Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 10:52:55 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: AUT: (en) Counterstrategies against online activism (fwd)



---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 13:47:37 +0000
From: "Anarchist News Distribution (Platform )" <platform-AT-geocities.com>
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To: a-infos-AT-tao.ca
Subject: (en) Counterstrategies against online activism

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      A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
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Note:  This following article although written for
the other side is useful background reading for the
online activism.

     Counterstrategies against online activism
           The Brent Spar Syndrome

By Eveline Lubbers

Shell is not going to forget lightly its
misadventures with the Brent Spar. The Oil Major was
taken by complete surprise when the Greenpeace
campaign against sinking that former drill platform
achieved its goals. What happened to Shell can in
fact happen to any corporation. Loosing control of
the situation as result of the activities of a
pressure group has become a nightmare scenario for
the modern multinational enterprise.

Shell did too little too late

The Oil Major's first reactive measures have
meanwhile become the perfect example of how not to
do it. But Shell has learned a lot as well. A
comprehensive review of what has become known as the
PR disaster of the century indicates that Shell had
it all wrong about its own influence on the media.
There was a new factor in the game, which had been
completely missed out: the role of the Internet.
That would not be allowed to happen a second time.
>From July 1996 Shell International sports an
Internet manager. His name is Simon May, he is 29,
and responsible for Shell International's various
presences on the Internet, and for monitoring and
reacting to what is being written and said about
Shell in cyberspace. He also helps formulating Shell
group's strategy for how the Internet should be
used.

              -----------------------
   Forwarded News 'of interest to anarchists'
  see bottom of post for source of this item
              -----------------------

May's carreer began in journalism, and more recently
he did a four-year stint in the Sultanate of Oman in
charge of the English- language communications for
the state-owned oil-company. With him Shell's got a
premium catch: May is young and eager, smart and
fast, open-minded and nice, everything the image of
the Company ought to be.

And he understands like no other the Internet's
potential - also what it could mean for a company
like Shell. Simon May openly admits that Shell was
beaten in the new-media war. The Brent Spar affair
was one, but the Nigeria situation also has prompted
a 'masive on-line bombardment' of criticism. To
quote May: 'There has been a shift in the balance of
power, activists are no longer entirely dependent of
the existing media. Shell learned it the hard way
with the Brent Spar, when a lot of information was
disseminated outside the regular channels.'

The Brent Spar affair has brought quite some change
of attitude to Shell. Ten years ago the
Multinational could afford to blatantly ignore
campaigns against the South African Apartheid
regime. Concern was brewing inhouse, however, but
Shell could maintain to the outside world that the
campaigns against Apartheid were not significantly
damaging the Company. And for the rest Shell kept
haughtilly mum. Come the Brent Spar and car owners
taking en masse to boycotting Shell's petrol pumps,
and such an attitude no longer pays of. Shell came
to feel the might of the mass market, and bowed
down. An alternative would be worked out for the
platform's fate.

But developments did not stop there. A few month
later opposition leaders were executed in Nigeria as
result of their attacks on the environmental
disaster Shell was causing in Ogoni- land, and this
caused a renewed storm of protest against Shell. The
intimate links between Shell and the military regime
came for severe criticism. The Oil Major then went
for a new tactic and opened a PR offensive. CEO Cor
Herstroter took the initiative in a debate on
politically correct entrepreneurship. At the
shareholders meeting in 1996 the new chart of
busines principles at Shell was unveiled, a
comprehensive code of conduct with due allowance for
human rights.

Does this all point out to a major shift in
policies? Or are we witnessing a smart public
relation exercise intent on taking some steam from
the pressure groups' momentum?

In the beginning of June 1998, Brussels saw a
conference devoted to pressure groups' growing
influence, organised by the PR agency Entente
International Communication. Entente did research
about the way corporations were interacting with
pressure groups ground vice versa. The outcomes,
presented in a report titled 'Putting the Pressure
on' are harsh: 'Modern day pressure groups have
become a major political force in their own right,
and are here to stay. They manifest themselves in
the use of powerfull communication techniques, and
they succeed in attracting wide attention and
sympathy, projecting their case with great skill via
the mass media - they understand the power of PR and
of the media 'sound-bite'. And now increasingly they
do so over the global telecommunication networks.

