Coincidentally, we’re in Washington this week working with our client, Education for Employment, that tackles youth unemployment in another part of the world, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), where the issue has been a major factor in the Arab Spring. Youth unemployment was also a busy area of discussion in Davos last month.

While youth unemployment has different causes and implications in different parts of the world, there are some notable similarities between the solutions this new report proposes for the UK, and the way EFE works and has achieved success in MENA.

The Miliband report calls for localised education-to-career support for the non-university bound.  EFE works through local affiliates (in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Palestine, Tunisia and Yemen) to provide young people there with the skills (often soft skills) they need to bridge the gap between education and employment.

The UK report calls for a part-time job guarantee for young people who have been on the work programme for a year without finding a job. EFE seeks guaranteed jobs for its young people, but does so by working with private sector businesses to identify the skills they are looking for, developing training programmes matched to these, and securing pre-committed jobs for those who go through the training.

The report calls for a new mentoring scheme for young people, by young people: where under-25s who have been in work for a year mentor others on their path to employment.  EFE promotes an active alumni network, through which its graduates stay involved to help their successors.

EFE has achieved a good deal of success to date with this approach, as recognised by the Economist, Time magazine, CNN and others.

Communication is critical to EFE’s success: communicating with employers to explain the business benefit of this approach to overcoming skills shortages, which can make it difficult to recruit despite high unemployment; communicating with young people to help them see a way over the barriers to employment that can appear insurmountable; and communicating with donors and other stakeholders to sell the benefits of what EFE does.  Importantly, communications is also central to aligning the network of affiliate organisations behind a common vision and values. It’s a privilege to work with them on such an important issue.

Finally, we had some good news this week when the Holmes Report named us their Corporate Consultancy of the Year.  They were kind enough to say that we have ‘consistently been on the cutting edge of corporate reputation management, creating campaigns that blur the lines between the converging corporate and consumer realms, focusing on storytelling, conversation, and thought leadership.’

Measurement has long been the holy grail of the PR industry.  For many years, PR practitioners measured the value of their PR through Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE), which calculates what the cost of the equivalent column inches would have been if you had purchased the same advertising space.

AVE has never, and could never be, a measure of Return on Investment (ROI).  ROI measures two things: money generated or money saved. Furthermore, it’s spurious to measure the cost of something that you weren’t going to buy anyway (advertising), and it’s meaningless for clients whose media buying agencies negotiate huge discounts for ad space anyway.  So why has it persisted for so long?  The honest answer is that PR practitioners were at a loss to know what to replace it with; many clients continued to ask for it and there is something compelling in a single, impressive figure showing the success of a campaign.

In the meantime, ad agencies have been busy laying claim to uplifts in sales that are most likely to have come through multiple channels.  It’s true that ads are more traceable, but agencies conveniently ignore that as well as seeing the ad on TV, a consumer may well have been driven to purchase by a sterling review on a blog or an editorially-generated piece in the Metro.

Now that the core role of PR is to create and sustain conversations, analysing the impact and influence of these conversations is a more meaningful measure of performance – but it still’s hard to prove ROI.

At salt, we measure across a spectrum of engagement, from awareness, attitude and action right through to advocacy.  It demands a bespoke approach to every client and campaign, but in these tough financial times it’s a necessity.  But the real value isn’t just about justifying PR budget, it’s because when you factor in measurement up-front in a campaign at brainstorm stage, invariably the ideas are much more robust.  All creative ideas are sifted through a critical filter to see where they will really deliver results across that spectrum.  Perhaps the holy grail isn’t so far off after all.

These chief executives and chairmen will undoubtedly agree that they, as responsible capitalists, are committed to making the world a better place, and will stand side-by-side in photocalls with politicians, NGO heads, celebrities and religious leaders, who will say they believe them.   And people will look on from the side, questioning their intentions, having ulterior motives, and arguing that nothing will change.  And they may be right in some cases.

