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 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 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 and 3.0 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 immature days of the early adoption period and starting to ask tough questions.

In the commercial sphere the risks and drawbacks have been fairly clear from the very beginning.

There is no doubt that knowledge-sharing, collaboration and instant feedback and decision-making all have great appeal. There is also no doubting that patents, IP, confidential information and in-house knowledge lie at the heart of commercial value. It is also obvious, or should be, that for legitimate reasons such as their survival, corporates are going to be reluctant to dilute and devalue their brand value and identity in an undifferentiated network. So the open Web 2.0 information flows between various players presents itself both as an opportunity and as a risk.

Yet 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.

Don’t get me wrong, however. I favour innovation and risk. I decry our current risk-adverse culture. I look forward to seeing more Web 2.0 and 3.0 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.

I also accept fully that Web 2.0 and 3.0 provide a new sense of power and control to consumers and poses new challenges to corporates. So of course corporates need to manage this threat and turn it into an opportunity. But that aspect of the story was not what this post was about.

Note: This first appeared here in May 2010.

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1. PR should help leaders lead, not listen

My profession seems to be obsessing on stakeholder relationship management. I see why. When the angry mob is howling at the gates (actually mostly not so much a mob as a media, protester and Twitter scrum), it seems sensible to pretend that crowds have wisdom. Like politicians, media and most bosses in the West, public relations professionals are terrified of seeming elitist. They believe that leadership is no longer possible, or is toxic.

I have often banged-on about how PRs fear that corporations are seen as evil, so now mistakenly believe they must wear a bleeding heart on their sleeve. That’s not my point today. I want to stress here that it is a profound problem that PRs and many organisations – from firms to political parties – dread leadership and responsibility.

There’s a shortage of adulthood

What I’m on about today is related to a wider social problem. I think it’s time the grown-ups behaved like adults.

We live in a society in which people strut about in a macho culture of bullying, slap-head, hyper-fit, scowling aggression, but at the slightest set-back everyone’s weeping and in therapy.

Big cars, sharp suits and watches the size of dinner plates don’t confer anything worthwhile on a person. Aren’t you struck by how fragile the self-esteem of so many modern pseudo-adults seems to be?

We have watched stars, CEOs and politicians behave like greedy, petulant, hysterical teenagers rather than heroes. But what is striking about many of them is that they have so little fortitude. Most CEOs disappeared from view when the credit crunch struck. We have heard how former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s inner circle phoned bullying help-lines to complain about him. Their self-confidence was revealed as being wafer thin.

At the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos we are repeatedly reminded that profit, shareholder value and shareholders are no longer priorities because all stakeholders are supposedly equal. Such talk comes from Western leaders. The bosses from the East generally hold their nerve and sometimes express disbelief. The split between the two world views has become so stark that Richard Edelman reported enthusiastically from the 2012 WEF gig how Ian Cheshire of Kingfisher, Europe’s leading home improvement retailer, opined that: “we have to get consumers in developing countries past wanting the “American Dream of more.”’

We need corporations rooted in a solid culture

It’s this bifurcation I’m after. I want to try to make it understood that ordinary decency, a workable sense of fairness, a sellable ideal of enlightened self-interest - proper trust between firms and employees and customers and wider society – has to flow from a far deeper sense of corporate culture than can ever be achieved by becoming a weather vane.

Today I want to try to get a proper handle on this particular concern: that our clients cannot afford to aim to become whatever the media or ether-mob, the gobby bloggers, the placard-wavers fancy. They can’t pick up a self-definition by triangulating the top three or four messages they get from a consultant. Even if they did, they’d have to live it and that involves sticking with it and that involves ignoring the next fashion which hurtles into view out of the mists.

I am tolerably sure that floating along on public opinion is never good. It sometimes leads to rushing weirs and crashing Niagras, but more often to long dreary shoals where no-one’s boat floats.

The public says  - or rather the media and campaigners say so supposedly on its behalf –  it wants to humble corporations and corporate bosses, just like it says it wants to humble political parties and politicians. So it has created the risk that firms, parties and institutions become rudderless (sorry, I couldn’t resist another water analogy).

In fact though, if there’s one thing the public fears and distrusts more than strong, mean, unaccountable and self-serving public bodies and leaders, it’s bodies which are too weak to do their job.