Their power and influence is bound to grow
inexorably over the next years.
Pressure groups are small, loosely structured and
operate without overhead or other bureaucratic
limitations, they move lightly and creativly. They
pursue their aims with single- minded and
remorseless dedication. To be on the receiving end
of a modern pressure group can be a very
uncomfortable experience indeed, sometimes even a
very damaging one.

Multinational companies are ill prepared to face
this challenge, their responses are often slow and
clumsy. There is a 'bunker' mentality, and a
reluctance to call in experienced help from outside
which is surprising - and potentially dangerous.
This failure could cost such companies dearly in the
future.'

At the conference in the SAS Radison Hotel in
Brussels, attended by some 70 participants from the
corporate world and the PR industry, fear for the
unknown prevails. The unpredictable power of
pressure groups, consumers, or even normal citizens
can take the shape of boycott campaigns, but also of
commuters on the (newly privatised) British Railways
to move out from a train that has been cancelled on
short notice. The biggest question remains
unanswered: whose turn will be next? The Brent Spar
affair has left its mark here.

By way of illustration the story of Felix Rudolph,
an Austrian national who worked himself up from farm
hand on his father's estate to manager of a factory
producing genetically modified grain. Pioneer Saaten
('Pioneer Grain', the company's name) was not aware
of doing anything wrong. The company produces for a
small market niche in Central Europe and strives for
optimal quality, so as to enable farmers to obtain
beter yields. All products have been tested
extensinvely, and all test results have been duly
registered. So nothing to worry about, that is till
the company became the focus of a protest campaign,
triggered by an impending referendum in Austria on
genetically manipulated foodstuffs. 'We suddenly had
to engage in debate with the public, something we
never had done before. Who's interested in grains
anyway?' Felix Rudolph, as he holds his presentation
at the Brussels conference, still looks dumbfounded
about what overcame him. 'Your products are
unhealthy and dangerous asserted the pressure
groups, and we had no clue what we had to say in
return. As soon as you try to explain the extent of
a risk, you admit that such a risk exists. In that
referendum, 90% of the people turned out to be
against gene technology, the majority of whom did
not know what they were talking about.' It is only
later that Herr Rudolph understood that his company
merely served as an example for the pressure groups.
'By engaging in a dialogue, we provided them with a
platform to put forward their case.  The discussion
itself went nowhere.' This realisation came too
late, however. The campaign so much impressed the
government that it enacted laws regulating
genetically manipulated foodstuffs. An embittered
Herr Rudolph: 'Now the farmers may foot the bill,
and the pressure groups have vanished into thin
air!'.  Pioneer Saaten had to temporarilly suspend
the production of modified grain. 'We will tray to
explain things beter next time we apply for a
license.'

According to Peter Verhille from the Entente PR
agency, the greatest threat to the corporate world's
reputation comes from the Internet, the pressure
groups newest weapon. 'A growing number of
multinational companies - such as McDonald's and
Microsoft - have been viciously attacked on the
Internet by unidentifiable opponents which leave
their victims in desperate search for adequate
counter measures.'

The danger emanating from the new telecommunication
media cannot be over-emphasized, says Mr Verhille.
'One of the major strength of pressure groups - in
fact the levelling factor in their confrontation
with powerful companies - is their ability to
exploit the instruments of the telecommunication
revolution. Their agile use of global tools such as
the Internet reduces the advantage that corporate
budgets once provided'. His conclusions made a hard
impact on the participants of the conference. In
fact most companies appear slow to incorporate such
tools into their own communication strategy. When
asked what steps they planned to take to match
pressure groups mastery of these channels, most
respondents simply repeated their intention to
expand into this area or admitted that their
preparations were still in a...preparatory stage.

As came to light in Brussels, there is one exception
to this picture however: Shell international.
Internet manager Simon May gave a smashing
presentation, which showed very well what Shell had
come to learn about the new media. Simon May was
also very open in an interview we hold with him (as
befits, by e-mail), even though he could
understandably not answer all our questions.