However, the reality is that these business men (and they are still overwhelmingly male; although it’s growing, the proportion of female delegates at Davos will be under 20%) may be the best chance we have of tackling the seemingly intractable social, environmental and economic issues facing us as a planet and a human race.

We want a co-ordinated, international approach to big global issues?  Who is better placed to address these, multinational businesses or national governments?

We want the world’s consumers (and the number of ‘relevant’ consumers is likely to rise from 500 million today to two and a half billion in the next decade) to adopt greener consumption habits?  Big businesses are the only ones who have a track record of being able to change consumer behaviour, so they’ve got the tools to change our habits for the better.

We want the media to pay attention to increased flooding in Asia or famine in Africa or forced labour in Latin America?  Governmental organisations and NGOs have been talking about these issues for years without any real media cut-through in Europe and North America.  Big companies can take these issues and make them a cause that matters for their staff, their customers, their investors.

Who is more likely to invest in long-term solutions?  Businesses that have been around for decades if not centuries, or governments caught up in the near constant electioneering of four or five year terms?

The big multinationals are the gateway to millions of smaller supplier businesses, tens of millions of employees, billions of consumers. They reach and influence our media and politicians. Even the bankers listen to them.  And they are a manageable group.  They can all get together in one place, as they are this week.

We have to give them a chance. So what if some of it is ego-driven?  It’s not as if those other gatherings – European Union summits, World Trade Organisation negotiations or Climate Change summits – have covered themselves in glory.  It’s time to give the business leaders a chance.

The most effective pressure groups – who above all want change – recognised this some time ago, as Chris Rose, the former programme director for Greenpeace UK, points out in his excellent book, ‘What Makes People Tick?’: ‘..governments were no longer leading, they were starting to follow business.  Our old strategies of hitting governments through media were paying diminishing returns. We were good at spotting these things – Greenpeace started shifting its campaigns to focus on corporate power long before it became standard practice among other NGOs.’

Businesses need regulating – by governments, by media, by investors, by pressure groups, by us as consumers – and there are too many examples of short-termism, selfishness and greed in the business world to suggest they be given a free run at it.  But they do occupy (yes, Occupy) a unique position in the world to effect real change for good.

But is it really going to be that different to 2011?  2011 was the first full year of the coalition government in the UK, and many of us got into the habit of blaming them for everything that was wrong in the world. And for ‘them’ you can read any number of ‘big’ authority stand-ins.  We blamed councils for cutting services, but no-one was volunteering to pay higher council taxes. We blamed the banks for bringing the western economies crashing down, but we all tucked into easy credit when it was offered.  We howled at the newspapers caught prying into people’s personal lives, but we all bought the newspapers to read those same stories.  We complained about supermarkets destroying the high street, yet we all shopped in them.

Of course, none of these institutions are blameless, but we’re not being entirely honest with ourselves if we believe we don’t have some personal responsibility too.

This is one of the big issues in the fight for greater sustainability.  We talk about the growing consumption by ‘the Chinese’ or ‘India’ and our Western governments call on them to reduce their large and growing environmental impacts.  Yet can we honestly look them in the eye and ask them to slow down in their charge towards our standard of living and levels of consumption, when so many of us find it difficult to use less energy?  How many of us are prepared to travel less, shop less or take colder, shorter showers?

Is that the difference between those who are going to be competing in London 2012 and the rest of us?  We’re going to hear a lot from them over the next seven months, about their hopes, their dedication, their personal stories. But I bet we don’t hear any athletes whingeing about ‘them’.  They’ve got where they are by taking personal responsibility, and then making the most of facilities and resources provided by ‘them’.   Usain Bolt doesn’t blame the Jamaican Olympic Committee or Nike or event organisers when things go wrong. He takes personal responsibility.