Before we can have listening and flexible firms, we need to have firms which are quite strong and quite clear about what they actually want to be.

So the perpetual self-abnegation involved in stakeholder relationship management is a folly. It is a chronic abdication of corporate responsibility. It constitutes a surrender of leadership to instrumentalist short-termism, which causes a loss of vision and direction, encourages low-ambitions and, ironically, undermines public confidence in modern corporations and institutions.

It is a myth that the best reputations must be sustained by stakeholder management crowd sourcing. Good reputations are not based on living within limits set by consumer or voter research and stakeholder engagement, but on breaking down barriers and achieving something significant.

Reputations, trust and success

The best reputations arise from doing things and from keeping promises and delivering results and sometimes from managing failures well. Reputations that endure do so because they inspire.

Great companies and governments transform the world by creating demand and conditions that didn’t exist before. They often do so at great risk in the face of fierce opposition.

There’s more for PR to do than to get their clients to reflect what audiences say they expect or claim that they will accept. There’s more for PR to do than to try to forge consensuses before advising firms to make decisions. Good PR acknowledges that what’s wanted in society is not fixed. Great PR helps society transform the prevailing perceptions of sustainability on business, cultural and environmental matters.

Successful countries from the democratic UK, America and India to today’s undemocratic China (I’ll defend democratic accountability another day) were not built on the back of listening and forging an instrumentalist-driven consensus. They were built on the back of courageous leadership and innovation that won the trust and confidence of their people. This gave the masses things of value  to believe in, such as the American Dream.

Now let’s review a few more conundrums and case studies that highlight how current wisdom is flawed, before I propose my manifesto’s alternative approach.

According to Edelman’s trust survey, trust in business and government today is strongest where stakeholder relationship management matters least and weakest where it seemingly matters most. By a significant margin, China leads the world in both categories and its media are supposedly the most trusted on earth, too. India, Brazil and Indonesia score highly. While Russia records trust levels for both business and government that hover around the same level year-on-year as France’s and Germany’s.

Meanwhile, the PC, the internet and Google’s search engine are all examples of top-down disruptive innovations, not ones driven by bottom-up demand-led engagement-based consultation. They did not arise from listening to the market or to stakeholder groups.

Google

Google’s search engine was an innovative marriage between algorithms and computing power that created its own demand.

The motto of Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin was “question everything”. As this review of recent books on Google explains, they were like postindustrial Henry Fords, using digital technology to eliminate all inefficiencies in traditional economies.

Ironically, Google’s Eric Schmidt advocates in a Washington Post piece, Erasing our Innovation Deficit, bottom up crowd-sourced innovation. In it he underestimates the risk-taking top down investment and leadership which helped Google succeed, the internet take-off and the US put a man on the moon: see here. However, that weakness should not detract too much from the mostly timely, insightful points Schmidt makes.

Unloved Microsoft and lovable Apple

Microsoft at its peak never won our empathy; it didn’t need to differentiate itself through branding while it was transforming successfully how we all worked and played on our PCs. Microsoft hardly consulted anybody as it developed what some viewed as monopolistic tendencies. Bill Gates wielded Microsoft’s power like a blunt instrument against all comers, including customers and partners. But if Microsoft was always unlovable, Apple is its polar opposite. Its fans adore it (almost uncritically until recently), believing it to represent an anti-corporate, culturally-fresh, arty sort of an entity. That’s mostly nonsense, but in any case Apple achieved this myth-making with top-down communication and command and control management. Apple’s path was classic old-style branding designed to attack and differentiate itself from a dominant incumbent.

Rock ‘n’ Roll

The electric guitar transformed music. It created new possibilities by creating new sounds. It helped spawn Rock ‘n’ Roll, including Punk, that outraged public opinion. But its hall of fame contains some of the greatest reputations of the last century. But as Simon Cowell shows, even this grass-roots business is managed from the top, even if it draws inspiration and talent from the bottom. It created its own space and its own demand.

Ryanair: nobody’s friend

Last, Michael O’Leary’s Ryan Air’s low-cost digitally-networked business model revolutionised the airline industry. It was an achievement of an aggressive innovative genius, not of stakeholder collaboration, which he despises.

