Last week I chaired a ‘Thought Leaders’ event at the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) in London where I interviewed Tom Foremski who became the first major journalist to quit mainstream media to make a living from blogging when he left the Financial Times to found Silicon Valley Watcher.

The event did leave me with some optimism that corporate media – that is companies paying real journalists to do real reporting – might be one future for quality journalism. Where I wasn’t so optimistic was where the next generation of quality journalists will come from. The traditional training ground was local newspapers and their decline mean opportunities for that crucial early learning are becoming rare. Some see the plethora of blogs and websites covering every conceivable subject area as being the alternative. I’m not convinced as they don’t have the seasoned old hacks who can teach the tricks of the trade. And I don’t mean fiddling expenses or hacking phones, but the old journalistic craft of knowing how to sniff out the truth in a story. How to check and double check the sources and facts. How to write well (and it’s not being pedantic to say that means good grammar, doesn’t need perfect grammar).

We explored a wide range of topics including content, corporate media, ethics, reputation, SEO, ‘Every Company is a Media Company’ and ‘brand journalism’ (we both hate the term).

As I was chairing the event and interviewing Tom I didn’t take any notes or record the conversation. However, I’ve captured some of the best tweets in Storify. If the embed doesn’t work for you then you can see it on the Storify site here.

I spent yesterday at the European Parliament in Brussels running a training session for MEPs and their staff about Wikipedia and best practice. Most of what I said was based on the CIPR’s Wikipedia Best Practice guidelines that we produced last year in co-operation with Wikimedia and I had a small hand in helping to create.

On the Eurostar home I discovered that the training I delivered might already be out of date as yet another PR and Wikipedia ‘scandal’ had erupted this time about BP’s Wikipedia page. However, this time it appears that the ‘guilty’ parties probably aren’t BP’s PR team who appear to have followed all the best practice, but the online ‘chattering classes’ and some Wikipedians who’ve taken offence at PRs at a ‘big, bad’ corporate following Wikipedia’s own guidance.

Basically the story is that Arturo Silva, a member of BP’s corporate communications team in Houston, created the Arturo at BP Wikipedia user account and used it to interact with the Wikipedia community in order to improve the BP Wikipedia page.

His user profile is fairly comprehensive, explains what the account is for and makes it clear he will only contribute to BP’s Talk page:

“Welcome to my user page. I have established this account to help improve BP-related articles in line with Wikipedia standards and guidelines. In the interest of full transparency, I chose “Arturo at BP” as my username so that my affiliation with BP is abundantly clear to all parties I may interact with on Wikipedia. Per WP:ORGNAME, I believe that this username is appropriate, and I should point out that I will be the only person to use this account.

Out of respect for guidelines on conflict of interest and the importance of a neutral point of view, and in recognition of the ongoing debate regarding companies’ involvement on Wikipedia, I will only be editing Talk pages and will not make any edits to encyclopedia articles. My primary goal in being active on Wikipedia through this account is to improve the overall quality of BP-related articles in line with Wikipedia guidelines.

Any delays in responding to inquiries are due to my other roles and responsibilities at BP which take up a significant amount of my time, so I appreciate your patience with me. I do look forward to working with other editors, and welcome any questions you may have on my Talk page.”

Most of this is inline with Wikipedia’s own guidelines and the Chartered Institute of Public Relations Wikipedia Best Practice Guide that was created last year by the CIPR’s Social Media Panel in conjunction with ‘Wikipedians’ and Wikimedia.

I’d have recommended that the user profile stated absolutely that he worked for BP’s corporate communications team and there is question mark over if the company name should have been included in the user name, but apart from that it is all pretty good.

Arturo Silva then used his ‘userspace’ on this account to draft improvements to the BP page which he then pointed to on the BP talk page. He wrote everything from a neutral point of view and importantly always provided credible third party references for everything he wrote. This is precisely what is recommended in the CIPR guidelines and the idea is that this information is then checked by independent ‘Wikipedians’ and eventually incorporated into the actual Wikipedia user page by those independent third party editors.

