Glasshouse Partnership » corporate reputation

Glasshouse Short-listed for Digital Impact Awards

James Thellusson — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 08:11:41 +0000

Glasshouse Partnership is delighted that its work with BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, has been short-listed in two categories at this year’s Digital Impact Awards – Best Use of Digital in a CR campaign and Best Use of On-Line Video.

The campaign called the Information Pioneers set out to highlight the heroes and heroines behind technology. Why? Because as a charity The Chartered Institute for IT has a mandate to educate and inform the public about the benefits of computing and computer science. Digital and social media clearly have many advantages for charities looking to engage the public – immediacy, interactivity, efficiency. But equally the web is so full of things to engage with, standing out is a problem. We were conscious we had to find ways of cost effectively getting people’s attention and involvement in a environment where attention spans are shorter and competition for eyeballs let alone engagement is vicious. And without advertising.

Here are five lessons from the experience:

1. Community insight is key

Traditional planning would seek to unlock the motivation of the individual. Digital campaigning needs to unlock the motivations of communities. Alan Turing won this campaign because there were several communities who felt he was important to them and cared enough to mobilize behind him. The Bletchley Park community for his work in the war, the gay community for his mistreatment at the hands of the State and the IT academic community for his work. Planning with a view to maximizing the potential communities of interest on a competition like this is critical.

2. Internal support comes first

By involving BCS members in the selection process we knew we would be able to harness the support of a network of fans, voters and promoters from day one. We were also able to get a number of IT corporations behind this because they could see a value to supporting their founder or CEO – from a corporate marketing perspective.

3. Everybody can help

In a social media environment, everyone is valuable. That doesn’t mean some may have more power to influence or amplify what you’re doing – some do. But it also means that quite small, personal networks of friends, family (as well as professional networks) are worth engaging with. One email to ex colleagues at Klenk & Hoursch triggered a flood of site visits and votes from Germany.

4. Media relations stills count

We had quite a short campaign timeline – just over a month. Unless you’ve got a mainstream, heavily endorsed story and an advertising budget, that’s not a great amount of time to get people engaged. So big media hits count. They get the campaign read about, re-tweeted, ‘dug’ etc. Key bloggers count too. A few big ‘circ’ bloggers were responsible for the campaign getting picked up in the USA and Amercians counted for more video views than any other nation. So never underestimate the power of a good story and a high quality media relations pitch.

5. Quality content counts

The films were embedded in over 250 sites from main stream media like the Daily Telegraph. This was because the content was relevant, engaging and high quality (the Telegraph used one of the films online for a month and sold advertising space around it). We got the same reaction from bloggers – the films were high quality so added appeal to their blogs. People were proud to be associated with content of this quality. The days of cheap and cheerful content are going fast.

AT&T’s lobbyist tells 300k employees to ‘protest regulation’

Ben LaMothe — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 11:31:22 +0000

The internet is a great way to spread news about your company. And on a CSR level, the internet’s inherent transparency lends itself well to a company’s efforts to make their processes more transparent.

However this can work against a company when the news is bad and the methods less than transparent.

Case in point, American telecoms giant AT&T’s recent attempts via lobbyist Jim Cicconi to thwart increased regulation on the internet, known stateside as “net-neutrality rules’. The Washington Post has more:

Cicconi has criticized FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s push to strengthen and broaden rules for how Internet service providers treat content on their networks. Cicconi said such rules should not apply to wireless networks, which have less capacity than fixed wireline networks like cable. He has said that AT&T Mobility and other mobile broadband providers should not be strapped by new rules when it comes to managing broadband traffic congestion.

The other major stakeholder in this debate is Google. Here’s what they’ve got to say about it:

Fundamentally, net neutrality is about equal access to the Internet. In our view, the broadband carriers should not be permitted to use their market power to discriminate against competing applications or content. Just as telephone companies are not permitted to tell consumers who they can call or what they can say, broadband carriers should not be allowed to use their market power to control activity online. Today, the neutrality of the Internet is at stake as the broadband carriers want Congress’s permission to determine what content gets to you first and fastest. Put simply, this would fundamentally alter the openness of the Internet.

