Posts Tagged ‘public relations’

Before I forget.  As I travel to Weber Shandwick offices around the network in Europe, some things resound in my head. One constant is that I am always reminded how much I enjoy and respect the people I work with inside our network. As colleagues, they are immensely collegial, collaborative, client-first focused and committed. Reputations are built on these types of factors and it is good to be reminded how deep it goes. But returning to a few other things that caught my eye as I traveled last week and look ahead to this week…..

• My colleagues in Berlin told me that the day before I arrived, there had been a march protesting “work.” I found it fun to think about. Down with work! How would we pay our bills? I meant to follow up with this online but forgot because I had to work.

• In a taxi back to my hotel in Berlin, I saw a restaurant named White Trash Fast Food. Wonder what that was?  I think it is a place for music, food and tattoos.

• In some research our parent company IPG did on New Realities among consumers, one of the findings was that people were not suffering from data overload. In fact, US citizens and our German brethren (in a separate study) by Respondi said that they were energized by being their own researchers and not frustrated, overwhelmed and inundated as people think they are. In fact, people felt smarter and in greater control over their choices than ever before. One of my colleagues in Germany mentioned that there was a big debate in his country about information overload and that the abundance of data was making us dumber not smarter. I think not.

• In Brussels, I learned that the head of NATO is a frequent Twitterer. I also learned that the EU’s broadcast service….EbS…Europe by Satellite, provided such good up-to-date information that journalists were losing their edge in being able to report on EU news. I was told that EBS was so good that it broadcasted negative as well as positive information about itself. What’s a journalist to do?

• One well-known and large Fortune 100 company communications professional told us how the company had established an “amplification” room, not a war room, to deal with two years of criticism in order to get their story properly told.

• Another company at our lunch in Brussels had recently won approval from management to develop a word of mouth program that would allow for the negative with the positive. He talked about how hard he had worked at getting it to happen and how a pilot was about to begin that would telegraph the program in consumer language, not corporate speak. He was reading a book titled The Conversation Manager. One victory at a time.

• Our Milan office organized a superb event with the American Chamber of Commerce, a well-known journalist, one of our Milan office’s leaders and the US Consul General who spoke about the rising “green economy” in the U.S. I was there to talk about The New Normality that I mentioned in my last posting. The US Consul spoke highly of President Obama’s efforts and I have to say it felt so good to hear some pro-Obama talk after weeks of backbiting at home.

• I ran into someone in a large department store off the beaten path in Milan who had been at the event with the American Chamber of Commerce. It was Saturday morning around 11AM. Could the world be smaller? He had just bought sunglasses.

• I made it to Amsterdam despite the volcanic ash debacle. It was a long day.

• The Economist wrote an article where they mentioned “headline risk.” Since I often write about reputation risk, I think this is an increasing factor in reputation recovery….reducing headline mentions. At what point does headline risk start to dissipate? And what has to happen? One course of action is a CEO apology or CEO dismissal. That’s been proven to work but not always the best solution.

More later on the rest of my trip.  Will update you on Amsterdam, Paris, London and Madrid in due time.

Two weeks ago I went to the Harvard Club in Cambridge to accept an award on behalf of Weber Shandwick for the best corporate responsibility advisory firm in CR magazine’s ranking of our category. No doubt about it…it was an honor. CR rated public relations agencies and advertising/marketing firms and we topped the list. The meeting in Cambridge was to honor CR’s 100 Best Corporate Citizens and to gather people together to discuss corproate responsibility. This was before the Horizon oil spill which would have undoubtedly dominated the discussion. The meeting was terrific by the way.

What surprised me the most was that one of the issues that was given out in addition to the issue devoted to 100 Best Corporate Citizens was CR‘s Black List.

This made me wonder whether there will be a bumper crop of Black Lists in the next few years. Should we brace ourselves for Black Lists of the worst companies to work for, least ethical companies, worst companies for working mothers, worst MBA programs, most terrible IT companies to apply for, meanest CEOs, etc. Actually there have been many Worst CEO lists — according to Google there are nearly 900,000 hits for Worst CEOs.  No surprise. But the Black List sounded deadly to me and I cracked open the issue to learn why a publication would go this far. Below is what CR’s magazine’s editor Jay Whitehead had to say about why they published the list. He makes some good points (transparency builds credibility) and I was glad to see why they did not take this List so lightly. As noted, many of the companies were on the list because they did not disclose information on the factors that go into CR’s ranking. We will see what next year brings in terms of Black Lists but I can tell you one thing….Worst CEO lists will be here for eternity. As I always say (and I am sure someone else said it before me)….Just as CEOs get all the credit when things go right, they get all the blame when things go wrong.

“We have a confession. What we have not told you is that every year after we publish the “100 Best Corporate Citizens List,” someone reminds us that we also have an obligation to publish the bottom of the list. Up until now, we’ve ignored that reminder. But we cannot ignore it any more. The “Black List” is the result of recurring demands to see which companies are the most opaque among the Russell 1000.

In publishing the “Black List,” we do not take our responsibility lightly. Companies on the “Black List” represent the least-transparent companies in the Russell 1000, which is a tough place to be in the era of corporate responsibility and its ever-intensifying drive for transparency. We expect the companies on the “Black List” will be unhappy with us.  We offer them one piece of solace. All a “Black List” company has to do is make a few CR-related data points about itself publicly available. Report a couple data points to the Carbon Disclosure Project. Put your employee benefits policies online. Publish some human rights information. Get a formal climate change policy, and put it online. Some of the actions required are the public company hygiene equivalent of washing your hands after visiting the rest room. Yet all the “Black List” companies have made the decision to skip that basic step. 

While being a “100 Best Corporate Citizens List” company is a major accomplishment requiring considerable commitment and cost, indulging in just enough transparency to get your company out of the cellar is not that hard, nor that expensive. And one thing’s for certain: it’s less embarrassing than being on the “Black List.”

 The “Black List” methodology is exactly the same as what we use for the “100 Best Corporate Citizens List.” Our population of companies is still the Russell 1000. We used the same 349 data points in 7 categories. We used the same data provider, IW Financial. We contacted each of the companies by email to request that they provide any data they have to help us correct their files. We got no replies from the 30 companies that appear on the “Black List.”

 Where the “Black List” differs from the “Best” list is in the paucity of data. Where “100 Best” companies disclose hundreds of data points in Environment, Climate Change, Human Rights, Employee Relations, Finance, Governance and Philanthropy, “Black List” companies have disclosed virtually zero. In fact, all 30 of this year’s “Black List” companies tie for dead last in every category—with the exception of three-year total return, which varied a bit as you see on the Black List above. And the irony is that “Black List” companies significantly under-performed both the S&P 500 and the “100 Best Corporate Citizens List” companies in three-year total return.”