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Barometer Rising: Edelman PR and Trust

This article is more than 9 years old.

NOTE: Porter Gale and I are co-authoring a book called Resurrecting Trust: Technology, Culture & the Bottom Line.  Mostly, it is about companies that are using contextual technology and transparent cultures to build unprecedented levels of trust. I am posting early drafts of extracts here in the hope of getting feedback on what we are writing.

Following is an extract, from Chapter 2, Trust Makers. It follows Chapter 1, which was called Trust Breakers.

Extract from Chapter 2: Trust Makers

Richard Edelman was running European operations for the public relations agency his father founded, when all hell broke loose on the streets of Seattle, Washington on Nov. 29, 1999. What happened there would shape who he was and the agency he would soon run.

The Battle of Seattle, as it would be called, was an occasionally violent clash between municipal authorities and 40,000 protesters who seemingly appeared on the streets out of nowhere. Their plan was to prevent delegates from attending a World Trade Organization [WTO] convention.

The protesters out-maneuvered authorities and caused havoc, shouting slogans against globalization and for sustainability. The confrontation generated media coverage that the WTO event would not have otherwise captured.

Edelman, told us he was astounded by what he saw. He didn’t understand who the people on the streets were, why they were so angry, what they had against a global trade organization and exactly what they wanted to see happen.

For Edelman, it was a watershed moment when he realized most people didn’t trust large organizations--the sort of enterprises and institutions that Edelman PR represented.

“I wanted to understand why Seattle happened,” he told us, and so he started a modest research project, which he called the Edelman Trust Barometer.

Now, it is the longest-running and most comprehensive survey of trust worldwide. In 2014, Trust Barometer researchers interviewed 33,000 people in 27 countries on whom and what they trusted.

Over the years, it has been useful to media and business observers to track the trends related to trust. For example, people are slowly trusting business more and steadily trusting government less.

Edelman sees the explosion of social media in the middle 2000s to have been a watershed event in terms of people, the enterprise and trust.

It is our observation that the sectors that are most engaged in online conversations tend to be more trusted. For example, technology is the most trusted of fifteen business categories that the Barometer tracks, and from what we can make out, it is the most engaged in social media, social networks, online reviews, etc. Finance is the least trusted business sector , and it remains, for the most part, out of the public conversation.

The Barometer digs down deeply enough to show which sectors of each category are more trusted. For example, oil and mining are among the ones we find to not be overly conversational, and they tie for bottom position on the Barometer. While sustainable energy companies are the more conversational and more trusted in the energy sector.

Business, the Barometer has consistently indicated since the middle 2000s, is more trusted than government. While politicians may use social media to get the word out and campaign contributions in, government employees, for the most part, are prevented from using social media for conversations—and problem solving with constituents.

“Social media has had a corrosive effect on government and trust, and I think it is a real cause for concern,” Edelman told us.

Amy Hemingway, senior vice president and Global Sector Chair of Energy, at Edelman PR oversees a practice that includes such energy titans as GE, Shell and Chevron. She walked us through how the Barometer shows how their recent strategic shifts into public conversations has coincided with public trust in the category.

Hemingway noted that historically the energy industry has had limited engagement and generally “didn’t talk much to anyone about anything,” even their own stakeholders. Particularly they didn’t talk with the media. So, when there was a controversy involving energy, detractors got to voice their perspective, while energy industry representatives remained mute. “The public could only get an unbalanced perspective,” she said.

In 2009, Edelman started coaching its energy clients to join the conversation—not just in social media, but also in as many public ways as possible. Initially, the objective was more to educate than persuade. “This is a poorly understood industry and companies have to recognize they need to play a role in educating people about it,” she told us.

Since then, energy has reached out to all audiences concerned with energy issues from environmentalists to investors.

Since the Barometer indicated that CEOs were generically mistrusted, Edelman encouraged executives to partner with technical experts and academics who maintain higher trust rankings.

Since 2009, Energy has improved steadily, growing from 39 percent in 2009 to 59 percent in 2014,thus moving in six years from 60 percent not trusting the energy industry to 60 percent trusting it.

Edelman invests over $2 million annually in the Barometer, and as the energy story shows, there is a measurable return on that investment.

Trust Me—I’m a PR Guy

There’s a part of this story that Shel Israel found particularly interesting. He had owned his own small PR agency for 17 years, until 2001. He sold it to employees and went back to being a writer, in part because people often didn’t trust him because he was a PR professional.

So, when the Trust Barometer was started by a global PR agency, he saw irony in it. How did an organization in such an untrusted field, become a thought leader on trust?

There is little doubt that that is precisely what happened.

When the Barometer was started, Edelman PR was the world’s third largest agency with billings at about $225 million. Now, it is the world’s largest PR agency and billings have more than tripled. Much of that can be attributed to its significant gains in its digital practice, but it seems to be clear to us the Barometer helped in that segment as well as elsewhere.

Edelman has become a thought leader on trust. And if you are a leader, others must follow. Competing agencies have started researching and reporting on closely related topics. FleishmanHillard, the second largest PR agency, has started the Authenticity Gap Survey. Weber Shandwick, another strong competitor, has a Chief Reputation Officer who conducts surveys on consumer trust of brands. Hill & Knowlton has also been conducting surveys that reveal trust in government is decreasing proportionately to public access to information about government.

As the late Jimmy Durante said, “Everybody’s getting into the act.” But, being first mover is important in every aspect of business. The public, in general, is well served by having the world’s leading PR firms tripping over each other to research, understand and teach the business advantages of trust and transparency.

But no company will attain a spotless record. Like almost every company and we researched, Edelman’s image has cracks in it.

In the weeks when we were working on this profile, the Guardian, a highly trusted British publication revealed that Edelman PR was the only major PR firm that would still accept clients that denied the existence of global warming. After the issue was made public, Edelman reversed its policy, in this case, following the pack of other PR firms.

A few days later, when the suicide of Robin Williams was heavily reported, Lisa Kovitz, an Edelman vice president posted a blog suggesting that the popular comic-actor’s death could be treated as an opportunity for a national conversation on depression. The post was heavily criticized for tastelessness and she would promptly insert an apology to the post, which she did not take down.

Both of these incidents caused the agency embarrassment, Stuart Elliott, wrote an article in the New York Times, that observed that these two events were the sort of “blunders” that Edelman was paid to stop clients from making. Edelman found himself mud wrestling with leading PR publications over the dismissal of the firm’s president and its relationship to the global warming comments.

None of this has done the agency much good, despite it’s fast and relatively transparent efforts to correct two serious, back-to-back gaffes. But will they do enough damage to offset, Edelman’s overall record? That remains to be seen. Certainly, Edelman PR needs to make certain there are no additional breaches to their trust contracts with the public.

So far, they do not seem to us to be sufficient, to unravel Edelman PR’s long-built efforts to position itself as a though leader on the issue of the enterprise and trust.