Trouble is, all too often, the public doesn’t buy it. It just doesn’t wash. And companies do too little to manage expectations or demonstrate to people that they are trying to cope. Their PR can be the disaster that follows the disaster.

Take the on again-off again relationship that the airlines and holiday companies have been having with that puffy Icelandic volcano. Yes, the clouds grounding flights across Europe have clearly been beyond their control and at first unforeseeable.

But the way they handled the aftermath was very much something they could get a grip on and the negative reaction to those that did little to help their customers could plainly have been predicted. But too many companies just left travellers stranded and only did the bare minimum to help their customers even once the threat of legal action seemed inescapable.

BP has been faced with a PR nightmare of mammoth proportions. The company may fairly claim that the massive oil leak off the coast of Louisiana was unforeseeable and is largely beyond its control – in the aftermath anyway – and we’ll see who gets blamed in the coming months and years.

Certainly there is widespread anger in the US at BP, which has been seen as arrogant, in denial, and more concerned about its share price than the catastrophic environmental damage the leak has caused. Whether this is fair or not isn’t the point. The company should have been prepared for this sort of reaction from the start – and managed expectations accordingly – but BP has instead seemed to be playing catch-up with the media reports and public outcry.

On the other hand, this week’s announcement by David Cameron that tough cuts in government spending will hit everyone and the accompanying “we face years of pain” headlines may just be the smartest move the media-savvy former PR man turned PM has made yet. While there has been a little blaming of the previous guys in charge – as there always is in politics – at least the coalition government is largely taking responsibility for the future and trying to create realistic expectations. There is little point in saying things will get better soon if no one is at all confident they will.

The only thing the new coalition government could have done better is to be a bit more realistic and up-front about the possibility of income tax rises. While the Cameron’s Tories certainly don’t want higher taxes, they could be a necessary evil if this government is to really succeed in bringing down the deficit – at least that’s the opinion a good many of our business leaders voiced in a recent survey we did of top financial mangers across the UK.

People will always play the blame game and those in a position to be blamed need to be ready face the flak. Yet, it never ceases to amaze me how often they don’t see it coming.

What really helped make the campaign unique was the role of media – but the new-style media coverage did not unfold quite the way some observers thought it would. Early in the election contest, I wrote about the fact that many in the political class were expecting this to be the UK’s first real digital election – in the mould of Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 when online communications played an unprecedented role.

Well that wasn’t quite how it worked out, was it? Instead, this was the election in which good old television played a huge role – maybe a bigger role that ever – as the TV debates dominated the campaign. So, while new media may be interactive and speak more directly to the individual, it took a back seat while an old mass media made a massive impact on the campaign’s trajectory as the old-fashioned big broadcast event created an excitement that set the election apart from any other in recent history.

For the Liberal Democrats, the television debates provided an unprecedented platform to showcase their leader and air their views – with Nick Clegg emerging as a serious player and legitimate contender for prime minister. But it was also another old medium that may have knocked him back down, as many of the mainstream newspapers went on the attack with a series of withering – and in most cases unfair – attacks on the LibDem leader who seemed bemused at the idea of going from the new Churchill to a Nazi sympathiser in the space of a week.

So while old media, particularly newspapers, have struggled to maintain their relevance and influence in the digital age, they certainly demonstrated that they can still be wheeled out take centre stage – to in fact provide centre stage – when Britons want to watch the big event unfold en masse before they gather round the water cooler. Even in the election’s compelling aftermath.

One talking point that has emerged so far is that just about everyone involved in the UK election industry – you know, those politicians, party activists, journalists, PRs, ad agency mad men, pollsters, quiz-show comedians and assorted pundits who live for the big campaign – is beginning to wonder if this one will be unlike any other when it comes to media.

With many of the consultants who helped devise the strategy behind Barack Obama’s successful US presidential run – with its extensive use of social media and other online touch points – heading to the UK as election advisors, the British political machine finally appears ready to embrace the digital age.

Will that make a fundamental difference to the way election campaigns unfold in the UK? Not very likely.

