It is just over a week since the third Corporate Affairs Summit was held at the British Library. Attended by more than 200 senior in-house communications professionals, it is – I believe – now the biggest annual gathering of the sector in the UK. In this newsletter, I share some insights from the Summit. But not all. There has to be some incentive for delegates to attend next year in person! (And let’s be honest, some of the biggest insights come from the chats at coffee time.)

Here are some statistics to make you ponder….

• 64% of UK adults believe mainstream media is biased

• 43% of 18-34 year olds do not pay attention to the news: they find it overwhelming

• But, if they were to seek it out, 68% most frequently get it from social media and online platforms

• Indeed, 32% of that demographic trust AI’s news judgment more, or as much, as they trust mainstream media

As Chris Ryall, partner at FGS Global, the summit’s ‘In Association with’ sponsor, told delegates: ‘Stakeholders have become atomised. They’re everywhere. They’re talking about everything, everywhere, all at once. And their views are not being formed by traditional, trusted conduits of well-sourced, vetted information; they’re being shaped by the next comment on a thread or an Instagram post.

‘People who may never have even thought about your business now may have strong opinions, and they are prepared to share those opinions with others. Or, in fact, with anyone who will listen.’

Witness Baillie Gifford. The investment fund last year withdrew sponsorship from nine literary festivals and three art galleries after protesters campaigned against its investments in fossil fuels. It is fair to say that few of those protesters had previously any interest in asset management ‘but when people coalesce around an issue without a central source of truth, it can quickly lead to an issue you did not see coming and cannot control’, added Ryall.

But how do communicators manage the intersection between traditional and new media?

For panelist Sam Underhay, senior director corporate communications at PepsiCo, which manufactures Walkers, Doritos, Monster Munch, Quavers as well as the eponymous drink, it always comes down to business objectives.

‘Whatever the business objective, we form the communications objective behind it and then we work out who we need to talk to and where we need to show up. But [for the past five years] we have really built out where our stakeholders are online.’

Tom Edmonds, co-founder of Edmonds Elder, stressed the importance of digital as an effective communications channel. ‘The big challenge in boardrooms is explaining to executives that personal LinkedIn channels are a very effective communications channel. It’s not a vanity channel. You have to win that battle through data and showing the reach.

‘There’s a couple of ways to do that: LinkedIn shows you the top ten organisations reached on a post and also the top ten job titles. We always find those compelling. But actually, it’s the on-post engagements, when politicians, journalists and clients are engaging, liking and commenting, that tend to make people think this has worked.’

Director of research and insights at FGS Global, Grace McKinnon conceded that, increasingly, organisations ‘don’t know necessarily know all the key people or organisations really influencing their sector. It could be Substack articles. It could be niche online communities where voices are loud and people are focused and passionate.

‘I think five years ago, none of us would have predicted that Fergal Sharkey [formerly lead singer of punk band the Undertones] would play such a massive role in the water industry.’

How should organisations identify and prioritise different stakeholder groups?

McKinnon said the old days of treating stakeholder mapping as a static exercise, updated once a year, are over.

‘In this landscape, influencers – and prominent ones – can appear literally overnight. It could be a TikTok influencer or an employer group. It has required us to do a holistic reimagining of stakeholder mapping, which involves AI tools, making sure we’re listening not just to the volume of mentions, but how and when conversations are slipping over from more niche pockets into the mainstream.

‘And then obviously tempering that and enhancing it with human intelligence: to measure that data, analyse it and taking it a step forward to assign value to the influencers we’re seeing coming up or rising to the top of news.’

Underhay added: ‘You map your stakeholders and how much influence they have and whether it is worth talking to them. We take the big corporate subject areas we want to talk about, such as health, and we map out who they are and where they are. If we’ve got a story that’s really strong, we will go to traditional and owned media. But, as a big American company, our role as a UK corporate citizen is really important.

‘We are investing £23m in Walkers crisp factory in Leicester, which has a message for so many stakeholders. It’s really important for local MPs, so it gives us an opportunity to talk to them. It’s really important for our employees, both at head office and those who work there, so traditional local TV and press is most important because they get third-party endorsement.

