Brand Anarchy

BRAND ANARCHY
Managing Corporate Reputation

Steve Earl and Stephen Waddington
To
Saskia, Alfie, Ivan and Sarra
Dan, Ellie, Freya and Katie

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CONTENTS
About the authors xi
Acknowledgements xiv
Introduction xv
1. Corporate reputation 3
Control in far simpler times 4
Appliance of science 5
Seeking more than fragile influence 8
What is PR these days? 9
The changing editorial world 11
In pursuit of the science of reputation 12
Is a best-guess still best? 14
Judgement days 17
Gaining command, not seizing control 20
2. Media: traditional versus digital 29

The decline of print 29
Broadcast is booming 32
Changing media habits 33
The new media 35
Journalism versus user-generated content 39
Maintaining standards 41
Changing media models 43
What will readers pay for? 44
No limits content 46
‘Google charged’ 48
Who are the new newsagents? 48
The future of media: smaller, leaner and
less profitable 50
VIII CONTENTS
3. Cutting out the middleman 55

The wall came down 57
Does each media type need a different approach? 59
Finding common ground 63
Conversation: an art 64
The daunting scale of conversations 66
The mighty media mashup 67
Media everywhere: mobile, static, work and play 70
Have appetites changed? 74
They’re listening. What now? 76
A world of influence beyond engagement 80
Integrated media planning 81
4. The end of spin and the need for authentic

communication 87
New organisational influence flows 90
Radical transparency 92
Brandjacking: do you know who I am? 93
Authentic communication 95
Propaganda relations 96
The corporate obsession with press releases and
other wire fodder 99
PR spam 100
An Inconvenient PR Truth 102
Searching for answers 104
The social media press release 107
5. The audience answers back 113

Why are we baiting? 115
‘Oh behave!’ 116
The social media bear pit 118
When conversation takes flight 120
You’re being watched, everywhere 121
CONTENTS IX
Conversation is also complex 123

The chatter that matters 125
Give a little, take a lot? 127
6. On the inside 131

So who’s in charge now? 134
Getting to grips with changing media 135
Don’t underestimate the fascination 138
Wagging tongues, willing ears 139
You’re a media brand, yes? 142
Becoming part of the action 144
And it’s happening anyway 145
Learning by listening 146
7. Monitoring and the management of risk 153

BP: Brutal Predicament 155
Making sense of data 158
Man versus machine 159
Sentiment analysis and other snake oil 161
Measure outcomes not outputs 162
Flawed metrics: reach and readership 164
Peer metrics 165
Can crowds really be wise? 166
Crap detection: verifying Internet sources 168
Legal process on the Internet 170
Protecting identity in networks 172
8. Measuring reputation 177

Making it count 178
Data with destiny 180
Does it really do that? 181
The search goes on 182
What is the public relations industry doing? 184
X CONTENTS
Death of Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE) 185

The business of influence 187
If not reputation, what about influence? 190
Life in the P&L 192
Once you’ve measured, what then? 195
9. Participation: the future of organisational

communication 201
Back to the street 202
Searching for answers 204
Social relationship management 207
Social media and communication in a crisis 209
Brands as media 212
Bridges don’t talk; people do 214
Participation 215
Developing communities 215
Developing a social media strategy 216
The shift to open business 217
10. Reskilling for the future 225

The big modernisation challenge 225
Communication skills for the future 227
Professional development rethink 230
Getting ahead 233
Building a network online 235
Personal reputation 237
Blogs as a personal brand voice 240
Beyond engagement: participation 242
Index 247
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Steve Earl and Stephen Waddington have worked together since
the popular rise of the Internet and the dawn of digital media.
They’ve helped brands such as the Associated Press, Cisco, The
Economist, IBM, Tesco and Virgin Media to manage their
reputations.
Their views are formed from 20 years spent working in one of
the most competitive media and public relations environments
in the world.
Most recently they launched the award-winning Speed
Communications, which has rapidly become one of the UK’s
most prominent public relations agencies, working with clients
across conventional, digital and owned media. Both were
journalists who turned to public relations and so have seen
from both sides the massive upheaval in the media we consume.
You’ll find the pair on Twitter: Steve at @mynameisearl, and
Stephen at @wadds. After reading this book, please do share
your views on modern reputation management challenges
through the conversations taking place in all forms of media
using the hashtag #brandanarchy.
We look forward to debating these issues with you.
Steve Earl
Steve (@mynameisearl) is a trained news journalist who went
into public relations in the infancy of the Internet boom in the
mid-1990s. He has handled national and international
campaigns for some of the world’s largest brands. He co-founded
Rainier PR, which is now Speed’s technology team, in 1998,
having worked for two large public relations firms, Brodeur and
Weber Shandwick. Steve holds a Diploma in Newspaper
Journalism from Cardiff School of Journalism, and specialised
in newspaper reporting, government and media law.
XII ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Stephen Waddington
Stephen (@wadds) is a former journalist who moved into public
relations in the early 1990s to work with British technology
start-ups. He has consulted some of the world’s largest
technology brands and is a regular commentator on and public
speaker on public relations, in particular on digital
communication techniques. He sits on the PRCA Council, the
CIPR Council and is a member of the CIPR’s social media panel.
Stephen co-founded Rainier PR, which is now Speed’s technology
team, in 1998, having worked for Brodeur and Weber Shandwick.
Stephen holds a BEng (Hons) in Electronics from the University
of Salford.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We’d like to formally acknowledge and thank the following
people that have helped inform our thinking during the writing
and development of Brand Anarchy.
Mark Adams (@cluetrainee);

Richard Bagnall (@richardbagnall);
Richard Bailey (@behindthespin);
Charles Bell (@thistoomustpass);
Rob Brown (@robbrown);
Dominic Burch (@dom_asdapr);
Alastair Campbell (@campbellclaret);
Lisa Carden;
Michael Chaplin (@michaelchaplin2);
Neil Chapman (@najchapman);
Margaret Clow (@executivetyping);
David Cushman (@davidcushman);
Greg Dyke;
Cliff Ettridge (@cliffettridge);
Russell Goldsmith (@russgoldsmith);
Andrew Grill (@andrewgrill);
James E. Grunig;
Dan Howe (@danhowe);
Neville Hobson (@jangles);
Dan Ilett (@danielilett);
Francis Ingham (@prcaingham);
Peter Kirwan (@petekirwan);
Howard Kosky (@howardkosky);
Quentin Langley (@brandjack);
Barry Leggetter (@barryleggetter);
Antony Mayfield (@amayfield);
Adam Parker (@adparker);
David G. H. Phillips (@davidghphillips);
Michael Regester;
Howard Rheingold (@hrheingold);
Phillip Sheldrake (@Sheldrake);
Jonathan Simnett (@westfour);
Andrew Bruce Smith (@andismit);
Jeremy Thompson @jeremycthompson;
Mike Walsh;
Sally Whittle (@swhittle);
Will Whitehorn;
Daryl Willcox (@darylwillcox);
Ross Wigham (@rosswigham);
Heather Yaxley (@greenbanana);
and Philip Young (@mediations).
INTRODUCTION
There is a simple reason why you should not waste your time
wondering whether you have lost control of your brand’s
reputation.
You have never had control of your brand’s reputation.
Think about it: you may have been able to control everything
your employees think, say and write about your brand. You
may have gained – through investment and persuasion – similar
influence over the media. Even all your customers might think
the sun shines forth from you.
And then someone you didn’t count on walks down the street
and mouths off about you. ‘I hate Brand X,’ they say. ‘I had a bad
experience with those guys, gather round and I’ll tell you all
about it.’ And they do.
That has always been the case. Since the dawn of commerce,
probably. Now the Internet is taking that mouthy pest and
multiplying it. A billion-fold. Worse still, those statements are
immortalised digitally, can gather their own moss in a digital
sense and can be seen by anyone, anywhere.
Reputation is not just under siege, the ramparts have been
utterly breached.
This isn’t a particularly rosy picture, is it? To top it all off, no
one knows whether it’s going to get even worse: will conventional
media become a rapidly dwindling factor as newer, social forms
of media immerse brands and hold them in a vice-like grip?
Our bet, and it is only a bet, is no: because although the nature
and value of conventional media is changing, it will always
have the trust factor on its side as it conveys information to the
public. At least, it will if it plays its cards right.
But if you’re going to try to understand what action plan you
need in order to protect and develop your brand’s reputation in
XVI INTRODUCTION
the future, you must first understand and continue to chart

media change.
Moreover, your business doubtless has a structure, a team
and processes for managing reputation that are matched to the
requirements of conventional media, perhaps with a little social
media specialism tucked neatly to the side. Like the mint sauce
next to a roast lamb dinner.
That must change quickly, or you’re really in trouble.
You will never have complete control over your brand’s
reputation. But you might, just might, be able to get more
control over it than you’ve had in the past. That’s what this
books covers. It is not very long, and even this introduction is
pretty short.
Because you don’t have time to waste.
CHAPTER 1
CORPORATE REPUTATION
Can reputation ever be controlled? And does the pursuit of
the science of influence hold clues? #brandanarchy
‘My reputation grows with every failure.’

So said George Bernard Shaw, a man with a reputation for being
quotable.
In a world in which companies can shine brightly, quickly,
but fade faster, and where rapid technological change leads to
new ways of marketing, consumers are confronted with
increasing amounts of information, each and every day. As a
result, positive brand reputation that cuts through the huge
swathes of information now available has never before been so
highly sought after. Nor has it ever before been further from a
brand’s grasp.
Pace of technological change has caught the practice of
reputation management on the hop. Which has many brands
very scared. Hang on a minute – brands are scared? Surely it’s
the people running those brands who are scared?
Fair enough. Without getting picky though, think about what
a brand is: at its purest level, a brand is a connection between
an organisation and its customers. The reason people running
organisations are scared is that their brands – those connections
– are no longer ‘connected’ to customers by a relatively small
number of tried, tested and predictable routes. Today, those
connections are multiplying like nobody’s business. They’re
everywhere, meaning the relationship between brands and
customers looks really complex, at least on the surface of it.
There’s no real telling how many marketing messages the
average consumer in Britain is now exposed to each day. Many
4 BRAND ANARCHY
experts reckon that advertising messages alone number around

3,000. As digital media, in particular social media, gives
customers greater and more direct exposure to brands (and as
media and technological kit continues to proliferate) that
number will only grow.
This probably isn’t news to you. You’re probably thinking that
the snowballing of media began when we moved beyond four
television channels in the UK; that the game changed when
Internet access surged, and that we then hit warp speed when
the ability to self-publish online took hold. All true. For brands
today, though, the fear factor comes not just from media volume
and direct engagement with customers, but from pace: the
speed at which information spreads and influence is created.
Both good, positive influence and the bad – negative influence
on brand reputation.
It’s frenetic. Brand owners may go to bed with healthy
reputations but wake up to a disaster scenario. A global slanging
match about a brand can happen during a tea break. And if a
response plan isn’t whipped up and put out immediately, all
you can do is watch and weep.
Control in far simpler times

So, tough times for brands. In a simpler age, things were far
more straightforward. While rarely scientific, media was
established and work could be done to build reputation
progressively by securing positive publicity that ‘said’ the right
things; better still, at the right time. Negative publicity could be
countered by responding on behalf of the brand, ensuring
positive exposure soon followed or ensuring the information
never saw the light of day.
Sound a bit like propaganda? It’s easy to see why, and in the
early days of what is now the public relations profession, the
term ‘reputation management’ was coined as a way of PRing
CORPORATE REPUTATION 5
the public relations industry – as propaganda had a nasty whiff,

particularly given political events in Germany before and
during World War II. Propaganda was about nations being
collectively swayed by the broadcasting of messages that served
a purpose, typically a dodgy one. Putting it more kindly,
propaganda was about a systematic and purposeful approach to
persuasion, exploiting the media to do so. So put that way, the
parallels with public relations come into sharp focus.
Ironically, the ability of brands to influence customers
through digital media by engaging them directly can also be
seen as a systematic and purposeful approach to persuasion.
But we have by no means come full circle. Rather, media has
exploded in complexity, reach and sophistication, meaning the
connections brands now have with customers make a pure
propaganda model, as it existed in the 1920s and 1930s,
impossible to sustain.
Just ask China.
Appliance of science
Realistically of course, the vast majority of brands have, over the
last 80 years or so, sought to manage their reputations through
techniques that are, largely, socially acceptable and which do not
cast a long shadow over the very reputations they are striving to
enhance. They have taken an increasingly structured and
sustained approach to public relations, although media change in
recent years has seen many brands adopt opportunistic, short-
term and in some cases irreverent approaches too. In many
cases, as in the advertising world, simply attempting such things
can make brands be perceived as fresh, innovative and ‘cool’ by
some audiences, so that alone justifies the means.
It’s worth briefly touching on the early days of public relations,
and in particular zoning in on what happened when brands first
came to appreciate that what they said and did in public,
6 BRAND ANARCHY
particularly those actions that were interpreted and

disseminated by a waiting media, and which could sway
reputation. And, therefore, commercial fortunes.
There have been many books written about the early days of
public relations, mostly focusing on the industrialisation of the
United States, the emergence of public relations as distinct from
advertising or promotion, and the need for a shrewd approach to
managing the perceptions of customers and the workforce
through what was written in the media. Perhaps the most
seminal transition in those early days was from public relations
being all about defending brands that had done bad things to
being all about building brands of which people thought of
highly. Until then, most public relations practitioners had
worked for large corporations, and were largely tasked with
diffusing negative situations by giving press highly-controlled
access to information, in order to sway the resulting articles.
The phrase ‘the media’ was not in widespread use until the
1920s. During the 1930s, despite the majority of news management
being war-related propaganda, pioneering brands and individual
consultants began applying what is best described as social
psychology in order to persuade broad target audience groups to
change their behaviour – principally, their buying behaviour.
This is all interesting stuff, but the agenda was typically to get
people to buy more of a certain type of thing; not get them to
regard a certain brand more highly. Sales were an immediate
by-product of the collective social action, rather than sustained
brand reputation being the primary objective.
That notion of collective social action points to the
backgrounds and beliefs of some of PR’s earliest practitioners.
Many had studied psychology or, what would become regarded
as, sociology. They were highly interested in the reactions of
individuals or groups caused by transmitting information to
them in such a way that drove word-of-mouth between them.
Provocatively, by today’s standards, many saw not just

commercial but cultural benefit in what amounted to the
manipulation of audiences through what was then a relatively
primitive media.
Pioneers like Edward Bernays, who worked as a press agent
for US President Woodrow Wilson during World War I, sought to
bring psychological techniques to bear upon so-called public
persuasion campaigns through what was seen as an ‘engineering
of consent’. So, something that later became seen largely as an
art form stemmed from pioneers who had science front of
mind. Similarly, Ivy Lee’s early campaigns sought to bring a
structured, planned approach to public relations work.
Convincing clients that they needed to listen to their audiences
as well as disseminate information to them was one of his
mantras, even if techniques for listening were far less advanced
than today and critics believed it was seldom put into practice
anyway. Lee is lauded as focusing more on crisis communications
work that supressed negative information by preventing it from
becoming public knowledge through the media.
Ethics and morals to one side, one thing that PR’s forefathers
did was illustrate to large corporations the importance of this
form of communication, and that several guiding principles
should be applied in order to do it successfully. In Lee’s eyes,
these were that the business or, as we now typically look at it,
the brand, should always tell the truth. It should always seek to
provide accurate facts about itself and its operations, whether
of its own volition or in response to information requests from
the public or media. And the person ultimately responsible for
public relations within the business must have direct access to
the person who runs the business overall.
Even in those early days then, there was an acceptance that
brands could not ultimately control every element of how they
were perceived by the public.
8 BRAND ANARCHY
Seeking more than fragile influence

Compared to today’s diverse media and companies’ ability to
influence customers rapidly through the Internet, this early
work can seem pretty primitive. Yet one thing sticks out as a
factor that has remained true throughout PR’s relatively short
history, and has relevance today: there was ultimately no
control, but brand perception rested on turning a fairly fragile
relationship with customers into a more robust one, by doing
and saying things that would get written about by the media, in
order to get them talked about by customers. Subtlety was
critical, but most important of all was to understand the context
– to understand how customers would react to the information
and how that was likely, or in some cases practically certain, to
influence their perception of that product or issue.
In its own basic way, public relations in the 1930s was founded
on establishing a dialogue of trust, understanding and respect
with customers. Only then could it use that position to further
the ambitions of brands to sell things and gain customer support
and loyalty.
Little could those pioneers have imagined that one day that
dialogue could be so direct, with new types of media forever
changing the rules of the game. Yet with an even more fragile
hold over influence with the public.
To delve into that, let’s consider what public relations actually
is. Despite it having been an established industry sector in the
UK for the best part of 50 years, and despite its undeniable role
in influencing editorial and, therefore, brand reputation, a
consistent definition of public relations remains hard to come
by. Search online for ‘what is PR?’ and you’ll be confronted with
a sea of different responses. High up the list is that of the Public
Relations Consultants Association (PRCA), which states that it
is ‘the result of what you do, what you say, and what others say
about you’. A tool used to gain understanding. Meanwhile,
Wikipedia cites it as ‘a field concerned with maintaining public

image for high-profile people, organisations, or programmes’. A
field concerned, indeed.
So, definitions of public relations remain as vague as ever.
And that’s fair enough, given the broad remit of the craft and
the fact that, whichever way you look at it, public relations has
spent the past decade or more trying to work out what its value
will look like in the future while struggling to address
technological advances that have changed how influence is
created.
What is PR these days?

In the meantime, the advertisers – themselves locked in the
most tumultuous period of modernisation they’ve ever had to
deal with – have realised that while they face threats, as well as
seek new opportunities, because of the ability of modern media
to connect directly with audiences, there is scope for the ad
men to get their hands on public relations budgets. There has
long been power in aligning advertising and editorial campaigns
that aim to sell products or services, so audiences are being
made aware and influenced through bought media content
around the same time that they’re being made aware and
influenced by earned media content – the editorial that is
driven by public relations efforts. But, increasingly, advertising
agencies have found themselves competing directly with public
relations agencies, and vice versa, as media modernisers and
budget-hungry executives make the case that ‘the line’ is no
longer blurred; rather, there is no line.
But most seasoned PRs and advertisers see it differently. To
them, the disciplines are different because each is seeking to
elicit a different kind of reaction from, or influence over, the
audiences. The challenge and the opportunity is that as
audiences increasingly connect directly with brands (and even
10 BRAND ANARCHY
actively seek some form of participative relationship with

them), planning the delivery of the content, and assessing how
best to gain the right reaction from the audiences, has become
really complicated.
According to Mike Walsh, a highly experienced advertising
man and the former European chief executive of Ogilvy1, PR’s
main challenges lay not in finding its place in a changing media
and marketing world, but in creating positive reactions for
brands rather than defending them against negative ones.
Walsh is optimistic about the prospects for PR becoming more
valued as techniques modernise, but feels it must shed some of
its old methods in doing so. ‘PR spends far too much time
reacting to crises and negative headlines. Its big opportunity
has to be to get itself on the front foot in the way that it enables
brands to communicate,’ he says.
PR, in his estimation, is a marketing craft going through an
uncomfortable period of change as opposed to being on the
wane. Apart from an observation that the tag ‘PR’ is sometimes
stereotypically associated with journalism (and so the industry
needs to better clarify both what it does and its potential),
public relations remains a potent weapon in the right hands.
The level of transparency now being brought to bear by media
change means that integrity and credibility are absolutely vital
if editorial, in a broader sense, is to drive influence more
forcefully for brands.
But the point here is not that public relations must be more
tightly defined; it is that the way in which public relations
applies itself to reputation challenges through fragmented and
diverse media – media as we knew it, social media and branded
or owned forms of media needs closer scrutiny.
1 Ogilvy UK Group: www.ogilvy.co.uk

The changing editorial world

PR still ‘lives’ in the editorial world. That is how it has its
influence on reputation. It is still about getting someone else to
say it’s good rather than saying so yourself. But the editorial
world is changing rapidly which means that the way public
relations creates influence and tackles things that impinge on
influence have to change too. Fast.
The biggest single driver in this change, fairly obviously, is
the Internet. Some might say it’s social media and, yes, the
ability of individuals to bypass the conventional media and
engage with brands directly is unprecedented. But the Internet
has changed publishing forever, which has, in turn, changed
both conventional and social media forms forever.
In some ways though, the role of public relations is little
different to how it was during the embryonic days of the 1930s,
and is far less clumsy. In fact, the industry is having to embrace
techniques well beyond media relations as it modernises and
this is, in effect, a return to the true, expansive public relations
of those early days when multiple routes to influence were
pursued, albeit in simpler times. Public relations remains
something of a middleman between brands and the editorial
outputs that influence their reputations. Just as the world of
brands has expanded to encompass new entrants, including
elements of the public sector, public initiatives and many more
facets of the corporate world, so editorial output has expanded.
Beyond the myriad of text, image and moving image-based
content that conventional print and broadcast media now offer,
media in its broader sense now encompasses all guises of social
media and the branded media stuff that bridges the divide. And
it’s a divide that is rapidly closing.
Originally, PR’s role as it became an established industry was,
at its most simplistic, to befriend the small handful of journalists
who wrote the most influential stuff, and come up with cunning
12 BRAND ANARCHY
ideas for both managing likely bad news and highlighting

goodness. A crass perspective perhaps, but media relations was
the thrust of it all. Over time, as the media grew and became
more sophisticated, PRs had to get to know many more
journalists, plus other influential people; in addition they had
to try to make measurement of public relations spend more
incisive, comparing it, where appropriate, to advertising spend.
But back then, we were still sending 200 copies of every press
release to a big list of recipients and clients still sent memos
when the staples were not perfectly horizontal.
And then came the Internet.
Slowly at first, then faster, and now at breakneck pace, the
ability to publish immediately to anyone, anywhere transformed
the media as we knew it. If only the conventional media could
work out how to really make money from it, we’d be laughing.
In pursuit of the science of reputation

What does all of this mean for public relations and its role in
managing brand reputation? Long term, it is difficult, or
impossible, to know precisely. A few things, though, are certain:
getting to grips with a far more diverse media is a much more
challenging job for PRs; influence must be managed at speed
and media digitisation creates audit trails that will make the
influencing of reputation more measurable.
Read that back again. First point: it’s a far bigger job to get our
heads around – so commercial wisdom is that automation is
required. Second point: it moves faster – again, smells of
automation. Third point: you can measure probable and
absolute impact on reputation because of digitisation and,
hence, automation.
So, as public relations enters a new age of sophistication and
speed, is the art of public relations very much on the shelf as
the whole thing becomes a science?
If you looked at the favoured talking points and daily brayings

of the social media mob – those proponents of social media who
seem to have the greatest self-interest in evangelising its merits
for their own sake – you’d certainly be forgiven for thinking so.
While some commentators using social media to spread
information and their views focus on the changes happening in
media overall, most narrow their gaze to social media, and in
particular to the measurement of social media influence, social
media sentiment, social media this and that. In fact, if social
media broke wind they’d find a way to harness and analyse it.
That’s harsh perhaps, but probably an inevitable situation,
given that a massive scientific breakthrough – the Internet –
made all of this change possible in the first place. The reality is
that while media digitisation has created requirements and
opportunities for public relations to become more scientific in
its approach and its application, the human factor will of course
always be at the heart of determining how content will best
create publicity which influences reputation. We’ve had the
appliance of science, now we have to apply the art part to a
very different media landscape that continues to evolve.
The human beings in public relations have to use technological
advances to gain a better understanding of their audiences and
how their opinions change. They must use technology to find
shrewder and more compelling ways to deliver their content.
But most of all, they must understand how science is changing
the media, and what demands the media now places on them as
a professional. Because professional it has become. The public
relations craftsman or woman who was largely focused on
generating publicity in established media will not be replaced
by a public relations scientist. It’s not about art versus science.
But modern PR people will have to take a smarter and harder-
working approach to the art of editorial delivery, and have a
real understanding of how the scientific stuff – such as the
14 BRAND ANARCHY
audience understanding, the monitoring of feedback and the

measurement of results – works too.
The mere mention of science is enough to both bring a wry
smile to the faces of long-in-the-tooth public relations practitioners
and marketing directors keen to find any way to make the
commercial value of public relations more tangible. While the
value of public relations to many organisations is wholly
recognised, it remains a dark art to some, and one that financiers
have long wanted to model so that payback can be charted using
mathematical formulae. Until now, regardless of the complexity
of evaluation metrics used, while it has been possible to gauge at
least some commercial perspective, it has been impossible to
precisely measure the value of public relations on a unit cost
basis by monetary means. And with the advent of editorial output
that leaves an audit trail – in other words everything that has
been published on the Internet – public relations measurement
is becoming a whole lot more scientific.
Is a best-guess still best?

Before the Internet, or at least before social media and its ability
to forge direct relationships with consumers, came along, PR’s
value and best-guess assumption were joined at the hip. Equally,
the most severe outcomes of PR-influenced editorial – both
good and bad – made measuring investment returns scientifically
something of a fool’s errand. If all the right press were writing
all the right things about you and sales went up in the absence
of much other marketing, then hey presto: good press means
higher sales. If sales dipped when corporate reputation had
taken a public beating, join the dots.
It’d be a bit like establishing monetary measurement for
every last bit of legal advice a company is given for a court trial.
Fundamentally, they know the advice has worked if they get
the outcome they were seeking. But measuring the value of
individual pieces of that advice would be more difficult, if not

futile. And unlike public relations advice, legal advice can also
give fast and direct payback, particularly where the outcome of
proceedings is involved. Unlike legal advice, however, public
relations has the ability to catapult a brand from obscurity or
run-of-the-mill awareness to something that consumers just
can’t get enough of. It is the seismic effects of both public
relations and routine editorial influence that keeps routine
sales and customer retention ticking over nicely that brand
owners would dearly love to get more scientific about.
Despite the technological advances that are revolutionising
media, there remains no bulletproof model for accurately
assessing how public relations investment generates a measurable
impact on reputation. That is to say, there is no single model.
There are many models that, when combined, can give a pretty
scientific overview of reputation, and, therefore, the likelihood
that a customer will buy a product or service, or even remain a
customer. Ultimately though, the only way to gain true assurances
over public relations spend and direct impact on reputation is to
interrogate each customer at the point of purchase, or other key
points during the customer lifecycle, and ask them telling
questions about a brand’s reputation. Even then, they might not
answer the questions honestly.
Reputation, then, is a sod of a thing to measure. Many people
have been well paid for trying to work out how best to measure
it but have ultimately ended up with an interpretation of
previous forms of measurement. Others have looked at all of
those ways of trying to measure reputation and tried to piece
them together, or stack them all up alongside each other, in
order to draw conclusions. What they’ve drawn though, really,
is a web of confusion.
In many ways, the Internet doesn’t change that. In fact, think
back to the last time you read a comment on a press article, on
16 BRAND ANARCHY
a blog post or on a Facebook update and tutted at the poor

English used; you may have been left thinking that the Internet
can make it even more difficult to assess the value of editorial
influence on reputation simply because the audience can’t spell
very well, or does a good job of appearing incoherent. What the
Internet does give us, and what social media experts therefore
get very hot under the collar about, is an audit trail.
If a consumer is hacked off about something a brand has said
or done, they can say so by typing their comments online, so that
many other people – potentially millions of people – can see
what they think. So the opinions that impact reputation can be
measured. So too can the extent to which those opinions have
been changed by editorial influence – both conventional and
social media – online be measured. And public relations
investment is fairly easy to measure, by counting what has been
spent. Those correlations are clear, and the tools that enable
these factors to be gauged and interpreted more usefully are
becoming both simpler to use and more sophisticated by the day.
What cannot yet be measured, at least not in any clinical,
scientific way, is the direct correlation between investment in
specific public relations activities and overall brand reputation.
You can measure an audience’s opinion on a specific activity.
You can measure, barometer-like, what the audience’s view of
the brand is and, therefore, the favourability of its reputation. But
you cannot put both together and reach scientific conclusions.
So the quest for a public relations measurement model that
enables every scrap of investment to be quantified against
brand reputational change goes on. In the meantime, it doesn’t
really matter that much anyway, because there are far bigger
matters at hand such as the impact of negative editorial on a
brand’s fortunes. When your reputation is being dumped on
from a great height by a potent cross-section of consumers from
across the world in a short space of time and sales dry up, more
effective measurement of public relations investment is the last

thing on your mind. Making it all stop is the priority.
Common sense and grown-up judgement prevail.
Judgement days
In fact, judgement has a lot to do with everything in this new
media landscape. Brands are being judged like never before,
and marketers are being asked to make judgement calls more
quickly, and with the benefit of far less experience than ever
before. The reason for this decision-making challenge is plain
and simple: speed.
Think back to the days when all media was conventional
media. What all major brands were looking for from public
relations investment was word-of-mouth recommendation
amongst their audiences. Sure, a brand can build reputation by
gaining a public following through sustained editorial exposure.
It can even do so relatively quickly. But nothing accelerates the
fortunes of a brand quite like the effects of word-of-mouth. By
causing human beings to converse about a brand or product
amongst themselves, rather than just reading or hearing about
it through the media, public relations can make or break a
product’s fortunes.
In today’s world of social, owned and conventional media,
the same is true. Only everything moves much, much faster.
Word-of-mouth in the pub or park remains a potent factor. But
online conversations have the advantage of being both preserved
for eternity in digitised text and much easier to disseminate
quickly amongst millions of people. Rather than relying on the
same words being said in every park and pub up and down the
land, just a few choice words circulated online can be pushed
and pulled to the outer limits of social networks in minutes.
Judgement is, therefore, a highly prized thing. Make the
right move and a brand can enjoy the glare of the attention of
18 BRAND ANARCHY
the online world, roused into conversation by a whirlwind

knock-on effect. Get things wrong, and it can backfire
catastrophically.
Social media has been a major change in the way that
word-of-mouth impacts upon brand reputation. Again, speed
is the driving force, but decisions about what brands should
say, and how they should behave, have the greatest bearing
on how a brand fares. Yet there are two big problems in
making those decisions: the organisational structure that all too
often does not allow sound decisions to be made quickly
enough, and the cultural adjustment needed to a media that
cannot be controlled – partly because of the pace at which it
moves, and partly because of the sheer scale and scope of
the conversations that it hosts. It can be like all of your
worst enemies deciding to get together and talk venomously
about you, while all of your best friends are listening. Not
comfortable territory.
Word-of-mouth, then, is the most powerful asset that public
relations has at its disposal. Editorial influence is critical too,
but its ability to trigger talk purely because the right things are
said or done is what sets it apart from other types of marketing.
With that power, though, comes a new kind of responsibility
and an appreciation that both listening to and understanding
the audience intimately is needed if a right royal cockup is to be
avoided.
The judgement required isn’t actually that difficult. It is mostly
rooted in common sense, albeit needing large amounts of editorial
skill, audience understanding and media insight to be effective.
The problem is that all too often, politics and organisational
pressures stand firmly in the way of common sense.
Of course, every brand has its own unique challenges. Yet
there are a bunch of fundamentals that are a given. They are
rules that, if you think about it, apply equally to all conversations
where the people you’re talking to are people you know and
understand, and where others may end up joining the
conversation during its course.
First, know who you’re talking to. Not just who they are,
but what their views are on the things you’ll be talking
about and, given their attitudes and behaviour (all of which
can be comprehensively assessed if they’re active on social
media platforms), what their views on other things are likely
to be.
Then you need to think about what point you’re trying to get
across. It may well be a wholly self-serving thing about your
brand. But if you’re not focused on it, it will soon drift into
waffle.
Finally, you need to be alert to the change in conversational
tone, direction and opinion that can be driven by group
dynamics. Just as in real word-of-mouth scenarios, as one
person receives a message and then passes it on for others to
hear, brands must be alive to how the content evolves and how
it may need to change what it says as a result.
Simple? It can be. Yet the discomfort that is caused by lack of
overall control still strikes fear into the hearts of brands. Often, it
is not in their nature: many brands are set up to try to deliver
influence and manage reputation through conventional media as
it operated in the past. Today, reputations can shift quickly
because influence can take hold in minutes, not in weeks or
months. The old media conventions of ‘deadline week’ for a
monthly magazines, ‘deadline day’ for a weekly title and a series
of deadlines throughout the morning or evening for a daily
newspaper have been swept aside by what the Internet has done
for publishing.
Today, deadlines are more important than ever, yet equally
there is often no deadline at all because the deadline is simply
as soon as you can type your opinion and press ‘send’.
20 BRAND ANARCHY
Gaining command, not seizing control

So if you’re a brand, it’s time to open your eyes. Not to the
realisation that social media is quite cool because it allows a
different kind of brand influence to be created. Not because
changing media is changing the management of reputation.
And not because the Internet has created online conversational
media that can fuel new levels of reputational impact through
word-of-mouth techniques.
The eyes of brands need to be open to all of these things.
Brands need to harness media change rather than stepping
back and scratching their heads. They need to work out where
control can be gained, rather than staring at social media like a
rabbit in the headlights. They need to look at how they manage
communication, and roles and responsibilities, and at how
audiences are reacting to it around the clock.
And they need to look at their own people, right the way to
the top. Take one look at the brands that are most highly prized
in the world today and it’s not hard to see that the enigmatic
executives that lead those organisations play a central role in
their reputations. Often, everything they do or say in public,
whether in front of a microphone, typed online or spoken into
a video camera, will be pored over by watching commentators,
not least the conventional media.
Today’s CEOs don’t just run the company, they run ‘the
show’. The brand’s show. Its ‘public performance’. The central
thread of its reputation.
In years gone by, chief executives and managing directors
could operate below the radar in a public sense, with few people
amongst their external audiences perhaps even knowing their
name. That is beginning to change. Of course, the technology
companies in Silicon Valley and the Internet mega-
entrepreneurs have led the way, but think about airlines, oil
and gas companies, major retailers and clothing brands and the
average person can surely name far more of their chief

executives than they could a decade ago. The fragmentation,
immediacy, and personal and viral nature of modern media has
not just put the CEO in the spotlight, it has often put the
spotlight in the hands of the audience.
Today’s senior executives don’t just need to be comfortable
in front of the media – adept at giving quotes and working
the editorial process in press interviews, likeable and believable
on TV, compelling on radio and so on – they need to be
comfortable in front of the world. They need to focus on body
language and vocal inflection as in days gone by, but it’s the
words that now count more than ever. Those words can
have greater power over reputation because of their reach and
their immediacy. Equally, they can have a greater negative
impact too.
For this reason, some brands front other senior executives
alongside, or instead of, the person at the very top. Media-wise,
it means you can cover more ground. You can do more to show
you understand your customers and your people. You can
compensate for any lack of natural media ability in the person
at the helm. Given the volume of media now at brands’ disposal,
spokespeople could come from anywhere within the
organisation, and beyond it within the customer base – not as
official spokespeople, but as important advocates.
The spotlight has never been more intense. But just because
you think you have more to say and you have more credible,
expert and empathetic people to do the talking doesn’t mean
that you’re necessarily going to get an easier ride. Just because
you have strength in depth doesn’t mean that you can gain a
tighter grip on your reputation.
For one simple reason: it’s just not possible.
The best way to look at it is that your brand cannot gain
control, but it can gain, or take, command. But only if it
22 BRAND ANARCHY
understands the media and audience intimately, and so plots

the right content. That, of course, is just the opening gambit of
the conversation, and the brand must be ready to engage in
fruitful dialogue rather than hiding under skirts when tongues
get rough. But with clear insight, considered wisdom, sound
ability to execute and an unhindered view of the desired
outcome, brands have so much to gain.
This is because they can command conversations, command
editorial attention and so command the respect that builds
reputation. As Mike Walsh says, ‘There is an urgent need to
define transparency. Organisations try to control it, but they
must face the facts. It is uncontrollable.’
Reputation is the result of what you do, what you say and
what people therefore think and say about you. The digitisation
of media can put you in greater command of it. But you must
know the game, and play it right.
‘Brands aren’t all yours, anyway’

Mike Walsh has witnessed more advertising campaigns for
more brands than you’ve had hot dinners. The former European
chief executive of Ogilvy began his career in advertising in the
early 1970s and has represented clients like Air Canada,
American Express, Beecham Foods, Polaroid and Spillers
Petfoods.
For him, today’s frenetic media change brings with it a need
for communicators to keep cool heads. As he sees it, there is a
need for business leaders to rise above the noise that is
associated with digital media and marketing change to
remember one of the fundamental truths: that brands are
created by consumers and exist in their minds.
So the organisations that own the brands cannot control the
brands – because they are partly the ‘property’ of the consumers
or audiences that are on the outside looking in. Equally, brand

managers should not be singularly focused on structural or
organisational changes that they make to their marketing teams
and programmes to address modern media, as to do so means
they’re focusing on themselves rather than establishing how
they can best use new media to forge stronger brand perception
and desire amongst their audiences.
‘Brands need to think about attitude change, not organisational
change,’ says Walsh. ‘Digital media, and in particular the
capacity for media to be mobile, right in the pockets of
consumers, presents a huge opportunity for them to redefine
transparency. The problem is that organisations try to control
this; they try to control the media content that has a bearing on
how they will be perceived, but it is fundamentally uncontrollable.
While it is a major and uncomfortable change for most brands,
they are having to become far more transparent, and build
credibility and integrity through the ways in which they engage
with consumers directly and engage with the media to drive
editorial.’
Yet organisational change is required if brands are to be more
effective at managing their reputations, readying themselves to
reduce the impact of reputational damage and meeting the
expectations of audiences that can now engage with them
directly. For Walsh, this can only start at the top, but who the
people are, how they behave and how they’re perceived has an
increasing effect on overall brand reputation. And there is
absolutely no way to hide from that.
‘The people in organisations are increasingly important. One
third of the overall shareholder value comes from the chief
executive officer, and specifically it comes from their reputation.
That is clearly an enormous part of the value of the business,
and editorial in its broadest, most modern and rapidly changing
24 BRAND ANARCHY
sense has to be utilised to the full to help build and maintain that
value,’ he says.
But the person in the hot seat cannot do it alone. There is too
much media, there are too many other demands on their time,
and the pace at which brand narratives – or other stories that
are completely beyond their control – develop is such that
resources required to develop and manage the communication
must be expansive, agile and well-marshalled.
‘Managing the reputation of the CEO is one of the biggest
tasks that public relations now faces. Their personal life is now
transparent too. Public relations agencies should be looking to
step forward and play the part of custodian in all of this, as chief
executives clearly need a lot of help to get it right. The relatively
high turnover of CEOs as a result of damaged reputations, for
example, when energy firms have mishandled communication
around oil spills, is such that someone needs to be asking why
it is that they get it so wrong,’ says Walsh.
Summary
• In the past, many brands may have felt they had a degree of
control over what was written and said about them in the
established press. They were never really in control, yet
influence was typically a simpler thing to come by.
• The ability to influence brand reputation through modern,
digitised media may seem fairly fragile, but corporate
communicators need to put themselves on firmer foundations.
• The editorial world is continuing to change rapidly, meaning
the techniques for influencing editorial are changing too.
• Pioneers in the reputation game pursued early scientific
approaches to creating and sustaining influence. We can
learn something from this today.
• Brands are more in the spotlight than ever because modern

media makes them more accessible. It is easy for them to be
judged by the public.
• It’s about taking steps to gaining command of reputation and
how it influences, because seizing control is impossible.
• CEOs are much more in the spotlight, and brands need to
scrutinise how best to handle that.
• Brands aren’t all yours anyway: they exist in the minds of
consumers, and public relations professionals would do well
to remember that.
CHAPTER 2
MEDIA: TRADITIONAL VERSUS
DIGITAL
The Internet has destroyed every business model that
it has touched. The media industry continues to rebuild
its future. #brandanarchy
It’s almost certainly too early to predict what the future of the
traditional media industry will look like. One thing is for sure
though; it cannot continue without radical transformation. Greg
Dyke was chief executive of London Weekend Television, now
part of ITV, in the early 1990s. He learnt the hard way the folly
of ignoring technological disruption in the media business. His
lesson for the current generation of media entrepreneurs could
not be clearer. ‘We made good programmes and had a good,
profitable business. Then along came Sky and multi-channel
television and pay television. We pretended it wasn’t happening,
just as the music industry has over the last 10 years. Instead of
embracing the new world ourselves and sacrificing some of our
current profits, we thought that we could see it off,’ said Dyke.
Two decades later, ITV is rebuilding itself again around a
fragmented media proposition. Ignoring the emergence of
multi-channel television was a harsh lesson.
The decline of print

