Firstly, let me say that I don’t know anything.
I especially don’t know anything about social media. And if there’s an area I know even less about than social media, it’s public relations. So don’t say you haven’t been warned.
I’m only writing this because I had a meeting cancel on me. So I thought I’d rant like a drunk in a bus shelter in the time available.
There are only three types of people working in PR – digital virgins, digital natives and digital immigrants. I fall into the latter category. The former probably aren’t reading this, so we can call them what we want.
If you ask any of the three types of people for a view on the future of PR you will get (respectively), denial, evangelism and confusion. Again, I fall into the latter category.
We can dismiss denial as a response because media is, without doubt, being affected by social media. The speed of the cycle is eroding truth:
If we accept historians as the ultimate arbiters of what happened (and that’s still debateable), then lawyers and accountants can deliver their version of the truth (which is even more open to debate). The truth may still be a valuable commodity but by the time it is established, it’s irrelevant. Think: Arthur Andersen. By the time it proved it hadn’t shredded documents for it’s client Enron, it had already disappeared. Think: WMD. By the time we discovered there were none, the war was over. Think: Toyota. No-one had yet brought a class-action suit for brake or software failure, but the share price has already suffered.
Historically, companies invest in CFOs and General Counsels to protect shareholder values. Unfortunately, they use systems that deploy too late to protect brand value. This has profound implications for not only business, but also the principles of Western reductionist logic-based thinking. We’ll leave that to Professor Brian Cox though.
The crowd is now right, even when it’s wrong. Companies control nothing. They are controlled. Think: GAP’s new logo.
We can also dismiss evangelism.
Just because social media CAN do something, it doesn’t mean it SHOULD or WILL. We only need to look to the lessons of technology adoption to see how this works.
Those of you old enough to remember the personal computer revolution will recall:
“Why would anyone want a computer at home?”
“They’re kids developing this stuff in their bedrooms, where’s the commercial application?”
“It will take years for them to develop into something useful.”
“Where’s the killer app?”
Sound familiar? Social media is going through the same process.
Take Twitter for instance. Because its servers index faster than Google’s it’s become the de facto search engine for news. Yet a lot of people still don’t get it. It already has 200 million users. No-one can read all these tweets, but media people need to know what’s being said and importantly by whom. Especially Charlie Sheen.
Companies face the prospect of sitting on a keg of gunpowder being showered by a thousand sparks. Of course, it only needs one to touch it off. Enter computational linguistics and sentiment analysis. Look up and shoot down radar for brand threats.
This is not difficult algorithmically to create. Brand crisis can be spotted quantitatively and qualitatively. As soon as a brand goes out of limits from a standard deviation volumetrically, it can be flagged. Similarly, the proximity of profanity can also be correlated statistically and flagged.
In crisis PR alone, the implications of this are significant. Companies will be able to use social media to provide the ‘Command of Now’ as defined by a ten day bubble or (in old-fashioned parlance) story arc. And this is getting faster, too.
This incidentally explains why PR agencies shouldn’t be written off as the inheritors of social media. They are after all, the only agency in the marketing mix that talks to their client every day of the week and twice on Sundays. They do imperative.
PR people have always used the wind, waves and weather to propel their clients. They’re arguably even more important when the weather worsens?
This is an important quality still in deciding the news agenda.
When I was a journalist, you might write three stories a week. Now journalists have to do this every day. They don’t have time to get out and research a story or do interviews. They rely on the web. So do customers, shareholders and just about everyone else.
This has several implications:
- Mainstream journalists have to compete with other content providers. The vast majority of the recent Japanese coverage was user-generated video. They also have to cover a much wider realm of digital input – email, multimedia on top of social media. No surprise then that their channels are being swamped.
- Because they have to compete they will be unwilling or unable to take calls from PR people pushing stories. This will no longer be credible. Every story now starts with a search so PR ‘push’ must give way to user ‘find’. This means that real creativity on a story will begin AFTER the story is created. If the story cannot be found quickly, then it is useless. This is where SEO comes in.
- The majority of what journalists or other users now find on the web is user-generated. The company or source has less and less control. This means that PR will no longer be about journalists, it will operate as Content Curators for all information gatherers.
You can summarise this environment as been driven by the three C’s – credibility, creativity and curation.
In summary, the digital revolution will create the biggest global opportunity this industry has ever seen. Just being able to understand it is not enough. You have to be able to implement it. Big established brands will have to knock down what’s already there to build anew. The smaller challengers can only exploit this opportunity if they have the resources.
Ironically, the future of PR has may end up looking a lot like the past in one important respect. Twenty brands have dominated the PR industry for the twenty years. It’s unlikely to change, but if it does, the digital revolution will be the best opportunity the challengers will ever get.
But as I say, WTF do I know?
Tags: Digital, Digital PR, Public Relations, Social Media