These examples provide evidence of Joseph Schumpeter’s law of creative destruction that drives the capitalist market. They support my argument that PRs who think our trade is all about aligning values, listening, engagement and relationships need a reality check; though I’m very pro using those techniques in the right context and more importantly for the right reasons.

Key manifesto messages

In contrast, I say PRs should be more prepared to defend, advocate and promote risk taking. They should be less concerned about what’s acceptable and what’s popular. They should be more willing to celebrate elitism and success. They should be less concerned with the crowd as it is currently constituted or inclined to emote and opine.

PRs should be more willing to celebrate the arrogance of the change-makers who bring innovation to society. We should be less concerned with bad headlines and with tyranny of media produced crises. Instead we should focus our campaigns on achieving positive outcomes and on getting things done. We should be the torch bearers honing the narratives and messages of the people and forces which challenge or ignore society’s constraints. In that game PR plays a transformative role: we could start by making economic growth our focus.

The blog which got me going

Here’s the article that inspired this manifesto: To listen, to engage: empty buzzwords? Let’s discuss. It sums up the risk adverse stakeholder relationship management approach of mainstream academic PR. According to this school of thought progress depends on winning the public’s trust by establishing empathy. For them it is all about connecting with stakeholders by gathering sense:

“The consequences of the interpretation-of the comprehension-of the gathered sense need to be explicitly related to the listener’s decision making process and are inherently fuzzy, non linear and situational. The competencies are creativity, feasibility, and time framing with their respective tools.”

This piece of gobbledygook is typical of current PR thinking. It springs from a misplaced faith in Grunig’s two-way symmetrical model of PR and an addiction to jargon and spin. Amusingly the author is so sure of his ground that he asks What comes after Grunig? and replies, “the answer to that looming question is that after Grunig…comes Grunig.”

The danger here is that Grunig’s supporters have ended up trying religiously to make reality fit the theory. That’s the trap, if I’m any judge of PR-related text, that the Stockholm Accords, arising from the Global Alliance’s World Public Relations Forum debate, fell into.

In summary, my point is that PR is a multi-faceted, flexible profession. Sometimes it is top-down and one-sided. Sometime it is a two-way interactive real-time force. In whichever way it does its job, however, PR is an objectives-driven art rather than a science that’s reducible to orthodox formulas. My take home message is that PR makes its most useful contribution to society when it advocates transformative risk-taking on which great reputations are built.

This is an updated piece that was first published in February 2010

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One of my major criticisms of Facebook has been that it is a closed platform. It lives behind a firewall so you must log in to access. It holds on tight to your personal details, which, when combined with repeat visits, provides mass eyeballs and user intelligence that equates to value for the company, not least because of the targeted advertising it facilitates. I considered that the walled platform was in the longer term shaky. I rated Facebook’s business model, rightly, as unsustainable because the future of social media on the Web is going to be based on pervasive, open, connecting, access.

But suppose your presence on Facebook followed you everywhere on the open Web?  Suppose it added a personalised social experience to your surfing? Suppose it provided added value as you surfed by leveraging your own social connections by revealing your network’s collective experience, enabling you to fiddle and create links, by building upon your network’s common interests?

In that scenario your own network’s collective surfing would help you navigate the Web better than hyperlinks do today. That’s exactly what Facebook’s social plugins (buttons to you and me), Open Graph, and Open Graph API intend to do:

Whoever knows what your interests are right now and can package them up for advertisers has the chance to make a lot of money. Of course, Google does this right now every time you declare your interests in a search box and it offers up matching ads on the side of results. But Facebook and Twitter are trying to capitalize on the shift from search to sharing. Your interests are expressed by what you follow and react to (“like,” “retweet,” etc.), not only what you explicitly seek out through search. (Facebook to Twitter Back Off, We Own People’s Interests – Tech Crunch)

Facebook aims to be the leader of deciphering and knowing what our interests are. In effect, Facebook aims to offer us a service that will provide relevant content via a web of feeds that we share with like minded people in our networks and in theirs. Of course, success for Facebook would depend upon it acquiring monopoly or near monopoly status by virtue of its mass and usefulness, the way Google does today. But with 500 million users and growing fast, Facebook is already well positioned.