Today, newsprint continues to have huge authority in the UK.
Brands such as the Daily Mirror (founded 1903), Financial Times
(founded 1888), Sunday Times (founded 1821) and Wall Street
Journal (founded 1889) have delivered the news to us each day
for more than a century. They are a cornerstone of the media
establishment. An online news site, often with a history of no
30 BRAND ANARCHY
more than a decade, always takes second place to a print article

in terms of authority, however relevant to its audience. Even a
story in the FT or WSJ has greater social creditability than
anything in their online counterparts (FT.com1 or WSJ.com2).
It’s a generational issue but it’s also reality. But the situation is
changing, and fast. People are reading online content more
widely than ever before because they can access more
information, more quickly, which indicates that they almost
certainly do not have the time to spend reading a newspaper.
Welcome to the era of snack media.
The 1980s and 1990s were the golden era of newsprint. The
Times newspaper used to sell 820,000 copies per day (1997) and
The Sun almost 4.8 million copies per day (1987). Now it’s
500,000 and three million respectively. Each month in the UK,
the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC)3 plots the decline in
newsprint readership and the corresponding increase in the
web audience for online news. The audience for newsprint is in
free fall, and ageing. You could predict the date that the last
newspaper will be printed by using annuity tables. Broadsheet
and tabloid audiences are declining by an average of 10 per cent
per year. Print won’t die anytime soon but its decline is
irreversible and there will almost certainly be fewer print
products by 2020. Whenever we talk to groups of journalists or
communications professionals we ask for a show of hands from
anyone who has bought a copy of a national newspaper that
day. Only a few hands ever go up. If people in the media and
public relations industries aren’t buying newspapers, what
hope is there for the industry? It’s a rhetorical question.
1 FT.com: www.ft.com/home/uk
2 WSJ.com: europe.wsj.com
3 Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) www.abc.org.uk
MEDIA: TRADITIONAL VERSUS DIGITAL 31
The primary function of newspapers is to service an audience

once a day. Huge investment has been made in paper, printing
and distribution to deliver a product to your doorstep. Yet via
your Internet connection you can access every single news
publisher that you could possibly want, whenever you want,
and as often as you want. In this sense, the conventional media
industry’s monopoly on news has been destroyed by the
Internet. The well-established media brands that have
dominated the business of news for so long must now compete
for our attention along with the thousands of outlets on the
Internet. It is little wonder that newsprint struggles to make
money when it faces such stiff competition for our attention
from millions of online publications, blogs and social media
websites. No longer does the news business reside with a
handful of terrestrial television channels and a small number of
newspaper publishers. It’s plain old economics. When supply in
a market is restricted it is possible for a small number of
operators to build highly profitable businesses. But remove all
barriers, as the Internet has with the news business, and the
market becomes much more to make money.
There is plenty of evidence to support the decline of newsprint
but our appetite for media content appears insatiable. According
to OFCOM’s 2010 Communication Market Report4, people in
the UK spend about seven hours a day consuming different
media but they consume more and more during this time by
so-called media multitasking. A fifth of this time is spent using
more than one form of media simultaneously. This results in
people squeezing almost nine hours of media consumption into
4 2010 Communication Market Report, OFCOM: http://stakeholders.ofcom.

org.uk/market-data-research/market-data/communications-market-
reports/cmr10/
32 BRAND ANARCHY
seven hours. More specifically, the number of hours that 16 to

24-year-olds spend consuming media is lower than in older age
groups, but 29 per cent of their time is spent using several
media forms concurrently, meaning that they fit nine hours
and 32 minutes’ worth of media consumption into every day.
You need look no further than your living room for evidence.
When families or groups of friends sits down to watch television
they are increasingly using Facebook or Twitter on laptops or
mobile phones to engage in conversations with friends who are
watching TV elsewhere. This is the future of media, and it’s
participatory.
Broadcast is booming
Print may be in trouble but broadcast media is booming. Digital
broadcasting disconnects television from the programme
schedules and means that content can be viewed on demand.
Furthermore, technical developments such as 3D and high
definition (HD) are driving growth for content that makes use
of these new formats and broadens the appeal of television for
consumers. That said, we don’t think we’ll see the death of the
television schedule anytime soon. Open Twitter during a
popular current affairs programme or the networked television
programme and you’ll discover the reason why. During 2011,
the BBC started to include hashtags within television
programmes so that viewers could participate in the programme
via Twitter. Hashtags are descriptive tags appended with a #
such as #bbcqt (comment on the BBC Question Time TV
programme) or #London (content about London) that enable
topics such be searched within a stream of social media content.
Without doubt, television has wholeheartedly embraced the
social media concept: ‘Television is fundamentally a social
media experience. It generates content that is shared and
discussed on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter,’ says
Howard Kosky, managing director of broadcast public relations

agency markettiers4dc5.
Radio listening in the UK, like television watching, is close to
saturation with 91.6 per cent of the UK population tuning in to
the radio each week, according to radio tracking data published
by RAJAR6. Listening to radio via a digital platform has risen by
more than 10 per cent year-on-year from 2010 to 2011, with 19.7
million people tuning in to radio via a digitally-enabled set each
week. Radio, too, is becoming social. Arguably it always has
been, with radio phone-ins being a staple of many programmes,
but in more recent times, helped by Apple’s iTunes platform,
radio has given rise to a new genre of audio called the podcast.
This enables anybody to create and circulate audio content
using a PC or mobile device such as a smartphone. ‘The
popularity of broadcast is down to three factors; access,
availability and brand. You can listen to the radio or watch
television on your computer, mobile phone or MP3 player
either live in real time or on demand, and broadcast brands
have strong well-defined personalities,’ says Kosky.
Changing media habits

You can plot the demise of print through the generations. We
have observed it first hand in our own families. Stephen’s
grandfather receives both a morning and an evening newspaper,
as he has for the 40 years that I have been alive. The Daily
Telegraph or The Guardian in the morning; chosen not because
of any political leaning but because of the crosswords; and the
regional evening paper for local news. He is almost certainly
5 Markettiers4dc: www.markettiers4dc.com
6 Data Release – Quarter 1, 2011, RAJAR: www.rajar.co.uk/docs/news/
data_release_2011_Q1.pdf
34 BRAND ANARCHY
one of the very few in the UK who subscribe to both a daily

morning and evening paper. Our parents’ generation haven’t
the time to read both a morning and an evening paper, while
members of our generation are unlikely to read a newspaper
unless they live in a city where the Metro is circulated for free.
Our children, by contrast, are unlikely to ever subscribe to a
daily newspaper. It’s far more likely that they’ll get their local
news from their Facebook newsfeed.
According to Francis Ingham, director general of the Public
Relations Consultants Association (PRCA)7 in the UK, the very
fact that media as we knew it has changed so quickly has caught
both communications people and brands on the hop. ‘One of
the main difficulties the public relations industry faces in
modernising is that we have got used to communicating mainly
via print and have been doing it for so long. People are now
bombarded with more and more news,’ he says. He believes
that in the future, media will have to become more specialised.
A mass of niche audience publications, or information services,
will ensure that editorial is punchy and individualised, to
overcome the glut of mainstream news options that are
currently available. ‘The future of the media will undoubtedly
see fewer newspapers being read by fewer people. And the
footprint of online newspapers will diminish because of
paywalls that block access to a website unless a payment is
made. Our reckoning is that we will see more editorial outlets
and they will be read by more people. Yet we do delude
ourselves into thinking there was a golden era of journalism,
which just isn’t the case. Publishing has all too frequently been
a vanity exercise, and few people have really been able to make
good money from conventional publishing alone,’ he adds.
7 Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA): www.prca.org.uk

The new media

David Phillips, a public relations practitioner and academic, is
co-author with Phillip Young of Online Public Relations8. He
believes that social media is a natural evolution of human
development and rooted in our psyche. ‘The leap from throwing
a spear to inventing a bow and arrow was huge. But using
technology you can shoot a spear much further. You can run fast
but on a bike you can go further. You can remember lots of text
but if you have access to Google you can remember everything.
We are extending our physiology. If you go back to the Internet
when it first started, it was a technology-driven thing for
technologists so that they could be better at what they did’.
In time, we’ll come to recognise the development of Internet
technologies at the turn of the 21st century to be as radical to
society as the invention of the printing press was in the second
half of the 15th century. The printing press meant that pamphlets,
newspapers and books could be printed in large numbers and
distributed. It was an expensive process but it removed the
limitations of manual copying. Developments in Internet
publishing applications mean that anyone with a web browser
and an Internet connection can become an online publisher.
Services such as Blogger9 from Pyro Labs (launched in 1999
and purchased by Google in 2003), TypePad10 (launched 2003)
and Wordpress11 (launched 2003) allow content to be published
on the Internet in a blog format. Blogs are usually maintained
by an individual with content published in date order. Most are
interactive, allowing visitors to interact with the publisher or
8 Phillips, David, and Young, Philip. Online Public Relations. Kogan Page,
2009.
9 Blogger: www.blogger.com
10 TypePad: www.typepad.com
11 Wordpress: wordpress.org
36 BRAND ANARCHY
blogger via comments. Initially blogs were used by motivated

individuals to publish their comments or opinions but quickly
became recognised as a means for individuals to engage directly
with an audience. By 2004, blogging had started to become a
mainstream communications activity. Politicians, business
professionals and journalists started to use blogs as a means of
communicating their expertise. According to Nielsen’s
BlogPulse12, there are now more than 156 million public blogs
in existence. The launch of the social networking site Twitter in
2006 gave blogging a shot in the arm. It enabled bloggers to post
and share their content and invite comment directly from
followers.
Head to Google Blog Search13 or Technorati14, the user-generated
media search engine, or a commercial tool such as BlogPulse, and
search on a topic. You’ll find hundreds of blogs returned, whatever
your area of interest. If you don’t, congratulations: you have found
one of the few topic areas that is poorly served by blogs. We suggest
that you start blogging immediately.
One of the strongest topics for blogging is parenting. It is easy
to understand why. New parents, typically mums, head to the
web to find out information about being a new parent, to reach
out to people in a similar situation and share their views.
Parenting blogs started initially as a medium for journalists and
marketing people on maternity leave. But the sector has
developed to embrace lawyers, doctors, schoolteachers, and
stay-at-home mums.
According to Sally Whittle, founder of TOTS 10015 a community
of more than 1,000 parenting blogs, blogging is booming with
12 BlogPulse: www.blogpulse.com
13 Google Blog Search: www.google.com/blogsearch
14 Technorati: technorati.com
15 TOTS 100: www.tots100.co.uk
mums and dads joining in greater numbers. ‘They come from

all walks of life and experiences. It’s mainly mums, although
not exclusively, who blog as a means of sharing ideas and
building a network,’ says Whittle. Blogging mums are a hugely
influential audience in the fragmented media landscape for any
organisation that is seeking to reach and engage new parents or
families. Consumer brands and even politicians recognised the
opportunity to connect with an influencial audience. Whittle
sells access to her TOTS100 community to organisations and
public relations firms that wish to connect with bloggers.
The June 2011 CyberMummy Conference16 in London
attracted more than 30 sponsors including Boots, Butlins,
Disney, Hewlett-Packard and Procter & Gamble, all keen to
connect with the 400 bloggers that attended the event. In the
lead-up to the 2010 UK general election, each of the party
leaders took part in a web chat on Mumsnet17, the UK community
website set up to allow parents to share views and advice on
parenting and family issues. The benefit of engaging with an
audience via a blog or community website is the transparency
and direct participatory connection that it provides.
The public relations industry has been quick to spot the
potential for blogs to connect their clients with target audiences
but often with limited success. The public relations industry is
a broad church and is itself going through rapid change as it
modernises. Some practitioners are excellent at blogger
relations; some are still learning. Practitioners have used the
media relations skills that they have developed to pitch content
to journalists, to work with bloggers and have expected them to
be directly transferable. They aren’t. There are similarities but
16 CyberMummy Conference: www.cybermummy.com

17 Mumsnet: www.mumsnet.com
38 BRAND ANARCHY
the motivations of a blogger are very different from those of a

journalist. Bloggers typically fit writing around a full-time
career or and are motivated by their own interests.
The best way to understand a parenting blogger is to follow
their blog and to meet them face-to-face if you get the chance.
If you want to learn about working with bloggers, there is no
better way than attending blogging events such as the
CyberMummy Conference. Below are some tips from a bloggers
versus public relations industry debate at a bloggers’ meet-up18
in London.
Successful blogger relations

Databases of blogs are the enemy of good public relations and
blogger relationships. PRs should plan campaigns by
understanding the blogs that they are targeting and not
spamming an email list.
Relevancy, relationships and respect are the key to successful
blogger relations. Abuse of these fundamental tenets of public
relations has been an issue for the industry for the last 30 years.
If you’re planning to run a sponsored blogging programme,
do it transparently. All bloggers targeted as part of a campaign
should be treated equally.
Bloggers may expect to be sponsored to participate in an
event, write or comment about a client, just as PRs are paid by
their clients to pitch stories.
There is no better way of gaining experience of blogger
relations than to start blogging yourself.
18 Commonsense prevails at bloggers vs PRs meetup:

www.speedcommunications.com/blogs/wadds/2010/09/09/
commonsense-prevails-at-pr-vs-bloggers-meetup
Journalism versus user-generated content

In debates about the future of media, the future of journalism
and the future of publishing are almost always incorrectly
interchanged. But journalism isn’t a business model. It is a
professional activity by which information and knowledge is
gathered and conveyed to an audience. Proponents of digital
media have called time on the mainstream media and claim
that blogs, Facebook, Google+ and Twitter are the new currency
for news for most consumers. There is no doubt that news
travels fast via trusted contacts through networks such as
Twitter and that so-called ‘citizen journalists’, armed with no
more than a camera phone, can share images from the location
of a news event before professional journalists can reach the
scene. But for every example of citizen journalism that has
broken a story, there are countless examples of social media
being used to push propaganda or news stories that are plainly
incorrect.
Social media may have a role within news reporting but it
needs to be treated with the same level of deference as any
other source. Stories can spread incredibly quickly in social
media, a characteristic that organisations work hard to mimic.
Agencies and brands carefully craft content with the goal of
inspiring like-minded consumers to forward it through their
networks. Armies of communication professionals are creating
content with the goal of baiting people to circulate it in networks.
‘Viral’ is the term used to describe this mechanism. Much has
been written about how you create viral content, but in truth it
is impossible to guarantee how a network will respond to
content. There are simply too many variables to predict any
given outcomes. Creating content that goes viral is the ultimate
goal of any Internet marketing professional. How often have
you forwarded a link via Twitter or clicked your mouse over a
‘like’ button on Facebook without checking on the authenticity
40 BRAND ANARCHY
or even the accuracy of the content? The tools that make it easy
to create and publish content to build reputation can just as
easily be used for malicious or ill-informed intent. It is all too
easy to create official looking accounts on social networks such
as Twitter and Facebook which contain erroneous content that
would fool most consumers.
Asda, the UK supermarket owned by Walmart, experienced
this issue at first hand in June 2011. Back in 2008, an Asda
advertisement for DVDs, aimed at fathers, was placed in the
Daily Mirror alongside a news story about wife-beating. It was
plainly inappropriate and was the result of poor layout on the
part of newspaper. On a typical day, there are approximately
1,000 posts on Twitter about Asda. That rose to 6,000 as the
dodgy Daily Mirror page layout was circulated by Twitter users
in June 2011 with the intent of embarrassing Asda. The fact that
content was, by that time, several years old didn’t occur to the
people circulating a link to the content. They clearly weren’t
Daily Mirror readers, and they didn’t check the original source
of the content, otherwise they would have realised their error.
Asda head of corporate communications, Dominic Burch,
suspected foul play on the part of a detractor stoking up an old
story. ‘We were first made aware of the issue by an agency that
works for Asda which spotted the story being circulated by
email. That was Tuesday. By Friday there were 2,000 tweets per
day. By Saturday that number rose to 6,000,’ says Burch. The
Asda communications teams decided not to respond proactively
to the issue, deciding that its impact on the supermarket’s
reputation was marginal. ‘We took the view that despite all the
noise on Twitter it was fairly harmless in the scheme of things.
It was clearly a bit dated, using our old brand, promoting old
movies and out-of-date pricing. The inappropriate layout clearly
resulted from the Daily Mirror’s production rather than Asda
choosing to be on that page by that article. After seeing the
umpteenth tweet we started to respond directly to people,

particularly those who should know better than to repeat a
tweet without verifying first, asking them to check that day’s
newspaper,’ says Burch.
But the content appeared sufficiently authentic to be
circulated by consumers. The fact that the advertisement was a
Father’s Day promotion from several years before and that all
of the DVDs were clearly out of date was clearly irrelevant. If a
newspaper publishes content that is erroneous, there is a clear
process for retribution – usually an apology. But in social media,
no such rules apply. Asda would need to prove defamation
before it could seek redress from the Facebook or Twitter users
that circulated the dodgy content.
There are two postscripts to this story that prove that Burch
and his team made the right call. Journalists from national
newspapers picked up the story from their own Twitter
accounts and called Asda directly asking for comment. In each
case they were told that if they checked the Daily Mirror, they
would find that the offending layout was several years old. No
one in the conventional media thought the story worthy of an
article except the diary page of The Grocer, which later published
an apology and a letter from Burch. Finally, when in-store sales
receipts for DVDs the week following the event were assessed,
they showed a significant rise during the weekend that the
Daily Mirror layout gaffe was doing the rounds on Facebook and
Twitter. The team’s quick reaction ensured not only that the
situation didn’t develop into a crisis but that it also helped to
drive sales.
Maintaining standards
There can be no doubt that individuals are supplementing the
work of journalists in providing content from news events via
networks such as Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube, often
42 BRAND ANARCHY
long before journalists get to the story. That’s because anyone

equipped with a mobile device is now prospectively a
multimedia journalist. Following the earthquake in Haiti in
2010, the first images out of the country came via Flickr and the
first source of information about actual conditions on the
ground was a social media wiki site that enabled anyone to add,
delete or revise content. Members of social networking sites
such as Facebook and Twitter spread messages to help kick-
start the fundraising effort.
But social media has a role to play in professional journalism.
It is enabling journalists to innovate when and how they pull
together stories. You can see this played out every single day on
websites as stories are developed and managed by journalists.
News organisations such as the Associated Press and the BBC
have recruited social media specialists to scrutinise and check
content from user-generated sources and networks such as
Facebook and Twitter. There can be no doubt that individuals
have a role to play in breaking news stories but as a minimum,
journalists need to make contact with the source and take steps
to verify content, as they should for any story. The news
business might be in a state of flux, but the basic tenets of
professional journalism must be maintained.
There’s a very real danger as production budgets for news
organisations come under increasing pressure for publishers to
cut costs. The demise of the subeditor is one of the tragedies of
the shift from print to online news publishing. Once upon a
time, a sub would act as gatekeeper of quality, correcting and
tightening up copy before a journalist submitted it for page
layout. But that role is disappearing fast as budgets are reduced,
and increasingly, journalists file copy direct to a production
environment or a live website without review. The result is an
inevitable drop in standards.
Changing media models

In contrast to the decline in print circulation, online newspaper
audiences are growing steadily, albeit in an increasingly
competitive environment for news. But the notion that a
company can charge a premium for a media product that is 24
hours out of date when it hits the newsstand, yet gives away its
content for free throughout the day, is an anachronism. There
has been a brutal awakening in the newspaper industry that
advertising revenues are never going to make up for the
shortfall in revenue following the shift from print to online.
The story of the decline in newsprint first began in the mid-
1990s when Internet dial-up access became a mainstream
consumer product. Entrepreneurs spotted the opportunity for
disruptive business models that were able to take advertising
revenue away from the newspaper industry. The newsprint
industry’s losses have been the gain of businesses such as
Craigslist, eBay and Google, which attracted advertisers by
creating online businesses that were able to match buyer and
seller more efficiently than print.
The game was up for newsprint long before Apple launched
the iPad and Amazon launched the Kindle. Other manufacturers
followed suit with a variety of tablet devices. But perhaps the
emerging market in newspaper applications – ‘apps’ – for
mobile devices points to a potential future where consumers
may be willing to pay for digital news content as consumers pay
for content in this new format. The iPad recreates the immersive
environment and production qualities of a newspaper. Content
follows a standard format and layout driven by production
values. The reader follows a path through the newspaper set
out by the editorial team rather than the click-and-mix approach
of a website.
Online newspaper audiences are growing steadily thanks to a
combination of apps and the web. If the print media is to have
44 BRAND ANARCHY
any future as a sustainable business, the shortfall in income

between circulation, advertising and product costs must be
addressed. If companies can’t make the news business pay,
then perhaps one potential future for the news industry lies in
ownership by a single wealthy individual. The Independent and
the London Evening Standard are both owned by Russian
billionaire Alexander Lebedev, and Richard Desmond owns The
Daily Express. We’re living through a period of intense
innovation in the media industry. Each national newspaper is
developing its own very different business models online. It’s
early days as publishers seek to build sustainable models.
What will readers pay for?

The Financial Times has an enviable position as a media
property with unique content and a point of view for which
customers are willing to pay. It has implemented a combination
of models. A standard subscription at £3.79 per week buys
unlimited access to the FT.com website, mobile phone and iPad
versions, and a five-year company financial archive. An extra
£1.70 per week buys the LEX column and access to it in an
electronic format. The FT has also implemented micropayments.
If you’re not a regular FT.com reader you can view 10 articles
for free per month before you have to buy a day pass or
pay-per-view.
It is not possible to discuss the future of the news business
without a mention of Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation.
Murdoch has built his empire around the news business,
initially in print, and latterly in television broadcast media.
He’s arguably one of the last defenders of print. His forays into
social media have not been successful, although he appears to
be staking the future of his organisation on paywalls and apps.
The Times and the Sunday Times, both owned by News
Corporation, have led the way in the UK with paywalls. The
content went behind a paywall in July 2010 when a 24-hour day

pass was priced at £1 and weekly access at £2. It claims 105,000
total transactions for digital content between July and October
2010, of which half were one-offs, meaning the number of
repeat subscribers is around 50,000 split across the web, iPad
and Kindle.
In tabloid land, the Daily Mail is the only UK daily newspaper
with a clear strategy for generating revenue from its Mail
Online service. Its approach is focused on generating potent
content to bait traffic and appeal to advertisers. It’s easy to see
how it is done. The right-hand side of the homepage is packed
with news stories optimised for search engine traffic more
typical of the red top tabloid or weekly gossip magazines. Add
to this the willingness on the part of the Daily Mail to embrace
social media. At least 10 per cent of its traffic is reported to
come from Facebook19. This strategy of appealing to a mass
audience is clearly working; the question is whether this
approach is scalable as it targets the US market in a bid to build
a larger audience.
The Daily Telegraph’s web strategy is the most inventive of all
the newspaper publishers. It is focused on the so-called three Cs:
content, commerce and communities. At its most crude, the
Daily Telegraph model uses editorial content to generate
commerce around special interest communities. The Daily
Telegraph Fashion Channel20 matches digital editorial content
with clothes shopping options via affiliate partners. It is following
a print model of publishing daily at 5 a.m. rather than the web
model of constantly updating content throughout the day.
19 Facebook generates 10 per cent of Mail Online’s UK traffic, The Guardian:

www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/nov/15/mail-online-uk-traffic-facebook
20 The Telegraph Fashion: fashion.telegraph.co.uk/
46 BRAND ANARCHY
The Guardian is backing a so-called ‘digital first’ strategy after

making operating losses of £33 million in 2010. That hasn’t
resulted in the closure of the newspaper but it will see the paper
invest heavily in its digital content. Like the Daily Mail, it
opened a New York office in 2011 and has the US market in its
sights, with a potential audience of almost 310 million versus its
domestic UK market, which is a fifth of that size.
No limits content
The web removes the restrictions on a news organisation of
page count and deadline. When a journalist is filing content to
a web server rather than a print publication, page count and
print deadlines are irrelevant. This has enabled newspapers to
follow stories as they develop in real time and to publish live
content, often in the form of blogs or real-time news feeds.
Some publications such as The Guardian and the Daily Telegraph
create microsites for big news stories which combine text, audio
and video. This puts publishers in competition with broadcasters
and social media channels to be the first to break and update
news stories, but this is not an entirely healthy state of affairs.
In 2010, a major police operation took place in the north east
of England when Raoul Moat, a 37-year-old man, went on the
run after shooting three people, one of whom died. Moat headed
to the village of Rothbury in Northumberland. During the
ensuing six days of the search for him, Rothbury, a small town
of 1,700 people, become a centre for the UK’s media as radio,
TV and print outlets set up camp. Rothbury residents were
polarised in their response to the manhunt, choosing either to
stay indoors or go about their lives as normal. Those who did
venture out were sought out by journalists to comment on the
story. Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter spawned
discussions as the search for Moat progressed. Every aspect of
the story was debated and discussed online. BBC News and Sky
News focused its coverage on the live story. This technique,

known as ‘monstering’, is increasingly used by rolling news
outlets when a big story breaks. Journalists used Twitter to
communicate with each other and their audience, thereby
crossing a line, possibly for the first time on a major news story,
between personal comment, speculation and reporting.
The police tracked down Moat on the sixth day of the
investigation and were involved in a standoff on a river bank in
Rothbury. Journalists recognised that the story was reaching a
conclusion but were thwarted when Northumbria Police took
the unusual step21 of directly asking the media to back off, via
Twitter and other media, and put in place a 10-mile exclusion
zone claiming that media presence was affecting the ongoing
operation. Moat shot himself in the early hours of the following
morning and was later pronounced dead at Newcastle General
Hospital.
But the story didn’t end at this point. User-generated eye
witness video footage showing the eventual standoff between
Moat and the police was published by the BBC22 and a Moat
tribute page on Facebook spawned 17,000 fans before it was
removed on the grounds of decency by Facebook. The media’s
handling of big news stories has often courted controversy and
stimulated debate. But the real-time nature of the Internet
amplifies discussion and democratises communication so that
everyone has an equal voice, meaning that a more stringent
editorial function is arguably more important than ever.
21 Twitter message issued by Northumbria Police (@NorthumbriaPol): http://

twitter.com/#!/NorthumbriaPol/status/18144945760
22 Gunman Raoul Moat’s final stand-off caught on film, BBC News: www.bbc.
co.uk/news/10593907
48 BRAND ANARCHY
‘Google charged’
Google is frequently charged with nicking the classified income
from print newspapers and stealing the eyeballs of readers.
Google aggressively counters the claim that it is a parasite
feeding off conventional media, citing the four to five billion
clicks a month that it sends to online news websites. The real
issue is that the saturated. Paywalls help newspapers overcome
this issue but in doing so they shrink the audience that is willing
to pay to access content as customers that have traditionally
been able to access content for free are expected to pay for
access. A similar charge is frequently levelled at the BBC. In his
2009 speech to the Edinburgh Television Festival, James
Murdoch accused the BBC of dumping state-funded news
content on the Internet. The theory is that if we’re not willing
to pay, we can head to BBC News Online, or Google will
efficiently find us another source.
The news industry has a feisty relationship with Google. But
it only has itself to blame. In July 2011, Copiepresse, a Belgian
copyright management company, pursued a claim against
Google for including excerpts of its content in Google News
search results23. A court ordered that Google must pay a licence
fee or face penalties. Google’s response was to remove
newspapers that were members of Copiepresse from its search
results, much to their irritation.
Who are the new newsagents?

Owning the relationship with the consumer is the big game to
play for in the media and technology industries. With it, supply
chains and markets that have existed for more than a century
23 Google blocks Belgian newspapers from web searches, MSN: www.msnbc.

msn.com/id/43775017/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/t/
google-blocks-belgian-newspapers-web-searches/
in print publishing — and more recently in gaming, music and

video distribution — are up for grabs. The race is on to create
the new global entertainment store. ‘Media disintegration’ is an
oft-used phrase but it lies at the heart of these market shifts.
The web has democratised the market for content publishing,
enabling anyone to reach a global audience at a low cost.
Consumers’ demands are straightforward. They want access to
content on their device of choice, in a seamless way. It’s no
longer good enough for a technology manufacturer to deliver
hardware alone. Instead, they must create appealing hardware
but also the infrastructure and services to deliver content. It’s a
very different way to how technology companies have operated
in the past, but it gives them a shot at getting higher up the food
chain and, crucially, a means of dramatically improving margins.
Predictions for growth of this new media infrastructure are
dazzling. They differ wildly from market analyst to market
analyst, perhaps because no one can get their head around the
scale of the opportunity. Apple created has created its own
flavour of hardware in the form of the iPhone and iPad, and the
iTunes market was developed for software developers and
publishers to sell their applications and content. The sacrifice
that companies wanting to sell their wares in that market must
make is to hand over 30 per cent of revenues to Apple, the cut
it demands to distribute content via iTunes. Inevitably,
publishers that have been used to managing their own supply
chain aren’t impressed with this model, particularly given that
Apple owns the relationship with the consumer and as a result
audience data. Google is alone in creating an open standard
called Android. It has its own hardware platform thanks to the
acquisition of Motorola’s mobile telecommunications business24
24 Google to Acquire Motorola Mobility, Google Press release: http://investor.

google.com/releases/2011/0815.html
50 BRAND ANARCHY
and to collaboration with third-party manufacturers such as

Dell, LG and Samsung, among others. Like Apple, Google has
also created an application and content market but its cut is a
more reasonable 10 per cent. Pearson was the first publisher to
pull its content from iTunes in September 201125 in protest at
paying such a significant chunk of revenues to Apple; other
publishers are opting to develop advertising-only funded
publications for iTunes to avoid having to share revenue with
Apple.
Free market economists and advocates of the open web claim
that any attempt to lock consumers into a proprietary
infrastructure throttles growth. Consumer enthusiasm for
Apple’s iPad almost certainly kills that argument for now but
publishers such as Pearson are voting with their feet.
Technologists respond by arguing that it is only by a closed
system and controlling access to content in a so-called ‘walled
garden’ environment that publishers can generate reasonable
margins. But a slew of new Android devices and a growing
backlash from publishers unwilling to hand over a third of their
revenues to Apple mean that Google could disrupt the market.
The future of media: smaller, leaner and less

profitable
The debate about the future of traditional media has been
taking place for the last decade. The business model for print
with its huge supply chain is almost certainly flawed. Publishers
are rushing to make their content available via digital channels.
They are also looking to social media as a mechanism to enable
readers to share content. What they have yet to figure out is
25 FT pulls app over customer data dispute with Apple, BBC News:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14734911
how to make money. Conventional media organisations will

almost certainly be smaller and a lot leaner in future. There
will be less money to be made. It’s an issue that we’ll continue
to see played out over the next decade.
Summary
• The Internet has fundamentally changed the media business
forever, removing the limitation on page count and deadline.
• But the Internet has also increased consumer appetite for
content. Individuals access content via multiple formats,
often consuming more than one media format at a time.
• Anyone with an Internet connection can become a publisher
online and reach a global audience, providing that their
content is sufficiently compelling.
• Social media has enabled the media industry to become truly
participative but the lack of editorial rigour is a huge issue for
corporate reputation.
• Traditional media owners are exploring numerous ways to
generate revenue from digital content and there is a fight to
own the distribution channel and relationship with the
consumer.
CHAPTER 3
CUTTING OUT THE MIDDLEMAN
The middleman of the media has changed. Now there are all
sorts of media, everywhere. So what now? #brand anarchy
Some words just roll off the tongue. Like bubble, igloo, or
yellow.
Disintermediation is not one of them. Economically speaking,
it means the removal of intermediaries in a supply chain. In
other words (and hence the title of this chapter), cutting out the
middleman.
In most walks of life, this has meant deliberately bypassing
the likes of distributors or agents in order to deal with the
producer or supplier of goods or services directly. Good for the
consumer, normally, and good for the supplier; but bad news
for those in the middle, who suddenly find themselves short of
business.
Apply this thinking to the new media landscape and you can
see how social media enables brands to engage directly with
audiences, thus cutting out the established middleman of
conventional media, namely newspapers, magazines, radio and
TV. Yet as far as reputation-forming is concerned, conventional
media forms remain in a strong position in terms of creating
influence. So is cutting out the media middleman – the ‘barrier’
of journalists and other conventional commentators that has
existed for so long – a good or a bad thing for reputation, given
that brands want to command the influence they have over
their audiences? You might think it’d be a bad thing for
reputation. But remember that brands have no control over
conventional media and certainly don’t have control over social
forms of media – the aggravating factor here is the pace at
which information, and therefore influence, now moves.
56 BRAND ANARCHY
So control is not really the point: the point is making sense of

the changed media landscape so you can formulate your
approach. The challenge many brands are facing in doing that
is that it has all changed so quickly, and so much fear,
uncertainty and doubt are being raked up by industry watchers.
Knowing how to approach the media turmoil is not easy. First
though, there’s the need to really get to grips with exactly what
has been going on, and what this means for the future of media.
Maclaren: not all toddlers are equal – or are

they?
On the morning of 8 November 2009, Farzad Rastegar, CEO of
Maclaren, woke up to an email alerting him to a headline in the
New York Daily News that read ‘Maclaren stroller recall: firm
recalls 1 million strollers on concerns children can cut off
fingers’1. The pushchair manufacturer had planned to recall a
million products following apparent finger injuries to 12 children
caused by the hinges of two of its models. Maclaren had
planned to make an announcement 24 hours later following
guidance from the US Consumer Product Safety Commission
(CPSC). But the story leaked.
Maclaren, by its own admission, was unprepared. According
to Rastegar it had spent ’several months’ developing a
protective cover for the hinges. The story in the Daily News was
inevitably picked up by other US media outlets and internationally
via the web. It took the business several hours to issue a
statement and because it had been caught out early it wasn’t
1 Firm recalls 1 million strollers on concerns children can cut off fingers, New
York Daily News, 8 November 2009: http://www.nydailynews.com/
money/2009/11/09/2009-11-09_kid_stroller_can_cut_off_fingertips.html
CUTTING OUT THE MIDDLEMAN 57
equipped to deal with customers calling, emailing or visitors to

its website seeking recall information.
Parents of young children are one of the most active
demographics online. Inevitably the conversation moved to the
blogosphere and Twitter as Maclaren customers ‘called the
company out’. Customers in the UK questioned whether they
would be eligible for the recall. Maclaren’s initial response was
no. It said that its pushchairs conformed to European Union
safety regulations and there had been only one reported injury in
the UK. Concerned parents inevitably questioned the difference
between the fingers of an American and a British toddler. Initially,
Maclaren did not take any action to provide UK customers with
the same hinge covers that were issued to US consumers, but
following consumer pressure it relented.
Rastegar evaluated the crisis response effort of Maclaren in
an article published in Harvard Business Review2 in January
2011. He admitted, ’We were like athletes forced to play the big
game a day early – in the rain. Everyone was out of breath. And
things stayed that way for at least two weeks, until nearly all
customer communications had been recovered and we were
airlifting additional hinge covers from our production centre.’
The wall came down

Disintermediation, then. An ugly word, but one that spotlights
the need for brands to distil various types of media down to
some workable parts in order to best plan how to manage their
reputations in future. The established media is no longer
necessarily a brick wall between brands and their audiences.
No more having to sweet-talk a journalist to convince them to
2 How I Did It: Maclaren’s CEO on Learning from a Recall: http://hbr.

org/2011/01/how-i-did-it-maclarens-ceo-on-learning-from-a-recall/ar/1
58 BRAND ANARCHY
give you a quick mention in that story they’re writing so that

your reputation is enhanced.
Now you can go straight to the people, right into their living
rooms, right onto their mobile phones, and right under their
noses.
Bear in mind, though, that media has long given brands that
kind of reach. People have long bought newspapers on the way
to work or on the way home. They’ve watched TV while
slumped on the sofa, they’ve listened to radio in their cars and,
in more recent times, they’ve kept up with news and views on
the Internet. Brands have long been in consumers’ faces – it’s
just that the brands have not been able to ‘watch’. And the
audience has had, until now, few opportunities to answer back.
But here we are. A bruised but still highly influential
conventional media that still, largely, has to work out how it
will continue to make money; and a fast-growing, rowdy and
ever-evolving social media that is hit and miss in the influence
game. It can all blow over without blowing up, or it can tear into
reputation with venom.
It is all too easy to see this as a shifting of the power base from
established media barons and large publishing groups to
networks of people with common interests who prefer to carry
out their own analysis and form their own views. It is perhaps
better to see it as a new opportunity – as the ability to have a
different kind of media, and so a different kind of correspondence
with brands, is now there. People are already seizing it with
open arms, alongside the information that they gather from
conventional media.
So, because of technology, the wall has come down. But the
old world of media-in-the-middle remains extremely influential,
although it is changing rapidly.
It’s making sense of all this that is the big pig. Largely because
the future of the conventional media is at stake in all of this
while social media contributors are deliberately vociferous on

this issue. Meaning that the range of views raised, exchanged,
critiqued, tossed aside and fumbled with gingerly is immense:
everyone wants to be in on the disintermediation debate. It’s as
if people haven’t got enough to do with their time.
Does each media type need a different

approach?
Meanwhile, brands sit back, draw breath and wonder how the
routes to managing reputation through the creation of editorial
influence have changed. Should conventional media remain a
wall that must be climbed whereas social media needs smart,
cautious engagement? Or is the matter more complicated than
that? These two types of media have never been mutually
exclusive, and given how they are beginning to cross over into
each other’s worlds, the whole picture continues to blur. In the
future, and that won’t be very far away, it will all just be media.
Conventional and social. Direct and indirect. Middleman and
man-to-man.
So, are the new instances of lack of middleman just all a
muddle, man? Potentially, yes. Because this is all a hell of a lot
more difficult than it used to be. Reputation management needs
a new level of more sophisticated media planning, because
each media – not just each type of media, each media –
represents a different type of route to influence. And that
impacts upon how brands engage editorially.
Here are a few examples.
Twitter
No middleman. Go directly to consumers, and remember that
the appeal of your content is everything when it comes to
sustaining brand engagement. Innovation is highly valued by
the audience and can create knock-on appeal. Yet conventional
60 BRAND ANARCHY
journalists use Twitter too, so influence created on Twitter can

have a bearing on the editorial they produce for conventional
media consumption.
An established print magazine

The conventional editorial world remains a brick wall that
brands must negotiate. The content is now also largely
replicated online, but offers no openings for two-way reader
engagement above and beyond that offered by the print
magazine. Yet content is often highlighted and forwarded across
social media networks. So influence is never just contained
within the walls of the ‘publication’ – because the content is on
the Internet too, it can be spread across all forms of media,
albeit that paywalls and subscriber access requirements will
inhibit its impact.
A progressive national newspaper

