Sir, Surely by now every last Londoner has been approached on the street by a distributor of one of London’s ‘free’ daily newspapers. These papers may be free to readers, but they also carry real costs for other social groups in the city.
Free dailies externalise their production costs in at least three ways. They clutter and detract from the appearance of our streetscapes and public spaces (costs to all Londoners); they generate great volumes of rubbish which then become the disposal problem of boroughs (costs to borough residents); and they create extra cleaning costs for Transport for London when papers are left behind on trains and in stations (costs to TfL and therefore transport users).
Given that 400,000 copies of each paper circulate daily (19m pages), these costs are not insignificant. We might be wise to ask whether free London dailies are really free - and if they are not, then who pays?”
Dr David Grover, Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics.
Dublin can easily be substituted for London in the letter above. While the Metro and Herald AM have both contributed to anti-litter campaigns, the costs they put on the environment easily outweigh their social contribution. Hundreds of copies of either publication can be seen discarded in the main train stations in Dublin everyday. If the rumours are to be believed about a bidding war between Herald AM and the Metro to get exclusive access to these locations, then a key prerequisite that CIE should demand of either party is the provision on recycling bins.
In January, we unveiled the Irish results of the Edelman Trust Barometer. The slideshow from our presentation is below. It threw up a lot of interesting data, especially from a communications perspective. The research which was extended to Ireland for the first time this year, set out to uncover the level of trust placed in companies, institutions and various sources of information ranging from the media to bloggers.
Business organisations come out as the most trusted institution in Ireland. This comes as no surprise given our recent economic boom. NGOs rank second. The media and government in general are joint third. Religious institutions rank bottom. Technology is the most trusted industry. Again this can be put down to the numerous benefits it has brought to our society.
There’s a lot of interesting data from a communications perspective. Although the public’s trust in the media is falling, the research shows that traditional media still has an important role to play. It also highlighted the emergence of peer-to-peer communications, with respected figures in the community such as doctors and a ‘person like me’ considered to be some of the most trusted spokespeople about an organisation. In the process, the research also revealed that this medium doesn’t simply consist of blogging and that the world of peer-to-peer communications is just as fragmented as traditional media.
The new model of communications that has been identified is about the influence of multiple stakeholders using a variety of channels. What does that mean exactly and how can it be achieved? Richard Edelman describes an organisation that has adopted the model as a smart company that uses its CEO to inform investors, the media and other key stakeholders, while at the same time arming its employees and customers with information to discuss issues with their peers. For me, it goes even further. It’s about building relationships.
Instead of looking to build sales, companies need to build long-lasting, valuable relationships with their customers. Why? A company is more profitable when it has the repeat custom of the people who purchase their goods or services. Instead of taking a short term view and looking to turn a quick buck, companies should try to develop bonds with their customers. There are numerous commercial benefits from taking such an approach. For example, in their paper, “The Long-Term Effects of Joining and Participating in Customer Communities“, Rene Algesheimer and Utpal M. Dholakia showed that eBay surpassed their competitors by developing customer communities:
Customer communities accomplish many marketing objectives effectively and economically, such as providing credible, low-cost, customized “high-touch” service and support (from expert to novice customers), rapidly disseminating new information, providing high- quality feedback from customers, signaling early warnings from the marketplace, and giving the firm access to its loyal and engaged customers.
Consumers buy from people they trust. Unfortunately the kind of relationship that is required to build trust has been discouraged of late, but this is beginning to change. In his book, ‘The Perfect Store - Inside eBay‘, Adam Cohen discusses the first business plan Jeff Skoll wrote for eBay:
Before the industrial revolution, the craftsman and the customer had a personal relationship. The quality and service were excellent, but the personal attention meant that goods were expensive, beyond the reach of most people. The industrial revolution ushered in a new era of mass production, in which goods were cheaper. But these efficiencies came at a cost: with large factories and elaborate distribution channels , buyers and sellers no longer formed personal relationships. The computer, Skoll argued would make it possible to reclaim the old-style relationship.
