Looking for a new energy provider can be a bit stressful if you have been used to doing business with a particular company for a long period of time. However, moving into a new home sometimes necessitates dealing with a new provider for your energy needs. There are obviously many companies out there that are in this particular industry. This can make choosing the right one a very difficult task. This is especially true if you do not know the right things to look for. Here are a few examples of what you need your energy provider to have.

1. An option to sign a contract
A contract is a very good option when you are talking about an energy provider. The reason for this is the fact that energy rates can fluctuate wildly in some areas. You might start using a particular energy provider at a certain rate and then have your rates go up quite considerably six months later. Signing a contract with your energy provider is a great way to prevent this from happening to you. You will be locked in at a specific rate for the entire length of the contract. However, you need to be reasonably sure that you will not be moving at any point while the contract is still in effect. If this happens, you will need to pay a large early termination fee that will eliminate all of the money you saved by signing the contract.

2. Immediate repair service
Hopefully, you will not need to have anything repaired while you are using this energy provider. However, there might be an occasion where your service is not working as well as it should. You will then be forced to have a repair technician come to your home to fix the problem. In this case, it is essential that the repair technician come to your home within 24 hours. This is especially important in the winter when your house can become dangerously cold very quickly. One of the best energy providers when it comes to customer service is ACN Inc. You can learn more by visiting http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/ACN-Reviews-E31927.htm.

3. Competitive rates
You understandably do not want to pay more for your energy than you need to. This is why you should compare the rates of all the energy providers in your region to see how much they differ. You can then make an educated decision.

Corporate PR professionals can learn a lot from political PR professionals and political PR professionals can learn a lot from corporate PR professionals. I was reminded of this when I read Patrick Wintour’s excellent insiders’ account of the UK Labour Party’s election defeat.
The main lesson I draw from the article is that the boss and your client aren’t always right. One of the most important skills for a public relations professional is being able to diplomatically push back and persuade the client that they are wrong.
It appears that Ed Miliband was the classic ‘difficult client’. He appears to be a man of principle. A man of convictions. His problem appeared to be that he could think ‘big’ – his vision to focus on inequality and ‘small’ – his obsession with ‘retail’ policies like freezing household energy prices. But what he was unable to do was join the two together. He had no clear strategy or over-arching narrative to link his vision to his policy ideas. The ideas that were tried to link it all together were never developed properly.
For me the stand out sentence in the article was this:

“The team that Miliband had assembled around him consisted of highly intelligent individuals, but the whole was less than the sum of its parts – it was, according to many of those advisers, like a court in which opposing voices cancelled one another out.”

I’d been arguing for at least three to four years before the general election that Ed Miliband’s main problem is that he’d surrounded himself with the wrong people. The problem wasn’t necessarily a lack of talent, but too much talent. It gives me no pleasure to have been proved right.
There was no one on the team able to stand up to the client and others in the team to point out what was wrong and what should be done to fix it.
Some of the corporate PR leadership lessons I think we can draw from the Labour Party’s failure are:

OST – Objectives, Strategy, Tactics

The article paints a clear picture of a dysfunctional organisation obsessed by tactics and without any workable strategy. In the Art of War Sun Tzu says:

“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”

If you’ve identified the right objectives and strategy then neither should need to change much in the short term. What might cause them to be re-evaluated are monumental changes driven by external circumstances. In Labour’s case this was the surge of Scottish nationalism following on from the defeat of the independence movement in the September 2014 referendum.
Labour had lots of tactics, but very little strategy and suffered its worst defeat in living memory.
It is essential that you first define your public relations or communications objectives and from these decide your strategy. Your communications objectives should be directly related to your organisational or business objectives. Only then should you start thinking about your tactics.
One of the most frequent mistakes I see companies making is to start with the tactics – create a Facebook page, hold a news conference, set up a social media newsroom etc – without being clear about why they are doing it and what they intend to achieve.

