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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So what kind of resolution should we be advising our clients to seek in this brave new world? Well, perhaps we should be telling them to win public confidence.

With the modern mantra people are told to trust only what’s transparent. The opaque will have to make a case for itself. Actually, I think almost all conspicuous transparency is fake. I am sure that in an honest world, we have to live with opacity. We need institutions to be capable of trustworthiness and secrecy and we require a public which accepts that fact.

There’s a difference between trust in individuals and confidence in institutions. Confidence is what brands are all about – it is the emotional bond marketing tries to generate – because it is about convincing people that promises will be fulfilled. As true friends know, true trust requires one to forgo the expectation of reciprocity as the basis of the relationship (call it open-ended). Confidence in firms and institutions, on the other hand, is conditional, negotiated and limited. As Norman Lewis usefully observes:

“Seligman [Adam B. Seligan's book The Problem of Trust] argues convincingly that if a trusting act was based upon calculation of expected outcomes or on the rational expectation of a quantified outcome, this would not be an act of trust at all but an act based on confidence.”

Here Norman Lewis explains:

“Trust not only entails negotiating risk, it implies risk (by definition, if it is a means of negotiating that which is unknown). But the risk is specific. It is based upon the implicit recognition of others’ capacity to act freely and in unexpected ways. Unconditionality and engagement sit at the heart of trust relations.”

Lewis supports Seligan’s argument for minimal state interference in privacy enforcement on the grounds that it would abolish risk and enshrine distrust in legal doctrine. They’re on to something that PRs know about; trust and reputations are about what people say and think about you, what they confer on you. Lewis remarks:

“Trust is therefore a very rare commodity and because it is based on free will, trust cannot be demanded, only offered and accepted. Trust and mistrust thus develop in relationship to free will and the ability to exercise that will, as different responses to aspects of behaviour that can no longer be adequately contained within existing norms and social roles.”

But I’m not sure that I share their distaste for legal sanctions as strongly as they do. Sometimes the law is required to put people and companies in their place. But that’s an issue of degree. I do share their desire to link levels of privacy corporations provide with levels of confidence people put in them. So where there is low trust or confidence there should be low privacy and vice verse.

In short, we should trust our lawyers and doctors with our inner lives. But we should be wary on Facebook of what we reveal and worry about what they will do with the information and why.

The best indication of the levels of consumer confidence that exist in society has to be the choices people make when it comes to spending their own money. Right now, the free services the likes of Google provide, gives them an incentive to betray our privacy. Otherwise they’d have no sustainable means of economic survival; no ad revenue and no innate value to attract investors.

However, that said, the key to success lies with PRs and their work to change social attitudes. This challenge is about managing relationships between firms and institutions and their various stakeholders. That requires that we engage and listen and respond to the real-world’s concerns.

We have to help firms and institutions set realistic and meaningful expectations about the bargain they are striking with different audiences, in return for the level of confidence they demand or expect from others. As Lewis insight-fully observes about life online:

“The tentative conclusion and the fundamental insight this approach offers is that privacy attitudes and behaviours will change according to the level of trust or mistrust people have with regard to the people or institutions they are interacting with. How much they trust the potential beneficiary of their self-disclosure is now [I say going to be] the overriding motivator of behaviour.”

If PRs want to be seen to be advocates for trust, confidence and reputations in society, this is among the biggest debates of all that we should seek to influence.

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PRs are well aware of the “Streisand Effect”, coined by Techdirt’s Mike Masnick, as the exposure in public of everything you try hardest to keep private, particularly pictures. Barbra Streisand, of course, tried to put the genie back in the bottle when she took legal action to have photographs of her home removed from the internet.

For celebrities, privacy and reclusiveness used to be a potent means of attracting attention and creating mystique. But, as Andrew Keen pointed out in his muse on Jerome David (J. D.) Salinger’s death, privacy is no longer a guarantor of publicity. We live in new times.

Here’s what Eric Schmidt has been saying recently to the WSJ:

“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” he elaborates. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.

“Let’s say you’re walking down the street. Because of the info Google has collected about you, we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are.”

He goes on:

“I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time.”

And he’s got a point. Upcoming facial recognition software will be able to identify people just from their photographs on the internet. It is unlikely that we will ban or restrict its usage, so we shall just have to learn to live with it.

The WSJ adds that Google also knows where exactly you are located (that’s the wonder of mobile devices). Supposedly, the next generation of smart mobile devices will be able to second-guess what you want. Schmidt claims:

“The thing that makes newspapers so fundamentally fascinating—that serendipity—can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically.”

Schmidt is certainly correct to imply that markets were always in the anticipation business. Goods are mostly produced for people in advance of their purchase and at considerable risk that there will be no demand for them. He says of the future:

“The power of individual targeting—the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them.”

The logic of Schmidt’s thinking is that he can take risk out of the equation. It is as if he believes that Google can ensure that every player in the marketplace is a winner. He seems to be advocating that we can have serendipitous-seeming planned production (I’ve stretched his logic a bit to highlight the utopianism he espouses).

What Schmidt overlooks, of course, is that his world view only works in “markets” that lack competition, and which favour oligarchical monopolies. I think Schmidt faces antitrust, competitiveness and consumer backlash issues over privacy, which might yet knock his vision for six.

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Browsing and Web searching are yesterday’s stuff, the next big thing is “getting” things from major suppliers on the internet via apps for a fee. In the words of Anderson and Michael Wolff in the latest Wired:

“Now it’s the Web’s turn to face the pressure for profits and the walled gardens that bring them. Openness is a wonderful thing in the nonmonetary economy of peer production. But eventually our tolerance for the delirious chaos of infinite competition finds its limits. Much as we love freedom and choice, we also love things that just work, reliably and seamlessly. And if we have to pay for what we love, well, that increasingly seems OK. Have you looked at your cell phone or cable bill lately?”

