Ertblog

A strange revolution: Ryan Giggs, the celebrity, Twitter and the law

It's a crying shame that Britain's clash over the respective rights of privacy and freedom of speech focuses on a footballer's affair. It's hard to imagine a cause less likely to justify a public interest case - as opposed to the interest of tabloid papers. As the Guardian's Michael White put it, it's not exactly Tahrir Square, the centre of Egypt's revolt against tyranny. 

Yet it was obvious days ago that Ryan Giggs' injunction preventing him from being named was a futile exercise. Twitter users knew what newspaper readers weren't allowed to. Yesterday, a Scottish newspaper became the first to name Giggs - and this afternoon Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming relied on the protection of parliamentary privilege to follow suit. Within minutes, Sky News and other major news outlets decided to ignore the legal order. Despite this, Tugendhat J this evening became the second judge today to reject News Group's attempt to lift the injunction. The legal establishment is understandably reluctant to abandon the rule of law to what has been described as Britain's biggest act of civil disobedience. Yet the longer this goes on, the less respect the law will enjoy.

The biggest lesson in this saga is that a cover up often ends up creating a bigger story. Anyone wanting to minimise bad headlines should think very seriously before going to law to try to stop it. Ryan Giggs isn't the first person to find that managing the story might have been a far better tactic. 

But we should also pause before accepting that a Twitter storm is somehow more legitimate than a reasoned legal judgment. Alastair Campbell made the point well in an interview on BBC Radio 5's Drive show.  The media, he suggested, were relying on a 'useful idiot' like John Hemming MP breaking cover so they could name Giggs. He added that something that interests the public isn't the same thing as the public interest. News Group itself struggled to claim a public interest in naming Giggs. 

The prime minister weighed in again today, arguing that Britain's privacy rules were unsustainable. But he repeated his concern about judge-made law, rather than legislation passed by parliament. This is facile. Much of our law is case law - an act of parliament is never the final word. It's the job of judges to interpret the law and - in the higher courts - establish precedent. If parliament doesn't like the results it can legislate to change them, but parliament has a far from unblemished record - as anyone who remembers the Dangerous Dogs Act of the 1980s will recognise. That was a classic example of the adage that hard cases make bad law. 

The greatest irony is that Britain had no general right to privacy until the 1998 Human Rights Act incorporated the European Convention of Human Rights into UK law.  How curious that this new right should almost immediately be eroded by the explosive growth of social media and the new power of the crowd.  

 

 

Deep Horizon a year on: BP PR lessons

A year ago this week, an explosion ripped through BP's Deep Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven people. The three month battle to cap the well and stop the spill shattered BP's reputation. A year on from the disaster, Lansons Communications held a debate about how BP handled one of the biggest PR challenges ever faced by a British company.

BP made an early, disastrous decision: to deflect responsibility for the disaster to the operator of the rig, Transocean. That may have been technically correct (and this week BP sued Transocean for £24 billion) but meant that BP didn't express a word of sympathy for the victims for four days after the explosion. As a result, BP was on the backfoot from the start.

The other key factor in the PR battle was chief executive Tony Hayward's decision to front the company's media response. Hayward was simply the wrong man to do this. His series of disastrous PR blunders - notably a catastrophic plea that he wanted his life back, after 11 men had lost theirs - fed American anger. And his insistence on going yachting just days after Congress grilled him over BP's performance was an act of immature stupidity.

But BP's biggest problem was reality. Oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico for almost three months. The greatest communicators in the world wouldn't have changed that stark fact. Oil spills are toxic reputationally as well as chemically: the world remembers the Torrey Canyon, Exxon Valdez and Amoco Cadiz disasters. During the crisis, a quarter of total US media coverage was about Deepwater Horizon. The intensity and duration of that media scrutiny was greater than the coverage of the 9/11 atrocities. Small wonder BP felt beleagured and unloved. 