Where it appears to have gone wrong is that despite Wikipedia’s commitment to a ‘neutral point of view’ the reality is somewhat different. The CIPR guidelines state that the definition of a neutral point of view is:

“All Wikipedia articles and other encyclopaedic content must be written from a neutral point of view, representing significant views fairly, proportionately and without bias. Fundamentally, where there is a contentious issue associated with a topic, Wikipedia content should be a good reference for the debate. In a few words, neutrality means this: report the debate, don’t take part in it.”

The problem is that people don’t agree what “representing significant views fairly, proportionately and without bias” actually means. However, for some Wikipedians, and some member of the social media chattering classes, big business is always suspect and they would prefer for it not to be included as a ‘significant view’. It’s fine for an environmental activist to actually edit the page (as long as they don’t actually work for Greenpeace), but not for a ‘big, bad’ company to follow Wikipedia’s own guidelines.

On reflection I think my training yesterday is still valid as I caveated the CIPR’s Wikipedia Best Practice guidelines with the advise that it was always best to err on the side of caution. There are some brilliant, sensible people who devote hours of valuable time to editing and improving Wikipedia. But, as in any community, there is also a minority (who are always the most vocal) who aren’t reasonable and want their personal micro-view of the world to be inflicted on everyone.

It’s that minority you need to be careful of and reflect in your dealings with Wikipedia which is why I advised “Just because you’re allowed to do something, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea”.

This blog post started as a comment on Stephen ‘Wadds’ Waddington’s thought-provoking article about ‘The public relations industry’s confidence problem’, but it was so thought-provoking the comment rapidly became too long.

His central thesis is that public relations is too introspective and needs to have more confidence of the role it plays in the broader economy. I’d go further and say public relations doesn’t just play a significant role in the economy, but also in politics and society/social. The first three of the PEST analysis, which are all being changed by technology.

If advertising and digital agencies don’t eat PR’s lunch, then management consultants might

Wadds says there is a “turf war taking place between advertising, public relations and digital”. Another war that Wadds hints at, but doesn’t mention, is when he talks of “earns the place that it deserves as a management discipline” is with management consultants. Public relations professionals are not the only people to recognise that public relations should be a serious business discipline and that means we’re also competing with the big global management consultancies.

I think a major reason for public relations’ confidence problem is its identity problem. Public relations practitioners aren’t even sure and can’t agree on what it is we actually do. Worrying how we define ourselves seems introspective, but it’s hard to be confident about who you are if you don’t know yourself. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that others do ‘define’ public relations, usually incorrectly in narrow and derogatory ways. Too many public relations practitioners don’t do our business any favours by perpetuating the myths about what PR really is.

PR is not just part of marketing

If we are to be seen as a true management discipline as Wadds asserts then we can’t allow ourselves to be defined as mere publicists or as simply part of marketing. Public relations and marketing are totally different disciplines and the confusion arises because both will often use some of the same tactics. It’s quite legitimate for public relations to use paid media. It’s not even new, I did it 20 years ago with full-page display advertisements in trade press across the world, as part of a corporate restructuring.

Part of the challenge we have as public relations professionals is that we don’t start off with the same budgets or even ‘share of mind’ within clients as some of our competitor disciplines do. Advertising and digital agencies typically have bigger budgets so can afford to experiment. Using a small percentage of their existing spend they can try something new to see if it works in this time of massive change in society and media. In contrast you’d need a bigger percentage of most public relations budgets which means you don’t have enough left for the tried and trusted. Therefore the leviathan advertising agencies can ironically be more agile than the theoretically smaller more nimble public relations consultancies.

Wadds’s example of a retail brand working with a peer analytics firm such as Klout, Kred or PeerIndex to identify and target online influencers could be done by an advertising agency simply pulling one or two TV slots to find the budget. A PR agency might need to significantly reduce the time it spends working with influential journalists in order to spend that budget on working with the new influencers.

The challenge from management consultants is that their consultancy day rate frequently dwarfs the day rate of a public relations consultancy. This in turn means they pay bigger salaries and get better people. That’s not to criticise public relations people, but the fact is that many of the best do it because they enjoy it. They are bright enough people that if they’d entered a better paid profession such as management consultancy, law or accountancy then they’d earn a lot more. They chose public relations because they enjoy it. But this makes it hard for the public relations profession to attract the brightest and best graduates.

