While We Have Been Away ...

If you followed our frequent blog postings in the past, you may have noticed that postings stopped in December 2010 with what amounted to an advertisement for the website of our sister company PendryWhite. We have let this stand for some eight months.

The truth is that we have become far more critical of the value of blogs unless they are integrated into social media so we diverted our energies - or rather the energy left over from dealing with our growing client list - into understanding and using other forms of internet-based media.

The blog was not killed off, merely preserved in aspic until the right moment. The right moment to revive it fully has not yet arrived but we will try to put in a few postings that seem relevant to our old readership in the coming months until our communications policy is in place.

But for those who are interested in how we are thinking about the internet as communications tool, these are some highlights of the last twelve months and some thoughts on where we go next ...

Internet Reputation Defence

We have been heavily involved in internet reputation defence working with legal counsel in multiple jurisdictions to make judgements on when it is resource-efficient to use the law and on when to engage in direct negotiation to deal with falsehoods or in positive PR through direct internet communication.

The process of monitoring the internet, evaluating threat, co-ordinating with other advisers, ensuring that negative elements do not drive client budgets and that client funds are invested wisely has been instructive. We hope, if the rules of client confidentiality permit, to say more on this in due course.

Online Media - Project Management

We have also been working on a project that has gone on for some four years but which only took flight at the beginning of the year.

This is at the other end of the scale of internet reputation defence and involves the project management of the business side and eventually promotion (with our sister company) of a ground-breaking attempt to use the internet to build an evidence-based subscription investigative operation.

Internet Marketing

The third area of interest is largely the territory of our sister company but we collaborate closely on intellectual capital, building shared alliances with service providers who can provide both the sophisticated security tools required by TPPR and the promotional flexibility required by PendryWhite.

This area is the effective integration of corporate messages with new social media platforms, a process that presents challenges in terms of internal understanding and risk (especially in areas of compliance). PendryWhite has been advising on techniques and work-arounds.

The New Identity Paradigm

The fourth area of engagement is more of an intellectual exercise than a commercial proposition but we feel it may come to be the most productive of all. This is our sustained study, using the social media as tools, of the changing nature of identity and what it means for reputation.

Our tentative opinion (with Google+ experimenting in precisely this area) is that the positive construction of personal brands will come to be integrated with a greater personal assertion of 'who one is' that will revolutionise 'corporate culture' and productive enterprise.

What Next?

These four zones of engagement are all works in progress and the next six months will see us:-

• integrate our experience of internet reputation management into a model that we can make available beyond our traditional client base
• oversee the launch of a challenging online media operation over whose actual content we will have no control (an exciting risk in its own right)
• integrate our defensive reputation management capability more effectively with our proven digital marketing support offer to create a rounded service for the new generation of wealth creators
• experiment with new and radical modes of identity that (we believe) will assist in promoting creativity and innovation at every level of society and allow challenge to old ways of doing things.

For Further Information: TPPR or PendryWhite 

New PendryWhite Website

PendryWhite's website launched today makes traditional public relations a less important part of its business. Yes, it still does media relations and it has an excellent side line in press and web office management for the HNWI clients of TPPR.

But the vast bulk of its work is now strategic reputation-based marketing that makes full use of the new media that are replacing print newspapers - these latter seem to be hovering between market breakdown and hiding behind exclusive online paywalls.

The new website is simple and it draws you into a dialogue. Using its blog Whiteboard and Twitter, it becomes an intellectual resource which you can return to periodically. The RSS tool keeps you up to date with opinions and Twitter with news.

This blog posting won’t puff up what you can read very quickly for yourself on the site but simply draws your attention to its existence and to its Clients - whose quality speaks for itself.

It is difficult for any corporation or firm to steer their way between the Scylla of over-enthusiasm and of uncritical engagement in the new media world and the Charybdis of fearful refusal to innovate.

This is why PendryWhite has spent three years building a proposition to act as guide between these monsters. The new web positioning expresses this change.

If you need strategic, marketing, new media or international support to deal with rapid market changes and its approach appeals to you, please do not hesitate to call PendryWhite on +44 (0) 20 7549 1672 and ask to speak to Roger White, Managing Director, or Jenina Bas, Director of Client Services.

Season's Greeting To All Our Readers