Can a corporation be credible?
Right now almost every PR person I know is trying to figure out how to jump into the blogosphere, how to create a blog for their CEO, etc. My advice to anyone who wants to ghostwrite a blog is STOP RIGHT NOW. STEP AWAY FROM THE KEYBOARD.
Why? First, we’re on the verge of a blogosphere bubble. There are lots of voices out there – now that Rosie O’Donnell and Arianna Huffington call themselves bloggers, it’s clear to me we’ve crossed the chasm. Bland ghostwritten corporate speak doesn’t stand a chance. Instead, the clearest and most authentic voices will be heard.
Second, people who work at corporations should blog to develop and deepen relationships – with customers, employees, partners, shareholders – all of their key audiences. To create productive and valuable dialogues online, you’ve got to have a credible voice (Match.com notwithstanding). And, to state the obvious, credibility is won and maintained by individuals. Blogs are powerful because real people write them and real people read them.
A corporation’s credibility is the sum of the credibility of each of the people who work at and represent the corporation - some more than others. According to research conducted by my employer, Burson-Marsteller, CEOs are held responsible for 50% of a company’s reputation. The CEO’s importance to a company’s reputation has increased 25% since 1997. (www.ceogo.com)
After spending nearly 20 years in the PR business, I’m a little bit obsessed with credibility. Thesaurus.com equates credibility to: believability, integrity, plausibility, possibility, probability, reliability, solidness, soundness, tenability, trustworthiness, validity. After a lot of thought over a lot of years, I think credibility distills down to one basic thing – reasonable-ness. What do I mean by reasonable-ness? Here are a few examples:
· When you make statements - in a blog, a press interview, a speech - be certain that your facts are clear and defensible. “When you hit that little publish button and something goes up, you know that literally millions of eyeballs around the world are going to parse it,” says Michelle Malkin, a conservative blogger. The Wall Street Journal, January 21, 2005
· Connect. Link to source material and authoritative third-party commentary to add weight to your positions and show that you’re reasonable.
· Shout out your mistakes. Be the first to acknowledge and correct your own mistakes and misstatements. A reasonable communicator does NOT hold on blindly to a position and refuse to acknowledge errors.
· Be clear about what you can’t discuss and why. A reasonable communicator assumes that his or her readers are smart and reasonable people. Reasonable readers don’t expect material disclosures in a blog entry – they know the SEC has rules. They’ve heard of Sarbanes Oxley. As a PR person who has handled litigation more than once in my career, I found that if I said to reporters something like “I know you want access to all the evidence in the case, but we can’t show you evidence until after it is presented in court,” I pretty much always got an, “Oh, OK, I’d just like to see it when you can show it to me” response from reporters. Thus we avoided all sorts of conflicts. Reasonable explanation, reasonable response.
· Be respectful in acknowledging dissenting opinions. This is the single most important factor in building credibility. Two intelligent, motivated and reasonable people with the same fact set can come to opposite conclusions. And that’s just fine. Not everyone has to agree with and love your corporation. They just need to know that you’re not afraid of their dissenting opinion and that you respect it. When you respond to them in this reasonable way, your critics lose their fangs.
While this is intuitive in personal relationships, it can be much harder to achieve in the business world. But it is very much worth the effort. Building credibility is a serious process that happens incrementally over what can be an excruciatingly long time. Credibility is hard won and easily lost. Warren Buffett famously said, “If you lose dollars for the firm by bad decisions, I will be understanding. If you lose reputation for the firm, I will be ruthless.”
For every communications professional, maintaining and expanding the company’s credibility should be the paramount goal of corporate blogging. If you don’t think your corporation is ready to do what it takes, stay on the sidelines for now. Watch and learn as others succeed and fail. Then you can show your executives how to do it right.
--Lisa Poulson
Managing Director, Technology Practice
Burson-Marsteller San Francisco
Posted by Lisa Poulson at May 11, 2005 08:31 AM
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