Back
PM Forum - London
Neutralising the threats to corporate reputation
The panel at May’s London PM Forum gave a bold and entertaining presentation about the thorny importance of being able to demonstrate that your firm’s reputation is squeaky clean. The three speakers were Rachel Atkins and Chris Scott from Schillings, and Sarah Reavley from Remark and their messages were fast, incisive and compelling.
Rachel set the theme with a quote from Goldman Sachs – ‘Our assets are our people, capital and reputation. If any of these is ever diminished, the last is the most difficult to restore.’ A serious statement reinforced by the fact that in 2008, reputation risks shot from being the 22nd highest business risk to the second in an Ernst & Young report.
She identified the three key trends affecting corporate reputations and illustrated each of them with real situations. When Steve Jobs went public with his illness shares at Apple fell 7% highlighting the major rise of focus on business leaders. A poll of 945 Americans losing or leaving their jobs found that six out of 10 admitted to having stolen company data before they left, proving that an increase in ‘business divorces’ prejudices company reputation. Finally, the 24/7 news culture can sometimes breed a lazy under-resourced media prone to critical mistakes.
Sarah’s response to the real dangers facing all businesses was to offer three practical steps to safeguarding your firm’s reputation – prepare, prevent and restore. Prepare by crisis planning, making watertight communications plans and building excellent support tools. Prevent through outstanding client relationships, robust brand values and positive media relations. Restore using insightful, up-to-the-minute implementation backed by legal authority.
The third part of the presentation was Chris’s and his job was to help you safeguard your firm’s reputation from a legal perspective. Advice included how to avoid silos through watertight working relationships, stop information from getting to the press, communicate honestly with all clients and think carefully about what you say and what is said about you in things like blogs and Google alerts.
All three speakers concluded that our natural instinct to protect and conserve in a downturn applies to reputation as much as economy and we need to be vigilant about any threats to our public profile. It’s also vital to take on board that business development and marketing professionals can help us to protect our firm’s reputation. If we plan ahead to avoid panic, communicate carefully, build great client relationships and take advice from the experts we stand a good chance of maintaining a positive reputation. And when bad news does leak out there are many ways to minimise the damage.
The evening provided a ‘how-to’ kit for avoiding bad press and slurs on your reputation but crucially how to deal with it if you do get it. From a personal, professional, practical and legal perspective this was sound advice timely given for all of us.
Treby Swingler
Words Publishing
Back