Of course, as Jack Schonfeld explains here the plug-ins are not new, but the vision is:

We’ve reported on all of these new features before, but today [April 21] Zuckerberg put them into context: “we are building a Web where the default is social.” How is Facebook doing this? First and foremost, Facebook has redesigned its Graph API for developers so that not only can they see the social connections between people, but they can also see and create the connections people have with their interests—things, places, brands, and other sites. Zuckerberg calls it the Open Graph (as opposed to the Social Graph). It is really an Interest Graph.

One thing going for Facebook is how inept Google has proven to be at leveraging its presence to facilitate social networking. Its recent Buzz launch flopped embarrassingly, partly because of privacy concerns related to its link to the G Mail email service and partly because social networking was not part of the original bargain. Privacy is also one of the big challenges facing Facebook, but its starting point is social networking.

The trick will be to maintain one’s reputation in a business that relies upon consumers trusting a company to respect users’ rights – but in the realistic expectation that consumers must trade in some of their rights to privacy in return for the services they mostly get for free.

Anyway, in a digitally connected world, privacy is no longer what it once was, or at least as possible as it once was. However, a good deal of most people’s browsing needs to be done in private. Also, the young are already aware that they need to be more guarded in their use of social networking than the likes of Amanda Knox.

For a very useful discussion about how this is a social and commercial challenge rather than a technological one, I recommend reading Rethinking Privacy and Trust, by Norman Lewis. He looks at the difference between trust in people (interpersonal relationships) and confidence in institutions, in a way which I find refreshing as well as useful in my work as a PR. It’s my opinion (and a point not lost on the always insightful Heather Yaxley) that for the likes of Google and Facebook their reputations are really going to matter more than they do for most companies and that’s going to be great news and big business for PRs.

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When the election started David Cameron’s Tories looked like they were cruising to some sort of nuanced victory. The first televised leaders’ debate put paid even to that. The Liberal Democrats jumped from a distant third to being front runner or in close second place, depending on which poll you trust. So-called Cleggmania was born. Now some sort of humiliation looks much more likely than it did, even if Cameron becomes PM.

Of course, the leaders’ debate is game-show politics, which makes it even more prone to febrile moodiness than EU or local elections. I agree with my friend Richard D North’s view (expressed on his blog and in his book on Mr Cameron’s Makeover Politics) that we may well be watching the end of 20th Century class politics. Why wouldn’t it get weird? But interestingly, the running is still being made by ordinary newspapers and broadcasters. Who said TV was dying or that dead tree press is dead? One wonders how Clay Shirky and Jeff Jarvis explain such events.

Once upon a time, political parties had a mass base, with mass membership, rooted in trade unions, social classes and local constituencies. Not any more. Today the political elite is remote and connects to the masses via the media. The contest for votes is fought on TV and in the tabloids and broadsheets, sometimes in the style of the X-Factor, Britain’s Got Talent and American Idol. Modern elections are always more about style than content, but I don’t think the real intentions of the major parties were ever more obscure to us than they are today.

Supposedly we live in an age of engagement, in an age in which we form interactive online social networks based on common values. But that doesn’t fit well with the British election experience. Social media – Twitter, Facebook and blogs – are just a backdrop to this story. Charlie Beckett summed up the TV-impact well:

…the curious voter can watch the debates and form their own judgements on the basis of what the candidates say and how they perform.This kind of ‘disintermediated’ communication is usually thought of as an Internet phenomenon. But as Michael Cockerill’s excellent documentary on the history of TV debates reminded us – mainstream broadcast media can do it, too, albeit without interactivity.

Moreover, the political party with by far the largest web-based social presence, with the most interactive website, has the least influence of all on public opinion. The British National Party is a joke (though it might win a seat; we’ll see). But according to the web-rankings agency Alexa the BNP is the world’s 28,545 most popular site compared to the Conservatives at 52,423, Lib Dems at 68,446, Labour at 69,527 and political blogging sensation Guido Fawkes at 40,688.