It has a foot in both camps: it publishes in print, but publishes
even more content online. It doesn’t yet charge for any of the
online content, but in the future it will. It uses Facebook to
cement its audience following, and understands the power that
its branded content can have when it finds its way into social
media. It has its own branded media, in the shape of a YouTube
channel. Many of its journalists use Twitter personally and
professionally. So the conventional media elements remain an
indirect, or associated, way of creating influence – the editorial
factor is required to make the influence more forceful if brands
are to develop better reputation. The newspaper’s brand
certainly counts for something influence-wise. Yet it is very
fragmented: there are often several social media avenues under
the same roof – for example feeds used by individual journalists,
as branded feeds from separate sections of the publication and
for the overall newspaper. And given that the same people are
delivering content across all of those mediums, the lines are

blurred so far as to be practically invisible anyway. So influence
through editorial is controlled by journalists across both
conventional and social media platforms; plus consumers can
engage directly both with the media brands and with other
brands that are featured in the content that appears, for example
in the comment stream below an article about a certain brand.
There’s a need for intricate planning, but herein lie the willing
ingredients of a highly potent influence mix.
And there is another factor, and probably a far more important
one. Editorial control and the barriers to creating influence are
complicated; they require a new level of planning. But that just
gets you in the door: once you’re in and ready to engage, there’s
a whole series of conversations to have. Make or break
conversations.
This new level of planning is pretty foreign to most marketers
let alone most PRs; and it’s incredibly complicated in comparison
to how we did things in years gone by. But it’s crucial. The
question is where to start.
It’s best, like with any media campaign, to take the broadest
possible look at the mix of relevant and available media to work
with. But rather than looking at all the different forms of media
that now exist and trying to categorise them in niches for the
sake of familiarity – like individual social media platforms, local
weekly newspapers or corporate websites — the people
responsible for planning and managing influence through
editorial are better off looking at how different forms of media
‘function’ in the minds of audiences. This approach is becoming
more commonplace as the development of influence, albeit at
lightning pace, across different, digitised media becomes better
understood, and communicators begin to learn from brands
that have set precedents. Rather than a multitude of media
niches, start with earned, bought and branded media.
62 BRAND ANARCHY
Each of these forms of media has brand reputation value in its

own right. What a brand communicates about itself directly, via
its ‘own’ media, will influence reputation – particularly if it’s a
ham-fisted attempt to gain influence that is counterproductive,
or a brilliantly executed piece of content that demonstrates
empathy with the audience. ‘Bought’ media – or content
published and controlled by the brand itself – can influence
reputation far above and beyond the immediate commercial
intentions of its content. Think back to television commercials
from your youth that still live large in the memory today, and
then think about how they influence(d) your perception of
those brands.
Looking instead at earned media, its potential to influence
the audience lies right at the heart of public relations – there is
inherent value in recommendation or reference having more
power. This is because it’s not the organisation saying it, it’s a
third party. It’s perceived as not having a direct commercial
agenda – through that perception can, of course, be misplaced.
So branded media, or ‘owned’ media as it is sometimes called,
has the advantage of the content being under the editorial
control of the brand itself. Yet the dialogue with the audience
about that content, the stuff that can be really influential, can
be in the hands of another party if it’s a social media platform
– for example, a branded YouTube channel. The editorial
control of branded media is also its disadvantage, in that it can
lack credibility unless it’s done right.
But the fact that it’s effectively the brand’s mouthpiece is a
card that can be played to its advantage, depending on the
subject matter and the level of audience scrutiny. Owned
media has enormous potential power to develop and maintain
brand awareness, and it can foster trust and belief too,
through creative techniques borne of knowing as much as
possible about what might compel the audience to buy. It can
create or change impressions of brands in the minds of the

audience. Earned media – the stuff generated through the
conventional press – has the ability to create similar outcomes
and also has the advantage of potentially greater influence
because of the editorial factor and the reach of the information.
But planning and achieving those editorial outcomes is a
constant challenge, as potency and suitability of content are the
route to success.
Finding common ground

There is one common thread, from a planning perspective, that
connects all three media disciplines: understanding the
audience. It might sound like the most obvious statement, but
if you know the audience inside out you can best figure out
what will be most effective.
To know how best to communicate to the advantage of the
brand, you’ve got to know what to say and how to say it. That’s
always been true in the business of public relations, it’s just
now a much, much bigger job. But we are armed with more
prescriptive tools with which to do it.
Nestlé loses Face(book)

Nestlé was caught in the eye of a very public storm when its
Facebook fan page became overrun with comments from
environmental protestors and sustainability watchers. Despite
its efforts to engage with the public directly and build engagement
for its master brand, the firm instead found itself publicly
exposed to direct criticism, and unable to handle that
conversation effectively. The conversation was rooted in
criticism, and appeared to have been a coordinated effort.
It started with Greenpeace posting a spoof video online that
criticised the Kit-Kat brand and Nestlé’s claimed use of palm oil.
64 BRAND ANARCHY
Then it moved to Facebook. The initial response from Nestlé

was to remove comments from its Facebook page that criticised
its business. So the conversation went silent. But then to make
matters worse, Nestlé posted its own comments seeking to
justify why it had done the editing job, openly criticising its
detractors with what by anyone’s standards is a pretty harsh
tone.
It turned an increasingly sour chat into a public row3. There
has been much analysis of how Nestlé handled the conversation
and what it could have done better to tackle the comments
head-on rather than seeking to remove them4. One major
highlight – or lowlight – was the company’s apparent use of
someone in a junior position to write and manage its comments.
By responding more appropriately rather than being provoked,
by not seeking to sanction comment but discussing it openly,
and by not rising to Greenpeace’s bait, Nestlé could have
gained reputation points rather than seen its actions held up as
an example of how not to engage audiences.
Conversation: an art
In theory at least, brands should be entirely comfortable
with conversation. For decades they have been seeking closer
connections with their audiences, a lingering emotive umbilical
cord between the consumer and the producer, a genuine and
lasting relationship in which there’s mutual respect, a camaraderie
3 Nestlé mess shows sticky side of Facebook pages, CNET: http://news.cnet.

com/8301-13577_3-20000805-36.html
4 How to salvage your brand on Facebook: lessons for Nestle, Social Media
Today: http://socialmediatoday.com/index.php?q=SMC/183947
and an unflinching desire to ensure that what it produces is exactly

what the consumer wishes to consume, profitably.
In reality, the Internet’s ability to enable consumers and
brands to interact directly has caught brands on the hop. Rather
than being suave and sympathetic conversationalists, most
brands have found themselves either occasional participants in
debates or information circulars that they have little influence
over, unless they started them in the first place. Like reputation
management writ-large, conversation is very much an art
rather than a science.
So it’s all about the art of conversation? Well, surely an
outgoing brand stuffed full of marketing talent, with global
recognition and respect, would have no problem holding
conversations? After all, it holds conversations about itself, its
products, its markets and its audiences every minute of every
day. They’re internal, they’re through conventional marketing
channels like advertising and media relations, they’re with
customers and partners, and they’re with shareholders. They’re
with anyone who’ll listen. Surely conversations started,
developed and sustained using social media can just be a bolt-on
extension of all that information exchange that is already
swilling around all over the place?
Surely this is all relatively easy? The art of conversation is
something best undertaken and exploited by the most
accomplished and engaging conversationalists in the organisation
– the most senior people; those with direct responsibility for the
important operations, those who already interact with customers
in order to do their jobs. It’s all great news: we can now talk to
all our audiences in a way that they’ll listen to. We can, in a
virtual sense, walk right up to them, tell them things that will
influence them and do things that will impress them. Like the
ultimate chat-up situation in a bar full of compliant and willing
suitors.
66 BRAND ANARCHY
It’s a wonderful theory, but if it were true then most brands

wouldn’t be struggling to assess and contain the bleating and
tweeting of all of their employees on social media, or work out
how on earth they try to hold productive and meaningful
conversations online as an organisation rather than cowering in
the face of attacks from the disgruntled. The art of conversation
needs a very different application in social media-land than in
person or, one step removed, via conventional media. Because
the rules have not only changed, they have morphed into an
entirely new set of rules, for a type of media that brands have
never had to work with before. It is not just a major shift like
the dawn of television broadcasting, it is a wholly different
thing altogether. It is less of a tool and more of a weapon.
The daunting scale of conversations

Social media has not only created new opportunities to engage
with audiences but has also made the whole area of reputation
management more complicated, not least because there is so
much more to manage now. Equally though, the direct and
conversational nature of, in particular, Twitter means that
brands can have a far more accurate and immediate barometer
of customer opinion about themselves and their activities. It
means that reputations can be built at lightning pace, but it also
means that they can crumble even faster. At least brands have
the scope to influence their own reputations directly though,
providing they know what they’re doing and can live at the
pace of the conversation. Like the well-worn analogy, social
media engagement can be much like conversations in a bar or
pub: flitting between serious and frivolous, noisy and quiet,
one-to-one or small groups or large groups, and with the
tendency to alter direction in the blink of an eye.
Which is why any brand expert worth their salt has been quick
to point out that engaging with customers using social media is
all about listening. It is a good point, and probably the most

rudimentary one that organisations have to grasp. They must not
only listen to what is going on around them and about them, but
also listen to customers and groups of customers when they do
step forward and ‘talk’ to the brand. Yet it is not all about listening
– the ability to listen and act upon conversations is just one side
of the coin. The other, in keeping with those pub and park
scenarios of the real world, is to open your mouth and say
something. It will make sure you have a voice that can be listened
to but, like a first-timer in the local boozer, many brands can be
unsure of what to say or what the consequences of piping up
may be. Instead, they remain on the fringes of the conversation,
smiling sweetly and nodding at others, but not scoring any points
themselves — they are more observers than participants.
The art of social media conversation is an art, not a science.
But it does require some basic science to be effective – brands
need a mouth as well as ears, and an acute sense of smell can
come in handy too. Particularly when conversations are likely
to snowball, and extend beyond social media into physical
conversations and somewhere where the snowball can become
an avalanche, the good old conventional media.
The mighty media mashup

You can cut out the middleman if you deal with social media.
But your conversations are visible to anyone with a connection
to the Internet, so you can’t stop conventional media picking up
on what you have published and then publishing reports on
your content. Not just a straightforward report of the proceedings
either: it’s more likely to be the press interpretation of what’s
happening online, which is then in turn analysed, sensationalised
and contextualised according to media agenda and, depending
on the scenario, raked up every time journalists want to
illustrate or reinforce a point.
68 BRAND ANARCHY
A few years ago, journalists were not really that bothered

about social media. It was an interesting development, it could
help them monitor and research stories, they may have even
had a personal passion for something and – being the sort of
people who like writing things and expressing opinions – either
written or contributed to some blogs. Since then, as Facebook in
particular has expanded its appeal around the world, the
conventional media has realised that social media is no longer
a special interest. It is mainstream and, while not everyone is
online and not everyone publishes content, it is a reasonable
reflection of public opinion and interest. The light bulb moment
in Fleet Street5 happened a while ago.
The title of this section contains the word ‘mashup’6. Let’s be
clear, ‘mashup’ is not actually a real word, regardless of any
attempts to gain it a place in the dictionary. In social media
terms, it seems to mean everything from pulling two data
streams together (think of those scenes with the proton packs at
the end of Ghostbusters7) to a few nerds using the word ‘cool’ a
lot over a chai latte.
We’ve used the godforsaken word here in a tongue-in-cheek
way, to illustrate that conventional and social media are
beginning to blend together, and will ultimately merge
permanently, creating a media that often connects brands
directly with consumers, but which can also be indirect, and
which leaves an audit trail and so changes the rules of
engagement. We are not there yet: some newspapers use their
websites to do little more than replicate online the content that
they publish offline. But the more progressive media companies
5 The Fleet Street revolution (Media UK): www.mediauk.com/article/32718/

the-fleet-street-revolution
6 Mashup (Wordnik): www.wordnik.com/words/mashup
7 Ghostbusters movie: http://ghostbusters.com/
are setting the pace, both with online content that engages
readers in a richer experience and pulls multiple types of social
media content into the frame, and offline content – think glossy
magazines – that is published shrewdly in order to maximise its
potency for social media.
So the media mashup is just beginning, and although the
moguls are now getting serious about needing to make readers
pay for content, the change in commercial models is embryonic.
Over time, social media platforms may shine and fade, but the
ability to connect directly means it is here to stay, in some
form. Which in turn means that conventional media will simply
have to evolve to meet changing reader expectations. The
picture remains cloudy, but you’d have to be pretty short-
sighted to believe that social media will take over the world and
that today’s media barons will just retire early. Instead, it will
all just be media: a new, more engaging and more powerful
form of it.
What do these media trends mean for brands, though, now
and in the future? Well it’s certainly a series of developments
that need to be watched closely, which few brands did well in
the early days of social media. We are seeing the biggest change
in the media since the invention of the printing press, and that
has manifold implications for every brand. Yet we won’t have
the full picture until conventional and social media are joined
firmly at the hip.
In the meantime, the most important thing is for brands to
take a joined-up approach to how they handle their reputations
across conventional and social media, rather than getting
dazzled by digitisation or, instead, sticking solely to the
familiarity of regular media.
The risks of concentrating on one camp alone are pretty
stark. Rather than developing an understanding of how the two
genres interlace, and how content can gain visibility and evolve
70 BRAND ANARCHY
when it is unleashed across the two, brands can be blindsided

by, for example, the way in which a social media campaign is
analysed and documented by a national newspaper or,
conversely, how an attempt to plug a brand in newspapers
through a well-worn publicity tactic starts attracting a
groundswell of criticism across social media.
In particular, abandoning conventional media and taking the
direct route to consumers means that brands forego any
influence they may have had over journalists. That is the kind
of approach that does not deliver control; instead it thoroughly
undermines it.
Media everywhere: mobile, static, work and play

It is not just the shape of the media that needs to be considered
though. It’s also the delivery of media content. And unless
you’ve been living in a cave for the past few years, a cave
without a high-speed broadband connection, 3G network access
and an IP address that is, you’ll have noticed that there are
many more devices on which people can read stories and view
videos these days. And much is going on to ensure that both
conventional and social media content can be delivered
anytime, anywhere, on anything.
There is an army of media experts and geeks out there who
debate the pros and cons of digesting content on each new
platform that emerges. There are obvious points like whether
the stuff is too small to see. But there are the deeper issues such
as download speed, the practicality of viewing content while on
the move, scope for reader engagement, scope for that
engagement to be seamless across different devices, operating
system compatibility shenanigans, and the hoary old chestnut
of navigability.
Which is all interesting stuff worthy of debate as technological
change continues to drive media change. But the broader point
is perhaps of greater value to brands, both in getting to grips

with reputation now and planning for the future. It is that
media, all media, is everywhere. All the time. On display in
public places, in people’s homes, at their workplaces, in the
palms of their hands. You cannot escape it, and the sheer
availability and potency of information is such that most readers
don’t want to escape it. They practically have a bloodlust for
news and conversation.
For brands, there are two overarching factors to consider in
working out the reputational implications: where people
consume media, and how they do it.
Let’s look at the ‘where’ part first. Media used to be in your
hands, in the form of a newspaper or other journal. Then it
expanded to the airwaves with the arrival of public wireless
broadcasting, and then swiftly on to the television screen. The
Internet obviously began to change all that. Initially though, the
exciting development was just immediacy: text-based news
reports could be read on websites at any time, so web-based
media could break stories faster than the television or radio
news channels. In effect, the Internet killed the newsflash.
Yet for much of the 1990s, media consumption over the
Internet largely took place at a PC in the home or in the office.
In the second half of the decade, more and more office workers
got laptops rather than bulky desktops, but wi-fi was not yet
available and the prospect of dialling up over a phone line to
slowly download a news report didn’t fill most of us with joy.
There were early news alert services and ticker applications
that were useful in news monitoring, but which hardly
represented a pleasant and engaging way to consume media
content.
It was, by and large, the arrival of faster wireless networks
that changed all that. It meant that phones could download data
faster and so provide us with richer content while on the move.
72 BRAND ANARCHY
It meant – in urban and suburban areas at least – the widespread

availability of reasonably quick fixed-line broadband and wi-fi
services so that using a laptop to get media information became
practical as opposed to a kerfuffle. The hype has always looked
to the future and anyone who was subjected to the promise and
frustration of WAP on 2G mobile phone a decade ago will attest
that readers were initially let down by the technology. Now
though, with the ubiquity of 3G phones, the looming arrival of
4G, and a social shift that has seen people using laptops, and
now iPads, in all manner of places, the promise has become a
reality. And because of social media, readers aren’t just viewing
the content; they’re commenting on it and creating it. In many
cases, they are part of the headlines, rather than being subjected
to them following a nervy two-minute dial-up download.
People used to get the news by reading a paper over breakfast
or on the way to work, or by listening to the radio while behind
the wheel or watching TV in the evenings. Apart from the dawn
of breakfast TV and, more importantly, 24-hour media coverage
thanks to the arrival of satellite networks, not too much changed
between that paper over breakfast and the arrival of the first
Internet news sites. But today, people are reading about, sharing
information about and engaging with brands on trains, in pubs,
at their desks, on the beach, in the queue for the cashpoint and
in the loo. Yes, in the loo.
Media consumption takes place while readers are static and
mobile. It used to make a big difference, as the captive audience
traits of the evening TV news, for example, made it enormously
influential, while people in transit were often only exposed to
brands in relatively fleeting glimpses – apart from British rail
passengers of course, who could find themselves stuck on
platforms with far more time to read the papers than they’d
intended. Today, it is practically irrelevant whether the reader
is sat still or on the move. Media consumption is pretty much
constant throughout each day for some people, apart from

when they’re asleep. In the future, even more people will
consume media this way, albeit with attention spans and the
capacity to be influenced varying depending on what they’re
looking at, where they are and how much of what they hear and
see matters to them. Location is no longer a factor in determining
what impact a media message will create; instead, for brand
reputation managers, harnessing audience attention and
engagement are much more important.
Then there is the issue of how people consume media. Again
though, the distinctions between different platforms are
breaking down as publishers tailor content to the devices their
readers are using and software developers innovate so that
media can be consumed in a practical way on many types of
devices.
Just as location has become irrelevant, so devices used to
consume content are becoming less important to brand
reputation managers. Of course, it matters very much to the
consumer: whether they’re listening to the radio, tweeting on a
3G phone or relaxing with a Sunday travel supplement before
the kids come back from the park, the media platform has a
bearing on the reader’s experience and so its impact on
influence – and thus reputation – may vary. This is something
that brands are starting to get to grips with, as more precise
content planning is undertaken so that there is a better
understanding of the desired editorial outcomes.
The bigger picture, though, is that while consumer experiences
vary by platform, content can infiltrate any platform – and
most consumers are accessing it via several platforms. Any
thoughts of a consumer getting a raw deal because they’re
struggling to view expansive video content on a phone screen
should be banished – if they care, then before the day is out
they’ll have found another way to view it.
74 BRAND ANARCHY
Have appetites changed?

What brands are having to understand, and what social media
gives them better insight into, is that human beings consume
media content throughout each day, both when they have a
quiet moment to focus on it and when they’re wrapped up in
doing several things at once.
Just as media planners had to get to grips with the various
types of conventional media that could influence consumers
during the average day – perhaps waking up to radio, a bit of TV
news during breakfast, a newspaper or news summary on the
BlackBerry® on the train, then Internet news grazing during the
working day and the lot in reverse in the evening – so those
horizons now need to expand to social media as well. Moreover,
the way in which content is received, commented on, forwarded
and so evolves across different types of media needs close
scrutiny.
The challenge for brands now is not really that different to
the challenges they’ve had to face in the past couple of decades
– much more media, many more options, far more ground to
cover. It is just that the scale of the job has increased beyond
prior comprehension because of social media. And there’s the
added challenge of it offering dialogue rather than monologue.
Engagement with brands is no longer a series of quick hits; it
must be sustained.
Recall the Toyota thing?

Toyota, a vehicle brand with a once enviable reputation for
product quality, has found out in no uncertain terms that
relying on conventional media alone in the wake of a crisis can
be problematic.
The company has experienced several years of major

product recall incidents, each one played out before not just
a watching media, but a growing audience base connected to
the brand – and to each other – directly by social media. In the
largest of the incidents, the firm recalled four million cars in the
autumn of 2009 amidst fears of sticking problems with
accelerator pedals. Four months later, it extended the recall
to a further 2.3 million cards over similar technical concerns.
Then in 2010, a combined 2.6 million further cars, of different
models, were recalled over an engine control system, brake
and fuel pump defects. Around six months later, fuel leakage
worries saw another 1.7 million recalled.
It is stating the obvious, but that’s a lot of cars, even for the
world’s largest carmaker.
The furore is often held up as an example8 of a brand that
had direct engagement with its audience already using social
media, but ignored that in how it responded to the crisis, and
suffered a resulting backlash.
While, if you look at the statistics, Toyota appears to have
been highly, directly engaged with its audiences using social
media during the recall period and afterwards, it has been
roundly criticised for not delivering the content – and the
transparency – that could have otherwise restricted the
damage to its reputation9. The content was there, but
commentators10 have pointed out that it was not there early
enough, and engaging people in frank conversations about
8 Toyota’s reputation could be tarnished for years, BBC News: http://news.

bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8498036.stm
9 Is Toyota’s reputation finished?, Business Week; http://www.businessweek.
com/lifestyle/content/jan2010/bw20100128_413922.htm
10 Toyota’s recall and crisis management 2.0 http://sparxoo.com/2010/01/29/
toyotas-recall-and-crisis-management-2-0/
76 BRAND ANARCHY
the situation and intended remedy earlier rather than facing

criticism over apparent opacity would have helped to keep
the situation from boiling over. As the recall situation unfolded,
information was released progressively through the company’s
website and conventional media relations. But by not
mobilising the consumers who were connected to Toyota
online already, many of whom therefore had the potential to
be positive brand ambassadors, it’s easy to think that the
company was digging in the wrong places in its bid to
communicate its way through the crisis.
It then went on to try to engage those people again post-
crisis, using a micro-site about the product recalls so it could
put its side of the story clearly and simply. By then though,
many observers saw it as too little, too late.
They’re listening. What now?

Today’s fragmented media is a very different environment in
which to manage reputation compared to the past. Previously,
brands would orchestrate communication that largely amounted
to preparing blocks of predominantly self-serving content
which was then released, shrewdly, to media contacts and
supported by regulated access to spokespeople for interviews.
Not that brands really had much choice – those were the media
options available, so it was a case of working those outlets to the
best of their ability, keeping what they didn’t want to make
public well under wraps and maintaining what was, in
comparison with the two-way Internet age, a narrow field of
communication with the outside world.
This means that influence upon reputation, because of the
editorial control maintained by conventional media, was
something of a game of chance. There have been many
well-plotted exercises to release information that created

maximum attention for a brand, and stirs word-of-mouth by
sensationalising the subject or the information. They tended to
take the tried-and-tested approach of assessing the media’s
editorial appetites and doing such a comprehensive job of
preparing content that journalists essentially took the whole
package – it was simply too good a story to turn down or even
meddle with very much – and ‘control’ over those particular
elements of reputation building was highly effective. They
could second-guess how stories would develop in the media,
what deadlines they’d work to, how coverage was likely to
spread across daily newspapers, daytime and evening TV and
radio bulletins, and be assessed through more analytical
editorial columns over time.
The Internet has, fairly obviously, upped the pace beyond
anything conceivable just 20 years ago. Now the stories develop
far faster. But the main shift in how brands need to respond to
these changes is that media is now a two-way street, and the
audience can play an active role in the story that is communicated
externally. It is perhaps surprising, given the rapid rise of the
Internet as part of the fabric of our lives, to think back to how
the media was before it.
Then, apart from letters to the editor, the way in which the
public participated in editorial was really just restricted to the
broadcast vox pop, or the journalist interviewing the eye-
witness in the street about an event or their opinions on
something important. Yet even that was highly controlled,
subject to both editorial standards and whims, and gave an
ultra-slim view of what the audience really thought or knew.
And it could be subject to distortion.
Today, the public can actively change the course of reporting
in the conventional media, and alter perception and reputation
because of content and comments shared across social media.
78 BRAND ANARCHY
While in the early days of social media this was touted as ‘citizen
journalism’, it now seems generally accepted that this is just
one element of the way in which the audience can be engaged
in the editorial process. The audience has, en masse, an element
of editorial control over perception and so, ultimately, over
reputation. Which, given that they ultimately determine what
your reputation is, could either be a good thing or a bad thing.
For the corporation or governmental organisation, this means
that it’s no longer really acceptable, let alone effective, to issue
a well-worded communiqué, then sit back and wait for publicity,
or a reaction. This factor is at the heart of how the reputation
game has changed.
Engagement means the prospect of a direct connection between
brand and consumer, a connection that is all too easy to orchestrate.
But those connections are also forged with rivals, protestors,
politicians, shareholders; in fact anyone with an Internet
connection. So it’s about more than simply being connected: it’s
about expectation, transparency, clarity and most important of all
– behaviour. Not just how a brand behaves in the eyes of the
watching public and media in a specific instance, but its cumulative
behaviour over the long haul. And in managing its behaviour, a
brand is far more exposed to risk that it has ever been.
BlackBerry bruised
Despite the popularity of the iPhone and the rise of Android
devices, Research in Motion’s (RIM) BlackBerry remains a
dominant mobile email platform for business with more than
70 million users11. But its reputation was badly bruised when
11 BlackBerry outage for three days caused by faulty router says former RIM
staffer, The Guardian, 14 October 2011: http://www.guardian.co.uk/
technology/2011/Oct/14/BlackBerry-outage-faulty-router-suspected
its email service failed for four days in October 2011. The
failure meant that emails, messages and web browsing were
all intermittent. If your company’s service is the provision of
secure information access on the move, a serious outage will
inevitably hit customer confidence. The failure apparently
resulted from the upgrade to a server at the company’s
European headquarters in Slough, UK.
In responding to the crisis, it appeared that RIM’s
communication effort was being directed by its legal team
rather than the communication team. RIM did little to explain
the issue beyond issuing brief statements acknowledging the
failure until day three of the crisis, when the issue began to
have an impact on customers worldwide. Among those
customers were many of the world’s media who used their
outlets to describe RIM’s efforts to deal with the situation.
RIM’s CEO for UK and Ireland, Stephen Bates, said that
engineers were working around the clock to get to the bottom
of the problem.
Customers, many of them high profile, turned to Twitter to
vent their fury at RIM’s lack of communication about what
was being done to fix the issue and how long it was likely to
take. The failure was repeatedly a trending topic over the four
days of the crisis and disaffected customers used the hashtag
#dearblackberry to tag their tweets. The long-term damage to
the business will be revealed in the months to come. Inevitably
businesses that chose RIM because of its reliability are looking
at other communication platforms.
But in principle, engagement in the editorial world, and directly

with the audience, is an extremely positive development. So
they’re listening, and you’re listening, and you’re both
communicating. A new kind of editorial control is being applied
80 BRAND ANARCHY
to these conversations to ensure that you’re both addressing

concerns and negative situations, and nurturing positive
perception. You’re engaged in a new level of reputation
management, one that is more sophisticated, more demanding
and potentially more fruitful, but more perilous, than the world
of conventional media alone. You’re actively conversing. Do it
right and you can gain greater command of your brand
reputation. The question is, what lies beyond this as media
continues to digitise and communicators continue to innovate?
A world of influence beyond engagement

The answer lies in the depth of engagement. There is potential
to go beyond managing and milking the implications of editorial
for your brand by being closely engaged to consumers and the
media. There is the prospect of being able to participate with
them. The fairly functional management of new kinds of
two-way communication, required because the audience is now
engaged, is a big step forward for a brand and it can be very
successful. But to take greater command of conversations in a
way that recognises and is sympathetic to the role of the
audience in determining the ‘story’ of the brand goes further,
and can be more powerful in shaping reputation. This puts
content right under the microscope – the extent to which it is
going to be trusted and the degree to which it can cement belief
must be fully understood.
This kind of participation in reputation will require a whole
new level of sophistication. It will require organisations to have
communication as their operational oxygen. It will require a
360-degree understanding of the audience, bravery underpinned
by systemic command, and control systems to authorise
instantaneous content. It needs a plan.
According to the Francis Ingham, director general of the
Public Relation Consultants Association (PRCA), communicators
are being forced to up their game with more effective planning.

Not just because media now demands it, but because they’ve
never been much good at it.
‘The public relations industry is typically pretty lousy at the
planning process. Being able to segment, and so target, an
audience well is something public relations needs to get better
at but the more important need is to get better at planning
overall. If we’re going to make public relations more valuable
then we need to get even better at it than the advertising world.
Planning is one of the best investments that public relations
agencies can make at the moment,’ he says. ‘But segmentation
needs to be approached sensibly. We can delude ourselves into
thinking that we are more sophisticated at this than we are.
Segmentation by conventional means will only get you so far
when you’re dealing with editorial. We need more pragmatism
and less hot air when it comes to segmenting audiences,
particularly when using social media,’ he adds.
Integrated media planning

If you’ve been sat there thinking ‘what is needed is some really
grown-up, intricate and pragmatic planning’, you’re not wrong.
But what is not needed is another layer – social media
planning in addition to conventional media planning misses the
point, and adds a layer of unnecessary complexity without the
required consideration to the relationship between the two.
And as this book has been preaching for the past few chapters,
before long it will all just be media. A bigger, more engaging,
two-way and one-way, available everywhere and lightning-
speed media; but media nonetheless. The distinction between
social and conventional platforms will fall away.
For the meantime though, each type of media will need a
distinct approach, as part of a single, overarching reputation
content plan. The format and scope will vary by brand, but the
82 BRAND ANARCHY
basic parameters are a long-term view of how reputation can

best be built, what factors will accelerate that reputational
development, who the audiences are and what content is
required to exert appropriate command over influence. In
some ways, there is much that public relations can learn from
advertising here: the ad world has long had a professional,
detail-driven approach to planning and rightly so, given that
clients are paying for the media space they occupy. In public
relations, the need has never been so acute, given that editorial
content influenced by organisations has no ultimate assurances
over where and when it is used. A comprehensive plan detailing
intended space, story angle, treatment and, ideally, headline
adds much sophistication to the typical public relations
campaign, but can only get you so far.
Reputation content plans are a new frontier for public
relations planning, a discipline that, in all too many cases, has
either failed to grasp the interrelationship between editorial
and other types of content or, at the worst end of the spectrum,
applies techniques that can’t really qualify as planning at all.
These plans must take a microscope to the probable short-term
outcomes of customer and media engagement through editorial,
but must do so in the context of brand reputation and brand
relationships in the longer term. Success therein is dependent
on the expertise of people who really know what they’re doing
with reputation. It needs a thorough understanding of appetite
for and timing of editorial, its likely implications once ‘public’
and the associated implications for the brand. Which is where
public relations nous has its biggest role to play in customer
engagement – editorial savvy is needed in spades.
Overall, though, no plan can be too rigid given the media
upheaval that is under way, and the requirement for sheer
agility that has been created by direct dialogue with audiences.
But you’ve got to start somewhere. And you’ve got to start by
gaining a 360-degree view of what media could conceivably

influence your reputation, then narrow your vision to those
best suited and with the greatest potency, and then start plotting
content. In tandem with that, there is a need for a far more agile
approach within the organisation to enhancing reputation
through editorial influence.
Finally, there is a need for a different mindset to be applied to
this different media landscape. Brand leaders may be worried
about social media because they fear loss of control, but they
never really had control. With conventional media, they could
at least plan content and nurture relationships so that they
commanded attention, even if they didn’t control the editorial
output. By doing so, they could set or participate in the media
agenda. Now the media agenda is in so many more hands, and
opinions can change like the wind.
Whether there’s a media middleman or not, only the level of
content planning and operational agility that come with
editorial understanding can turn a potentially perilous fumble
in the dark into the ability to exercise some command over
reputation. It is a big step up from dealing purely with
conventional media and the approach is a departure from what
marketing departments have historically been used to. Chief
amongst the factors they have to come to terms with is that
every consumer potentially has the brand in its sights, and can
publish a reaction to it.
Planning and media savvy put to one side, we come to the
issues of credibility and, ultimately, truth. Reputation is worth
nothing if there is no trust. And recent media changes do not sit
comfortably with the conventional spin doctor. Indeed, the spin
doctor’s blend of medicine might be the last thing that brands
need.
84 BRAND ANARCHY
Summary
• The previous barrier between brands and their audiences that
was created by the media as we knew it has now eroded.
• This makes two-way conversation with audiences possible,
but the challenge can be knowing what to say and where to
begin.
• Media has become a complex landscape and content, and
therefore influence can flow quickly across the different
types.
• Not only that, but media can be instantaneous and available
everywhere, so agility is paramount in reputation
management efforts.
• Once you have audiences engaged in conversation with you,
what do you do next?.
• Why more mature, more expansive planning is required so
that content and conversations can have a more strategic
bearing on reputation.
CHAPTER 4
THE END OF SPIN AND THE
NEED FOR AUTHENTIC
COMMUNICATION
The Internet has killed spin forever. Transparency is the
only possibly form of sustainable organisational
communication. #brandanarchy
‘The best way to build a reputation is to deserve it.’

Seth Godin
Media fragmentation and the rise of Internet-driven
communication is returning public relations to its roots as a
means for an organisation to engage with the public in a two-way
process. Yet the public relations industry is locked into systems
and processes that have become industrialised over the past 50
years. But change is coming, and fast. You have been warned.
It is no longer possible to control or dominate a media agenda.
Arguably it never has been, although you’re about to read about
one communications practitioner that retained an iron grip on
the media for half a decade. The simple fact is that the public
relations and communications practitioners are no longer in
control, or in what they thought was control. You’ll almost
certainly be bored of hearing that mantra by the time you have
read this book. It’s message that runs through it like words
through a stick of Blackpool rock.
Alastair Campbell1 is best known for his role as former British
Prime Minister Tony Blair’s spokesman, press secretary and
1 Alastair Campbell’s personal website: www.alastaircampbell.org/

88 BRAND ANARCHY
director of communications and strategy from 1997 to 2003,

having started working for Blair in 1994. According to Campbell,
it is no longer possible to control a media agenda. The style of
communication planning that characterised his tenure in
Downing Street no longer works. But with a handful of
newspapers, fewer broadcast outlets and limited online
publications, it used to be far easier to set and lead a media
agenda. In the mid-1990s, a hit on BBC News coupled with a
splash in The Sun and The Times would ensure that a story
dominated the agenda for at least 24 hours. Blair’s first election
win in 1997, and subsequent re-election landslide in 2001, were
built on this command and control approach to communications.
We met Campbell when he spoke to a group of communications
professionals at a dinner in London, organised by media
evaluation firm Durrants, while we were researching this book.
Snagging the attention of the BBC and national newspapers
helps, of course, but there are dozens of other influential
channels that have equal clout and are vying for the same
audience. ‘It used to be fairly straightforward working out how
to dominate the agenda – get yourself on the main news, and
big in a few of the papers, and everything else would flow. But
companies and individuals in the public eye have had to adapt
to a totally changed media landscape in which the old rules no
longer apply in the same way. The way media is digitising, and
the pace at which it has already happened, has changed the
game for those wanting to be out there connecting with the
public. It now means understanding all media channels,
knowing which will be most potent, and how they can work in
unison. And it means letting go of the belief that “the agenda”
can be controlled. The agenda is being set as much by those
who consume the media – and respond instantly – as those who
are trying to exert that control,’ says Campbell. He continues:
‘This means public relations techniques have to adapt
THE END OF SPIN 89
constantly. Digital media and, in particular, social media have

injected new requirements for transparency, detailed story
planning and genuine dialogue with the audience. Now, the
audiences can get involved in the editorial coverage of the issue
– they can talk back, and sometimes their responses can be
more interesting and more newsworthy than the initial
point. Information must be both authentic and delivered with
full appreciation of how the audience is most likely to react.’
Campbell says that we have entered the era of the permanent
campaigning, citing five organisational communication themes
that demand a fundament shift in communication style to what
he called ‘authentic campaigning’2.
Alastair Campbell’s five organisational

communication themes
Citizens and consumers
Private sector standards and efficiencies are expected of the
public sector, and public sector values are expected of the
private sector. This shift has made it much harder to operate in
both the private and public sectors.
Rise of the democratic corporation

Stakeholders are no longer clearly defined. The Internet provides
a window through which organisations can be scrutinised
minute-by-minute. This has completely changed corporate
democracy.
2 Command and control communication planning gives way to authentic

campaigning, says Alastair Campbell, Speed Communications blog post:
www.speedcommunications.com/blogs/wadds/2009/09/20/
command-and-control-communication-planning-gives-way-to-authentic-
campaigning-says-alastair-campbell
90 BRAND ANARCHY
Participatory media environment

Print can’t deal with a 24-hour news culture and its web-based
response is leading to financial ruin. Newspapers are still
important and still set the agenda for broadcasters, but social
media is cutting through, particularly with big stories.
Culture of negativity
Negativity drives the media. In 1974, for every one negative
story there were three positive; by 2003, Campbell claimed the
ratio had switched to 18 negative for every one positive. It’s a
tough environment in which to operate.
Information is infinity
A strong, clear message pushed to one or two sources is no
longer good enough for successful communications. We
operate in an era of infinite sources and infinite channels.
New organisational influence flows

The major shift in the last decade that underpins almost all of
Campbell’s themes is technology. The Internet provides the
means for an organisation to engage directly with the public.
This new media is social and, as Campbell acknowledges, it is
participatory. This is the basic premise that provides the basis
for Philip Sheldrake’s book The Business of Influence3. Sheldrake
is an engineer turned public relations practitioner who brings a
refreshing perspective to organisational communication.
‘Information and communication technology has laid bare the
facts in a way that you can’t call anything less than brutal these
days. You can’t fake it so, to me, reality is now perception. So
3 The Business of Influence (Philip Sheldrake): www.influenceprofessional.

com Wiley, 2011.
THE END OF SPIN 91
you’d better make sure you build that reality in order to live up
to the perception you’d like others to have of you. Ultimately
that’s the business of influence,’ he says.
In The Business of Influence, Sheldrake challenges his readers
to reconsider the influence flows around an organisation. In his
reframing of organisation communication he identifies six
primary influence flows:
1. Our influence with our stakeholders

2. Our stakeholders’ influence with each other with respect to
us
3. Our stakeholders’ influence with us
4. Our competition’s influence with stakeholders
5. Stakeholders’ influence with each other with respect to our
competitors
6. Stakeholders’ influence with our competition
Figure: Philip Sheldrake’s Six Influence Flows
Sheldrake’s contention is that the first flow (our influence with

our stakeholders) and the corresponding third flow (our
stakeholders’ influence with us) are well understood and these
are the typically the areas where an organisation will invest the
majority of its marketing and sales effort. But technology has
made the second flow critical to the management of the
92 BRAND ANARCHY
reputation of an organisation and your market online. Your

stakeholders are using the Internet to find each other and
communicate about your organisation online. You need to find
those conversations as they will almost certainly provide
incredible insight about your organisation and you may decide
that your organisation needs to be part of those conversations.
Equally, technology makes it easier to track your competitors
and their influence on your stakeholders and vice versa –
influence flows 4, 5 and 6. Organisations must also track these
conversations and be aware of their reputational impact.
Radical transparency
What will you do when your organisation’s file servers are turned
over to the Internet and your most confidential documents are
available for anyone to view and copy? If you don’t think it will
happen, think again. It has happened to the US government on
more than one occasion. Wikileaks4 is a non-profit media
organisation that publishes private and classified information
from anonymous news sources, news leaks and whistle-blowers.
In April 2010, it published footage from a 2007 Baghdad airstrike
in which a dozen people, including two journalists, were allegedly
killed by gunfire from a helicopter5. Throughout 2010, it released
US government information from the wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq and then in November 2010 it began leaking US diplomatic
cables6. Wikileaks is the harsh reality of the future of Internet
transparency that organisations need to face.
The only possible form of defence is transparent and authentic
communication. Your organisation may not be the target of
4 Wikileaks: wikileaks.org
5 Collateral Murder, Wikileaks www.collateralmurder.com
6 Secret US Embassy Cables, Wikileaks: wikileaks.org/cablegate.html
THE END OF SPIN 93
Wikileaks, but Google provides consumers with access to the

sum of all knowledge on the Internet. Social networks such as
Facebook, Google+ and Twitter enable information to be
shared and scrutinised with friends and colleagues. Companies
must respect their relationships with their audiences. They
must be transparent and avoid spin as customers who lose trust
in a company or its products will be quick to go elsewhere. An
organisation that attempts to be anything but completely honest
is quickly shamed via social media. A claim made by a company
about its international policy in London can be quickly verified
across a network with people on the ground in Bombay, Mexico
City or Sydney.
Pick a story on the other side of the world that has broken in
today’s news and try asking your network on Facebook,
Google+ or Twitter to connect with someone involved in the
breaking news and see how quickly you can get commentary
on the story. We’ve tested this thesis on numerous occasions
and it rarely takes more than 60 minutes before you’re
corresponding with someone local to the situation. In fact,
news-gathering organisations apply this tactic to connect with
individuals to get first-hand reports. During the aftermath of
the earthquake in Japan in 2011, we exchanged messages on
Twitter with people involved in a bid to test the veracity of
international media reports. We quickly discovered flaws in the
news reporting by news organisations that weren’t on the
ground.
Brandjacking: do you know who I am?