Social media has become a kind of cure-all for whatever ails marketing programmes of all types – and political “brands” are no exception. The Conservatives have already made an early, near-disastrous foray into the world of social media with the Cash Gordon website launched on Twitter and Facebook. The aim was to embarrass Brown by exposing links to the Unite union, but the site ended up being hijacked by opponents of the Conservatives who used it to embarrass the Tories themselves by uploading swearing, porn, links to Labour websites and even Rick Astley videos.

This underlines the inherent risk to any brand – whether it is a political party, a corporation, a charity, a restaurant, a car, a laundry soap, or a biscuit – if it chooses to engage the public through social media: this opens a dialogue in a medium over which the organisation that started the conversation has very little control.

When political groups, companies, or other organisations start using social media to get a message across, it all too often smacks of GMOOT (“Get me one of those”) syndrome, as it has been dubbed in AdAge. This is the trend whereby someone senior in an organisation sees that someone else is using some type of social media and demands that those below him do the same – without thinking things through strategically. 

Any organisation – especially a political party – has to weigh up the benefits and potential costs, and even dangers, of launching a campaign using social media. And digital activity still has to be part of a broader media campaign that unfolds and fits in with a wider strategy.

Social media might seem like a great way for a party like the Conservatives to make a connection with a younger demographic than they normally might, but it has already been shown that it can blow up in their faces. Would social media on its own enable David Cameron to connect with younger voters and finally get his chance to hug a hoodie – rather than be mocked by one? Don’t bet on it.

What you can bet on is that social media will play a part in the campaign – perhaps even a growing part as the run-up to election day progresses and the parties get a handle on digital – but television, newspapers, radio, doordrop brochures and good old-fashioned face-to-face campaigning will still all be big in the mix.

Cute tweets and virals may make for good water cooler chat and headlines but they won’t drive fundamental change – either in the political landscape or in business.

Campaign magazine’s table of the biggest UK media agencies showed eight of the top 10 suffered a drop in billings between 2008 and 2009 – including a more than 10% slump by number one agency MediaCom, a 16.5 % fall by number four Mindshare and a 22.5% plunge by number six Starcom UK Group. The headlines also showed that WPP Group, which owns Mindshare, saw its profits fall by 16% in 2009.

But is there more to these figures than just the recession? We are now living in an age where companies are realising that they can rely less on traditional media vehicles such as newspapers, radio and even television and can instead speak more directly with their customers through digital media.

We already see print media owners struggling as newspapers and magazines grapple with ever-shrinking page counts and staff cuts. The long-term trend may be that the fragmenting TV marketplace, radio and other conventional media will be facing similar issues sooner rather than later.

Before the recent news on media agencies seeing their billings slump, we had a lot of talk in PR Week about Richard Sambrook, former head of global news at the BBC, jumping on the PR bandwagon to become “chief content officer” at a global PR agency to help clients create written, video and audio pieces.

This recognition that, in future, communicating with customers, stakeholders and the public at large will be about more than traditional PR – ie. placing articles in print publications or arranging broadcast interviews for clients – is nothing new to us here at Lindsell Marketing. Generating content that can fuel PR initiatives, marketing campaigns, websites, sales programmes and other ways of talking to the marketplace is a future that has already arrived here.

So while the recession may have accelerated the process, the change we see taking place in the way companies, government departments and other organisations communicate with the world around them is a permanent shift we have seen coming – and that includes PR as well as other traditional ways that companies communicate. The key going forward will be to develop the right content to fuel the new communication engines that are replacing traditional media vehicles.

First there was the issue of the apparently defective accelerators that led to lawsuits in the US and, splashed across the global media, the heart-wrenching story of a family heard on a 911 call to emergency services in the US as they sped into a crash that killed them because their Toyota Lexus was accelerating out of control. You can’t buy publicity that bad.

But Toyota was slow to concede that there was anything seriously wrong with its cars and questions are being raised about how long the company knew about problem. Toyota is now in the midst of the recall of eight million cars worldwide – but attempts to deal directly with the issue by the company have come only after the story has snowballed.

Now there is the additional story of the recall of nearly half a million Toyota hybrids due to faulty brakes, the ramifications of which will be compounded by Toyota’s slow handling of the accelerator recall crisis.

Toyota could have been proactive about its safety problems as soon as word began to spread but waited until the media bandwagon started rolling with the momentum of a rocket ship before deciding to take firm and open action. Companies today just can’t wait for a situation to reach crisis point before taking action to deal with the fears, concerns and questions of their customers.