The Internet has changed the way we do business. Although it might not always be visible, every single industry has been affected. Importantly, it has shifted a lot of power into the hands of consumers. The following passage from ‘Freakonomics‘ captures this brilliantly:
Information is the currency of the Internet. As a medium, the Internet is brilliantly efficient at shifting information from the hands of those who have it into the hands of those who do not. Often, as in the case of term life insurance prices, the information existed in a woefully scattered way. (In such instances, the Internet acts like a gigantic horseshoe magnet waved over an endless sea of haystacks, plucking the needle out of each one.)…it has vastly shrunk the gap between the experts and the public. The Internet has proven particularly fruitful for situations in which a face-to-face encounter with an expert might actually exacerbate the problem of asymmetrical information - situations in which an expert uses his informational advantage to make us feel stupid or rushed or cheap or ignoble. Consider a scenario in which your loved one has just died and now the funeral director - who knows that you know next to nothing about his business and are under emotional duress to boot - steers you to the $7000 mahogany casket. Or consider the automobile dealership: the salesman does his best to obscure the car’s base price under a mountain of add-ons and incentives. Later, however, in the cool-headed calm of your home, you can use the Internet to find out exactly how much the dealer paid the manufacturer for that car.
We now live in the era of the educated consumer. Nancy Turett, global president of health in Edelman, adds, “Sophisticated and socially engaged, they form their trust by listening, conversing, gathering opinions, and thoughtfully forming their own.” Now more than ever, we rely on the opinions of others when deciding what to buy. Today’s companies are charged with shaping the conversation, something that sounds like an impossible task. So how does a company go about building relationships with its customers? By starting from the inside out.
An organisation’s employees are on the frontline of shaping the public’s opinion about it. They have titles like CEO, account manager or sales assistant, but we forget that they have other titles after they clock off like mother, father, son, daughter, partner or friend. If they have nothing positive to say about the company, the general public will fare little better in their opinion. As Gary Grates, global managing director of Edelman Change and Employee Engagement, points out, “Instead of treating employees as a captive audience, it is essential that leaders and communicators recognize them as a public constituency capable of opinion-shaping, decision-making and organizational success. When a company ignores this truth, it suffers. Employees now have the technology as well as a choice of public forums for airing their concerns.” A fantastic example of seeing this in action is the email Michael Dell sent to Dell employees spelling out the steps the company is taking to turn its fortunes around.
Another point worth addressing from the research is the hype around social media, blogs in particular. Blogging has been heralded of late as leading the peer-to-peer communications revolution. However, the research shows that the medium of peer-to-peer communications is just as fragmented as that of traditional media. Simply put, not everyone behaves the same and the research went some way to recognising this. Four distinct groups were identified based on common behavioural characteristics:
Public activists - Engage in outspoken public actions
Social networkers - Share, seek and value public opinions
Solo actors - Take more passive or personal actions
Uninvolved - Opinions of brands not driven by trust reputation
An overview of these four groups can be found on slides 36 and 37.
Instead of repeating the mistakes of the past and focussing all your efforts on a narrow range of mediums, companies would be better off by inverting the communications funnel - build out to influence multiple stakeholders using a variety of channels.
Ask any US political consultant advising an Irish political party what the most surprising thing about Irish politics and they will all say the same thing. What really surprises the US hired guns is the fact that the economy does not feature as an issue. Why is that and what does it mean for the next election.
There is no group in society, who believe as strongly as politicians do, that demographics are destiny. Long before David McWilliams discovered the “Pope’s Children” Irish political parties ( and their market researchers) had discovered Ratoath Women. Early 30’s with one or two young children, husband works in IT while she is a teacher, living in the commuter belt. Economically liberal but socially conservative, frustrated by poor planning and substandard public services she is the voter who will decide the next election. Ratoath women is part of a huge demographic bulge of children who were born around the time of the Pope’s visit, and who are now buying houses and beginning families. If you want to see them in their natural habitat, go to B&Q on a Saturday morning where you will find the father, pushing a buggy or trying to control some tearaway toddler. They are probably buying something for the Garden or shelving for the kid’s room.