Occasionally, as journalists, we’d vent our fury at poor service
by threatening to write a damning piece of editorial to shame
an offending company into action. ‘Do you know who I am?’
was our childlike mantra. Only the most professional of
journalists have not tried this tactic. Now, sitting on the
94 BRAND ANARCHY
receiving end of demands from the media, we’re well used to

the tactic. But ‘Do you know who I am?’ is no longer purely the
refrain of journalists. Anyone with a blog or significant Twitter
presence can call an organisation to account. The audience is
answering back. Quentin Langley, the editor of a popular blog
called Brandjack News7, calls the ability for an individual to
criticise and publically shame a company ‘brandjacking’ and,
for now at least, it places the brand in a hostile relationship with
the consumer.
TIME magazine showed incredible foresight when it named
‘You’ as the TIME Person of the Year in 20068. The Internet
means we’re all important and can ask ‘Do you know who I
am?’ of a company. An unhappy consumer has a platform
through social media to voice their discontent and if it resonates
with their social network it will be shared, amplifying the
message. In July 2009, Canadian singer Dave Carroll became an
overnight YouTube hit when he posted a song, ‘United Breaks
Guitars’9, after his guitar was damaged at Chicago’s O’Hare
airport. He wrote the song after watching his guitar being
thrown into the aircraft by baggage handlers and spent the
following 12 months attempting to get compensation from
United Airlines. The video had four million views in 10 days
and United’s share price fell by 10 per cent. It was a harsh
wake-up call for corporations. In 2011 examples occurred on a
weekly, if not daily, basis.
‘Brands have always been careful of powerful customers. If
you’ve got Henry Kissinger or Bill Clinton flying with you as a
7 Brandjack News: www.brandjacknews.com

8 TIME Magazine Person of the Year 2006 – You, TIME: www.time.com/time/
specials/packages/0,28757,2019341,00.html
9 United Breaks Guitars, YouTube: www.youtube.com/
watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo
THE END OF SPIN 95
customer, you have to be really careful. Because you know they

can hurt you. But now anyone with access to the Internet can
create and distribute content. If it resonates with your
community online you have the potential to hurt a brand and
you don’t necessarily even have to be right,’ says Langley.
Powerful individuals and journalists have always had the
power and the platform to fight back but social media gives
everyone a voice. But it is Langley’s final point that strikes at the
operation of the corporate communications department as the
frontline defender of corporate reputation. Social media and
networks have little regard for journalistic rigour or media law.
Authentic communication
In 1984, James E. Grunig and Todd Hunt published the Four
Models of Public Relations as part of their book Managing Public
Relations10. The model describes the different forms of
communication between an organisation and its stakeholders.
The first model is publicity or press agent, the second is known
as the public relations information model, the third asymmetric
persuasion, and the final one — the two-way symmetrical
model — has become accepted as a formal definition of
communication. It remains as relevant today for the era of
digitised communication as it was when it was first created.
Few organisations truly engage with their audiences as Grunig
and Hunt describe, but are locked into one-way forms of
communication. To return to Sheldrake’s Six Influence Flows,
they broadcast to their audience, focusing purely on the first
flow of influence.
10 Grunig, James E, and Hunt, Todd. Managing Public Relations. Harcourt

Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, 1984.
96 BRAND ANARCHY
Model Name Type of Characteristics

Communication
Press agent / One-way Uses persuasion and
publicity communication manipulation to influence
audiences to behave as the
organisation desires.
Public One-way Uses press releases and other
information communication one-way communication
model techniques to distribute
organisational information. The
public relations practitioner is
often referred to as the in-house
journalist.
Two-way Two-way Uses persuasion and
asymmetrical communication manipulation to influence
model (imbalanced) audiences to behave as the
organisation desires. Does not
use research to find out how
stakeholders feel about the
organisation.
Two-way Two-way Uses communication to negotiate
symmetrical communication with the public, resolve conflict
model and promote mutual
understanding and respect
between the organisation and
its stakeholders.
Table: James E. Grunig and Todd Hunt’s Four Models of Public Relations
Propaganda relations
While technological change allows organisations to engage
directly with their audiences, very few are actually doing so.
Pick a consumer brand you admire and head to Facebook or
Twitter and look up whether it has an account. It almost
certainly will. But is it using that account to engage with its
THE END OF SPIN 97
customers and prospects? More than likely it will be using its

social media accounts to push out branded content as an
extension of its web marketing efforts with little effort to
engage. We exclude media owners from this exercise that use
networks as an extension of their distribution network. It’s
early days but, to use Grunig and Hunt’s model, corporate
communicators remain wedded to propaganda relations as
their primary means of communication.
In a paper published in the PRism Journal called ‘Paradigms of
global public relations in an age of digitalisation’11, Grunig
claims that organisations have embraced social media and
networking as a knee-jerk reaction with little thought to how
they use it as a strategic means of communication. It is no
smarter than propaganda as a means of engagement. ‘For most
practitioners, digital media [changes] everything about the way
they practise public relations. Other practitioners, however,
doggedly use the new media in the same way as traditional
media. From a theoretical perspective […] I do not believe
digital media change the public relations theory needed to
guide practice, especially our generic principles of public
relations. Rather, the new media facilitate the application of the
principles and, in future, will make it difficult for practitioners
around the world not to use the principles,’ says Grunig.
Edward Bernays is credited as one of the forefathers of the
public relations industry who understood the value of advocacy
and direct audience engagement. His techniques are as relevant
today as they were almost 100 years ago. One of Bernays’s early
campaigns saw him survey doctors and report their
recommendation for consumers to eat a good breakfast to
11 Grunig, James E., University of Maryland. ‘Paradigms of global public

relations in an age of digitalisation’. Prism Journal, 2009.
98 BRAND ANARCHY
improve their wellbeing. He sent the results to 5,000 doctors

along with materials promoting eggs and bacon as a hearty
breakfast. Sales of bacon inevitably rocketed as a result of his
advocacy. Influenced undoubtedly by his uncle, Sigmund
Freud, Bernays recognised that the public could be influenced
in their thinking through advocacy or propaganda, as he wrote
in his book, Propaganda, published in 192812. Bernays was one
of the first to spot the opportunity for a new industry that he
called ‘propaganda relations’ which would use advocacy as a
means of building influence, as opposed to the emergent
advertising industry, which sought to buy attention. He quickly,
and in hindsight wisely, renamed this business public relations
as a result of the negative connotations associated with
propaganda during World War II.
Bernays worked for US President Woodrow Wilson during
World War I, forming the Committee on Public Information to
influence US public opinion towards supporting US participation
in the war. He was responsible for devising the campaign
spearheaded by the slogan ‘bringing democracy to Europe’. In
1919, he was invited by Wilson to attend the Paris Peace
Conference, a meeting of the Allied victors, to set the peace
terms for Germany and other opposition forces. Bernays was
stunned by the level of support for the United States and the
degree to which his democracy slogan had taken root. That
same year, Bernays opened a public relations agency in New
York and developed his craft. Many of his campaigns and tactics
would be familiar to anyone working in a public relations
agency today. Arguably his most effective piece of work was the
promotion of tobacco to women on behalf of the American
Tobacco Company. Prior to 1920, smoking amongst women was
12 Bernays, Edward. Propaganda. I G Publishing, 1928.

THE END OF SPIN 99
taboo. Bernays’ solution was to persuade debutantes to smoke

in the 1929 Easter Day Parade as an act of defiance against
male-dominated society. He succeeded in creating a news event
that was reported by journalists and photographers across the
United States. The campaign made it socially acceptable for
women to smoke. But more than that, it created the perception
that it was cool for young women to smoke, and opened up a
new and lucrative audience for the tobacco business where
advertising had previously failed.
The corporate obsession with press releases

and other wire fodder
Ivy Lee was another early pioneer of the public relations
industry. He was the founder of a New York public relations
firm in 1905. Twelve months later, he sent the world’s first
press release as part of a crisis communication effort on behalf
of the Pennsylvania Railroad. He persuaded the railroad
company to issue a press release after an electric train fell off a
drawbridge; 53 people were killed. Lee’s intention was to engage
openly with media organisations and, on the basis that rumours
quickly fill a void in communication, get a statement directly to
journalists before other versions of the story could be spread. It
was a strategy that worked. The New York Times printed the
press release the following day word-for-word as a statement
from the railroad.
The tactics may have changed but Lee’s response of
communicating quickly and openly in a crisis situation is as
appropriate today as it was more than 100 years ago. Despite
huge advances in technology, the press release remains one of
the primary forms of communication between an organisation
and journalists. Proponents of social networking get excited
about an organisation’s potential to communicate directly with
its audiences but, in the main, organisations remain wedded to
100 BRAND ANARCHY
the press release as a means of communication. They have

mangled its purpose to communicate not only with journalists
but other audiences, such as analysts and customers. The
modern-day press release – with its familiar format of a date
line, headline, body content and boilerplate – remains
unchanged.
Here’s a challenge. Head to one of the wire services such as
Businesswire or Marketwire and check the headlines of the first
50 press releases. How many contain news? By news, we mean
a story that would satisfy news-gathering criterion set out by
the Associated Press or Thomson Reuters, and would lead a
journalist to follow up on the press release and write up a story.
Here’s the reality; the majority of press releases do not contain
news content. The press release has become a general purpose
document that an organisation publishes on its website and
issues via a wire service, not to inform the media of a news
event, but typically to reach broader audiences and to satisfy an
internal audience. It’s a catch-all communication tactic that
seeks to address Sheldrake’s multiple influence flows around an
organisation rather than purely external audiences. We call
them wire fodder or public relations spam.
PR spam
The issue of public relations spam has come into sharp focus in
the public relations industry in the last five years. It has been
exacerbated by technology. Commercial media databases
enable untrained public relations executives to create email
lists of hundreds of journalists and push out irrelevant content
at the push of a button. Adding another 100 or even 200 names
to a distribution list, just in case a press release might be
relevant, is trivial. When asked to provide the size of a typical
distribution list the media database firms we contacted were all
reluctant to provide a figure.
THE END OF SPIN 101
In a future where reputation is governed by the strength of

your network and your relationship with your audience,
databases break a basic rule of network theory by providing
individuals with a shortcut into the network. The flaw in this
model was apparent long before the arrival of social media.
Dan Ilett13 is a journalist-turned-media entrepreneur who
knows only too well about this issue, and claims that it has got
so bad that it’s getting in the way of journalists doing their job.
During his career, Ilett has written for some of the leading
newspapers and business magazines in Europe, including
the Financial Times and The Economist Group. Most recently,
he founded the environmental business website Greenbang. On
a good day he says that he receives 30 to 40 press releases and
pitches, rising to hundreds on a bad day.
‘I divert press releases into a folder and scan the headlines
once a day. The majority are ignored and deleted because the
headline is so badly written. In any other business it would be
classed as spam,’ says Ilett. ‘With any other business
communication, you have an option to opt out or receive
information the way you prefer. It’s permission-based. Not with
PRs. They abuse email and jam their nasty little press releases
in your inbox so you have more work to do. The answer to all
this – as it always will be – is good headline writing. Get to the
point. Twitter and text messages force you to do that,’ he says.
Journalists are fighting back and starting to put controls in
place against public relations spam. Twitter provides a brutal
means of managing public relations professionals and it’s no
surprise that journalists are increasingly insisting that PRs use
Twitter as the primary means of pitching a story. It puts the
journalist back in control of the relationship. By using Twitter,
13 Dan Ilet’s personal website: www.danilett.com

102 BRAND ANARCHY
journalists can block or choose not to follow anyone that

consistently pitches poor content. Shortmail is another tool that
journalists are starting to use to cut their inboxes down to size.
It’s an email system that is limited to 500 characters of text and
is accessible to anyone who wants to read it. The brevity and
transparency may just force the public relations industry to do
a better job.
Ilett claims that the majority of pitches and press releases are
pushed out by individuals that don’t understand the subject
matter, let alone the audience. Yet the pressure on journalists
to file copy accurately and quickly has never been more acute
but, according to Ilett, the content being promoted by the public
relations industry is getting worse. ‘Trust is becoming a vital
currency in the relationship between journalists and their
sources. I have a small number of PRs that I work with whom I
trust to pitch my story. Beyond that, I get my information
elsewhere and within a corporate organisation that’s typically
from executives who are creating the stories rather than the
corporate communicators that are dressing them up as public
relations fodder,’ says Ilett.
An Inconvenient PR Truth
UK-based wire service, Realwire, claims that a mammoth 1.7
billion irrelevant press release emails are received each year by
UK and US journalists. It led a campaign called an Inconvenient
PR Truth in 2010 to raise awareness of the issue. It worked with
the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR), the Public
Relations Consultants Association (PRCA), the Investor
Relations Society (IRS) and the National Union of Journalists
(NUJ) on a spamming charter and crowd-sourced a so-called
Bill of Rights for the public relations industry. These documents
set out a minimum set of standards for PR’s communication
with journalists. Despite widespread consultation, it has been
THE END OF SPIN 103
largely ignored. Occasionally, journalists bite back and publish

lists of offenders, but largely the issue goes on unchecked
because database providers and wire services have no interest
in cannibalising their own market.
Realwire CEO, Adam Parker, believes that it’s because the
public relations industry, unlike other professional service
industries such as the accountancy or legal professions, has no
imperative to change. ‘Regulation forces education and seeks to
stamp out bad practice in other industries. The lack of regulation
in the public relations industry means there is no necessity for
those purveyors of bad practice to take action, and such
practitioners are also unlikely to take much notice of standards
initiatives from professional bodies such as the CIPR and the
PRCA,’ says Parker.
Parker’s solution to the issue of spam is technology-driven.
Like Ilett he has little confidence in education in the public
relations industry. Realwire is making a lone bid to tackle the
issue with a service called PR Filter14. It’s an open, web-based
platform that puts users, in this case bloggers and journalists,
back in control. The web application scans a blogger’s or
journalist’s online output for the past six months and serves up
press release content from the major wire services based on
their areas of interest. There are three variables to broaden or
reduce the number of results: relevance (low to high), time
(how far back you want to extend a search) and geography
(source of content). Its simplicity belies the massive amount of
computing power required to semantically analyse the 15,000
press releases handled by the platform each week.
PR Filter has proved that a software application is capable of
automatically profiling the interests of thousands of recipients
14 Realwire’s PR Filter: prfilter.com

104 BRAND ANARCHY
and then match thousands of releases a day to those recipients,

at a level of relevance that feedback suggests is significantly
better that that achieved by current distribution services. In
fact, in many cases significantly better than that achieved by
many individual public relations practitioners. But uptake is
slow, admits Parker. ‘The success of PR Filter or services like it
depends on the public relations and media communities
adopting and supporting such a tool. It’s a similar issue to the
one that Spotify faces. It is trying to solve the problem of illegal
downloads through balancing the interests of music creator
publishers with consumers. However, it will only do so if
consumers adopt and support its model. Anyone trying to
implement such a service is therefore faced with a similar
challenge to Spotify to try and encourage the relevant
communities to engage and support it,’ he says.
The future of communication flows between an organisation
and its audiences will continue to remain in flux for some time.
But overcoming the issue of irrelevant content or public
relations spam is an issue that the public relations industry
must tackle if it is to remain relevant and have a role in
organisational communication. If not a technical solutions such
as PR Filter will allow recipients to proactively take control of
the content that they receive.
Searching for answers

We have explored how the press release has been abused by the
public relations industry but it’s not the only offender. The
online search industry has recognised the opportunity that
press releases and wire services offer to build inbound links as
a tactic to improve keyword search rankings. Faux news content
is distributed via a wire service with the goal of securing
widespread coverage around target keywords and web links on
THE END OF SPIN 105
editorially driven websites that are ranked highly by search

engines such as Google and Yahoo.
It’s a crude tactic that has been proven to be flawed but it still
goes on according to Kelvin Newman, creative director of UK
search engine, SiteVisibility, and producer of the Internet
Marketing podcast15. ‘Press release syndication never has, and
never will, be an essential element to a search link-building
campaign. Optimising press releases for keywords is about low
hanging fruit. If they are going online, you’re mad not to be
giving them the once over for keywords, but I doubt many link
builders would be upset if they lost the ability to syndicate press
releases,’ he says.
Not only is it a flawed strategy but it can also create confusion
and result in reputational damage. In a major update to its
search algorithm called Panda16 in the first half of 2011, Google
took action against sites that consisted of low-quality content
and organisations that had a high search ranking as a result of
large chunks of content being replicated around the Internet.
US retailer, JC Penney, was one of the casualties of Google’s
action. It previously ranked highly across a range of keywords
for consumer products. In many instances JC Penney had a
higher search ranking than the manufacturers of the products
that it sold.
The media despise the tactic of spraying out content to media
websites. Nick Davies coined the term ‘churnalism’ in his book
Flat Earth News17 to describe how the media, under pressure to
file content to the web, is distorted by public relations-driven
propaganda. ‘This is the heart of modern journalism, the rapid
15 Internet Marketing podcast: www.sitevisibility.co.uk/impodcast/

16 Finding more high-quality sites in search, Google Blog: http://googleblog.
blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html
17 Davis, Nick. Flat Earth News. Chatto & Windus, 2008.
106 BRAND ANARCHY
repackaging of largely unchecked second-hand material, much

of it designed to service the political or commercial interests of
those who provide it… This is why researchers from Cardiff
University [who investigated this issue] found that, among even
the best national papers in the country, only 12 per cent of their
stories were their own work and only 12 per cent of key facts
were being checked.’
The Media Standards Trust, a UK-based charity that promotes
standards in journalism, operates a website called Churnalism.
com. It enables visitors to paste chunks of content into a churn
engine, which compares the text against a constantly updated
database of articles from UK media outlets. The results show
the percentage of any given article that has been reproduced
from public relations material. For example, a survey about
television catchphrases on behalf of OnePoll.com was published
almost verbatim by The Sun18, the Daily Mirror19 and the Daily
Telegraph20 in January 2010. It paints a dismal picture for the
future of original reporting and fact-checking in the UK media.
We return again to the issue of authenticity and transparency.
Search marketing techniques are developing as fast as search
algorithms and attempts to dupe search engines will always be
penalised. But good online public relations aimed at connecting
an organisation using interesting and meaningful content will
18 Yeah, but Vicky has best telly phrase, The Sun: www.thesun.co.uk/sol/
homepage/showbiz/tv/2824188/Vicky-Pollard-has-best-TV-comedy-
catchphrase.html
19 Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard has funniest catchphrase, the Daily Mirror:
www.mirror.co.uk/tv-entertainment/most-popular/2010/01/26/
little-britain-s-vicky-pollard-has-funniest-catchphrase-115875-21995626/
20 Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard takes catchphrase crown for ‘yeah but no
but yeah’, the Daily Telegraph: www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/
7070986/Little-Britains-Vicky-Pollard-takes-catchphrase-crown-for-yeah-
but-no-but-yeah.html
THE END OF SPIN 107
always be rewarded by search rankings. By all means optimise

the content of a press release for search marketing once it has
been drafted but don’t have search marketing as your primary
objective.
Press release distribution is a small sideshow in the debate
about the differences between the public relations and search
marketing industries. In truth, the public relations industry was
slow to spot the opportunity presented by the online search and
missed the chance to broaden its offer. That oversight has cost
the public relations industry dearly. Econsultancy, a community
for digital marketing and ecommerce professionals21, estimated
that the natural search marketing industry in the UK grew by 16
per cent in 2010, reaching a value of £436 million, up from £376
million in 2009. This represents approximately 12 per cent of
the value of the total UK search engine marketing sector last
year, which Econsultancy estimates to have been worth £3.63
billion. The scale of the US market is even more staggering. It
rose to $16.6 billion in 2010, according to Econsultancy. The
debate about whether public relations or search agencies are
best placed to deliver search marketing campaigns has been
well and truly won by the search industry but there have been
plenty of scraps along the way and there will inevitably be more
to come.
The social media press release

The first attempt to redefine the format of the press release
since Ivy Lee devised it in 1906 came with the advent of the
social web. Public relations practitioners debated with
journalists via blogs how the text format could be enhanced to
21 Econsultancy Search marketing stats roundup, Econsultancy Blog:

econsultancy.com/uk/blog/7580-search-marketing-stats-round-up-2
108 BRAND ANARCHY
incorporate hyperlinks, images, audio and video. Todd Defren,

Principal at SHIFT Communications based in Boston,
Massachusetts, created a social media news release template22
that was quickly adopted by the public relations industry.
Subsequent revisions have added social functions such as
Facebook ‘like’ and Twitter sharing.
Just as the media has fragmented, so too has the process of
corporate communication. Press releases are as likely to turn
up in search results, shared on Facebook or Twitter, or published
on a blog, as they are to be used as a means of communicating
with traditional media audiences. Using the web to add richer
content beyond text and hyperlinks adds context and makes a
traditionally dry document more interesting and likely to be
shared by its audience. It provides a means to link to relevant
areas of your own site or third-party sites and allows content to
shared and commented upon.
The simplest way to create a social media press release is to
use a blogging platform such as Wordpress to create your own
documents and append them to your web presence. Bespoke
social media newsrooms can be incorporated into any corporate
website and wire distribution providers have been quick to
build social media news release distribution into their services.
The social media release may be built to enable an organisation
to share its content with journalists and bloggers, but that is the
limitation of its social features. But it is not remotely social in
the sense of providing a mechanism for the audience to engage
and answer back. The primary purpose of the press release – a
means of broadcasting communication from an organisation
out to its audiences – remains exactly the same as when Lee
22 Social Media News Release, SHIFT Communications: www.shiftcomm.

com/downloads/smprtemplate.pdf
THE END OF SPIN 109
sent the first press release about the Pennsylvania Railroad

crash one hundred years ago.
Authenticity is crucial to the success of organisational
communications. Operating in the modern media environment
is tough — there’s no doubt about that. You need a clear and
distinct strategy to tell and sustain the interest in a story over a
period of time, and messages must be seamless and transparent
across all channels. You also need to integrate communications
across all areas of your business, from customer relations to
sales, and you must be ready for when the audience answers
back and moves towards a strategy of engagement and
participation.
Summary
• The fragmentation of media resulting from the development
of the Internet means that it is no longer possible for an
organisation to dominate the news agenda.
• The Internet enables an organisation to monitor the flows of
influence between itself and its stakeholders, and vice versa.
Similarly flows of communication between an organisations’
competitors and its stakeholders can be monitored.
• Social media democratises communication and gives
everyone the opportunity to have a voice online. It enables
organisations to communicate directly with their audiences.
• Attempts to mechanise media relations are flawed. The
majority of press releases contain no news content and media
databases shortcut the process of building relationships to the
annoyance of journalists.
• Search marketing strategies that attempt to dupe search
engine algorithms will always be penalised. As with public
relationship authenticity is crucial to long-term success.
CHAPTER 5
THE AUDIENCE ANSWERS
BACK
Brands are being baited. Brands are under an intense
spotlight. Their audiences want to talk. Is it even
optional? #brandanarchy
When two, now former, employees appeared on YouTube,

apparently stuffing cheese up their nostrils and farting on
sausages when preparing food, Domino’s Pizza1 soon realised
that everyone in an organisation is now a spokesperson.
Well, not really a spokesperson, but certainly a public
representative of the organisation, and a publisher. So, is social
networking a communications anarchy that can deflate or
implicate a brand at the touch of a keyboard, leaving
organisations at the whim of a mobilised army of on-payroll
publishers? Well, we’ve always had the ability to publish. A
person who puts something on a village green noticeboard is a
publisher, and is subject to all of the same legalities, at least in
England and Wales.
Everyone working for a brand can be its spokesperson. That
has always been the case. But with social media, everyone else
can now be a brand analyst in a matter of seconds.
Of course, most brands have a relatively limited number of
authorised spokespeople who speak on its behalf via the
conventional media. Their content delivery is typically well
planned, structured and engineered to develop reputation in
the right direction, at the right time. However, there are also
1 Domino’s Pizza Employee fired and arrested (CNBC): www.youtube.com/

watch?v=ZtjVEBZWweM&feature=related
114 BRAND ANARCHY
renegade unauthorised spokespeople, normally aggrieved

‘company insiders’ who leak information to the press or who
make claims about their employers in some other public forum.
Typically though, by their nature, these cause short-lived
problems.
What many brands rarely consider, though, is that lots of
their employees interface with the conventional media in other
ways: phoning in reports on their son’s rugby team to the local
paper, publicising a charity bike ride in a personal capacity but
referencing their employer in doing so, writing to the editor of
a newspaper about the council’s failure to collect the bins on
time – accompanied by a follow-up ‘angry resident’ picture
story the following week. Some can have a positive impact on
reputation, some can be negative, most are neutral. Just
because authorised spokespeople are subject to controls does
not mean that a brand’s engagement with audiences through
the conventional media is ever really controlled. Employment
contracts can help, but are a deterrent rather than a gag, and
can be unenforceable anyway. It is just that there is some
reasonable degree of influence over the influence, and therefore
reputation.
So the unfortunate scenes at Domino’s spotlighted an acute
organisational risk. One of the changes they highlighted was
that people can now publish at will, and so drag a brand down
with a few clicks of a mouse. The bigger change though was that
everyone in the world may now be watching. And those people
watching also now have the ability – and often the willingness
– to answer back.
Particularly if bad things are being done to pizzas.
What was largely a one-way street is now a two-way street.
The information superhighway goes in both directions, so
editorial influence on reputation is faster and complex.
THE AUDIENCE ANSWERS BACK 115
Why are we baiting?

Again, control would seem to be slipping out of the hands of
brands. The ability for consumers to respond to external
communications by a brand, or even instigate discussion, places
a burden of expectation on brands to engage in conversation, or
risk looking dismissive. And, as we have said repeatedly, the
entire world could be watching.
A conversation that begins between a brand and a consumer,
who is probably a customer, can escalate in minutes to involve
comments, viewpoints, allegations or irrelevance from thousands
of others across continents. With millions looking on.
The worst thing brand managers can do is panic, or bury their
heads in the sand. It is not enough for them to go wobbly-kneed
at the what, they must also investigate the why – why audiences
choose to engage with a brand using social media, and what
they’re looking to get out of doing so. And is what those
audiences contribute to social media really a true reflection of
how they perceive the brand? Perhaps most importantly, have
they always felt this way about the brand, always influenced its
perception by word-of-mouth and always actually wanted to
engage with it in some way?
If the latter is true, social media can be far more of an
opportunity than a threat.
Getting to grips with that requires many questions to be
answered. While it’s not the central issue, one very important
part of all this is the question of why anyone would want to bait
a brand into a ‘bad’ conversation in the first place? A big factor
though, obviously, is the brand in question.
Yet it is not just what you are, it’s what you do – or don’t do.
Conventional media’s bad-guy brands are obvious – those most
likely to get a bad rap, or at least may start off on the back foot
as far as reputation is concerned, are the most overt capitalists
– oil companies, mining firms, energy providers and the like
116 BRAND ANARCHY
– and those large multinationals that face big cost pressures to

be competitive – retailers, airlines, telecoms firms, the food and
drinks industry, and so on. Social media’s publishers, readers
and analysers may have the same preconceptions, but in today’s
multi-way media world it is behaviour that invariably has the
largest single impact on a brand’s reputation.
‘Oh behave!’
Brand behaviour? Before social media, that phrase was most
likely to have been uttered in the context of whether a brand
was being ‘good’ or whether it was demonstrating that it was
‘behaving itself’. A playground-like notion born of expectations
of corporate responsibility, citizenship and plain old common
sense. Has social media changed that? Well, those expectations
still exist, and some might argue they have been heightened by
social media’s glare and immediacy. But really, the change is
that digitised, networked conversation has added an extra
dimension. It is that of how a brand responds to criticism or
questions about its market and activities, and whether indeed
the brand is inspiring, demonstrates leadership or even, where
appropriate, is amusing when it starts a conversation in the first
place.
Part of the fear factor that many brands harbour about
participating in social media conversations is that they aren’t
the ones starting those conversations about themselves.
Regardless, such conversations are going on all around us, and
can be more influential than a brand’s own communication.
Customers, broader consumers, industry watchers and those
with an axe to grind – think union members in the case of a
workplace dispute – are not just willing to get involved in the
chat, they’re actively seeking it. They’re thriving on it. They
want to tell tales about your brand and provide their own
perspectives.
Secondly, the social media audience’s appetite for these

stories – those begun by a lone individual or, using appropriate
behaviour, by the brand itself – is becoming ravenous.
Individuals are increasingly realising that their brand choices
can influence corporate performance, and that expressing their
views can swing political fortunes. They’ve realised what can
be achieved by harnessing the power of inspirational digitised
conversation. Each wallet can wield a very small amount of
power over a brand, but many wallets can make or break it, and
social media too has that unifying influence. Reputation is,
implicitly, at the heart of every online conversation about a
brand or the markets in which it is active. Given this shift in the
nature of a brand’s relationship with its audiences, largely
driven by the ability to answer back, and the associated
additional expectations for brand behaviour, the priorities for
today’s brands are being stretched well beyond being there to
make money for shareholders. The new priorities extend
beyond shareholders to stakeholders – customers, employees,
investors, partners and the environment.
Which at least helps set out the scope of conversations that
brands need to engage in, and provides some steer on what type
of brand behaviour is expected by those audiences. And once
brands are clear on those factors, they are on their way to being
able to use social media to their advantage. They can gain the
ability to have a degree of command over their reputation by
influencing the editorial content about their brand and its
circulation online – because they are set up to create and
nurture conversation, rather than just participate in it or nod
from the fringes.
In those conversations, brands must be bold. To be assured
about how bold brands can be, and that their reputations can be
enhanced or at least maintained through their participation,
what they say and how they do it must be both appropriate and
118 BRAND ANARCHY
in context. By being appropriate and having a real understanding

of, from the stakeholder’s perspective, the context when they
engage in conversation, they can ensure that they’re not turned
upon. Or simply ignored.
That way, it doesn’t matter if brands are baited; they will get
baited anyway. By being able to engage boldly in conversations
about themselves – and indeed beyond – they can stand up for
themselves and make a stand that builds positive reputation, in
a world of changed behavioural expectations.
The social media bear pit

In the real world, not all conversations are joyous. Quite clearly,
they aren’t all a bundle of laughs in social media either, which
is probably one of the main reasons why you’ve read this far.
So you have thought long and hard about how your brand can
best engage in conversations. You know you can be bold, you
know you can exude the most appropriate behaviour. You’ve
monitored anything and everything online about your brand
and its markets. In just the same way as you would when having
a conversation in a pub or bar, you’ve drawn breath. You’ve
looked around at your audience. You’ve prepared your opening
line.
Time to jump in. To jump into what could well be, or quickly
become, a public slanging match around the brand. A
conversation that spirals perilously out of control. With an
exchange of comments, information and materials that make
you wonder why you bothered, and whether you’ll be able to
stand up for yourself.
Looking at some of the snippets of those so-called
conversations, you might be forgiven for thinking that social
media is more like a kangaroo court, an exercise in political
philandering or a loose-knit ensemble of highly vocal people
realising they have a new-found power.
That is largely because the most extreme, most potent, most

pungent social media conversations are those which tend to
end up at the forefront of brands’ attention. Rightly so, given
that they are likely to be amongst those with the greatest
negative influence on reputation. But the same is absolutely
true of editorial content published in conventional media. And,
at the risk of making a simplistic point, of life writ large: you
never know what’s going to be thrown at you.
How can brands have confidence that they’re ready for
anything when they dive into social media conversations? Well,
they can never be completely sure, but the same is true of
conventional media, and indeed any other situation that a
business may face. What you can do is do your best to understand
who you’re conversing with and what the rules of engagement
are, particularly when things get a little rough.
We’ve already looked at what is required to identify and
understand the audience. So, looking next at the rules of
engagement, the first is the most crucial: brands must be
transparent, so the onus is on them to be both honest and clear.
If they seek to bend the facts or change the tune, they’ll be
found out because digitised conversations leave an audit trail
and anyone could be watching closely. If they’re opaque,
brands’ behaviour may be pilloried and their messages may be
distorted.
Transparency forces honesty and clarity. Brands have had to
move to a more transparent relationship with the customers
since Internet access became mainstream and customers were
able to gain more information about them. Now they are being
compelled to do the equivalent of conversing directly with any
and all stakeholders while the world records the conversation,
then plays it back and critiques it. In time, brands will come to
realise that this is a good thing; that if they can get involved in
the right conversation and drive editorial influence through the
120 BRAND ANARCHY
content that transpires, they have far more to gain than they
have to lose. But it still requires a shift in mindset and marketing
approach, compared to the way that brands have built and
maintained their reputations in the past. Whereas those actively
contributing to social media conversations on behalf of a brand
today tend to be either digital media enthusiasts or spokespeople
sanctioned to carry out the role, in the future it is entirely
feasible that everyone within an organisation may have to do
so. They will all have to be accustomed to being a public ‘face’
of the brand and rather than a small number of people being
authorised as spokespeople, it will be a necessary core skill for
all worker, much like having to represent the organisation
every time they pick up the phone.
When conversation takes flight

Just like those real, verbal conversations, social media
spokespeople need sufficient free reign to be able to deviate,
within acceptable bounds, from the corporate script in order to
achieve their aims. Just as sales and customer service personnel
are trained to be, for example, gracious and acknowledging in
the face of customer criticism, so must conversations in social
media be both transparent and honest when a brand or its
activities are criticised. Ultimately, if you’re wrong you must
admit it; if you disagree you must agree to disagree; and if
you’re blindingly brilliant at something, or have been proven
right at the expenses of others, there’s a commonsense need to
show a bit of humility. In digitised conversations, as in real
conversations, it is not just what you say, but how and when
you say it. And a little grown-up grace can go a long way.
Similarly, humour has to be approached cautiously. You have
to know your audience: you wouldn’t blunder into a group
conversation in a pub cracking cheap gags about something
sensitive like weight loss only to find out that half the group had
eating disorders that had taken them to the brink of severe

depression. Likewise, you must think hard about trying to be
funny in a social media conversation, and appreciate that many
more people are listening and their personal viewpoints are
therefore likely to vary widely. What seems a tepid joke in one
part of the world can be highly offensive in another, and the
conversation may take the ugliest of turns. Politics, sex and
religion can make very amusing conversation topics, but only
providing you know exactly how the recipient of the joke will
react. Equally, there are many safe-bet topics, such as sport and
the weather, that are pretty much fair game anywhere; so the
light touch of humour can humanise a brand to the benefit of its
reputation.
Finally, there is an obvious rule of conversation that must be
respected in social media – no one loves a loudmouth. You may
get heard by everyone, but you will not grow in their estimation
if your communication resorts to shouting louder and more
frequently than everyone else. For many brands, simply
speaking up once or twice in a fairly difficult conversation can
be enough to answer criticism and gain respect.
With all elements of social media conversations, drawing a
parallel with appropriate behaviour in real-world conversations
is the best starting point, and will avoid most of the pitfalls.
Which is why those conversations that brands get dragged into
against their will, in which they are practically teased into
responding to, may be particularly dangerous.
You’re being watched, everywhere

There is no doubt that brands are being goaded into responding
to social media. Unlike the case with conventional media, in
the world of social media brands cannot just take the risk of
declining an interview or making excuses about a packed diary
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making talk-time impossible. If they don’t respond, it can be

like a guilty plea being entered in their absence.
But while responses must be appropriate and relatively rapid,
they must also be issued with a clear comprehension of what
impact that content will have on their reputations and how it
may be published across many different media platforms. There
are the classic, well-commanded examples of a social media
exercise – for instance an amusing or engaging video put on
YouTube – that create much conversation and interest across
other social media, to the extent that they gets picked up by
conventional media and, before you know it, are featured on the
evening television news. By ‘picked up’, we of course mean
picked up following an appropriate steer from a public relations
agency paid to plug the brand and build its reputation. But the
ability of content to be passed as-is from one type of media to
another, or filtered into something that makes it more appropriate
for the media in question, is increasingly commonplace. As
media converges and, in the example of The Guardian
newspaper’s website, a publisher begins to push reader
engagement and experience on multiple fronts in relation to the
same topic, content does not so much evolve across different
platforms but is available from a number of appropriate sources
at the same time. That way, the reader is given the option to read
or respond to the content how they want to.
Regardless of dissemination points though, the important
factor here is how quickly the audience for content can grow,
and how something intended for a relatively niche group can,
unless you’re shrewd and plan for such outcomes, end up in the
faces of millions. It is best to assume that anyone and everyone
may end up seeing your content, so it is essential that this is
factored into your communication planning, and that the
domino effect of cross-media momentum is used to your
advantage, where appropriate. Content that may not get much
interest if you aim it at broad-brush media may be better

targeted at a respected special interest journal, at least initially
— think of the New Scientist, for example. Once that journal
touts its story via Twitter, your brand can pick up the reins and
push it further, so much so that the likes of the BBC picks it up
and covers it across radio and TV news bulletins, with more
in-depth analysis online. Bingo.
Conversation is also complex

Yet let’s not get lulled into thinking that conventional media is
all one-way and social media offers the only scope for
conversations. Yes, The Guardian is a prime example of media
that offers multiple content types, but many online publishers
now offer the ability for readers to put their views across in the
form of comment streams, feedback columns, Facebook fan
pages and links to follow the brand on Twitter. Comment
streams are particularly powerful, given that they are a good
way for a publisher to develop a story editorially with relevant
input from readers – a smart brand can say the right things in
comment streams so that it influences the total editorial in its
favour, in a way that’s there for all to see when the piece gets
disseminated across social media. Nous is needed to make this
work well, though: too much blatant publicity-mongering and
the comment will get vetoed by editorial controllers; too little,
and your point will be lost on the audience.
It is a powerful example, however, of how a little editorial
intervention in the right place at the right time can help to steer
the right kind of exposure, and influence the reputation of the
brand. Many social media novices say they don’t know where to
start – for many brand managers now engaged with social
media, the bigger problem can be knowing where to stop.
Sustaining conversations across social media takes not only
time, but editorial savvy and the authorisation to be engaged in
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the first place. While media has diversified beyond all prior
comprehension in the past few years, and will ultimately have
to consolidate, the challenge remains that there is simply too
much ground to be covered for a brand to expect to be
appropriately involved in every conversation that is relevant
to it. Instead, brands must pick and choose those conversations
that will have the greatest impact on reputation, as well as on
customer service, employee engagement and corporate
citizenship. There is no magic formula for doing this – as is the
case with conventional media, facts must be gathered about
the scope and audience of each media type, then the most
valuable ones monitored for editorial output and engaged for
editorial success.
Which takes people. Brand communication has long been
overseen and implemented by a combination of internal teams
and, where appropriate, outside agencies and contractors. This
hierarchy has historically provided a resource for structured
and responsive reputation management through conventional
media and direct engagement channels. Social media does not
fundamentally change that, but it does place an onus on those
teams to develop new skills, understand how reputation
management works across social media and assign responsibility
to the right people.
The oft-lauded social media strategy has no place in this,
because there really is no such thing. Did you ever have a local
radio strategy? No, you just developed appropriate approaches
to that media based on need, driven ultimately by commercial
objectives. What matters is your business strategy – get that
clear, and brand managers can then best plot reputation
management across the entire media landscape; not just fret
and pontificate over the brave new social world.
The worst thing your marketing team can do is form a digital
division to handle the specific requirements of reputation
management in social media. Creating expertise niches when

the media is a cauldron of change is just asking for trouble in a
world that requires transparency, agility, coordinated
communication and the editorially sensitive delivery of content
across all media. It is far better to develop a plan for ensuring
that all brand managers understand all media, and that specific
responsibilities are designated for certain media titles,
communication programmes and initiatives. Many brands are
not there yet, but as media alignment is typically the most
effective structure for media engagement, this is not the time to
be creating ghettos of social media haves and have-nots.
Does this fundamentally change the job of the modern brand
manager, at least as far as external communication goes? Well,
yes and no. Yes, in that more skills are required as roles will
require greater sophistication, and brand communication will
need to be closely aligned with – and in cases overlap with – the
functions of customer relationship management and human
resources. But no, in that many of the fundamentals of
communicating with customers, prospects and other
stakeholders remain the same. Brands must say the right things
to the right people in the right way in order to meet their
commercial objectives. They must be responsive when engaged
by those audiences over two-way media channels. And, as has
always been the case, they must prioritise in doing the things
that will have the greatest impact on commercial outcomes.
The chatter that matters

So, how do you know which conversations will most impact
upon brand reputation? A bit of bad news for astute
communication planners working to routine cycles: you don’t.
But a lot of the priorities can be set out in advance. It’s just
that digital conversations are like real ones, just on a much
larger scale. They can take sudden twists and turns. They can
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fade away in the face of competition from new information or

topics. They can rapidly lose momentum when individuals
who’ve been driving them lose interest. They can suddenly be
thrust into the spotlight to the amazement of all involved.
Is that really that different to the prioritisation challenges
we’ve long faced in managing brand reputation across
conventional media? Not really. Brands have always had to
prioritise how they handle the conventional media that will be
most influential for them, depending on the nature of their
business. They’ve always had to prioritise how they develop,
channel and amend content based largely on their commercial
priorities and, let’s be honest, the occasional whim or whiff of
internal politics. The big change is the pace at which this stuff
moves; how agile brands must be in order to shift gears through
conversations and decide what action to take when their
priorities and the directions of social media conversations
change.
Armed with an integrated communication plan and a clear
understanding of which media are likely to have most influence
on reputation, brands must ideally instigate digital conversations
as well as monitor those going on across all media, so that they
can take decisions quickly and respond to situations as soon as
they arise. It may be that they decide not to intervene or,
alternatively, they might interject in an attempt to divert the
conversation towards other content or another topic. It may be
that it’s a conversation they have to be at the heart of, or which
centres squarely on them so that to ignore it would be damaging
to brand reputation. Whatever the scenario, if brands cannot
see or hear what’s going on, or assess a conversation’s relevance
to their reputation, they are not in a strong position for
determining the appropriate course of action.
Give a little, take a lot?