Speaking at the Lansons event, American body language expert Joe Navarro was dismissive of Tony Hayward's media performance. "You don't ask engineers to do performance", he argued. Yet Ian King, business editor at The Times, took a different view. He applauded the very human response of another technician chief executive, Centrica boss Sam Laidlaw, who cut short a Christmas holiday to respond to a tragedy. Hayward may have done better had he concentrated on leading BP's response, leaving the media and community response to Bob Dudley, the BP executive who grew up on the Gulf coast - and who succeeded Hayward after the crisis was over.

Navarro argued that BP should have built an alliance of the organisations involved, rather than standing alone. I pointed out in the debate that this would have been impossible. Few outside the oil industry had heard of Transocean. And as events proved, the media and politicians were only interested in BP's role: big oil makes an easy target. President Obama shamelessly played fast and loose with reality - theatrically insisting on calling BP by its historic title of British Petroleum. Lansons chief executive Tony Langham said Obama demeaned his office by doing this, but recognised that 'politicians do what politicians do'. 

Ian King was very critical of BP chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg's role in the crisis. He asked why Svanberg didn't more actively support his beleagured chief executive, adding that it was a scandal that the chairman was still in office.

King was generally sympathetic to BP. he admitted that The Times initially treated the crisis as a foreign story, only later recognising its impact. He reflected on BP's dilemma over calls to suspend its dividend in a Times column in June. (At Wednesday's event, he explained how a generation of BP executives including Hayward were seared by the experience of BP's 1990s dividend cut.) And he rightly pointed out that oil companies do dirty and dangerous things so we can run our cars and enjoy our lifestyle. The oil business will never be risk free. Ian added that he never understood why British companies were always so keen to do business in America, given the litigious and protectionist instincts of the land of the free. 

Late in the debate, I pointed out that no one had mentioned social media. This was one of the biggest crises of the social media era. It led Tony Langham to praise BP's use of social media, including a reasonable apology on Facebook for Hayward's disastrous 'I want my life back' plea. Another participant said BP did an amazing internal communications job, keeping BP people informed and reassured. And BP has published a moving film called A year of change, introduced by new boss Bob Dudley, on the first anniversary of the tragedy. 

Langham pointed out the irony of criticising Hayward for insisting on taking the media flak. He asked how many times people slammed company bosses for hiding from journalists when the going got tough. (Remember how invisible bank bosses were during the early stages of the credit crunch?) Yet it takes a formidable comms chief to tell a CEO he or she's not the person to front interviews. And as Navarro said, external advisers are often better placed to do so. 

BP's experience will be studied for years to come. Last month I chaired a CIPR Corporate & Financial Group talk by Andrew Gowers, BP's head of communications during the Deepwater Horizon crisis. I said at the time that many PR people would have been partly relieved, partly disappointed, not to have been involved in this enormous story. We crave big stories - but this was a story that would have devoured almost anyone. 

I'll end with a recent comment from one of our best friends, who works for BP. She said that many BP people were frustrated that the company seemed unable to get its message across during the crisis. I'm sure the company's PR people felt the same way: BP was a company under siege. That siege only lifted when the well was capped. It's easy to look to PR people to solve problems. Sometimes we can achieve that, but reality is always our greatest resource - or weakness. 

Wednesday's event was held by Lansons Communications. It was chaired by Louise Cooper, head of Lansons Live. I was invited as head of PR of a Lansons client. 

Why RIM's CEO shouldn't have fled Cellan-Jones BBC interview

The chief executive of RIM, the company behind BlackBerry, has become the latest interviewee to walk out of an interview. Mike Lazardis ended his encounter with BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones after the corporation's technology reporter asked about RIM's issues in India and the Middle East, where governments have challenged BlackBerry's encryption of messages.

The interview was set up to explain the new BlackBerry Playbook tablet, RIM's answer to the Apple iPad. But RIM's PR team must have known that Cellan-Jones would take the opportunity to raise other hot topics. At first Lazardis dealt calmly with the challenge. Had he stuck to that approach, viewers would have been reassured and left to focus on the Playbook. Instead, all the talk on Twitter and elsewhere was about the CEO who walked out. 

The golden rule of media interviews is to answer the question but bridge to your key message. Cellan-Jones appears to have given Lazardis ample chance to respond and get back to talking about the Playbook. I can't help wondering how the RIM CEO would have fared against a truly aggressive interviewer, such as Jeremy Paxman or John Humphrys...

