Reputation Management
Ghost writing blogs: right or wrong?
Dec 11th
On Monday I attended Dell’s excellent B2B Social Media Huddle. One of the hottest topics of debate, both at the event and on Twitter (#dellb2b), was the issue of ghost writing blogs. What I found most interesting was that not only were there legitimate differing opinions, but also there was perhaps even more misunderstanding and misinformation.
Some people thought that the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 outlawed ghost blogs. They don’t. They outlaw fake blogs, which are a totally different issue. Fake blogs are where a brand or agency create a blog that that appears to be independent or from a customer, when in fact it is being written by them.
A ghost blog is where a blog is transparently from the company or organisation, but where the posts have been written by someone other than the person identified as the author. Neville Hobson sparked the debate by stating that ghost writing a blog post was inherently wrong. Some in the audience thought it was OK and likened it to a speech being written for a politician and that people thought was was acceptable and therefore a blog post could also be ghosted. Neville’s argument (I paraphrase) was that a blog post was personal and therefore couldn’t be ghosted.
I’m a realist, not an absolutist. The politician’s speech analogy is a good one, because it actually helps to prove that ghosting can be acceptable. In reality the substance of most political speeches are actually written by the politicians. A good politician will brief a trusted staffer to write the actual words of the speech, but the ideas, tone of voice, emotion and meaning are all the politician’s very own. Step one is the politician, step two is the writer, step three is the politician polishing the writer’s work.
You can quite legitimately create a blog post in exactly the same way. The reality in many companies and organisations is that there are lots of people who only half want to blog. They want to do it, but won’t/don’t because of barriers such as a lack of time, insecurity about their writing ability, worries they can’t think of enough topics etc. That’s where the in-house public relations team or external PR consultancy can help. They can work with an author to create a post that the by-lined author is happy with. That might mean dictating the copy and the PR person typing it and polishing the prose. This doesn’t mean changing the meaning of the post, but can mean turning it into plain English by reducing jargon. Usually, as long as the blog makes it clear that the author had assistance then that’s totally acceptable.
There isn’t just one right way to write a blog. There are hundreds of different approaches that all work, there are also hundreds that don’t. That’s why appropriately experienced public relations people can help an employer or clients to get it right. Unfortunately you too often get the problem of PR people who don’t have the appropriate experience or expertise and then provide bad advice.
Matt Bamford-Bowes, head of social media at MediaCom Beyond Advertising tweeted “it isn’t surprising that companies pay PR teams to maintain blogs. It gives aligned tone of voice and point of view.” I disagree that the role of public relations should be to ensure an “aligned tone of voice and point of view” as that sounds far too much to me like turning it in to corporate or brand speak and the type of thing that marketing people who are used to controlling the message would want to do. If that was the role of the ghostwriter then I’d be opposed to it.
Vikki Chowney was faster off the mark than me and has already blogged about it. In the comments Benjamin Ellis makes a sensible reference to the divide between social media natives and traditional PR/corporate folks:
“It will be a 50:50 split in the big wide world :- social media natives will say “bad bad bad” traditional PR/corporate folks will say “fair game”.
Lots of mature businesses are stuck with “can’t blog won’t blog” senior execs – the temptation for PR folks to ghost blog for them is almost irresistible. That doesn’t make it right of course. The biggest down fall is when the CEO meets a customer and the customer starts to talk to them about what they said in the blog post – big #fail / embarrassment, or if a customer posts a comment and someone else responds as the CEO #biggerfail.”
His example ideally illustrates how PR people shouldn’t crudely simply ghost write a blog, but there are so many other ways we can help clients to blog which legitimately do involve helping to write posts.
My thoughts on the #socialmedia chat
Oct 6th
Have you ever been to a great party where you’re just arriving as everyone else is leaving.That’s what it feels like this afternoon with this afternoon’s #socialmedia chat. As I’m too late to participate on Twitter, I thought it might be better to add some slightly longer thoughts to some of the sound bites on Twitter. The recurring theme that I picked up on was the debate about who ‘owns’ social media. If you read a lot of the tweets one of the main problems is that a lot of the people talking don’t actually really understand what either PR or marketing is. They use their personal misunderstanding of the disciplines to come to understandable but ultimately ill-informed conclusions.
- JonClements: @TDefren #socialmedia It should be a team effort. It’s the jostling for position that will sabotage SM. #socialmedia
- carlainsf: @ckieff Agree that many depts help in execution, but 1 dept needs to hold the keys, drive process w/execs/co, be accountable. #socialmedia
- vedo: Absolutely! RT @BlakeGroup: SM works well w/ team approach. PR, sales, cust service, mrktg, etc. Cross-silo. #socialmedia
Absolutely agree that it should be a team effort, but that still means someone has to lead the team. Public relations or corporate communications are perfectly positioned to do this. It’s a media neutral discipline which uses the channels that work best for reputation management. It’s a two way discipline as much about listening, understanding and responding as it is talking. Social media also needs to include marketing communications, customer service, sales, human resources and legal, as well as to a lesser extent others, but PR is well positioned to lead and co-ordinate.
