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.

Should organisations Twitter or not? If so, why and how? We’re trying to find answers to questions like this. What’s the best business use of Twitter? Who’s using it in the most innovative way?

We’ve produced a guide to corporate Twittering — it’s very much a work in progress, so your suggestions for additions, changes or new links are all welcome.

Take a look — and don’t forget to let us know what you think!

OK, so Glasshouse Partnership is now on Twitter.

Despite some tremblings the other week as Hugh MacLeod deleted his account on the grounds that it made him lazy, I think there’s a lot of potential to be had in 140 characters. Steve Rubel’s more confident, and (I hope) for the right reasons.

Glasshouse Partnership’s motivation to sign up is neatly encapsulated in Sam Lawrence’s post over at Go Big Always:

Twitter is nice because it strips everything away and focuses 100% on people and the economy of interaction.

And that’s what we hope to do. It’s not some part of a big masterplan. Not an aggressive sales strategy. Not even really a collaborative social interaction facilitation exercise, much as we’d secretly like to make it one. Just an opportunity to share our thoughts and collective personality with the world.

The fact that we have a collective personality, of course, is perhaps a little scary. In fact, it’s something we’re rather proud of, and that’s why we’ve gone down the ‘corporate’ Twitter route. Some of us have our own accounts too — see if you can stalk us down — but the Glasshouse tweets will be our home for everything brand, marketing, reputation and CR related, with a healthy dose of cynicism and irreverence thrown in for good measure.

Head over to Twitter and follow us — you wouldn’t want to miss out…

If you’re wondering what Twitter’s all about, then Bobbie Johnson of the Guardian has the basics covered. If you’d like to get our updates to your mobile without signing up, just text follow glasshouse to +44 7624 801423. If you later decide you can’t stand us, you can unsubscribe by texting leave glasshouse to the same number.

AdAge reports:

Ad/marketing-services sectors have rebounded from the ad industry's January 2004 post-recession employment nadir. Advertising/marketing services has added 106,000 jobs since then; marketing consulting accounted for nearly half (48,200) of those gains.

As murketing puts it, ‘In the future, everyone will consult’. Could the data from AdAge be a sign that the marketing industry as a whole is waking up to the fact that our clients don’t just want to get stuff in the papers these days? I suspect this is probably a little over-optimistic — even aside from the fact that there’s going to be mileage in the efficient publicity shop for a good few years to come. After all, there are plenty of market sectors (fashion retail is one which springs to mind) where media coverage is a critical component of short term sales strategy.

Glasshouse Partnership, on the other hand, try to help our clients move beyond this machine-gun approach to selling. As Tim said the other day:

We do corporate marketing. We help design and evolve organisations which meet actual stakeholders needs. We advocate changes that should leverage existing relationship systems as a source of competitive advantage. We try very hard to suggest changes that may actually be deliverable and may actually have an impact. We want strategies that multiply; not divide.

Stakeholder collaboration doesn’t just have to be for the big guys, though. Anyone can set up a wiki or a Skype public chat, open a Flickr group or — if you’re doing things the old fashioned way, get a group of mates down to the pub to talk about some new product ideas.

Getting to know the people who care about what you do is important stuff, and so this sort of dialogue (even though it’s a horrible word) is good. Also, the people who understand how to make dialogue work are the people who’re getting hired these days, it would seem.

Today, Nicholas Ferguson, chairman of The Courtauld Institute of Art, has announced the formation of the Samuel Courtauld Society.

Named after one of the UK’s leading 20th century philanthropists, the new Samuel Courtauld Society aims to attract committed philanthropists and donors willing to support the Institute, which Courtauld created in 1932.

Described in the Spectator as the ‘pre-eminent centre for the study of art history in the world’, The Courtauld is known for its collections and for producing many of the art world’s leading critics (such as Brian Sewell) as well as museum directors and curators (such as Sir Nicholas Serota).

His key conclusion: leading practitioners are focussed on materiality; which will force clients to be more proactive in their stakeholder relationships and better align their CR and PR functions. Data dumps and greenwash have had their day.

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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.

With blogs for Skype and the management systems community at BusinessAssurance.com part of our current portfolio, we’re at a stage where sharing our experiences has become an integral part of our own learning process. Through open discussions like these, we’re well placed to draw on the insights of our peers, as well as demonstrate our own strengths.

We believe that blogs are a crucial weapon in the armoury of an organisation which values transparency — an open, honest, and most importantly human mode of communication, valued by stakeholders and search engines alike.

Further reading:

• There’s more on the value of blogs in marketing over at Blogopreneur.
• Murphy’s Law has a good round-up of some recent corporate blogging discussions.

The core consumer insight was that Ariel’s ability to provide a ‘brilliant wash’ at 30°C would help consumers save money and at the same time help reduce their carbon footprint. The campaign which was launched in conjunction with the Energy Savings Trust is still being evaluated to see if it really has had a long term impact on consumer behaviour as initial results suggest consumers in several EU markets are ‘turning down the dial’.

The campaign strikes us as a brilliant piece of P&G marketing… data driven insight, clear analysis of a rational (money saving) and emotional (help the environment) consumer benefit and then a cleverly endorsed, well executed integrated marketing and communications campaign.

Interestingly, the product promise (a great wash at a low temperature) has been the same for years and wasn’t really changed, just emphasized in a different way. Even more, the possible guilt of using the product (after all, how ‘green’ are the chemicals in washing powder?) has been replaced by a gentle, reassuring sense of greenness.

Earlier, on the same stage, Gareth Hughes, Climate Change Capital, painted a picture where the capital markets are going when it comes to environmental factors — those interested in a quick view should read Peter’s blog over at BusinessAssurance.com.

High-level officials in the central government are known for being hyper-aware of the personal legacy which their administration will leave. For Deng Xiaoping, it was launching economic reforms and opening to the west; for Jiang Zemin, it was single-mindedly driving these economic reforms at almost any cost. The current fourth-generation leaders, President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen, the legacy which already appears to be surfacing is one seeking a more sustainable, environmentally-compatible form of economic growth. Urban-rural inequality in China is one of the world’s worst, and the countryside has seen little of the economic benefit which coastal cities have (Some say they are even worse off as basic education and health care provision have withered away after market reforms).

Because local officials are largely responsible for overseeing their own local development, they are incentivised simply to produce high levels of economic growth (which equates to more taxes for their area, more bribes, and quicker personal promotions up the party ranks). Because non-financial metrics have not been incorporated into these incentive structures nor have they been sufficiently institutionalised in the rule of law, environmental and social factors have largely been ignored.

All things considered, the government has closed ranks well in order to cover up these oversights up to now. (When I was living in Beijing in the summer of 2001, they famously shut down all the factories before the Olympic Committee visit and spray painted the grass green to reduce the feeling of pollution in the capital.)

Nonetheless, as the Chinese economy deepens and the demands for supply chain transparency increase around the world, Chinese leaders and businesses will face pressing challenges in incorporating sustainability metrics into the country’s future path of growth.