Christmas Number One decided by Facebook

So the power of social media has spectacularly destroyed the X-Factor’s vice-like traditional grip on the Christmas Number One spot.
Geordie teenager Joe McElderry, who won the top rating television music talent show earlier this month, would normally have been a certainty to have the Yuletide best seller on the back of his success.
But a Facebook campaign propelled American band Rage Against the Machine (RATM) to the top of the charts in an act of defiance against the influence Simon Cowell’s multi-million pound X-Factor empire has wielded over the music industry.
An astonishing 500,000 people bought the RATM single, Killing in the Name, to topple McElderry’s The Climb by 50,000 copies.
The Facebook page for the RATM campaign had almost one million members the last time I looked, many of them attracted there via discussions on online social networking sites like Twitter and interactive chatrooms.
What this demonstrates is the remarkable ability of the internet to bring people together to fight against something they disagree with.
And it has major implications for public relations professionals. It used to take time for action groups to organise themselves in opposition to new developments or environmental transgressors. Public meetings had to be arranged and householders visited to rally support and get people together.
Now it is easy to set up a website and send online messages to people regionally, nationally and even internationally to build backing for a campaign.
Supermarket chain Tesco have to battle a nationwide action group aiming to prevent it setting up yet more stores around the country to the detriment, the campaigners believe, of local businesses.
Unhappy passengers have banded together on websites to lampoon airlines and football supporters chatter away in cyberspace whenever they are unhappy about the way their club is being run.
PR people need to monitor these messages so they can counter what is being said in the never-ending quest to protect an organisation’s reputation.
But how do they tackle something like the monster created by RATM fans on Facebook?
Cowell was initially scathing of the campaign, leading to widespread condemnation of his perceived arrogance. Interestingly, he has since changed his stance and praised the initiative, even going so far as to personally congratulate the main organisers.
A clever PR move maybe but it remains to be seen whether the X-Factor winner will ever grab the Christmas Number One spot again to follow Shayne Ward, Leona Lewis, Leon Jackson and Alexandra Burke between 2005 and last year.
It makes you wonder what else can be influenced by the power of Facebook. Could the electorate band together to get a political party in power at the next General Election. Maybe dissenting voices on the social networking site could get together online to oust a Prime Minister.
A final thought. In 10 years’ time we might be talking about campaigns being started to break the hold of Facebook on popular opinion.

How best to regain a damaged reputation

I have been pondering the concept of reputation and how public relations professionals can best deal with situations where the image of their client has taken an almighty hammering.
Every day, it seems, the media is alive with the latest scandal involving a high profile personality. This was particularly the case in the world of sport in 2009.
We witnessed the remarkable fall from grace of golf legend Tiger Woods, whose acknowledged status as one of the greatest ever sportsmen has been soiled by his alleged infidelity with a succession of women.
His marriage is reportedly on the rocks and fellow golfers, as well as newspaper columnists, bloggers and comedians, have rushed to condemn and lampoon his behaviour.
We have heard very little from Woods himself, save for the occasional brief rambling comment on his official website. He is taking a break from the sport but has not fully explained the reasons why.
His silence led to widespread speculation through social media forums like Twitter where his reputation was attacked and ridiculed across cyberspace.
This has all blown up at the same time that another sporting hero – former tennis champion Andre Agassi – told the world he had taken the highly addictive drug crystal meth during his playing days. He writes graphically about the issue in his autobiography and explains why he did it.
Yet another sports icon, Great Britain sprinter Dwayne Chambers, has spent all year trying to repair the considerable damage done to his reputation after he was banned for taking performance-enhancing stimulants.
I got the chance to interview Chambers for a local newspaper last year as he visited a school to warn its students about the perils of taking drugs in sport.
It was part of a tour of the country where the athlete was seeking to garner public sympathy as he explained why he had resorted to cheating and how sorry he was.
The sprinter told me how warmly he had been received around the country and he was eventually welcomed back into the British team after qualifying for championships as a clean athlete.
Telling the truth and opening up to the public has certainly benefited Chambers, as it has clearly done for Agassi. The ex-tennis player’s book is selling impressively and he has enjoyed adulation wherever he has gone to promote it in book shops and on television and radio chat shows.
This is surely a lesson for Tiger Woods and his PR team. In an age when issues can be publically debated across the globe seconds after they are publicised it is not a smart move to lay low and hope the problem goes away. Telling the truth and showing genuine remorse is essential.
If you open up to the public they will take you to their hearts again. Exuding a sense of vulnerability is not a bad thing for a high profile individual because it shows they are human, like the rest of us.

Is all publicity good publicity?

Recent events have heightened the debate over whether all publicity is good publicity.
This is a crucial theme for public relations students such as me. In many cases you might argue that being in the public spotlight can only be good for an individual or organisation.
An actor being interviewed on TV or radio, or being featured in national newspapers, can only benefit any film or drama he or she is currently appearing in.
Likewise authors publicising their latest work via the media or at bookshop signings can only surely result in extra sales.
Product placement in movies has long been a way of helping finance them and the economic benefits of Coca Cola drinks or Microsoft computers being used on the big screen in front of millions of cinema-goers worldwide are obvious.
But what do we make of the ongoing debate about Nick Griffin’s appearance on the BBC television political debating show, Question Time.
As the leader of the far right extremist group, the British National Party (BNP), many people believed he should not be given such a high profile stage on which to expound his views.
They fear that his appearance in front of an estimated TV audience of eight million people might persuade more people to join a party, which holds openly racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic beliefs.
The programme was almost entirely devoted to the BNP, which has secured two seats in the European parliament – one of whom is occupied by Griffin – and a number of local councillors around the country.
He may well have garnered some sympathy for the way he was pilloried by every other member of the panel and an audience which seemed vehemently against everything he stood for.
In fact, the BNP claimed afterwards that new members were eager to join the party and thousands of pounds in donations had been pledged to it.
But the crucial aspect of Griffin’s appearance was the way he came across to the public and how he explained his extremist ideas. Was it enough to motivate more voters to tick his party’s box at the next General Election?
Popular public relations theory would suggest that Griffin failed in his attempts to persuade wavering supporters of Labour, the Tories or the Liberal Democrats to back him instead.
The philosopher Aristotle said the credibility of the speaker was critical in whether he could persuade his audience to agree with his viewpoints.
PR scholars also learn about the findings of Perloff, who outlined four key elements by which listeners evaluate speakers – their expertise, trustworthiness, physical attractiveness and how similar they are to themselves.
Since Griffin appeared nervous, naive and historically and socially uninformed on Question Time, few potential supporters can surely have been impressed by him, if we are to go by the thinking of Aristotle.
Similarly, Perloff’s principles also indicate that Griffin shot himself in the foot, politically-speaking.
He did not appear an expert in anything he talked about and he cannot clearly be trusted since he appeared to deny making extremist and offensive statements which had been caught on film.
His sneering tone throughout the programme and his attempts to make light of the Holocaust and the Ku Klux Klan would clearly have portrayed him as unattractive in the eyes of most right-thinking people.
Since Britain is a multi-racial nation which embraces same-sex marriages and abhors everything the Nazis stood for, very few people will have thought that Griffin was like them.
Undoubtedly, there will be some new voters who will support the BNP as a result of Griffin’s television appearance.
But accepted theories of PR tell us that many BNP voters and potential supporters will desert the party because its leader does not possess the credibility to play a leading role in the political life of this country.
Publicity is clearly not always positive, I conclude. It may well raise the profile of a company, organisation or individual. But if that portrayal is negative then the act of publicity is counter-productive.