Big data. Big trust.

Thu, 27 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This morning, my colleague Hector Arthur pointed me to a new report from Ovum’s Mark Little knowing I’d have a few comments to make. In the corresponding blog post – “Big Trust is Big Data’s missing DNA ” – Mark kicks off with:

In the rush to monetize customer data, companies risk diminishing the trust people have in services and brands. Sustaining and growing people’s trust in services is not just about “doing the right thing,” but also makes commercial sense.

As I like to say in other words, big data is worth more when wielded with customers rather than at them. Ovum calls this approach Big Trust.

Big Trust strategies are designed to build “trust equity” with customers as a basis for making core services stickier, for selling new services, and for brokering personal data to commerce under a new set of trust principles.

Public relations

The outlook is informed, directly or indirectly I know not, by the excellence theory of public relations presented by James E Grunig more than twenty years ago, which champions the two-way symmetrical PR model. This model uses communication to negotiate with the public, resolve conflict and promote mutual understanding and respect between the organization and its stakeholders. My Six Influence Flows model from 2011 extends this work for the digital / social / big data age, and you can find out more about PR models in my post here if it’s your thing.

Of course, this is not how the majority of practitioners practice PR, deferring instead to publicity and ‘spin’, which may be associated more closely with distrust than trust. But excellent practice is championed if, as a shrewd procurer, you know where to look.

Strategic Public Relations Leadership

Thu, 24 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I learned this week about the Cockpit-in-Court , an early London theatre that stood where we find 70 Whitehall today. Apparently, it did as the name conveys host cockfights, although they stopped as long ago as the Jacobean times. The current building includes Kent ’s Treasury, built 1733-37.

I attended an event in Kent’s Treasury this week at the kind invitation of Professor Anne Gregory and Paul Willis of the Centre for Public Relations Studies at Leeds Business School , hosted by Alex Aitken, Executive Director of Government Communications, to celebrate the launch of Strategic Public Relations Leadership.

[Google books , Amazon.co.uk , Amazon.com , Routledge , BookDepository , Waterstone’s , WHSmith , Blackwell ]

The vision we have for social business at Euler Partners is built up and out from public relations in its “excellence theory” manifestation (rather than the various flavours of publicity and spin with which some readers may be more familiar). It is a fundamental, and one that has too rarely contributed all it has to give to organisational success, and Anne and Paul believe the time has come for public relations professionals to step up to the mark. They cite the increasing complexity of the modern organisation as reason enough:

This context requires public relations professionals to be able to clearly articulate and demonstrate their own contribution to organisational effectiveness. This textbook provides public relations leaders with a framework to do this, as well as a checklist of essential capabilities which they must acquire and exhibit if they are to operate at the highest levels of any organisation.

I’m delighted to have provided a “product description” in Amazon’s terminology or, in the jargon of the publishing industry, a “book blurb” for the back cover:

The authors write “an organisation’s reputation is determined not by expert publicity programs, but the alignment of declared and enacted values as judged by those with whom it has a relationship.” If you understand what this means, this book will help you make it happen. If you don’t understand what this means, you should read this book. Given the compelling association the authors identify between public relations excellence and organisational leadership, it can only benefit your career trajectory.

Anne-Gregory on Philip Sheldrake

Big data. Big trust.

Public relations

Strategic Public Relations Leadership