Is PR too introspective?

Wadds claims that the public relations industry is too introspective because it is obsessed with “inward focussed issues such as whether it is a profession and the issue of measurement”.

So what’s the answer? I think Wadd’s blog post perhaps starts to provide some of them. He’s right we need to win the professionalism debate through action. Despite being a Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) member for my whole career I didn’t complete its continuous professional development scheme until 2012. That’s wrong and I know I should become a chartered practitioner, but I’m not afraid to admit that the time involved still makes me hesitate. As a newly elected CIPR council member I feel obligated to at least complete CPD, but really I should also complete the accreditation to become a CIPR Chartered Practitioner.

He says that solid work is now being done by organisations such as AMEC to improve measurement and evaluation. This is one area where public relations could be more confident. Public relations is perceived as not being very good at measurement and evaluation. The fact is that we’re getting a lot better. The dirty little secret of much of the advertising and digital agency world is that they might be better at measuring stuff, but much of their evaluation is just as flawed as that used for public relations. Public relations needs to start being confident about what it can measure and evaluate, rather than worrying about what it can’t.

“The debate about who owns social media is flawed…”

… says Stephen as “The future will be owned by the practitioners that define it”. And he’s right. It’s also a sterile debate as social media doesn’t necessarily need to be owned by anyone. The fact is that social media needs to be used by human resources, legal, customer services, marketing, IT, public relations et al. As well as using social media itself one of the main roles of public relations is to ensure that others within the organisation don’t abuse or use social media badly, which will inevitably lead to reputational damage.

Public relations therefore has a dual role with social media. Firstly to use if effectively itself. Secondly, to coordinate and lead its use by others. In most companies and organisations public relations has a unique 360 degree perspective because reputational issues can arise from anywhere. That makes PR uniquely placed to lead on something that also has a 360 degree impact on the company or organisation. The danger is that there are disciplines out there, such as marketing and advertising, who might want to ‘own it’ and those disciplines are far more narrowly focused so while capable of doing brilliant work won’t necessarily sufficiently get the wider implications. That’s what we need to guard against.

It’s time for public relations professionals to take the advice of Mark Borkowski and Stephen Waddington and “find our swagger.”

The Twitter password security breach is a good reminder of why it is important to always protect yourself by using good online security. You should be doing it on your personal accounts, but if you are responsible for corporate social media accounts it is even more important to get it right. They are more vulnerable to potential attack because they are higher profile than most personal accounts.

LinkedIn has also suffered similar security breaches. That’s why it’s so important not to use the same password across different accounts as if you do then one is breached all of the others are vulnerable as well. The @HMVtweets incident where an employee that was being made redundant used the official HMV Twitter account to tweet about it is another good example of why you need a good password management policy in places. It appears in the HMV case that management didn’t immediately have access to the Twitter account.

If a brand or corporate social media account is breached then the corporate reputation consequences can be serious. Not only is the actual breach embarrassing, but it also raise serious doubt about the company’s or organisation’s ability to keep other information secure. The fact that sensitive data is dealt with securely by a different team to the social media won’t stop people worrying and doubting you.

Some good tips for password security are:

1) Use a different password for everything. Yes, if you’ve got lots that might mean hundreds of different passwords, but there are ways to manage that. And also in reality you’ll be using far fewer on a day to day basis as some of these accounts will be ones that you aren’t active on.

2) Lots of secure password advice is wrong. Lots of people think a secure password means an eight character word with a mix of capital/lower case letters, numbers and symbols. One problem with this is that you’ve very little chance of actually remembering it, especially if you’ve used a different password for everything. Another is that most people use the same ‘tricks’ to change the word. They’ll replace ‘O’ with ‘0’ (zero), or ‘S’ with ‘5’, or ‘l’ with ‘1’. You seriously don’t think hackers don’t know that and haven’t developed programs designed to use the same logic to crack passwords?