Fight lies with truth, but emotion beats facts

Alastair Campbell is another fan of my favourite PR leadership mantra – Objectives, Strategy, Tactics – and early on he identified a flaw in Ed Miliband’s desire to move on from New Labour. Ed Miliband’s desire to disassociate himself from Tony Blair’s and Gordon Brown’s leadership meant he failed to defend Labour’s record in government. This allowed the Conservatives to lodge the emotional argument in people’s minds that Labour was responsible for the deficit, even though the facts proved the opposite.
Labour frequently makes the mistake of thinking that because the facts are on its side that it can win the arguments. The Democrats in the USA frequently make the same mistake. You saw it with the debate over Obamacare. The Democrats talked about the millions without the right healthcare who would be lifted into safety. The Republicans talked about the 92 year old grandmother in South Carolina who would be prevented from seeing her favourite doctor of 20 years.
Emotion beats facts.
To be fair Labour’s communications team recognised this, but did so in such a clumsy way that it opened Ed Miliband up to even more ridicule. Ed Miliband’s conference speech was riddled with references to real people such as “‘Gareth, whom Miliband had met while walking in Hampstead Heath”. It sounded horrendously fake.

Believable messages

Labour also failed to understand how messaging works in the modern era namely that you need to:

1. Identify messages that work to help towards achieving your objectives
2. Ensure these messages resonate with your audiences – do your stakeholders talk about them, do they care about them?
3. KISS Keep It Simple Stupid – don’t make the messages too complicated, as there is too much competition for attention
4. Communicate the meaning of the message, don’t constantly repeat tired old phrases that people can tune out of

The last is a topic I’ve written and talked about a lot. If your key message (as one of Labour’s was) is the ‘cost of living crisis’ then don’t keep saying ‘cost of living crisis’, but instead constantly talk about what you mean by it. Illustrate it with practical examples people can understand. But don’t keep repeating it ad nauseum.

Clear roles and responsibilities

Labour’s team had some very talented and experienced people with lots of expertise. But that was part of the problem, not the solution. Without clear leadership from Ed Miliband as leader of the party everyone thought that they were right and fought for their own ideas. If there had been clear objectives and a sensible strategy then ideas could have been questioned to ensure that particular tactic worked within the strategy.
Vigorous open discussions and disagreements are an essential part of making the right decisions. But within the discussions there needs to be a mechanism for making decisions and sticking to them.
Labour’s team suffered from too many senior people all vying for their ideas to be heard instead of concentrating on their own area of expertise and actually doing their jobs using their own skills and expertise.
Ed Miliband was leader of the party, but from reading the account there doesn’t appear to have been a real head of communications strategy. Instead there were lots of people with very senior sounding job titles. The Labour Party needed a head of public relations or chief communications officer that all of these talented individuals reported to.
In the corporate world I often argue that the head of public relations should have direct access to the CEO and c-suite/board, but shouldn’t be part of it as being one of the decision makers prevents you from providing the most effective counsel.

Developing the right public relations team

Many of the mistakes in the campaign could perhaps have been avoided had the right people, with the right skills being doing the right things. You get the impression that the many talented senior people in the team all wanted to ‘lead’, leaving some of the daily drudge and hard work to less experienced people who lacked the appropriate training and expertise.
The infamous #edstone while small in itself is symptomatic of the dysfunctional team. It is scarcely believable that the idea of carving Labour’s six election pledges onto a giant stone tablet and unveiling it in a car park actually got beyond the first brainstorm, let alone surviving 10 separate planning meetings.

Digital doesn’t exist separately – it’s all just public relations

The final Labour Party conference speech before the election was always going to be a key moment in the campaign. How is it possible that the need to change it at the last minute couldn’t be foreseen? How could it not be foreseen that attempting to deliver it from memory would mean that it would be very different from the original script?
The fact that the ‘digital team’ spent the original version of the speech out, which included the missing paragraphs on the deficit, highlights the problem of not having digital and social as a core skill for every member of the PR and communications team. An experienced PR shouldn’t have made that mistake. It shouldn’t have been a ‘digital’ or ‘social’ expert doing it, but a PR expert.