‘They go home, sit down, turn on the telly and they’re on the news. There’s a bigger sense of pride than sending out a newsletter. But we also provide content that people can use: so maybe crisps going down the conveyor belt for Sun Online. It’s a multi-faceted approach.’

Edmonds agreed that it is important to ‘serve up content that they are interested in’. He cited research conducted by Edmonds Elder on behalf of a major FTSE 100 company looking to reach business leaders and politicians in three territories: India, US and UK.

‘In India, it was about national pride. If you created content as a business that celebrated India as a country, then chances were you could get people to take your message, and engage, comment, like or share it. In the US, it was about tapping into pride at a state level.

‘In the UK, it was very difficult. Politicians and business leaders are sceptical about engaging with corporate content online. But if you tapped into the thing that really resonated with them, such as their personal political agenda, then you have a chance of engaging them with your corporate content.’

But he also believes that corporate content needs to move on from a staid photo of a CEO with a 500 word quote. ‘You're going on digital channels where there's lots and lots of exciting content every day. If you think about your messaging, how you can bring it to life in new creative ways, then you've got a chance of reaching your audience and then getting them to engage too.’

However, remember to keep perspective…

‘You’ve got to understand what matters and what doesn’t matter on social,’ added Edmonds. ‘If we reacted to everything all the time, we’d all have heart attacks and be on our phones constantly. You can’t overreact. But you also need to know when the tide is turning, and be able to explain to an organisation why this particular Substack post matters and this Reddit thread doesn’t. As a general rule, though, we always say if you comment on one thing, you’re going to have to comment on everything.’

For Underhay, whether to respond depends on what mode she is in: promoting or protecting. However, she also recognises that, as a consumer brand, PepsiCo can unexpectedly hit the headlines.

‘I’ve been in the national press all week because [Max Pizza Hut Texan BBQ] crisps were delisted, and two people on X were upset about it. And then traditional media gets involved because people like to hear and talk about crisps. There is a clickbait element.’

Often though, while it may feel like a major issue because it’s trending on X, ‘I would advise to breathe through it because it’s normally gone within 24 hours. People get outraged. Every week, we get people outraged about us. But I don’t think they’re that outraged: they keep buying the crisps.’

Yet trust remains an issue.

‘The widespread lack of trust from the public in all institutions is unprecedented,’ added McKinnon. ‘It means that organisations with really great reputations are struggling to be believed. Having an authentic voice that is genuine and human and cuts through noise to feel believable to the end audience, which frankly is apathetic at the moment, is really important.’

MISINFORMATION

What about conspiracy theorists?

As conspiracy theorists go, Pepsi was probably not expecting its nemesis to be a Romanian presidential candidate.

But last year, Călin Georgescu, the winner of the first round of the presidential race, claimed that Pepsi inserted microchips into its canned drinks ‘that enter you like a laptop’ and allowed the company to make people do its bidding.

As Underhay said, incredulously: ‘It was a grown-up standing there saying it in front of other people. And you're like Come on. You just ignore that kind of thing.’ (He didn’t win.)

But a Public Pulse opinion poll, published by FGS Global the day after the Corporate Affairs Summit, found that 69% of people are worried that they, or people they know, have been misled by false information online.

Ironically, the main source of information used to get news does not really impact levels of concern. For example, 69% of those who get information from physical copies of broadsheet newspapers or magazines are concerned about being misled, against 75% of those who get information from social media channels or through conversations with friends, family, colleagues or teachers.

Yet despite these concerns, just 33% use a fact-checking website to verify content. ‘There’s not actually interest in closing the loop on Is this information correct?’ said McKinnon.

FGS Global tested five prominent false claims, including President Trump’s widely debunked assertion that using paracetamol when pregnant strongly raises the risk of autism in children and that the UK government houses migrants in luxury hotels. At least half the respondents reported seeing each false claim, and indeed had encountered these more than five factual claims tested in the same survey.

False information proves sticky. The public finds such claims more persuasive than the true facts presented. This is particularly true when it comes to immigration: 43% of those surveyed believe migrants are housed in luxury hotels, against 36% who do not, and 27% believe illegal immigrants receive more financial support than state pensioners.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Reform voters are more susceptible to believing false information about immigration than other voter groups: 92% of Reform voters believed at least one of the false claimed posited.

