As the three companies faced their interrogators, behind sat protesters wearing T-shirts embossed “Energy shouldn’t cost lives”. When the proceedings closed the protesters screamed at the BP spokesman, “Hey, Hey, Lamar MacKay, how many fish did you kill today?” They chanted “Boycott BP”. They seemed to have friends in the Senate. Bob Menendez, the Democratic senator from New Jersey said:

“We were told that the Titanic was so technologically advanced that it couldn’t sink, and we were told that this well was so technologically advanced that it couldn’t spill. Unfortunately both of these technological marvels ended in tragedy.”

Actually, nobody ever said that either accident couldn’t happen. Though the makers of the Titanic and BP both at some point understated the potential risk involved in their respective challenges. That’s all the more reason, I believe, for BP to use this latest incident to set the record straight with the public about the realities of its business.

But right now the White House has vowed to “keep a boot to the throat” of BP. That’s an understandable response while the oil flows unchecked from the seabed. That does not mean that either PRs or BP should see it that way.

However, PR dogma suggests that BP should bite its tongue. The PR rulebook, designed to maintain a licence to operate, opines that if people think BP’s the villain it should act like one. Larry Smith of the Institute for Crisis Management and Timothy Coombs of Eastern Illinois University advocated this viewpoint to Slate:

[It's] literally true: BP owns the oil but not the rig. But it’s a shoddy communications strategy, says Smith. Wherever the fault lies, BP shouldn’t be splitting hairs. Companies should take the fall and work out recriminations behind closed doors, says Coombs. For example, when the chain Taco Johns had an E. coli outbreak, it didn’t publicly blame the lettuce supplier. It took responsibility. And, of course, sued the lettuce supplier later.

Effectively, Coombs is arguing that BP should adopt a cynical strategy in which it says one thing in private and another in public. His logic – and that of most PRs – is that the truth is too nuanced and complex for the public to comprehend. The argument goes that perception is everything. As the WSJ explained, they’ve got a point:

When you consider that analysts’ worst case scenarios put the eventual cost to BP at around $8 billion, yet $30 billion has been wiped off the company’s market capitalization since the crisis began, it becomes clear that this reputational damage has a value.

The problem is that by accepting full responsibility for the accident, BP would promote itself (dishonestly) as incompetent. How would that help maintain its credibility and reputation? Hence, I much prefer BP chief executive Tony Hayward’s strategy of accepting full responsibility for cleaning up the mess caused by its oil, while quietly but firmly disputing that it caused or was responsible for the accident. But Malcolm Gooderham, MD, TLG Communications, dubbed Hayward’s approach a “Miss” in PR Week. He also contrasted Hayward’s stance to that of his predecessor, Lord Browne:

“The virtue of Browne’s tenure was that despite the disasters, he is revered because of his strategic achievements. The challenge for BP today is to define a new thought leadership agenda.”

Browne’s thought leadership led him to re-brand British Petroleum as Beyond Petroleum. It was deceptive positioning and slightly bonkers to boot. To his credit, when Hayward took control of BP, he quietly downgraded the tag-line’s prominence. It now merely serves as “shorthand for what we do”, which is petroleum, and it hardly features at all in BP’s PR. What’s more, the irony of BP’s current plight is that it follows Mr Hayward’s determination to re-oritentate itself on technological competence rather than geo-political flair.

So what’s my advice to BP today?

• BP should concentrate on proving itself committed and competent as it cleans up the mess and reconsiders safety strategies
• BP has to speak with one voice in public and in private, now and in the future
• BP should use this crisis to educate the media, public and political elite about the realities of complex accountability
• BP should seek to lay the blame wherever the facts take them, even if some more of it falls on them
• BP should remind the world that energy is bottled force; BP is as good as any in handling the hazards involved in fueling our world
• BP should state the Browne years of Texas and Alaska lapses are behind them and what happened in the Gulf of Mexico was not caused by the same internal flaws
• BP needs to stress that the oil that’s now being drilled is located in inhospitable conditions and has inescapable risks
• BP should repeat and repeat that whatever lessons can be learned will be learned and that no stone will be left unturned in discovering them.

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The report explored WikiLeaks’ claim to speak truth to power by pulling down the controlling, secretive barriers the establishment erects to protect itself. WikiLeaks uses zillions of ISPs to bounce leaks from whistle-blowers around the world leaving no way of tracing the originators.

This insurgent, trendy phenomenon has some impressive backers in the media world who endorse the idea that it’s good to leak. These include AP, the Los Angeles Times and The National Newspaper Association, according to WikiLeaks.

Perhaps they’re seeking novel ways to do investigative journalism in the face of cutbacks in budgets; a case of old media seeking new lifelines through new media. According to The National, “Wikileaks has probably produced more scoops in its short life than the Washington Post has in the past 30 years.”

