STUFF BY ME WEEK-ENDING 26 DEC 2009

In both the first and penultimate seminars I run on the Brunswick Internship Programme I pose the question "what exactly is PR?"

It's a pretty fundamental question in a training programme that prepares graduates for a career in PR, but not as easy to answer as you might expect. Still a relatively young profession, even those working in it use a number of different terms and definitions to describe the PR industry at large, and the constituent strands within it, and not everyone agrees on which are best.

For over a decade now some have been promoting the expression 'reputation management' to describe some or all of the PR profession. While clearly open to accusations of being just a little bit pretentious, it's a term I rather like. And given that PR Week now describes itself as a magazine for 'professional communicators and reputation managers', others presumably do too.

But even before the PR industry has properly got around to adopting this expression, now another profession is trying to steal it, and for a decidedly dodgy practice which is likely to greatly tarnish the reputation of the phrase "reputation management". For this year the lawyers who try to abuse the English legal system in order to hide their clients' embarrassing secrets, in one case by threatening some sacred parliamentary principles, increasingly referred to themselves as 'reputation managers'.

Do those who genuinely work to make their employers more responsible corporate citizens really want to be associated with overpaid attorneys misinterpreting human rights legilsation to help irresponsible companies keep their dirty secrets out of the papers? Especially when many of those PR people who adopted the phrase 'reputation manager' in the first place did so in a bid to distance themselves from the more shady areas of their own profession. I suspect not.

PR, of course, means 'public relations', and in a strict sense that makes PR about managing a company's relationships with the public. Which it is. PR people manage relationships with any group of people a company has to engage with on a day to day basis, whether they be politicians, investors and money lenders, neighbours, competitors, suppliers, employees, journalists or customers. PR text books call these groups of people 'stakeholders'.

Of course, a key part of managing these relationships is about communicating with the stakeholders, which is why an alternative term for PR is 'corporate communication' (though, I should note, mass communications with customers is generally handled by advertising and marketing people, who wouldn't say they worked in either PR or corp comms).

Most PR people specialise in communicating with one group of stakeholders - maybe politicians, investors, employees or journalists. To distinguish this work, terms have been adopted to describe different 'kinds of PR', based on stakeholder specialism. So lobbying or public affairs for politicians, investor relations and financial PR for investors, internal communications for employees and media relations for journalists.

As for an industry-wide label, well, viewpoints differ.

Because the stakeholders you may be communicating with, and the companies you may be communicating for, can vary so greatly, the actual day-to-day activities of any one PR person will also vary greatly from one part of the industry to another. That part of the industry that is about all audacious publicity stunts, raucous parties, celebrity set-ups and long boozy lunches with journalists (and even Max Clifford style scoops-for-cash) - which does exist - is what many people associate with "PR".

Which is why many of those working at the more corporate end of the industry - those who prepare financial reports for shareholders, or explain changes in healthcare benefits to employees in some far off country, or who deal with journalists and consumers when one of the products you sell accidentally poisons someone - often prefer to say they work in "corporate communications".  So their friends don't think their work is all about parties and stunts and schmoozing the latest set of 'Big Brother' wannabes.

But for some, even 'corporate communications' isn't an entirely satisfactory term because, is managing a company's relationships with the public just about communicating? Marketing isn't just about selling products, it's also about honing products so they are something people want to buy in the first place. Likewise, PR isn't just about telling people your company is their friend, it's also about making the company operate in a more friendly way.

Hence 'reputation management'.

Those PR practitioners who are not glorified party planners, and who don't just think up the best words to express a company's position (or, perhaps, just hide bad news through that other derogatory term for the PR profession - 'spin-doctoring'), will probably like the 'reputation' concept. Even the dumbest CEO and most profit-hungry shareholder must realise that a company needs the best possible reputation it can secure, so that politicians limit regulation, investors provide investment, neighbours don't complain, competitors can't smear, suppliers give good service and credit, the best people become your employees, the media write about you plenty, and in a positive light, and customers come and repeat buy. A successful company needs a good reputation, and therefore needs good PR people to help build and preserve that reputation.

Of course once a PR person adopts the expression 'reputation manager', they arguably have a bigger task to achieve than just staging the best party or getting the most press coverage. Good communication maybe important in ensuring a good reputation, but reputation managers also really need the power to actually make their companies better corporate citizens. Even if you don't have an ethical problem with PR people covering up irresponsibility with spin, the fact is communication designed to mask bad things will never be as successful as communication genuinely communicating good stuff. Reputation management is about doing good stuff, and then telling everyone about it.

This is something I considered in a lot more detail ten years ago, when the term 'reputation management' was first in vogue, when I co-authored a report on the concept with the inspirational corporate communications expert Alison Rankin Frost. There's a summary of that research in this article from an old edition of the IABC's magazine Communications World from back in 1999.