Maybe that’s what we’ll take from 2012: a greater sense of personal responsibility.  It’s what the athletes in London will demonstrate, and it’s what the most positive moves in 2011 were built on.  Individuals from Tunis to Tripoli, Cairo to Kuwait took it upon themselves to create and build on the Arab Spring.  Less dramatically, the UK government’s trialling of personal budgets for health, education and social services points towards citizens taking more personal responsibility for choosing services traditionally selected by ‘them’.

Who knows what’s going to happen.  But 2012 promises to be an interesting ride.

“We shall not finally defeat AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, or any of the other infectious diseases that plague the developing world until we have also won the battle for safe drinking water, sanitation and basic health care,” Kofi Annan, United Nationals Secretary-General.

When I was young, I remember being told that it was not polite to talk about what happens on the other side of the bathroom door. Of course, all the boys my age couldn’t resist chuckling over a toilet joke and were sent to the naughty corner by the teacher. It was simply anti-social to talk about such things.

Not much has changed. It is still taboo to talk about poo, toilets, waste and sewage but it’s about time we all started.

I never have to think twice about finding a bathroom when nature calls, but over the past few months, I’ve realised just how many people do. There are 2.6 billion people around the world who do not have access to proper sanitation – and by that I mean a clean and functioning toilet. That’s two fifths of the world’s population.

By ignoring the topic, are we ignoring the issue? We have turned into a society that doesn’t like to speak about toilets and waste publically and this impacts how we draw public attention to this very real issue.

Basic sanitation should be a human right. We need to change perceptions about sanitation, give people the license to talk sh*t and get them involved in the debate.

Last month, the global sanitation community did an incredible job of starting conversations about sanitation in the public domain over World Toilet Day. The day established by Jack Sim, Founder of the World Toilet Organization (WTO) was established to get people talking about the sanitation crisis – from governments and policy makers, to corporations, to you and me.

This World Toilet Day it has been terrific to see so many groups come together to raise the issue and start building awareness for the sanitation crisis. Perhaps the most memorable communication on the day was from toiletday.org, a collaborative group of NGOs and foundations, – ‘Matt Damon Talks Sh*t For Global Sanitation Awareness’. The video was posted and shared across public health and news websites and social media.

At the same time, we saw other organisations step up to the plate, including Domestos (our client), that announced its commitment to improving sanitation on a global scale, starting with the opening of the world’s first Domestos Toilet Academy, in partnership with the World Toilet Organization.

I am a big believer in what can be achieved when different organisations and groups come together to work towards a common goal. By sharing resources (products, supply chain, people, etc.), and expertise (consumer understanding, cultural understanding, innovation, technology etc.), so much more can be achieved.

The benefit of such collaborations don’t stop with community or societal benefits, it helps to build the partners’ brands through brand equity and market development; a clear win-win for everyone.

I also believe that it is only through collaborative, complementary efforts that progress can be accelerated towards the Millennium Development Goal for Sanitation, the goal lagging the furthest behind. Even if goals are not reached, ambition is needed to enact change and make measureable progress.

But if this is going to be a global ‘movement’ it is not only up to the corporations and NGOs, we all have our role in putting the spotlight on something that we take for granted every day.

So next time you’re busting to go to the loo, enjoy the dignity of having a private toilet that you know will remove and treat your waste at a sewage plant, and think of the billions of people who would love to swap ‘seats’ with you, who deserve that same dignity.

Julia Lloyd

But there is another area of sustainability that is coming into sharp relief for all businesses, just as they’ve started addressing their environmental impact, and that’s people.   Businesses will increasingly be accused of being ‘unsustainable’ because of the negative impacts they have on people throughout their value chain, and leaving gaps in this other sustainability will pose new threats to brand reputation.

‘People sustainability’ raises the question of which people in the value chain a business should be held responsible for.   And it’s not that simple.