WikiLeaks (ominously, in my view) is currently behind attempts to introduce legislation in Iceland to turn the island into an offshore “Switzerland of bits“, a safe haven for digital leaks. They’ve positioned it tantalizingly as a potential new business model for the bankrupt country.

Let’s unpick this and begin with the question: whatever happened to trust?

Is every leak a blow on a whistle that can justify itself in the public interest? Aren’t we supposed to want more trust in society? Does that exclude firms and official bodies hoping to trust their employees? How should we balance the tension between trust and the right to whistle-blow?

Well, as somebody who thinks that trust is vital to the functioning of a healthy society, I think the balance has to weigh – even positively favour - the right of institutions and individuals to keep things private, secret and confidential over the right of others to leak.

We have to trust that one another’s rights are going to be protected or we will destroy the bonds that make society function pleasantly and decently, not to say ethically and legally. Transparency has its place, but so does opacity. Reputations have a right to protection against defamation and they have the right to the benefit of the doubt when attacked, just as private property does.

We all have public, private and sometimes very separate other lives which would collapse like a house of cards if they were made transparent. Hence, the restraining arm of the law has a valuable role to play when it comes to protecting our collective freedoms.

That’s why as PR I have recently been on the side of gagging orders on behalf of John Terry, Tiger Woods, Trafigura and the British National Party membership list.

Very often, I have been glad that these issues are under the control of the courts, and very often I’ve found that the careful balancing of peoples’ competing human rights (to privacy, to free speech) are more sound than some giddy free-for-all masquerading as a crusade against censorship or for open-ness.

However, I accept it is a moot point whether the US justice system handles such matters better than does, say, the UK. But, whatever, I’m against a truly free press, just as I’m for democracy precisely because as well as protecting our freedoms, it limits them.

The UK Cabinet and any other organisation have a right to keep some things under wraps. They also have a right to expect that people they hire in any capacity will feel obliged not to betray them.

As a PR I know that the most embarrassing part of most crises is the behind-the-scenes highly-strung incompetence, panic and failure of leadership under pressure. My colleagues and I have always mediated that nonsense: that’s our job.

In a crisis the role of PRs is to keep the focus on the real issues the outside world cares about. Mostly, PRs put out fires which have little fuel but which generate lots of heat. But if ever we leak the detail of the inside insecurities we witness, the outcome becomes far worse than the original crisis warrants.

For instance, the problem at Three Mile Island was the stream of conscious transparency that the operators presented to the world as they grappled to grasp what had gone on inside their malfunctioning reactor. That was the very opposite of a cover up.

So it is no wonder, then, that governments want and should have the right to keep much of their inner workings secret. The same should go for companies and individuals. Moreover, at the heart of any profession is a lack of transparency – call it client confidentiality – which makes them honourable and trustworthy. Lots of people can do good, but not if what they say is leaked. As a list of such types, let’s begin with PRs, lawyers, priests, doctors, consultants and therapists. I don’t mean that every confidence accepted by every one of those is of equal importance and equally inviolate. I mean that very often what these people know is useful because it’s private.

That’s why WikiLeaks is bad news. It is why I am pleased that it is currently so short of funds that it cannot function properly. And it is why I think that it would be in society’s interest to curb the power and effectiveness of this new threat.

At the end of the day, society has more right to keep its secrets secret, than does WikiLeaks have a right to wreak havoc, and to keep its sources hidden while doing so.

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Last week the BBC’s flagship investigative news programme Panorama hilariously shot itself in the foot when it tried to apply a corporate social responsibility critique to Ryanair. Rather than trash the company’s reputation The Times reports Panorama had the opposite effect.

A Times Online Travel poll at the start of the show found that 88 per cent of respondents were on the hate spectrum of the love/hate Ryanair relationship (although 63 per cent of people fly with the carrier anyway), while only 12 per cent attested to “loving” the airline.

A second poll at the end of the show found Ryanair’s fortunes had reversed, with the BBC considered the “baddie”. Ho ho.

Now here’s why I love Ryanair’s messaging:

1. Ryanair’s no-frills offer is cheap and authentic but not chic, more like chav.

2. Ryanair does not negotiate with campaigners, enter into dialogue with them even, or pretend to care what they think (tough luck for Plane Stupid).

3. Liberals – including I guess liberal PRs – hate Ryanair’s audacity, not least because it runs against the grain of what the latter advise most of their clients to behave like .

4. Ryanair’s boss Michael O’Leary does not do Mr Nice Guy. He pulls no punches:

“We will double our emissions in the next five years because we are doubling our traffic. But if preserving the environment means stopping poor people flying so only the rich can fly, then screw it.”

That may not be a nice, intelligent, constructive or savvy remark. It may not even be in Mr O’Leary’s interests to make it. But it is what he thinks and its authenticity is worth a shed-load of focus-group tested schmoozing.

