Archive for the 'Reputation Management' Category

…just a typical week for the Mason Media PR team

The week seems to have flown by even more quickly than usual. 

Certainly, the prospect of a night away without the children tomorrow at the lovely Golden Pheasant Hotel in the idyllic Ceiriog Valley has helped the week speed by.

But just as responsible has been the success we’ve enjoyed for our clients both in terms of PR and crisis management support.

The week kicked off with a number of prominent national media hits for PDSA, the leading veterinary charity, after it revealed that stressed out cats and dogs are suffering compulsive disorders when couples break up. The Daily Telegraph, Express, Mirror and ITN News all loved the story as something a little different to the wall to wall financial doom and gloom.

While our PR consultants were busy generating coverage for PDSA, our specialist crisis management unit, Reputations Matter, was working closely with another leading charity to help them handle a number of media enquiries relating to a senior management issue. This is an incredibly specialist area of work and one that we are called upon regularly to help with. It often involves having to begin work within minutes, to get to grips rapidly with often complex issues and then to develop and implement a bespoke crisis management strategy.

The week ended with another great burst of national and international media coverage for Pannone, one of Britain’s leading law firms. Within minutes of the news breaking that Madonna and Guy Ritchie were definitely divorcing after months of speculation, our team was lining up Pannone family partner Andrew Newbury to provide expert commentary on the legal and financial implications of the split. 

Sky News was the first to react, sending a crew to Andrew’s Manchester office to conduct a live interview. Further interview requests soon flooded in from the Guardian, Press Association, Daily Express, Times, BBC Radio Five Live and Radio Manchester as well as various media in the States and as far away as the Philippines. Many other lawyers were also clamouring to get on to the airwaves and into print, but the firm whose name stood out among the pack was Pannone.

While all of this was occurring, we also found out that a leading Irish insurer, a national teaching organisation and one of the country’s fastest growing drainage specialists had decided to sign up Mason Media’s PR team to handle their PR briefs.

 All in all, not a bad week’s work and worth a celebratory drink or two at the Golden Pheasant!

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What’s in a Name? The Value of Protecting Reputations

2008 has proven to be a truly brutal year for reputations.

Celebrities have been shamed, financial titans have been humbled, politicians have been caught embarrassed and all at sea, and even charities have seen their good names under serious threat.

They’ve all discovered that far from being an abstract concept, damage to one’s reputation doesn’t just cause a brief headache, it affects them in their pockets too.

Some of the hits have been self-inflicted but others have been unavoidable, a case of wrong person, wrong place, wrong time.

Billions have been wiped from stock markets and apparently solid institutions have gone to the wall because of their inability to deal effectively with rumour.

Respected politicians experienced severe turbulence after being quite literally framed in photographs on bikes and boats over which they had no control.

Charities, meanwhile, have found themselves unfairly under the spotlight because of employees understanding how an all too selective use of the media to undermine legitimate campaigns can be used to apply pressure for financial gain.

For many who’ve never had to endure the late hours, head scratching, lengthy legal conversations, personal and professional fall-out which such situations bring, it may well be a case of “Well, something like that will never happen to me!”.

However, as this rollercoaster ride of a year has illustrated, there are simply no guarantees. It always pays dividends to have insurance as much in place for your reputation as you would for your car or your home. It can be the difference between staying in business, keeping your supporters and having a job…or losing the lot.

Unlike car insurance, it’s also bespoke. With incredibly few exceptions, there are strategies to at least minimise the damage and allow the wealthy, the famous, the committed, commercial and charitable to get back to doing what they do best.

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I was in London at the end of last week and took the opportunity to catch up with a former colleague who now runs the press operation at Scotland Yard.

He’s only been in post for a few weeks, but in that short space of time has had to deal with more crisis management work than most PRs see in a lifetime!

At the centre of much of this negative publicity is the Met Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair, who seems to stumble from one crisis to the next.

His reputation has never really recovered from the shooting of Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes exactly three years ago tomorrow.  And that reputation is likely to be even more tattered when the inquest into de Menezes death gets underway in September.

Sir Ian has always maintained that he did not know his officers had shot an innocent man until he was told a full day afterwards. Many of Sir Ian’s harshest critics do not believe this account. However, even if true, it is staggering that Britain’s most senior police officer was kept in the dark for so long after such a catastrophic event had occurred.

The Daily Mail and others in the media never liked Sir Ian anyway, but since the de Menezes affair it seems they have become hell-bent on driving him from office.

While Sir Ian may be living on borrowed time – surely a damning verdict at the inquest would be the final nail in his coffin.

However, critics of Sir Ian should also remember that his job and that of his colleagues in the frontline of policing are not for the faint-hearted.

While the de Menezes affair grabs many of the headlines, each day across London officers, many much more junior than Sir Ian, are having to make life and death decisions in order to fight the capital’s ever escalating crime problem.

