours (if you have one), and that it covers out of hours and weekends.

In an emergency during office hours it is fair that – if you can’t immediately get hold of anyone in their team by phone then, by sending the agency team an email marked, Urgent: Crisis – Please Call Immediately – you should expect a call in a matter of minutes and no more than 15, and no later than 30 minutes for out of office hours and weekends.

Note: Once you have signed contracts, establish communications protocols and individual contacts (emails, mobiles, home telephone numbers, home addresses – in case you need to express post them/deliver them something in the evening or weekend) and a group email address for the agency team agreed. These should be shared among you on the first day of working together.

Don’t forget all of this should be part of your criteria of performance delivery for crisis communications. Even before signing contracts and commitment to all of your workload criteria, you should all agree such documentation is essential.

Does all of this seem too tough or excessive to demand of the agency? Well, don’t be squeamish. After all, your company’s – and your own – reputation is at stake and this should be bread and butter protocol for them. If it isn’t, and you don’t agree these things, you’re exposing your company to reputational risk that could have far-reaching and potentially disastrous consequences. Still feel it’s too demanding? Thought not.

5. Your agency fails to deliver on its reporting and measurements.

Auditing of work they do should be a standard procedure for them. Results you receive must be both quantitative and qualitative. Criteria for performance and success for all types of work assigned must be clear and agreed.

Daily results should be tallied into weekly summaries that are clear, easy-t0-view and include quantitative as well as qualitative evidence, as well as next step recommendations; monthly infographic-based reports should be delivered, then quarterly ones, and so on.

Keep in mind that your monthly reports need to satisfy your own management/board/boss to demonstrate that you are succeeding in partnership with your agency, and that these results prove this claim.

If your agency fails to deliver on reporting and results, or doesn’t recommend specific ways in which they will measure outcomes, consider it a deadly warning of agency failure on their part.

If they don’t deliver and they don’t demonstrate excellence in their methodology and reports, as well as their performance, consider them “goodbye, so long and thanks for all the fish” (or lack of them). Alternatively, start looking for a new job yourself.

Conclusion

While these five aren’t comprehensive, they are certainly critical warning signs that merit serious attention and necessitate action on your part.

Perhaps if you get a moment, you could let me know the ones that have driven you nuts.

Let’s start from the top. Arguably, life’s too short, so this is an appeal to hearts and minds to raise awareness going forward. It’s not rocket science to avoid language not fit for purpose. Therefore let’s think outside the box to create sea change, a quantum leap and a paradigm shift.

That first paragraph comprised 51 words, of which 33 were tired, overused phrases and the rest were there only as filler. Yes, we’re talking of clichés, used as much in the business world as are four-letter words in a bad argument. But while most of us won’t tolerate swearing in a civil conversation, we don’t seem to tire of tolerating clichés in communications. How vigilant are we in making sure we don’t use them ourselves? Unfortunately, in the world of business, as well as communications, including PR, marketing and advertising, there remains a great tendency to use clichés instead of writing content that works well simply by being clear, to the point and providing value and evidence for the reader. Some phrases are so hackneyed and tediously predictable they induce brain freeze or a reading coma, if not a clichéd rolling of one’s eyes. Over the course of a day, never mind a week, you’ll bump up against one or more of the following: ‘award-winning’, ‘leading edge’, ‘first class’, ‘quality time’, ‘unique’, ‘cutting edge’, ‘best in class’, ‘delighted’, ‘first rate’, ‘thrilled’, ‘proud’, ‘world class’, ‘game-changer’, ‘at the end of the day’, ‘to be honest with you’ and any one of those that began this article. There are more of these horrors in the writer and journalist John Rentoul’s Banned List, for those who enjoy true horror writing. Sadly, those tiresome words and phrases are not the only bad language. In our professional world of communications we have developed an endless appetite for jargon and use the casual language of exploitation and manipulation. Few of us tend to reject it precisely because it is so omnipresent. We don’t question militaristic-sounding, technocratic, bureaucratic blather that smacks of Big Brother, even though ironically such terms are all meant to be in aid of communication, whether through marketing, PR, advertising or in general business communications. We are meant to be reaching for understanding, to encourage sharing, develop loyalty and long-term relationships based on meaningful content. Yet the words we use to achieve that? “Native advertising”, when we mean advertising that has merit for the reader; “targets” instead of potential clients; “stakeholders” for persons or groups of interest, “penetration” instead of engaging, “capturing” instead of gaining new clients, “audiences” when we mean people of interest, and much else – and worse – besides. Surely it’s not surprising that there remain so many businesses, small, large and even global, that still don’t get it and fail to build relationships of loyalty and value between them and their “targets” when the language used to consider clients and potential clients is based on exploitation and hunting? We are in the business of human communication to share understanding, for whatever end or purpose. Instead, however, we have people in companies thinking and behaving in a corporate rather than an empathetic way, which not only dehumanises them, but it also alienates those with whom they wish to engage. Alternatively, consider the behaviour – the actions, communications and customer service – of successful companies, such as Ben & Jerry’s, innocent drinks, Dove and Southwest Airlines. The one thing they have in common abundance is that they’re all genuinely friendly and their words and actions reflect this. They sound and write with personality, passion and interest in their work and with their clients and potential clients. They care about the environment and the impact they make. They engage with their customers in a manner that’s fun, caring, understanding and worthwhile. They respond to any issues or concerns. They want to contribute and encourage positive activity from others as well as themselves. They do their work responsibly and are part of their communities. They value their employees as much as those who value their brands. Their words, speech and actions all reflect this personable approach.