5. Ryanair knows what makes British and Irish culture tick: “binge-flying” and binge-drinking (though it won’t tolerate drunks onboard its flights and quite right too)

6. Ryanair stands up for the poor – slags, lads and chavs out on the razz – who want to see the world but can’t afford to fly British Airways. It is very much in the spirit of Thomas Cook and the railways that brought the seaside to the masses, and yobs to Southwold, back in the 19th and early 20th century.

7. Ryanair does not pretend to love its staff the way British Airways once famously did when it put cabin crew at the centre of its PR. The unions cleverly twisted the slogan and held the company’s reputation to ransom when the staff went on strike and slagged off the airline big time (ho ho for corporate slime)

8. Ryanair is contemptuous of interfering moralistic regulators who think they are the defenders of the public interest.

Michael O’Leary once famously denounced the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), Britain’s regulator of advertising and marketing, for being a “bunch of unelected, self-appointed dimwits”. (See #4.)

9. Ryanair puts profit and customers – as in cheap no frills flights – unashamedly at the center of everything it does. Ryanair is unashamedly capitalist. It makes money where it can and not always attractively (as in charging for credit card payment by customer not transaction). It’s almost a challenge. Tacitly, Ryanair is saying: “We’ve weighed up who and what we’ll lose by this charging system, and we’ll take the hit. Got a better idea? Get over yourself.” (See 11)

10. Ryanair is not on the Web to do dialogue and have a chat (what tosh about it’s all about conversation now) it is there to do business, and it will punish you hard if you don’t book and book-in online.

11. Here’s the cavil. Ryanair isn’t quite as bold as it ought to be. Its communication director has defended its charge for credit card payment (which is levied per passenger and flight, not per transaction) on the basis that it is possible (just possible, he might have added) to circumvent it. Why not say: “Come on guys, we’ve got to make money somewhere and we reckon this hacks people off less than any other similar ramp”?

Conclusion
So the bliss of the thing is that Ryanair is not just no-frills, it is anti-frills. It rips veils, conceits, devices, cons, prettinesses and even decencies away. It is a pretty competent airline in the sense that it’s pretty reliable. It’s mouthy and quite grasping. You have to be on your toes when you deal with it. I wouldn’t buy a holiday home based on its route map.  All that said, why bother to hate it? It has distinctly lovable dimensions.

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Last week I had coffee with a PR executive who helped manage Thursday’s UBS shareholders’ meeting in Lucerne. We met at Sprüngli on the Paradeplatz, the branch of the posh chocolate, cake and coffee shop favoured by wives of Zurich gnomes. He gave me an insider’s account of his work to restore trust in the Swiss icon.

He said the bank’s strategy was to rebuild trust in its competence piece by piece, issue by issue. He described how UBS was managing a series of crises ranging from toxic debt, excessive executive bonuses, plunging share price and accusations of facilitating tax evasion and abusing banking secrecy rules in the US.

This was the fourth shareholders’ meeting of 2008. Besides ratifying a government bailout, he told me how Thursday’s meeting was about communicating that UBS’s culture is changing. It was about saying sorry again, and trashing the image of arrogance. It was also about reassuring stakeholders that investments in UBS were safe and about setting out the new course for the bank.

He stated that UBS was developing a formula for managing executive bonuses that the rest of the banking industry was sure to emulate. UBS chairman Peter Kurer certainly tackled the controversial bonus question head-on. He renounced his own bonus entitlement this year and announced:

We want to give shareholders a greater say in decisions on compensation. Starting with the general meeting in 2009, we will make our decisions on the principles and guidelines for compensation within the framework of a consultative vote.

This time around the sceptical audience was more subdued than at the other shareholder meetings. News that former UBS chairman Marcel Ospel and two colleagues had renounced their right to collect CHF33 million in bonus won some applause. But chairman Peter Kurer’s enthusiasm to clawback the bonuses of others won still more. However most of Peter Kurer’s speech was heard in silence.

My friend explained that on some issues the bank will just have to take the blows. For instance, when Peter Kurer praised board member Rainer-Marc Frey for his contribution to the bank, there were whistles of derision – this being the man who sold all his UBS shares before the worst of the you-know-what hit the fan. There was no news on the level of recent withdrawals from the bank, which fueled speculation that yet more taxpayer-cash would be required soon.

But Peter Kurer was certainly a contrite CEO. He said:

We have admitted to our mistakes several times in recent months – and have also apologized for them.

Some letters have accused us of arrogance and say that we need to get off of our high horse. This, too, may have had an element of truth in it in the past – at all levels.

But let me reassure you, ladies and gentlemen, there is no room for arrogance in the UBS of today – nor will there be in the UBS of tomorrow.

Peter Kurer, it seems, values the role of PR in ensuring UBS’s recovery. He even praised the around the clock work of his communications department to shareholders in Lucerne. My friend had nothing but praise for his chairman’s commitment to communication.

They would both agree, I think, with what Leslie Gaines-Ross says in her timely book Corporate Reputation, 12 Steps to Safeguarding and Recovering Reputation, recovering a lost reputation is a marathon task, not a sprint.

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