3) A long nonsense phrase is far harder to crack. This great graphic (via @absinthetweets) explains it better than I can:

4) Use a password management service. Personally my favourite is LastPass. The basic version is free and it makes it really easy to generate and store a unique secure password for every website or service you use. The premium version is just $12 a year and lets you use the service on most mobiles. The enterprise version which is ideal for managing password security on corporate social media accounts is $24 a year per user and lets you securely share groups of passwords with other users. The obvious point of vulnerability for systems like LastPass is the master password which is why you need to make sure it is both secure and changed regularly.

5) Always remember to change passwords, third party access permissions and administrator privileges when employees change or you change external providers who you’ve given access to such as digital or PR agencies.

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There are a lot of Twitter analysis, influence, measurement and evaluation tools. A lot! However, for PR and corporate communications professionals TweetLevel from Edelman is definitely worth a look and there is new version just released. For a start it is designed by people who really understand public relations, corporate communications, public affairs and the relationship between influence and reputation.

TweetLevel lets you analyse by Twitter ID and topic or hashtag. Unlike some tools you don’t need you don’t need to authorise it on your Twitter account to analyse a Twitter ID. This means you can easily use it to analyse an account that you are interested in. It also doesn’t ‘force’ you to tweet about it in order to see your full report.

The topic or hashtag analysis lets you see who is talking most and is influential about the most relevant issues. The advanced search options on TweetLevel are also impressive with the ability to filter specific date ranges, languages, include/exclude words and phrases and search within a Twitter user ID. You can also analyse how a specific URL is being shared.

For the topic search you get three graphs. The first is level of buzz over the period, showing the peaks and troughs. The second is a pie chart showing the top users by share of voice and the third is a bar chart showing the most shared web links. You also get a ‘related phrases’ word cloud. The related phrases can be a really useful tool for helping to refine not just the words and phrases you monitor for, but also the ones you should use in conversation and engagement.

Another interesting feature is that once you’ve performed a simple or advanced search you can enter your email address to be mailed with a list of the most influential tweeters (not simply the most popular). This isn’t an email harvesting exercise either as Edelman don’t keep your email address.

A tip for PR or public affairs people is that one way of using the Twitter ID analysis is to identify other topics that someone is interested. You might already know that they are a relevant stakeholder for your issue or organisation, but what else makes them tick? Do their other interests make them potentially more of an ally or perhaps a threat? Do you share other common interests so you can engage on more than just your issue?

Once you have done the Twitter ID analysis you get a graph showing where someone sits on an influence/popularity axis and is categorised into different types of Twitter account: Viewer, Commentator, Curator, Idea Starter and Amplifier. You also get a word cloud showing the topics they talk about most, an activity graph showing when the user has been most active and the time of day that they tweet most. You can also compare one user with another.

One improvement that I’d like to see is the ability to filter the word cloud, in particular to remove hashtags. If someone frequently uses a hashtag or has recently been at an event with a hashtag then this can skew the word cloud and make it difficult to see what they actually talk about.

My influence score is 80.8 and TweetLevel identifies me as an Idea Starter / Amplifier.

Idea Starters are the “small collective of people who are the creative brains behind many of the thoughts and ideas that other people talk about… their insightful opinions often flow and are repeated throughout conversations long after they have left.” Amplifiers are “people who frequently have a large audience and following.”

TweetLevel’s general verdict on my Twitter ID influence score is:

You are a Twitter superstar. In your segment, you have a huge number of followers who find what you are saying interesting. As Spiderman said, “with great power comes great responsibility”. Carry on tweeting and sharing your opinions – people like what you have to say.

One of the big criticisms levelled at Klout is that it doesn’t really measure influence and it can’t be trusted because it keeps its algorithms secret. Personally I find Kred and PeerIndex to be far more useful tools. Unlike Klout TweetLevel is transparent about its methodology and publishes the formula of how it calculates the TweetLevel. It uses more than 20 different variables, all of which are explained. Because the science of influence isn’t really a science then much of this is open to challenge, but that’s exactly what Edelman want you to do:

This tool will be in permanent beta as we seek to continually improve its functionality based upon your feedback. Even though we believe that it goes a great way to understand and quantify the varying importance of different people’s usage of Twitter, by no means whatsoever do we believe we have fully solved the ‘influence’ problem. What we would appreciate is your views, advice and criticism is crucial in helping us understand social media measurement.