The leaders' debates: a good idea, but get them right in 2015

Britain finally adopted leaders' debates in the 2010 general election - and life may never be the same again.

The three 90 minute debates transformed the fortunes of Nick Clegg and his Liberal Democrats. They confirmed Gordon Brown's weakness in an era when easy charm pays dividends. And they posed a serious challenge to David Cameron, who surely assumed he was bound to become Britain's next prime minister.

But the series of debates was far from perfect. The third debate felt like one too many, as the leaders bombarded us with soundbites and questions were repeated from the first two encounters. (All three debates included a question about immigration.) The ban on audience applause or heckling didn't have as much an impact as I suspected it would, though it probably added to the boredom of the final debate. And, above all, the debates had an air of unreality as the leaders pretended there would be no great pain to come whoever wins the election. 

So debates are here to stay. And that must mean that no political party will ever again risk a leader so unsuited to debating and engaging with voters as as Gordon Brown. 

Social media comes of age: a day at Don't Panic's latest event

Social media is now part of the mainstream. Last week's conference about strategic social media, run by Don't Panic, confirmed how much has changed since I attended one of Don't Panic's first events on the subject, the University of Sunderland's Delivering the new PR in 2006. 

Don't Panic's Andy Wake has written an excellent account of the changing impact of social media on the Eventualities blog. (See also this comprehensive post by Adam Burns.) Those early events included workshops explaining what a blog was, and encouraging PR people to try their hands at blogging and social media. No such introduction is needed now, as the BBC's news bulletins regularly cover Twitter and Facebook. (Perhaps excessively, as I suggested in a blog post about the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones last month!) Corporate communicators are now judged on how their organisations are engaging with social media as well as traditional media. 

Yet we should take care not to treat social media as a bandwagon. The best presentation at last week's Don't Panic event was by Martin Thomas, the co-author of Crowd Surfing. Martin mocked the idea that companies need a social media strategy. I totally agree - a social media strategy suggests a synthetic response to the changes that social media is prompting. (My boss recently posed the compelling question: why he should have a social media strategy but not a newspaper or email strategy.) Instead, we should apply the lessons of social media (that transparency and authenticity are crucial) to all our communications efforts. It's telling that many senior communicators regard Twitter as a way of pushing out corporate messages. That's completely wrong. In the same way, too many corporate communicators only tweet when they've got a news release to sell. That's not going to win them many friends. 

The other refreshing presentation was from Stephen Waddington from Speed Communications, who gave everyone a copy of the Beano. (Thanks to Don't Panic's Andy Wake for the photo of Stephen and his son reading the Beano in the background.) This wasn't as eccentric as you might think: Stephen's point was that great content is always a winner, whatever the medium. He contrasted the hopeless online efforts of Britain's biggest regional media groups with the SR2 blog, an extraordinarily compelling website run by Josh Halliday, a journalism student in Sunderland. 

I'll end this account with a plug for a brilliant piece of viral marketing for Blackpool, described by Sarah Lundy from Visit Lancashire. I've a particular interest here as my father was a pioneer of local government and tourism PR in Wales and London. I was thrilled with the success of Blackpool's J'aime La Tour video, which confirms Stephen Waddington's view that great content wins. 

I've included below links to my blog posts about the Don't Panic events I've attended. Social media has dominated! 

CIPR Northern Conference July 2006: PR embraces blogs 

November 2006: Delivering the new PR

June 2007: Delivering the new PR 2.0

January 2008: crisis communications

May 2008: a new era of authentic communication

May 2009: it's not about technology

The election leaders' debate: making up for our democratic deficit?

History was made tonight as Britain held its first leaders' election debate. (Or more accurately, the first debate between the three biggest UK-wide parties.)

Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg got off to an uncertain start, with Clegg nervous as he opened the debate. But the Liberal Democrat leader must be delighted with his performance, as ITV News and YouGov both proclaimed him the winner.