Watch out for dead cats

Labour believed it had a popular new policy to unveil during the short election that would give it a poll boost. It was to abolish the loophole that allowed non-domiciled residents of the UK to pay no tax on foreign income. Labour’s communications team believed it could dominate two full days of the mainstream news agenda.
However, Lynton Crosby, the Conservative’s Australian campaign director responded with a classic ‘dead cat’ tactic. London mayor Boris Johnson describes it thus:

“There is one thing that is absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table – and I don’t mean that people will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted. That is true, but irrelevant. The key point, says my Australian friend, is that everyone will shout, ‘Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!’ In other words, they will be talking about the dead cat – the thing you want them to talk about – and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.”

You have to be prepared for your competitors using such tactics and think about the practical and ethical considerations of using such tactics yourself.

Strategic public relations leadership

These are just a few quick observations of what public relations professionals can learn from Labour’s failure, most of which are down to a chronic lack of PR leadership.
If you’re interested in the concept of public relations leadership then I’d urge you to read Strategic Public Relations Leadership by Professor Anne Gregory and Paul Willis. It’s a slender tome which strikes just the right balance between academic theory and practical management advice.
Through my PR consultancy work I help companies, governments and organisations all over the world to modernise their public relations and corporate communications strategies and ensure their teams have the skills needed to deliver modernised PR strategy. If you want a chat about how I can help you modernise your PR strategy and PR team then please get in touch.

If the title ‘How to measure PR’ got you hooked and you came here in search of the silver bullet that will tell you how to measure exactly how successful your PR is then you’re going to be disappointed. There is no silver bullet. And there is definitely no silver bullet that will measure the ROI on your investment in public relations.

But if that’s what you’re trying to do then you’re trying to do the wrong thing. If you want to calculate the value of investing in public relations then surely you’d also want to know what the cost of not investing in public relations is. You don’t decide if you’re going to do public relations. Every company has relationships. The only decision is if you are going to manage them professionally or leave them to luck. Every company has a reputation. The only decision is if you are going to manage that reputation professionally or leave it to luck.

There is no silver bullet

The reason there is no silver bullet is that every company and organisation is unique and therefore how you measure the success of its public relations and communications is going to be unique.
There can be no one size fits all approach as everyone is trying to achieve different objectives. Even within one company or organisations there will be multiple communications objectives which should be tied to different business or organisational objectives. The way you measure the success of an internal communications campaign to improve staff retention in a contact centre will be very different to how you measure the success of a public relations programme to help improve a company’s corporate social responsibility.

It is essential that communications and public relations objectives relate to business and organisational objectives, but it doesn’t follow that achieving the business objectives is a measure of the success of the public relations activity. There will always be too many other factors to take into account to be able to draw such a direct line. If staff retention was improved it might be because the competitor call centre just up the road relocated to a different town making it harder for people to switch jobs. If it got worse it might be because the new parent company adopted a more antagonistic approach to its relationship with the trade unions at the centre.

Communications and public relations contribute to the final result, but ultimately the most important factor is always the reality of the situation. That’s why public relations is far more about what you do, rather than just what you say. The best way to improve the sales of a widget is to make a better widget.

Measuring the ROI of PR is a myth

ROI means return on investment. There is no other meaning. You calculate ROI by using this formula.
ROI has a specific financial meaning that CEOs and chief finance officers understand. The challenge you have in calculating the ROI of public relations activity is that while you know the cost of investment, you don’t usually know the gain from the investment.

Even if it is something where you can calculate a financial gain, such as sales, there are always lots of contributory factors so you can’t isolate the contribution of just the public relations activity. ROI doesn’t mean value for money or cost effectiveness. So if you run a campaign that costs £5,000 and gets your Facebook page 500,000 new likes it might be great value as it’s only 1p per like, but it isn’t great ROI. You still don’t know what the ROI is as you don’t know in financial terms what the gain from the investment is.

