I’ve always believed that reputation can be shaped (and word of mouth driven) by great customer service.  Just look at Jetblue or Zappos as examples of building phenomenal brands selling commodity items but with great customer service. 

To back this claim up a bit more, I took a survey of 60 professionals on LinkedIn.  First I asked them what had the greatest impact on their opinion of a company.    When the choice was “what people say” versus news, search engine results and customer service, then “what people way” was the overwhelming choice.  This makes sense as a bad experience might be chalked up as the exception if ten friends say they love it. But when this option was dropped, then customer service was the overwhelming winner for what impacts the opinion of a company. 

Why is this important?  In the end, companies have a lot more control over their customer service than word of mouth.  So perhaps instead of focusing resource on WoM and other PR related tactics, they should start seeing customer interactions as a primary PR tool.

So, is this good or bad for public relations departments?  If they can quickly develop capabilities and influence in training and measuring (from a reputation perspective), customer service and other customer facing interactions, then I believe it can be a huge boost.

PS NOTE: Unlike previous posts, I’ve chosen to leave out the company name.  I’ve decided that the point of this blog is not to bash companies publicly (there are plenty of others that do that) but to learn lessons from the action of others. 

Here’s the apology I got after they sent out a messed up mass email.  I did not even notice the original email but the apology caught my eye, starting with the subject line.  And I came away thinking that this is an honest, transparent, customer oriented company with a great sense of humor.

Subject: Poll Everywhere – We’re Boneheads

Hi Ephraim,
Just wanted to apologize and say that we know your name is not "FNAME"   Oops.
We’re so bad at this spamming thing… We don’t even know how to do a proper mail merge!
Jeff

I wasn’t thinking happy thoughts about Poll Everywhere before this email.  I am now.

The brief background:  Amazon got into a bit of reputation trouble last week when they deleted books from people’s Kindle e-reader without notifying them (including, oddly enough, 1984).  This was the result of the books being bought from an Amazon seller that did not have the right to sell it.  However, consumer sentiment was that this was a personal violation by Amazon and one that highlighted that you don’t really own them the way you own physical books (people asked if Amazon would have raided houses to take back books illegally sold?).

But then Mr. Bezos comes out with an apology so straightforward, it would be hard to doubt both the sincerity of the apology or of the commitment to doing better for customers:

This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our "solution" to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.
With deep apology to our customers,
Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
Amazon.com

The apology was issued on the Kindle forum and customer feedback on the forum was overwhelmingly positive.  You can see it here.

This is a great example of what makes a great customer service reputation – a combination of the right communication and business action..  It’s not that the service is perfect as that is rare, it’s that the company is honest about their mistakes and aggressive about fixing them.

For example, from a PR point of view its notable that keyword ads on search engines are lower down on the trust level.  But they can still work well for advertisers.  On the other hand, brand web sites and sponsorships were high up next to consumer opinions and editorial content.  I’ve seen PR use a lot of brand material/web sites and sponsorships (e.g., CSR, trade sponsorships in the B2B world) for getting the information.  It’s may be interesting to note that the trust level of those sources is at the same level of editorial content.  

1. Do you want to be seen as drivers of PR campaigns (after decisions are made) or PR counsel (as a part of decisions) – Presenting measurement data is often a historical look at campaigns.  However, it can also be a forward looking process that shows how PR can play a critical role in making better business decisions.
2. Three rules to follow  – Take an audience research based approach to presenting to your CEO (it’s harder to ignore the audience than it is the PR executive’s advice), use business language and provide business counsel.
3. Make your counsel actionable – Don’t wait for the CEO to ask what to do; let your data show what the options are to consider and why.
4. Present data driven business counsel – Valued PR counselors are that because they are presenting business (not just PR) counsel backed up by data (not opinion).   In the idea situations, business decisions consider the PR impact as part of the decision making process.
5. Focus on audience data – Even for CEOs that love to see their name in print, it’s the audience data that is critical to business decision making and, by extension, draws you closer to them as a trusted business counsel.
6. Look forward, not back – Measurement systems and presentations often focus mostly on what has been done.  CEOs, however, are always looking forward.  So be sure to measure what has been done, but then quickly and substantially focus on what the company can learn from the measurement data and how that data can help steer better future decisions (and communications).
7. Let the visuals present a data driven story – Measurement dashboards should not simply be some dials reflecting PR metrics but a series of charts that tell the CEO a data driven story – one that can be used to make business decisions.  As an example, I showed a dashboard that started with news share of voice and ended with data on what search terms consumers were increasingly using.  This showed an upward trend on what topics people were interested in (and what language and brands they used to look for those topics).  This type of information can be used for anything from product development to marketing decisions.

