CRO POV: Corporate PR & Stakeholder Communications--The Next 50 Years

By Jay Whitehead

If you have yet to meet Fred Cook, CEO of multinational PR firm Golin Harris, you might want to put it on your to-do list. Don’t get me wrong. Fred is not bigger-than-life like his fellow Chicagoans Michael Jordan or Mike Ditka. In fact, he does not sport the broad shoulders of a power forward or tight end. He has more the whippet-like stature of a marathon runner. It’s not even that he’s as loud as his city-mates Harry Carey or Dick Butkus. In fact, Fred is rather soft-spoken, even quiet.

And it is not just that Fred’s firm won PR Week’s 2007 Editor’s Choice award. Or that his firm celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. (In 1957, when Ray Kroc was a mere upstart, founder Al Golin captured the McDonalds account.) Or that his firm has just published a seminal survey, “Corporate Citizenship Gets Down To Business” that ranks firms (the top 5 are Ben & Jerry’s, Target, Patagonia, SC Johnson and Gerber), and concludes that companies must do more and be authentic.

What is more remarkable about Fred Cook is his view of the future of corporate public relations—the next 50 years, to be exact. “In the future,” Fred told me recently, “corporate responsibility is corporate PR’s number one driver, because corporate responsibility is a sustainable competitive differentiator.” Fred says that in the age of the internet, “the value of media relations, long the PR industry bread-and-butter, is fading. Now it’s about employee and stakeholder communications, getting ahead of the citizenship curve,” and driving offline, online and on-air conversations on as many levels as possible. Fred’s most notable conclusion is that no message resonates with stakeholders of all stripes as much as corporate responsibility.

A few months ago, Fred led his firm’s charge into the anarchy of the blogosphere, with www.nextfiftyyears.com . While the wild world of weblogs is new territory, Golin’s corporate social responsibility practice, “Change,” is practically old—it dates all the way back to 2004. And its “Engage” practice works with NGOs and the corporations that need to deal with them. “All these new units represent new levels of conversation-building, some of it is even experimental,” he says. Back in 1971, when fear of the power of big business ran high, Al Golin and Ray Kroc innovated with a revolutionary citizenship concept they called the Trust Bank. Fred Cook knows that the future, while unknowable, will share one thing with today: good corporate citizens will beat bad ones.

Tomorrow: Is CRO the New CRM?