Firstly I’d like to say thanks for the comments in response to my last post on Phorm. It’s clear there is a growing sense of public anger which is being articulated through a motivated and well organised grass roots campaign. From reading the 36 comments so far, I don’t think the same can be said of Phorm’s PR effort to date.
I think there are a couple of immediate observations that will be of interest for those of us working in Social Media relations. Firstly the tactic of instant-rebuttal, responding to every single negative blog post or forum posting written about Phorm has done little to endear the company to its critics. As Paul C puts it,”What an utter PR disaster. Trying to slashdot their way out of a storm, not realising how cynical an exercise responding to individual blog posts will appear to the community.”
There is also the perception that rule No.1 of blogger relations - be authentic and honest – has been broken. The backlash against Phorm began in the tech community in response to articles on sites like The Register. This prompted a series of postings, credited to the ‘Phorm Tech Team’ which were not seen by these communities as coming from genuine techies. As M. Bishop puts it, “In a dissertation about how not to run a PR campaign, pretending to be a tech bod from a company and engaging in a technical debate with experts, only to eventually have to admit you really aren’t a tech bod, or even a Phorm employee at all, because you got so out of your depth, is probably pretty high on the list of don’t do’s.”
If Phorm wanted to engage in a ‘Geek vs. Geek’ debate, why didn’t they get the CTO or a named member of the Tech team to respond? As the ‘Phorm Comms Team’ point out in a comment today, these spokespeople were used in ‘traditional’ press interviews but apparently not at the start when engaging with forums and blogs. I think these initial mistakes and the approach of hiding behind ‘Tech Team’ or ‘Comms Team’ umbrellas only reinforced the growing lack of trust in Phorm and did little to emphasise the key message that company had “nothing to hide”.
Taking a step back, the emphasis being placed on the technology powering Phorm is symptomatic in my mind of the fundamental misunderstanding at the heart of both Phorm’s proposition and its wider communication strategy. Phorm sees itself as offering a B2B product when in fact its service is profoundly B2B2C. There seems to have been a scenario underpinning the business model where ISPs around the world would quietly adopt the service with the hope that the majority of their customers wouldn’t care or notice, everyone would be happy and could rake in their share of the advertising cash. That was never going to happen.
The issue isn’t about Phorm’s technology and the long list of safeguards that are in place. It’s about the benefits of the service to the ultimate end customer, ordinary internet users. Basically ‘better targeted online advertising’ is not a benefit to the average person, most would be happier if there was no online advertising at all. It certainly isn’t such a life changing development that consumers would be willing to enter into a Faustian pact for it, through giving up their internet privacy (real or perceived). Phorm seem to have understood this in part, hence the red-herring focus on phishing.
It’s basically all about perception. I have no reason to doubt Phorm’s privacy claims, and having worked in online technology for a decade I can understand their technology arguments, but the average internet user isn’t going to give a toss about the intricacies of IP address tracking, selective cookies etc. They will simply distill everything down to the Costs vs. Benefits proposition being presented by Phorm and their ISP and most will say NO.
CEO web chats, sharing the code, having one to one meetings with Ged Carroll and other members of the great and the good :-) or (ahem) re-educating Tim Berners-Lee on internet technology is going to do nothing to address the fundamental scepticism of mainstream public opinion.
If Phorm were hoping that the ISPs would take on that mammoth task for them, they are delusional. So far BT has arguably not confronted the issue head on, presenting the service which its is calling BT Webwise, with a heavy emphasis on online fraud prevention. BT is currently planning to make the system opt-out, whereas Talk Talk has succumbed to customer pressure and has been forced to make the service opt-in. Online advertising is a numbers game and the Phorm business model is not based on millions being able to escape the system.
The real PR danger now shifts to the ISPs. For players like Virgin Media the problems could be acute, with disgruntled internet users not only shifting their monthly broadband subscriptions to other providers but their TV and telephone subs as well. In an increasingly commoditised broadband market, being able to claim that we don’t invade your internet privacy and sell your personal data on to advertisers would be a rather strong USP. I can see why Sky and Tiscali have had the foresight to keep their hands clean at this point.
