The year is 2009.
The global economic system is now still shuddering from the aftershocks of huge tectonic shifts that occurred (and was ostensibly triggered by) the subprime mortgage crisis that became apparent in 2007, but which became a full-blown catastrophe last year.
Going past saturation point were news replete with stories of the tumbling of corporate Goliaths: the spectacular failures of giants like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, Merrill Lynch and the Lehman Brothers, and other slain behemoths out there. Dick Cheney may disagree that it started in the US, but still…
Apart from simply being a foreclosure crisis or a pessimistic context limited to just economic terms, the fallout has also given rise to a crisis of communication faced by individual and corporate leadership that had promised too much but delivered too little.
With public communication and narratives under scrutiny, facing the brunt of this must be the public affairs and PR industries – and it may well be a state of emergency that’s being called.
Just imagine…
If some world-renowned and celebrated PR and public affairs maven were to step up to the podium for an industry-called EGM (Extraordinary General Meeting) right now, how would this guru describe the state of the PR+PA union?
Yes, our very own State of the Union Address!
I figure some fundamental issues that need addressing would be:
- Challenges that practitioners from the communication industry would be facing…
- How, because of the Sarbanes Oxley Act, communication professionals need to help organizations refocus on the issue of transparency...
- Major issues (or skeletons in the closets) that need to be resolved…
- Most importantly, actions or focus areas that the industry need going forward…
Three Critical Issues Shaping this Discussion
Well, if I’d a hand in shaping, or even ghostwriting, this monumental address, I believe the following three issues would be crucial (you’ll see that I’ll be revisiting several similar themes over and over again):
- Recognize that whether you call it public affairs, PR, corporate affairs or whatever, the crux of the matter is strategic communication focused on building meaningful relationships.
- Recognize that Web 2.0 is going to fundamentally redefine the lines of communication. Think in terms of the removal, essentially, of intermediation by the press and their gatekeeping effect. Think also in terms of being able to engage groups of people in conversations like never before.
- Recognize that PR and public affairs agencies will have to repurpose their fundamental business models to stay relevant. With the rapid pace of change in new media technologies, it's anticipated that agencies and consultancies will no longer be able to count on their traditional suite of services to stay in business. Neither is it sufficient for agencies to be good at helping organizations to integrate the most advanced Web 2.0 tools available. Rather, the ability to conduct insightful behavioral and attitudinal analytics, coupled with the ability to offer strategic advice on integrating only the most appropriate tools for the messaging needs, will be key in deciding which agency or consultancy is able to value-add and thrive.
A Review...
In The Fall of Communication and the Rise of Dialogue in the Web 2.0 Era – Part 1 published yesterday, we talked about how the PR and public affairs industry essentially developed from the 1900s onwards, and how as time went on, especially with the successful application of propaganda in influencing people’s perceptions during WWI, businesses began integrating such techniques into their communication. Ironically, corporate communication may have begun unraveling because of the issue of ‘spin’ and broken promises, the apex of which is seen in the current global financial crisis.
We also talked about how it's important to recognize that whether we call the practice (public affairs, PR, corporate affairs, external affairs, etc), the crux is all about strategic communication that is focused on building meaningful relationships. Though it may seem intuitively difficult to imagine trusting the words of large corporations today, given what is daily being reported in the news about the rhetorical failures of the political and business leadership, I think the current state of communication breakdown (if I may frame it this way) is also the opportunity to rebuild the business with a brand new focus.
This new focus I’m talking about is one that’s built on the backbone of what technology, new media and social networking is now offering everyone: Less of top-down – or the mass communication hypodermic needle model – communication, but the rise of genuine two-way dialogue.
One Quick Look into the Past…
But since I’m on this topic of technology, I thought it’ll be interesting to dive back a little into the past (this is a quick one, I promise) just to bring into perspective how the way communication technology was organized back in the previous century would’ve hampered the strategic element of PR and public communications, and forced a lot of reliance on third-party ink (i.e. third party reporting) through the traditional media.
Marketing and PR guru David Meerman Scott (2007, p.10) says that prior to 1995, apart from paying large sums of cash for advertising space through a newspaper’s sales department (which also secured some editorial spots with the news side), and also the usual third party ink through reporters, organizations – governments, NGOs and the private entities – had little options to tell their story to the ‘outside’ world.
McNamara (2008) concurs, observing that corporate communications such as PR efforts has conventionally been conducted through media channels such as newspapers, television, and magazines. Organizations, however, had little to no control over the message in the media.
There was no other choice in those days, and in fact, the further back you move in the 20th century, the lesser options there were for organizations to have controllable means of sending their messages out to their publics.
As Cooke (2005, pp. 22-46) found in her research - A visual convergence of print, television, and the Internet: charting 40 years of design change in news presentation – the main communications channels from the 1960s to the early 1990s were dominated first by the newspapers, and then television. The Internet as a possible tool of communication did not really take hold until the late 1990s, and even so, the adoption was more like a fumbling into cyberspace in those days (marked by the many initially jarring web designs) with organizations desperately trying to experiment with different ways of arranging the visual layout of their sites that would make their content more appealing to the public.
