So, I was at the Taylor Swift gig last Friday at Wembley Stadium – either I’m a fan or I have a tween and a teen who are, or both…you decide.

It’s called the Reputation tour after her last album and, as she talked about the name, I thought she gave the best definition of public relations that I’ve heard in a long time. Of course she didn’t call it public relations – not many do any more – but she talked about reputation as: ‘what people say about you when you’re not in the room ‘.

Most of the definitions of public relations from various industry bodies are quite stiff and go something like ‘the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics’. I’m picking on the Chartered Institute of Public Relations here but you get the point. Not very memorable and quite dry.

Taylor’s version though strikes home the power of PR over other marketing disciplines. Get your reputation management right, get people talking good things about your business when you’re not even in the room and you can avoid all that Bad Blood, get it wrong though, sour your reputation, and you’ll never Shake It off.