It’s a myth to think that businesses calculate the ROI of everything they do. They don’t calculate the ROI of many of things they do. Making sure you get great value doesn’t mean you’ve got to know the ROI of everything. For a great take on this listen to what David Meerman Scott has to say in this rant on ROI.

Don’t ask how, but ask why you measure PR

If your first question is how to measure PR then you’re asking the wrong question. You should first ask yourself why you want to measure your public relations.

If your answer is to impress your boss or client or to justify your worth to them then you’re measuring PR for the wrong reasons.

The most important reason for PR measurement and evaluation is for yourself. You do it so you can do your work better.

That means you’ve got to be constantly measuring and evaluating. It’s not something that you relegate to the end. That’s too late to improve.

By constantly measuring and evaluating and using that insight to improve what you do then by default the result at the end will be better.

Once you accept these three simple truths then you can start to develop a public relations measurement and evaluation framework that really works:

• There is no silver bullet
• Measuring ROI is a myth
• Use measurement to improve what you do, not prove what you’ve done

By accepting these truths you’re far more likely to be able to identify ways of measuring your PR that will impress your boss or client.

If you want to implement an improved new PR measurement and evaluation system then there are lots of free resources on the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communications (AMEC) or contact me to discuss how I can help you develop a system or ask about the PR measurement and evaluation courses that I teach all around the world including open courses in London run by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR).

Many PR professionals help companies and organisations to create annual reports, but despite improvements to make them more interesting they are still frequently just focused on financial data with everything else relegated to mere cosmetic additions. The reason is that many organisations such as public limited companies and charities are legally required to publish annual reports with prescriptive rules on what should be included.

Attention and reputation boost from annual report

Private companies face no such obligations and indeed frequently want to be secretive about disclosing financial and business information that they don’t legally have to. That’s why I was interested to see Dell’s approach to its annual report. Until 2013 Dell was a publicly listed company, when it became privately owned again. Dell therefore doesn’t have to publish annual or quarterly financial reports. Indeed that is reported to be one of the reasons for it going private, so that senior executives could focus on long-term business objectives, rather than the demands of short-term financial reporting.
But the downside is that customers and the marketplace have confidence in companies that are growing and doing well. Not publishing a report means that Dell loses the attention and boost to its reputation it would have got from its annual report. Publishing an annual report can be an important element of reputation building enabling privately owned companies to get a share of the attention usually reserved for publicly listed competitors.

Annual report to customers

Dell addressed this problem this week when it published its first Dell Annual Report to Customers. Freed from the constraints of the arcane language and legal compliance mandated for listed companies Dell has published a far more innovative report that focuses on innovation and customer satisfaction.
Publicly listed companies are restricted in how forward looking they can be in annual reports so as not to mislead potential investors. As a private company Dell faces no such restrictions so its report to customers is as much about showcasing what it can and plans to do as it is on showcasing what it has done.
Interestingly Dell launched the report at its annual analyst conference, highlighting that although it was called a report for customers, Dell recognises its importance to analysts and other key influencers and stakeholders.

Innovative design and data transparency

The report features 60 Windows 8.1-esque colourful panels with icons that flip when you move over them to reveal snippets of interesting data. Clicking on them reveals more information and a link to the full annual report to customers. The report covers four main areas: technology, business, perspectives and ‘future ready’.
The report is also studded with lots of videos and every part of it can be shared individually on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook. It also makes great use of older content with some sections of the report appearing to be existing content integrated into the new report such as this article on Entourage actor Adrian Grenier being named Dell’s sustainability champion.

Integrated reporting

The Dell 2015 Annual Report to Customers is an indicator of the innovation that’s possible in annual reporting. But it’s just the start and could have drawn more lessons and best practice from the integrated reporting (IR) framework drawn up by the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC).
It’s a very exciting time to be in public relations and corporate communications and I’m looking forward to working with clients on creating modernised annual reports that draw on innovation in integrated reporting, corporate storytelling, corporate media and content marketing. Get in touch if you’d like help with yours.
Thanks to Microsoft’s Tom Murphy for alerting me to the Dell Annual Report to Customers.