TweetLevel was created by Edelman director and head of influence engagement @jonnybentwood.

Lots of buzz about #neverseconds and almost universal ridicule of Argyll and Bute Council’s statement (see Update Three below as the council has now unethically tried to hide its incompetence) in response. The story is that nine-year old Martha Payne has been blogging photographs of her school meals and writing about what is wrong with the meals. The blog has had more than two million hits and raised nearly £2,000 for charity. But after some negative newspaper headlines the heavy-handed council stepped into ban her from taking photos in the school canteen.

I’m seeing tweets from lots of people describing this move as ‘bad PR’ by the council. And it certainly is, however I strongly suspect it’s not a public relations person behind it. My experience of working with local authorities and councillors tells me that it is likely that the photo ban idea was taken by a senior councillor or council officer. The PR person’s failing is probably just that they weren’t strong enough or respected enough internally to be able to explain to the numpty in charge that they were wrong.

The council’s reputation is taking a hit which is almost entirely self-inflicted and could have been avoided had a corporate communicator had a seat at the top table.

UPDATE: And the ban was so counter-productive the council has had to back down!

Hurrah the guy from Argyll and Bute council has just announced the pics will be allowed on the school meals blog, live on Radio4

— Paul Richards (@Labourpaul) June 15, 2012

UPDATE TWO:

LISTEN: Argyll & Bute council reverse #neverseconds camera ban live on The World at One BBC Radio 4 #wato via @Audioboo bit.ly/L9RzvI

— Nick Sutton (@suttonnick) June 15, 2012

Leader Roddie McCuish (SNP) backs down, but it’s still not clear who made the decision. About one minute 30 seconds in he appears to admit responsibility saying “I’ve changed my mind”, but later when pressed as to what happened he claims not to know yet.

UPDATE THREE

I’m afraid that I don’t think the PR team can escape the blame for the latest staggering incompetence from Argyll and Bute Council. What on earth were they thinking to remove the original statement and replace it with the u-turn statement. They make it worse with the arrogant statement that “This statement supersedes all other council statements on the matter already issued.”

A basic tenant of good public relations is to remember that “Google never forgets” so here is the original Statement on school meals from Argyll and Bute Council before they tried to rewrite history:

Argyll and Bute Council wholly refutes the unwarranted attacks on its schools catering service which culminated in national press headlines which have led catering staff to fear for their jobs. The council has directly avoided any criticism of anyone involved in the ‘never seconds’ blog for obvious reasons despite a strongly held view that the information presented in it misrepresented the options and choices available to pupils however this escalation means we had to act to protect staff from the distress and harm it was causing. In particular, the photographic images uploaded appear to only represent a fraction of the choices available to pupils, so a decision has been made by the council to stop photos being taken in the school canteen.

There have been discussions between senior council staff and Martha’s father however, despite an acknowledgement that the media coverage has produced these unwarranted attacks, he intimated that he would continue with the blog.

The council has had no complaints for the last two years about the quality of school meals other than one from the Payne family received on 6 June and there have been no changes to the service on offer since the introduction of the blog.

Pupils have a daily choice of two meals from a menu which is designed with pupils, parents and teachers. Our summer menu is about to be launched and includes main course choices like meat or vegetarian lasagne served with carrots and garlic bread or chicken pie with puff pastry, mashed potato and mixed vegetables.

Pupils can choose from at least two meals every day. They pay £2 for two courses and this could be a starter and a main or a main and a desert. Each meal comes with milk or water. Pupils can have as much salad and bread as they want. Salad, vegetables, fruit, yoghurt and cheese options are available every day. These are standing options and are not a result of any changes in response to the blog site.

As part of the curriculum for excellence, pupils in all our schools are regularly taught about healthy eating and at lunch breaks staff encourage pupils to make good choices from what is on offer. We use a system called ‘Nutmeg’ to make sure everything is nutritionally balanced. Our staff also get nutrition awareness training so they know how to provide a good healthy meal. There is portion sized guidance which we adhere to and it is matched to the age of the child so they get the right amount of food. Second portions would mean too many calories for pupils.

