BBC's corporate communications efforts look very uncertain - why?

I thought I would have a look at the BBC web site to see how they have made their latest announcement  about the editor of Newsnight "stepping aside" regarding the Jimmy Savile programme and enquiry and to see how they are handling it on the web site.   It is rather illuminating and tends to confirm the confused impression which is coming over in the media with senior management uncertain how to handle the situation.

Going to the BBC Media Centre home page and there is no section dedicated to the Jimmy Savile affair with all the information and links currently available accessible from one site.  The latest announcement is the lead story but no overall section.  In a crisis PR situation, this would have helped journalists and public seeking information about the situation and should have been part of the BBC's Corporate Communications approach.  

The official statement is also peculiar as it then links to a statement on the Editors blog pages.  These are where the Editors in the BBC of the leading programmes discuss issues and agendas.  This is a journalistic part of the web site and should not be confused with a corporate communications statement.  This blog entry should be on the Corporate Communications blog section of the BBC web site not the journalistic side.  It does appear that the senior management team at the BBC does not have a blog outlet and that is presumably why it is carried on an editorial section of the web site.  There is yet a further link to the original Peter Rippon blog entry about the reasons for not carrying the Jimmy Savile story on Newsnight.  

All in all a confused picture making it difficult to follow the story and also for the BBC's senior management message to come over. What does appear is that the new DG George Entwhistle looks very uncertain when it comes to media; remember the confidence of Greg Dyke even when he was sacked over the results of the Iraq enquiry.  The senior management team of the BBC need to realise there is a corporate communications aspect to this enquiry which is quite separate from the needs of BBC journalism.  If they don't get a grip of this soon, then I think that one or two senior management will fall and fundamentally over an issue which if handled with more transparency and skill, never needed to have reached this level of media storm.

 

Tax as a reputational issue

The way that the payment of corporation tax has moved from being an minority activist agenda (Vodafone) to a mainstream agenda within a very short space of time is instructive.  Starbucks executives have now been summoned to appear before a Parliamentary committee to explain its non-payment of tax in the UK and the company is facing a developing media campaign, with worryingly for them, the Daily Mail, the voice of "middle Britain" having the company firmly in its sights and referring to a company boycott.

Source: Guardian.
It would be interesting to know when market research organisations such as Ipsos Mori with their reputational surveys of elites widely used by large brands was first starting to spot this as an agenda.  Also whether payment of corporation tax by large brands is a developing global agenda and will appear as an agenda impacting on trust in the Edelman Trust barometer.

Starbucks need to be credited for their transparency on their web site allowing us to read the gathering comments about the CEO of Starbucks UK trying to communicate around the issue.  A rich stream of data for analysis alongside gathering commentaries of users on the Daily Mail and other news sites.

By all accounts from sources in the company, Starbucks has a small PR department and is yet another example of large brands which do not have sufficient feel and insight on developing stakeholder agendas.

It is worth highlighting that new marketing perspectives show a growing appreciation of stakeholder perspectives and non-marketing relationships around the development of the brand particularly with the influence of social media.  The doctoral work of a colleague Dr Jon Wilson is in this very area.  This is an area of growing focus and expertise for a number of us at Greenwich with overlapping interests around PR and marketing in this sphere.  However the evidence from major brands (Google, Apple, Starbucks) is that practice is lagging behind theory in this respect.