Ever since his downfall and the resulting political firestorm cast him as ‘arch villain’ in the world’s biggest banking failure (so far), the erstwhile ‘Sir’ and now just plain old Fred Goodwin has never given a media interview. It could initially have been for legal reasons, but I wonder if maintaining a dignified silence was ever the right approach and if he should now review that? Was it a deliberate, planned and considered action or an early mistake that he’s since compounded by failing to tell his version of events?

It really is fascinating and puzzling to watch this former business ‘superstar’ making no apparent attempt to defend his reputation. Did he make no senior media allies throughout his career? Why didn’t he take the well-trodden advocacy approach of speaking through ‘friends’ or other ‘sources close to the subject’ to get his defensive messages out there?

If his position in considered indefensible, then why not hand back the pension pot with a humble ‘mea-culpa’, and start to redeem himself? He wouldn’t miss the money. RBS’s current boss Stephen Hester found temporary reprieve from personal criticism by doing a u-turn on his controversial bonus award: change the story if you don’t like it!

Another possibility is that Fred Goodwin simply doesn’t give a damn. That seems unlikely from all that we’ve read about him and his allegedly Hindenburg-sized ego. Redemption is clearly possible although it takes a long time, much effort and genuine will: the old adage about reputations taking years to build and seconds to destroy still holds.

But the point here is that reputations can be rebuilt. There are plenty of examples of people who’ve recovered from worse than Goodwin; does anyone remember Gerald Ronson? Look at his Wikipedia page to see how far you can sink and how high you can subsequently rebound. A more recent example is ex-BP boss Tony Hayward. He seems to have done all right so far, and in a relatively short space of time. And so has the reputation of Toyota, following the crisis surrounding its global recall. It will be interesting to see if and how Fred Goodwin finally reinvents himself. Maybe he’s working on a book deal?

If you find yourself having to explain something important but potentially boring, it can be tough to find the right language and keep people listening. It gets worse when the subject also happens to be abstract and complex. And the pinnacle is when you’re called upon to do it live, in front of many of the country’s most influential people. So it was interesting to hear the approach of a guest commentator on this morning’s Today programme (BBC Radio’s flagship current affairs show). The guest was Jerome Booth, head of research at London-based Ashmore, an investment management advisory firm. Booth was invited on to the show to discuss the reactions of individual countries to the ongoing financial crisis.

Presenter Adam Shaw’s introduction to the interview began with the notion that countries were reacting in a similar way to individuals when presented with catastrophic personal loss (death of a close  relative, a job, income, freedom). He cited the Kübler-Ross model, commonly known as The Five Stages of Grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance. He then invited Booth to comment and this is what he said:

“I’d like to offer an analogy and it’s a rather vivid one. We have dead bodies. The dead body in the UK is very messy, there’s blood all over the kitchen floor. We know it’s there and we are trying to clear it up. In the Euro zone, the German part of the kitchen floor is spotless but the dead body is in pieces elsewhere; it’s all around the edges. Our approach to dealing with it is to cover it with a sheet, which doesn’t solve anything in the long term and we keep having to replace the sheet with a bigger one. In the US, they’ve taken the dead body, propped it up in a chair, put a cup of coffee in its hand and are trying to have a conversation with it. The level of denial really does differ.”

Anyone invited to do media interviews on business subjects can use this as a consummate example of how to paint vivid word pictures to keep audiences engaged and entertained. Booth could easily have droned on about economic history (he’s an economist) and lost his audience in five seconds flat. Instead, with this analogy he provided a simple to understand and powerful way of explaining what’s going on. What examples can you think of that do the same?

In my first article on customer advocacy I outlined what I hope was a strong case for talking about your successes through the clients’ voice. In this second piece, I want to explore what’s preventing more firms from doing so. Some of the common reasons I’ve encountered are:

1. The firm has a long-standing (and unchallenged) policy not to talk about clients
2. Clients would never agree to it, for various reasons
3. There is no resource to chase relationship ‘owners’
4. Marketing people are not trusted to talk directly to clients
5. It’s too risky. The outcome cannot be controlled. Clients might be misquoted or say something detrimental

Taking the first two in turn, changing the firm’s policy might be a tall order but when was the last time anyone asked if this approach was still relevant for the hyper-networked, information-rich 21st century? There will always be circumstances were your firm (or more likely your client) doesn’t want the whole world to know of your commercial relationships and what you do for them. But such a rigid policy locks out many other valuable opportunities where this doesn’t apply. You’ll automatically miss the opportunity of identifying those success stories that can go ‘on the record’. And these can be deployed to give potential new clients a very good reason to hire you.

