Reputation Management. Shaping And Maintaining A Positive Public Perception.

All organizations are currently managing their reputation, often with a PR agency or agencies. Very few are managing them in a holistic, integrated way. There are several available frameworks for those considering a more integrated approach.

Dynamic, Flexible And Agile 

Many older professionals remind their younger colleagues that managing reputation is in some ways the same as it has always been. The most authentic organisations always performed better than others, and public relations groups know this. Communication has always been about 

telling great stories. 

There's some truth in this. But in many more ways, reputation management has changed beyond almost all recognition and continues to change. Social media has increased the pace. Customers having direct and public access have increased the intensity of praise and anger. Modern NGOs and organisations such as the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists have increased the depth of the challenge. AI will expect to potentially multiply the scale of criticism in all this in an increasingly dissatisfied and unsympathetic world, something PR companies are used to. 

For these reasons, the reputation management structure should be agile, dynamic and flexible. It should be self-sufficient, but in late 2023, according to McKinsey research, organisational agility, the ability to quickly reconfigure strategy, structure, processes, people, and technology, is proving elusive for most. Their research showed that only 4% of organisations had completed an agile transformation, although 37% had one underway. They concluded that organisational agility is ‘catching fire’ for those wanting to deliver effective reputation management and organisational transformation.

We Can't Bore Our Stakeholders (or each other)

One of the dangers in professionalising (and even creating) a function like reputation management with a PR agency is that a new bureaucracy is created in addition to the existing silos, and there are already too many of those normally. 

Companies require two things from the range of professions, we call marketing services, profitable revenue, and a strong reputation. 

There need only be two core functions, integrated marketing and reputation management. In addition to an insight function with the skills and weight to measure reputation as well as the data analytics required for marketing. This should reduce bureaucracy, not create more.

In reputation management, as in everything else, the work in terms of time taken should be 5% strategy and 95% implementation. 

And our new structures need to leave greater scope for creativity to flourish. The new head of reputation management should be just as much fun over a coffee as the old head of public relations. 

This latter point, while flippant, contains a heartfelt belief. There is a danger that reputation management comes to symbolise ‘reputation protection’ only. It shouldn't.

Crises are now inevitable for almost every organisation over 10 years, and are therefore inevitable parts of every CEO and CCO's career. Risk mitigation and crisis preparedness now form part of every organisation's ongoing activity

Ethics And Legality

Ethics and the overlapping but also separate areas of legality and morality are becoming critical areas for everyone in business life, particularly those of public relations groups working in reputation management

With PR,  I completely reject the idea that what we do might be unethical in itself. In a modern capitalist economy, democracy is strengthened if all elements of society openly communicate, 

Democracy is weakened by secrecy and opacity. If companies communicate, that is good for society. If they lobby the government, that is how democracy works. But society should be able to see who lobbies whom, and how much they spend. In the international arena. The same holds true. Countries that communicate and explain are preferable to those that don't.

The ethics, or more correctly, morality, of those who work for as individuals or PR consultancies is a matter of individual conscience. Tobacco companies, casinos, high-interest lenders, franking companies, and mining companies are okay to some, unacceptable to others, as long as the activity is legal, it seems to me a matter of personal choice. 

However, I believe PR agencies should be an individual conscience option. Just because the consultant decides to work for a fracking company, it doesn't follow that all members of staff have to work on that piece of business. They should be allowed the option to decline. 

There are three areas of ethics that I feel strongly about. They are transparency, what we actually do, and fake news. 

Reputation managers should be transparent about who they are working for at all times when the work is in the public domain. Principally, this means when engaging with journalists, lobbying government, or trying to influence debates of public interest. For those people working for companies, government or other organisations, this is relatively straightforward. Although it does not mean that the formation of ‘fake’ interest groups or (not actually) ‘independent’ expert websites is automatically wrong

For those working in consultancies, this means declaring our clients when we work in the public domain. It's simply not acceptable to conceal them. When UK-based Bell Pottinger exploded in 2017 it wasn't because it had worked for Oakbay Investments, the South African company owned by Gupta brothers. It imploded because the ‘economic emancipation’ campaign it worked on was seen to incite racial hatred. What we as reputation management professionals actually do for our clients is key, and we need to do the right thing, just as we often advise our clients to do, for many brands. 

For many consumer brands. It's very tempting to concoct stories that fit the’ clickbait’ obsession of some media outlets. It can seem harmless. At the opposite extreme, the deliberate release of knowingly fake news to influence election results is clearly wrong. As a profession, we should be part of neither.