Of course if you buy this idea that reputation management is about more than just communication (ie not just constant positive spin), then you might not wish to apply that expression to the entire PR profession. And that might be why those working at the media relations end of the industry (which is the biggest bit, and where people are more likely to spin by default) have not generally adopted the term. But over all, I still like the expression. Partly because it better explains what the PR industry at large does. Partly because it gives the profession more credibility. And partly because it encourages PR professionals to go beyond just finding and distributing good stories that already exist in a company's operations, and instead to work towards changing those operations so that more good stuff happens.

While I have mixed views as to whether the entire PR industry should fall under the 'reputation management' banner, I have stronger opinions when the term is used by the Carter Ruck lawyers who this year helped oil firm Trafigura misuse English law to keep its involvement in the dumping of toxic waste in the seas off the Ivory Coast, and the alleged ramifications of the dumping, a convenient secret (check the Guardian articles here and here if you're not in the loop on this).

As has been widely reported in recent months, lawyers like the 'reputation managers' of Carter Ruck, with the help of a handful of misguided English judges (and one in particular), have been busy misinterpreting human rights legislation to develop a whole host of new privacy laws in the UK, which are being used by the rich, the famous and the corporate to stop newspapers from reporting on their more controversial actions. Even when, particularly in the corporate cases, knowledge of said actions is very much in the public interest. This activity includes the issuing of so called 'super-injunctions', where newspapers are banned from not only reporting on the action, but on the fact the ban exists.

If companies, or individuals, are defamed, then the law should be there to hold those who libel to account, and to make sure the public at large know the truth. But the law does not have a duty, nor a right, to keep actual controversial events involving companies a secret, nor to help those companies avoid having to engage in a debate with the media or the public in order to justify their actions.

Radio 4's 'Westminster Hour' recently asked Christopher Mayer, the former boss of the Press Complaints Commission, to review the emergence of these new privacy laws. His report included a quote from one of these legally-trained reputation managers (from a competitor of Carter Ruck) observing that "a company can spend many years building their reputation, and that reputation can be damaged in minutes by a negative story". Very much a truism, but not an excuse for misusing the law to cover up controversial and important news stories, like Trafigura's alleged involvement in the dumping of toxic waste into the sea.

If companies want to keep their good reputations, they should be good, and utilise the best minds of the PR industry to help them work out what that means. They should resist the temptation to just use their PR people to put a constant positive spin on shoddy operations, and they certainly shouldn't rely on bad law to hide bad business. And it's the people who help companies do the former, and not those who do the latter, who should have to right to say they work in reputation management. 

--------------------------------------------------

STUFF I DID THIS WEEK
So in among all the food consumption and the dishing out of half a forest of books and the receiving of the 'Arrested Development' complete box set and a nice new hat, I have been spending sometime this week working on the CMU archives.

Our aim is to eventually have every CMU news story from May 1998 onwards available via the CMU News-Blog. It's something we could automate and do relatively quickly, but I'm keen for every story to be expertly tagged, so that stories in our news archive are properly logged and linked and easy to locate, something few websites I use have really nailed. It's quite a time consuming process, but is rather interesting to do, in a geeky sort of way, especially when you're archiving articles from long running stories that have been covered in depth by CMU.

I'm currently archiving May, and with so much written in CMU about Michael Jackson since his death in June, it now seems quite odd to be going back through our Jacko coverage from when he was still alive. Of course ever since the doomed O2 residency was announced in March, Jacko had been pretty newsworthy, even before his premature demise. Though there was one story in particular, or at least our take on it, that seemed rather prophetic, with hindsight. This one here.

--------------------------------------------------

STUFF I WROTE THIS WEEK
A round up of some of the news stories and articles I wrote for UnLimited's media in the last seven days (it was Christmas week, remember, so a lot less than normal)...

--

THE CMU REVIEW OF THE YEAR

The artists and the music in 2009 - this one done by CMU Editor Andy Malt

The music business in 2009 - this one done by me

The media and the internet in 2009 - this one done by me and CMU Editor Andy Malt

--

MUSIC BUSINESS STUFF...

LiveMaster merger gets UK approval [CMU News-Blog 22/12/09]

HMV makes bid for MAMA [CMU News-Blog 23/12/09]

Borders is no more [CMU News-Blog 23/12/09]

Political types think Cowell is just brill [CMU News-Blog 23/12/09]

--

COPYRIGHT STUFF...

File-sharing on the up, shocker [CMU News-Blog 21/12/09]

--

DIGITAL STUFF...

Sky Songs sign up Merlin [CMU News-Blog 21/12/09]

--

GENERAL MUSIC STUFF...

RATM v X: Quotes round up [CMU News-Blog 21/12/09]

Boy George banned from appearing on Celeb Big Brother [CMU News-Blog 23/12/09]

--

MEDIA STUFF...

NME launches on Digital One [CMU News-Blog 21/12/09]

BBC Trust approve Beeb involvement in Canvas [CMU News-Blog 23/12/09]

--

PR STUFF...

Reputation challenge for Eurostar [Creative Business News-Blog 22/12/09]

--------------------------------------------------

ME ON THE RADIO THIS WEEK...
Me talking about the Competition Commission approving the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger on the BBC 5Live Drive show...

'5Live Drive' is © BBC