AT&T’s lobbyist is doing the company a great disservice by, in a round-about way, telling the company’s employees that they should protest unfettered access to the internet. Since AT&T signs their cheques, it makes it difficult for an employee to openly disobey something like this.

Because the internet is transparent, AT&T’s activities have been given wide-spread attention. It’s got similar traits as the Trafigura scandal that unfolded in the UK last week: A big company trying to have a say over information, or a vital service, the alternative of which is free-flowing information and data to all. Concerned citizens then took it upon themselves to spread the information, turning it from a footnote to a viral news item.

The take-away item from this for corporate entities is to understand fully the potential viral nature of an item of potentially bad PR. Because AT&T gave their lobbyist the mandate to distribute that message to more than 300,000 people, it was bound to leak. With the leak, and the contents of the leak, AT&T lost control of the messaging and opened the company up to wider, more cutting critiques from customers and media.

It’s likely that AT&T’s stance will begin to inform public opinion. However it’s unlikely to be in the way they had hoped.

Trafigura, Jan Moir and reputation management online

Ben LaMothe — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:28:08 +0000

The events of the past week and a half serve as a good case study for how social network users and bloggers can bury a reputation, often without any real burden of truth. The first event involved The Guardian newspaper, micro-blogging site Twitter, oil traders Trafigura and their libel lawyers Carter-Ruck.

The Guardian explains:

Lawyers for oil traders Trafigura finally abandoned attempts to keep secret a scientific report about toxic waste dumping in west Africa, that was shown to the Guardian … The Minton report, commissioned in 2006 from the London-based firm’s scientific consultants, said that based on the “limited” information they had been given Trafigura’s oil waste, dumped cheaply the month before in a city in Ivory Coast, was potentially toxic, and “capable of causing severe human health effects”.

Despite the backdown, serious damage had already been done. Across Twitter and the blogosphere, people were digging into Trafigura, their lawyers and everyone involved in the alleged cover-up. The messaging around the trial and the report seeped out of the tight grasp of the stakeholders and proceeded to bounce around the web.

Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger phrased it nicely:

“Trafigura thought it was buying silence. A combination of old media – the Guardian – and new – Twitter – turned attempted obscurity into mass notoriety.”

The second incident involved an inflammatory column by Daily Mail writer Jan Moir on the mysterious death of former Boyzone singer Stephen Gately. Given her position as a well-known columnist, having readers disagree with her views is part of the job description. However, again thanks to Twitter’s ability to spread news like wildfire, the inflammatory column became headline news.

In a ‘Comment is Free’ column, Charlie Brooker captured the general response to the off-colour column:

It has been 20 minutes since I’ve read her now-notorious column, and I’m still struggling to absorb the sheer scope of its hateful idiocy. It’s like gazing through a horrid little window into an awesome universe of pure blockheaded spite. Spiralling galaxies of ignorance roll majestically against a backdrop of what looks like dark prejudice, dotted hither and thither with winking stars of snide innuendo.

Given that Brooker is a well-read journalist in the UK, it’s fair to say both Moir and The Mail have lost complete control of the situation. And days later it’s still spiraling. Readers have reacted decisively, lodging 22,000 complaints with the Press Complaints Commission since Friday 16 October.

But what can you do? The internet enables lightning-fast communication on a global scale. Writing in the Financial Times, David Bowen of the web consultancy Bowen Craggs & Co., lists seven points to consider:

1. You have 48 hours to save your reputation.

2. The traditional method is no longer enough.

3. Understand these channels.

4. Corporate communications needs to be reconfigured to respond, fast.

5. Draw up a reputation management response plan, to complement crisis management.

6. Use all the weapons you can.

7. If you are drawn into trench warfare with your critics, consider carefully the best approach.

It’s difficult to determine what the impact will be on the reputations of the above mentioned until it the controversy dies down. From the looks of it, both incidents appear to have a few more days of life in them.

If either had a reputation management contingency plan in place, perhaps they could have prevented some of the damage. For others, it should serve as a case study in what can happen and how to stay ahead of the curve.