Pressure on the Internet, Threat or Opportunity was
the core issue at his presentation. Internet may be
a threat to companies, it also offers big
opportunities. Simon May states that the fact that
anyone can be a publisher cheaply, can be seen, or
at least searched and looked at worldwide, and can
present his/her viewpoints on homepages or in
discussion groups is not merely a menace, but also
an unique challenge. 'Why are pressure groups so
active on the Internet?  Because they can!'

Companies should do the same, he argues, but must do
it professionaly. 'On-line activities must be an
integral part an overall communication strategy, and
should not be simply left to the care of the
computer department.'

Basic tenet of the Shell Internet site (launched
early 1996) was a new strategy based on openness and
honesty. Dialogue was the core concept, and
sensitive issues were not sidestepped. May is quite
satisfied with the results of this approach and
illustrates this with some facts and statistics.

http://www.shell.com receives over 1100 e-mails a
month, a full time staffer answers all these mails
personnally and within 48 hours, there is no such
thing as a standard reply. There are links to the
sites of Shell's competitors and detractors, and
also to progressive social organisations (nothing
there more radical than Friends of the Earth or
Greenpeace, but this aside). Shell also allows
opponents to air their views in forums - those are
uncensored. Not without pride, Simon May states that
Shell is still the only multinational to do this.
There is no pre-determined Internet strategy at
Shell's, flexibility is the name of the game. 'It's
all about being able to to react, listen and learn'.
His advice to the Brussels conference-goers: 'Be
careful, technology changes fast, and your audience
changes and develops even faster. And think before
acting: anything you're putting up on an Internet
site you make globally available.'

Taking care of Shell's presence on the web is only
one of the Internet manager's tasks. He must also
monitor and react to what is being written and said
about Shell. 'The on-line community should not be
ignored' was one of his advices in Brussels.
'Pressure groups were aware of the potential of the
Internet far earlier than the corporate world. There
are pressure groups that exist only on the Internet,
they're difficult to monitor and to control, you
can't easilly enroll as member of these closed
groups.'

Listening to the Internet community can be an
effective barometer of public opinion about your
company. The Shell Headquarters in London are making
a thorough job of it. Specialised, external
consultants have been hired who scout the web daily,
inventarising all possible ways Shell is being
mentioned on the Net, and in which context. Things
are not made easier by the fact that search engines
will assign 48 different wellknown uses of the word
'shell'...

Simon May gladly explains how the work is done. 'We
use a service which operates from the US, E:Watch,
who scan the Web worldwide for references to certain
key words and phrases we supply to them. In the UK
we use a company called Infonic, who does the same
thing from a European perspective. The results they
come up with can be completely different, although
they have been given the same search criteria, and
the search has been done at the same period of time.
This can be for a number of reasons, including the
methods which they use to search, and the times of
day they enter a site to index it.'

Shell also uses so-called intelligent agents. These
are search programs that can be trained to improve
their performance over time. Simon May: 'This is
particularly useful for us since our company name
has so many different meanings. We can tell the
'agent' which results are useful and which ones
aren't, the next time the agent wil go out and come
back with only those documents which are relevant.'

This monitoring can not be for 100% truly effective,
but has to be carried out nonetheless, according to
Simon May. 'You need to keep track of your audience
all the time, since you may learn a lot from it.'

Visiting the Shell web-site, http://www.shell.com,
the first surprise is the measure of openness about
issues previously wrapped in taboo. There are
carefully written features on human rights, the
environment, and even the devastation and
exploitation of Ogoni- land in Nigeria. The somewhat
defensive character of some stories gives an
indication to which issues are still sensitive.
Speaking for instance of the massive oil spills in
Ogoni-land, for which Shell is held responsible
('totally exagerated and unproven accusations'),
there is always the mention that 80% of those have
been caused by sabotage by radical resistence groups
(this percentage is contested by the groups
concerned).

At the site's discussion forums arranged by subject
everybody is allowed a say about Shell's practices.
It is then ironic to see Shell collaborators from
Malaysia and Nigeria reacting with dismay about what
they read in those forums about their employer.

The question is of course whether this form of
openness really yields results. The forums are not
intended for people to use to question Shell - the
e-mail facility is provided for that. 'The forums
are intended for people to debate issues relevant to
Shell among themselves, so to speak', says Simon
May. The e-mail service is actually being used quite
intensively to put questions to Shell - these are
the 1100 e-mails coming in every month. What the
nature is of these questions, and the answer to
these, remains between Shell and the e-mailers.

