Ethics on Philip Sheldrake

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.

CIPR TV on journalism, PR and the Leveson Inquiry

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I hosted the CIPR TV show on the Leveson Inquiry on Monday. As you may have seen, I wrote about the inquiry for last week’s CIPR Friday Roundup, a day after the publication of the inquiry’s report – Public relations and the ’ethical vacuum’ .

Our guests were Michelle Stanistreet , General Secretary of the National Union of Journalists , and Jane Wilson, CIPR CEO.

Public Relations and the "ethical vacuum"

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .]

“Too many stories in too many newspapers were the subject of complaints from too many people, with too little in the way of titles taking responsibility.” Newspapers have often demonstrated “a significant and reckless disregard for accuracy” and “misrepresentation and embellishment takes place to a degree far greater than could ever be thought of as legitimate or fair comment.”

I’ve just read the Leveson Inquiry , published yesterday and running to nearly two thousand pages. These quotes come from the forty page executive summary. For those of you beyond the UK’s shores, the Inquiry is about the freedom of the press in both the positive and negative manifestations of that expression, with a focus on how we can attenuate the negative.

The UK enjoys a pluralistic media of which other countries are rightly envious, and a free press is central to our national identity. The report quotes Sir Winston Churchill: “A free press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize; it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny … Under dictatorship the press is bound to languish … But where free institutions are indigenous to the soil and men have the habit of liberty, the press will continue to be the Fourth Estate, the vigilant guardian of the rights of the ordinary citizen.”

CIPR TV on ethics

Sun, 20 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This week’s CIPR TV addressed the topic of ethics, and ‘spin’. Joining me in the studio were Eliane Glaser, Guardian columnist and author of Get Real: How to tell it like it is in a world of illusions (Amazon , Waterstones ), and Dr Jon White, PR consultant, strategist, and author of the CIPR’s PR2020 report (PDF) .

It appears the world of public relations has a reputation problem. It’s almost schizophrenic, with one camp entrenched in persuasive ‘spin’, or perhaps publicity, and the other in working towards open, transparent, mutual understanding between the organisation and stakeholders. Max Clifford for example, whilst often introduced by the British mass media as a PR consultant, is actually a publicist; a distinction indeed that the Wikipedia community is able to make at the time of writing.

Ethics in PR Measurement

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I took part in the #measurepr Twitter chat today on ethics in measurement. These chats are organised by Shonali Burke and her blog post “Influence: From BS to Best Practice ” set the scene nicely.

At the most fundamental level, we were asking whether some of the techniques being deployed for PR measurement are compatible with the aspiration of public relations professionals to be transparent and authentic, and, more precisely, whether they are compatible with codes of conduct as published by the likes of the CIPR , PRSA and CPRS .

In one of my tweets I suggested a more straight forward test, what one might describe as a layman’s test for those of us uneducated in the matters of ethics:

RT @kseniacoffman : Q2: Where do you go for best practices? <– Ask your mum, siblings, neighbours what’s acceptable to them!? #measurepr

At Shonali’s invitation, I contributed the three questions posed today…