Un manifesto per il futuro delle relazioni pubbliche

Paul Holmes (di www.holmesreport.com, ricca fonte per questo sito) dice la sua sullo stato dell'arte della nostra professione.

What We Believe: A Manifesto for the Public Relations BusinessBy Paul A. HolmesThe public relations industry ought to be entering a golden age.External forces being brought to bear on corporations (and other institutions) mean that the ability to manage relationships effectively is more critical than ever before.On the corporate reputation front, organisations are under more intense scrutiny than at any time in business history. There are activist groups willing and able to opine on every aspect of corporate behaviour, from where materials are sourced to how many workers in developing countries are exploited in their manufacture. These groups have learned how to leverage their righteous indignation into media coverage and even legislative action.  And if that doesn't work, they can use the power of the Internet to share their outrage with thousands, even millions, of others.For corporations and other institutions, the age of transparency has arrived. The only choice is whether to embrace the demand for greater openness or resist.  On the product branding front, meanwhile, there is a growing scepticism of traditional marketing techniques.  An increasingly sophisticated (and fragmented) television audience either skips the ads between programs altogether or sees right through them. Consumers hunger for authenticity; they expect marketers to talk to them rather than at them, to recognize that markets today are conversations and to participate respectfully in those conversations rather than trying to drown them out with raucous advertising and self-serving promotion.  In this environment, the brand is an expression of corporate character rather than a fiction created by the marketing department.In other words, corporations need sound public relations counsel more than ever before. They need experts at the highest level of the organisation who understand what external stakeholders expect and how to align the policies of the corporation with those expectations. They need professionals who can help them engage with employees, shareholders, regulators, and the media. They need creative thinkers who can initiate dialogue with consumers, who can earn their attention in a world where buying it is more expensive and less credible than ever.The question is whether the public relations profession is equipped to take advantage of this opportunity.In the wake of the corporate scandals of the past two or three years—Enron and Worldcom and Shell and Ahold—the CEOs of major corporations turned first to their lawyers and accountants, not to their public relations professionals, for advice. Public relations people have, for the most part, been bit players in corporate governance issues, which are central to corporate credibility.At the same time, many brand and product managers continue to see the role of public relations in terms of product publicity, while advertising agencies try their hand at word-of-mouth campaigns and buzz marketing (both of which are properly functions of public relations) and direct marketing people co-opt the term relationship marketing in an attempt to convince clients that sending people unsolicited letters and junk e-mail is the basis of a relationship.In other words, public relations is being used by most organisations to only a tiny fraction of its potential to add value. To some extent, obviously, the industry has failed to convince its most important constituency—the senior corporate executives to whom it reports—of its ability to contribute on a strategic level, to produce real, tangible business results.If public relations is to contribute to the maximum of its ability, it must become a C-level function, with the chief public relations officer (or chief reputation officer or chief relationship officer) taking his or her place alongside the chief operations officer, the chief financial officer, and the chief legal officer as a senior advisor to the CEO.Every time an organisation makes a decision, there are four broad sets of implications that require serious consideration: operational implications; financial implications; legal implications; and relationship or reputational implications.  At most organisations, the first three sets of implications are considered routinely and formally at the highest level—there are senior executives whose responsibility it is to make sure those implications are clearly understood and fully incorporated into the decision-making process.Reputational implications, however, are often relegated to an afterthought. Rather than being asked for input when policy is being made, public relations people are too often called in after the fact to "spin" the selected policies, to make ill-considered decisions more palatable to a sceptical public. (This is not to say that reputational or relationship implications should override operational, financial, or legal concerns—only that they should be considered alongside them. Considering all the potential implications of a decision can only lead to better decision-making).There are several reasons why public relations does not currently operate at this policy-making level in most organisations.  The first is that, in many companies, the public relations function has been Balkanized, so that responsibility for relationships resides in multiple departments: the employee communications component reports in to human resources; the public affairs component reports in to legal; the investor relations department reports in to the CFO. Other PR people may report to marketing or brand managers, while the corporate communications department can report anywhere from the CEO (best case scenario) to the COO to a corporate secretary.There may have been a time when it made sense to segment stakeholders in this way, but that time is long past.  The various internal and external audiences are no longer discreet groups; they interact and overlap. Many of a company's employees own shares or hold stock options; many shareholders also buy the company's products or services; many customers live in communities where the company has factories or stores; many of the people who live in those communities know employees.Any company that communicates with each of these groups without central coordination of its messaging is likely to create dissonance or, at the very least, miss out on potential synergies. Employees can be powerful lobbyists, for example—in some cases, they are likely to be more credible and more influential with legislators than the CEO—but their power is unlikely to be harnessed if public affairs and employee communications executives don't work side-by-side.In managing the corporation's relationships with its various stakeholders, the chief reputation officer needs knowledge, wisdom, integrity and courage.Knowledge, particularly business knowledge, is critically important. Unless a public relations person can demonstrate familiarity with business fundamentals—from the basic ability to read a balance sheet to a keen understanding of the specific operations of the individual organization—he or she is unlikely to be taken seriously by other members of the management team. (That's one reason why PR should be taught in business schools rather than journalism schools, a subject to which this newsletter will doubtless revisit in the future).This will enable him or her to ensure that the organisation's public relations strategy is always aligned with and contributing to its business strategy—that good relationships are not an end in themselves but a means to achieving the long-term goals of the organisation.Wisdom, meanwhile, will come from experience in handling a wide array of public relations challenges, and from listening to a broad range of voices—including critics of the company, who are likely to be dismissed by other members of the management team.Integrity means ensuring that the organisation's communications are always authentic, that the company's values are reflected in its culture, its brand, and its behaviours. It means eschewing spin—a transactional approach to public relations—in favour of building, maintaining, enhancing (and, ultimately, leveraging) mutually beneficial relationships. And finally, courage is the defining quality of a counsellor, the ability to offer the best advice even when he or she knows that advice may be unpopular. Public relations people, like all trusted advisors, truly add value when they provide their leaders with bold new ideas or prevent a course of action that could lead to disaster—when they challenge the conventional wisdom.In short, we believe that public relations has the potential to add significant value to the organisations for which it works, to contribute at a policy level, to help corporations build and leverage reputational capital.But we also believe that the industry needs to make significant changes if it is to live up to its potential in this regard—changes in everything from its recruiting process to its professional development activities to its business practices.It is our hope that by identifying some of the key challenges facing the public relations industry, by questioning the sector's approach to some of these issues, and by promoting best practices, we can make a small contribution to helping public relations achieve a higher status and contribute at a more strategic, more valuable, and more lucrative level.We hope you'll let us know how we're doing, and provide us with plenty of ideas about how we can do it better.