That said, the BBC's Nick Robinson made a fair point: debates have no winners. We all watch with our own prejudices and values. Labour's Alan Johnson said Brown was the victor, while William Hague said Cameron came out on top. I think they're wrong, but who am I to say? The real test will be how the leaders came across to millions of voters, especially in marginal seats.

I didn't think Cameron was as bad as some have argued. But his curse is to be seen as the successor to Tony Blair. We're suspicious of slick politicians, after discovering from Blair that that smooth-speaking politicians are the last people to trust. And the Tories have been so muddled in their thinking (slash spending? cut taxes?) that no one knows what they'd do if Cameron moved into Downing Street after 6 May. (Lesson from the past: Thatcher doubled VAT in 1979 despite not breathing a word about this bombshell during that year's election campaign.) 

The debate reinforced the view of many of us that Britain's electoral system is fundamentally unfair. Some people's election votes carry far more weight than others, which is outrageous. We must never repeat the travesty of 1983, when the Liberals and SDP won almost the same proportion of the vote as Labour but got a fraction of the parliamentary seats. I hope that the three debates help nudge the British public to share their votes more evenly, to force a fairer voting system.

The other lesson, for me, was that social media made the debate far wider than the three men in suits, watched by a studio audience told not to cheer, applaud or boo. I loved seeing what people were saying on Twitter, and sharing my thoughts and weak jokes. It made up for the ridiculous, Orwellian rules constraining the debate. (Are the politicians really so frightened of the public that they need such protection?) We've got another three hours of debate before polling day. It should be surprisingly interesting.

Why the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones is wasted on digital election stories

I'm a huge fan of the BBC's technology business reporter Rory Cellan-Jones - or @ruskin147 as he's known on Twitter. I first appreciated his expertise and enthusiasm after reading his book about the dot com boom and bust, Dot Bomb. 

But my heart sank when I heard that Rory had been given a temporary role as the BBC's digital election correspondent. Not because I don't think social media will play a role in the imminent British general election. No, my concern is that the move appears to confirm the fears of the BBC critics who think the corporation is obsessed with Twitter and - to a lesser extent - Facebook. More significantly, it suggests a preoccupation with the medium rather than the message. 

Don't get me wrong. I love social media. I've been blogging since 2005, and have embraced Twitter and Facebook with a passion. But Rory's new (temporary) beat suggests the BBC is desperate to be seen as cool and in touch. His blogpost about the budget confirms my fear. As he says, the Facebook election page has just 1,000 fans active and 12 contributors. I sense that Rory is desperate to find a new digital angle to the election, rather than judge possible stories on their newsworthiness. That's a great shame for such a talented journalist.

The political social media enthusiasts constantly point to Barack Obama's 2008 campaign as the model for future engagement of voters through social media. But America is, as they say, another world. Obama was engaging in a great debate with Democratic party rivals, followed by the actual race for the White House. The idea of change was compelling after eight years of George W Bush. Britain is very different. British political parties seem to have transferred Punch and Judy politics to Twitter and Facebook. (The Tories' Cash Gordon stunt was pitiful.) We're hardly likely to be impressed. If they're going to succeed, they must remember that social media is about transparency and authenticity, not control and yah-boo insults. Individual MPs, such as Labour's Kerry McCarthy and Eric Joyce, often rise above this in their blogs, and provide a compelling insight into the role of the MP. (Though interestingly Kerry appears to talk more to the converted on Twitter. Does 140 characters lead politicians to be more partisan?)  

My view is that the televised leaders' debates will have more of an impact on the 2010 election than the political parties' social media efforts. The real impact of Twitter and Facebook will be from voters commenting on the debates and developments in the campaign, not the parties' own efforts on social media sites. But Kerry and Eric are great role models for other candidates.

The day my bank card appeared in ITV's The Bill

The news that ITV was scrapping The Bill, its long-running police drama, brought back happy memories of my encounters with one of British television's best loved shows. 

Back in April 1989, I arranged for Thames Television to film part of an episode at Nationwide Building Society's Shepherd's Bush branch in London. The scene featured PC Stamp, played by Graham Cole, who was trying to take money out of his account. The hapless Stamp had his cash card swallowed by the ATM as he'd forgotten his PIN. The card was mine - and I arranged for Nationwide's branch staff to fish it out of the back of the ATM at the end of each 'take'. 