Are you as a business responsible for your staff?  Of course, and that responsibility is enshrined in employment law and protected by unions in most countries.  What about temps?  Are they your responsibility or your staffing agency’s?  People who work for your suppliers?   Companies found using sweat shops and child labour in their supply chain get a very public, very damaging dressing down, as Primark, Gap and most famously Nike have found to their cost (although there have been some positive changes as a result).

Where does it stop?  Are you responsible for the people supplying your suppliers?  How far down the chain does your responsibility travel?

And whose rules apply?  When does child labour start?  The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child defines a child as anyone under 18, but in many counties the legal employment age is much younger – 10 in Sri Lanka for example or 13 in Thailand.  And of course even that’s not quite as it may seem, given it’s legal in the UK, for example, to employ children from the age of 13 for jobs like delivering newspapers.  So the type of work is important, as well as the age of the child.

Are your ‘people sustainability’ duties breached when you comply with Saudi law, for example, and seek approval from a women’s husband or male guardian before employing her?  What does this do for your global reputation?

It’s all very complicated, but then so are environmental impacts and businesses (many businesses) set out to address these, not least because it threatens their reputation not to.  The Ruggie Principles set out guidance for businesses in ‘people sustainability’, but we’re a long way from consensus.  This report to the UN Secretary General says that States should protect human rights, businesses should respect these, and seek effective remedies when they are breached.   But it’s very difficult to legislate for all situations and the principles have been criticised by some, Human Rights Watch for one, for being weak.

Businesses need to understand where their vulnerabilities are and tackle them if they want to stay on the right side of not only regulation but of reputation too.  It’s not easy, but if their reputation is important, then it’s important to address this other sustainability.

Moneyball tells how Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland A’s baseball team, enlisted the help of Paul DePodesta, a Harvard graduate statistician, to use computer-generated analysis to challenge previously accepted factors for choosing players.   Together, they transformed the success of the team, and the approach has been adopted across the MLB and in other sports, including by the England cricket team, who now employ a full-time statistician, Cambridge maths graduate, Nathan Leamon, to analyse where best to bowl to opposition batsmen.

All very interesting, but why has a book about statistical analysis become a worldwide hit?  Yes its author, Michael Lewis, has a track record with books like Liar’s Poker, and yes, it’s about a sport so would attract a crossover audience. But statistics is an odd subject for a mainstream bestseller, let alone a Brad Pitt film.

Maybe we’re witness to a backlash against spoon-feeding mass audiences entertainment they don’t need to think about too much?  Maybe we’re starting to give audiences a bit more credit?   Moneyball’s screenplay was written by Aaron Sorkin, a year after his Oscar for The Social Network, a film that attracted huge audiences despite (or maybe because of) requiring them to concentrate for two hours.  The film asked the audience to think and fill in some of the gaps themselves.

There’s a lesson here for how to engage with audiences in business.  Consumers and customers now find it easier to opt out of direct communication – they skip through the ads on their Sky+, they block pop-ups on their lap-tops, they opt-out of cold calls and direct mail.  So brands and businesses are using more indirect forms of communication to reach them, going through third party journalists, tweeters and bloggers, for example. To do this, they have to be more subtle in what they communicate.   They develop broader brand platforms and ideas that naturally engage, rather than force overt sales messages that won’t get past the third party, independent filter.   And the best of these allow the consumer to fill in the gaps for themselves.

Greenpeace used this to great effect in their DeTox campaign, drawing viewers in with a highly engaging piece of film, but leaving them to work out what was going on.  When you let people fill in the gaps, they become more engaged in the story and what you’re trying to communicate.

The alternative view, as The Guardian argued last week, is rather more depressing: “A mind-numbing cultural diet of Downton Abbey, Adele, home-baking, crafts à la Kirstie Allsopp and novelty knitwear is crushing the spirit of the nation.”

Either way, if you think your audience is intelligent and worth investing in, it might be better to treat them as such in the way you communicate with them.

