“Trust No One”

Posted on September 24, 2008 | 0 Comments

Contributing columnist Ron Alsop of the Wall Street Journal kicked off a discussion of trust at the Page Society’s Annual Conference in Chatham on Monday by quoting the lead of a Journal story on the current financial crisis: “Trust no one.” The value of trust in business has never been clearer.

Alsop and his co-panelists, Paul W. Critchlow, Vice Chairman, Public Markets,
Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc.; Patricia Wright, Vice President, External Affairs,BP America and Christine Anderson, Former Communications Director to Governor Eliot Spitzer of New York, discussed their experiences with institutions struggling to maintain trust in the face of a crisis of confidence.

Among the lessons:

• Embrace transparency. You can’t trust what you don’t understand.
• A commitment to sustainability or corporate social responsibility may hold one to a higher standard, but it also buys good will that earns one the benefit of the doubt.
• Relationships with key stakeholders built on dialogue also earn trust and pay dividends in a crisis.
• It’s important to sustain trust in institutions, rather than individuals, recognizing that leaders may disappoint, but institutions must persevere.

As our institutions – both public and private – strive to contain and resolve this crisis, it’s clear that new regulatory approaches are both necessary and inevitable. However, we would do well to consider that regulation alone will not build lasting trust in business. It will require a sincere commitment by businesses to these fundamental building blocks of trust: transparency, corporate social responsibility and genuine relationships with disparate stakeholders.

These concepts – apparently foreign to some of the high-flying risk takers on Wall Street – must become part of the DNA of their successors in whatever institutions may ultimately survive the current debacle.

Roger Bolton
Senior Counselor
APCO Worldwide

Page Society Presents Recognition to Dave Drobis and Jim Grunig

Posted on September 24, 2008 | 0 Comments

The Arthur W. Page Society presented its two highest awards today to David Drobis, Chairman Emeritus, Ketchum and James E. Grunig, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Communication, University of Maryland.

Both received standing ovations from an audience of about 200 people at the Chatham Bars Inn on Cape Cod after presenting their acceptance remarks.

Drobis credited “any success I’ve had to the relationships I have with clients and colleagues and to relationships I’ve helped build for clients with their stakeholders,” in his remarks entitled “In a Facebook World, Face-to-Face is Still Important.”

In Grunig’s remarks, “The Profession’s Store of Knowledge,” he said “researchers not only must add to the profession’s store of knowledge but they must also search for practical applications of that knowledge.”

Drobis noted that “a lot has changed about the ways relationships are started and maintained today,” citing meetings and networking through Linkedin, Spoke and other web sites. He also pointed out that “whole public relations campaigns are conducted online.” However, he cautioned “that even in this Facebook world, face-to-face is still important.”

He also stressed that “relationships built on trust are the glue that can hold such an ever-changing network together,” encouraged public relations to “play a larger role in building those relationships,” and said the corporate communications field has a world of opportunity available to it “if we’re seen as relationship experts.”

Drobis said, “I’d suggest that while you’re helping brands and companies with their B2B, B2C and high-tech word-of-mouth marketing, I hope you won’t forget to throw in a little F2F, or face-to-face relationship building. He also said, while a lot has changed, real relationship building is still the most important game in town.

Grunig talked about three kinds of public relations research: research in the profession, research on the profession and research for the profession. He praised Ed Block and Jim Tirone of AT&T for being the first corporate communications professionals to ask for research in the profession more than three decades ago. He also praised the Institute for Public Relations for its “enormous contribution to our understanding of how to do research in the profession.”

He said public relations scholarship has “come a long way” during his 40-plus years in the discipline and noted the work of the International Association of Business Communicators for funding its now famous Excellence Study that he claimed had much to do with moving public relations from one-way communication centered on the news media into two-way communication focused on relationship building.

Both honorees made comments about public relations education. Grunig noted that since only a few major US research universities offer public relations courses, only a few Ph.D. degrees are granted each year with specialties in public relations. He said this limits not only research productivity but also the prestige of public relations as an academic discipline.

Drobis said, “it’s always concerned me that we as a profession don’t do more to support the schools that are training public relations people – either by hiring their students or working with the schools to improve the curricula so we want to hire their students.”

He also said most occupations “seek out people who are trained in their professions – while our industry often ignores students trained in public relations.” Drobis cautioned that while it is important for public relations “to attract people who have a diversity of skills beyond communication . . . we also need to be careful about sending the message that just about anyone can do our jobs.”

Grunig also noted the importance of the creation of academic journals devoted to public relations including Public Relations Review, the Journal of Public Relations Research and Public Relations Journal.

The Arthur W. Page Society is a select membership organization for senior public relations and corporate communications executives who seek to enrich and strengthen their profession.

Donald K. Wright, Ph.D
Professor of Public Relations
Boston University

Globalization and Public Relations Roundtable

Posted on September 18, 2008 | 0 Comments

In the wake of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the AIG rescue and the HBOS take over, Echo's third round-table on globalization and public relations hosted in Zurich today in Credit Suisse's offices, focused not surprisingly on the issues of mono brands versus sub brands, centralization vs decentralization.

The round-table panelists included Charles Naylor, CCO, Credit Suisse; Jan Mueller, VP Issues & Strategic Commmunications, EADS; Rolf Schlapfer, Global Corporate Communications, Roche; Inge van Halst, Global Communications Manager, Dow Chemical; Simone Lauper, Global Communications Manager, Swiss Re; and Henner Alms, Principal, Dr. Schanz, Alms & Company.

The view from the discussion group is that the current crises have been so large and significant, that whichever approach is used, the parent brand will inevitably suffer. Globalization and its urgent demand for transparency is forcing the need to clearly articulate the essence of the brand - its values, its ethics, its principles.

Ensuring communications is in tight alignment with business strategy is no longer a nice to have, but an essential ingredient in long-term survival, and internal commmunications is gaining in importance as a result. Furthermore, that the current economic turmoil may force corporate social responsibility further down the list of priorities was inevitable, the participants agreed, but that nevertheless corporate responsibility is here to stay as organizations work on their wider license to operate and their core differentiation in an increasingly competitive environment. The PR professional of tomorrow needs to be more globally experienced, with intercultural skills that are not currently present, and work on providing a far reaching view to management teams on stakeholder expectations and the value of globalization to civil society. The collective findings of Echo's round-tables will appear in IPRA's Gold Paper on Globalization, to be launched in Beijing, at the IPRA World Congress in November.

Sandra Macleod
Group CEO, Echo Research