89% of UK respondents wanted companies to explain how they were supporting employees and customers, according to a March 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer special report. In the same report, 74% said they would permanently lose trust in companies that put profits before people. That is the brief for PR in crisis. People judge whether you […]
You're a founder, two minutes from a live radio interview. The holding statement on your tablet names a former employee and includes a figure nobody can trace to a source. The presenter wants a clear answer, your team wants reassurance, and you need to decide which words are safe to say. When a Public Statement […]
Post every day, be seen everywhere, and trust will follow. That's the most popular advice about a PR communication strategy, and it's backwards. Publishing is cheap. Being believed isn't. A full social grid can still leave customers, regulators and journalists unsure what you stand for, which claim is true, or who can defend it in […]
It is 4.40pm on a Friday. A customer posts that your booking system took payment and then cancelled the slot. Within the hour the screenshot is on a local Facebook group, someone tags your founder, and a journalist you have never met sends a one-line message asking for comment before close of play. Your community […]
A one-star review appears before breakfast. An AI-generated answer describes your service inaccurately. By mid-morning, a regulator's letter is sitting in the inbox, and the founder is asking the same question every team asks in that moment: what do we do first? Online reputation management is no longer a marketing clean-up exercise. It affects customer […]
Most advice on PR campaign planning still starts in the wrong place. It starts with a press release, a big media list and the hope that volume will compensate for weak relevance. That approach doesn't hold up in UK newsrooms. Editors and reporters are dealing with inbox overload, aggressive promotion, AI-assisted content and constant pressure […]
PR is harder to measure than it is to launch. Ninety-seven per cent of UK and Ireland communications professionals say they struggle to measure PR effectiveness, at an average annual cost of £80,000, with many teams still reporting coverage, traffic and engagement instead of leads, behaviour change or ROI (UK and Ireland communications measurement research). […]
The phone rings just after 2am. A Glasgow hotel has a flood in the basement, the Wi‑Fi is down, a guest has posted a video from reception, and the manager on duty is trying to work out whether this is an operations problem, a safety problem or a reputation problem. In that first ten minutes, […]
You're probably staring at a campaign that looked clean in the deck, then hit a compliance wall once legal, product, and risk got involved. Maybe the statement is ready, maybe the media team is already asking for comment, and the launch date is still moving because someone has flagged wording that sounded harmless in isolation […]
A criticism lands badly because it rarely arrives at a convenient moment. You're between meetings, checking your phone at dinner, or about to walk into an investor call when a review, email, comment or journalist's question hits a nerve. The instinct is usually the same. Correct them. Defend yourself. Explain what they've missed. That instinct […]