Why a celebrity needs Honest London or any PR agency
Lauren Beeching
Let’s be clear, a celebrity doesn’t necessarily need a PR/Communications agency… But it’s highly advised.. The reason most celebrities have a PR agency is to essentially help manage their fame day to day.
A PR team is expected to get you covered by more media/press if that’s what the celebrity wants OR strangely enough keep the celebrity out of the news, if that’s preferred/advised.
Becoming a celebrity comes with some hard and fast truths about securing, managing and protecting a reputation.
Let’s talk Martha Stewart, this leads us to a brilliant segue about how celebrities should really hire PR firms to manage their reputations. Martha Stewart has one brilliant PR team seeing as she went to prison and became “federal prisoner number, 55170-054.” However, she emerged with her reputation intact. How? A talented PR, marketing and reputation management team. That’s what it means to hire a good PR firm or firm offering quality online reputation management services.
Let’s be clear, not every case of celebrity mistakes winds up on a positive note. It’s depends on how good the PR team is and how much work they put into making the mistake go away and if not “go away,” turning it into something positive. A great PR/Celebrity Management team would stop the mistake happening in the first place, this is how we work here at Honest London.
Reputation management is really a natural spin-off for celebrities. Bad things happen, shit happens. But, when you’re a celebrity, a bad thing could be a one-time mistake that leads to no career and no income. So, to prevent that from becoming a reality, celebrities hire PR teams like Honest London to protect, manage or rebuild their reputation.
On the rare occasion when the bad ‘thing’ happens
From our perspective, the first priority is to make sure our client is ok and reassure them that it will get fixed… Then to fix it.
We work on getting the focus off of the bad ‘thing’ and put the spotlight on several good ‘things’. You want the bad ‘thing’ to appear as low in searches, as possible. This isn’t always an easy thing for us to come up with, but we’ll end up doing some clever tap dancing, called, “spinning.”
(Honest London produces a thorough report on the bad ‘thing’ such as where it came from, how it started why it begun to avoid this ever happening again.)
While we won’t go into any great details about what spinning is or isn’t. We will say that sometimes, it means that you have to do whatever it takes to put something positive in the news and distract the audience.
Reputation management should be all that matters for celebrities because the media and the public are how celebrities make their living. A long-term good reputation and positive news stories online, can result in a long standing career.
A bad reputation and the future doesn’t look so fantastic.
When it comes to celebrities, PR agencies are used to handling their reputation management problems. It should be noted that we don’t just come to the rescue of celebrities in trouble/crisis situations.
We also hide anything that could potentially hurt the celebrities ability to earn a living.
This means, old skeletons rattling around in a some forgotten closet (old tweets, inappropriate behaviour or lies).
In some cases, reputation management means preventing the press and general public from finding out about past indiscretions. These past indiscretions could include any criminal or civil matters, such as jail time, paternity lawsuits or other related matters, that could damage their reputation, either online or in-person.
It’s for this reason it’s incredibly important to work with a team that’s trusted and you feel comfortable enough to share this information with. At Honest we keep things incredibly casual, no formal boardrooms here. We usually have a pizza and beer at a private members club to relax and have a real conversion and get to know the potential client.
Although it can be awkward.. Even with pizza. It’s incredibly important for us to know of any bad past that can come back to damage a celebrities career. What we do at Honest is have an action plan on preventing it coming out and a crisis plan set up in place for if it ever did somehow get out.