Interview: Steve Falla, Orchard PR

With more than 27 years in the PR industry, Steve Falla, Managing Director at Orchard PR in Guernsey, has seen major changes in the Channel Islands, not least in the way organisations communicate with the wider world

Give us your personal career history in 60 seconds.

I was a journalist for 10 years – straight out of school in Guernsey. I worked on the Guernsey Press and then the Oxford Mail before returning to the Guernsey Press. 

I wasn’t entirely sure how I wanted to move on from there, but Wallace Barnaby, a full-service agency, was setting up the first professional PR firm in the island and I had the opportunity to join them as number two in the organisation.

I worked there for seven years, running White Knight PR. I started Orchard in 1996 – we now have a team of 14 and work with a broad portfolio of clients across financial and professional services, consumer, utilities and the private and public sectors.

Orchard’s been going for 20 years – how has the PR industry changed during that time?

Professional PR came to the Channel Islands relatively late in the 80s. When White Knight started, the demand was largely for an outsourced press office function. It’s now become much more about strategic communication. 

I think the word ‘strategic’ is overused, but there’s definitely an element of strategy about what we do – and by that I don’t mean ‘spin’. The advent of digital means organisations now communicate across multiple platforms. PR used to be about getting clients into the news media, now it’s more about what the client says in the media. We used to push messages out, but 21st century comms is more about having a conversation.

Have social media and the internet made managing PR a lot harder?

I don’t think it’s made it harder, but it’s made it relentless – and there’s a sense that we’re ‘always on’. We no longer have the restricted news cycle around mainstream media deadlines. In one respect social media has made it easier, because organisations can talk directly to their stakeholders – they’ve had to become more transparent, more accountable and more accessible. In fact, we have one client that no longer uses the mainstream news media to communicate proactively; they use ‘owned media’ – their own media channels – to communicate with stakeholders.

Some professional business clients are nervous of using social media because of what happens when something goes wrong. I tell them that’s often the best opportunity they can have because the way you respond really shows the strength of character and culture of the organisation. 

Yes, people can get it wrong – the social media function might have been delegated or you have the peril of the ‘late night tweet’. However, there’s no escaping the fact that social media is now absolutely an integral part of modern PR. In fact, it probably accounts for 50 per cent.

There’s that age-old phrase ‘there’s no such thing as bad PR’ – would you say the likes of Mossack Fonseca and, on a more local level, Condor Ferries have put that to bed?

That adage is really about publicity, and that’s something else altogether. The notion assumes you have to do PR, but in reality people form a perception of an organisation as a result of what it says, what it does and what other people say about it. So PR exists whether one chooses to actively manage it or not. 

This is where crisis or issues management becomes interesting – this is something we get involved in a lot. Unsophisticated communicators don’t always recognise that the very time they need to communicate more is when things are going wrong. When there’s an information vacuum, commentators and ‘opinion formers’ fill the void. It’s important you set out your stall properly when things go wrong.

So what constitutes ‘good PR’?

It most definitely has to be ethical. And that means, particularly with digital, what we call ‘two-way symmetrical communications’ – listening as well as telling. We no longer push messages onto the audiences from whom we want to provoke a response. Social media’s created a new way of holding conversations with stakeholders and influencers and we can do that not just by starting new dialogues but by responding to the issues and challenges that arise. 

A phrase I love is ‘changing behaviour before unleashing words’. It’s about authenticity: organisations not just saying what they do, but doing what they say they do. The whole ethics piece is relatively newly embraced in communications, and a world away from spin, but people aren’t stupid and when an organisation behaves and communicates authentically they become a trusted organisation.

Do you think PR has a bad reputation, because of ‘spin’ and the way the industry is portrayed on TV?

I think it’s part of life – and we’re not alone in that. Many professions have been parodied on TV and in other ways. Take Ab Fab, which I find really funny – I don’t think most people judge PR based on having watched an episode or because someone’s poked fun at the profession. 

I do think there’s often a slightly strained relationship between PRs and journalists, and that journalists, with their naturally cynical, inquiring minds, will believe PR is presented in a certain way. I hate the word ‘spin’, but PRs have to work openly, honestly and transparently or you come undone. You have to work hard to build relationships – it’s a relationship business, be it with clients, the media or politicians.