With them, there’s no room for cliché, double-talk and jargon. Rather, they know they have so much to celebrate and gain from by simply using real words and phrases based on meaning and human qualities. In brief, their word is their bond and character.

All of these are examples of the ways in which they communicate with passion and sincerity and, unsurprisingly, their words convince customers who see this and on that basis they become loyal to those brands.

Sooner or later most of us will have to deal with recruiters, whether in-house HR departments or recruitment agencies. While we know our profile and character matter to help us get a job, it's interesting that often recruiters don't seem to understand the impact that their bad behaviour towards candidates can have on their own reputation.

While some of them are absolutely fantastic, there are those among them who ruin it for us as candidates and ruin their own reputation in turn - both as individual recruiters and companies. The Undercover Recruiter, the no. 1 blog on recruitment and career issues in the UK and Europe, generously agreed to publish my views on the topic.

Here's my take on the worst bad habits of those culprits.

I can't be the only one who thinks former Edelman EMEA CEO Robert Phillips is dead wrong about PR in his opinion piece published in PR Week US recently, in which he claims that "PR is Dead". So I pitched the publication and they kindly accepted my counter response to his views, published today. Hope you enjoy it. 

It's almost impossible to exist in social media without receiving an unwanted auto Direct Message (DM). Especially infamous on Twitter (which I love), 99% of the time the DMs sent add no value and, worse, irritate.

Even Twitter itself recommends against the practice:

Automating your direct messages

Including an automated “thanks for following” message to your new followers might be annoying to some users. We do not recommend this behavior; if you receive a DM you don’t like, you can unfollow that user and they will no longer be able to send you messages.

So here are 10 top reasons why auto DMs should be hung, drawn and quartered or at least sent to live in exile forever.

We are not robots, so why treat us like them? Auto DMs are generic; effectively mass produced, assembly line and we're supposed to value them on that basis? We who receive them are individuals (even if on behalf of organisations). To receive them is to be treated as nothing more than a robot; a non-individual - just one of the masses. Who wants to be treated like that?

They state the bloody obvious. Thanking us for following. Do we need to be thanked (generically, too, of course), when we're glad to have done so and don't need nor want automatic thanks to acknowledge our interest?

"Join Us/Me on Facebook/Have You Seen My Facebook Page" No bloody thanks! Ninety-nine per cent of them ask us to join them and/or favourite them on their Facebook account. Woah - waaaait a minute (or forever, preferably). It's too in your face and too familiar already. We've just decided we've liked their tweets - or even just one tweet - enough to motivate us to follow them. But a split-second after following them on Twitter (and a lot of other social media as well), they're already inviting us around to be their best friend at their wedding/hang out/to be a potential client/be a part of their family/subscribe/receive and be loaded with yet more. If we want to, we will. But first and last: let us decide. We have our own minds and want our own time to think about whether we will or won't. If we like content enough via Twitter, it's more than likely we'll check out whatever other site they have added to their Twitter profile or via their tweets. We don't need reminding of this, being told of this, and it's certainly not persuading us, either.

"Join Us/Me on Something Else Besides Facebook!" Again, no thanks. And how weird is it that we don't even know each other - but we may end up becoming great friends on social media over time - yet you're inviting me to join you on your LinkedIn professional network? We've never done business together and we don't know each other from Eve. What sort of professional private network has someone in it that you don't even know from experience or by recommendation?

Me, me, me, meeeeeee. The irony of auto DMs is that they're about acknowledging the fact that us - we as individuals - includin as an individual acting on behalf of a group - matter to that person who DMd us. But isn't it more a case of being about them, not us? Isn't it getting in our faces and private spaces immediately, rather than a polite, friendly nod of the head from some safe distance in the cafe? (For which, a direct tweet is great, saying thank you, acknowledging your name, if you want - please, no mention or invitation of your Facebook or other accounts; we know or will decide for ourselves; otherwise there's no need, really. No, really no need.)

They're so boring. When 99% of them say the same thing, it is - to paraphrase Patrick Bateman's character in American Psycho (page 320 of US edition): "Pumpkin, it's a tumbling, tumbling tumbleweed of a bore, darling." 

Too much of a bad thing can make you sick. Meaning, who isn't sick and tired of them? Who isn't tired and irritated and fed up to the back teeth with them? And since we're already sick, why on earth would we want to get more sick by someone coughing up another DM one in our face? No, thanks.

They provide no value, so you could end up losing a valuable follower and/or even a client.

They are horribly predictable.

They are a waste of time. 

Maybe I sound over the top, or like the Grinch. Sorry if I do. But surely I'm not the only one who feels this way? After all, check out these six thoroughly enjoyable rants, reasons and recommendations to end DMs, which I've bundled together in one link to save time. 

In the meantime, for anybody who does auto DM, allow me simply to recommend to put in something meaningful, original, compelling. Heck, interesting and different would be great! In other words - anything that is not blindingly obvious (like your website or asking us to join you on Facebook or simply thanking us when we need no thanks, etc.).

If I do receive an auto DM that surprises and delights me, I'm a happy bunny, believe me - as, I'm sure are others - all of us who could be your long-term followers, friends, advocates and even clients. Just please treat us with consideration: as the individuals we are.