In Lochgilphead Primary School we are piloting a new pre-ordering scheme which is designed to encourage class discussion around meal choices and also improves the accuracy of meal choices. The pupils use a touch screen to select their lunch option and the data is downloaded in the kitchen so they know how many portions of each meal are required. As they place their order, the pupils are given a coloured band which relates to their meal choice that day. They wear it during the morning, and at lunchtime they hand it to the catering assistant, who will give them the corresponding meal.

The council’s focus is now on supporting the school in the education of young people in Argyll and Bute.

Related articles

• Good crisis communications – 99p Stores CEO turns tables on BBC Watchdog (stuartbruce.biz)
• Social media crisis comms – outflanking the Sunday Times (stuartbruce.biz)
• Social media in local government (stuartbruce.biz)

Corporate communications heads agree (82%) that discussions in social media and social networks can impact on a company’s overall reputation and licence to operate, but are split on how seriously it should be taken. Forty per cent said that criticism in social media channels was taken too seriously while 46% disagreed.

The report also looks at some of the issues facing corporate communications professionals and highlights the importance of the need for digital experience and and expertise:

However for most Reputation Council members, relevant experience in the
communication sphere is the key criterion. A particular specialism can sometimes be
valuable, but generally a spread of experience, particularly across all things digital, is
required. This reflects the fact that the media landscape is changing rapidly.

You can download the full Ipsos MORI Reputation Council Insight & Ideas report (PDF).

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I try not to watch BBC Watchdog as it tends to annoy me with its fake concern for consumers, when it’s just making cheap ‘shock’ TV. But I’m glad I caught last Thursday’s as it contained a brilliant performance by Hussein Lalani, the entrepreneurial CEO of a family owned retail business. The 99p Stores is a fast growing value retail chain and for some bizarre reason Watchdog decided to make it the victim of one of its usual hatchet jobs.

The allegation was that 99p Stores was ripping off consumers by using misleading price claim signs such as ‘Amazing Value’, ‘Mega Deals’, ‘We will not be beaten on price’ and ‘Unbeatable Value’. On some products it also has price comparison labels on the shelves.

Watchdog’s complaint was that a lot of these labels were wrong, which does on the face of it seem rather outrageous. However, Watchdog’s own research found that most of the time 99p Stores was still actually cheaper than the comparison. Not so outrageous, in fact it makes me rather want to go to a 99p store and spend my pennies.

Watchdog’s chief attack dog is veteran TV presenter Anne Robinson, who has a reputation of being particularly aggressive, so it’s a brave business person who agrees to be humiliated by her. It is why companies so frequently resort to the tactic of simply sending a statement that can be read out.

That’s why I was surprised that the 99p Stores CEO agreed to the studio interview. However, once it started you could see why. He was brilliant and for once you saw an unfairly maligned business turning the tables on Watchdog.

The moment when Hussein Lalani apologises and says the misleading signs will be removed and then whips the new replacement poster out of his pocket is genius. The new poster makes the simple factual claim that ‘According to BBC Watchdog research 82.5% of the time we do beat the leading supermarkets.’ Anne Robinson continued to flounder for the rest of the interview as Hussein kept responding politely making her appear to be rude, petty and unreasonable.

Watch the whole report for context or jump to 5m 36s for the interview. It’s an excellent crisis communications case study and one that I’ll be using in my online PR crisis communications training in future.

After the interview Hussein also did a great job of using social media to engage with both supporters and critics on Twitter and YouTube.

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Social media crisis comms – outflanking the Sunday Times (stuartbruce.biz)

When I’m doing online PR and social media training and communications consultancy I usually spend a lot of time on crisis communications looking at how it has – and hasn’t – changed because of the rise of social media. This weekend saw a classic case of how a smart PR operator can outflank one of the world’s biggest newspapers.

Last week the Sunday Times carried out a classic sting operation when it caught Conservative Party co-treasurer Peter Cruddas ‘selling’ access to the UK prime minister for £250,000. This week, in classic Insight style, it carried a follow up with more revelation’s that showed the Conservatives appear to have been ‘economical with the truth’ in rebutting the allegations.