- DoctorDigital: @wordymouth Possibly, integrated agencies are common. But think PR & Ad guys need to keep an eye on dedicated ‘digi agencies’. #socialmedia
- DoctorDigital Nobody owns SM. And that’s why agencies from different sectors are competing against each other #socialmedia
It is a real threat is that public relations consultancies might lose business to digital agencies. But in reality digital just isn’t geared up to do it, they might win the business because they can do a slick online presentation with lots of metrics and exciting, cool looking things, but they can’t necessarily deliver. They don’t understand corporate communications strategy, so if they are to compete long term they have to recruit PR people that do. Public relations should be looking to own the strategy, some of the tactical delivery can be farmed out to digital agencies who are great at building and measuring.The challenge for public relations is getting our voice heard as other disciplines frequently have much bigger budgets and can therefore do things like diverting a percentage of it to ‘experiment’ with social media. PR budgets are much smaller and therefore a greater percentage needs to be diverted.
- ckieff: @ShannonPalmer excellent point- and a challenge for marketing b/c they’re used to absolute control. #SOCIALMEDIA
- Sue_Anne: More than ever PR folks need to realize that they don’t have "control" over the message or the medium. #socialmedia
Control, that hoary old chestnut. That’s one of the main concerns of marketing people, that they won’t have control. And they are absolutely right to be concerned, because they won’t have control. They just have to change and learn to live with it. For public relations people it’s just not a concern. PR people who ever thought they had control are fools – they didn’t. And nothing has changed in the new world, you can still manage, influence, interact and persuade
- ScottDeYager: @Tdefren SM is the catalyst that is driving the merge of PR and marketing. Needs to happen. #socialmedia
- btrandolph: RT @ckieff: @TDefren I think the new PR skills will cause PR and Mktg to merge into a single "outreach" discipline. #SOCIALMEDIA
- TDefren: @ScottDeYager In many cos, PR was always part of the Marketing group.#socialmedia
No, no, no and no again. Public relations is NOT part of marketing and NEVER should be (YES I’m SHOUTING!) You can and should use lots of public relations tactics as part of a marketing communications campaign, but it’s an entirely separate discipline. We also look after CSR, investor relations, internal communications and public affairs. Marcoms is just one small part of what we do. And that’s perhaps what best illustrates why public relations should lead on co-ordinating social media and planning strategy.
- DoctorDigital: #socialmedia Who are we to decide who should own it? Isn’t that the client’s decision?
Disagree with this one as well. If you’re a consultant it is your job to provide strategic counsel to your clients. That’s what they pay decent fees for. They aren’t going to pay high hourly rates for tactical implementation of monitoring, blogger outreach, media relations etc. So yes the client decides, but with your help. It’s also your role to help your clients create a social media strategy internally and help them to get all the different departments and disciplines around the table.
Thanks to Todd Defren for sparking the #socialmedia debate.
Edelman mid year Trust Barometer report shows declining trust – again
Jul 30th
The latest Edelman Trust Barometer reveals some interesting, if expected, insights into levels of trust. You can see all the figures (and Twitter comments) on the Edelman site, but I just wanted to highlight some of the UK figures of particular interest:
Addressing global issues
- 78% think government has not done enough to reduce energy costs and 74% think government has not done enough to minimise global warming
An interesting dichotomy that perhaps indicates that people don’t/won’t accept that tackling global warming is going to cost them more personally.
Brand trust
- 54% have switched to a new brand in the past six months because of something positive they heard or read
- 35% switched to a new brand in the past six months because of something negative they heard or read
Actions to rebuild trust
- Transparent and honest business practices (98%) ranks top for rebuilding trust, followed by treating employees well (97%), quality (94%) and frequent and honest communications (93%)
- 89% would trust a company more if it invested in R&D to drive innovation
- Over half (59%) believe that CEOs appearances in media on strategy and performance help to rebuild public trust
Stakeholders
- Employees and customers (95%) rank as the CEO’s most important stakeholders when making decisions, followed by local community (84%) and society at large (83%) – ahead of shareholders (78%) and government (55%)
All of the issues highlighted under brand trust, actions to rebuild trust and stakeholders are yet yet more validation of the importance of reputation and the need for effective public relations and corporate communications to manage and ‘curate’ reputation.
Edelman UK also did some supplementary research as a result of the recent parliamentary expenses scandal.The most fascinating figures for me were:
- 73% trust MPs in general less than six months ago vs 1% trust more (22% trust the same)
- 37% trust their local MP less than six months ago vs 7% trust more (49% trust the same)
This apparently indicates that people’s trust in their own local MP has been damaged far less than their trust in MPs generally. This potentially bodes well for MPs of all parties who haven’t personally been implicated in the expenses scandal as the collateral damage, while bad, isn’t as bad as expected. However, this is very complex issue. A few years ago I did some research into people’s knowledge, trust and support of their local MP. What we found out is the more a person knew about their MP, the higher the levels of trust and support. Interestingly this was despite party affiliation. You could find people who were firm Labour voters who ‘admired’ their local Conservative MP because they knew what they did for them. For firm supporters this wouldn’t make a difference to how they voted, but for undecided and weak voters it could frequently make a difference.
However, the most important factor was if the person had met their MP. Trust and support levels were invariably a lot higher if they ‘knew’ the MP. And therein lies the problem for politicians. With constituencies of 60,000 plus it is almost impossible for even the most hard working MP to have personal contact with more than a fraction of electors. If we truly value British democracy we should be looking to take steps that increase people’s trust in politicians. It illustrates how ludicrous, and indeed damaging, David Cameron’s idea of reducing the number of MPs is. I can understand why he’s saying it, it’s a populist vote winner, but if he truly believed in what was best for Britain and democracy I very much doubt he’d be floating the idea of something that would further reduce trust in MPs.