Nuffield Health hires Glasshouse Partnership

James Thellusson — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:09:34 +0000

Nuffield Health, the UK’s largest healthcare charity, has appointed Glasshouse Partnership to help run the Group’s corporate affairs. The appointment is effective immediately. Glasshouse Partnership won the account in a joint tender with Van Communications.

For further details check out this week’s PR Week or read the press release attached.

What? No crisis management….

James Thellusson — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 12:29:07 +0000

A new report today from lawyers Freshfields finds a staggering one in ten of major multi-nationals don’t have a formal incident management plan or team in place to handle product recalls. Given that last year, the European Commission saw a 56% increase in the number of consumer safety alerts from member states, this is an amazing number of ’serious’ companies, not ‘Mom & Pop’ corner stores, who don’t seem to have got their act together. Equally bizarre, is the fact that nearly 40% don’t have good working relationships with the regulators – precisely the people who can force product withdrawls. ‘You cannot be serious!.’ No incident plan! Is the survey relaible? If it is, it suggests there are several directors of major european businesses, including a number of corporate affairs people, who need to take a closer look at themselves…and this report. I can’t say I’ve come across a major business which doesn’t have (at least) an incident plan and team. But what does chimes with our experience at Glasshouse Partnership is this: that in an age of marketing transparency your product is your CSR policy; your customer is your most dangerous ally and the supply chain is the battleground where your brand’s product and corporate integrity will be won or lost.

Pan-European Soccer in the Community

James Thellusson — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 12:27:41 +0000

In one of its final acts, G-14, the soon-to-be wound-up european club football association, has published a report into its community investments. The report, which was audited by UK based charity, Business in the Community, using its Clubs that Count methodology, is probably the first pan-european review of soccer club community investments and policy. There are some clear trends…clubs moving from a local philanthropic approach to a global, CSR based one; increasing links to charities and NGOs in order to find suitable programmes for clubs to engage with social issues and, lastly, an increasing number of environmental schemes and growing environmental awareness.

Glasshouse, which helped G-14 with the project, thinks these trends will accelerate over the next decade driven by pressures from politicians and Civil Society to engage more actively in dealing with social issues (look at the European White Paper on Sport). As well as this external pressure, professional sport, especially football, will seek to build relevance and esteem with their newly expanding fan bases across the globe. To read the BITC / G-14 report, go to G14.com and dig through to News ‘New Report Provides Insight into…‘

The Future of Corporate Responsibility Communications

Michael Hoevel — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 17:16:17 +0000

A recent report called “The Future of Corporate Responsibility Communications” highlights several recent material changes driving the future of the industry and makes some predictions about the effects these will have on corporate behaviour.

Because of new frameworks such as the UN Principles for Responsible Investment and the new Sustainability Reporting Guidelines from the GRI, companies will continue to find that their financial and non-financial performances will affect each other more and more.

The report predicts that companies will create more and better ways to reach out in more specific ways to different stakeholder groups, both so that they respond in more bespoke ways to specific concerns but also so that they can get more accurate feedback on how these issues might affect their core business offerings in the long-term.

www.newscounter.com

James Thellusson — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 08:02:35 +0000

newscounter.com is a right of reply service for companies and individuals who feel badly done over by media coverage. And who hasnt heard a celeb or client moan about media mispresentation? In a wired, blogged world, where bad news spreads like wild fire, corporate integrity is vulnerable to the spread of uncontested negative opinion. Getting a retraction and correcting inaccuracies can be a slow business. It’s a process too, which many feel (rightly or wrongly), is stacked against them.

Going to war by bringing in the lawyers is a guarantee the ‘negatives’ will spread. newscounter.com meets a real market need – for those aggrieved by media inaccuracies to put a full, immediate, unedited rebuttal ‘out there’, next to the accusation, for the world and the search engines to see.

If it builds a reputation as a place to go to see ‘both sides of the story’ and where those rebuttals can be seen, then it will have a place in the corporate communications armoury. At the moment, the Baby Products Association (BPA) is winning the public vote against Which? in a battle over child car seats safety. The fact that ‘public opinion’ on a public, impartial web site ‘backs’ their position is a gain in itself because it’s referenceable as evidence in their ongoing communications battle that their position is understood, believed and deemed fair. For corproate communicators, that’s got to be worth having.