The other common excuse offered is that ‘the client is far too busy’ and/or would be irritated by such a request. This may indeed apply in some cases. All too often, though, it’s a blocking tactic used to deny client access by someone who wants everyone else kept away from ‘their’ client. It’s understandable but unhelpful to you as a marketing professional.

Reason number three is really little more than an excuse, and a poor one at that. There can be few marketing activities more important to the firm than finding clients willing to advocate on its behalf. So what’s really needed is a reallocation of resources. Put your most capable person on the case – delegate it downwards at your peril! And if you truly have no-one internally who can take on the task, outsource it with the same care and attention to a trusted, experienced third party.

The fourth and fifth reasons are understandable and often stem from a combination of inexperience and the absence of a formalised process. The very fact that you cannot fully control the outcome is why client-told stories are so powerful. What you can do, however, is minimise the possibility of a negative outcome. One way to reign in your control freak colleagues, and get them to see and accept this, is to prepare a formal process. This should include how you identify and approach clients, plus how any subsequent outputs are managed (the media interview or the case study article, for example). Ultimately, if a client says something negative, it’s not as dire as you’d think and will be in the context of many other positive things, plus you’ll have worked out the best response to minimise the fallout in advance. That’s one key reason for having the right endorsement management process. That process is the theme of the third piece in this series, coming soon.

Most business people are understandably wary of talking to journalists because they know they don’t control the outcome. They worry about looking stupid, being misquoted or misunderstood. There are techniques you can deploy to minimise all of these possibilities but for this posting I want to talk about another danger: finding you’ve ended up offering the unintended ‘contrarian’ viewpoint.

This happened recently to a university professor who was invited alongside myself and three other very experienced PR professionals to offer his views on the importance of selling in public relations. He was first to be interviewed and gave his view that selling wasn’t very important, saying he’d never been asked by employers to include selling in a course syllabus and that it wasn’t necessary. Everyone else, including me, said it was a key skill and that it was vitally important to be good at selling to do the job well. Here’s the resulting article. Judge for yourself but I think the academic ended up looking out of touch.

One of the key things I teach people in media training sessions is this: before you begin a discussion, ask the reporter who else is being/has been interviewed and where you sit in the planned interview sequence. That allows you to think more carefully about what to say, plus it gives you the chance to politely ask the reporter to interview you last of all (when you can ask what others have already said and add value to/take issue with/correct/balance previous comments), or request that they come back to you to review what you’ve said in the light of other comments. It’s not always practical but can make a very big difference to the end result.

Photo courtesy of gabemac http://bit.ly/mDAMPF

Whether or not you’re a fan of Tony Blair, one of the welcome things that came into being under his watch was the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) in 2000. This gave UK citizens a legal right to information held by most public authorities. American citizens have had this right for some time, of course, and the UK is now one of about 85 countries that have introduced similar rights. Now, back to this post’s subject: how can you use FOI as part of your organisation’s PR activities? There is no universal answer as it depends on what your organisation does and what it’s aims are, but here’s an example I orchestrated a few years ago, which might prompt some ideas.

Pre-recession (and a change in government), I was working with a trade association of large construction companies. It wanted to put pressure on central government to maintain its promises to increase capital spending on public hospitals, transport, housing and schools. Part of this campaign was an annual monitoring report on the subject and I was asked for ideas to make the report a little more newsworthy. Among my suggestions was to make Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to the facilities management departments of the top 20 NHS Health Trusts, asking them about the size of their respective repairs backlog, and in particular, the amount of work still outstanding to meet basic hospital fire safety regulations (these had recently been tightened).

From the answers we were able to compile a Top 20 worst-to-best league table for hospital fire safety. Releasing this alongside the usual annual report gave a potent illustration of the scale of outstanding repairs in UK hospitals and an attractive talking point for journalists. It also gave us a story angle for local media. The whole thing cost very little and worked very well indeed, providing a platform around which the trade association’s chief executive could make his key points. He was able to do so in The Financial Times and numerous other national and regional media outlets.

As a tactic worth considering, I don’t think it matters whether you sell to the public sector or not. All you need is an issue that you want to be associated with and a little imagination. Plus there are now websites geared around making multiple FOI requests easier to administer, such as www.whatdotheyknow.com. A little time spent browsing the requests and responses made should soon provide lots of ideas. It will also produce some fascinating trivia. For example, I just found out that Royal Mail used a staggering 870 million elastic bands in f/y 2007-8. If your company supplies these and Royal Mail is not on your sales prospects list, it’s time to correct that situation quickly.