There’s lessons here for firms. Old media still counts for much more than new media. However new media and old media interconnect so both need to be engaged. But it’s largely a myth that the online networked society changes the rules of PR and communication in general. By the way, I shall deal with the advocates of the Stockholm Accords’ misreading of contemporary developments (they think we live in a new value-network society) at a later date. For now I merely remark that in many ways they miss the obvious: the emergence of new media, and the fragmentation it encourages, makes old media more important than ever, even as their audience shrinks, precisely because the mass public is increasingly disengaged from public life.

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When Obama was elected some PR theorists said it was the dawn of a new age of democratic and decentralized public engagement. In the words of Richard Edelman, delivering the Grunig lecture at University of Maryland, the main evidence for this was:

…Obama campaign’s mobilization of five million volunteers, who are able to make decisions on how best to contact voters, attract funds and communicate on social media.

But one year on, the evidence does not stand up. The trend today is toward disengaged elitism, not mass engagement.

As Obama’s popularity plummets, Jacob Weisberg’s writing for Slate blames the childish, ignorant American public – not politicians – for his country’s political and economic crisis. He whines about how the GOP has put the nation in an angry, populist, tea-partying mood.

The Tea Party Movement is a kick in the goolies (English slang) to the Obama Presidency. According to Reason Magazine, the campaign is materially affecting things as big as Scott Brown’s election and as little as a Virginia state vote to outlaw health insurance mandates. It adds that its core messages appeal beyond the movement’s ranks.

Meanwhile, Kurt Andersen rants in New York Magazine about how the walls that the founding fathers erected to contain the mob may no longer hold. He says irregular passions and artful misrepresentations are being whipped up to an unprecedented pitch and volume by the fundamentally new means of 24/7 cable and the hyperdemocratic web (the author of Reset is dead set against nonsense and the worst aspects of modernism).

In contrast, Andersen describes the essence of America’s democracy as being, by the people and for the people, definitely; of the people, not so much. Lamenting the emergence of the tea-party citizens, he says they are:

…under the misapprehension that democratic governing is supposed to be the same as democratic discourse, that elected officials are virtuous to the extent that they too default to unbudging, sky-is-falling recalcitrance and refusal. And the elected officials, as never before, are indulging that populist fantasy.

It seems, then, that critical thinkers are “deserting” dialogue and increasingly seeing Grunig’s two-way symmetrical model as a threat.

The reason is that Middle America is feared. It’s a case of What’s The Matter with Kansas, Thomas Frank’s bestseller, which attempted to solve the conundrum of how so-called ruling class conservatism became the creed of millions of ordinary Americans. His answer was that the masses were so stupid they’d been duped. Our old friends, cognitive dissonance, false consciousness and denial are in play.

Obama nearly let his elitist contempt for the masses – the white and black working class – out of the bag during his campaign with his ‘cling to guns and religion’, remark.

Anybody who still harbours a hope today that Obama’s regime is listening to criticism from friend or foe, let alone engaged in dialogue, hasn’t taken note of the recent rant from the White House’s chief of sfaff Rahm Emanuel. He’s been dismissing liberals as “retards”.

Regular readers of this blog know that I admire elite thought and achievement. They will also know that I believe that it is the job of leaders to lead.

I’m a critic of the two-way symmetrical “orthodoxy” that Grunig espouses. It is my belief that if one seeks answers or to find one’s direction in the crowd, one comes up with confusion (or worse, a horrible gungho certainty), which leads to paralysis (or a parity of unpleasantness).

Nevertheless, I maintain that dialogue, consultation and two-way communication has its place. But so does decision-making, which must not be shirked.

In reality, I don’t think there is any correct model for conducting PR. That’s because PR is an art, not a science. It is more results-driven than method-driven. It is a flexible tool designed for a specific purpose, which comes from above. Put simply, PR serves whoever pays for it, or whomever else it is accountable to, including the law and other stakeholders.

Moreover, how could anybody have ever really thought that somebody with Obama’s preacher-style approach to politics could ever become the leader of a new engaged movement based on real-time dialogue?

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Let me remind readers how some PRs responded to Obama-online-mania and the idea that he listened as much as talked with social media:

As we all know, there is a tendency for politicians to prefer the sound of their own voices more than those of their constituents and supporters, but the key to Obama’s success was that he used social media not just to talk to supporters, but to talk with them.

Frankly, I am unimpressed by the idea that Obama got into social media in order to listen. I imagine he and his team had their ears to the ground in all sorts of ways and that they could as it were have over-heard most of the chatter they needed rather than join up in order to listen.

Arguably, there was something fraudulent about the personal connection that social media conveyed Obama as having with his audiences. The truth was he was as remote and mediated on social media as he was in mainstream media. But here’s Edelman’s take on the first step potential voters took to engage with Obama’s campaign:

The Obama campaign gave prospective supporters a menu of options:
•     Personal – You could start by friending Obama on a social network. Then, you might sign up for text messages and e-mails to stay informed about the campaign. As a supporter, you may make your first donation or register to vote.

But now we know that Barack Obama personally did not talk or engage with anybody via social media. Nevertheless, he was supposed to embody a new style of communication some call the public engagement model, which now appears to be as transparently one-way and as contrived as anything the traditional world of media could devise.

My point here is not to knock social media or to advocate a boycott for PR purposes or anything of the sort. My point is that those who advocate that social media forces on corporates a new form of touchy-feely engaged PR, are not inline with reality. Their major case-study has always been Barack Obama, but their evidence does not stack up.

Social media is supposed to be about the personal, not about PAs and PRs doing it (corporates don’t do personal very well; for good reason, as I argued here)

My message is that the old rules apply on social media as much as they still do on old media. There is no new age of communication so much as new technology and channels and new opportunities and threats that comes from everybody having access to the digitally-connected world.

I do not deny that social media played a valuable role in Barack Obama’s victory, particularly when it came to surfing youth enthusiasm and raising funds to pay for his TV ads. But it was social media that was in quite important ways hijacked and even corrupted from its most obvious value to most of its users.

I think the Obama campaign duped the social media and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the blogosphere will be more cross than most when they do fall out of love with their erstwhile hero. Think Labour and their luvvies in 1964 and 1997.

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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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I’ve just been out rowing on Zurich lake. It’s a good place to muse. You can’t share my blisters but I hope you’ll share my water-bourne (and not water-logged) thoughts on whether the ultra-modern “social” media really are all that different to poor old “mass” media.

The word media was traditionally used to describe communication vehicles that had mass reach in the sense of one-reaching-many. Hence, the telephone as a medium of communication was never considered to be a part of the media [see my comments on PR Conversations here]. Conversations on telephones traditionally were one-to-one, or at best one-to-few on conference calls. (Oh, yeah right, let’s leave the UK gutter press hackers out of this for a moment.)

The word “social” in “social media” was coined to distinguish it from the mass media. It highlighted the ability of digital technology to enable direct – disintermediated – and interactive networked communication.

It was meant to capture all kinds of more or less micro-communications whose essence was that they were peer-to-peer.

Things got complicated because “social” media are not just “narrow-casting”. They might be micro, but they had also to be two-way. They were essentially interactive. But they were also essentially about networks: they were clubs.

My sticking point is that I don’t think this was all that new. I see why the new media were called “social”, but I think the old media were highly sociable.

And I think my most serious objection to social media hype is the old elitist one. I love gossip and I am often thrilled by crowds. But “crap in, crap out” is as true of conversations (whether between two individual or crowds of peers), as it is of computer models: remember how the Club of Rome’s computer predictions once panicked the world? Lots of people saying a thing, and lots more agreeing with them, is no guarantee that there is any merit to what’s said. I am thrilled that people have “voice” (and even “agency”). The next step is to get them to love wisdom.

The old media were social
The traditional media – in the mass sense – were always about building relationships with audiences; that’s what sustained them. I maintain that old media were always highly sociable. They spoke to a fan base. They reinforced the prejudices of their demographic. They stoked their appeal to their audience. In short they chased their market. I imagine that they tested their market, but in a way they didn’t have to. Their market tested them. Oh, and many of them worked hard at earning trust, often by proving themselves brave, truthful and intelligent.

Yes, they were intermediated, but they were interactive.

Take TV. It envisaged itself as the nation’s hearth. It knew it had to generate “water-cooler” shows. It saw its role as providing social glue; a role Walter Leland Cronkite played for most of his 92 years as the world’s leading TV newscaster. If it didn’t generate conversation, TV was dead.

Take radio. For decades it pioneered interactivity because phone-ins were cheap.

Take the press. Many were owned by campaigners and political parties. Plenty more connected with and mobilized millions of people on behalf of a variety of causes.

The mass media got to be massive because it was personal. It was social because at all sorts of levels (from family to nation, via interest groups and societies) it connected its users to their peers.

Social media aren’t always media or social
The web allows all sorts of communications which don’t really deserve to be tagged as “media”, social or otherwise. They are too like phone calls or rooming-house notice boards for that. They don’t aim to reach out beyond the immediate very small number of people they link. I’d say that lots of Facebook communication is of this inward-looking sort.

You may say that Twitter blows this argument out of the water (lake or not). But I think it reinforces it. Yes, Twitter is a super-SMS, and thus a bit like phoning. But its point is that it offers conversations which are designed to be overheard. It takes SMS messages and makes them public. That’s super, but it is also too like the “old” business of blogging to be quite as intimately peer-based or as distinctively sociable (its viral nature is not personal at all) as it might perhaps like to appear.

My point is that very often “social” media look very like narrow-casting or broadcasting (just like old-style blogs or websites or newspapers or TV or radio). But it also very often looks a super-phone call or private message board.

In these cases, and in practice, the wonders of interactivity and reflexivity offered by social media don’t really add up to all that much. And they are not very social either.

Truthfulness, wisdom and seriousness
Call me old-fashioned, but I think if something is to be called social, it ought to be good for society as well as just involve relationships between people.

I’m not a Luddite. However that has not stopped social media commentators such as Danny Brown accusing me of, “discounting one of the most valuable tools in business branding and promotion today.” But while he gets me wrong, I do love society becoming better educated and more discriminating. I don’t think the web is undoing that general trend. But I do think that we should think of “social media” as a technology with power for good or ill and that we need to keep on its case.

As Andrew Keen points out in The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture, don’t underestimate the importance and value of professionalism.

Twitter might seem to contradict Keen’s pessimism by demonstrating that quality can thrive on so-called social media platforms.

But hang on. Twitter encourages mass followings and debate, gathered as followers and following around brands (and here brands can be personal as well as corporate), and interestingly so when it aggregates searchable content in the stream. I don’t dispute Twitter’s power. But at its most powerful it remains very like building old-style fan-bases. It does nothing to validate the merit of the enthusiasms it can generate.

Clay Shirky seemed not to spot this when he asserted here comes everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations on the real-time web. Though he seems to be weakening as the reality of “everybody” dawns on him. Following a deluge of unmanageable content on the real-time web, much of which is irrelevant and nonsense, he’s become a fan of Greylisting, which – if used to its potential – excludes nearly everybody who does not matter much or at all (most of us).

So he has started advocating in a positive way the need for filtering the stream. Clay and Keen agree about this, but Keen thinks it should be done by humans not machines. Keen promotes the example of how Middle-Eastern news network Al Jazeera, curates tweets, and present an edited and logical flow to their viewers and readers. It seems that the disintermediated world needs mediating after all. And, as I bobbed up and down in my rowing boat on Zurich lake, it made me remember the wise words of Walter Lippmann describing what function the media (as in mass and professional) serves:

I argue that representative government, either in what is ordinarily called politics, or in industry, cannot be worked successfully, no matter what the basis of election, unless there is an independent, expert organization for making the unseen facts intelligible to those who make the decisions. I attempt, therefore to argue that the serious acceptance of the principle that personal representation must be supplemented by representation of the unseen facts would alone permit a satisfactory decentralization, and allow us to escape the intolerable and unworkable fiction that each of us must acquire a competent opinion about all public affairs. It is argued [by Lippmann] that the problem of the press is confused because the critics and the apologists expect the press to realize this fiction, expect it to make up for all that was not foreseen in the theory of democracy, and that the readers expect this miracle to be performed at not cost or trouble to themselves. [Public Opinion PN Publishing 2007, first edition 1921]

So, contrary to the likes of Clay Shirky, the power of mediated thought and making sense of the world does not lie in the crowd: also see Jeff Jarvis’s What would Google do? where he gets over-excited by the always understood “insight” that marketing is based on building relationships and that networks matter.

Jarvis’s mistake is to advise companies that they’ve lost control so go with the flow, partly by ditching their PR, by relating to their customers in an unmediated fashion. It misses the point that companies never really had control [remember New Coke?] over much; it is just that the internet makes that fact more transparent. Hence, I say that mediation is needed more than ever – to keep what control one has over messages, narratives and brands – when everybody can publish their wares and views on line. Organizational structures are not dead but more vital than ever. And so is PR.

When it comes to the future of the media, I increasingly favour Charlie Beckett’s analysis in Supermedia: Saving Journalism So It Can Save the World that media institutions are being transformed towards creating social networks of news. In his view, the mass in media lives and like all living organisms it adapts. It is my view that is why social media as a meaningful term is doomed.

I think what is happening is this: social media will go its merry way, not really deserving the term. The intermediated media will continue to live with it and even deploy it to its own ends. The sensible public will continue to seek quality-assured material and know that mass-acclaim doesn’t guarantee it. The mass media will stay as it is: a series of niches.

So, I was dismayed to hear reports quoting Richard Edelman saying recently that the mass is dead and the future is public engagement. If that is so public relations is dead as Jarvis says, because the word public relates to the people as a whole. Hang on a moment, says I, let’s have a reality check all round.

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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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An article on Spiked-online usefully highlights how well Israel has used Twitter, blogging, YouTube, MyFace, Facebook, to mobilize online support. It also cannily wonders whether it all really adds up to very much.

The current Israeli attack on Hamas in Gaza may well be the first War 2.0 in the sense that Israel is using all the tools of the “social” web for its propaganda. Quite recently Georgia’s very highly developed sense of war PR got noted, but Israeli seems to have gone even further. The internet has become, as Spiked suggests, part of the battleground. We had better get used to it.

It is moot whether Israel is hoping to win new hearts and minds by this media barrage. A little like Barack Obama’s use of the same tools, it seems to be more about servicing and motivating its existing fan base.

It’s interesting how all this activity looks much more like a sophisticated version of broadcasting or narrowcasting than anything especially interactive. Israel is talking to audiences rather than engaging with them as four-minute men did during World War One, face-to-face with audiences throughout the US.

Personally, I am a little uneasy about the brevity of the messages (140 characters max). It’s inevitable and it’s part of the point. But it comes close to trivializing the very challenging facts and ideas which underlie the issue.

More generally, I am also a little challenged by the way the state is imitating teenagers. It is one thing for youngsters to chatter at each other but something else again when Heads of State – or armies – use the same techniques. A little like the grainy and phoney videos on David Cameron’s website, these approaches can seem curiously contrived.

Some Twitterings

The FT has commented:

San Francisco-based Twitter says it has grown 600 per cent in the past year in terms of numbers of users and expects to grow to 10 times its current size in the next 12 months. It currently has 4m-5m users, or Twitterers, according to estimates.”

Twitter is ideal for the handheld mobile internet. In countries such as Nigeria, India and Kenya the mobile inernet is the first internet and phone experience most users ever get. People have bypassed POTS and Web 1.0 and gone straight to Web 2.0. Twitter lets them have fun, network and share.

Curiously, Twitter is not entirely liberationist. It encourages a herd mentality: I follow so and so because it is good for water-cooler talk, or for my cool image. The larger the following a Twitter has, the less of a real community it represents.

Twitter commentator LeMeur highlights on his blog the 7000 posts from LeWEb posted over two days, and says:

We need filtering and search by authority. We’re not equal on Twitter, as we’re not equal on blogs and on the web. I am not saying someone who has more followers than yourself matters more, but what he says has a tendency to spread much faster.

I would add that depending on what’s being communicated, or who you seek to reach, quantity should never be confused with quality or influence. Targeting content (messages) at audiences is the key to the successful use of any communication channel, including Twitter. (If you want more on this, it is well covered from all sides of the debate by SWOM).

Hence, Twitter is developing specialized clones such as StockTwits.

But the point about Twitter, the lovely, attractive one, is that it encourages a certain anarchy. It requires, therefore, a certain restraint to be understood or used well by corporates, institutions, opinion makers for PR purposes (but used it can and should be as the likes of PepsiCo and Ford do).

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