Beware of the vanishing story – there’s no magic solution
You often hear experienced PR pros talk about the ‘good old days’. The days (and nights) of long boozy lunches with clients, a bygone era of embargoes that were actually adhered to, and being able to speak freely off the record without fear of major recrimination.
Well, how times have changed. While much of the industry’s transformation has been gradual, the advent of social media has fired PRs out of a canon at break-neck speed into a brave new world.
If you’ve not got a LinkedIn account then you are seriously out of touch (according to some), and if you’re not tweeting your pitches to journalists then why not? The adventurous types, and there are plenty of those in PR, are also not complete without their own mini Tumblr or WordPress blog.
But the recent revelation that a new breed of PR agencies are setting up fake social networking profiles to post positive stories about their under-fire clients in order to drive negative stories down the Google search rankings, is slightly more difficult to reconcile.
Working for clients who may have done something ethically, if not criminally wrong, these PR agencies use thousands of social networking profiles, under false names, operated using computer software designed to simulate a real person, to pump out positive stories and drown out the damaging coverage.
It’s clever stuff, as more than 90% of us only look at the first page of results returned by the likes of Google, with only a tiny fraction going beyond the third page. As the boss of one of these online ‘reputation management’ agencies said: “You can’t stop an event happening but you can stop it being seen.”
At the heart of this new approach lies one of the major problems for the PR industry today, in that anyone with access to a computer or a mobile phone can start to promote themselves to the world. The media don’t have a monopoly anymore. These ‘reputation managers’ have seized on this fact and taken it to the next level again.
However, the fact that you can now get pretend people to do your PR for you does not seem quite right. PR should be about building trust in a brand but this new practice can only undermine it long term when people find out that what they read online isn’t really what it seemed.
And the reality is that in this multi-media age people do get found out. For example Tom MacMaster, the man behind the Gay Girl in Damascus blog, and, even more recently, Johann Hari, the Independent journalist who was vilified on Twitter for plagiarising quotes in his interviews.
So, beware of the agency, or ‘reputation managers’ who promise to play tricks online to make a story disappear overnight as it’s just not that simple.