Simply because of the sheer numbers in this demographic bulge they have the power to decide the next election. Childcare, primary education, commuting, the environment everything that concerns her concerns Ireland’s politicians. The first political party to target them was Fine Gael, in the European elections and that happened almost by accident. In Mairead McGuinness they had a candidate who might have been genetically designed to get Ratoath women’s vote. In the initial stages of the campaign Fine Gael believed that Mairead’s appeal lay in the fact she was an agricultural correspondent. They hoped she would win the farming vote. However a few days on the campaign trail enough to convince them that Leinster was no longer a rural constituency and Mairead’s real appeal was to the denizens of the commuter belt. Articulate, attractive, a professional with a young family, and tough, Fine Gael had found a dream candidate for the commuter belt. Every other party watched and learnt the lessons of the campaign.
In the last year Ratoath women has become interested in the environment and concerned about global warming and so has every political party. However she has not been concerned about the economy. Why? Remember this is a person who has never experienced an economic downturn. She grew up during the longest boom in Irish history. To Ratoath and her peer group, economic growth and full employment is the norm. The tech downturn which devastated the electronics and high tech sector in the US and mainland Europe was barely felt here, reinforcing their feeling that downturns were for other people.
Focusing on public services rather than on the economy also suited the opposition. Who wants to debate a Government that has presided over the most successful economy in Europe on the economy? No one.
The focus of the opposition attacks has been on Health and Justice rather than the economy. The subtext of their attacks has been change versus more of the same.
That may all be about to change. During the last election Fine Gael’s focus group research told them that quality of life issues were of most concern to people and they fought a campaign based around these issues. Focus Group research can date very quickly however and in the weeks leading up to election campaign the public became concerned more about the threat to their jobs of the global tech downturn. Fianna Fail spotted the trend quickly and began to fight the election on the need for political stability in tough times. In the days leading up to the election FF knew they had it won and were praying no one would notice how close they were to an overall majority. We may well be facing a reprise of this scenario.
The recent spate of manufacturing job losses is beginning to worry Ratoath women, and may well bring the economy back as the big issue, the hot button that decides how people vote. Paradoxically this may in fact suit the Government. The economy is the chosen battleground for the Government; it has not only a strong record but can wave the threat of potential rainbow’s policy incoherence. Economic jitters will give the Government the opportunity to push the line, there may be trouble ahead now is no time to experiment. In such a scenario the opposition will attempt to blame the Government for allowing rising costs, particularly public sector costs to erode national competitiveness.
An election fought on the economy is good for business. It will allow the business community to push business concerns to the top of the political agenda and will give an incoming Government (of whatever complexion) a mandate to take some of the tough decisions needed to tackle rising costs.
Seamus Mulconry, Director of Public Affairs
This article also appeared in Business and Finance.
David Schlesinger, the Reuters Editor-in-Chief, talks about the controversy last year when Reuters published and then withdrew two photographs from Lebanon that had been digitally altered.
Contagious magazine has a pdf document recapping the most contagious moments of 2006. As the magazine put it, “It’s been an interesting year, to say the least. Put your hand up now if you predicted that YouTube would have a mid-year price tag of $1.65bn, or that the population of Second Life would hit 2m by the end of the year. Who thought that the winner of this year’s console wars would be unlikely underdog Nintendo, or that shaky footage of a graffiti artist attacking President Bush’s Air Force One plane would become the most viewed branded viral ever?”
Shel Holtz describes how the American airline, JetBlue, uses YouTube to apologise to customers and outline the steps it is taking to ensure the delays their customers had to endure last week won’t happen again. Interesting from a crisis management point of view.
This week Trocaire launched the Just World online community, a Bebo-style social networking site designed for people who are interested in development and social justice. This is a first of its kind site in Ireland and a first for an Irish development agency. It will connect people in Ireland and around the world to find inspiration, get information and become involved in improving their local and global communities.
Welcome to the Edelman Dublin blog. On this site we will discuss public relations in Ireland, the media landscape, stories and trends that grab our attention and tell you about the people that work in our office.
As some readers will know, Edelman is the world’s largest independent PR firm with 42 offices around the globe. To find out more about the Dublin office, visit the About Page where you can find out how to contact us and see who we represent (when we’ve finished the site design )
Unfortunately we will not always be able to reply to comments given the demands of the job.
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