All in all, one might conclude that this amounts to
a fake openness, for show purposes only. True
discussions in public are being eschewed, after all.
But Simon May would deny that the forums are mere
window-dressing: 'We do believe quite firmly that
people have the right to debate these issues and we
provide a place where they can do that in an
environment which might just lead to their view
being heard in an organisation that can make a
difference.' Of course these forums function as
barometer for what certain people think, May admits,
although this is not their primary aim.

At Earth Alarm (the foreign affair project of the
Dutch environmental organisation Milieudefensie)
these rather embellished representations of reality
do not cut much ice. 'They've changed a lot in their
communication, they're far more carefull about how
they present themselves to the outside world. But
that is mostly addressed to their customers here, in
the Western world', says spokesperson Irene
Bloemink. 'Profits and principles, the first issue
of the totally overhauled Shell International Yearly
Report has been only distributed in The Netherlands,
Great Britain and the United States. That's where
the people are Shell sees as a potential threat.'

The situation in Ogoni-land has not improved in the
two-and-half years since Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged;
on the contrary, things have only gone worse, at
least till the death of the military dictator
General Sami Abacha. 'Scores of people have been
arrested in the beginning of this year by a special
military unit, founded specially to 'ensure Shell
comes back to Ogoni-land'. This would at least
suggest some kind of involvement. Yet Shell has done
nothing to stop the latest wave of arrests.'

Adopting a code of conduct regarding human rights
and the environment is simply not enough. What
counts is implementation and enforcement. Shell has
not in any way made clear how they intend to
translate their good intentions into concrete
practice. There is no independent body to monitor
the implementation of the code of conduct. 'Shell is
self- congratulating about their first environmental
Year Report, which they claim, has been thoroughly
reviewed by KPMG Management Consultants. Shell
considers this a fully independent review. But then,
KPMG's environment CEO George Molenkamp goes in de
Volkskrant (Dutch daily) to say that 'accountants
don't vouch as such for Shell's policies. Anything
that comes in the report is as Shell has decided.'
Some contradictory viewpoints, I may say', says
Irene Bloemink.

It is doubtful whether Shell has really learned
anything from its mistakes in Nigeria. There is a
new Shell venture in the Westafrican country Tshad
that looks as big as the Nigeria operation, and with
the same possible consequences. And everything seems
to go wrong again. Shell joined in a partnership
with Esso and Elf (stakes are 40-40-20 respectively)
and intends to start drilling new oil fields in the
unstable South of that country. A report on the
environment assesment came as an afterthought,
according to Earth Watch: the agreements were signed
and test drillings had already begun. The local
population was appraised of what was in store for
them as the invading oilmen were underway, and the
operators came to the villages to bring the news
accompanied by a heavyly armed military escort. In
March of this year, over a hundred civilians were
killed by the army as it tries to wrest control back
of the area from the FARF separatist movement, which
in its turn highlights its existence by attacking
this oil project. The FARF claims that the earnings
of the oil production will exclusively benefit the
presidential coterie in the North.
 Up to now, Shell has been hiding itself behind Esso
as the local executive partner responsible for
external relations, and has declined to engage in
public debates on the subject. Even Simon May doesnt
want to burn his fingers on the Tshad issue. Not
yet, that is.

(Translated by Patrice Riemens)

On counterstrategies against activism:

http://www.shell.com
http://www.e:watch.com
http://www.infonic.com

On online activism:

http://www.xs4all.nl/~evel
http://www.mcspotlight.org

On monitoring Shell:

http://www.mcspotlight.org/beyond/companies/shell.html
http://antenna.nl/aseed/oilwatch/index.htm

Source details:

From: Eveline Lubbers <evel-AT-xs4all.nl>
To: nettime-l-AT-Desk.nl
Subject: <nettime> Counterstrategies against online
activism (The Shell case)

(This text has originally been written and
translated for zkp5 and will be published in the on-
line magazine Telepolis. A Dutch version will
appear, in 2 parts, in the magazine Intermediar)

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