Most people old enough to be in senior management roles today know the slogan ‘Let your fingers do the walking’. It did wonders for promoting Yellow Pages and joined the advertising hall of fame back in 2002. But how about ‘Let your clients do the talking’? Nope, that doesn’t resonate quite so loudly does it? But it should, because credible endorsements from others are one of the most potent sales tools in business-to-business, especially if you’re selling professional services. PR professionals call this ‘third party endorsement’ (TPE) and, well managed, it can win you business, forge alliances, improve recruitment and retention, and help in a multitude of other reputation-enhancing ways too.

TPE is so powerful because it responds to a basic psychological need. In business – indeed in life in general – when presented with an important choice, dilemma or problem, we tend to look around us to see what others in the same circumstances have done. Even if we already have a good idea about the appropriate course of action, we still tend to look for external validation of that choice. Both scenarios present management with an opportunity for their firm to be seen as the best choice of solution provider.
Here’s another very good reason why TPE is valuable in marketing terms. Journalists will be much more interested in your story ideas if they are ‘client-told’ as opposed to stories told purely by the firm. Good journalists will instinctively seek out independent validation and evidence when presented with a claim. It’s part of their training to be cynical.

They also know that good stories need tangible examples readers can relate to in a meaningful way. They want drama, personality and, even in dry business publications these days, a little entertainment. Because journalists are more time-pressed than ever before, if you feed them your choicest case study morsels, chances are they’ll bite your hand off.

So, by exploiting TPE, you’ll be benefiting from powerfully-told endorsements of your services and expertise, and pushing against an open door when your PR team contact the media. Why then, are more firms not making the most of such a great opportunity? That’s something I’ll cover in a forthcoming post.

Elle Macpherson and a ceo. I know which one I'd prefer to have in my boardroom

Earlier this month Elle Macpherson, one of the original ‘supermodels’, was interviewed by Lucy Kellaway in The Financial Times. You can read the article here (although you may need to register). It’s a great read, though it left this formerly neutral reader, and I suspect many others, with a rather dim view of ‘The Body’, as she used to be known. It made me wonder what the original objective for doing the interview was, what preparation went into it and whether the outcome might have been better for McPherson, who clearly went into damage limitation mode judging from the writer’s account of post-interview phone calls.

Super models, like others at the top of their game in fashion, media and sport, are used to journalists fawning over them. Because they are hugely in demand, they can pick and choose who they grant interviews to, with the result that most journalists have to accept the sometimes ridiculous conditions they (and their publicists) demand: so-and-so will not talk about this; you are not allowed to mention (insert sensitive issue). You can see evidence of it in Kellaway’s piece but all such attempts at media interview control were never going to work with The FT, which as most people know is much more interested in business than celebrity stories.

Kellaway doesn’t make her living interviewing the likes of Elle Macpherson so had nothing to lose from writing an honest and frank account of the meeting. Though she is fair, she has a low tolerance for flaky business ‘guff’ and isn’t afraid to get the highlighter pen out when she encounters it. So why did Macpherson’s PR firm, a high-end fashion PR agency based in Savile Row, think it was a good idea to do this interview? My bet is that they approached Kellaway rather than the other way round. Why, at the bare minimum, wasn’t Macpherson briefed and ready to talk about business instead of underwear? Did they think their client was safer talking to a female reporter?

Tellingly, Macpherson misinterprets Kellaway’s reference to the basic accounting term ‘wasting asset’ and responds frostily (savour the mental image, as the ‘Ab-Fab’ PR agency minder sitting in on the interview didn’t get it either). We are left wondering if she really is as deeply immersed in the business world as she claims to be.

What’s the most important lesson? I’m torn between “never use a fashion PR agency to handle business media relations” and “if your client is the brand and writes a ‘brand poem’, make sure they never mention it during a media interview.”

It was a real pleasure to work with Six Sigma PR to communicate globally the results of a highly complex, multi-year study. Andy played the role of our lead public relations consultant, developing, gaining support and executing our global communications strategy and coordinating the work of three agencies in China, the UK and the US. With 14, highly diverse companies participating, this was no easy task. Andy was a strong asset to the team; he kept the project on track at key moments, executed on strategy and was a pleasure to work with.