Public Relations, Ethics & Sardines

There was a time, before the rise of social media and user generated content when organisations could get away with scurrilous acts of consumer extortion safe in the knowledge that the muted customer had few ways to hit back other than writing to Watch Dog.

Then came user generated content, forums, websites like ‘ihatedell’ and this week the magnificent ‘www.trainsardine.org’ a platform for commuters to complain about the million pounds a week they pay to travel like sardines in this country.

As a result, ethics suddenly has an elevated place at the board room table because a lack of them can now seriously damage a company’s profits.

Makes you proud doesn’t it.

There is a light and it never goes out.

The Citigroup logo I’m used to seeing blazing proudly at night atop their Canary Wharf office block has been extinguished this week, perhaps out of respect for the 50,000 redundancies announced on Monday and what with Lehman’s once proud sign now unscrewed and lying in the liquidator’s skip, Auden’s words ‘pack up the moon and dismantle the sun’ seem weirdly apt for the financial sector these days.

However, in other areas of the economy we may be over- gloomy. “It’s a recession not Armageddon”  said the CEO of Next, Simon Wolfson today in Drapers and the belief that financial journalism must bear some responsibility for talking us further into recession is something also spotlighted this week in a timely report from POLIS – the LSE think tank which analyses the affect of media on society. They say:

“Whilst the root causes of the crisis appear to lie in the behaviour and regulation of banks and other investors, many have asked what role financial reporting may have played in the crisis, and whether the crisis would have been so sudden and deep if a different approach to the practice of financial journalism had been taken.”

Not that it’s all the journalist’s fault - PR strategies are seen as one of the four major problems facing financial scribes.  I wonder if by PR strategies they mean lack of them. If food companies can stem consumer fears over contamination by announcing immediate action why didn’t the banks and the government? It seems the knee jerk reaction is to keep a low profile, issue as little information as necessary and perhaps even go as far as to turn the light off on the logo of your company headquarters.

Big problem with that is people will wonder what else you’re hiding.

Divided by a common language

Listening to Barack Obama’s speech yesterday, I was reminded of Shaw’s quote about how different we are in our use of language. Obama’s genuinely inspiring speech, referencing Martin Luther King in his call for supporters “to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day” while magical in a US context, sadly wouldn’t work for our politicians.

If, for example, David Cameron became Prime Minister and started quoting Churchill in the tone of a US politician on the podium, he’d be derided as pompous, possibly crazed and certainly a bit ‘up himself’.

The differences continue in business language. A favourite US phrase at the moment is ‘reach out’ as in, ‘company x is reaching out to its customers’. I quite like the feel of this phrase but put that in front of a British journalist and they’re unlikely to read any further.

The best a PR can do is write the release in the language and style of the publications they are targeting and in the UK this means free of any hyperbole or blatant self promotion. If this is done well, the release may appear verbatim in the target publication – the ultimate accolade for the anonymous PR.

Incidentally, one other thing that doesn’t always translate is abbreviation. Hearing one supporter referring to Obama as BO was a bit of an eyebrow raiser.