Mark Twain’s quote is arguably more relevant today, in our age of internet-fuelled transparency, than when he wrote it nearly 120 years ago.  He was warning against the knots we tie ourselves in to avoid being caught out by friends and family, society and colleagues.

Today, telling the truth makes organisations a whole lot less susceptible to accusations of hypocrisy from everyone from traditional media to alert pressure groups and curious citizen journalists.  True, it might reduce the number of fat fees paid to PR people to unpick or distract from bad news, but hey, we’ve all got to make sacrifices.

I’m not just talking about companies behaving less than honourably in their supply chain or to their workforce, or being cavalier in their environmental or social impacts.  Of course these need to be cleaned up, and I’ve written previously about this. It’s more the little lies that creep in and make life more complicated than it should be, where companies would do well to heed Twain’s advice.

The little lies when corporates start talking to charities about a partnership and say “We’re doing this because we believe in your cause”.  No you’re not. You’re doing it because you believe it will improve the reputation of your company, that it will encourage customers to choose you over your competitors, that it might keep a regulator off your back, that it will make your staff happy, that it may take you into new markets.

But that’s OK.

And the little lies when charities tell potential corporate partners that they understand and welcome their commercial motives.  No they don’t.

But that’s OK too.

It’s OK for the corporate to have its motives and the charity to have its different ones, as long as they can find a common, overlapping goal.

It’s so much easier to answer the journalist question, “You’re in this to make money, aren’t you?” with a “Yes of course we are”, than with protestations about your commitment to development and helping the world’s poor. That’s when companies start tying themselves in knots.

The danger of all these little lies is trying to remember what you’ve said to who.  How you’ve pitched the programme in the boardroom, compared to how it’s pitched to the partner and the public.  Each little difference serves to erode trust, with the result that these partnerships don’t last as long as they should.

Of course, all this soul-bearing might reduce the crisis and clean-up fees for PR, but far better for us to be able to tell authentic stories. And it means we don’t have to remember anything, which for us simple PR folk is a real blessing.

A couple of weeks ago we helped break two world records.  Not many lawyers do that (I haven’t really got a downer on lawyers; I only just dodged that particular career bullet anyway).

On October 12th, Thorntons broke the world record for the world’s largest chocolate bar (six glorious tonnes of the stuff), and the next day, 50,000 children were brought together by Lifebuoy in a stadium in Nigeria to break the world record for simultaneous handwashing.  The handwashing should have come before the chocolate eating you’d have thought, but deadlines are deadlines.  And headlines are headlines, lots of them for both.  Very different audiences and media channels for each, although the Huffington Post, bless them, covered both stories: Thorntons and Lifebuoy.

All very interesting, but does it make a difference?  Records, like surveys, have become a staple of many PR campaigns, and are often derided as such, for creating easy but meaningless headlines.  But when they bring a brand idea to life, they work, they really do. The issue, of course, is when they bear little resemblance, if any, to the brand idea (sometimes born of the fact that the PR people responsible don’t really understand what a brand idea is).

Not surprisingly, I’d argue that these two attempts succeeded not only in breaking world records, but also in telling key elements of the brand story.  One of the ways Thorntons differentiates itself from its competition is the skill and craftsmanship of its master chocolatier and his team, who can create magic from chocolate. The world record showed their expertise to millions of chocolate lovers around Britain (and, pointedly, took the record away from the Americans who had recently snatched it, like they did another now formerly British chocolate company).

And Lifebuoy soap wants to make handwashing with soap the norm, so what better way of demonstrating this than seeing 50,000 children all practising the life-saving habit together?

Two questions to ask, next time you see a PR-created survey or world record attempt: one, is it newsworthy enough for someone to choose to publish it or talk about it? And two, does it effectively get across what the brand stands for?  Similar to the question Diageo asked itself ten years ago, when it decided to sell the Guinness Book of Records. Yes it was newsworthy and interesting, but no, it didn’t really say anything about a pint of the black stuff.