In today’s world, where the lightening speed of communications on the internet magnifies much smaller problems than Toyota is facing, preparing to deal with the spectre of a major recall or safety alert before things start to spin out of control is vital. A brand may take a hit – maybe a big financial hit – by being up front and admitting if it has a problem, but this will help to mitigate longer-term damage and distrust that could ultimately be much more costly. And it has to have call centre capabilities and a contact strategy it can roll out quickly.

One of our clients, Blueview, has been beating this drum for a while now. As a company specialising in multi-channel communication and contact, Blueview sees having a contingency plan in place in case a recall crisis breaks as vital. Existing customer contact facilities are never enough to deal with the flood of queries that comes in when a major recall or safety alert is announced.

To showcase Blueview’s expertise in this area, we have worked with the agency to put together a research report on product recall management, the results of which were widely reported in the media,  and also a how-to guide that shows how a company can prepare for and tackle a crisis.

If a company can at least have enough people in place to take calls and reassure its customers – or at least tell them where they stand with respect to a product problem – while its PR team is talking to them openly in the media and through online channels, then it stands a much better chance of recovering from a major recall crisis sooner. And the sooner a company tackles a problem the better. Unfortunately for Toyota, it seems to be just learning this lesson now.

This must be welcome news indeed for News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch, who would have begun to feel just a little alone on a very high limb after announcing last August that his newspapers were planning to start charging for content.

But now The New York Times, arguably the most famous and influential daily newspaper in the United States, has said it is formulating plans to introduce a system in 2011 that will provide readers with a limited amount of free content and then start charging them.

Now that the NYT has weighed in, both Murdoch and the New York paper’s proprietors, the Ochs Sulzberger family, will be hoping desperately that others in the industry will follow suit.

Since buying The Wall Street Journal in 2007, Murdoch has warmed to the business paper’s highly successful paid-content web model but his News Corp has yet to take any concrete steps to roll it out to its other newspaper brands, which include the New York Post and The Times and The Sun in the UK.

Nonetheless, Murdoch has clearly signalled what just about everybody in the media and marketing industry already knew: that newspapers are haemorrhaging readers and are failing to migrate advertising revenues to their sister web brands.

This is a fundamental problem for the industry. With more people – particularly younger readers – turning to the web for their daily dose of news and information, as well as content that informs and helps them in their working lives, newspaper brands have to make their online operations start to pay. And they have been singularly unsuccessful at doing this.

Unfortunately, a decade of free newspaper launches, the emergence of Google and loads of free online content available on websites run by the media owners themselves have conditioned the great mass of readers consuming daily news to believe that content is a free commodity – water from a well that they should be able to dip into and drink from any time they want at no cost.

Of course, as Murdoch himself has pointed out, there is a great cost to producing useful and credible content. To start, for each article there is the digging, the research, the filtering of information, the interviewing of sources, the checking of facts and the distillation of all this material into a digestible story. That all takes a great many man-hours put in by trained, professional journalists.

That has to be paid for and online advertising is just not cutting it as far as revenues go, so Murdoch, the Ochs Sulzbergers and most likely a number of other bigtime newspaper publishers are looking at the paid subscription model as a possible salvation.

The trouble is they need everyone in the newspaper business everywhere to buy into the idea of charging for content – and of their own accord, as anti-trust authorities won’t like them to hold a big board meeting like a bunch of James Bond villains and decide to cut off free content collectively.

If readers can simply click onto another site or search through Google and get very similar content for free, then those that are charging will find themselves with very few readers very quickly. And in the UK there is the prickly issue of the BBC website, which has its own remit and the license fee – and certainly does not seem to be positioning itself to charge for content any time soon.

Of course, many in the industry will worry that ultimately readers won’t pay for content anyway. It is one thing to get the investment community and financially motivated individuals to pay for access to the business coverage in the online archives of The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, but will they pay for general news, human interest stories, sports, or arts and entertainment?

It remains a leap of faith – and a big gamble – for the newspaper owners that go for the paid online model. A media brand that starts charging for content risks completely eroding a following on the internet that it would have spent years building. But with online ad revenues coming up short while the newspapers shed readers and advertisers on the print side, do the owners really have any choice at this point?