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Any human activity can be ether professional or amateur. Each of us has inborn abilities that have not become our way of earning a living and remained either an extra competitive advantage in the game called “life” or a constantly burning wound of a shattered dream. One can be a doctor and write fine poems, a marketing expert who can dance marvelously, an engineer with an opera-quality voice. Sometimes a hobby still becomes a source of income and the life's journey changes its direction abruptly. Yet it is more like an exception than a tendency.
Also, one can have a natural endowment to manage one’s reputation. People with different social status often have an ability to reflectively assess consequences of their actions for their reputation and to leave a favorable impression that makes it possible for them to achieve the set aims. It is something like intuition, or stamina, or eloquence, or people skills.
For an average person’s life, it is useful or at least harmless. And in the business sphere, people endowed with this trait have a competitive advantage, on the one hand, and are a serious threat for themselves, on the other.
It is great if a person can make farsighted and wise decisions that will yield reputation dividends. It is the way he/she lives – the words and actions that stimulate a properly accentuated public response. But without knowing the technical aspects of reputation management a counterpoison can become a poison.
Some simple business tales telling
…that success in PR = 10% talent + 90% systematic work. One big businessman with a talent for forging positive reputation with his every single breath craved for not just good reputation but enormous publicity a couple of years ago. He embarked on the right course, danced ritual corporate dances, hired adequate reputation managers. By joint efforts of the reputation holder and his managers the necessary image was successfully implanted in the minds of stakeholders. As soon as he started getting reputation dividends regularly the businessman developed giddiness of success. He decided that he was his own image-maker, he sacked reputation managers, began talking straight to the media and ... making one mistake after another. Having forgotten that one soldier does not make a PR battle, that it's the retinue that makes the king and that a seemingly easy achieving of reputation success is a 90% result of meticulous unapparent work done by specially trained people.
The finale of this morality tale can be foreseen. For another six months everything was ok through inertia but the very first reputation crisis (a “friendly” journalist’s leaking of confidential information that became a reason for competitors’ information attack) made the businessman come to his senses and return to a usual system of reputation management. And the lesson learnt from this tale is that you cannot manage your reputation single-handedly and efficiently no matter how naturally talented a spinner you might be.
… that journalism ≠ PR аnd that PR is not always reputation management. An owner of a distresed asset had never seriously thought that reputation of a decent person helps his business. And he had never used the category of “reputation” because he considered the only acceptable form of communications to be “negative spinning his competitors like crazy”. But in the corporate conflict his opponents looked less crazy. And because of this they won the sympathies of the media more easily and got the advantages of incumbency. As a result our hero decided to hold a PR campaign so that the public might know what his position was like. But he did it in a most exotic way: he commissioned a famous top journalist who had dealt with the subject of this corporate conflict before to hold “an independent inquiry”. In the end, it was all show and no go. The journalist turned out to be a dignified person – he refused to write what he was told to. The sought-for inquiry did not emerge. And while the hero was pondering over the necessity to turn to boring reputation managers offering difficult solutions to the problem the distressed asset was happily acquired by the competitors. Lesson #2: don’t bank on journalists – those who do their duty seek the truth and those who have joined the dark side do not possess PR technologies, fortunately or unfortunately.
…that being in the mass media’s demand does not guarantee a high-quality media presence. A lady engaged in politics was very cost-conscious and did not waste her money on a press secretary not to mention PR consultants. In line with expectations, she had “friends” – editors and journalists who, trying to outdo each other, invited her to take part in various live shows, interviews and so on. And she had very close friends in the media who, basing on their own tastes, corrected her texts and recommended where to go or not. When her name was put on the party list for the next elections, the party’s strategists were shocked by the mess of conflicting messages that had been accumulated in the information space during the time of her amateur performances. So the lesson of tale #: the cheapest is not the dearest, and journalism, again, is not PR or reputation management.
…In recent years the economic situation in the country has not improved, to put it mildly. Like in 2008, when corporate budgets are cut the first to suffer is the back-office including PR services. Which, allegedly, do not create value. Business owners and top managers lull themselves into a false belief that “journalists like us anyway” and that nobody trusts “grisly stuff” in the media today. Like in the famous saying, “love was invented not to pay money”. However, it is a most dangerous delusion. Free food can last you some time. Yet, the mills of Gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. That is why the best professional PR agencies and strong consultants practicing privately feel as good today as they did in 2008. Because the flow of orders for anti-crisis campaigns does not slow down as boundless is conceit of businessmen and top managers who deal with reputation management with the help of their intuition.
http://forbes.net.ua/woman/1377192-pr-tonkim-sloem