It also attempted to widen its attack and planned a new front page revelation that accused Ed Staite, a former Tory PR operator, of also ‘selling’ access to policy makers.

The Insight team attempted to sting Ed by approaching him and pretending to be a wealth management company that needed a communications consultancy. However, during the meeting the fake business people (aka reporters) continually asked Ed about making a donation to the Conservatives in order to meet senior policy makers. From Ed’s account it appears he advised them against this and instead suggested that it would be better to consider entirely open and transparent sponsorship of things like policy groups and conference fringe events.

Unfortunately for the Sunday Times Insight team Ed appears to be quite good at his new job as an independent communications consultant and demonstrated that his claim to do crisis communications is probably justified. Rather than letting the Insight team do its worst Ed fought back using his blog and Twitter.

It’s standard practice for the The Sunday Times Insight team to keep its victims in the dark until the Friday before publication when it lets them know they are under attack. This way it can say it gave them a chance to respond, but in reality give them just a few hours to respond to an attack that has had the benefit of often weeks of preparation. When Ed received his approach he simply responded by publishing the Insight team’s email on his blog, along with his response.

That’s not how the Insight team likes it. They are like bullies in the playground and bullies don’t like it when the little guy fights back. Ed Staite has worked for the Conservatives and for big global consultancies like Burson-Marsteller, but he’s now an independent consultant trying to establish a business – the little guy up against one of the world’s biggest newspapers. The Insight team fought back with a series of tweets:

Spin doctor @edstaite‘s allegations that Insight tried to entrap him with offer of £250k to meet Osborne absolutely untrue. Tapes prove it.

— Sunday Times Insight (@insightST) March 30, 2012

And then even more aggressively:

If spin doctor @edstaite thought meeting with Insight “bizarre,” why did he follow up by sending proposal to charge £40k for his services?

— Sunday Times Insight (@insightST) March 30, 2012

Note the derogative ‘spin doctor’ in both tweets. Hardly fair and balanced journalism, even in a tweet!

Ed’s response on Saturday morning was even better. He published his entire proposal (complete with the budget for each element) which turned out to be a fairly standard crisis communications proposal. No better or worse than I’d expect of any communications professional. Nothing out of the ordinary at all.

I think there are three main crisis communications ‘lessons’ we can draw from this:

1) Speed – Ed possibly succeeded in moving the story from the front page of the Sunday Times to a far smaller story one on the inside pages. The Sunday Times was hindered by its print publishing date while Ed was able to publish three detailed blog posts before the Sunday Times even appeared.

2) Transparency – By publishing the Sunday Times email and his response along with his new business proposal Ed has demonstrated what appears to be total transparency. In contrast, as far as I’m aware, the Sunday Times has refused to accede to Ed’s polite request to be as transparent by publishing its recordings of the meetings.

3) Every company is a media company – says Tom Foremski and Ed’s response demonstrates it. More than 20 years ago my old PR lecturer used to say ‘You don’t pick fights with someone who buys ink by the barrel’. Well now thanks to social media everyone has their own barrel of ink. Ed’s blog post and tweets was quickly picked up and tweeted by lots of influential people making the Sunday Times look arrogant and bit daft.

In the interests of full transparency I should point out that I don’t know Ed beyond having read his blog and contributions to the Dale & Co group blog. You also wouldn’t expect me to be Ed Staite’s natural defender as you could probably define him as a ‘competitor’ of what I do and he’s a Tory while I’m very publicly Labour and have advised Labour cabinet and shadow cabinet ministers. But that doesn’t stop me applauding good work when I see it.

In conclusion this isn’t meant to be an attack on investigative journalism. On the contrary, one of my fears about the decline of mainstream media is that it will damage and even mean an end to good investigative journalism. But we’ve got to be careful about treating investigative journalists as if they have a halo- they have an agenda and spin, just as much as the companies and politicians they usually target.

I’ve been involved in handling crisis communications for more than one case of companies or individuals that have been targeted by the Sunday Times Insight team. It would be fair to say that in each case the Insight team did have a case. It would also be fair to say that the resulting story was never fair and balanced and always distorted the facts and used innuendo in order to make it look worse than it really was.