PR shouldn’t tell lies says Howard Robinson, director of PR agency Quay West Communications

Have you heard about the Premiership footballer who took out a super injunction to prevent details of marital infidelities becoming public knowledge? Of course you have, but I don’t mean that one. I mean some of the others whose identity is protected by law and whose reputation online is now being managed in a way to prevent names and details from seeping out online the way Ryan Giggs’s did a couple of weeks ago.

The Giggs affair – no, I don’t mean that one – showed that while the English media can be tamed by legal injunctions, media outside of that jurisdiction cannot be so easily controlled and, arguably, the Twittersphere and other corners of the social media and online world can’t be controlled at all.

The Times reported last week how a spate of high profile individuals – footballers, politicians and actors among them – are reaching out to “a new breed of PR company” to hide their secrets in Google search results. Apparently these new agencies promise to suppress negative search results by driving them down the Google rankings by setting up literally thousands of fake, computer-generated social networking profiles which simulate the behaviour of real people and which post, discuss and link to placed positive stories about the individual or the brand, such that they rise higher in the Google rankings than the negative or salacious stories. The Times reported that two actors and a prominent sportsman has paid up to £20,000 per fortnight to use these services.

The premise is that more than 90 per cent of us only look at the first Google results page when we make a search and only a tiny fraction go beyond the third page. This being the case, if the “new breed of PR company” does its stuff, then most people will come away having bought the contrived view that the “unnamed Premiership footballer” is a hybrid between Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama rather than a philanderer who believes his perceived power and influence gives him the right to behave like a latter-day Casanova.

Whether that behaviour is right or wrong is not a matter for me. What interests me more is whether the service being provided constitutes “public relations” or even “reputation management” at all, and if not, do we as an industry want to be judged by those standards? I was always brought up to believe that PR was about communicating a message between an organisation or an individual and its various stakeholders.

The common truth was always that PR couldn’t and shouldn’t lie for you. It could manage your position by persuading the media that a story wasn’t newsworthy (or as newsworthy as another story you can offer) or at best making sure the story is balanced and the client’s viewpoint and position is properly reflected. I always say to clients that if you attempt to use PR to lie, it will catch up with you because the messages you are putting out through the media must resonate with the public’s experience of your brand. If you say your customer service is first class and it’s not, no amount of PR guile is going to prevent people coming forward to give examples to the contrary. Just ask anyone who’s been on Watchdog and tried to blag their way out of it.

There is nothing wrong or improper with placing true, positive stories about an individual or a brand – but only if they’re true and not necessarily to so overtly attempt to suppress other truths. Proper reputation management must be founded on honesty. This development is more about “reputation manipulation”, using computer technology to stifle or cloud the truth with questionable messaging. As a PR consultant for more than 23 years, this removes the skill and insight of the consultant, the understanding of and relationship with the media and will do little to enhance the reputation of the PR industry.