In the current economic climate, how is PR being affected – are you having to do more for less?

PR is a time-consuming activity so there’s a limit to where you can pare down the amount of time that’s needed. Without a doubt we’re having to do more for less but I don’t think we’re alone in that. In the islands, businesses are taking comms more seriously, so what they also need to do is have the will to invest in it. It requires a budget, and professional comms works best when we’ve got that level of commitment at board level.

How difficult is it to attract talent into the profession? 

It’s important to distinguish between the Channel Islands and the UK. PR is an attractive career option for many people of a certain skill set – there are people who are instinctively brilliant at it, and I’ve been lucky enough to have some of those work for me. If we were based in the West End, we’d be spoilt for choice when hiring. In the islands it’s more limited because of the barriers to living and working here. 

We’ve spent a lot of time developing a training culture at Orchard, which now includes an apprenticeship. We also put all of our graduate joiners through professional qualifications with the CIPR. As a result, we’ve grown people from the bottom rung of the ladder to Account Director on more than one occasion. 

I see Orchard as having been something of a communications ‘academy’ – many former Orchard people are now working in-house in the islands, in consultancy in the UK or further afield, and some have even become clients. 

As far as attracting talent goes, we’re looking for raw material that we can hone. Retaining the talent is really hard work. It’s not the best-paid work in the world, so you have to love it and be prepared to put in the time in order to progress.

You look after clients in all the Crown Dependencies, but only have a physical presence in Guernsey. Why is that?

Guernsey’s where it all started, although very quickly we were working in Jersey. Where there previously may have been a need to open satellite offices, the digital revolution has changed that. Clients are comfortable with the communications function not being right on their doorstep. 

We’ve worked for clients in the UK, Jersey and Isle of Man, and, from their perspective, what we can deliver is no different than if we were sitting a few hundred yards down the road. 

Sometimes there’s the need for face-to-face meetings, and Orchard people do spend quite a lot of time in the air, but we’ve made a conscious decision to keep the team together as a cohesive unit. 

How challenging has PR in financial services been in the past decade – and most recently with the Panama Papers?

You never know what’s going to happen when you sit down at the start of the day, and financial services is one of those industries where the bombshell can drop. I’ve experienced a lifetime of threats and challenges to international finance centres since I started in PR, and Panama is an interesting example – it’s presented a positive opportunity for the islands to restate their reputation and standards. 

I’ve spent time with Guernsey Finance talking to columnists on the broadsheets in London off the back of Panama, and it’s opened doors that might not have been accessible. While no one would have wished for Panama and some of the issues it has raised, it’s actually been a good thing for the islands from a PR standpoint. 

Do you think some firms simply don’t ‘get’ PR and how to manage reputation?

The biggest issue isn’t necessarily firms getting it wrong, because most of them either have in-house or external support and senior people do tend to be strong communicators. The flaw is that many professional firms aren’t prepared to take the risk in communication – they’d rather not have it at all than risk it going wrong or being misinterpreted or misquoted. 

This is something that’s an ongoing challenge for us because we’ll be called in by a potential client who’s very nervous about speaking to the media or putting their head above the parapet. Yet because others are doing it, and because they want to grow their business and better educate their market about what they offer, they feel they need to do it. I think the firms that are behind the curve are missing out.

How do you feel the Channel Islands in general manage their PR?

It’s a bit of a curate’s egg. Sometimes they are very good, especially when it comes to reactive activity when they’re responding to the UK government, for example. I’ve seen both islands doing a very good job recently. Take Guernsey’s open letter to David Cameron explaining why we couldn’t sign up to transparency because we didn’t have a government, as we were in the middle of our election. That was done well. 

But sometimes there’s a lack of cohesion across departments in the islands – the private and public sectors could work more closely together to get unified messages across. 

Is PR going to become even more important as firms in all sectors battle it out in a noisy and crowded marketplace?

Clearly I’m bound to say yes, because I think the importance of good communication isn’t going to go away and will be taken more seriously. Good PR is the opposite of noise – it enables organisations to stand out in the market with a clear, concise and authentic message.

But it will continue to be two-way – we’re not going back from that – and that means organisations listening to stakeholders and taking action. And that might mean changing and adapting to what the market needs them to be.