Just as with conventional media, brands cannot be expected to
answer every question, and be available to everyone at the drop
of a hat. But there is an expectation, and it is in their best
interests, to be fully aware of the risks and rewards associated
with what they choose to say and how they choose to behave.
It is much the same for deciding how to handle social media
conversations or questions that affect other areas of a brand’s
operations. As mentioned briefly earlier, social media is changing
the face of customer relationship management and human
resources too. There is a growing expectation from customers
that if your brand engages online in any way via social media,
that is carte blanche for entirely transparent dialogue with the
public. You’re either engaged or you’re not, just like it not being
possible to be half-pregnant. Gone are the days of being able to
keep customers at arm’s length through centralised call centres
with lengthy ‘on hold’ queues, with other contact points
deliberately kept opaque. Instead, brands have to learn that
customers will approach them using social media, and that the
way they’re handled can be visible to the whole world.
Employee engagement using social media is typically less
structured (and in many cases has evolved organically), and is
driven by individuals within the business who came to social
media early. The watchword here is consistency – if you’re
saying one thing to customers in order to drive reputation but
saying something else to staff, it will be immediately obvious.
Instead, brands are realising that pointing their employees to
the way that the brand is engaging with the wider world online
is a highly effective way to keep them informed, aligned with
brand messages and feeling a sense of engagement with the
brand at large.
Like commonsense approaches to integrated marketing,
brand communication should be undertaken with mutual
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understanding and clear visibility across reputation, customer

relations and employee relations activities. Transparency and
immediacy mean that there is no real alternative.
Summary
• Audiences are starting to bait brands into conversations that
they may not want to have. Why is that, and what are the
risks and opportunities?
• How brutal can those negative conversations get, and where
can they lead?
• Remember that your brand exists in the minds of the
audiences. By understanding them better and what influence
their perceptions better, you can establish how best to
improve your reputation.
• There is a new level of scrutiny being applied to brands
online. Brands need to be able to work out how to make the
most of that, rather than running scared.
• There is so much noise and talk online. How can brands work
out what really matters to them?
CHAPTER 6
ON THE INSIDE
Is talk cheap or extremely valuable? And how do employers
work out which things their staff say are really important, and
learn from them? #brandanarchy
So media change has forced organisations to communicate

differently because external audiences have greater ability to
interact with, and scrutinise, brands than they did in the past. It
has also forced organisations to look long and hard at how their
own people are communicating with their colleagues.
The same technological advancements that have changed the
nature of public media have empowered employees on the
inside too. But handled appropriately, they can empower
employers too.
To understand this, it’s best to look back at how internal
communications used to be planned, delivered and evaluated,
and how digital tools can offer new possibilities today.
Firstly, it’s a relatively young discipline, at least in the guise
we think of today. It draws on influences and techniques from
many other marketing and communications disciplines and,
like public relations, is rooted in the study of psychology. While
large organisations in particular have a lengthy history of
orchestrating and promoting a sense of pride and unity amongst
employees through specific activities or engrained philanthropic
attitudes (highlighted by the enlightened approach of some
Victorian industrialists, for example), internal communications
as a distinct function is new to the party.
Company newsletters and memos were often ineffective or in
direct conflict with messages encouraged by trade unions.
Messages, and the inherent values they sought to nurture, were
often driven by the unions and, where they’re active, still can
132 BRAND ANARCHY
be. In other organisations though, over the past three or more

decades, the value of well-run employee communications and
relations has been increasingly appreciated.
The real driver of the steady formalisation of internal
communications has not been understanding and appreciation
though; it has been technological progress. The presence of the
telephone in offices more than 100 years ago opened up new
communications possibilities that began to alter human
behaviour and dynamics. The widespread arrival of the fax
machine in the 1980s made a dent in the telephone’s dominance,
but not much of one. It was not until the arrival of the Internet
that internal communications took a gargantuan leap forward.
So in the pre-Internet age, when the lines of communication
started to be redrawn, impact on how staff perceived the brand
they worked for was largely due to attempts by senior
management to communicate major events or decisions that
affected the business or organisation. But there was always a
broader impact on perception caused, depending on the nature
and size of the brand, by the media outside.
Take, for example, a brand involved in contentious operations
or a brand that ‘enjoys’ a high media profile because its products
were very much part of the fabric of everyday life around the
world – food and drink companies, fashion houses, motor
vehicle manufacturers, nuclear power plant operators and high
street retailers spring to mind. The coverage of the brand by the
mainstream media would invariably impact brand reputation,
and hence the perceptions of the brand’s employees and their
peer group. Those who worked for such brands would face
typical questions or remarks from others when asked where
they worked, and there was no getting away from that.
It was almost a dirty secret, something rarely talked about
with senior personnel or in anything other than a flippant, or
irreverent, way. The nature of the reputation that existed in the
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minds and on the lips of external observers looking in would

rarely even be acknowledged internally, let alone become the
subject of an interactive discussion between the senior team
and the rest of the staff. Any communication that did take place
was normally carried out without the benefit of any plan or
structure; it was employed often whimsically or reactively to
counter negative media coverage by telling ‘the truth of the
matter’, through some hastily-prepared internal statements.
The problem was that even when internal communications
provided a full and frank account of the truth of the matter,
there was a high risk that employees wouldn’t believe it anyway,
given that the raising of such matters would be a bolt from the
blue, rather than part of any sustained dialogue.
And that was the stuff that stuck in the mind. In the past,
more structured and sustained endeavours to maintain a direct
and empathetic line to staff through internal communications
would typically amount largely to meetings involving as many
people as feasible, the oft-read but much-mocked noticeboard
memo and, by comparison with online tools, primitive means
that were not a huge step forward from schoolroom antics
where notes were passed between desks in class.
Computerisation of the workplace made a big difference, but
more to the atmosphere of the office than to the ability of
brands to communicate with staff or encourage healthy
communication between employees. It began in earnest in the
mid-1980s, but it was to be a decade or more before the arrival
of email as a mainstream workplace tool – rather than a useful
aside – began to change the way people could talk and listen to
others using their keyboards during the working day.
These days, it is perhaps difficult to imagine the impact that
email had in its early days in the workplace. Before that, most
people had spent most of their time communicating with
colleagues and external contacts overtly – their phone calls and
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conversations at desks could readily be overheard. Before that,

in the era when most workplaces consisted of many individual
offices rather than open plan areas, the situation lent itself to
even less open internal communication. With the arrival of
email, fact and opinion could be transmitted not just between
colleagues and business contacts but between people generally
such as friends, family and acquaintances. To an extent it didn’t
matter. Email offered a way to mimic, in a basic way, the power
of conventional media – it had the potential to inform and
entertain. It didn’t have anything like the collective mass
influence of social media. It didn’t have anything like the
editorial credibility of conventional media nor the breadth or
focus of some of today’s owned media. But it was a sharp and
colourful glimpse of things to come.
Email was silent, apart from the tapping of keyboards or the
stifled laughter when something amused. It put mass and
individual instantaneous communications at the fingertips of
what became the vast majority of office-based workers, and
ultimately having an email address became as mainstream as
having a telephone number. It was the beginning of a quiet
revolution in how people communicated amongst themselves
internally in a wholly different and, potentially, extremely
powerful way. The problem was that most brand owners hadn’t
a single clue how to turn it into an aide to more effective
internal communications, and some even tried to ban it. They
missed a massive trick, because it was a watershed moment in
internal communications.
So who’s in charge now?

The ability of email to connect people in what could become
one large, largely unchecked and fast-moving conversation,
spooked many brands. There was concern at the time that not
only would email see productivity dip but that its use as a gossip
ON THE INSIDE 135
channel would make it a threat rather than an asset to

commercial success. In a way, it was a predecessor of social
media from an internal communications standpoint. It showed
how people could, if appropriate and in their own way, by the
collective power of a group’s principles and interest, apply
editorial controls to content that was circulating socially.
Today, the lines are blurring all over the place. With
commentary in the conventional media about brands now also
being rapidly circulated within companies via social media, it’s
easy to suggest that there are no longer any real barriers
between internal and external media. To that extent, it’s easy to
conclude that brands see little or no hope of ever regaining
even a shard of control over internal media.
There is no editorial gatekeeper, at least not in the way that
there used to be. In many ways, given the speed at which
content can be criticised, forwarded, embellished and debated
internally using the Internet, the editorial gatekeeping function
is actually now in the hands of all employees who view and
pass on the content to others. The question is how brands can
turn that to their advantage, by seeing it as an opportunity to
regain some centre ground rather than seeing it as
communication anarchy.
Getting to grips with changing media

The collective power of changing media actually presents brand
owners with an enormous opportunity to finally use
communications to better harmonise people internally and
counter any speculation about the brand or its operations. Done
well, it can drive a much more positive brand reputation
amongst staff: more loyalty, less doubt, more clarity, less
misunderstanding. The challenge lies in realising that changing
media can help, and then taking a cohesive approach to doing
something about it.
136 BRAND ANARCHY
And the thing to realise, above all others, is that the root of its
potential is that it can engender active conversation, rather
than encourage another conversation altogether to take place.
The two-way nature of digital media means that conversations
which may previously have taken place between individuals or
small groups can now be orchestrated, developed and sustained
in a way that engages an entire staff.
It’s not overstating it to say that the Internet, and the way in
which employees can use it to communicate amongst
themselves, gives employers an opportunity to whip up and
maintain excitement. By communicating the right things in the
right ways, organisations can not only improve relations with
their internal stakeholders but can also turn their brands into a
tangible, cohesive asset amongst their staff, developing
employees into not only more loyal (and less sceptical) workers
but better advocates for the brand externally.
Sounds great. The question is knowing where to start, and how
best to gain a level of cut-through so that the message is well
received, perhaps with similar editorial principles applied to
those used by conventional media externally, so that content has
the desired effect within your four walls. Ideally, it should share
the same focus as the brand’s external communications, but
should be applied and communicated in a different way that’s
appropriate to how staff feel about the brand, about their work
and about their futures. So just like external communication, a
thorough and frank understanding of what makes the audiences
tick will arm the brand with the best insight in order to ascertain
what content will do the job, and how best to get it out there.
In that regard, each and every brand is different, but the
knowledge of the audience is crucial to knowing what content
to create – its messages, its tone, its balance of information and
entertainment, and so on. Beyond that, there are a number of
truisms that have, to an extent, always been present in internal
ON THE INSIDE 137
communications, but are now bubbling to the fore as social

media platforms give fresh impetus to them. According to
internal communications consultant and partner at The Team
Brand Communications, Cliff Ettridge1, looking at classic
examples of human behaviour in reacting to information
dissemination will give brands the cornerstones of
communications planning. Ettridge has spent the best part of
two decades working in a field that now tends to be labelled
‘employee engagement’. In the Internet age, the one that leaps
right out is that content will be most compelling, and best
understood, when someone adds to it. Ettridge, who has
delivered engagement programmes for brands such as BAA, the
BBC, the Body Shop, BP, Deutsche Bank, Marks & Spencer,
Orange, Royal Mail and Vodafone, puts it simply: scribbling on
a sign or wall to deface it where bureaucracy has been badly
applied, such as when safety instructions are clearly contrary to
common sense, can have enormous communications impact
and points to how best to engage employees around a brand.
Such action uses some of the most powerful weapons in the
communications arsenal – sarcasm, humour, irreverence – to
get the point across. Think of a ‘Bill Posters Will Be Prosecuted’
notice amended to ‘Bill Posters Is Innocent’ and you get the
picture. The point is that by adding to the original content, far
more people will take notice, understand and be inclined to
share their perceptions with others. These are daft examples of
course, but thinking laterally about how to apply the principle
to internal communication makes it clear how, with thorough
planning, original content can be orchestrated to entice
comment from employees, encourage sharing and take on a life
of its own – within a conversation that the brand is part of, and
1 Cliff Ettridge http://cliffettridge.wordpress.com

138 BRAND ANARCHY
as part of a cohesive communications plan, rather than left to

the anarchy of the felt tip pen.
Don’t underestimate the fascination

You have a captive audience that cares about the subject matter
because it has to – and by applying two-way communication
models you can manage brand reputation far more successfully
than by issuing doctrines to a nonplussed readership with a
sarcastic view on such things. By participating in conversations
about the brand and its activities – in a way they want to and
about things they care about – employees can understand their
employer better, develop stronger belief in the organisation’s
vision and strategy and, over time, build even greater faith in it.
According to Ettridge, most senior management teams are
conscious that employees are generally reluctant to have
conversations with them about the things that really matter to
the brand or how the organisation is being managed, but the
ability to comment and the pulling power of an entire group of
people actively wanting to cite their point of view in the open
changes the game.
Yet it’s still all too easy to get it wrong. ‘The people at the top
need to learn to get out of the way,’ says Ettridge. ‘There needs
to be a recognition that social media is great for employee
engagement precisely because it was created somewhere else,
rather than by the people at the top on the inside. There is a
sense of ownership over social media content amongst
employees, and the brands that will be most successful at
managing their reputations internally will be those that latch
onto this sense of ownership and tap into its potential rather
than trying to replicate, structure or suppress it.’
Therein lies a massive opportunity, and not doing so poses
risks too. The risks are that other organisations around you may
be doing employee engagement better, and if you don’t engage
ON THE INSIDE 139
with people in a way that they’re rapidly coming to expect in

the workplace anyway, then they’re left to their own devices.
They can form opinions by drawing on content and conversations
from the many other sources of influence that now exist out
there. If you’re not at least engaging them in conversation or,
better still, actively participating in all corners of internal
discussion about the brand, then you could well be on a sticky
wicket, to use a charming English cricketing term that probably
needs no further explanation.
Wagging tongues, willing ears

We have mouths, and bits on the sides and fronts of our heads
that, if we’re lucky, allow us to talk, hear and see. People will
always talk, and people will always listen, to some extent. And
then they might do something with that information that creates
influence, hence the crux of reputation.
You know this, and have known it since childhood. Yet, too
often, internal communications planning fails to grasp these
most basic tenets. Tongues will always wag and ears will always
prick up so that other tongues wag elsewhere. It’s called gossip,
and most brands see it as a problem rather than something to
embrace.
Pre-Internet, internal communication could backfire. Internal
memos could become the subject of gossip, and dissent, for all
the wrong reasons. Computerised memos often only sped the
rate at which gossip spread, rather than turning it to the brand’s
advantage. The corporate intranet seemed like a great idea
when it was heralded as a new way of coalescing staff in the late
1990s. Today’s media options call for far broader thinking on
how best to communicate information and tap into the human
tendency to gossip in digesting and sharing it.
‘People don’t use structures for this,’ says Ettridge. ‘When you
impose them, people don’t want to use them. The Internet is far
140 BRAND ANARCHY
faster than the tools we’ve been trying to utilise in years gone
by. But it brings with it an increased emphasis on leadership
and an increased requirement to share information much
faster. Brands need to be actively engaged with their employees
all the time, not just saving up choice communiqués for the
opportune or seemingly appropriate moment, which typically
used to be something issued to staff on a monthly or even less
frequent basis.’
People will always be fascinated by what goes on in the
boardroom. There will always be a need for certain information
to remain confidential, but innovative brands are now
experimenting with going far further than they ever have
before, using social media to engage employees in conversations
and information sharing about what’s going on at the top of the
organisation, albeit to a restricted extent. Tweeting from, or
straight after, board meetings? It’s worth thinking about.
Listening to employees’ conversations online and using them
as part of the decision-making process at the top of the company?
Seems pretty sensible, depending on the matter in hand. It all
adds up to a need for brave and visible leadership, and that’s not
typically out of synch with the mandates or aspirations of senior
managers in many firms. The challenge tends to be in getting
them to communicate in ways that still seem alien to many.
The reality is that it is impossible for organisations to prevent
their employees from connecting amongst themselves online.
Even if access to social media is banned on work equipment,
they’ll do it at home. If they want to, they’ll always find a way.
You couldn’t gag them before the Internet arrived, and now
doing so has the potential to backfire – spectacularly.
Brands today need to have a broad and astute approach to
how they consider using any and all forms of media, but also to
which tools are the best for certain types of communication.
The great corporate intranet experiment may have provided
ON THE INSIDE 141
some interesting ways of sharing text-based information, but its

stifled and structured nature could not hope to provide a
platform for conversations around a brand in the way that social
media can. Increasingly, brands are realising that those
conversations shouldn’t just be in words, but in pictures and
moving images too. Just like the conventional media on the
outside, they’re learning what types of content – governed by
editorial nous – are most likely to get people to engage with
brands and, ultimately, become a fully signed-up participant in
the most important conversations.
There is a reason that subeditors on newspapers lay out pages
with pictures first and then flow the words around them:
pictures can often communicate things with greater power and
precision, can garner greater interest and retention, and so
tend to get talked about more. Talk enhances reputation, and
the right reputation can lead to sales. Media companies are now
learning this about video too, in that it can be a useful
instructional tool or can be more engaging that text or static
images alone. So brand managers should not just be thinking
about how to infiltrate chat online, but how to use a rich tapestry
of content to get their people talking, get them thinking about
things by the intervention of clued-up content and, as a result,
make a positive impact on their brand’s reputation.
Being part of the conversations gives brands a direct route to
addressing the rumour mill and snuffing out incorrect
information. It avoids the risk of dissent or dissatisfaction
festering because the company hasn’t intervened to address a
particular issue. It enables the most important information in
the business to be communicated to people in a way that the
employees want, and in a way that gives them the ability to be
heard.
It needs to be well planned of course. But as Internet-based
communication becomes woven into the fabric of our daily
142 BRAND ANARCHY
lives, smart brands are realising that the risk of not being part
of the conversation far outweighs any lingering concerns about
the risks of not communicating effectively.
You’re a media brand, yes?

It became the flavour-of-the-month a couple of years ago for
communications strategists to try to convince all companies
that they were now, in the age of Internet-based communication,
media companies. That’s not to say that they’re all publishing
companies, but the point is that so many companies and their
brands are being talked about online now, and getting involved
in those discussions is no longer even optional, so in effect
every brand is also a publisher of its own content. It’s a fairly
largesse way of assessing a pretty obvious situation, but there’s
something in it.
The reality is that every brand that has any level of public
awareness whatsoever has always been, and will always be, a
‘media brand’ by definition. The difference is in the frequency
of attention brands now get from diversifying media, and the
expectations of brands to communicate more. As has been
covered elsewhere in this book, brands must now find ways to
communicate constantly with their audiences, and make the
right choices about how and why to do that. From an internal
communications standpoint, the implications of being a media
brand – a brand that must work media to its advantage – are
that it’s no longer feasible to write and farm out the odd
communiqué here and there or, worse still, be mute.
Changing media has placed a greater demand on brands to
communicate internally. Knowing where to start can be tricky
though.
Digital media, and the changes that are happening in all other
media too, mean that there are more opportunities than ever
before for information to be broadcast to staff through a planned
ON THE INSIDE 143
programme of communication that is targeted directly at them.

The problem is that while digital media may provide a faster
way of getting messages across than in a paper- or meeting-
based world, it’s still just amounts to sticking a message up on a
wall and hoping that people will think and say the right sort of
things about it, providing of course that they understand it in
the first place.
What social media gives – and what owned and earned (or
conventional) media can give too if the content is well planned
and delivered – is the ability to engage people. In this case, the
people who work for the owners of the brand. Engagement is
what most social media types will talk about until the cows
come home. Engagement is also what many brand managers
have been seeking through a series of experimental and, now,
more structured and long-term initiatives to capture the
eyeballs of the audience and keep them looking. And ideally,
the audience will go further than merely looking and will
interact with the brand in a way that fosters their loyalty and
triggers willingness to both buy and recommend.
Looking inside the organisation, loyalty, commitment to the
cause and ambassadorship to the outside world are the typical
outcomes that a brand really looks for. But given this,
engagement seems to stop short of how a more effective type of
internal communication could be applied. Let’s face it, the
people are already engaged to some extent in that they turn up
for work and keep coming back. The ability to go beyond
engagement holds new possibilities for brands looking to get
more from how they communicate with their own employees.
What they should be looking for, although they may not know
it, is participation.
144 BRAND ANARCHY
Becoming part of the action

Participation with the brand in conversations that affect both
the brand and its employees is what organisations should be
setting their sights on. It is the only sure-fire way to make
employees want to keep conversing with you in order to
develop a relationship that moves beyond understanding to
trust and, ultimately, to faith.
But you can’t make communication work in this way while a
‘wall’ remains in the middle. First you must engage: to do that
you need to have brand content that people can digest, comment
on and forward to others. The content has to be relevant,
appealing, thought-provoking and in line with the organisation’s
vision, values and both immediate and long-term priorities.
That said, it needs to convey the information with an editorial
touch applied, so that it is either really informative or
appropriately entertaining. Or both.
Moreover, this content shouldn’t just come from the brand
itself – it needs to have a human touch. But to attain the kind of
attention from the internal audience that turns functional
engagement into emotional participation, people have to be not
just visible but actually communicating. This is the part that a
lot of senior executives seem to either thrive on or struggle
with. What should they say, and how often should they say it?
Do they actually have to do it themselves, or can it be
ghostwritten? How frequent should the communication be and
how on earth can the potential level of individual engagement
required be fulfilled by any one person? The brand may be
aiming for communication that is both authentic and
transparent, but what about the things they they’re duty bound
or commercially compelled to hold back?
These are all valid questions. But there are viable answers to
all of them, so long as there is a cohesive internal and external
reputation plan in place that is rooted in both the art and science
ON THE INSIDE 145
of editorial, joined-up appropriately with other marketing and

business development plans and which, most importantly of
all, has the full and frank backing of a brand that appreciates
that media change equals opportunity as well as threat, and a
need to do things differently.
And it’s happening anyway

That need, as we’ve already examined, doesn’t just exist because
fragmented and digitising media is creating new threats and
new opportunities for brands and how they communicate. The
truth is that staff are using new media to undertake internal
communications themselves, whether you like it or not.
Today, in the UK at least, most statistics show that workers
are more likely to be using social media in a personal capacity
than not. Conventional media still outshines social media in
total audience figures, but that kind of misses the point: the
lines between them are blurring anyway, and it is the immediacy
and two-way nature of changing media that is forcing
communication methods to change, rather than the fact that
social media in itself now exists.
As two-way media began to bubble up in the mid-2000s, the
people within an organisation became connected to other
people within that organisation. Quickly, that mushroomed
into lots of people who conversed frequently within the
organisation, who perhaps socialised together after work, and
who were increasingly connecting to people outside their
workplace. The network effect had begun. Without going into
the practicalities and possibilities of these interpersonal
relationships, let’s just draw the simple conclusion that all
social media has really done is broken down the differences
between how people used to communicate within the brand’s
four walls and how they did so outside. From an internal
communications perspective, looking at the people they work
146 BRAND ANARCHY
with and who they’re connected to online, few people think

there’s any difference between the content that they share and
comment on for work purposes versus personal purposes. It’s
all just conversation, just like in the real world. Just like in the
office kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil, over lunch, or by the
proverbial water cooler.
So brands have to realise that content they disseminate to
staff with an internal communications agenda will naturally
flow outside of the organisation and have prospective influence
on external audiences. There is no way of stopping that. And
given they’re paid employees of the brand, their influence can
be potent.
The ability of people to input to media rather than just view
or listen to it has extended their level of influence dramatically.
It’s only replicating or forming an alternative channel to what
they were doing already – down the pub, social club, on breaks,
or with friends. But given that the facts and opinions people
choose to communicate via social media rapidly end up
becoming hard-wired into the networks of an external audience,
content developed for internal communications has to become
more sophisticated, better planned and contain more editorial
skill if it is to be commented on favourably beyond the four
walls of an organisation.
Learning by listening
Smart planning and editorial skill will only get you on the road
though. To really go places with your reputation management
internally, you need to go beyond that initial engagement with
employees and ensure that they participate fully in conversations
about, and with a bearing on, the brand. And the only way you
can keep that conversation alive and kicking, and sufficiently
fired up to keep reputation developing, is to do what you must do
to ensure successful conversation in the real world. Listen.
ON THE INSIDE 147
Someone who talks at staff rather than with staff will quickly
become a bore, or an irritant. Brands must first engage, then
drive participation by listening and learning from their
communication with personnel. Having an open ear will enable
the brand to develop conversation in directions that help fulfil
the objectives of the overall communications programme. But
being able to learn from what is heard will enable reputation
development to be far more successful, as conversations can be
kept as relevant as possible, different points of view can be
properly considered, new trends can be tackled, and hitherto
unheard information can be unearthed. If you play your cards
right.
It is practically impossible to anticipate what you might learn
from conversations about the brand, or how or when you might
learn it. Like many of the most crucial pieces of insight that
brands gather in order to plan their communication, some of
the most precious information might simply be tripped across
at random. The key factor here is actually incredibly complex:
it is human behaviour. It might seem the case that human
reactions to information can largely be predicted, but in a
changing media world, you must remain highly focused on the
fickle nature of consumers, the speed at which opinions change
and the impact the network effect of social media has on how
influence flows. Blink and you might miss the juiciest bits.
By studying human behaviour closely, and acting quickly on
fair and accurate interpretations of the data it creates, brands
can begin to attain the appropriate balance of command and
control in their editorial efforts to manage reputation internally.
It’s not just about what they say, or even how they say it – the
so-called sentiment with which facts and opinion are expressed
online. You also have to learn from the way people engage in
order to work out the most effective channels for communicating
with them, and from the way they participate to work out the
148 BRAND ANARCHY
most effective content. It may be that participation in discussion

about a certain topic begins, for example, because images of a
company event have been posted on a photo-sharing site by an
employee. That sparks a humorous debate between employees
on Facebook. More employees discuss it offline, fuelling further
word-of-mouth appeal. Then later, on Twitter, that brand
participates in the now-developed conversation again to bring
some new information into view that’s relevant, but makes a
more serious point about the brand’s intentions. At each stage,
the ways in which content evolves, how participants react to it
and the nuances of how behaviour in a conversation changes
between one media and another, all provide vital information
in the quest to understand how influence is formed, whether
positive or negative. By figuring this out and addressing it in
communications planning, greater command over reputation
can be gained, even if it can never be controlled.
That planning also needs to consider the expectations that
employees will have of the brand when communicating. These,
again, may be complex, but certain factors are likely to be
constant, just like in real conversation. Initially at least, there is
likely to be an expectation that brands may not be completely
honest in what they are communicating, or at least will try to
polish the information as much as possible. That’s an expectation
that can be confounded, perhaps immediately or perhaps over
a period of time, depending on the brand’s communications
history and what the brand is.
Typically though, with honesty will come trust, and with trust
will come respect; so long as explanation and corroboration are
provided in the course of the conversation. It is just not good
enough to simply make claims and statements, to communicate
fact or instruction, and expect it to stick with internal audiences.
Rules, for example, must be explained through participation with
the audience as well as just broadcast at them.
ON THE INSIDE 149
According to Ettridge, the tone of the conversation, as well

as what is communicated, has a bearing on to what extent the
brand is believed and to what extent individual and collective
faith enhances its reputation. ‘The tone of honesty and the
natural expectation of the group of people are what really
make a difference to how successful brands are in doing this.
They can make belief much more realistic, providing they
stick to the truth and are both smart and consistent about how
they communicate it. People will form opinions about how
honest the brand is going to be based on its past history, their
interactions with the people at the top and the way in which
each conversation is approached. In the online world, this
stuff all comes together, and judgement can be practically
instantaneous. It requires a different approach to years gone
by, but one that is to a large extent rooted in common sense,’
he says.
Innovative companies are not just looking at what they used
to do and migrating it to online techniques; they are trying new
things too. Measures such as giving an insider’s view, where
appropriate, on matters being discussed at the top table, and
even opening some of the agenda at board meetings to two-way
conversations with personnel, are being contemplated. It’s all a
long, long way from the noticeboard memo but with proper,
cohesive planning it has the potential to power reputation gains
from the inside, and manage the risks of uncertainty, confusion
and lack of faith.
Once the brand has the respect of its employees, participation
in conversation can nurture true belief in it. And with belief in
the brand, faith in the brand owner – the employer – is within
grasp too. It is within the command of the brand’s communication.
150 BRAND ANARCHY
Summary
• Media change has also changed the way people communicate
and respond to information in the workplace. Has this worked
more in favour of the employee than the employer?
• Gossip has always happened. Questions will always been
asked. There is a natural human curiosity. Brands need to
recognise and work with that rather than against it.
• Do these new forms of media change the game for perception
of the employer brand by employees?
• Brands should realise that staff have always been influenced
by conventional media anyway, but media change has made
the points of influence more diverse and given them the
ability to engage in conversation. That can be a good thing.
• Employers can use modern media to learning from their staff
and listen to them better, for everyone’s benefit.
CHAPTER 7
MONITORING AND THE
MANAGEMENT OF RISK
Listening to customers and markets has become a crucial
function for corporate organisations. #brandanarchy
According to Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, every

two days we now create as much information as we did from
the dawn of civilisation up until 20031. That’s one billion
gigabytes. Much of this content is social and includes images,
blog posts, comments, tweets and Facebook posts. Conversations
about your company and its market are, almost certainly, taking
place on the social web right now. Frequently. But how can an
organisation possibly make sense of this avalanche of data and
figure out what’s relevant?
Speaking at a Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA)
event in London about the future of content2 in June 2011, former
director of BBC World Service and Global News, Richard
Sambrook, described the period when the audience shifted from
having a passive role as the recipient of content from the
broadcaster into an active role, where the BBC and its content was
actively discussed on the web. ‘I distinctly remember the shift
because, running BBC News, you were always used to getting one
or two letters of complaint per week. Some of them were
reasonable, some of them less so, and by and large you would give
them a polite reply, noting their point of view,’ he says.
1 Eric Schmidt data, Techcrunch: techcrunch.com/2010/08/04/

schmidt-data/
2 The future of content with a nod to the past, Holmes Report blog post:
blog.holmesreport.com/index.php/media/the-future-of-content-with-a-nod-
to-the-past/
154 BRAND ANARCHY
The medium for complaints changed from letter to email

around the end of the 1990s as the Internet moved from a
period of intense commercial development into social
application. Sambrook, now chief content officer at public
relations company, Edelman, describes observing the shift.
‘Suddenly, at the turn of the decade, the emails went up and
instead of getting one or two we’d get 20 or 30, and then get 200
or 300. Email was treated then like letters; with a polite reply.
Then, of course, the weight and the pressure built up as the
public really started to express themselves, and some colleagues
very rationally started to engage in discussion and emailed
back. Then what happened, and this is the key point, is that
members of the public started talking to each other without us
and they would have whole conversations about the BBC and
we weren’t included. There were whole websites dedicated to
discussing what we were doing and we weren’t invited. It was
extraordinary.’
Your organisation may not be involved in the conversations
that are taking place about it but the open nature of the web
makes it easier than ever before to monitor what’s being written
– thanks to Google. Google Alerts provides a real-time alert to
content being posted on the web. Used smartly, Google Alerts is
an incredibly powerful tool. Every corporate communicator
should set up services to alert them, in real time, to email
content that is being written about their organisation. Beyond
that you can set up alert services in the markets in which you
operate.
Twitter, with its 200 million users, is the best service to glean
insights on real-time events. Enter your keyword in the search
function on the Twitter website and you’ll see recent tweets
and new ones being posted live. Alternatively, use an application
such as Tweetdeck to set up a dedicated search that opens
within the application. The search variables within Twitter can
MONITORING AND THE MANAGEMENT OF RISK 155
be configured to monitor tweets from within a geographic

location, from particular named accounts, and hashtags on a
given topic. A huge software industry has grown up to deliver
insights into corporate communications. More on that shortly,
but there’s a huge amount that can be achieved at little cost
using the techniques that we have described here.
BP: Brutal Predicament

The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in
20103 was one of the biggest corporate disasters in recent times.
But it was much more than a public relations crisis; it was a full-
blown industrial and environmental disaster and the company
faced an onslaught from both conventional and social media.
The attacks that the company faced from traditional media,
blogs and comments posted on the social web were a very real
example of the fact that, as Sambrook described as a factor of
his latter years at the BBC, organisations don’t own conversations
that take place about their brands any more. The damage to BP
was well documented in the form of a battered share price and
widespread criticism, across all forms of media, from politicians,
activists and consumers. BP couldn’t start the job of repairing
its reputation until it had stopped oil from leaking from the sea
bed. The best that it could hope for was to convey its management
of the clean-up operation and be utterly transparent in its
communication.
‘You can’t PR away what is essentially a human tragedy. It was
a large spill that went on day after day after day. The new
dimension in this crisis [that we hadn’t seen before] was the fact
that it was ongoing, and no one could see the end of it in sight.
3 Timeline: BP oil spill, BBC News:

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-10656239
156 BRAND ANARCHY
Not only was there was an almost unending flow of oil but also an
unending demand for information; and communicators had to
work hard to try and meet that demand to give good information,’
says Neil Chapman, founder of crisis communications firm, Alpha
Voice Communications. He left BP in 2011 after 14 years where
his most recent role was in the unified command centre in the
United States, set up to respond to the Deepwater Horizon
explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The BP disaster was the first major disaster in which social
media played a major role in people calling not only for BP to
address the crisis but also in the organisation’s response effort.
‘Social media played a large part in terms of how people
interacted with the company and with the organisations that
had useful information to impart. The BP spill demonstrates the
challenges there are in trying to monitor what is going on in a
crisis because so much of the news coverage, and of the
resulting conversations, takes place online, in real time. But
real-time conversation gives you an opportunity to get your
own message across, which can help to dispel any negative
commentary,’ adds Chapman.
We had the opportunity to question the former chief executive
of BP, Tony Hayward, in June 20114 when he spoke at a meeting
of the Mandrake networking group in London about the
aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon crisis. He said that the
conversation frenzy on social media created an immense
burden on the communications team on top of the impossible-
to-meet demands for information from the conventional media.
At the height of the crisis, there were approximately 50 people
4 Deepwater Horizon: inside the vicious media war, Speed Communications

blog post: www.speedcommunications.com/blogs/earl/2011/06/16/
deepwater-horizon-inside-the-vicious-media-war
from BP working around the clock to counter inaccurate

information being posted on social networks such as Facebook
and Twitter. It was a social media storm, the like of which had
not been seen before. For the team trying to manage it, the
pressure was immense and the tide impossible to turn.
Conventional media coverage of the accident and subsequent
clean-up operation was ‘vicious’, says Hayward. This point was
mainly levelled at the US media, which led with the story round
the clock for weeks. The demand for information from BP was
insatiable. Hayward claimed that there were inaccuracies in
some of the reporting, and inflated fears about the extent of the
spillage and its impact on the Gulf coast. ‘We were at war with
the media every day. There is no other word for it,’ he adds.
Hayward volunteered that despite BP’s utmost efforts to
communicate clearly, transparently and at breakneck pace,
many mistakes were made. Given his time again he says that he
would have had more of the senior team around him to handle
the media. While the person in overall charge should face the
media, the glare can now be so intense that it is too much for
one person alone to manage.
Hayward was extremely candid about the lessons he’d learnt
from the crisis. The most important was to make sure that
expectations are managed when the entire world is watching.
This referred to the ongoing efforts to cap the leak on the sea
bed. Hayward says that the process and degree of testing
required to cap the well weren’t adequately communicated,
leaving journalists and other commentators to assume that BP
had become increasingly desperate to plug the well rather than
following a clear process.
More efficient processes, including communications and
media planning, may have stopped events spiralling to the
extent that they did. A crisis on the scale of Deepwater had
never happened before so there was no way of either predicting
158 BRAND ANARCHY
or mapping out clear plans. BP wasn’t sufficiently well prepared

but then could any organisation have been adequately prepared
for a crisis on this scale? The main lesson for large organisations
is that plans for crises such as Deepwater should be made and
tested regularly.
Making sense of data