Bulldog PR Measurement Summit_Translating PR Results to Business Results

The research looked at 100,000 Facebook users as well as the location 4,500 e-mail messages received.  As noted by the chart below, the more local the sender-receiver, the higher the density of messages. 

This is consistent with what I’ve seen in every day life.  People connect online with those they know offline – and people tend to know people locally.  Not to say there are not global benefits as the tale of lower density of messages may reflect that valuable global reach we did not two decades ago.  However, this type of data is an important reminder that when reaching many audiences, having a local, geographic focus is an important part of being targeting the demographic.

Match the message and audience to the medium - The approach outlined in the article is great if you are looking to reach a Silicon Valley centric audience (and Twitter is their platform de jour).  But what if you want to reach the financial or other industries?  In our recent survey of professionals on how they get their news, Twitter and blogs came in last.  What we found is that these are useful tool for very specific audiences and situations (such as reaching the Silicon Valley crowd that tends to focus on the latest platform, but the article fails to make this clear.  Our current best practices survey, to be published this summer, also shows that most PR people clearly understand this.

Confusing publicity with public relations – If the article was titled, “Publicity in Silicon Valley,” I’d have far fewer problems.   Public relations is just that, managing the relationship with the public (or, your specific publics known as audiences).  Publicity, the art of spreading awareness often through hype driven media, is but one tool that is used to manage these relationship – events, direct mail/email, speaking engagements and other approaches are all part of a tactical tool set.  I don’t blame the article, many publicity firms call themselves PR firms thus adding to the confusion.

McKinsey makes some key points about what companies need to do on the reputation side.

"As a result, responses to reputational issues can be short term, ad hoc, and defensive–a poor combination today given the intensity of public concern. And therein lies a problem that companies must solve quickly: even as reputational challenges boost the importance of good PR, companies will struggle if they rely on PR alone, with little insight into the root causes of or the facts behind their reputational problems."

But Paul Holmes picks up on the unsaid theme – that it’s a management consulting agency, not a PR agency, making these important points:

I wish I could push back more aggressively against this–the idea that public relations is about "spin" rather than "changing business operations and conducting two-way conversations" is particularly offensive–but the reality is that the authors seem to have formed a pretty accurate impression of how most corporate communications departments actually work.  (This is where I would ordinarily go into a rant about the inherent problem with naming public relations departments "corporate communications," which is that public relationships are defined not by communications, but by actions, but you’ve all heard it a hundred times before.)

Finally, he pulls another solid quote that outlines what the most effective PR counselors do (hint, communication is not at the top of the list, understanding audiences and recommending actions is).

The authors’ conclusion: "Companies should emphasize three priorities. First, they need to assemble enough facts–most important, perhaps, a rich understanding of key stakeholders, including consumers–and not only the product preferences but also the political attitudes of consumer groups. Second, companies should focus on the actions that matter most to stakeholders, something that may call for an exaggerated degree of transparency about corporate priorities or operations. Third, they must try to influence stakeholders through techniques that go beyond traditional PR approaches, with an emphasis on two-way dialogue."

We recently conducted a series of polls on LinkedIn to determine how professionals read news.  You can download the full report here.  The key findings showed that while news sites continued to dominate, search engines and aggregators were a major source of news.  On the mobile side, news specific mobile applications (such as the WSJ app on the iPhone) were even more important than a mobile web browser.    Our bottom line finding, based on these polls and third part research such as Hitwise’s list of top news web sites (which found both news sites and search engines in the top ten), is that major news sites along with search engines and aggregators still need to lead the way in distributing information.  Social media then provides a measurement of how well the news was received as well as an amplification effect.  Key findings included the following: