Utopian PRs have been dreaming about “one world, people and planet” in which all the barriers between various publics come tumbling down. They envisage a connected world in which the lines of demarcation between internal, boundary and external stakeholders dissolve as they connect transparently and interactively in a value chain that links interdependent companies to their consumers and markets.

But such views ignore some major issues.

One is that in an open digitally-connected world, there’s more need than ever to conspire – organise, ghettoise, corral – to keep things confidential and hidden behind closed walls.

Indeed, we will see the kind of problem which Freedom of Information rules can produce: a clever, covert, closed decision making in which everything which really matters is centripetally driven to a cabal. (Remember the government of Tony Blair?)

Arguably, the more open things become and the more control bosses relinquish to networks, the more restrictions they will have to impose on those who operate in them. This might, paradoxically, lead to even tighter control on commercially sensitive information than exists today. It might lead corporates to adopt a civil service mantra of only releasing information on a need to know basis.

Another issue that the utopian PR camp ignores is competition. Companies forging various so-called value networks (I’ll argue later that PRs should avoid using the term) are as likely as not to form lots of them. They are as likely as not to value some more than others and to find themselves involved in contradictory and conflicting chains.

This will lead to lots of tension and uncertainty within corporates and institutions, such as government service providers, as they are forced to choose between their various product ranges, service offerings and partnership relationships, according to either their broader interests or their ability to sustain them. The resolution of such problems, or issues, will remain driven from the centre, from the top, by corporate or institutional bosses concerned with strategy.

Moreover, because of competition, PRs at either end of a chain, not to mention the middle, might find themselves pulling in different directions and unable to always align their interests, messages and narratives. There is no reason to believe that just because we introduce new tools into the workplace that real-world tensions, politics and commercial interests, will evaporate. We should, I warn, avoid falling into the technological determinism trap.

My point is that we should not think that corporations are about to relinquish control to horizontal or flat digital networks. We should not kid ourselves that top-down management and communication are about to die out. Neither should we imagine, as the PR utopians do, that existing internal silos, lines of responsibility and accountability, will be or should be altered very much by commercial Web 2.0 applications.

Here’s what Norman Lewis, Managing Partner at Open Knowledge UK, had to say on this when he commented on my piece There’s no social media revolution:

… it’s definitely the case that social media like any other technology does not alter the realities of the business world. (I very much like your points about the chaos that would ensue in a company if everyone could relate to sales, customers etc). This is based upon the naive hippie prejudice that enterprises can become democracies run in the interests of employees empowered to act like free agents.

Another of the problems that’s being overlooked by utopian PRs is how social media usage in the personal sphere is maturing. They seem to have missed the point that the major stumbling block for social media of all kinds is privacy, trust and control over personal data. It would seem that social media users are emerging from the blindly heady immature days of the early adoption period and starting to ask tough questions. Anybody really interested in this would do well to read Facebook challenged by ambitious upstarts on BBC online.

So already in the personal usage of Web 2.0, privacy and transparency are emerging as issues which are tempering how it is used. But in the commercial sphere the risks and drawbacks are fairly clear from the very beginning. While knowledge-sharing, collaboration and instant feedback and decision-making all have great appeal, in fact IP, confidential information and in-house knowledge lie at the heart of commercial value. The open information flows between various players presents itself both as an opportunity and as a risk.

But there’s even more reason for PRs not to get over-excited about Web 2.0′s ability to transform the workplace as utopian PRs do when they talk about paradigm shifts. Some believe that Michael Porter’s value chain model has already been replaced – or almost so – “by fuzzy (and not linear) and immaterial (rather than material) networks that normally disintegrate the distinction between internal and external publics.” But the truth is that Web 2.0′s commercial applicability is in its infancy and has yet to make a great impact.

The point the utopians miss is how much experimentation will be required to ascertain where and how to make Web 2.0 and social media applications work best in the corporate and public sector domain given the virtual impossibility of measuring their benefits accurately. But don’t get me wrong. I favour innovation and risk. I decry our current risk-adverse culture. I look forward to seeing more Web 2.0 applications introduced by business and institutions to deliver products and services. I don’t doubt for a moment that they can boost productivity and add great value.

This leads me to flag an event which I think PRs should attend, and to use it to explain why I think PRs shouldn’t use the terms networked society and value networks: International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 – Milan June 9 – 10.

The term Enterprise 2.0 was coined by Andrew McAfee, professor at Harvard Business School (Technology and Operations Management Unit). He defined it thus:

“…the use of platforms of social software in an emerging way inside the organization or between the organization, their partner and their client.”

The three building blocks which constitute E2.0 are:

• Social software: instruments which enable people to be in contact and collaborate together creating an online community of practice;
• Platforms, or rather, digital environments:  co-created interactive collaboration spaces that are visible to all users at all times;
• Emergence: the capacity to make visible the application structure and basic patterns of interactions between people.

As the event’s website explains, in McAfee’s words:

“Enterprise 2.0 technologies make the intranet similar to what the web is already: an online platform, continuously evolving, defined by the spread of independent user actions.”

I find the definitions and explanations provided by the International Forum’s organisers very useful. I’ve been arguing for some while that for PRs the terms “network society” and “values network” lack specificity and are confusing because they are in-house IT-speak. What the utopian PRs forget is that PR is and always will be about communicating with publics via networks and that society is nothing but networks personified. Moreover, all human networks are united by common interests and, or, values.

For those PRs wanting to get up to speed on social computing and E2.0 (both terms are useful and convey specific meaning in a PR context), I strongly recommend the following experts who explore – from different perspectives – this emerging field:

• The Social Enterprise – Italian blog on Enterprise 2.0
• The Business Impact of Information Technology (IT) – Andrew McAfee
• Enterprise Web 2.0 – Dion Hinchcliffe
• Futures Diagnosis – Norman Lewis

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In the past footballers, like most employees, were not allowed to issue press releases, but Twitter and Facebook can easily amount to doing just that. Their bosses are nervous, and rightly so. Footballers are, after all, mostly only of interest because of their association with the game and a particular club. So every public utterance they make and the way they behave becomes of concern to the football companies.

The same goes for the likes of Kate Moss, Tiger Woods as representatives of their sponsors - just as it does for Jonathan Ross and John Humphrys as voices of their employer, the BBC. (With Ross the thing is complicated by his being not merely a freelance, but also a corporate sub-contractor.)

However, there’s distinction between Tweeting as an individual and Tweeting as someone who is clearly identified with an entity. The question is maybe this: should entities allow their members to Tweet about the entity but not about the wider world. Or is it, weirdly, vice versa?

Well, one wonders whether the wannabe editor of The Independent Rod Liddle now regrets writing on Millwall Online fan site that it was:

“Fcking outrageous that you can’t smoke in Auschwitz. I had to sneak round the back of the gas chambers for a crafty snout. Also, I wasn’t convinced by the newish Auschwitz Burger Bar and Grill.”

I’m sure that Amanda Knox wishes she’d never been described as Foxy Knoxy on a social media site, and then gone on to build on that reputation, if only for fun.

Perhaps that explains why one of the fastest-growing social media services is www.suicidemachine.org, which allows you to watch as your online history and friendships are shredded.

The reality is dawning, I believe, that the web is not a place to abandon inhibition. It is a place that should be engaged with confidence, but with the knowledge that everything is public, transparent and potentially damaging. Indeed, the new media have not overthrown (actually they have reinforced) old wisdom about reserve and caution.

Firms need to be able to say that they have a right to expect loyalty, up to a point. Individuals have a right to assert that they have a right to “voice”, up to a point. How can we get too cross when we find even footballers want to be articulate?

Well, one moderating influence might be for organisations to caution their staff that they’ll have to live with what they say: Tweets are horribly permanent. Best to be sensible, then.

Frankly, I suspect that organisations and their PRs will approach these issues very variously.

The best hope may be not to control what your people say so much as to get them to make it clear when they are speaking as individuals and when as representatives of the corporation. Indeed, an organisation should at least insist that their employees make it clear when they are not being “official”.

That’s one reason why, in contrast to the likes of Neville Hobson, I argue that corporate utterance is collegiate, not personal. If anyone wants the corporate view, they’ll need to log-in and get the official line or stick in the SM world but listen to people licensed and badged as corporate. The individual can say “I”, but only the PR or the manager can say “we”.

It’s easy – perhaps too easy – for some organisations to claim security is a problem. For instance, the US Marine Corps has banned all social media usage on its networks for security reasons, while allowing soldiers to continue to use them at home. I can’t judge the merit of the decision of the brass, but I recognise that firms are often paranoid about criticism and may attempt to silence their employees under a cloak of commercial confidentiality. The tension here is natural and sometimes healthy, as it was with Pfizer’s whistle-blowing saga.

An assessment of risk should determine the degree to which individuals are left free to exercise their judgment when it comes to using social media, or whether they will be restrained by bans on this or that topic or using this or that channel.

The case for corporate censorship is particularly strong in instances in which the distinction between “we” and “I” is difficult to separate in the public mind, and when the “I” helps calibrate the brand’s value. But censorship, whether corporate or self, will often make sense.

There are some big general points to make.

1. Companies never really could control what people said about them, and certainly can’t now. But for as long as they’re being talked about (bigged-up, dissed, or whatever) at least they are the subject of interest, and what they say is of interest. They’ve just got to be better and better at their end.

2. But to do so they need to be more strategic and approach messages from an evidence-based, grown-up, real-world position to win or retain credibility. They need to tie communication to business goals online and offline, and that requires a strong strategy backed by clear tactics in the face of chaos.

3. So with social media just like old media, if you are not proactive you let someone else define your brand, which was always the case, but only more so with SM etc.

The refractions, perceptions, versions and channels through which the world perceives you are as various as there are people looking and talking about you, and are growing all the time. Whilst you – the entity – can’t be static and rock-like, you should at least aim to be considered, serious, adult and stable. That’s surely the best way to earn respect and see off  – or even gradually respond to – the gales of opinion and gossip swirling around.

The trick for PRs is to anchor our communication in a solid reality and to get the message out to wherever audiences are. (But that shouldn’t stop us being adult just because we’re speaking with young people on our employer’s behalf.)

Everything else will come out in the wash.

Hence, the less we as PRs can control the perceptions of employees or customers on SM, or anywhere else, the more we’d better be good at managing and communicating the underlying realities to a wider audience. As ever, our messages need to be heard by as many of the disinterested or the uninterested as possible. All the people who aren’t talking (or even thinking) about our employers or clients matter as much as the tiny number who are making their life bloody.

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Addressing Neville’s argument
I don’t think it’s a revolution, and even if it was it wouldn’t be all good or all bad. But before I say what I think it is really about, let’s begin by looking at how Neville Hobson defines what he’s addressing.

“…this isn’t really about arguing over tools and channels. It’s about fundamental shifts in behaviours that I believe are having a powerful effect on many organizations and how they conduct their business.”

“For instance, take a look at companies like General Motors and their experiences with blogs and other social media around the world; and Dell Computers’ IdeaStorm as well as the $3 million revenue Dell earned via Twitter. These are legitimate examples that illustrate how those firms’ embrace of new forms of communicating, connecting and engaging with their customers have directly influenced the way they conduct their business.”

I fear his examples illustrate the weakness of his point. General Motors is a bankrupt government-owned modern-day failure. While GM’s flirtation with selling new cars on under-performing eBay opens a new channel, GM has been keen to downplay its significance, arguing it does little to sidestep dealers. Moreover, if you follow the link Neville provides, you read:

“Driving Conversations is a blog for GM leadership in Europe—mostly led by Carl-Peter Forster—to discuss products, issues and corporate performance from a personal perspective. ”

But that’s a misleading claim from GM at best; dishonest at worst. Here, the “personal perspective” is a clever way to express the corporate perspective, or Forster would soon be out of a job. Consider this example: Whole Foods CEO John Mackay created a storm when he voiced an opinion critical of Barack Obama’s health-care policy that ran contrary to his company’s brand and reputational image. 

As for Dell using Twitter to sell, a $3 million revenue stream in a company turning over $41 billion per year is hardly a sign of an emerging commercial or social revolution: it represents 0.0073% of its business.

Dell, by the way, has had to ditch using the internet as an exclusive direct channel and adopt – the once derided – multi channel distribution, sales and marketing model favoured by the likes of HP. As the FT said last year as Dell started selling its kit at Wal-Mart: 

“The company has been struggling to right itself for more than two years after its belated response to fierce competition and changes in customer buying habits [in Dell's case away from the internet] led sales and profits to slip.”

Meanwhile, Twitter might have many millions of users, but it has no business model or revenue of note. It is in fact not a business at all. 

Toward the end of his explanation of “social media’s fundamental shifts in behaviours”, Neville calls up some evidence from others;

“Here’s a pretty good way to illustrate what’s happening now and what shifts in behaviours herald for many organizations and their old-world business rulebooks in the very near future, in  this video produced by  Erik Qualman to promote his book Socialnomics: How Social Media has changed the way we live and do business, and posted on YouTube last month.”

Addressing Erik Qualman’s argument
The video kicks off by welcoming us to the revolution. It then describes how the adoption of the internet and later social media platforms outpaced any communication channels that went before such as telephones, radio and TV.

That’s all true (except the revolution bit). But so what? Let me now rebut a few of the video’s major claims that follow.

Claim: Word of mouth is the new black. Evidence: 25% of search results for the world’s largest brands are linked to user-generated content. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products and brands. It asks, do you like what they are saying about your brand? For instance, 75% of consumers trust peer recommendations, only 14% trust advertising.
Rebuttal: This is the big one. This is the one that companies do grasp and rightly seek help to manage. However we should take the denigration of advertising with a pinch of salt, just as we should any denigration of PR; both remain critical to corporate success. Moreover, there’s nothing new about word of mouth, it has been around since we learned to talk. It just that it has gone from being grounded to being virtual. Apple – no fan of social media in marketing and corporate practice  - shows how an interactive relationship with its customers based on a fan base still works today, just as it always did so long as companies deliver on their promises. 

Claim: Successful companies in social media behave more like Dale Carnegie than David Ogilvy. Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertisers.
Rebuttal: Dale Carnegie and David Ogilvy sales techniques remain the major push-pull double act in town. Brands still need to be marketed driven, promoted, built and managed. Apple, for instance, has not been blinded by its own innovative technology or by the concepts of planners, aggregators and facilitators to ditch old-fashioned command and control management and marketing techniques. 

Today, the spontaneity of the crowd is as “manipulable” as ever. Indeed, with the advent of social media, brands have more reasons than ever not to stand by and leave their fate in the hands of others. But on the other hand, brands have always had little control over their markets, customers and society’s chatter (remember New Coke?). Marketing remains as risky as ever. 

Claim: If Facebook was a country it would be the world’s fourth largest
Rebuttal: If Facebook was country it would be bankrupt and facing a revolution, not leading one. The New York Times speculated last week about whether Facebook was “doomed to someday become an online ghost town, run by zombie users who never update their pages and packs of marketers picking at the corpses of social circles they once hoped to exploit?”

Claim: We no longer search for news; the news finds us
Rebuttal: The news still gets filtered and produced by gatekeepers and then its distribution finds us or or we find it. News production is still a profession, a business, the product of which we’ve been getting for free on the internet and soon will have (rightly) to pay for. Put another way, Rupert Murdoch is about to call the bluff of those who believe dead tree press is dead by making people online pay to read his output.

User generated content cannot – repeat not – compete with professional news production, even if it can complement, supplement, spread, sometimes source news and most definitely interact with its originators via online networking. 

Addressing one or two other views
However, Tom Murphy, a leading PR working for Microsoft in the USA, sees things differently:

To argue that social media will not have any effect on the way we do business is like arguing that we should have four different bathrooms for four different levels of workers each with a different quality of toilet paper. And make sure that we eat in four different canteens because that’s the way we’ve done business for the last four hundred years. (I was in a factory just like that in Coventry in 1981. It was a wonder it still existed at all. I am pretty sure it didn’t last very much longer.) Business like society will change because of social media. 

Murphy makes a valid observation about culture’s impact on the world of work. But my argument is that while innovations from the spinning jenny to modern-day computer systems continually change the business landscape, business basics remain pretty fixed in terms of its essence, as the likes of Boo.com discovered during Web 1.0. 

Meanwhile, social media management guru Shel Holtz recognizes that despite utopian dreams of social media champions of flat, open models, the real work of real businesses requires structures. But he says that I don’t appreciate the full scope of what social media can do to improve how businesses function. For instance:

‘The ability for people in the oil and gas unit to have relevant and useful conversations with the people in marketing, for all of them to talk directly to the customer, and for the customer to have a voice in the organization alters the way businesses make decisions. It makes them nimble.”

Yet telephones, email and normal social interaction have long made it possible for everybody in an organisation to relate directly to customers. What’s stopped them doing so was commonsense. The last thing a salesperson needs is a PR or backroom technical person interfering with his or her pitch. That’s a recipe for chaos.

My own view
Social media is all very interesting but it may not change business and politics as much as people think. It may not change organisations as much as the internet did in the first place. The internet changed things by altering (a) information storage and (b) communications (within companies and between them, and between companies and the outside worlds they deal with). Obviously the net made customers both easier and harder to deal with. Roughly speaking, it made it easier to be nice to your friends and easier for your enemies to be nasty to you.

The internet also, of course, helped customers (voters) share information about you, and that was probably good all round provided you were up for the criticism.

Social media intensifies some of these trends. But it increases the likelihood of febrile and misinformed reactions. Febrile, because viral; misinformed because gossipy. Viral because peer-to-peer; gossipy because conversational. The trouble is, of course, that while social media doesn’t have to be lazy, stupid or ignorant it doesn’t encourage the diligent, intelligent or well-argued.

The issue for business (and politics) is how to join this conversation without becoming prey to its worst features, and how to respond to the viral world’s occasional attacks. So, social media is neither good nor bad, useful or problematic.

Social media is just there and everyone has to wrestle with it as best they may. Even when it seems to be working for you, you have to remember that you may be lured into bad or trivial behaviour by its charms. So you may dumb down your messages and then find you’re accused of dumbing down – and you hoped you were being alert to the zeitgeist. 

Now it’s over to Neville who, in the tradition of polite debate, gets the right to close this session because I opened it.

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PR Week reports that up to 100 Lib Dems are set to convene at the end of this month to figure out ways in which the party can improve its internet communications. It seems the Lib Dems want to obtain a louder voice on the web than their Labour rival Derek Draper and Tory Iain Dale. But it is the racist BNP which is eclipsing them all online.

BNP is currently the number one political hit on the web in the UK. They’re followed by Guido Fawkes’ blog which ranks as 84,182 most hit website worldwide, and by Iain Dale who has a traffic ranking of 100,289. Neither blog matches the BNP’s “UK political-chart-topping” position of 48,382, according to traffic ratings agency Alexa.

Britain’s mainstream political parties lag further still behind the BNP in terms of popularity online (see graphics below). The supposition is that the internet has been neglected by the official party machines. They might have created websites, but they never attracted an audience with which to interact.

The dirty little truth here may be that the web is not crucial to mainstream retail politics. After all, the successful “Conservative” sites are unofficial to a degree. They appeal to a Private Eye sort of market (the “Wannabe Insider”) and the obsessive pol rather than to the routine undecided marginal voter. They are not a model for the mainstream, “official” parties.

Moreover, as Rachel Sylvester has hilariously pointed out in The Times, some of the recent interventions on the web by the mainstream political establishment have been embarrassing. For instance, Derek Draper has just been suspended from Twitter for inappropriate usage. (There’s an amusing report on this from Iain Dale here.) And was John Prescott really the right person to lead Labour’s charge on the mainly teenage Facebook; or was it that he was the only senior figure willing to give it a go? Politicians do need a measure of gravitas, and that peculiar beast may leak away online.

Confronting the BNP online’s presence may be very difficult. But this is because the BNP can resort to dog-whistles and nudges-and-winks and general dissembling in a way which can’t be matched by mainstream parties.

It’s certainly a real problem. One fallout from the recession is that more and more unemployed people have time on their hands and access to the internet. Sections of this constituency, including Chav-town Dagenham-man (employed as well as unemployed), feels that the “traditional” white working class has been bypassed. It should be no surprise that the BNP has tried to pander to such sentiments.

One of the major concerns of this audience is immigration.

Thank goodness, the mainstream debate is now free of racism. Policy itself is daring to be slightly less permissive. Where that “tightening up” will end up, and whether it will leave a big rump of angry refuseniks is important, of course. Will the mainstream leave a large pond for the BNP to fish in?

The good news is that though the party is as unpleasant as ever, most casual BNP supporters are not hardline racist bigots any more than are the rest of Britain’s population. Most of them are not racist at all: rather, they are angry about their recent experience.They could probably be brought back into the mainstream.

But the mainstream policy shifts which might achieve this probably won’t need a specially online approach. Remember, the online world has an element of the Samizdat about it: it is somehow slightly forbidden. That mood inherently appeals to the BNP because for good reasons and bad, its messages aren’t much heard on the mainstream media but are always faintly and deliberately paranoid.

So in this most important case, the mainstream parties can win this and other battles out in the open – and the BNP can’t easily win the battle, however well it uses the web for which it is so well suited.

I am of course very keen that the mainstream use the internet as best they can. But they ought to use the web in a good, richly informative way. Success online, just as it is offline, is about communicating the right messages in the right format in the right place to the audiences which inhabit the online space. For more on this I recommend Stuart Bruce’s PR blog here, on which he usefully challenges the blogging glitterati’s obsession with social media netiquette.