Inevitably, tools are helping brands make sense of the massive
amounts of online data, not only in a crisis but in the day-to-day
operation of their business. Analytic and monitoring services
that would have demanded hefty premiums a decade ago are
now available for free. Google Analytics allows a website owner
to scrutinise traffic visiting their site. Doubleclick Ad Planner5
is a media planning tool that provides insights into websites
that your target customers are likely to visit. Google Insights for
Search allows you to compare search patterns across specific
regions, categories, timeframes and web properties. Andrew
Smith, managing director of public relations, search marketing
and web analytics firm Escherman6, calls these services Google’s
‘databases of intentions’.
‘Consumers are no longer characterised by demographics;
instead they are defined by their search history which is made up
of personal motivation and interests. Google almost certainly
knows more about your web browsing habits than even your
partner and it makes this data freely available via the web. Think
of these services as Google’s gift to the public relations industry,
but it’s also a missed opportunity as few practitioners have taken
the time or the trouble to understand and use these services.
They are broadly the domain of search marketing,’ says Smith.
5 Doubleclick Ad Planner, Google: www.google.com/adplanner/#siteSearch

6 Escherman: www.escherman.com
Monthly clipping reports of press coverage are in effect dead

as a monitoring tool. Companies need real-time data to enable
them to respond and adapt their public relations programmes
as they are implemented rather than after the event. The
feedback loop should be minutes and hours, not weeks or
months. Real-time monitoring combined with editorial nous
makes this a reality. Richard Bagnall, managing director of
Metrica, a global media analysis and public relations
measurement firm, cautions against the march of
industrialisation in web monitoring. Software analysis is useful
in helping to gather data from the web but it requires human
intervention to ultimately make sense of the content.
According to Bagnall, results from automated analysis are
typically only accurate 50 to 60 per cent of the time. To support
his claim he cites a project that analysed and made sense of
more than 100,000 pieces of social media content from an
18-month period for a large technology company that had been
supplied by one of the leading US social media monitoring
companies. Utilising the specialist Boolean search team from
sister media planning, monitoring and evaluation company,
Durrants, and some technologies developed in-house, Bagnall’s
team reduced the number of relevant client mentions by a
third. Metrica’s specialist media analysts then read and
evaluated all of the remaining coverage with the result that the
data reported back to the client showed that just 33,000 of the
posts were actually relevant. One in three.
Man versus machine

In a parallel exercise, Metrica invited some of the leading social
media monitoring tool companies to partake in a trial to prove
which would be the best partnering company. It challenged
them to undertake the same search string over the course of
two weeks, and then the Metrica team compared the results.
160 BRAND ANARCHY
The volumes returned were widely different, by as much as 50

per cent. Next, Metrica took 1,500 clips from the search results
and had media evaluation researchers analyse them for
relevance and sentiment, not once or twice, but on three
occasions, for positive, negative or neutral sentiment. The
results were benchmarked against those from all of the social
media measurement companies to really get a sense of which
companies were providing the most robust data.
Incredibly, the worst performer was accurate only 29 per cent
of the time with its favourability ranking. That’s four per cent
worse than the one in three wager of leaving the result to pure
chance. The next best got the answer right 52 per cent of the
time and the best was only 58 per cent accurate. ‘If you offer me
a lift and there’s a 40 per cent chance I won’t make it home, I’m
not keen to get in in your car. Platform-based monitoring tools
alone aren’t good enough yet for automated analysis. For the
foreseeable future we will need humans to provide context and
meaning to the language and the conversation,’ says Bagnall.
70.00% Sentiment Accuracy

% posts with accurate sentiment
65.00%
60.00% 61.0%
55.00%
50.00% 54.3%
45.00%
40.00%
35.00%
‘CHANCE’
30.00%
29.5%
25.00%
20.00%
Co. A Co. B Co. C
Figure: Percentage of content returned with accurate sentiment analysis

during Metrica’s analysis of social media monitoring tools (Source: Metrica)
Sentiment analysis and other snake oil

Yet, despite Bagnall’s evidence that points to the relative
immaturity of monitoring solutions, the market for such tools is
saturated and it is nigh on impossible to differentiate one
vendor from another. The market for software monitoring tools
is overcrowded. A Media Monitoring Solutions Wiki7 maintained
by web marketer and technologist Ken Burbary lists more than
200 so-called solutions. Software firms have spotted the
opportunity that the market offers for rapid growth. Scrutinising
the context, structure and sentiment of a comment on a blog,
tweet or a post on Facebook is complex. It’s little wonder that
machines struggle.
Consider the following post from a user on Twitter:
‘I’ve just been to Waitrose. Great value but parking with kids
is awful. Thinking of trying M&S but it’s a longer drive.’
The sentiment for Waitrose is both positive and negative. The

shopper likes Waitrose because it offers good value for money
but finds it difficult to park at the store that they visited.
Automated sentiment analysis would almost certainly score the
post as neutral. But in fact, a human being would recognise the
sentiment of the post as negative for Waitrose as it is about to
lose a customer to M&S. Likewise, the post is both positive and
negative for M&S and would most likely be marked up as
neutral by an automated monitoring tool. M&S is gaining a new
customer but its store is further away than Waitrose. A human
would mark the sentiment of the post as positive for M&S.
7 A Wiki of Social Media Monitoring Solutions, Ken Burbary:

http://wiki.kenburbary.com/
162 BRAND ANARCHY
Only a human being would be guaranteed to recognise the

post as negative for Waitrose and would have the insight to flag
the customer to be contacted by Waitrose to determine if their
parking experience could be improved. Likewise, a human
being working for another supermarket or online grocer would
recognise the potential to attract a new customer by persuading
them to try their store or shop online.
For now, language beyond simple assertions of like or dislike
and love or hate is too complex for machines to grasp. Moreover,
a simple red, amber or green traffic light commonly used by
sentiment monitoring tools doesn’t convey the complexity or
meaning of the message. During an hour-long period in
December 2010, we counted 45 messages on Twitter relating to
M&S and more than 90 for Waitrose. It is going to take
considerable resources and organisational change for companies
to be able to process and respond appropriately to such a high
volume of customer contact. There is a reason that some
organisations, notably the majority of retail banks, don’t
entertain engaging on social networks such as Twitter. They
know they wouldn’t be able to cope with the sheer volume of
conversation. These organisations are actively blocking social
interaction channels because they know they will be inundated
with criticism and complaints.
Measure outcomes not outputs

Measuring the success of a communications campaign is not
trivial. For now, the industry is measuring outputs. This is a
fundamental error according to Bagnall, who believes that the
public relations industry is in danger of being bombed back into
the dark ages in which we used proxies such as advertising
equivalent value (AVE) and column inches as a means of
determining the success of a campaign. AVEs were created as a
means of benchmarking the results from a public relations
campaign. The cost of buying the physical space in a media

outlet was calculated and multiplied by a factor of three or four
in recognition of the fact that editorial has more value as a
means of influence than an advertisement. Spot the flaw. The
implicit goal of any campaign was to prove that the total AVE
value was two or three times the cost of buying the space, thus
claiming a respectable return on investment. The industry has
come a long way but remains wedded to counting outputs as a
metric of success. Blog posts, Facebook ‘likes’, comments and
tweets (like headline fonts, photograph sizes and circulation
figures) are all logged and charted as a demonstration of success.
‘We’re still counting and looking at quantity but it’s meaningless
without context. You can’t have a one size fits all approach
without disregard for the business’, says Bagnall.
Herein is the issue. The public relations industry has avoided
creating a universal measurement system because it deemed it
too difficult. No two public relations campaigns are the same.
It’s an issue that has challenged practitioners for the last 50
years and, as a result, led to the public relations industry being
sidelined because, unlike other business functions, it is unable
to show a relationship between investment and return. As a
result, the industry has grasped onto false metrics of advertising
value equivalent (AVE), and the opportunities created by a
campaign for interaction with the target audience, in an attempt
to prove its worth. Fixing this problem requires industry-wide
education and it needs everyone operating within the industry
to challenge the objectives set for a public relations campaign
and ensure that they are aligned directly to the objectives of the
business. The measurement framework, or infrastructure, then
needs to be created to support the measurement of the outcomes
of the public relations campaign and demonstrate return on
investment. It is not going to be easy, but it’s a difficult issue
that lies at the root of reputation of the public relations industry
164 BRAND ANARCHY
itself. We’ll look at how some individuals and organisations

within the industry are tackling this issue head on in Chapter 8.
Flawed metrics: reach and readership

In a bid to demonstrate the pointlessness of counting variables
such as reach and readership, Realwire’s Adam Parker and
Escherman’s Andrew Smith teamed up in August 20108 to
undertake a project that demonstrated the difference between
the editorial reach of a website versus the engagement of
Internet users that visited the site.
‘For decades, public relations has been viewed as a means to
gain editorial coverage that provided the greatest number of
opportunities to see a mention of a company name, at a
significantly lower cost than advertising. Because the means of
providing a verifiable link between editorial coverage and
business impact was either prohibitively expensive or just not
possible, there has been a largely accepted assumption that
positive press coverage is valuable. The notion of measuring
engagement with editorial content was largely theoretical.
Circulation and readership figures were treated as proxies for
engagement,’ says Smith.
If a publication had 10 million online readers, then the
assumption is that a large proportion must, in some way, be
engaged with some or all of the content. Yet how can we be sure
which content and to what degree? But for online PR, Google
tools provide hard numbers. Parker and Smith define reach as
the number of views that a page receives, and engagement as
the amount of time that a person spends on a page. The pair
8 Online news title readership and engagement analysis Slideshare

presentation, Andrew Smith and Adam Parker: www.slideshare.net/
realwire/online-news-titles-readership-and-engagement-analysis-280710
scrutinised the reach versus engagement for 50 online news

sites ranging from The Guardian to The Economist and found
that visitors spend a widely varying amount of time on different
news sites; the pair also predicted how many words visitors are
likely to have read per page. They found that, for the period of
the study, the average UK visitor to The Economist website
spends around 122 seconds per page whereas the average UK
visitor to the Vogue site spends around 33 seconds per page. If
you accept that a typical reader can consume around 200 words
of content per minute then a visitor to The Economist is going to
consume around 400 words versus around 100 for a Vogue
reader.
As a general rule, specialist titles seem to have lower numbers
of visitors and page views, but tend to have far higher
engagement with content. For consumer titles and newspaper
website, the opposite is the case. There is one exception to the
rule. News sites such as Reuters act as a syndication service and
have both a high level of reach and engagement. A UK visitor to
the Reuters website spends 214 seconds per website consuming
more than 700 words. The lessons for online public relations
are clear: plan your campaigns and target content at sites in
which your audience is engaged; and there is little value to be
gained in chasing sites with large circulation numbers as
engagement is likely to be low. Finally, and this maxim has
always been the case, the higher up a story the mention of your
organisation, the greater prominence it achieves and the more
likely it is to be read. Some things never change then.
Peer metrics
A group of social media analytics firms are now specialising in
tracking and ranking the contributions of individuals within
social networks. These include Klout, based in San Francisco,
and PeerIndex, based in London. Klout measures a user’s
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influence across the social web by collecting data from each of

the major social networks. Scores range from one to 100, with
higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of
influence based on reach, amplification and network size.
PeerIndex takes this approach a stage further by scrutinising
activity, audience and authority. It also provides a single score
for a user’s social media influence but, perhaps most usefully, it
breaks down scores across a range of topic areas which include
arts, technology, science, medicine, lifestyle, sports, politics
and business. This recognises that, while a user might be
influential about technology, they may not be about food or
football.
Peer metrics are a shortcut to evaluating an individual’s
relative influence on a topic within a social network. They
provide a mechanism by which to identify the influence of one
individual versus another on a given topic. This, in particular,
is the benefit of PeerIndex over Klout. Its application in
developing and planning marketing campaigns are clear.
PeerIndex allows me to identify the thought leaders in a given
market and reach out to them via their social network. Peer
metrics will almost certainly become part of the due diligence
process for human resource teams and it is inevitable that
organisations will start to use peer metrics as a means to
prioritise responses to complaints made via social media.
Customer service teams that receive large volumes of social
media traffic will inevitably prioritise an individual with a
higher peer metric.
Can crowds really be wise?

Much of the information created on the web, especially the
social web, is utter nonsense. It’s a common viewpoint for
which you’d struggle to put up a case for the defence on a
Sunday morning on Twitter. We’ve already explored in
Chapter 2 how social networks don’t check facts. Anyone can

publish and share information, irrespective of motivation. That
openness is a benefit as well as a challenge. It means
organisations can face assault from anyone armed with an
Internet connection. In this section we’ll look at what brands
can do to verify the authenticity of content and what are the
legal jurisdictions on the web.
In The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki9 described how
information is shared and assimilated by a group resulting in
decisions that are better for the group than those that would be
made by any single individual. We’ve already cited numerous
examples of organisations being called out via social media for
failing to meet the expectation of their audience. Technology
both facilitates and accelerates communication by crowds. But
can crowds make the wrong call? Almost certainly, the answer
is yes.
August 2011 saw riots on the streets of several British cities,
triggered by the death of Mark Duggan at Tottenham Hale in
north-east London, apparently at the hands of a police firearm
specialist. Messages spread quickly on social networks wherever
trouble occurred. But for every tweet or Facebook post which
reported areas to avoid, there were numerous which cited
rumour or speculation.
In this instance, the crowd panicked. At one point during the
crisis, an image circulated on Twitter of the army assembling
tanks at Bank underground station. It was sufficiently credible
to be reposted and retweeted, and so spread quickly from
mobile device to mobile device. Anyone who had opened the
image on a device with a larger screen would have seen the
9 Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds. Anchor Books, reprint edition,

16 Aug 2005.
168 BRAND ANARCHY
Arabic writing on the side of the tanks. A Google search turned

up the original source as being Tahrir Square, Cairo. The image
had been taken earlier in the year, in February 2011, when the
Egyptian military there cracked down on protestors.
Crap detection: verifying Internet sources

News organisations such as the Associated Press, the BBC and
Thomson Reuters are working hard to verify content sourced
from social networks as part of their news-gathering efforts so
that original content can be used as a source. In locations such
as Syria, where governments outlaw media organisations, social
media provides a useful context to the news-gathering process
but only when content has been verified. News organisations
can invest significant effort in qualifying a source but what of
the individual that spots an insightful message in their
newsfeed? How should you verify it before sharing it with your
network or retweeting the content? Organisations need to be
able to determine the authenticity of an individual and the
content that they share in social networks. It has implications
for sharing and responding to comments.
Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social
Revolution10, published in 2003, believes that social media
literacy is critical for anyone using the Internet. Rheingold is a
critic, writer, and teacher; his specialties are based on the
cultural, social and political implications of modern
communication media. He cites five competences that he
believes are critical for any Internet user, namely attention,
participation, cooperation, network awareness and critical
10 Rheingold, Howard. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Perseus

Books, 2003.
consumption. It is this latter attribute, namely critical thinking,

or what Rheingold calls ‘crap detection’ 11, that we should all
have when searching and assigning credibility to content that
we consume online and detect information tainted by ignorance,
misinformation or deception.
Rheingold credits Ernest Hemingway with originally
inventing the phrase ‘crap detection’ in an interview for the US
magazine Atlantic in 1954. Hemingway is reported to have said,
‘Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector
operating inside him. It also should have a manual drill and a
crank handle in case the machine breaks down.’
Detecting the credibility of content online starts by asking:
who is the author? ‘If you can’t find one, or if the source is
hidden behind a pseudonym, turn the scepticism meter to the
top of the dial,’ says Rheingold. Web domain websites such as
easywhois.com enable the registrar of a domain to be checked.
If the source provides a means to ask questions, communicate
or comment, it improves the chance that the content will be
authentic. The same rules apply in social media. Is the original
source a real person with a photo, contact information and
credible biography, or is it clearly a spammer? Secondly,
scrutinise the context. Does the author have prior citations on
the Internet? Do they link to reputable sources? Do people link
to their content? Who do they engage with online? And what
sort of conversations are they having? Thirdly, use social media
analytics tools such as Klout and PeerIndex, combined with
search engines, to interrogate the social media ‘capital’ of an
individual.
11 Rheingold, Howard. ‘Crap Detection 101’, San Francisco Chronicle, 30

June 2009.
170 BRAND ANARCHY
During a breaking news story such as the 2011 London riots,

time is compressed and it becomes more difficult to perform
these checks, but that is arguable that they are more critical
than ever. Individuals have a responsibility to their networks to
authenticate the credibility of content before sharing it with
their networks. Do not ever rely on spoon-fed information from
the Internet. Everyone needs to be their own information
analyst and be able to question the authenticity of content.
Facts can be checked using your network but it also means
venturing beyond the echo chamber of your immediate
community to be exposed to alternative viewpoints.
Legal process on the Internet

What happens when its goes badly wrong? Social media is a brave
new world of free speech according to its proponents. It’s an
indeterminate location online that is open, borderless and free
from the shackles of editorial control where activists are able to
communicate freely. But what happens when the conventions of
a social network don’t provide an adequate mechanism for
response or retribution? Individuals and organisations need a
mechanism to protect their reputation and for now that’s still the
law. Conventional wisdom says that it is not possible for media
law to hold up online and cite the Trafigura case in October 2009.
Trafigura (a large international oil, metals and minerals trader)
obtained an injunction to prevent an MP from tabling a question
about the company in Parliament. Media commentators got very
excited when a huge number of conversations on Twitter
seemingly forced Trafigura’s lawyers, Carter-Ruck, to back down.
But, contrary to popular opinion, the injunction was overturned
following an appeal by lawyers from The Guardian and not the
debate on Twitter.
Did we observe a game-changing moment? Not a chance.
There are currently more than 300 so-called superinjunctions
holding tight in the UK. Is the Trafigura incident a one off? It

almost certainly is not. But don’t let the Trafigura case fool you.
While we would always advocate a legal response as the last
resort, social media is not beyond the reach of copyright,
defamation or privacy laws, according to media litigator Gideon
Benaim, partner at Schillings.
‘The law of defamation applies equally online as well as
offline, whatever the legal jurisdiction. A story used to break
without warning and then die away relatively quickly. Now,
thanks to social media, stories frequently bubble under for a
time and, if they can be dealt with before the tipping point, a
crisis can often be averted. When a story does break, social
media typically extends its lifecycle far beyond traditional
means. It is important that corporate organisations have a plan
for dealing with attacks on their reputation,’ he says.
The judiciary’s attitude to media in the UK has been to treat
it as they would any other form of social media and apply the
same laws of copyright and defamation. It’s booming business
for lawyers who are active in this area as cases come before the
courts on a weekly basis. Here’s an example. Jeremiah Barber,
who posted child pornography along with a defamatory
comment on the Facebook page of his former friend Raymond
Bryce, was fined £10,000 in July 201012. Barber, who had fallen
out with Bryce over an £80 debt, removed the post within 24
hours. But Bryce contended that there had been 11 links to the
post, two comments from viewers, and more than 800 people
would have been able to view the material and so he sued
Barber for the stress he endured.
12 Law student wins £10,000 after being branded a paedophile: www.

telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/7912731/Law-student-wins-10000-
after-being-branded-a-paedophile-on-Facebook.html
172 BRAND ANARCHY
Protecting identity in networks

Social networks deal quickly with trademark infringements and
cases of deliberate misinformation. Trademarks provide legal
protection against a brand name being hijacked online and
contrary to perceived wisdom, the process of enforcement is
straightforward. Both advertising and social networks recognise
the importance of protecting a brand online and, once alerted
to abuse, will typically move quickly to correct the situation.
Trademark owners should follow guidance set out by individual
network owners.
Brand protection
International design and innovation company, Seymourpowell13,
had to enforce trademarks on Facebook, Twitter and Google’s
advertising network. When Seymourpowell came to register its
company name on Twitter, it found that someone had got
there first. But by following Twitter’s trademark violation
process, the company was able to claim @seymourpowell for
itself. ‘The process was very simple. We completed a violation
claim and within a matter of days Twitter released the account
to us. Similarly, Facebook removed a spurious page that was
hijacking our company name in a matter of hours,’ says Tim
Duncan, Seymourpowell’s head of public relations.
Seymourpowell has also used its trademark to successfully
stop competitors from bidding on its name as a Google AdWord.
Google respects trademarks and prohibits infringements by
advertisers. ‘In each instance of abuse we followed Google’s
advice and contacted the site owner that was abusing our
13 www.seymourpowell.com
company name as a paid-for search term, pointing out that it

was a trademark. In each instance they ceased their
activity immediately,’ says Duncan. Organisations must
monitor and police their trademarks online and take
immediate action to address breaches. A robust monitoring
policy is critical.
Whether or not a business wants to invest in online and social

media monitoring depends entirely on whether it wants to
listen to the conversations taking place online about its business
and the markets in which it operates. We’re often asked to
explain the return on investment of social media. I encourage
anyone who asks that question to head online and explore the
conversations taking place around their business and its
markets and determine whether they have a value to their
organisation. We suggest that they almost certainly will.
Summary
• Conversations are taking place online about your organisation
and its markets. Social media monitoring enables you to listen
to what is being said.
• Monthly clipping reports are useless as a monitoring tool.
Software tools enable online content to be monitored and
recorded in real time.
• Automated sentiment monitoring should be complemented
with human analysis.
• Plan campaigns where your audience is engaged, not by
chasing large and almost certainly irrelevant audiences.
• Peer metrics are a shortcut to evaluating an individual’s
relative influence on a topic within a social network.
174 BRAND ANARCHY
• Editorial intelligence is required to determine the credibility

of a source online.
• Legal process is the final recourse for defamation and
intellectual property infringements online.
CHAPTER 8
MEASURING REPUTATION
From an obsession with counting stuff to an obsession with
measuring the right stuff. But what next? #brandanarchy
Reputation is the result of what you do, what you say and what
people therefore think and say about you.
So the digitisation of media – all media – can actually help in
the measurement of reputation, because what you do and say,
and what people therefore say or ‘hear’ about you, can be
tracked. It can be assessed and analysed. It can become the
subject of a multitude of impressive graphs.
And if you engage in the right way, or ask the right questions,
it can also enable you to find out what the audience truly thinks
about your brand, which can have an underlying, yet powerful
influence on your brand’s reputation.
Yet while the management of reputation is the classic
definition of PR, many marketers are now looking for faster
gains from both social and conventional media campaigns. The
drive to assess business outcomes – the direct commercial gains
that a brand makes by undertaking an external public relations
exercise – is rapidly gaining ground as media digitisation, a
joined-up desire to be able to measure those outcomes and
better analysis tools for doing so combine to take the
measurement of public relations, traditionally largely a random
activity, to new heights.
Conversely, if brands are able to measure the success of
public relations exercises by clinically assessing business
outcomes, so they should also be able to assess the negative
impact that adverse circumstances have on commercial
fortunes. While this is an area that, to date, has been far less
explored than its more positive outcome cousin – public
178 BRAND ANARCHY
relations tends to like to focus on the good stuff; it is in its

nature – it could have equally powerful value for brands
wanting to quantify and best manage their exposure to risk in
an increasingly digitised and now two-way media world.
The sum of this, however, is that digitisation brings with it the
ability to measure things better, and that is forcing the industry
to do so in a way that puts a monetary value on the outcomes of
investment. To date, most of the work has been in measuring
the short-term impact, or the effect, of one-off campaigns. Over
time, measurement will have to broaden its horizons to address
the impact of perception and, therefore, reputation.
The important thing, ultimately, is that the correlation
between public relations investment and measurable change in
reputation becomes an identifiable and understandable item in
the profit and loss accounts of brands. We are not there yet. But
we are edging closer, and the digitisation of media means that
– without the application of supposed ‘industry science’ – that
correlation is not far from reality.
Equally, though, as with all other types of sales and marketing
activity, being able to count to the penny what impact an
activity has had on the bottom line is a fool’s errand. This is
because the time and, therefore, cost of doing so may outweigh
the benefits, and because we are ultimately talking about the
hearts and minds of human beings, and so any measurement
can never be absolute.
Making it count
The modern public relations industry has an obsession with
counting things.
But actually, public relations has always been preoccupied
with counting – it’s just that a lot of that counting, at least from
an evaluation perspective, has historically been of limited
value. In some cases, it has been next to meaningless, and in
MEASURING REPUTATION 179
most cases the counting has been served up with a hefty dollop
of claims about how the results prove that the editorial coverage
gained makes a marked difference to the business. Largely,
such claims were wholly unsubstantiated.
Today, public relations is able to get much closer to a
meaningful answer to the eternal question: ‘Is all this public
relations stuff really worth it for my business?’ We don’t yet
have the full answer, but it is being put together, piece by piece.
What evaluation experts in the industry are still doing is
counting things – only now, because of media digitisation,
they’re able to do so with greater accuracy and with a greater
sense of meaning. And it’s largely automated.
Counting alone will not get you very far, though. Imagine you
have swathe of positive reviews of a new product on Internet
news sites, but one scathing one in a national Sunday newspaper,
and sales have been thin since launch. Do those positive reviews
have any real commercial value in this case, regardless of how
many you achieved? Yet if every piece of editorial had been
positive, what notional value would you place on the newspaper
piece versus that of the others?
So, volume alone is something of an evaluation cul-de-sac.
The quality of editorial – what it says – matters too, but so does
whether the ‘right’ people read it, how and where they read it,
the extent to which they are influenced by it and, ultimately,
whether it compels them to buy from you immediately or more
open to buying from you in the future. Moreover, there’s the
question of whether they will recommend you to others, which
has long been held up as one of the most powerful factors of
editorial influence yet continues to be one of the trickier ones
to evaluate in raw commercial terms.
180 BRAND ANARCHY
Data with destiny

What can brand managers count meaningfully today then,
given the upheaval in the media and the fact that there are both
direct and indirect routes to influencing audiences through
editorial? Well, the straight answer is that they can count pretty
much anything: readership, page impressions, resulting search
rankings, you name it – if the data is available from the media
in question, totting up is a relatively simple exercise. The
number of inbound sales enquiries can even be measured and
attributed either directly or indirectly to the investment,
providing the relevant product or service is purely being
publicised through editorial.
The problem is that this only tells you whether the volume of
your publicity is increasing, not whether that makes any
difference to your business. An obvious and much-made
statement, perhaps, but it remains the case. Analytical tools are
springing up practically every day to help brands attach some
commercial logic to the content that appears about them, or
their markets, on the Internet. These aim to measure things
like the degree of influence exerted by editorial over a set
period of time, the sentiment of the audience towards a brand,
how social media conversations about a particular brand
compare with those about other brands, and the impact of social
media content on editorial content in conventional media. This
is all extremely useful information, and a lot of people have
invested bags of energy, time and money in enabling its
accessibility. What it doesn’t tell us, of course, is whether people
have opened, or will open, their wallets as a direct consequence
of having viewed or been told about the editorial. A consumer
might have long harboured strong feelings about the Ferrari
brand, read a lot about it and will always circulate the brand’s
content to other interested parties when it’s spotted. But unless
he wins the pools, he won’t be buying one anytime soon.
The summary is this – brands now have ready access to far

more data than they’ve ever had before in order to try to assess
the value of ‘their’ editorial. Yet this value largely remains a
likely or best-guess value, as putting pound signs in front of the
results of public relations investment is the only way that public
relations can ever be charted all the way through to true
commercial outcomes.
It means that there is still much to do to make public relations
measurable to the enduring satisfaction of finance managers
and, therefore, to all stakeholders. Yet if your brand is being
slated by a braying mob of consumers across the world which
ends up eroding years of careful imaging-building, you don’t
really care about how much commercial impact the editorial
and its influence are having. You just want it to stop, because
the commercial outcome is pretty bloody obvious.
Does it really do that?

But even if we were able to show in pounds and pence how
successful a public relations campaign has been, was it really
the editorial in question that forced the purchase? Would the
customer have bought the product or service anyway? Was a
customer about to buy it but then circumstances changed and,
for some unknown reason, they decided not to?
PR is not alone in facing this challenge over absolute proof.
Here’s an example. Imagine that a salesman’s new tie (which
he bought with his own money, from a reputable store, in a
sale) may have had some impact on a customer being sufficiently
impressed to sign a £10 million contract with the salesman’s
organisation. Where is the saving on the cost of the tie, or the
salesman’s salary, pro rata to the amount of time invested in
winning the contract, in the P&L? But the point is that, rather
than wanting to undertake extremely granular measurement so
that every element of public relations investment can be
182 BRAND ANARCHY
commercially assessed, brands should instead focus on the

bigger picture, and then drill down to specifics – where that
makes logical sense.
There is a level of detail that is, ultimately, counterproductive.
Yet what the digitisation of media – conventional and social –
gives brands is a unilateral power to at least see what it is they’re
dealing with when it comes to influence over reputation. To the
letter. Their challenge is to make sense of what they see, and
apply commercial value to it in a way that’s appropriate for them.
There are limits to what can be done. You may be able to see
everything that’s going on that could conceivably affect brand
reputation, and have the right tools and the right approach to
make sense of it. You may be able to apply that data to your
commercial goals so that the impact on your success can be
assessed pragmatically and logically. You may be able to draw a
thick, straight line between what you spend on public relations
and what money it makes for you.
But beyond that, brands must realise that regardless of how
technologically advanced media and routes to editorial become,
PR’s value will never be measured through purely clinical
means. That’s because we are dealing with human beings, and
human beings are fickle. The only way you can ever truly
assess the commercial impact of editorial influence over a
customer is to go and ask them whether the editorial was the
sole reason for their purchasing decision.
And even then they may not remember, or may not want to
admit that they’ve been swayed.
The search goes on

There is a proverbial elephant in the proverbial room though.
Search.
The impact of editorial on your reputation is no longer just
that lots of people may see it on one particular day if they read
the newspaper, tune in to the TV or listen to the radio. Impact

is lasting, because much of the editorial content is preserved for
eternity on the Internet, and is also voluntarily sought out by
audiences. Rather than browsing media and chancing across
content, they actively seek it and search engines retrieve it for
them.
Moreover, the further up a search list that some editorial
content appears, the greater the inference that it has more
influence, and so the more likely it is to affect brand reputation.
This is clearly an area where conventional and digital media
are coming together to create a combined impact on reputation
but, more importantly, there are profound implications for
reputation when audiences actively go looking for editorial
about brands – or set up trackers to automate the process –
rather than effectively waiting for it to fall into their laps.
Does that really matter? Won’t audiences probably, or
eventually, see the content anyway, so all search does is drag it
to their attention earlier? Those points are true, but pretty
primitive in the scheme of things. Search is becoming a major
force in purchasing decisions for all manner of goods and
services. What is written or ‘said’ about your brand can have a
direct impact on decisions to buy, while archived editorial
content can impinge on brand reputation for years to come,
depending on the publisher, the search terms and the
circumstances.
The positive thing about search for public relations practitioners
is that it can be extremely straightforward to measure some
commercial outcomes. Take, for instance, someone searching
for a product, finding that a national newspaper’s online review
of it is third in a Google search under the product brand name,
reading the review and then clicking on the brand’s website to
purchase. The audit trail that this leaves is like the consumer’s
thought process mapped out for all to see – the downside is that
184 BRAND ANARCHY
negative editorial will be just as prominent, if not more so, and it

can linger in archives indefinitely.
There are myriad implications for brand reputation that stem
from the mechanics of search and how it is used to track down
editorial content. What’s more, those mechanics are constantly
changing, so there is rule book that can be adopted now and will
stand the rest of time for brand managers worried about the
potency and longevity of good and bad news. The precise impact
that search results have on reputation is very much a work in
progress, although for the time being it is an inflammatory
concern for brands already struggling to deal with how technology
has made the world of media a far more dangerous territory.
Search is another facet of modernising media that the public
relations industry must wrestle with as it works to find its feet
in a very different landscape.
What is the public relations industry doing?

Before social media became mainstream, most public relations
industry conversations about evaluation tended to go in circles.
They were small circles and, normally, the same circles.
Progress it was not. The ability for audiences to answer back
and engage in direct dialogue with brands has forced the issue
– public relations is now having to develop a commercially
mature and resilient approach to evaluation for the first time.
In fairness, media modernisation was driving that change
anyway, but the advent of social media put the need for a new
kind of evaluation beyond question.
For a while, the question was where to start. Then the
industry, led by those with most to gain from a more progressive
approach, began to make noises that PRs would have to agree
on a basic set of principles for measuring returns on investment
in order that we could then work collectively to establish how
best to do it.
What the public relations industry needs to do, and is working

hard to do, is to get brands to understand what they’re up
against, and what choices they need to make in determining an
evaluation model that is right for their business. That alone is
not easy, but to compound matters it’s a moving target – further
media change will only make evaluation even more complex,
while further digitisation will give us more things to measure.
The public relations industry is inching towards the type of
evaluation that modern media will require. Meanwhile, calls
from businesses for public relations measurement to be absolute
continue unabated; businesses want clinical measurement of
public relations investment.
Death of Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE)

AVE was finally effectively ‘buried’ as a means of evaluation in
June 2010 by the Association for Measurement and Evaluation
of Communication (AMEC) which brought together a group of
experts in Barcelona to agree on a set of measurement and
evaluation principles. The Barcelona Principles were conceived
by Barry Leggetter, executive director of AMEC, after what he
describes as a ‘light bulb moment’ to tackle one of the key issues
that the public relations industry had always avoided; the
development of a universal framework for the measurement of
PR.
Leggetter acknowledges the drive of Dr David B. Rockland,
partner and CEO of Ketchum Pleon Change and Global Research
and chairman of AMEC’s North American Chapter in taking the
Barcelona Principles idea forward – and making it work. The
resulting Barcelona Principles1 consist of seven statements that
1 The Barcelona Principles, AMEC: www.amecorg.com/amec/Barcelona%20

Principles%20for%20PR%20Measurement.pdf
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aim to move the public relations profession from measuring

outputs towards evaluating outcomes:
1. Goal setting and measurement are important

2. Media measurement requires quantity and quality
3. AVEs are not the value of public relations
4. Social media can, and should be, measured
5. Measuring outcomes is preferred to measuring media
results (outputs)
6. Organisational results and outcomes should be measured
whenever possible
7. Transparency and replicability are paramount to sound
measurement
‘We’re proud of the fact that Barcelona put measurement firmly

on the agenda for the first time. It defined a measurement
framework and it has been rewarding to see how the industry
has taken the Principles to heart. Each week we see
announcements from public relations agencies and
organisations announcing that they are ditching AVEs. It has
resulted in initiatives by public relations organisations
worldwide,’ says Leggetter. In the UK, the Chartered Institute
of Public Relations (CIPR) and the Public Relations Consultants
Association (PRCA) have both established measurement toolkits
which incorporate the Barcelona Principles. An AMEC taskforce
subsequently developed a measurement framework called
Valid Metrics that identifies possible metrics for individual
public relations programmes2.
2 Valid Metrics for PR Measurement, AMEC: http://ameceuropeansummit.

org/amecorgdocs/ValidMetricsFramework7June2011PrintVersion.pdf
AMEC has set a long-term vision and recognises that is going

to take a generation to establish an industry-wide measurement
framework. It is making a genuine bid to tackle measurement
and develop a worldwide standard by bringing together the
Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), the International
Communications Consultancy Organisation (ICCO), the CIPR,
the PRCA and the Council of PR Firms. But it is also engaging
directly with public relations agencies and organisations to
develop a robust measurement framework. It is by adopting
such an internationally consultative approach through such
initiatives that AMEC will establish the Barcelona Principles as
standard operating procedure in the public relations industry.
AMEC’s Measurement Agenda 2020 priorities are:
1. How to measure the return on investment (ROI) of public

relations
2. Create and adopt global standards for social media
measurement
3. Measurement of public relations campaigns and programmes
needs to become an intrinsic part of the public relations
toolkit
4. Institute a client education programme such that clients
insist on measurement of outputs, outcomes and business
results, from public relations programmes
The business of influence

The pursuit of a robust measurement system for the public
relations industry is something that Philip Sheldrake seeks to
tackle in The Business of Influence3. ‘Anybody who tells you that
public relations cannot be measured just hasn’t investigated it
3 Sheldrake, Philip. The Business of Influence. Wiley, 2011.

188 BRAND ANARCHY
in a professional manner as they should do for their employer’s

sake or their clients’ sake, and for their own professional sake,’
says Sheldrake.
Influencer relations is a buzz phrase of recent times. ‘It’s been
hijacked to mean different things. If you look at the dictionary
definition, what it effectively means is that we’ve been
influenced when we think in a way we wouldn’t otherwise have
thought or when we do something we wouldn’t otherwise have
done,’ says Sheldrake. Sheldrake is making a bid to help the
public relations industry grow up and adopt management
discipline. There has traditionally been a disconnect between
public relations and other parts of an organisation which results
from the industry’s inability to prove return on investment or
be measurably accountable in the way that other marketing
disciplines do. This issue lies at the core of the reputation of the
industry and it being recognised as a strategic, rather than a
tactical, tool.
Sheldrake’s solution has been to investigate the Balanced
Scorecard, a strategic performance management tool devised
by Professor Robert Kaplan and Dr David Norton in the 1990s,
and augment it for marketing and public relations. The Balanced
Scorecard is a structured methodology that is used by managers
to keep track of business activities within their remit. According
to the Balance Scorecard Institute4:
‘The Balanced Scorecard has evolved from its early use as a

simple performance measurement framework to a full
strategic planning and management system. The […]
4 Balanced Scorecard Basics, Balanced Scorecard Institute: www.

balancedscorecard.org/BSCResources/AbouttheBalancedScorecard/
tabid/55/Default.aspx
balanced scorecard transforms an organisation’s strategic

plan from an attractive but passive document into the
“marching orders” for the organisation on a daily basis. The
framework […] not only provides performance measurements,
but helps planners identify what should be done and
measured. It enables executives to truly execute their
strategies.’
Sheldrake’s Influence Scorecard is a subset of the Balanced

Scorecard, containing all the key performance indicators (KPIs)
stripped of the typical siloed departmental thinking that
permeates the influence disciplines such as marketing, public
relations, internal communications, public affairs, and customer
service. The latter point is important as it removes the tension
between functional roles and focuses on outcomes. The
scorecard is both a philosophy of setting strategy against the six
influence flows around an organisation and a set of checks and
balances that demand the setting, scrutiny and reporting of
progress against defined targets.
Most importantly, the Influence Scorecard approach
recognises the multifaceted, multidisciplinary and complex
way in which influence goes-around-comes-around. While the
structure, culture and processes of the typical organisation are
rooted in traditional media, technologies and understanding of
business strategy definition and execution, the Influence
Scorecard helps organisations adapt to 21st-century media and
disintermediation, the latest Internet, web and mobile
technologies, and the best-practice thinking for business
strategy and execution.
The key point is that there are no easy answers or one solution
such as AVE that fits all. Sheldrake summarises the issue neatly.
‘If your market is unique and your vision is unique, then by
definition your strategy is unique; therefore, your execution is
190 BRAND ANARCHY
unique and your measurement and evaluation will be unique.

But you’re beholden to actually make sure you invest in the
resources to monitor progress otherwise you don’t know what
you’re doing from one week to the next and you don’t know
whether it’s working or not,’ he says.
At the AMEC Lisbon conference in 2011, delegates decided
that AMEC’s number one priority should be the development of
an approach to distilling the return on investment of public
relations type activities. ‘Anyone with a general understanding
of associated influence disciplines – from branding to
advertising, HR to supplier management, retail to packaging –
will recognise this challenge. And yet all such investments are
intangible, and intangible assets only have value when they’re
“in the mix”. It’s complex, yet executives hanker for the simple.
I hope the Influence Scorecard increasingly helps executives
appreciate the complexity and ensures that the potential to
influence and be influenced is exploited cohesively throughout
the organisation, with ROI built in. Ultimately, the ease and
effectiveness with which we manage and learn from influence
flows is integral to the ways all stakeholders interact with
organisations to broker mutually valuable, beneficial
relationships,’ says Sheldrake.
If not reputation, what about influence?