But the pulse survey also found that Reform voters do not trust traditional media sources. Just 26% consider the BBC as one of their top three most reliable sources, against 57% of Conservatives and 67% of Labour and Lib Dem supporters.

CASE STUDY

Lessons from a cyber attack

News that the government has written to chief executives recommending that they retain physical copies of their crisis plans for cyber attacks brings to mind an interview I conducted with Jarrod Williams*, former digital and brand lead at Bromford, a housing association responsible for more than 47,000 homes and 110,000 customers across central and south west England.

I am not sure that there is widespread understanding of what a cyber-attack actually means, in terms of day-to-day operations.

For Bromford, which took the decision to shut down its systems in July 2022 over fears it was under attack, it meant losing its ability to communicate with colleagues, customers and partners, along with the housing association’s access to calendars and customer contact details.

As a ‘Microsoft house’, once colleagues switched off their work phones, they lost access to apps, such as Outlook and Teams, but were also forced to delete these from personal phones.

And there were other impacts that perhaps were not initially appreciated. For example, each building was disconnected, door fobs no longer worked and fuel cards were inaccessible – an issue that caused considerable concern to some colleagues, who travelled extensively on behalf of their work.

As the timing was ultimately Bromford’s decision, Williams was able to access and download colleagues’ mobile phone numbers, and reactivate a third-party text messaging service which the housing association had recently decommissioned. Other victims have not had that luxury, implying that keeping contact details regularly updated and offline may prove to be a valuable asset.

Bromford created separate WhatsApp groups, such as one for senior leaders and others for individual teams, and used these to cascade information through to its 1,800 colleagues. Each WhatsApp message was swiftly followed by a text message to ensure it had been received.

It also activated social media channels to communicate with partners and customers, reaching more than 70,000 people over 30 days via a mix of tweets and video updates.

The housing association was fortunate because its website sat on an external platform, which meant it was able to create and update pages specifically for colleagues, creating FAQs about the issues that specifically concerned them, and similarly create others for partners and customers. The incident accelerated the introduction of a live chat channel for customers, which a year after the shutdown accounted for 40% of all customer queries.

Ironically, Williams had been teased for keeping a paper version of Bromford’s original cyber crisis plan in his car. But it had been drawn up in 2016 – later versions were kept online: ‘we learned not to put any business continuity plan onto a system that may get pulled down’ – and the plan looked dated, with instructions such as Set up this shift pattern, Bring this person in.

As he recalled in our interview: ‘That’s all great if the incident follows some sort of formulaic framework but we didn’t know from moment-to-moment what would happen next.’

Following his experience, Williams recommended that any cyber crisis plan should try to answer the question: What would you do if you had no communications channel? Bromford had assumed there would always be something. ‘It [reinforced the importance] of fall back channels, and the need for phone directories to be kept updated,’ he told me.

*Williams is currently head of digital communications, content and channels at St James’s Place

ODDS & SODS

🧨 I have developed a new hobby, one that is oddly satisfying. Each time I receive an irrelevant press release, I ask the sender which media distribution service they have used. I then give my honest assessment of said service [💩]. When I am personally given the option to ‘unsubscribe’, I find it highly therapeutic to fill out the reasons why.

🧠 Journalist Chris Stokel-Walker advises that the perfect PR pitch should comprise four paragraphs:
1) What is it? Why this matters to you
2) Key information and value Who, what, when, where, why
3) Differentiation and added value Why is this unique, plus other incentives: images, interview with CEO
4) CTA State your specific ask

Ironically, I find it is often on the fourth point that pitches can fall down. For example, an offer of an interview is withdrawn at the last moment because of ‘diary clashes’, or the opportunity dissipates. I get it: I’m not as important these days - but don’t make the offer without first checking with the client.

In next week’s issue:

• 💡More insights from the Corporate Affairs Summit 

• ☔An interview with Tabitha Aldrich-Smith, associate director, communications and engagement, Met Office

• 🐝How Punch Pubs has partnered with the Eden Project to bring biodiversity into pub gardens

• 📦Details of our first Unpacked event

• 🃏And more besides… perhaps even a joke or two!