In fact, as Brian Solis (quoted by Breakenridge, 2008, p.262) says, the 1990s were the days when many communication professionals were just experimenting with online brand communications.
Under such circumstances, it’s little wonder that the effectiveness of PR and public communication gradually became one that was measured by the amount of ‘mentions’ in news or media clippings (Scott, 2007, pp. 10-12). As a result, communication practitioners spent a great deal of time writing press releases that were targeted exclusively at journalists and editors with the hope that the media would give them some coverage.
The news ‘clip’ became the proof that PR had done its job.
What were some of the ‘old’ rules of the industry then? Here I list five interesting ones from those that Scott (2007, pp. 10-12) talks about:
- The only way to get ink [in other words, to be written or talked about] was through the media.
- Companies communicated with reporters by sending news releases and courting them by phone or in person to develop the story. And except for the media, rarely would anyone in the public – who’re the actual target audiences – see the actual press release.
- Related to the earlier point, the only way for customers to learn about the company and its event or service was only if the media wrote a story about it. The alternative is for companies to advertise, or do mass mailers, but both options are expensive.
- Companies thought they’d need to have a significant news or event before a press release could be crafted.
- And, just for iteration’s sake, the only way to measure effectiveness of the press releases (which was also indicative of the PR Department’s effectiveness, or so they thought), was though ‘clip books’ that noted each time the media picked up on the company’s story.
In reality, however, this was just a measure of possible exposure or ‘eyeballs,’ but not an indication of how well the target audiences were consuming and processing the messages (which is the real intention, isn’t it?).
PR agencies and corporations could conduct polls and studies to determine the traction of their communication, but this was inherently an expensive undertaking and one that smaller firms could not afford. So, in the end, it’s still the action of getting the story ‘out there in the news’ that became a benchmark of sorts, and the traditional media were still the most dependable and credible third-party sources then.
The Birth Pangs of Change
When did things start to shift? Well, I would say a watershed would’ve to be the introduction of the personal computer (PC) for domestic use from the late 1970s (so thank god for Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, the MITS Altairs and the others…???), plus the entry of word processing software in 1978, according to Knight (2001).
A slew of breakthroughs in both hardware and software developments took place during the years to come, and Time Magazine even called 1982 the ‘Year of the Computer.’ And as a sign of the rapid expansion of the personal computing, Knight (2001) notes that there were 10 million PCs in use in the U.S. alone.
Why is this significant?
Because the commoditization of the PC marked the beginning where word processing power became available to anyone who could afford it. But this on its own was just the initial birth pang of the coming new order. Other significant events were, for example, the introduction of both the Apple LaserWriter for desktop printing, and the Aldus PageMaker (now known as Adobe) for creating layouts and designs that kicked off the desktop publishing revolution.
The industry-wide deflation of prices for both computers and software, coupled with the development and advancements to the Internet, are also in my opinion critical pillars to the revolution in the communications industry.
In its roughest form, that was the commencement of User-Generated Content (UGC) capabilities that could be proliferated on a broad scale. I remember in the early to mid 90s when I was in school, we were then talking about how with desktop publishing, individuals could theoretically compose any content they want and send it out. Basically, have a ‘voice,’ if you can find a willing audience. But postage and printing costs would have been a major disincentive.
Fast forward to today, with all the changes to personal computing and the Web, I would say that this ‘voice’ has truly met its true potential in this day and age!
And this is the perfect segue for me to transit into a discussion about Web 2.0 and how it is demanding a transformation to public communication as we know it today.
Whereas organizations in the past were largely dependent on traditional media to generate awareness on their behalf, none of this is true anymore, according to Scott (2007, p.13). He argues that the Web has transformed the rules, and we have to amend our PR [and generally most of our communication] strategies to make the most of the web-enabled marketplace of ideas.
Quoting Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail, Scott (2007, pp. 17-18) argues that the Web is fundamentally forcing an economic shift from mainstream ‘block’ markets at the head of the demand curve towards smaller and almost infinite niche products and services towards the tail-end of the curve.
“There is more diversity and less one-size-fits all solutions," he says. “In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare [in the new Web environment].”
Web 2.0? What the heck is this, and what is it transforming?
Though I struggle to find a pithy and simple way to explain something as complex as Web 2.0, here’s something that I think may be sensible in relation to the central issue of public communication that defines Web 2.0 and sets it apart from Web 1.0: The ‘architecture of participation’ where users are encouraged to add value to the application as they engage with it. Think back to UGC that I talked about earlier.
Web 1.0, which describes the original state of the Worldwide Web (WWW) during the 1990s to the turn of the century, was an environment where information flow from websites was one-way. Apart from this form of message ‘broadcasting,’ information on corporate websites tended to be ‘read-only,’ with an occasional email contact as the only means for consumers and the public to give feedback. Web 1.0 was also a time where technological limitations meant fewer people had access to computers and broadband access wasn’t mainstream yet (recall the growing pains stage that I talked about…).
The term ‘Web 2.0’ came into popular use after the 2001 bursting of the dot-com bubble, possibly as an attempt by the technological community to reframe the birthing of a new era, if you will, of the Internet (O'Reilly, 2005).