When considering ways to protect the reputation of an individual or organisation, making a clean breast of it is always our favourite approach. If your closet door is always open, there’s no place for those nasty skeletons to lurk, awaiting painful and damaging exposure.

Being totally frank once certain private indiscretions have already been aired is a more high risk strategy, particularly when you’re a famous figure and you’re trying to disarm the libel defence of one of Britain’s leading tabloid newspapers.

But after a sensational first week at the High Court in London, Max Mosley, president of the FIA, the body which governs Formula One motor racing, could be argued to have the whip hand, if you pardon the pun.

Day after day of frank admissions over shaven buttocks, stern German dominatrices and an longstanding interest in sadomasochism seem to have strengthened Mosley’s chances of winning his case, especially after the News of the World’s key witness refused to give evidence.

Having already won a vote of motor racing’s leading players to keep his FIA post, his bold tactic of (quite literally) baring all has paid dividends.

His fortunes contrast sharply with another Alpha Male in the world of business, Sir Stuart Rose, the chairman and chief executive of Marks & Spencer. After fighting off the interest of Arcadia’s Philip Green and re-establishing the firm’s dominance on the High Street, Sir Stuart has seen the retailer’s performance dip markedly, attracting the criticism of his former fans amongst its shareholders.

It makes you wonder whether Max Mosley might have earned less credit for a little shopping at M&S than indulging in a little slapping and S&M!

Mason Media today launched its new Reputations Matter unit which specialises in working with clients on their crisis management strategies.

We have been approached by a number of businesses and other organisations during the past six months keen for us to work with them on protecting their reputation.

As a result of this work, we have taken the decision to launch a standalone unit which will be overseen by Managing Director Nick Mason and Director Brendan Pittaway.

The story appeared today on the How-Do website…

Listen. Can you hear it? Yes, that drip, drip, drip is the usual soundtrack to the British summer. But while rain stops play at Lords or Wimbledon, nothing it seems can halt the tally of public figures falling foul of the corrosive effect of not telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth as soon as those storm clouds of media speculation and official enquiry start looming over the horizon.

Drip! Take Conservative Party chairwoman Caroline Spelman. Charged with (amongst other things) trying to trying to keep David Cameron’s push for Number 10 free from sleaze and having acted tough with Tory MEPs who’d played fast and loose with their expenses claims, Caroline obviously hadn’t taken a peek inside her filing cabinet before assuming the top job.

So, when someone checked her own expenses and found that she may have paid her nanny from her parliamentary office budget, did she come clean? Err, well, partially. She maintained the woman concerned had done secretarial duties in addition to looking after Mrs Spelman’s children. ‘Not really’, said the nanny. ‘Okay’, Mrs Spelman tried again, ‘it was all very brief, a piffling sum and happened a long time ago’.

‘Sorry’, said the very helpful nanny, ‘but it wasn’t.’

‘Why don’t I just go quietly?’, said Mrs Spelman, having finally realised that the woman entrusted with safely raising her kids hadn’t been quite so delicate with Mummy’s political career. Her involvement dealt them the sort of sharp slap across the legs which would have landed her in court had she treated Spelman Junior in such a rough manner.

Drip! Severn Trent also came a cropper for quite literally mismanaging leaks. Asked by industry regulators to come up with data for the amount of water seeping from its faulty pipes, it puffed out its corporate chest and came up with numbers suggesting it was well on top of the problem.

The only thing was that the figures were wrong. Very wrong. The extent to which the company had lied became clear when those compiling performance statistics for across the UK realised that Severn Trent was doing conspicuously better than everyone else.

‘Ooh’, said the regulator. ‘That’ll be two million pounds, please.’ Naughty Severn Trent!

Drip! Ray Lewis had charmed successive prominent Tory politicians by the time he was appointed one of new London mayor Boris Johnson’s deputies. Recognised for his work with teenagers in the capital’s deprived boroughs, Lewis stood proudly alongside ‘Bozzer’ when the first whiff of suspicion began to circulate around the deputy’s CV.

‘He’s my man’, said Johnson. Yet, only a couple of days later, when fresh allegations surfaced of financial and sexual misconduct, he wasn’t.

It turned out that Lewis had committed the cardinal sin of lying, not the done thing for a registered preacher ….erm…except he wasn’t any more. Alright then, it might have been behaviour unbecoming of his status as a magistrate. Except he’d never been one in the first place.

Quicker than you can overlook a copy of The Spectator on a news-stand, Johnson washed his hands of Lewis and another burgeoning political career had bitten the dust.

So, will these three cases mean that there’ll be a drought of further casualties before Autumn sets in or will the news papers be as soggy with the inundation of damaging revelations for others as cricket pitches across the country at this time of year?

Well, sadly, it appears that few individuals or companies truly recognise the value of identifying and dealing with problems before they become full-scale crises. Fewer still appreciate that coming clean immediately once trouble hits may mean short-term pain but illustrates (albeit belated) honesty and prevents the gradual haemorrhage of a steady drip of revelations.