Mr. Walker is senior partner in PIELLE Consulting, Feintuch Communications' UK-based partner in the PR World Alliance. The blog post originally ran in PRO PR Magazine (Croatia) in Croatian and is soon to be published in Nigeria and Ghana.
Yesterday my doctor
complained to me that she was worried at the number of patients who now came to
see her armed with their own diagnosis of their ailment together with a list of
treatments they wanted her to give them. It’s the internet she said, easy to
access, free, just type in a set of symptoms and there you are, a menu of
illnesses and a set of treatments. Instead of being respected for my six years
specialist education and training, Wikipedia and websites are making me
redundant in the eyes of my patients.
It was tempting to tell her that
she had just joined the real world of professional advisors and the world
where, thanks to Google, everyone is an expert and firmly believes they can do most
jobs as well as a properly trained and experienced expert. Just ask any
experienced public relations manager. It isn’t helped by those, among the ranks
of every profession, who take a great delight in suggesting that flair
creativity and personal genius is all you really need. Education, training and
expertise born of experience is as nothing. It is particularly true in the
world of the media what price a properly trained journalist with clear
editorial standards in a world of the ‘citizen journalist’ When the immediacy
or Twitter, Instagram and any number similar web based platforms are taken
seriously and become the basis for Government policy and legislation it is
about time someone sounded a warning. Are these really the expressions of the
majority or, as is more likely, are they are the vehicles of self promoters,
pressure groups, big business interests, and a host of vested interests?
During the so called ‘Arab
Spring,’ the world was awash with Tweets, mobile phone videos and pictures. No-one
questioned their provenance or suggested they were part of a propaganda war;
only later did the truth emerge. Far from demonstrating that the youth of the
Middle East were using the internet to shape a democratic future -- in reality the
vast majority of the social media traffic was coming from vested interests
promoting revolution from outside the countries where uprisings were being
fermented. Professional journalists trained to answer to editors, check sources
and certify the information might just have
provided a more balanced picture. Instead
spurred by what they saw a commercial competition they joined in the battle as
herd instincts took over to confuse and confound the watching, reading world.
Contrast that position with
the protests in Turkey in August 2013 when that Government proposed building over
a park in Istanbul. Trust in the national and some international media fell to
about 20 per cent and social media became the most relied on sources of
reliable information. The circulation of newspapers dropped and with the drop
came the loss of advertising revenue.
Only Government and
Government agency advertising kept some of them afloat. The difference here was
that under 20 per cent of the social media traffic came from outside the country
and then it was clearly coming from expatriate Turks in the UK, Germany, and
the rest of the world. A salutary reminder perhaps that professional advice and
comment still has a real and important value.
Reflecting with some
amusement on my Doctor’s despair, Linked-In this morning reminded me not to be
smug. There, as the first entry in the PR community section I read on my phone,
was an appeal by the managing director of a small electrical business for
advice on where he could get low-cost public relations. He explained his was a
small business and by inference couldn’t afford a real professional
consultancy.
We don’t know and probably
won’t ever know whether what he wanted was just a few moments of photo-op glory
in a trade paper, on local radio or TV on a slow news day and with a bizarre or
creative enough idea a national newspaper might pick it up. Vanity has a value
but for the professional advisor clear management based objectives are a better
guide to shaping, managing and measuring the effectiveness of the programme. Did
footfall into the store increase, have the reps on the road found that the
company name and product is familiar to buyers – has making the sale become easier
as a result of the planned and sustained public relations activity. Has
recruitment and job applications increased, is staff retention high? In short
have the objectives you defined and were then factored into the public relations
programme been met?
It doesn’t take a fortune and
it does not need a genius. It does require a manager who knows his business,
has clear plans for its future, has defined his objectives and his budgets.
The next step and
it is a difficult one is finding the advisor, the firm with whom you are
comfortable professionally and whose advice you believe you can trust. There is
no alternative to taking the time to research and then setting up and
structuring the interview. If you believe that a beauty parade of companies
each given up to an hour to convince you is the best way to select the people
into whose hands you are entrusting the reputation of your organisation then go
ahead.
But the smaller the budget
the more time you should invest in interviewing the small number of likely
candidate firms or individuals your research should have identified. A series
of discussions rather than ‘pitches’ from a
professional advisor on how they would plan a properly planned and
professionally managed public relations programme that responds to your
commercial objectives and can contribute
to sustaining the present and realising the future is probably the best way to
go.
When NASA was upgrading its
computer systems some while ago they froze. Nothing the assembled array of
computer engineers could do to restart the programmes on whose effectiveness the
lives of astronauts -- let alone the prestige of the USA relied. In some
desperation about the heritage programmes thought to be the cause, they sent for
a long retired NASA computer engineer and flew him in from the wilds of
Nebraska to take his advice. On arrival he spent about three hours checking the programmes and coding asked for a small rubber ended hammer and walked over to the bank of servers and after ten minutes careful inspection he took the hammer in his left hand he gave a gentle but firm tap on the casing of one of the servers walked back to the desk asked for the system to be rebooted.
No surprise the upgrades started to load. Having seen them installed and satisfactorily operating, the question of his fee was broached. $350,000 was the reply, no surprise there was a clear objection at what one manager saw as a preposterous rate for just 4 hours work and 7 hours travelling time in a private aircraft sent by NASA.
"All you did was tap the casing and any fool could have done that and it could have been done for free.” Yes said the retired engineer but this fool spent 10 years in college and 30 years at NASA learning just where on the casing to tap.
There is plenty of free
advice out there, most of it, worth what you pay for it. Any professional, even
my doctor, can do more with an informed and well-briefed client, customer or
patient. But every manager should be clear about their objectives and keep value
rather than cost in mind when looking for a professional advisor particularly
when the reputation of the organisation is involved.
# # #
A
former President of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations Peter Walker is
a Freeman of the City of London. After a period in advertising, management
consultancy, UK and European Government then as Secretary to the Board Pubic
Policy Committee of one of the UK’s largest multi-national groups, he joined Pielle
as one of the founder partners in 1980 and is a board member of the Public
Relations World Alliance. An expert in international risk and issue management,
Corporate Responsibility, community relations and governance his advice is sort
on national and international public affairs and public relations programmes that protect and promote business, brand
,individuals organisations and governments.