[Ironically, the dot-com crisis was also the abyss of sorts for the PR industry, says Solis and Breakenridge (2009, p.28). During the start of the boom times, PR agencies were actively involved in contributing to the rise of several dot-com brands (some even became media darlings) even though many were in the red or running near empty. When many of these startups subsequently crashed and burned, it left a bitter taste in the mouths of the public, and further discredited the industry as being built on spin.]
Back to the advent of Web 2.0, growing in tandem with this was massive improvements to IT and telecommunications (ubiquity of broadband services, Internet Wi-Fi ‘hotspots’ as well as the computer’s penetration of the domestic market in the U.S. and many other countries in the world), the period after 2001 was also marked by the evolution of Web-based services and applications from a predominantly Level 1 (machine-level) communicative system to Level 2 asynchronous communication (some interactivity, but low social presence) and beyond.
As O’Reilly (2005) puts it, the effectiveness of Web 2.0 applications grows in proportion as more people make use of them because of the inter-human connections that are absolutely critical in adding value to the systems and platforms due to the synergistic effects of the growing ‘cloud’ of networks and connections (e.g. eBay, Craigslist, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Skype, and the various social networking platforms).
It’s this kind of interactivity and connectivity – the new voice people have – that marks the crux of Web 2.0 developments that are so important to communication-related practitioners. But as O’Reilly points out, it must be clarified that much of the basic technologies present in Web 2.0 were already pretty much around during Web 1.0; what changed, however, was the philosophy on how the Web should be utilized. It is really a ‘By the people, for the people’ sort of thing!
Want an idea of what Web 2.0 entails? Watch the video below...
It's Not the Technology but the People and their Conversations
Breakenridge, in her book PR 2.0: New Media, New Tools, New Audiences, supports this when she argues that it’s not the Web 2.0 technological platform or a cool multimedia application that ‘makes’ communication. In her words, it'll always be about communicating for the right reasons, at the right time to reach the stakeholders with information and material in ways that gets their attention. It’s about meeting them at their communities and finding the pathways to their conversations.
Hence, the new buzz and lifeblood of a Web 2.0-based Internet are words like connectivity, participation, innovation, networking, transparency, and empowerment! It’s a whole new attitude to the Internet (O’Reilly, 2005; Breakenridge, 2008, p.267). What people are witnessing is a fundamental shift in the sociology of human communication fueled by the transformative powers of new media and technologies!
Chris Ranjitkar, an employee of a local investor relations firm, agrees.
“… the common thought is that new media is going to force organizations into conversations with their constituencies. And I think we’ve already seen a lot about how new technology is bringing about a new level of transparency. We see this from the micro-blogging site Twitter, and also something as simple as a cell phone with a camera. These technologies are really empowering people to transmit information about their day-to-day activities at a level we’ve never seen before,” he says.
He then adds the point that corporations now have the capabilities to listen and really understand what their stakeholders are really interested in, and what they want.
“New media is a great opportunity to learn to listen because people are tweeting, people are blogging, people are exchanging messages on Facebook, people are joining groups online. So I think that’s really presented a great opportunity for both corporations and [PR] agencies to really listen out for what people are saying [about certain products, policies or services].”
Or, as Solis and Breakernridge (2009, p.xvii) put it, it's the democratization of content [and opinion] generation, and the shift in the role people play in the process of reading and disseminating information – UGC, once again.
Just imagine how the BBC was able to tap on the power of the masses during the 7 July 2005 London bombings to drive its own search for content. According to Kinsville‐Heyne (2008), facing an information vacuum at the initial hours of the attack, and learning that information and eyewitness accounts were going viral on the Internet, the BBC was quick to open up communication lines to the public. They were more than richly rewarded for their enterprise when they received some 20,000 emails, 3,000 text messages and 300 images with both videos and stills that day.
Richard Sambrook, the Director of BBC Global News, said that the volume and quality of the media received were on an unprecedented scale (Kinsville‐Heyne, 2008).
“Something changed, forever,” he said, “in the way the public wanted to contribute to the news.”
This is but a glimpse of the power of user-driven content dissemination and the result of the democratization of communication on the Web.
TOMORROW, I'll publish the last part of this article, which investigates further, the impact of social media on public communications, the adaptations that PR and public affairs practitioners have to make, the importance of knowledge leadership, and some trends and challenges. More to come...
Selected References
Breakenridge, D. (2008). PR 2.0: New media, new tools, new audiences. Pearson Education, Inc: New Jersey
Cooke, L. (2005). A visual convergence of print, television, and the internet: charting 40 years of design change in news presentation. New Media & Society, 7(1), 22-46.
Kinsville‐Heyne, C. (2008, February 27). Timeline: The London bombings, the first two hours. Lecture presented at Corporate communication 2008 conference, Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Scott, D., M. (2007). The new rules of marketing and PR: How to use news releases, blogs, podcasting, viral marketing, & online media to reach buyers directly. John Wiley & Sons, Inc: Hoboken, New Jersey
Solis, B., & Breakenridge, D. (2009). Putting the public back in public relations. Pearson Education, Inc: New Jersey
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