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1. In 2009 the buzz around social media will decline. All media are social or they are not media. Convergence will make this fact transparent. The media form the fourth estate precisely because they connect to their audiences and interact with them. So let’s stop implying traditional media are not social when they clearly are.

2. In 2009, newspapers and broadcast media will re-platform themselves, but serve much the same purpose for much the same audience. The Daily Telegraph’s integrated newsroom – combining digital, print and all other media in one newsroom around the distribution of content in different forms, meeting different needs of consumers throughout the day – is going to become the norm. Though the details will vary between publishing houses.

3. In 2009 the major media players will be recognized as clear leaders across all channels and formats, including blogs; the tail is not wagging the dog. The best blogs will become part of mainstream media, as Iain Dale has already demonstrated.

4. My prediction for 2009 is that the ability of social media companies to burn cash will be constrained, their valuations will decline also. This has already happened to Friends Reunited, while the American firm EW Scripps wrote off almost the entire £210m it paid for the price-comparison website Uswitch.

5. So in 2009 much of the hype will become yesterday’s news. Twitter and Facebook might have done well by creating inclusive networks on a closed platform, but they will face real trouble making people pay to enter or upgrade later (unlike Xing and Linked-in).

6. In 2009 people will get bored of visiting multiple social networking sites. As the Economist notes, that’s a drag. The big issue will be the Web’s openness. Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and other firms already have the ideal infrastructure for social networking in the form of the address books, in-boxes and calendars of their users. It has the advantage of being an open rather than a closed Web network. As the Economist says, big networks have decided to be “open” toward independent programmers, to encourage them to write fun new software for them. But they are reluctant to become equally open towards their users, because the networks’ lofty valuations depend on maximising their page views—so they maintain a tight grip on their users’ information, to ensure that they keep coming back. This is an unsustainable proposition.

7. Social media will mostly remain gossipy, silly and only very slightly scary. When the novelty wears off, people will seek “not-very-social” digital access to “broadcasters” and “narrowcasters” for the receipt of news and opinion they care about.

8. 2009 will confirm that there are no replacements for old media such as TV, radio, print, or even advertising. While there are no substitutes, new media and communication channels such as Twitter, Facebook, You Tube and blogs will continue to redefine old channels in a complementary fashion (just like mobile phones and Skype do to POTS). They open up new possibilities to network, share, explore, distribute ideas and content by redefining what the channels are used for (SMS for grooming, mobile for voice to coordinate etc). This dynamic tension certainly alters past habits, expectations and trends.

9. In 2009 content not the channel or medium will be king, and increasingly acknowledged. Professionalism and quality matter. The difference between today and twenty years ago is the number of channels and the fragmentation of audiences.

10. In 2009 – as always – the most important social networks will be mum, dad, wife, husband, and best friend. Intimate networks are small in scale and intense in interaction, whether on or off line. Though backbone utilities need to be grand in scale, as with the electricity grid, the phone network and the internet.

The PR lessons?

The old PR rules do not need abandoning. Messaging, targeting and relevance to audience and channel still matter. The world might be more diverse, more complex, but it is not fundamentally different.

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Obama spent the most money ever in a Presidential election race on TV advertisements. The normal critics of such spending, however, were silenced because Obama was their man. They preferred instead to talk about how he was activating a mass participatory base (and he did).

What Obama’s campaign team seemed to have understood is that modern communication techniques do not substitute traditional ones; they complement them.  There was no substitute for mass advertising. National TV debates continued to form a major part of the campaign.

Stefana Broadbent, Head of the User Adoption Lab Swiss Innovations, makes the point most clearly in a white paper (The reality of convergence: mobile content) that I wrote for First Tuesday Zurich, sponsored by PriceWaterhouseCoopers. She says:

“What we’re seeing, which is really interesting, is that none of these communication channels substitutes a previous one. But what is definitely clear in this, in our studies over these years, is that there seems to be no replacements. But people, there’s a French word, (engagement), there’s an enthusiasm for any channel. The new channels are incorporated in this sense.

“What is also very interesting is that the new channels come to redefine the old channels. So they’re not substitutional. But they do have an effect of redefinition. But what is also fascinating is that people are incredibly capable of distinguishing what are the strengths and specificity of each of the channels, and how they can actually exploit them to best advantage.”

Just like in my home, the TV, radio, email, SMS, IM, blogging, social networking, POTS and Skype are virtually going on at the same time. Each serves a different purpose.

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