I enjoyed working with the programme, and remember Thames changing the script after I explained the planned sequence wouldn't happen in real life. The following year, The Bill filmed at another Nationwide branch, but disguised it as the storyline wasn't one I wanted the society associated with. 

The Bill became famous for featuring the working lives of the characters rather than their lives outside the station, setting it apart from other British police dramas. It had a string of memorable characters, including PC Stamp, Sergeants June Ackland and Bob Cryer and DCI Burnside. In some cases life imitated art, and millions of viewers were shocked after the actor Kevin Lloyd, who played the troubled Tosh Lines, died tragically following a drinking binge just days after being fired from the series.

In time, The Bill became a more sensationalist drama, and lost something special as a result, as former Met Police commissioner Ian Blair described in a valedictory Guardian article last week. I wasn't surprised to hear about a Facebook campaign to save the show, but can't help thinking the very idea of a preservation society for a TV drama is ludicrous. TV should be constantly refreshed - and The Bill has had its day after over a quarter of a century. As Ian Blair put it, quoting the original British TV policeman Dixon of Dock Green, "Goodnight, All!"

The people's champion: Wall Street Journal's Patience Wheatcroft tells bankers to get real

The rebellion against bankers bonuses claimed an unlikely champion today as the European editor in chief of one of the world's most iconic business newspapers said bankers just didn't get it and needed to get real. 

Patience Wheatcroft was speaking at the latest Gorkana breakfast briefing, along with WSJ Europe's new deputy editor Iain Martin, who vividly compared the RBS directors' rhetoric with 1970s union leaders, who were similarly accused of holding Britain to ransom. The two WJS journalists regarded the bankers' tactics as disastrously misjudged. Martin said he had far more sympathy for taxpayers than bankers. 

Wheatcroft supported Bank of England governor Mervyn King's view that 'casino' (investment) and high street banks should be separated, adding that it was a very strange business model to combine the two. 

Neither journalist had much sympathy for the government, arguing that it largely has itself to blame for allowing the bonus fiasco to develop. The saga simply showed that Labour never decided whether it had truly nationalised RBS and Lloyds Banking Group, or was merely the largest shareholder, allowing the banks' boards to operate at 'arm's length'. 

Google's news?

It's not every day that you get the chance to ask Rupert Murdoch's editors about their boss's battle with Google. But I got that opportunity at today's event when I asked about Google's unexpected partial retreat this week. I wasn't surprised that Patience and Iain took the Murdoch line. ("We don't like people giving away our content for nothing", as Patience put it.) But Iain was clear that newspaper management across the world had got it wrong from the start, giving content away in the hope that "something would turn up" in the shape of a revenue stream. But it simply hasn't happened - for most media owners. 

The Wall Street Journal is different. It's the only significant part of Rupert Murdoch's newspaper empire that successfully charges online readers. Its business readers value its content - even if they get their companies to pay the cost of getting past the paywall. It's not the best indication of whether other papers will successfully follow its lead. 

By a strange coincidence, today's WSJ included Google chief executive Eric Schmidt's op ed piece countering Murdoch's charge that Google is stealing content. Schmidt pointed out that Google sends online news providers a billion clicks a month from Google News. That's 100,000 opportunities a minute to win readers and generate revenue, he added. Google News only shows a headline and a couple of lines from a story. If readers want to read on, they have to go through to the media owner's website. I'm with Google on this. The search company may have blinked this weak, and made a concession to make it harder for users to bypass paywalls. But it has a greater intuitive understanding of how business and consumers thrive in an online, connected world. The media's rage against Google has echoes of luddites smashing machines in the early industrial age. The reactionaries want to return to an easier, gentler time. But none of us can turn the clock back. Not even the bankers. 

Fog in the channel...

