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Popular sentiment has just caused the death of a 168-year-old newspaper, and there are wider implications for any communications people advising corporations.

If you’ve worked in PR for a little while, you’ve probably come across a corporate executive who, when things start going wrong, demands an immediate fix to their “PR problem.” One can only imagine that’s a scene played out more than once or twice in the meeting rooms at News Corporation recently.

One standard response of the communications professional is to first distinguish between “PR problems” and “problem-problems”. PR problems arise from issues with which information has been communicated. Problem-problems are concerned with the substance of the communication itself. Solutions to PR problems are thought to live in the corporate communications department. Solutions to problem-problems live in the boardroom.

The instinctive reaction of many executives is, of course, to mistake one for the other.

news-of-the-worldCertainly the response of News Corp over the initial weeks of the phone hacking story suggests that it has been treated as a PR problem that could be addressed via press statements and promises. But the announcement yesterday of the imminent closure of the News of the World newspaper, represented a devastatingly commercial response to a real problem-problem.

Some commentators, including my esteemed colleague have argued that, in effect, by apparently treating this issue as a PR problem, News Corp made the problem-problem considerably bigger than it might otherwise have been. In this case, the commercial losses caused by growing advertiser and reader boycotts made the unthinkable – closing down the newspaper – thinkable.

But another implication concerns the awesome power of a consumer backlash.

Hell hath no fury like a consumer scorned. Today, consumers both demand and have the means to be engaged by the brands they choose. PR problems can become problem-problems in an instant. And so when any miss-step is a crisis waiting to happen, the distinction that we’ve relied on in the past doesn’t carry quite the same weight as it might have done in the past.

Scary stuff, but the good news is it doesn’t have to be that way. Brands and organizations that respond flexibly, transparently, and above all, sincerely to all kinds of problems are better placed than ever to emerge unscathed.

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