So you now know how you can keep score better. But how do
you know what actions scored the most points? How do you
know what your priorities are in trying to milk those potentially
glacial influence flows?
First you need to be able to segment your audience, which in
itself is complicated. Then you need to establish, within those
brackets and overall, which people have the greatest influence.
On sales, on brand perception, on brand awareness, on
legislation, on whatever will assist your brand, fairly and legally,
with its objectives. But most important of all for sustained

success you must establish which people have the greatest
influence on your brand’s reputation.
The Internet has helped to automate, and even identify, a
good deal of that. You need to interpret the data wisely, but it’s
perfectly feasible to observe and work out which people have
the greatest influence on your brand, how they’re connected,
the extent to which others listen to and have faith in them, and
how influence might build amongst those people. That’s where
the multitude of social media monitoring tools come in, but
there are data feeds to consider from other media too: what’s
being said in conventional media and how is that impacting
upon conversations in all forms of Internet-based media? What
type of engagement are you having with the audience on your
own media? Are those the same people, or different?
But data will only get you so far – it’s what you make of it and
how you choose to apply meaning to it that counts. Brands need
to look past what is said about them online; instead they need
to find out who those doing the talking or conversation-broking
are connected to. You need to know who are they are. What do
they do for a living? Who do they know, and how and why are
they connected? How long have they known them, how
frequently do they interact, and over what types of issues?
What recommendations do they have influence over, and
why, so far as you can tell? What perceptions do they seem to
have, and do they influence others to form similar views? What
decisions do they have authority for and what others do they
have some sort of a say over? And, beyond all of this, how do
they behave in these conversations?
This is all typically easier to work out where businesses are
marketing to other businesses than where a brand is marketing
to billions of consumers around the world. The fewer people
that are involved in decisions about whether to buy the brand’s
192 BRAND ANARCHY
products or services, the easier it should be, albeit that the

buying cycles are normally more complex where more
substantial sums of money are involved. Yet with strong data, it
is all possible. You just need to know where best to dig, and
appreciate that you can’t turn over all the topsoil.
Once you’ve started to work out how influence flows amongst
the most influential people in your audience, as a brand you
must also face the reality that it’s ever-changing. Influence may
vary from one scenario or one conversation to another. The
personal reputations of those in the mix may change too – for
better or worse.
Tapping into influence flows is vital for understanding them
though, and for developing standardised approaches for
measuring influence. With standardisation, measurement is set
to become more clinical. The power of influence can better be
charted, and placed in a commercial context.
By understanding not just how people are networked but why
they are networked, we can get closer to applying science to the
way in which they exert influence. We can begin to measure
that influence. And by knowing what buttons we might want to
press there, we can make influence a more commercially-
tangible component of reputation management.
It brings greater certainty to how the value of influence can
be measured, even if reputation, in the hands of the audience,
ultimately cannot.
Life in the P&L

But measuring the influence power of networks only goes so
far. Public relations cannot be measured clinically across the
broad gamut of its influence over reputation. The direct
commercial impact of every project budget spent on managing
reputation cannot be quantified, although some form of
monetary measurement of public relations spend versus
reputation change versus commercial outcome is on the

horizon.
That’s real progress, but it’s unlikely to make an accountant
smile. Where in the P&L should all of this investment sit, given
that while it’s becoming more tangible it has historically
lumbered uncomfortably as a series of line items in the cost
centre of the marketing budget?
Actually, that really doesn’t matter. Well it might matter to
accountants, for the purpose of business administration, but it
does not have any real bearing on whether the money spent
creates commercial returns for the organisation by furthering
reputation. Which begs the question: shouldn’t accountants be
sorting out the commercial evaluation of public relations, rather
than practitioners?
That would seem logical, but realistically it needs to be people
with in-depth editorial understanding and the ability to connect
editorial outcomes to business outcomes who sort this out. Only
then will we be able to explain to financial teams the variances
and data that are factors of modern public relations, and to what
extent it is – and isn’t – possible to compute the financial value
of a brand’s reputation. And what part public relations has to
play in that.
Social media has brought sweeping changes to the editorial
world, but has also had a profound impact on advertising, and
indeed in marketing generally. It makes it far more difficult to
figure out where one traditional marketing discipline begins and
another ends – cue most agencies making attempts to muscle in
on area that they previously had no real interest in, with mixed
results. Those are growing pains that can cause both opportunity
and irritation for agencies, and a fog for marketing departments
considering using their services. Yet this has had one substantial
benefit – it has made marketers realise that better results and
better commercial returns, truly do come when different
194 BRAND ANARCHY
disciplines either work hand in hand or join to form a single

discipline, drawing on the skills of several areas.
Which makes assessment of what truly influences reputation
tricky. Public relations has never had the lone bearing on
reputation, but in today’s more demanding consumer society,
in which expectations of brands have increased and there are
more points of interface, the whole lifecycle of customer
management can influence reputation. Public relations is often
left to do what it can to help, or to pick up the pieces. Moreover,
as the lines between marketing disciplines blur, it is far more
difficult to pick apart which aspects of marketing spend
influence reputation, and to what extent. Public relations may
be the mainstay, but no longer holds exclusive sway, which
makes it impossible to discern PR-driven reputation gains from
those achieved by other marketing activities when assessing
return on investment.
So where does that leave us, given we need to find some way
to make sense of this both for the board and for the accountants?
Well, time will tell: commercially-satisfactory evaluation of
public relations investment in managing reputation remains a
work in progress. Digitising media has put it in close reach but
has also further muddied the waters. But one conclusion that
does shine through is that no single model will be able to
measure business outcomes in monetary terms and place
measurable commercial value on a brand’s reputation.
And someone needs to pay for it.
Francis Ingham, director general of the Public Relations
Consultants Association (PRCA), believes that evaluation needs
far more focus as public relations becomes more sophisticated.
‘The biggest gap we have in public relations at the moment is
the need to be able to evaluate our work better. We have to have
standard metrics. The problem is that clients don’t want to pay
for it up front,’ he say.
‘Tracking activity against sales is one thing, but changes in

attitude and behaviour are a different thing. That’s right at the
heart of the challenge, and we need to find an answer. The key
thing though is the approach to evaluation has to be determined
right at the beginning of the process,’ he adds.
So PR’s efforts to measure reputation should probably pursue
two avenues, albeit in close alignment. At the same time as
piecing together the information feeds that will allow public
relations impact to be better assessed by financial outcomes, we
should be working with all other marketing disciplines to
ensure that reputation measurement is a primary consideration
of a more astute, transparent and agile framework for measuring
all marketing returns on investment.
Once you’ve measured, what then?

PR measurement is not easy; in fact it’s getting more difficult
and yet must be tackled properly if brands are to be able to
justify the correlation between money spent managing
reputation by influencing editorial and the actual commercial
impact of the activity. But with an effective measurement
system in place, with as much sophistication as possible built in
to meet the needs of the business, what should the next steps be
for brands wanting to drive commercial advantage through
reputation, and wanting to gain greater returns from their
investments in PR?
Before they can drive returns, they should first understand
that the only way public relations will become a true asset for
them today is to first gain some editorial command for the
brand. Not control, because brands cannot control the media
today – no one truly can. But by taking the kinds of steps
covered in the previous chapters, they can at least seek to
command their brand reputations by doing as much as is
possible to influence them.
196 BRAND ANARCHY
Once they have exercised a degree of command and have

systemised a more sophisticated and more agile approach to
reputation management, they can then adopt an all-seeing
approach to measurement in order to both assess the financial
performance of investments in reputation and improve their
approach to managing it. This needs a dual approach of both
clinically measuring investments against the money that results
from them, and assessing the overall value of reputation to the
business, albeit without the ability to put pounds and pence
against it.
Overall, the value of more accurate and more commercially-
savvy public relations measurement to the business is lessened
or nullified unless brand managers and those who make the
ultimate financial decisions keep clear heads on what they’re
actually trying to achieve in the reputation game. All the data
and all the science in the world are practically worthless unless
common sense is used to make the right decisions in order to
build a better reputation for the business.
You must know what it is of greatest commercial value for
you to measure, then apply the right tools to doing that, in so
far as it is currently practical and with your eyes open to how
those techniques may improve in the future.
Summary
• The public relations industry has been obsessed with counting
things so that the volume of output can be assessed.
• But that doesn’t really tell you whether what has been
invested in managing reputation is having the desired effect
for the organisation. It doesn’t correlate with the degree of
influence exerted.
• Search technology makes this even more complicated, as
perception can be formed and judgements made on the basis
of a mechanistic evaluation of relevance, and even of

reputation.
• The public relations industry is responding with initiatives to
modernise measurement to increase its commercial
relevancy.
• Absolute clinical measurement of reputation is impossible,
but measurement of influence is becoming far sharper.
• What can brands learn from measurement in order to gain
reputational edge?
CHAPTER 9
PARTICIPATION: THE FUTURE
OF ORGANISATIONAL
COMMUNICATION
The future of corporate communication lies in a return to
public relations: two-way engagement with people and
markets. #brandanarchy
By now you should be convinced of the fact that organisations

have lost control of their reputations forever. The issue of how
to deal with the situation, however, remains. The leadership
and vision provided by early professionals has since been
squandered. In Two-Way Street, published in 19481, Eric
Goldman describes the three stages of the development of
corporate communication during the period from 1900 to the
time of the publication of his book:
1. Public fooled via spin

2. Information through communication
3. Public engagement via two-way engagement
It’s uncanny how these same stages can just as easily be applied
to the public relations industry in the second half of the 20th
century. But we’re not claiming to be original thinkers in
recognising the relevance of these staging posts to the
developing public relations industry; the subject has exercised
generations of public relations academics.
1 Goldman, Eric. Two-way Street. Bellman Publishing Company, 1948.

202 BRAND ANARCHY
Shortly after the publication of Goldman’s book the public

relations industry became obsessed about communicating with
the public via the proxy of media relations rather than direct
public engagement. David Phillips, a public relations practitioner
and academic, says that the rise of mass media and its ability to
provide a shortcut to large audiences for the change in style of
corporate communications: ‘In 1962 the Pilkington Report
recommended a second BBC channel, a separate service for
Wales, and the restructuring of ITV. Transatlantic television
became possible. At the same time, the ability to print fast and
cheaply brought a concurrent revolution. Public relations had to
change and the easy, but not nearly as effective, form of public
relations was to use the fast-growing media. It was a
communication revolution. The growth of consumer and trade
titles in the 1970s sawcorporate communication from community
influence to print editorial. By 1980 it was dead easy,’ he says.
Back to the street

Now that print media is in decline and the Internet has enabled
communication with audiences directly via digital media and,
ultimately, direct participation within communities, the public
relations industry is attempting to modernise and reinvent
itself. Phillips believes the industry faces a dramatic upheaval.
‘Too often in practice we’ve confused public relations for media
relations,’ says Phillips.
Shedding the shackle of media relations will be critical to the
future success of the public relations industry. It is inevitable
that as traditional media continues to fragment because of
technological change, and consumer behaviour becomes
increasingly participatory, that organisations must change how
they communicate.
Organisations are recognising the opportunity to communicate
directly with audiences. But for many organisations this
THE FUTURE OF ORGANISATIONAL COMMUNICATION 203
involves simply disseminating content via newswires, websites

and Twitter feeds; ‘a means of dumping messages’, as Grunig
describes. The cocktail of print media decline and Internet-
enable consumer empowerment means that consumers are
open about their likes and dislikes and are quick to vent their
frustration at brands via networks such as Facebook, Google+
and Twitter. They cannot, and should not, be ignored. The
future of communication between an organisation and its
audiences must be participative.
The writing is on the wall, and more than likely it is a
Facebook wall. Brands that fail to engage with their audiences
are on a path to self-destruction. Any gap between a customer’s
expectation of your product and its reality will drive a
conversation on the social web. The evidence is scattered across
the Internet for search engines to uncover. According to a
report published by Alterian called ‘Your Brand: At Risk or
Ready for Growth’2, only five per cent of consumers believe
what a company says about itself, whereas a third of respondents
using social media believe that companies are genuinely
interested in them. And that figure is growing. The study,
undertaken in the UK and the United States, found that
broadcast marketing is broken; it is too east for consumers to
ignore brands. It concludes that companies must rediscover
how to engage with consumers. Alterian neatly sums up the
three key principles of social media marketing:
1. Analytics to deliver insight

2. Conversational engagement
3. An agile approach to managing and responding to feedback
2 Your Brand: At Risk or Ready for Growth?, Alterian www.alterian.com/

resource-links/campaigns/brandsatrisk/brands-at-risk
204 BRAND ANARCHY
Surveys are typically used as a tool to support a company’s own

public relations agenda. But Alterian’s report, based on
qualitative and quantitative research, was written by Professor
Michael Hulme, an academic at Lancaster University, and
speaks to anyone who is concerned about the reputation of an
organisation. Businesses need to redirect marketing spend into
audience insight in order to understand and engage with
customers as individuals, says Alterian in the report. This
requires an investment in skills to retrain the marketing
department.
‘Meeting the challenge of individualisation will require new
thinking in the collection of customer information/data for an
organisation to be able to interact at a personal level. This will
call for a commitment from the business to both structural and
skill changes, arising from the need to break down silos, both
departmentally and functionally, to address the “single view” of
information but to also understand how the information is
being used at any one time across the organisation,’ says
Professor Hulme.
Searching for answers

To be fair, the public relations industry isn’t alone in ignoring
lessons from the past. The search marketing industry is no
different. In the last five to 10 years digital marketing has
reached a place where keywords and inbound links assume
more importance on a website than the actual content and
audience. But here too a subtle shift is taking place, as media
consumption and buying habits are turning to social media.
Here, reputation is built and products and services are sold
through word of mouth, not purely via search.
Web spam is the issue. We’ve become so obsessed with search
marketing that we’ve filled the web with useless content in a
bid to manipulate search engine results. Search engine
marketing has become mechanised to such a point that we’ve

boiled down our audience to keywords. And in this world, the
organisation with the largest search budget and the smartest
agency wins. We’re in danger of taking our eye off the audience
and forgetting that it’s great content, rather than keywords and
links, that build engagement and trust over the long term. Best-
practice search marketing is smart but filling the Internet with
low-value content isn’t. We’ll almost certainly come to see the
floatation of content development company Demand Media in
January 20113, with a valuation of $1.5 billion, as the high water
mark of search marketing. It generates 7,000 articles a day and
has a simple formula: create lots niche content targeted at
search engines and generate revenue through ads.
If you want more evidence, look no further than the results
from an informational search rather than a commercial search. If
you search for information on a topic such as prostate cancer, the
results from a search engine will be incredibly useful. But
commercial searches are almost always polluted and the site
with the biggest budget rises to the top. Search for popular
keywords such as ‘car insurance’, ‘holidays’ or ‘coffee machines’
and you’ll see what’s happening for yourself: highly competitive
markets for pay-per-click and millions of natural results packed
with web spam. Paid-for search has become more sophisticated
and you can become more selective about where you place your
ads, but for organic search we’re surely close to game over.
Our view is that search will give way to social networks as a
means of discovery. It’s already happening. In the last five
years we’ve seen the rise of social networks such as Facebook
3 Demand Media, Inc. announces the closing of its Initial Public Offering,
Demand Media: http://ir.demandmedia.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=215358&p=
irol-newsArticle&ID=1521835&highlight=
206 BRAND ANARCHY
and Twitter. But there are lots of others focused on niche

communities. These are built from trusted friends; friends who
understand our personal motivations. We’re entering a new era
of digital media: the discovery of brands and products through
the recommendation of friends in our networks who share
links.
You build reputation and sell in this market through word-of-
mouth. That means you need to have a deep understanding of
your audience. And create compelling content that gets their
attention. We’re reverting to community life. If the pub provides
a lousy meal or bad service, everyone in the village knows
about it. But in the contemporary analogy, thanks to the web,
the village is now your network on Facebook, Google+ or
Twitter. Your organisation needs to have a presence on the web
that potential customers can visit but it also needs to have a
presence where your audience is, and where conversations are
taking place about your organisation and its peers. You need to
identify your audience and work out what, editorially, will get
its attention. And then you need to inspire people to talk about,
listen to and share information about your brand.
Search results for popular terms within social networks are
completely unsatisfactory. A timeline of scrolling tweets,
riddled with spam, isn’t really that helpful. But what about if
you overlaid your own network on this set of results and those
results were filtered based on the authority of the people you
trusted? Bing is incorporating Facebook ‘like’ into its search
algorithms. Google is doing the same with Google+. In future,
when you search for a film or restaurant, the results will be
prioritised according to the opinions of people in your network.
You’ll find the Facebook ‘like’ button on more than two million
websites. And at the last count there were more than 500
million people on Facebook including 30 million in the UK.
This is the future of search marketing and it mirrors our
changing habits of media consumption. Social media types talk

of the death of search marketing. That’s an overly dramatic
stance, of course. Online search isn’t going anywhere. But the
balance of power will start to shift from search marketing to
social media optimisation.
Social relationship management

An inevitable development for the future of social media
marketing is to connect social media monitoring systems with
customer data within an organisation. This enables data from
social media platforms to be incorporated into customer
relationship management (CRM) systems. This is an area that
PeopleBrowsr UK CEO, Andrew Grill4, an active social media
user and thought leader, has already explored. The problem is
that organisations aren’t ready.
‘CRM systems sometimes don’t even have an email address
field. The challenge for anyone that runs a CRM system is to
add a field that records a customer’s social media name (whether
it be a Twitter name, Facebook name or a URL) by which the
customer can be identified. I have never had a company ask me
for my Twitter name, however, I’m easy to guess – @andrewgrill.
But if you’re @wadds or @mynameisearl, and you are a high-
value Vodafone customer tweeting about a problem, how does
the customer service team know whether or not to step in?’
says Grill.
Grill is frequently vocal on Twitter about service from
organisations such as BT, Starbucks and Vodafone. He no longer
picks up the phone when he has an issue with an organisation.
Instead he sends a Tweet, preferring the asynchronous nature
4 Andrew Grill personal website: www.andrewgrill.com. You can follow

Andrew on Twitter @andrewgrill
208 BRAND ANARCHY
and not having to stay on hold to a call centre. Instead, the

companies call him. ‘My profile on the BT CRM system does not
have my Twitter name but I’m sure I’m on the hotlist of the
team that runs the Twitter account in Northern Ireland,’ says
Grill. While social media has yet to be integrated directly with
social media platforms, it is entirely conceivable that
measurement tools such as Klout and PeerIndex enable brands
to determine the influence of a Twitter user and prioritise their
response accordingly.
Escherman’s Andrew Smith shares that view. ‘For big
organisations and brands, the sheer volume of customer interactions
they have to deal with means that they’re going to use shortcuts in
order to prioritise their customer service response. For example, an
unhappy customer with a PeerIndex score of 60 is going to get
prioritised over someone with a score of 20. You may say that’s
unfair but that’s the reality of the world we live in,’ says Smith.
Perhaps the first indication that organisations are seriously
tooling up to integrate social media beyond marketing, and into
their customer relationship management systems, came in March
2010 when business software firm Salesforce acquired social
media monitoring firm Radian6. Salesforce.com already had
some basic social monitoring and analytics capability but Radian6
will enable it to enhance its capability for brand management and
monitoring and, crucially, the emerging areas of social sales and
CRM. Salesforce.com has said that it is integrating Radian6 into
three areas of its business, namely customer engagement via
social media with the Sales and Service Cloud, reputation
monitoring with Salesforce Chatter and integrating social features
into the Force.com platform so that developers are able to put the
social web into everything they build.
So is engaging via Twitter a cure-all for customer service
woes? In our opinion, no, but even if it is, it is going to take a
generation before Twitter is adopted as a customer service
channel. It’s a start, however, and is a way for brands to further

understand the needs of a customer and take action.
What could be clearer than a customer telling you what they
want? For now, Twitter is a tax that companies must accept as
a cost of providing poor products or service. We’re only
beginning to see the use of Twitter for customer service. But
the expectation of brands that use the channel is increasing all
the time. Ultimately, the ability for consumers to communicate
directly with organisations is likely to require fundamental
corporate and organisational change.
Social media and communication in a crisis

We couldn’t write a book on the future of organisational
communication without a comment on the impact of the
Internet and social media on crisis communication. Principally,
the impact is two-fold: speed and participation. Technology
enables a crisis to be communicated at breakneck speed and
social media enables anyone to comment on it. A situation that
starts as a tweet can quickly spread via networks. It will typically
be amplified and inflamed as it spreads. But corporate
communicators are better armed than ever before to deal with
a crisis situation as it arises. The social web allows every
conversation to be monitored in real time. You might not like
the fact that conversations that are taking place publicly about
you but at least you have the opportunity to listen in and,
crucially, take appropriate action.
‘The rise of social media has forever altered the corporate
reputational landscape. Individuals and NGOs alike enjoy
unprecedented access and reach within an increasingly
diversified digital media space; one in which everyone is an
expert and a publisher. The transition to [the social web] has
brought with it an array of associated reputational risks and
opportunities which modern organisations need to understand
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and acknowledge as part of their crisis planning and

management activities,’ says Michael Regester, founding
director of Regester Larkin.
Prior to 2000, a crisis communication situation was led by
broadcast; either radio or television news. It had both the
audience and the airtime to play out a story in real time.
Newsprint, with its 24-hour cycle, followed with deeper analysis.
Now, people at the scene share the news loaded with their own
comment and opinion.
‘Social media can trigger and escalate a problem or crisis. It is
not only commercial organisations that break news. Damaging
information increasingly enters the public domain via a range
of social media platforms including Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia
and citizen journalist websites and blogs. It can also serve to
magnify and perpetuate an issue that may otherwise, due to
factors such as commercial news values and other practical and
resource constraints, have faded from public view. In this
sense, in some instances, social media itself can become the
problem,’ adds Regester.
Whatever the pace of a crisis event, the nature of it, or the
media by which it breaks, the response effort should follow best
practice. That means preparing for an event long before it
breaks out by scenario planning and rehearsing crisis events. In
their excellent handbook to crisis communication, Risk Issues
and Crisis Management in Public Relations5, Michael Regester
and Judy Larkin summarise the key components of a crisis
communication plan:
1. Develop a positive attitude towards crisis management
5 Regester, Michael, and Larkin, Judy. Risk Issues and Crisis Management in
Public Relations. Kogan Page, 2010.
2. Bring the organisation’s performance into line with public

expectation
3. Build credibility through a succession of responsible deeds
4. Be prepared to act on opportunities during a crisis
5. Appoint appropriate teams to act on opportunities during a
crisis
6. Catalogue potential crisis situations and devise policies for
their prevention
7. Put the plan in writing
8. Test, test and test again
We’ve already heard from Dominic Burch and his

communications team at Walmart-owned Asda headquartered
in Leeds, UK. He has more than 15 years’ experience in frontline
corporate communications but it is in his role at Asda that he
has faced his most testing crisis situations. His responses have
been textbook stuff. In 2009, the police launched an investigation
at Asda’s request into a supermarket worker who called himself
Adeel Ayub. The employee had previously (three years earlier)
been based at a store in Fulwood, Lancashire but had since left
the business. However mobile phone content had been posted
to YouTube now that showed him urinating in a bin, playing
cricket with food items and wreaking havoc in the aisles during
night shifts three years previously. He was also observed
slashing the coats of other employees and breaking furniture in
the staffroom.
Management at the store were aware of instances of vandalism
at the time, but not the culprit. There was also footage of Ayub
setting off fire alarms and the resulting response from
firefighters. The most disgusting footage showed him ripping
the wrapper from a chicken and apparently licking it before
returning it to the refrigeration cabinet. It resulted in the tabloid
media labelling him the ‘Asda chicken licker’. Asda’s response,
212 BRAND ANARCHY
led by the in-house communications team, was to acknowledge

the situation and assure the media and customers that the rogue
employee no longer worked for Asda.
But Asda went further, with the communications team
heading down to the Fulwood store to capture the thoughts of
staff who had worked with Ayub on the same nightshift, and to
interview the store manager in person. They invited them to
speak to camera about their former colleague. The results make
for powerful viewing. ‘One by one Ayub’s colleagues gave their
response to the actions of their former colleague. Each interview
told a powerful story of frustration and disappointment,’ said
Burch. This first-hand storytelling was more powerful than any
traditional corporate response could possibly ever have been. It
was authentic and transparent. We posted it to all YouTube and
as a result it got 3,500 hits in the first week, so almost one in
three people who witnessed the original video saw our
colleagues’ response. As a result both the media and customer
reaction was fairly neutral. Their criticism was focused at the
childish actions of Ayub, not toward Asda as a supermarket or
employer.
Brands as media
As the fragmentation of media continues apace, organisations
are creating their own media products. Blogs are the best
example of this medium but Twitter feeds, LinkedIn groups
and YouTube channels are also examples of platforms on which
companies generate their own content and share it directly
with their audiences as a means of engagement. Branded media
content is a step along the route to two-way communication, or
conversation, to adopt social media parlance. Instead of pushing
press releases as the primary means of communication, public
relations teams turn publisher and tell stories on behalf of an
organisation. The tone is intended to be less corporate and
more human. Individuals take the role of journalists and use

text, images and video to tell the stories of an organisation to its
audience.
In 2005, a BusinessWeek cover story announced that a
revolution was set to sweep through corporate communications.
Public relations and communications teams would cease to
exist as business leaders used the web to communicate directly
with their audiences. Blogs promised to fundamentally change
the relationship between a company and its staff, customers,
suppliers and the media. Websites would be overhauled for the
2.0 era, the press release would cease to exist and the public
relations industry itself faced revolution. We’re still waiting. It’s
an overstatement of the case, of course, but six years on there
are very few examples of large UK organisations – outside the
media and information industries – that have successfully used
a blog as the centrepiece of their communications strategy.
Yet the benefits of corporate blogging are undisputed: direct
engagement, leadership, search marketing, social capital and
raw web traffic. As a rule, good corporate blogs are hard to find.
And for every success, the Internet is littered with the twitching
corpses of dormant corporate blogs. They started with a burst of
regular posts but enthusiasm waned as the posts failed to engage
with their intended audience and, inevitably, the posts became
less frequent and, in time, completely dried up.
One of the reasons that there are so few examples of good
corporate blogs is because of the clash between personal and
corporate communication. There are fundamental differences
between how people communicate and how companies
communicate – and very few corporate organisations have
managed to bridge that gap.
Then there is the issue of ownership. Should a blog be the pet
project of a senior executive or fall within the communications,
public relations, product marketing, customer relations or
214 BRAND ANARCHY
human resources teams? And the legal arm of any organisation

will almost certainly want to get involved and pass judgement
on blog posts and comments. Finally, there is the issue of the
generation of authentic content. It’s the only way to attract and
stimulate an audience yet organisations see it as time-
consuming and requiring the constant input of senior
management.
Bridges don’t talk; people do

Shifting from traditional forms of corporate communication to
social communication necessitates a change of language that
not all organisations are able to make. The language of the
social web is familiar and friendly. It’s the antithesis of most
corporate communication. It’s authentic. The @towerbridge
Twitter account provides a great case study that spotlights
exactly this issue. It was originally set up in 2008 when Twitter
was less than a couple of years old. The account provided witty
updates about traffic on the River Thames in London when the
iconic bridge opened and closed as boats passed up and down
the river. It was the brainchild of Tom Armitage, a games
designer who operated the account independently of the
owners of the bridge. It was a simple commentary on a London
landmark that was followed by 4,000 people and regularly
received mainstream media attention. Then in May 2010, @
towerbridge abruptly announced: ‘Hi – we’re new to Twitter.
Follow us to find out what’s happening in and around Tower
Bridge. Did you know there’s an exhibition inside?’ The account
had been claimed by its rightful owner who had eliminated its
irreverent history. Fair enough; but to ignore Armitage’s
obvious success and erase his good work as the prior voice of
the account was a tactical mistake.
Participation
In time, perhaps, we’ll see the death of the website as a
marketing vehicle. If your audience is interacting on the social
web, why would you create a website elsewhere on the
Internet? This is a tactic that organisations are testing. You’ll
struggle to find a website promoting Talisker, the whisky from
Skye in Scotland, owned by Diageo; but head to Facebook and
search for Talisker and you’ll soon discover it, along with
140,000 other proponents of the brand. Here you’ll discover
photos from the distillery, competitions and details of tasting
events, alongside the comments of lots of engaged Talisker
fans.
But this sort or participatory engagement isn’t just limited to
consumer brands. Social networking is increasingly being used
by public sector organisations to reach their citizens.
Northumberland County Council faces a unique challenge in
communicating with its 300,000 citizens that are spread over
160 square miles, often in remote rural locations.
During the hard winter of 2010, it used a Facebook page to
alert residents to road and school closures. The engagement on
this page, combined with research that showed that more than
50 per cent of residents are active on Facebook, prompted
Northumberland County Council to extend its strategy to
include events pages that enable residents to sign up to and be
alerted about everything from the summer reading challenge at
local libraries to big events at National Trust attractions.
Developing communities
Savvy organisations are starting to harness the conversations
that are taking place about them, or with relevance to them, to
develop their own managed communities. When former Virgin
communications chief Will Whitehorn was leading the Virgin
Galactic project, he used an early form of social media to build
216 BRAND ANARCHY
a community of customers for the visionary space project.

Virgin Galactic was created in 2004 to sell the promise of space
tourism and a ride on the first commercial spacecraft. Whitehorn
steered Virgin Galactic from concept to reality, convincing
investors, overseeing technical plans and moving to a position
where daily flights to 100 miles above the Earth’s surface have
become possible. ‘The first six months in the job was spent
trying to find 100 high net worth customers willing to pay
$200,000 for a trip into space. We told a story and sold a dream
using public relations as our single means of marketing. We
generated attention by creating big events around key
milestones such as test flights and by enabling journalists and
bloggers to share the experience,’ says Whitehorn.
Virgin Galactic now has more than 400 customers waiting to
take a three-minute flight into space in 2012 when the spacecraft
is due to launch. Before then, customers have the opportunity
to speak to each other via what is surely must be the world’s
most exclusive online social network – Space Book. ‘Facebook
launched in 2004. We came up with Space Book before we’d
even heard of Facebook. We launched the Virgin Galactic
website with a community for our future astronauts. It enables
customers to talk to each other and share their views. At the
same time, the Galactic team gets the opportunity to understand
the concerns and motivations of its customers,’ adds Whitehorn.
Developing a social media strategy

Social media requires input from all levels in an organisation
and is likely to lead to the restructuring of many of the
operational parts of the corporate organisation as it integrates
social media into marketing, customer relationship
management, sales and even product development. You can
almost smell the panic as organisations recognise that their
audience is shifting its attention from conventional mainstream
media to social media. According to David Cushman, managing

director and co-founder of international open business
consultancy, 90:10 Group, there are two possible reactions:
some organisations view social media as a bolt-on channel to
traditional methods of communicating with an audience, while
others see it as a strategic platform for customer engagement.
In utilising social media as a bolt-on channel, an organisation
transfers the communication techniques that it has used with
its traditional audiences, typically the media, and supplements
them with a sprinkling of social media workings. You can spot
these organisations every day on Twitter, spewing out content
with little or no audience engagement. The strategic approach
to social media recognises, and tries to capitalise on, the
opportunity that social media offers: to put its customers at its
heart. That process starts with researching the conversations
that are already taking place around an organisation and its
markets, and move on to the development of a strategic
communications plan, anchored around suitable content, to
assess the opportunity for the organisation to help build and
participate in this newly emerging approach to audience
relations.
‘The senior managers within customer-centric organisations
increasingly recognise that social media is hugely positive. I
think we’ve passed the moment where managers are asking
about the value of social media. The opportunity to engage with
customers in a participatory medium is transformational,’ says
Cushman.
The shift to open business

90:10 has developed a strategy called ‘open business’ to describe
the future of a business that participates with its audiences via
social media. These are shared enterprises that are constructed
to create best-fit outcomes for the actual, rather than perceived,
218 BRAND ANARCHY
needs of their customers. ‘They engage with their customers and

potential customers with a view to insight, innovation and
change. Their role is to be the 10 per cent discovering those who
share their purpose, bringing them together, surfacing their
needs and then enabling, supporting and delivering innovations
against the expressed needs of the 90 per cent,’ says Cushman.
According to Cushman, the start of the journey towards being an
open business requires the development of evidence- and insight-
based strategic approaches based on four areas:
1. Understand the community landscape in which you operate

2. Clarify the needs, abilities and attitudes of customers, staff,
senior teams and other stakeholders, in respect of social
media and its technology
3. Identify what needs to change about crisis management and
decision-making processes
4. Learn how the organisation functions and how data flows
through it
‘Learning from each step we can build an organisation that

embraces social media and is ready to take full advantage of the
opportunities offered to open businesses. One thing is certain;
the organisation which derives value from its connection to its
customers is going to outperform those that don’t. And those
organisations which quickly learn how to do that best are going
to be first to the top,’ says Cushman.
Mark Adams, partner and chief operating officer of the
Conversation Group, believes that the catalyst for change in
organisations comes from one of two places. He believes that
we’re at a melting point where both conventional and social
media co-exist – but not for much longer.
‘Change in an organisation is typically being driven by an
enthusiastic individual that is evangelical about the potential of
social media technologies, often surrounded by sceptics

concerned with security and governance; or it’s the realisation
by executives that the Internet is changing how customers and
employees buy and engage with an organisation,’ he says. In
organisations that are engaged in social media, programmes are
usually piloted by marketing or communications teams.
According to Adams, gains are expected or anticipated but
frequently not achieved because of the latent inertia of the
organisation.
‘They will have started using some new social media tool,
maybe an internal social network or an external Twitter
account, and maybe an employee collaboration tool. They will
almost certainly be in breach of company policies since legal
protection typically lags behind the use of social media tools,’
says Adams. If individuals within an organisation fail to
persuade executives of the importance of social media, in time
the market almost certainly will. Adams compares top-line
sales growth with the performance of online and traditional
sales to predict when an organisation will cross a threshold of
50 per cent of sales online. At that point he says it will become
When does a firm become an ‘Online Firm’?

(When the majority of its revenue comes from online)
Total revenue: 500

Annual growth rate of total from online: 5.00%
Share of revenues today from online: 20.00%
Growth rate of online revenues: 25.00%
The firm become an online firm on: 02 January 2016
Figure: When does a firm become an online firm? (Source: Mark Adams, The
Conversation Group)
220 BRAND ANARCHY
an online organisation, and for most organisations that date is

approaching within the next five to 10 years.
‘If you are a retailer or manufacturer and your revenues grow
predictably by five per cent each year and 20 per cent of your
revenues are from online sales today but they are growing by
25 per cent each year, by January 2016, the majority of your
organisation’s revenues will come from online sources. Around
this time, the firm will need to be thinking and acting like an
online firm,’ says Adams.
The second shift in organisations is a social one. According to
Adams, when more than 50 per cent of an organisation’s
employees are on Facebook and able to talk about their
workplace, the boundaries between corporate and personal life
will cease to exist. ‘People have emotions, attitudes and
opinions. They used to be largely private matters, or shared
with friends. Now at a click of a button they are public. This has
created a new wave of social behaviours, engaging people in
their personal life and the workplace,’ says Adams.
This shift will strike at the core of corporate communications
and human resources. Conversations in the office will continue
at home and vice versa. The change from businesses organised
by command and control to enterprises that are open and
engaged with their audiences will be an evolution and not a
revolution, says Adams: ‘Companies want quick change and
aren’t used to scaling up processes. Control pervades. But we
don’t know what the future looks like and the best approach is
to acknowledge uncertainty and turn the protectionism of
organisations into a religion.’
Both Cushman and Adams describe an environment in which
everyone in an organisation has a communications role. That
means radical change for anyone who currently develops a
communications strategy on behalf of a business or has a role in
executing that strategy. But it also means that anyone within an
organisation will need to be able to communicate on behalf of

the brand and fully understand their role in building its
reputation.
It’s called participation.
Summary
• The public relations industry is attempting to modernise as
media declines and digital media enables organisations to
participate with their communities.
• Organisations are recognising the opportunity to communicate
directly with markets, but organisations typically broadcast
their content to their audience rather than attempting to
engage.
• Search market is set to give way to discovery via social
networks. In the future search engines will be overlaid on
social networks.
• Social networks enable a crisis situation to be monitored at
grassroots level before if breaks.
• Anyone can share and comment on an organisation involved
in a crisis. But proven techniques for dealing with a crisis
situation hold up.
• Shifting from traditional forms of corporate communication
to social forms of communication requires a change in style
and tempo of language.
• In time social media will impact all the operational areas of
an organisation, requiring the organisation and its employees,
to participate with its communities.
CHAPTER 10
RESKILLING FOR THE FUTURE
The marketing, media and public relations industries are
modernising. But are you and your organisation?
#brandanarchy
The public relations industry is enjoying a renaissance.

Conventional media is fragmenting and social networks are
connecting organisations and their audiences in a direct
relationship. The editorial, influence and engagement skills of
the public relations industry mean that it has a crucial role at
the heart of these changes. There has arguably never been a
more exciting time to work in the industry. But it’s also
incredibly daunting. Practitioners must learn new skills and
expertise if they want to have a future in the industry.
The big modernisation challenge

People starting out in their careers today are likely to see the
biggest changes in the media that we have ever seen, probably
since the invention of the printing press around 1440.
Modernisation is the biggest issue that the public relations
industry needs to face up to. That’s not only our view but is
shared by almost everyone that we’ve spoken to during the
development of this book. The public relations industry is locked
into a workflow that has its origins in the 1950s. If the industry is
to develop, that has to change. The public relations industry has
already missed out on the opportunity created by the emergence
of the search marketing industry and a new breed of agency has
emerged to pick up the work. The same may yet happen with the
opportunity presented by social media.
The industry faces a mixture of fear and entrenched practices.
Yet despite all the talk about moving into a new age and
226 BRAND ANARCHY
adopting new skills, the number one thing people are still doing
in the public relations industry is media relations. We caught
up with Andrew Smith of Escherman and asked him about his
experience as a trainer for the Chartered Institute of Public
Relations (CIPR), the UK’s professional body for public relations
industry, and the Public Relations Consultants Association
(PRCA), the UK trade association. ‘I delivered a session at the
CIPR last March and there were about 70 senior communication
directors in attendance. I asked them how many of them
utilised data from Google Analytics to inform their approaches
to communication planning and not a single hand went up.
That’s shameful, when you think of the extraordinary amount
of data information that is freely available to help determine
and shape what communication strategies are more likely to
work,’ he says.
‘Yet calling journalists and asking “did you get my press
release?” continues to be the primary activity that public
relations agencies and in-house communication functions are
still primarily geared around. It’s going to take time to crack
and it’s going to take people to make a real effort to break away
from that mindset. There may be pure media relations
opportunities for some very niche operators out there but they
are going to be fewer and farther between,’ adds Smith.
As Smith spotlights, the industry is at a crossroads although it
is almost certainly in denial. The Internet has dealt a brutal
blow to the media and it is in a process of reinventing itself. For
now, media relations continues to be an important part of
managing the reputation of an organisation. But new influencers
such as bloggers and Twitter users, with a high level of authority
on a relevant topic, must also be considered as part of the
communication mix, as should communities in which
conversations are taking place about organisations with or
without their involvement. Inevitably, over time, media
RESKILLING FOR THE FUTURE 227
relations will become a smaller element of reputation

management and the emerging areas will come to dominate.
You must put yourself in the best possible position to operate in
this new environment.
Communication skills for the future

Practitioners must first and foremost recognise how technology
is impacting upon the media, how it is enabling brands to
develop their own content and forms of media, and how
networks and communities develop and operate online. This is
an essential step to recognising the skills required to operate in
this new environment. In the table below we’ve returned to
some of the key trends explored in this book and have identified
what personal skills practitioners require in order to meet the
challenges.
Trend Description Skills

Branded As media fragments, organisations Creativity and editorial
media are creating their own media skills are required to
products. Organisations are now develop compelling
media owners in their own right. content that engages the
Blogs are the best example of this target audience.
medium but Twitter feeds,
LinkedIn groups and YouTube
channels are also examples of
platforms companies use to
generate their own content and
share it directly with their
audiences as a means of
engagement.
228 BRAND ANARCHY

Engagement Conversations are almost certainly Good interpersonal and
and taking place about your social skills are essential
conversation organisation in online communities to represent a brand and
scattered across the Internet, be its voice online.
whether you like it or not. Your
organisation needs to monitor
these exchanges and determine
whether not it has a role to
contribute. There is also an
opportunity for your organisation
to develop communities of its
own, both internally and externally,
to engage with staff, customers,
prospects, and other
stakeholders.
Online conversation is a two-way
process, typically in real time. In
the same way that individuals
interact with each other the
expectation in the social web is
that companies should respond to
their customers in a timely fashion,
using an appropriate tone of
voice.
Speed Digital communication removes Interaction and
the print media constraints of communication on the
page space and deadline. News web requires a level-
stories are written and published headed attitude.
in real time. Spokespeople need Individuals must be calm
to be available on demand and and considered.
content must be supplied to tight
deadlines. Any delay will mean you
miss out. The same rule applies in
direct communication between a
company and its audience.
Misinformation can quickly
escalate into a crisis online.