Once upon a time, a British newspaper supposedly ran a headline, Fog in channel, Europe cut off. It was probably an apocryphal story, but summed up Britain's parochial view of the world. Iain Martin described how the British media fell into a similar trap this week by getting worked up about the threat to London's financial centre from the EU's new single market commissioner Michel Barnier. Barnier was chosen as part of the deal that made the unknown Briton Baroness Ashton the union's new foreign minister. As Martin says, the British media were so obsessed about the possibility of Tony Blair becoming Europe's so-called president they missed the idea that Barnier's role was the more significant. And, more to the point, were two weeks late in creating ludicrous headlines about a Frenchman destroying London's dominance in financial services. Still, we can probably rely on Britain's home grown bankers to achieve that. 

When news and views merge

Patience Wheatcroft made a telling point in favour of the American way of running newspapers. As Harold Evans and others have long argued, the serious US papers cherish a clear distinction between news and opinion. It's the American way, with the two parts of the paper edited separately. By contrast, too many British newspaper owners have used their papers as a mouthpiece, from Northcliffe and Beaverbrook onwards. For them, the whole paper was propaganda. The most blatant current British examples are probably the Sun, Daily Mail and Daily Mirror. But even the Independent, which for many years boasted it was as independent and reasonably minded as its title suggested, came to use its front page to shout its opinions from the news-stands. 

Patience also argued strongly in favour of 'double sourcing' the validity of stories. This was a timely reminder of the importance of being right, not first. Just this week, the world's media fell for a flawed attack on Microsoft from an obscure tech company. The Guardian's Technology section amongst others ran a story claiming a new 'black screen of death' in Windows 7. In the same edition, the paper's corrections column carried a grovelling admission that the story was groundless. This kind of reckless disregard for checking the truth is legion in today's media. 

And finally: the poacher turned gamekeeper turned poacher...

It was fascinating to hear Patience Wheatcroft talking about her 18 months as a non executive director at Barclays. A recent profile in Guardian said she had wanted to understand better an industry she had covered for so long. As she explained today, she saw 100 years' worth of banking dramas in her 18 months on Barclays' board. But she also saw the failings of her old - and future - trade. "One edition of the FT carried the headline, 'Barclays fails FSA stress test'. The next edition's headline was 'Barclays passes FSA stress test'. The next day, the paper had the cheek to boast that it had exclusively predicted that Barclays had passed the test!" 

Gorkana's breakfast briefings are well worth the early trek to London. You get the chance to talk to the top names in Britain's media industry. 

PS: if you're wondering where the name comes from, Gorkana commemorates a Gurkha soldier who saved the life of the firm's founder, Alexander Northcott when Alexander was serving with the Royal Gurkha Rifles. 

How MPs can win back our respect (with help from Twitter!)

Stuart Bruce raised an interesting question recently: do we respect our MPs more when we get to know them better?

Stuart was commenting on the latest Edelman trust barometer report. His point was that we've not lost trust in our local MP by anything like the same degree we've lost faith in MPs generally trust. 

Stuart went on to say:

"A few years ago I did some research into people’s knowledge, trust and support of their local MP. What we found out is the more a person knew about their MP, the higher the levels of trust and support. Interestingly this was despite party affiliation. You could find people who were firm Labour voters who ‘admired’ their local Conservative MP because they knew what they did for them. For firm supporters this wouldn’t make a difference to how they voted, but for undecided and weak voters it could frequently make a difference."

I agree completely. My local MP is Cheryl Gillan. You may remember that she was the MP who claimed for dog food on her expenses. While I'm certainly not a natural Conservative supporter, I do regard Cheryl as a good constituency MP. This meant that the dog food incident did not affect my opinion of her. (The fact it was for a trifling amount also helped!)

I also believe that MPs who make a real effort to communicate with constituents will be better regarded. This is where blogging and Twitter might make a difference. I enjoy reading tweets and posts from Kerry McCarthy, Labour's MP for Bristol East. in the post above, she refutes the suggestion she should be working not tweeting. As she says:

"...basically what Twitter comes down to, is this: It's about communicating. It's about engaging with people. It's a conversation, a dialogue, and anyone can join in. And don't we politicians get criticised all the time for not doing that?"

Amen to that.