Series of 7: Top Topics from the PROI Gathering of the World’s Leading Independent Agencies:Reputation Management After the Global Economic Meltdown

This is the first in a series of seven blogs highlighting the seven breakout session topics presented at the 2010 PROI annual meeting.  PROI is the largest, oldest and furthest-reaching alliance of independent communications agencies.  The PROI partner office for the Upper Midwest, LaBreche attended the 2010 international meeting in May, which was hosted by its L.A. partner office, mPRm.

 

All PROI agencies, representing the world’s most forward-thinking innovators in the communications industry, participated in a discussion on how reputation management is viewed and managed for companies, as they begin to emerge from the global economic crisis.  Below are the top-ranking insights from these leaders – from Delhi to Copenhagen, Bratislava and NYC.

 

• Research now reveals that the topic of reputation makes it on to the agendas of the meetings of the boards of the world’s largest public companies.  Today’s board members and executives are increasingly concerned about managing their reputations in a new media world, in which every stakeholder has a voice and many are using that voice, after 24 months of decreasing trust in companies, their brands, governments, and world and industry leaders.
• Social networks and the messages they move -- based in truths and untruths – because increasing consternation among leaders, many of which are not yet comfortable adopting, participating in and using networks to proactively engage their stakeholder communities.
• Reputation management processes are becoming more mature, advanced and accepted by companies and their executives.  The best reputation audits, maps and outcomes are measured in tangible values – in languages that can be understood by the CFO.
• As companies move into their next challenge – the fight for talent that is expected to be able to soon act on their desires to change jobs – they will pay more attention to their reputations as employers of choice, and take action to proactively position themselves to compete to retain and attract the human resources a knowledge economy demands.
• Reputation management – a term that first used in the 1980s and never really made it out of the agency’s lexicon – is finally understood by companies, at the highest levels of the organization.  Agencies have seen increases in proactive conversations with clients who want to understand how to manage the perceptions of their companies.  The role agencies now play is connecting what a company does to what it says to lead to what it’s known for.
• CEOs are interested in knowing what stakeholders think about their companies, its leaders, its products, and agencies skilled in reputation management are delivering research that leads to strategic discussions around the current-to-desired path of reputation building.
• Issues management is at the core of reputation work; intelligence mapping and risk management that identifies, monitors, interprets and prompts preventative crisis controls is a given at any well-managed organization.
• Rebuilding credibility will be the mantra for many companies and companies within industries that have taken a beating over the past 24 months. 

 

Next week’s topic:  digital marketing…who owns it?

International Views on Communications

Every May, I travel to the annual meeting of the world’s oldest and furthest-reaching alliance of independent communications agencies.  The alliance is called Public Relations Organisation International (PROI) – and, yes, Organisation is spelled with an S, not a Z – which signifies the origins of this international group, which can be traced back 40 years to eight innovative firms in Europe.

Those innovators, owners of independent public relations agencies, banded together to share information on trends affecting how to best represent clients and their brands as consultants and communicators.  Today, people from 78 agencies, 120 cities, 40 countries and 5 continents gather twice a year to do the same thing.  Sharing knowledge and resources across borders has always been inherent in the independent agency’s character.  Imagine the depth of thinking when the world’s leading independent agency owners gather to study such important topics as crisis management across global social networks and working with procurement and sourcing models to deliver results measured in today’s terms.

This year’s meeting was held in Los Angeles and hosted by our PROI partner office there, mPRm.  In the coming days, I’ll recap the priority topics we huddled on in L.A.   I think you’ll find that all of us – as agencies and clients – must address them in 2010, a year that is expected to usher in a new era of communications in a world that’s largely been in turmoil over the past 24 months.

The first blog in the series will cover reputation management trends in this brave new world.  Join me, and I welcome your comments on this global discussion.  Stay tuned.