Planning PR and media relations have been Rudimentary
clumsily interchanged during the mathematics and a
past two decades. Audience familiarity with analytics
planning has been limited to are increasingly important
looking up a media category in a for practitioners in the
directory rather than thoroughly development,
researching an audience segment implementation and
and analysing its influences. That’s measurement of
changing. Planning tools such as campaigns.
Google Insights allow practitioners
to gain sophisticated intelligence
about audiences and their
motivations that can be used as
the basis for campaign planning.
Monitoring The press clipping book is dead. The Internet doesn’t have
Companies need real-time data to an ‘off’ button. Business
enable them to respond and online is relentless.
adapt programmes in real time as Attention to detail and
they are being implemented. The quick-wittedness are
feedback loop should be hours, required.
not weeks. Real-time monitoring
combined with editorial nous
makes this a reality.
Integration Social media democratises Practitioners must be
communication. Functional familiar with all aspects of
departments within organisations the business and be able
must work together because to work across functional
customers expect it. A Facebook departments within an
page set up as a brand fan page organisation.
is just as likely to be used as a
customer service or sales channel
as a Twitter feed used to push out
corporate content. Companies
must have clear processes for
signposting conversations to
customer service, public relations
and sales.
230 BRAND ANARCHY

Measurement The public relations and As with planning,
communication industry is rudimentary mathematics
growing wiser and has rightly cast and a familiarity with
aside AVEs and has recognised analytics is increasingly
that the industry should measure important in the
outcomes not outputs. AMEC is measurement of
working on a new measurement campaigns.
framework. In the interim the
PRSA has proposed the so-called
‘Valid Metrics’ framework which
aligns the workflow of a public
relations campaign. Philip
Sheldrake has proposed the
Influence Scorecard as a means
of tracking key performance
indicators within an organisation
that pertain to influence.
Technology Internet-driven technology is Fearless and a
driving the reputation of willingness to test new
organisations. Progress is products and
incredibly rapid. Google launched applications are critical to
in 1998; Facebook in 2004; and anyone wanting to stay
Twitter in 2006. The oldest online ahead.
‘newspaper’, The Telegraph (now
telegraph.co.uk), was launched
only in 2004. Yet it seems
inconceivable that we would
operate without any of these
services today.
Table: The skills required for practitioners operating in the new reputation
landscape.
Professional development rethink

Basic training in core skills and practice should be the foundation
of the industry. Educators must align their teaching with the
day-to-day role of a public relations professional, but the
industry must also take responsibility for professional
development. Public relations educator Richard Bailey1 has

called for the public relations degree to be reinvented. He
reckons that degrees could be delivered in two years at the
same time as balancing academic theory with practical craft: ‘In
response to higher university fees, let’s offer some genuinely
full-time degree courses. These could be delivered in two years.
Let’s deliver a much slower track to those in full-time work,
sponsored by their employers to study part-time. Delivery will
have to shift from face-to-face to online learning. The learning
will move out of the university and into the workplace. The
university becomes a partner in, rather than an owner of, the
course,’ he says.
We’re almost certain that Bailey would have a supporter in
his call for a rethink of public relations education in fellow
public relations educator and practitioner Heather Yaxley2.
She says that the industry needs to take responsibility for
educating its professionals, citing WPP boss Sir Martin Sorrell’s3
now infamous comment that the industry nicks talent rather
than training and developing people in-house.
‘There are many ways to learn and develop but the best take
effort and investment. Too much training and development in
public relations seems to involve attending industry conferences
where the pinnacle of learning seems to be listening to other
practitioners giving anecdotal reports of their own experiences.
Learning is primarily “on the job”, often at the hands of those
who do little more than pass on poor practices. I believe these
1 Richard Bailey blogs at PRStudies: www.prstudies.com/. You can follow

him on Twitter: @behindthespin
2 Heather Yaxley blogs at Greenbanana: www.greenbanana.biz/. You can
follow her on Twitter @greenbanana
3 Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO, WPP: www.wpp.com/wpp/about/whoweare/
leadership.htm#name2
232 BRAND ANARCHY
are all areas in which the professional bodies and training

organisations need to do more and not simply focus on their
revenue generation potential,’ she says.
We’re not so naive as to think any system is perfect, but in the
UK the CIPR has made huge strides in taking its professional
development programme scheme4 online. Participants are
required to earn a quota of points per year by participating in
training activities or by submitting work for assessment. It’s
exactly what you’d expect from professions such as finance or
law. But Yaxley remains critical. ‘I’d like to see training courses
include some form of outcome for students so there is genuine
learning, not simply attendance. This could be in the form of a
post-session online test which confirms learning and turns
attending a course into genuine personal development,’ she says.
Herein lies the major flaw in debating professional
development in the public relations industry. It isn’t a
profession. It lacks the discipline of professional training, or a
requirement for examinations and continuous professional
development. At best it’s a craft to which the cost of entry is an
ability to use a phone and computer. Individuals can gain skills
via training or through work experience; they aren’t formally
tested as a requirement to operate in the industry in the same
way that accountants, lawyers and medics must train and pass
exams and then undertake rigorous ongoing professional
development.
The industry needs to support practitioner development but
individuals must also take personal responsibility. ‘It is a
minority that bother to join a professional body and attend any
form of training or development courses, or who sign up for the
4 CIPR Continuous Professional Development (CPD) programme: www.cipr.

co.uk/content/careers-cpd/about-cpd
qualifications offered by a professional organisation or a post-

graduate university qualification. Even fewer are members of a
professional development scheme. CPD systems are laudable
but they need to be robust and should be compulsory if the
professional bodies are serious about development,’ says
Yaxley.
Successful people, in any field, are those that work hard and
make a point of surrounding themselves with other successful
people. We’re with Malcolm Gladwell5, author of Outliers6, when
he wrote that you need 10,000 hours’ experience to become
exceptional in any area of expertise. There are no shortcuts.
Not even in the public relations industry. The chasm between
basic training and expert knowledge in a field requires
continuous professional development, training and mentoring.
Practitioners and their employers, whether agency or in-house,
have a crucial role to play in developing the next generation of
public relations practitioners.
Getting ahead
Fortunately, there is no shortage of information or content
available for individuals seeking to learn the skills demanded
by this new brand reputation landscape. The table on pages
227–230 sets out the areas that we believe are most important.
We hope that this book has provided you with a good grounding
in many of these areas but to continue the process we’d
recommend that you seek out professional organisations such
as e-consultancy, the CIPR and the PRCA in the UK, and the
Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) in the US, and
follow practitioners and educators online. Therein lies a lesson
5 Malcolm Gladwell personal website: www.gladwell.com/

6 Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story of Success. Penguin, 2008.
234 BRAND ANARCHY
in itself. The web lowers the cost of access to information and

self-education. The sum of all knowledge on any topic, including
reputation management, is available online, for anyone
equipped with a web browser, to explore and read. And the best
bit? In the case of reputation management, the Internet
provides access to the tools and networks to explore the
potential for developing reputation online.
Journalists often make the best PRs. That’s because they
understand the editorial process and can craft content that will
elicit a positive reaction from an audience. They have been
trained in the art of storytelling, too. It’s a key skill that everyone
operating in the business of reputation needs to learn. But
words alone won’t do the job. You must understand the
community with which you are seeking to engage and the
purpose of what you are doing.
Personal education in reputation management should start
with Google. After all, it’s the place where most journeys on the
web start. Almost everyone uses Google as a means of discovery
but, as we’ve heard, many individuals are only just starting to
use it to inform online reputation and public relations
campaigns. As well as simply using the search engine to
discover information about organisations and individuals, you
can do an awful lot with Google’s free tools. Yet the reputation
industry is only just beginning to get to grips with the fact that
Google makes all this data available on the web for free. It costs
absolutely nothing to discover how many people searched for
your organisation’s name last month, or last year, and what
related search terms they used. Head to Google’s Keyword
Tool7 and try for yourself – right now. Armed with this
information, you can start to generate content that matches the
7 Google Keyword Tool: adwords.google.com/

terms for which people are searching. Welcome to the business

of search marketing.
The Internet has no respect for traditional business models.
Google provides free access to services and information that
would have demanded a premium before. If you don’t have a
Gmail account already, get one right away and start by exploring
some of the services. Google Reader is web application for
tracking RSS feeds, a distribution format provided by almost all
online media outlets. Google Alerts real-time alerts to mentions
of a keyword in online publications or blogs. Meanwhile,
Google’s DoubleClick Ad Planner8 provides user information
for almost any significant website. For example, a search for
information about BBC News tells me that: it receives 42 million
visitors per month of which 31 million are UK based; 64 per
cent of visitors are aged 25 to 44; the male to female split is 64
to 36; and that 72 per cent earn more than £30,000 per annum9.
Users can map a target audience against a location, demographic
and online interest. Google provides these tools primarily to
enable advertisers to build campaigns with better reach and
relevance but of course they are of huge benefit to the reputation
management industry.
Building a network online

If you’re making your first foray into social networking,
Google+10 (launched in June 2011) is a good starting point for
the simple reason that content featured in your personal profile
will be highly discoverable via a Google search. The network is
8 DoubleClick Ad Planner: www.google.com/adplanner/

9 Data about news.bbc.co.uk from DoubleClick Ad Planner, September 2011
10 Google+: plus.google.com/
236 BRAND ANARCHY
available via the web and there are mobile applications for
Android and Apple.
Google+ is reckoned to be Google’s shot at countering
Facebook’s dominance in consumer social networking (in 2011,
it had 750 million users11). Google clearly has its work cut out,
particularly as many of the new services remain a work in
progress. Their plan is to make all of its applications social, thus
enabling you to share information with your network. Google
faces an uphill challenge in getting users to shift from Facebook.
The driver may be privacy. Facebook has been criticised by
users on numerous occasions for not transparently
communicating its privacy settings. Facebook’s role in enabling
you to build your online reputation is limited. It has a huge
appeal for consumer organisations seeking to explore, engage
and generate conversations related to their business and for
this reason you should explore it, but business-to-business
audiences are almost certainly likely to be elsewhere on the
Internet.
LinkedIn is the grandfather of business-to-business social
networks. It enables individuals to build and manage a
professional network and create a personal portfolio. Users
complete a profile of the workplaces and the people with whom
they have worked. You can post updates, information about
recent professional assignments and link your profile to other
content from around the web. As such, it is a living CV that is
searchable via the LinkedIn website, mobile applications and
search engines such as Google. It’s also a good way of promoting
your expertise and finding people that you might want to work
with. It is worth paying the monthly subscription fee so that
you are able to access data about who has visited your account.
11 Facebook Statistics: www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

Armed with this information, you can make a proactive

approach to people searching for you or your organisation.
If Facebook is your personal network and LinkedIn your
professional network, Twitter is the crossover between the two.
It’s a place where you can dip in and out and know that there
will always be someone with which to exchange a message or
two. Networking is an overused and abused phrase but it used
to take an individual starting out in their career years to build
up a professional network. As journalists, we both spent our fair
share of evenings in the pub in a bid to build a contacts book.
But that no longer needs to be the case. People throughout your
industry are almost certainly on Twitter. We suggest that you
go and seek them out and add them to your list of the people
you follow. In this sense, Twitter is democratising
communication and relationships – you can connect with
anyone in your industry and follow their comments. Every day
on Twitter you can listen in on conversations taking place
between people from all walks of life. Hashtags enable
conversations around a particular topic to be tagged and give
rise to niche communities in their own right. There will almost
certainly be a hashtag for your own area of interest or location.
Connect with the two of us (@mynameisearl and @wadds) and
track the hashtag #brandanarchy. It’s a good place to start out
and explore the network.
Personal reputation
Antony Mayfield introduced the concept of a personal web
footprint in Me and My Web Shadow, his book about managing
personal reputation online12. Managing your personal web
12 Mayfield, Antony. Me and My Web Shadow: How to Manage Your

Reputation Online. A&C Black Publishers, 2010.
238 BRAND ANARCHY
shadow is crucial, says Mayfield, as our lives increasingly move

online. It’s important for anyone who wants to develop a career
in communications as the web is the first place people will look
to find out about you. But more than that, Mayfield believes
that openness online is rewarded. Developing and managing
your web footprint will increase your connections to people
and access to opportunities, he says.
Mayfield’s personal web shadow extends over his blog and a
variety of social networks. Look him up via Google and you’ll
see the benefit of investing in a web shadow for yourself. In his
book, Mayfield focuses on blogs, Facebook, Twitter and
LinkedIn as a means of building a personal profile online.
Inevitably, the issue arises of how you maintain a presence in
so many places and segment each network.
We asked Antony for his personal view.
Blog ‘When it comes to the social web, blogging was my

first love and it remains one of the most exciting
and valuable parts of my working life. Establishing,
developing and maintaining a blog requires
significantly more effort and time than other
elements of maintaining your web shadow, but the
rewards are significant. A blog can give you a great
deal of control over your web shadow and potential
to develop your online presence. You can define its
look and feel and pull together all the strands and
streams of your different profiles and activities in
one place. Search engines love blogs. They have
fresh content, are well connected and are can easily
be crawled by search engines.’
Facebook ‘Facebook is a personal space for me, mainly for

friends and family. I restrict what people see about
me, and things I post there, beyond that network of

people, partly for privacy, but mostly so that I don’t
have to feel too self-conscious about posting endless
updates about family life, running, or whatever,
which will be boring, or even irritating, to many
people in that volume. Colleagues and acquaintances
that I “friend” on Facebook see some content, but
not everything – this isn’t a business networking
space for me. It feels a little harsh dividing people
into groups or degrees of closeness, but it is
necessary to do so in order to make the network
useful for you and them.’
Twitter ‘Twitter is a very special network for me. It’s mainly

for sharing thoughts about what is happening right
now and getting those amazing moments of
serendipity when someone posts a link or a thought
that is precisely relevant to me in that moment.
How I manage this network is simple: I follow
people who are interesting to me at that time, and
unfollow those who seem to be less relevant at the
moment. I allow anyone except blatant spammers
and bots to follow me (I block them) and try hard
not to be offended if they unfollow me – I appreciate
that I might not be useful to them right at that
moment.’
LinkedIn ‘As my blog is my public notebook, LinkedIn is my

public contact book, biography and a functional,
business networking space. I don’t cross-post to
Twitter as I don’t think most people hang out there
like they do on Facebook or Twitter, and the volume
of posts would be irritating. I’ll connect with anyone
240 BRAND ANARCHY
who seems interesting and relevant, but mostly

people whom I have met. There’s no real need to
segment networks in this space, beyond giving
endorsements only to people I have actually worked
with and not connecting with people I have reason
not to trust.’
Developing digital expertise and online reputation takes time.

It’s an issue of which Mayfield is acutely aware. ‘Think of social
media services like Twitter as productivity enhancers first.
Reputation is a byproduct, an outcome, of living and working
effectively with the web. There’s an investment of time to be
made in learning how to use both specific web tools and, more
generally, about how to live and work in online networks.
Beyond this, the things that enhance your online reputation
should be a part of your work. Management consultant and
writer John Hagel13 calls Twitter a serendipity engine – you
have more coincidences when you are present in online
networks: you hear about that article, that job, that conversation
which helps your work, nudges your thinking and your career
forward a little,’ says Mayfield.
Blogs as a personal brand voice

Having built a profile online and created social networks, you
need to start creating content and participating in communities
online. A personal blog is one of the most effective ways. Blogs
are a means for an individual to create their own media property
and comment on issues relevant to their own area of expertise.
They also provide a means with which to engage with other
bloggers and engage in conversations as issues are debated
13 John Hagel, personal website: www.johnhagel.com/

around the web. Content can be syndicated to other websites,

increasing your reach and, if you’re blogging regularly on
topical issues, it will almost certainly be picked up journalists.
Opportunities for media comment, news business and public
speaking have all come our way via blogs.
Neville Hobson is a UK-based professional communicator,
podcaster and blogger who has built his reputation as a thought
leader in the communications industry, thanks largely to
blogging and podcasting. He started blogging about
communication and technology in 2002. He believes that the
main benefit of blogging is building a personal reputation online
and getting noticed. ‘It’s very helpful to have a record of content
online that shows up prominently in a search. It has almost
certainly resulted in connections and work that wouldn’t have
come to me in any other way,’ says Hobson.
But for Hobson, personal development and skills are equally
important outcomes of almost 10 years publicly blogging. ‘It has
enabled me to develop a voice and build confidence in
articulating and developing my thoughts publicly. The almost
instantaneous feedback loop and public comments mean that
you very quickly develop a thick skin and a confidence in your
convictions. It makes you much sharper,’ he says.
Perhaps you’re not ready for the commitment or public
scrutiny of a blog. If not, there are plenty of ways that you can
contribute content online that will enable you to build your
digital skills and, ultimately, your online reputation. Seek out
online publications and communities focused on topics related to
your area of expertise and start to comment on stories posted to
the site. In the reputation business, that could be Advertising Age
in the United States or PR Week in the UK. Also explore
communities such as those on LinkedIn: some are incredibly
active. If you post a question about an issue such as which is the
best clipping agency or what is the best wire service, you will
242 BRAND ANARCHY
find that you are inundated with responses in short order. The
point is that, if you join in conversations and contribute your
own content, you will make new connections and your profile
will develop quickly.
Beyond engagement: participation

So content, in many forms and across many media, is the fuel
of your reputation. Applying it to best effect is not just about
broadcasting it to whoever will listen. Direct engagement with
your audience is the first step on the journey to building your
reputation through modern, two-way media. It appeals to a
fundamental basic human need to be social, and as media
continues to evolve in ways that support sustained dialogue,
then the one-way street is likely to lose its appeal.
Not just because old media amounted to audiences being told
rather than being engaged, but because communication that
fosters strong relationships doesn’t really work that way. No
one enjoys spending time with an individual that only talks
about themselves. Think about the times that you have been
stuck in the corner of a room at a party with a self-obsessed
individual. How long did it take you to make your excuses and
head to the bar, or the bathroom? We all want to share our
experiences and our needs.
The same premise applies in organisational communication. If a
brand broadcasts to its audience with no effort to engage, the
audience will have a very limited attention span. But if, instead,
the brand makes an effort to understand the concerns of its
audience, and not just entertain and inform them but even inspire
them, it will be rewarded with attention. Better still, if it strikes the
right chord it will be rewarded with influential recommendation
through word-of-mouth endorsement, in all its modern forms.
But while engagement gets them looking and listening, you
need to go further to build a more successful kind of influence,
one that can be the engine room of brand reputation. Once you
have engaged your audience you need to build a relationship
based on empathy. A brand must truly understand the needs of
its audience and respond accordingly. This is participation: a
real, sustained and organic conversation between the brand
and its audience in which the brand responds directly to the
needs of its audience on the audience’s terms.
The ‘conversation’ at the centre of that participation may
take place internally within an organisation; it might happen
via a social network such as Twitter or Facebook, or via a form
of branded media such as a blog, plus in conventional media
too. Wherever and however it happens, building a rapport
with your audience won’t be easy. But then relationships are
rarely straightforward. But it is worth the effort. The benefit of
truly participating with your audience is incredibly powerful
for brand purposes. It is the root of fostering respect and
ultimately building the right reputation, insofar as you can
command it.
Is it possible to have such an intimate relationship with an
audience? We think so. Every bit of evidence points to the fact
that consumers are fixated with media in its many forms, and
that brands are of persistent interest to them. Social networking
is now one of the biggest occupations on the web. We’re
approaching the position where more people are on social
networks than aren’t, and still subscriber numbers continue to
grow. Consumer backlashes are frequently predicted around
privacy issues on social networks such as Twitter but consumers
appear to have accepted that handing over personal data is the
price that must be paid for access to services online. Your
customers are openly volunteering and sharing their personal
information in far more detail than you’ll find in any customer
questionnaire. Corporate computer systems aren’t sophisticated
enough to harness this information. Very few brands are able to
244 BRAND ANARCHY
even begin to understand their customers in such a granular

level; but that will change in the next decade.
The future of organisational communication, and therefore
the future of reputation management, lies in participation of
the brand with its audience. That is achieved by understanding
the audience and building editorial influence across all forms of
applicable media. This should start with a detailed planning
exercise to identify and understand your audience, and then
build an editorial content plan that forms the basis of
engagement, and beyond that, participation.
Then determine the best ways to communicate with your
audience. That will almost certainly involve direct engagement
with via social forms of media but it will almost certainly
include indirect forms of communication via actual discussion,
more conventional forms of media, owned or branded media
outlets and integration with other forms of marketing.
Again, the simple fact is that you can no longer control your
reputation for the simple reason that it isn’t yours to control. If
you thought you were once in control of it, you’re kidding
yourself. But you have more chance than ever of being aware of
conversations that are taking place about your brand and that
provides you with the means to take action to improve or
address challenges to your reputation. Your audience wants
some type of engagement with you and is almost certainly
actively identifying itself on the Internet. For the time being,
the measurement of reputation by tangible commercial returns
remains a work in progress that is occupying some of the
smartest minds in the public relations industry. It is not yet
possible to assign a financial value to the impact of a single
piece of content about your organisation such as an article
online, blog post or a tweet, but the measurement of reputation
is becoming more sophisticated and scientific.
Our advice is to stop worrying about whether or not you can

control your reputation. You can’t. But it needn’t be brand
anarchy either. Invest your energy in identifying and listening
to your audience. Then plan how you will orchestrate the right
conversations for your brand in order to engage and participate.
Oh, and get on with it. You haven’t much time.
Summary
• Communication practitioners must learn new skills in order
to thrive in the new Internet-driven communication
environment.
• For now the public relations industry remains wedded to
media relations as a means of reaching audiences as a proxy
for direct communication with its community.
• The public relations industry is not a profession by the
standards of other professions. It lacks the discipline of
professional training and enforced continuous professional
development.
• The web lowers the cost of access to education and provides
the tools for a motivated individual to develop digital skills.
• As our lives and business move online individuals should
consider developing and managing their web profile.
• Social networks enables anyone to establish relations and
build a personal network online.
• The future of organisational communication lies in
participation between an organisation and its markets.
INDEX
Adams, Mark, 218–19 Bailey, Richard, 231
advertising baiting, 115–16
compared to PR, 9–10 Balanced Scorecard, 188–9
effect of social media on, Barcelona Principles, 185–6
193–4 bear pit, social media, 118–20
on Google, 48 behaviour
Advertising Age, 241 brand, 116–18, 127
advertising equivalent value human, 147
(AVE), 162–3, 185–7 Bernays, Edward, 7, 97–9
Alterian, 203–4 best-guess assumption, 14–17
analytical tools, 180 Bing, 206
Android, 49 BlackBerry, 78–9
appetite changes, consumer, Blogger, 35
74–6, 117 BlogPulse, 36
Apple hardware, 49–50 blogs/blogging
Armitage, Tom, 214 corporate, 212–14
Asda, 40–1, 211–12 description of, 35–8
Association for Measurement personal, 240–2
and Evaluation of personal reputation and, 238
Communication (AMEC), bought media, 62
185–7 BP disaster, 155–8
attitude change, 23 brandjacking, 93–5
audience, understanding, 63, Brandjack News, 94
136–7, 206 brand(s)
audit trails, 16 behaviour of, 116–18, 127
authentic campaigning, 89–90 communication, 124
authentic communication, definition of, 3
87–109 as media, 62, 142–3, 212–14,
automated monitoring tools, 227
161–2 protection, 172–3
public exposure to, 3–4
Bagnall, Richard, 159 broadcast media, boom of, 32–3
248 INDEX
Burch, Dominic, 211 consumer appetite changes,

The Business of Influence, 90–2, 74–6
187–90 content, multiple types of, 123
control
Campbell, Alistair, 87–8, 89–90 in simpler times, 4–5
Carroll, Dave, 94 taking, 20–2
CEOs, reputation of, 20–1, 24 Conversation Group, 218–19
Chartered Institute of Public conversation(s)
Relations (CIPR) the art of, 64–6
Barcelona Principles, 186 behaviour in, 118–19
measurement framework, complexity of, 123–5
187 controlling, 115
training, 226 daunting scale of, 66–7
churnalism, 105–6 expectations about, 127
citizen journalists, 39–41, 78 impact on reputation, 125–6
comment streams, 123 internal communication,
communication 136
authentic, 87–109 participating in, 116
brand, 124 rules of, 120–1
crisis, 209–12 skills for, 228
internal see internal source of, 243
communication tone of, 149
organisational, 90–2, 244 crap detection, 168–70
organisational themes, crisis communication, 209–12
89–90 cross-platform conversations,
skills for the future, 227–30 124
see also conversation(s); crowds, wisdom of, 166–8
participation Cushman, David, 217–18
Communication Market customer relationship
Report, OFCOM (2010), management (CRM),
31–2 207–9
communities, developing CyberMummy Conference, 37
online, 215–16
complaints, medium for, 154 Daily Mail, 45
INDEX 249
Daily Mirror, 29, 40–1 readers paying for media,

Daily Telegraph, 45, 46 44–6
The Daily Express, 44 disintermediation, 55–84
data analysis, 158–9, 180–1 distribution lists, 100–1
databases of intentions, 158 Domino’s Pizza, 113
Davies, Nick, 105–6 DoubleClick Ad Planner, 158,
deadlines, 19 235
defamation, 171
Defren, Todd, 108 earned media, 62
Demand Media, 205 The Economist, 165
digital media Econsultancy, 107
growth of, 4 editorial world, PR in, 11–12
influencing through, 5 email
and internal for complaints, 154
communication, 142–3 internal communication
versus traditional media, using, 133–5
29–51 threat of, to companies, 135
broadcast media, boom email lists, 100–1
of, 32–3 employees
decline of print, 29–32 empowering, 131
future of media, 50–1 engagement, 127, 137, 138–9
Google, 48 as spokespeople, 113–14
journalism vs. user- see also internal
generated content, communication
39–41 engagement
maintaining standards, beyond, 242–5
41–2 depth of, 80–1
media habits, changing, employee, 127, 137, 138–9
33–4 expectations about, 127
media models, changing, influence beyond, 80–1
43–4 reasons for, 115
new media, 35–8 release of information,
new newsagents, 48–50 76–80
no limits content, 46–7 skills for, 228
250 INDEX
Ettridge, Cliff, 137 Google Insights for Search, 158

Evening Standard, 44 Google Keyword Tool, 234–5
exposure to brands, public, 3–4 Google Reader, 235
gossip, 139–42
Facebook Grill, Andrew, 207–8
broadcast media and, 32 Grunig, James E., 95–6
versus journalism, 39–40 The Guardian
like button, 206 metrics, 165
Nestlé on, 63–4 reading online, 46
personal reputation and, website content, 122, 123
238–9
press releases on, 108 hardware, 49–50, 70–3
transparency and, 93 hashtags, 32
Financial Times, 29–30, 44 Hayward, Tony, 156–7
Flat Earth News, 105–6 Hobson, Neville, 241
Hulme, Michael, 204
Gladwell, Malcolm, 233 human behaviour, 147
Goldman, Eric, 201–2 Hunt, Todd, 95–6
Google
advertising on, 48 identity protection, 172–3
hardware, 49–50 Ilett, Dan, 101
keyword search rankings, Inconvenient PR Truth, 102–4
105 The independent, 44
news industry and, 48 influence
reputation management beyond engagement, 80–1
education, 234–5 the business of, 187–90
social media and, 206 development of, 61
transparency and, 93 fragile, 8–9
Google+, 93, 206, 235–6 measuring, 190–2
Google Alerts, 154, 235 organisational, 90–2
Google Analytics, 158, 226 through digital media, 5
Google Blog Search, 36 influencer relations, 188
Google DoubleClick Ad Influence Scorecard, 189
Planner, 158, 235 information, release of, 76–80
INDEX 251
Ingham, Francis, 34, 80–1, JC Penney, 105

194–5 journalism
integration, skills for, 229 social media role in, 41–2
internal communication, versus user-generated
131–50 content, 39–41
and being a media brand, judgement, 17–19
142–3
changing media and, 135–8 keyword search ranking, 104–5
email, 134–5 Klout, 165–6, 208
employee engagement and,
138–9 Langley, Quentin, 94
gossip, 139–42 language of the social web, 214
learning by listening, Larkin, Judy, 210–11
146–9 learning
pre-Internet, 131–2 by listening, 146–9
International Communications new skills, 225–45
Consultancy Organisation Lee, Ivy, 7, 99–100
(ICCO), 187 legal process on the Internet,
Internet 170–1
and change, 13 Leggetter, Barry, 185–6
and crisis communication, LinkedIn, 236–7, 239–42
209–12 listening, learning by, 146–9
effect on reputation, 15–16 London riots (2011), 167–8
employees using for
communication, 136 Maclaren, 56–7
legal process on, 170–1 magazines, middleman and, 60
media consumption on, Managing Public relations, 95–6
71–2 man versus machine,
reading news on, 31, 44–6 monitoring, 159–60
and traditional business marketing, effective social
models, 235 media on, 193–4
verifying sources on the, Mayfield, Anthony, 237–8
168–70 Me and My Web Shadow,
iTunes, 49–50 237–8
252 INDEX
measuring monitoring, 153–74

influence, 190–2 skills for, 229
outcomes, 162–4 monstering, 46–7
outputs, 162–4 Mumsnet, 37
reputation, 15–17, 177–97,
182–4 negativity, 90
skills for, 230 Nestlé, 63–4
media networks, online, 235–7
agenda, control of, 87–8 Newman, Kelvin, 105
brands as, 62, 142–3, 212–14, newsagents, new, 48–50
227 newspapers
changing, 135–8 decline of, 29–32
consumption, 70–3 middleman and, 60–1
disintegration, 49 no limits content online,
future of, 50–1 46–7
habits, changing, 33–4 older generation and, 33–4
integrated, planning, 81–3 online reading of, 43–4,
mashup, 67–70 44–6
models, changing, 43–4 90:10, 217–21
multitasking, 31–2 Northumberland County
new, 35–8 Council, 215
see also specific types
media, history of the, 6 online communities,
Media Standards Trust, 106 developing, 215–16
Metrica, 159–60 open business, 217–21
metrics organisational change, 23
flawed, 164–5 organisational communication,
peer, 165–6 89–90, 90–2, 244
middleman, cutting out the, outcomes, measuring, 162–4
55–84 Outliers, 233
Moat, Raoul, 46–7 outputs, measuring, 162–4
mobile phones, media owned media, 62
consumption on, 72
modernisation, 225–45 Panda, 105
INDEX 253
Paradigms of global public Barcelona Principles, 186

relations in an age of on changing media habits,
digitalisation, 97 34
parenting blogs, 36–7 defining PR, 8–9
Parker, Adam, 103–4, 164–5 measurement framework,
participation, 80–1, 201–21, 187
242–5 planning and, 80–1
PeerIndex, 165–6, 208 training and, 226
peer metrics, 165–6 public relations (PR)
PeopleBrowsr UK, 207 compared to advertising,
personal blogs, 240–2 9–10
personal reputation, 237–40 and counting, 178–9
Philips, David, 35, 202 in current times, 9–10
pictures, power of, 141 defining, 8–9
planning early days of, 5–7
integrated media, 81–3 in the editorial world,
public relations, 81 11–12
skills for, 229 models, 95–6
press releases, 99–100, 107–9 planning in, 81
PR Filter, 103–4 spam, 100–2, 102–4
print, decline of, 29–32 value of, before Internet,
PRism Journal, 97 14–15
professional development, Public Relations Society of
230–3 America (PRSA), 187
profit & loss, 192–5
propaganda, 4–5 radical transparency, 92–3
Propaganda, 98 radio listening, 33, 72
propaganda relations, 96–9 Rastegar, Farzad, 56–7
protection, identity/brand, reach, 164–5
172–3 readership, 164–5
PR Week, 241 real-time monitoring, 159
psychology, 6 Realwire, 102–3
Public Relations Consultants Regester, Michael, 209–11
Association (PRCA) reputation, 3–25
254 INDEX
best-guess assumption and, search marketing industry,

14–17 105–7, 204–7, 234–5
content plans, 82 sentiment analysis, 161–2
control of, 4–5, 22–4 Seymourpowell, 172–3
editorial world and, 11–12 Sheldrake, Philip, 90–2, 187–90
effect on employees, 132–3 SiteVisibility, 105
gaining command of, 20–2 skills, learning new, 225–45
influencing customers Smart Mobs: The Next Social
about, 8–9, 60–3 Revolution, 168
judgement and, 17–19 Smith, Andrew, 158–9, 164–5,
management, 4–5, 244 208, 226–7
measuring, 15–17, 177–97, social media
182–4 bear pit, 118–20
personal, 237–40 blending with conventional
PR and, 9–10 media, 67–70
science of, 5–7, 12–14 in the BP disaster, 156–7
Research in Motion (RIM), 78–9 building an online network,
Reuters, 165 235–7
Rheingold, Howard, 168–9 conversations on, 66–7
risk, 153–74 and crisis communication,
Risk Issues and Crisis 209–12
Management in Public effect on advertising and
Relations, 210–11 marketing, 193–4
Rockland, Dr. David B., 185–6 growth of, 4, 35–8
and internal
Salesforce, 208 communication, 143, 145
Sambrook, Richard, 153 versus journalism, 39–41
satellite television, 72 maintaining standards in,
Schmidt, Eric, 153 41–2
science and the news, 46–7
appliance of, 5–7 peer metrics, 165–6
of reputation, 12–14 press releases, 107–9
search, measuring reputation for propaganda relations,
with, 182–4 96–9
INDEX 255
protecting identity in, 172–3 and organisational

responding to, 121–3 communication themes,
science of, 13 90–1
search results in, 206 and PR spam, 100
strategy, 124, 216–17 skills for, 230
and word-of-mouth, 18 using, 13, 35
social relationship Technorati, 36
management, 207–9 television viewing, 32–3, 72
sociology, 6 TIME magazine, 94
software monitoring tools, The Times, 30, 44–5
161–2 TOTS 100, 36–7
Space Book, 216 @towerbridge, 214
spam Toyota, 74–6
public relations, 100–2, trademarks, 172–3
102–4 traditional media
web, 204–5 blending with social media,
speed, 17–19, 228 67–70
spin, 87–109 BP disaster, 157
spokespeople, 113–14 versus digital media see
Spotify, 104 digital media, versus
standards, maintaining, 41–2 traditional media
Sunday Times, 29, 44–5 prioritisation of, 126
The Sun, 30 Trafigura, 170–1
superinjunctions, 170–1 training, 230–3
Surowiecki, James, 167 transparency, 22, 23, 119–20
radical, 92–3
Talisker, 215 Twitter
technology broadcast media and, 32
and communication by conversations on, 66
crowds, 167 as a customer service
and crisis communication, channel, 208–9
209 hashtags, 32
and future communication versus journalism, 39–40
skills, 227 lack of middleman, 59–60
256 INDEX
language on, 214 Wall Street Journal, 29–30

launch of, 36 Walsh, Mike, 10, 22–4
online networking through, websites as marketing vehicles,
237 215
personal reputation and, 239 Whitehorn, Will, 215–16
press releases on, 108 Whittle, Sally, 36–7
PR spam and, 101–2 wi-fi, 71–2
searching through, 154–5 Wikileaks, 92–3
transparency and, 93 wire fodder, 99–100
Two-Way Street, 201–2 wireless networks, 71–2
TypePad, 35 The Wisdom of Crowds, 167
word-of-mouth, 17–18, 206
user-generated content versus Wordpress, 35, 108
journalism, 39–41
Yaxley, Heather, 231–2
video, power of, 141 Young, Philip, 35
viral content, 39–40 Your Brand: At Risk or Ready
Virgin Galactic, 215–16 for Growth?, 203–4
Vogue, 165
First published in Great Britain 2012
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BRAND ANARCHY

Managing Corporate Reputation

Saskia, Alﬁe, Ivan and Sarra

Dan, Ellie, Freya and Katie

2. Media: traditional versus digital 29

3. Cutting out the middleman 55

4. The end of spin and the need for authentic

5. The audience answers back 113

Conversation is also complex 123

6. On the inside 131

7. Monitoring and the management of risk 153

8. Measuring reputation 177

Death of Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE) 185

9. Participation: the future of organisational

10. Reskilling for the future 225

Mark Adams (@cluetrainee);

the future, you must ﬁrst understand and continue to chart

‘My reputation grows with every failure.’

experts reckon that advertising messages alone number around

Control in far simpler times

the public relations industry – as propaganda had a nasty whiff,

particularly those actions that were interpreted and

Provocatively, by today’s standards, many saw not just

Seeking more than fragile inﬂuence

Wikipedia cites it as ‘a ﬁeld concerned with maintaining public

What is PR these days?

actively seek some form of participative relationship with

1 Ogilvy UK Group: www.ogilvy.co.uk

The changing editorial world

ideas for both managing likely bad news and highlighting

In pursuit of the science of reputation

If you looked at the favoured talking points and daily brayings

audience understanding, the monitoring of feedback and the

Is a best-guess still best?

individual pieces of that advice would be more difﬁcult, if not

a blog post or on a Facebook update and tutted at the poor

effective measurement of public relations investment is the last

the online world, roused into conversation by a whirlwind

Gaining command, not seizing control

average person can surely name far more of their chief

understands the media and audience intimately, and so plots

‘Brands aren’t all yours, anyway’

or audiences that are on the outside looking in. Equally, brand

• Brands are more in the spotlight than ever because modern

The decline of print

more than a decade, always takes second place to a print article

The primary function of newspapers is to service an audience

4 2010 Communication Market Report, OFCOM: http://stakeholders.ofcom.

seven hours. More speciﬁcally, the number of hours that 16 to

Howard Kosky, managing director of broadcast public relations

Changing media habits

one of the very few in the UK who subscribe to both a daily

7 Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA): www.prca.org.uk

The new media

blogger via comments. Initially blogs were used by motivated

mums and dads joining in greater numbers. ‘They come from

16 CyberMummy Conference: www.cybermummy.com

the motivations of a blogger are very different from those of a

Successful blogger relations