As Anderson and Wolff say, consumers will pay for convenience. How else can we explain the success of iTunes selling otherwise free music for 99 Cents a pop? And therein lies the secret of the internet.

Rather than professional content becoming valueless, it has risen – or is in the process of being resurrected – once more to become the most valued commodity of all in the media, distribution and consumer world:

“We are returning to a world that already exists — one in which we chase the transformative effects of music and film instead of our brief (relatively speaking) flirtation with the transformative effects of the Web.

“After a long trip, we may be coming home.”

Explaining how this works out in business terms, they say:

“…technologists have steered clear of actual media businesses, seeing themselves as renters of systems and third-party facilitators, often deeply wary of any involvement with content. (See, for instance, Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s insistence that his company is not in the content business.) Jobs, on the other hand, built two of the most successful media businesses of the past generation: iTunes, a content distributor, and Pixar, a movie studio. Then, in 2006, with the sale of Pixar to Disney, Jobs becomes the biggest individual shareholder in one of the world’s biggest traditional media conglomerates — indeed much of Jobs’ personal wealth lies in his traditional media holdings.”

What does this mean for PRs? Well, for starters the old top down model of influence still applies on the internet. PRs are going to have do some rethinking about how they advocate conversations, crowd sourcing and word of mouth PR. Some old-world notions of brands, reputation, quality and service are going to come back in to play (they never really went away). But at the same time, as Anderson and Wolf point out:

“…the so-called generative Web where everyone is free to create what they want, continues to thrive, driven by the nonmonetary incentives of expression, attention, reputation, and the like. But the notion of the Web as the ultimate marketplace for digital delivery is now in doubt.”

And, as Anderson and Wolff also note:

“According to Compete, a Web analytics company, the top 10 Web sites accounted for 31 percent of US pageviews in 2001, 40 percent in 2006, and about 75 percent in 2010. ‘Big sucks the traffic out of small,’ Milner [Yuri Milner] says. ‘In theory you can have a few very successful individuals controlling hundreds of millions of people. You can become big fast, and that favors the domination of strong people.’

“Milner sounds more like a traditional media mogul than a Web entrepreneur. But that’s exactly the point. If we’re moving away from the open Web, it’s at least in part because of the rising dominance of businesspeople more inclined to think in the all-or-nothing terms of traditional media than in the come-one-come-all collectivist utopianism of the Web. This is not just natural maturation but in many ways the result of a competing idea — one that rejects the Web’s ethic, technology, and business models. The control the Web took from the vertically integrated, top-down media world can, with a little rethinking of the nature and the use of the Internet, be taken back.”

So it’s not yet a done deal when it comes to who controls what and how. However the trend is certainly clear. The utopian dream of paradigm shifts is over. Welcome back to familiar reality – even if it is virtual and digital.

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The hacking of Google email accounts and the stealing of its worldwide log-in authentication code for every Google service, presumably by the Chinese military, threatened the brand’s core being. That’s because Google’s shareholder value depends on a combination of intellectual property and public trust, based on the exploitation of a worldwide web infrastructure it does not own or control. What’s more, Google can only optimise its money-making if its users divvy up more of their privacy in exchange for its world of “Free”.

So the pull-out from China was never about money. It was never about Google’s failure to gain market share in China. Neither was it about defending the right to the free flow of information or the freedom of speech. Google withdrew its co-operation with the Chinese government’s censorship of the internet in retaliation at the hacking of its users’ emails and the theft of the company’s property.

If Google’s users cannot rely on the privacy and security of the firm’s platforms, applications and services, then Google does not have a sustainable business model.

Google’s return to China – like its entry in to the market – comes with the implicit acceptance, however reluctantly conceded, that the government there has the right to restrict access to internet content. This time around, Google simply relocated its servers securely in Hong Kong. It has allowed the Great Firewall of China to censor access to them. It is a pragmatic compromise. As the BBC points out:

“The battle between Google and the Chinese government appears to have ended in a score-draw.”

Of course, Google’s reputation remains a victim of its split personality. On the one hand, the company was built on the premise of an ambiguous “Do No Evil” slogan and on the utopian notion of enabling unhindered free flow of data and information across the web. On the other, Google has always been a profit-driven, share-price sensitive animal, which pushes it to be pragmatic and not to be overly ideological in practice.

The latest development in China highlights how Google is growing up fast. It reveals a company which is learning how to keep hold of its integrity and USPs while remaining sensitive to the real-world forces and issues, many of which it is not in a position to influence. Nevertheless, Google has been scoring some own goals recently. One example was Google Buzz, which failed partly because its clumsy “auto-following contacts” in Gmail upset users. Another was the wifi privacy intrusions by Google’s mapping vehicles.

The PR challenge now for Google is to convince a sceptical world that it can be trusted long term with our personal and social networking details, viewing habits, interests and data. It’s my view that unless Google handles privacy issues well it will be replaced by the next big competitor that comes along. However, the news from China suggests that a grown up Google might survive into old age.

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I paid my subscription fee with something like pride. I felt it was – in the spirit of Andrew Keen – time to separate amateur from professional content. I warm to the sheer courage of the Murdoch organisation in assuming that they can ensure their content is so good people will pay for it.

The internet should not spell the death of journalism. Worthwhile news should not be free because it takes time, effort and expertise to produce. I’ve long opposed the likes of Clay Shirky’s worship of all things free and his dismissal of the value of professional journalism. In his widely-acclaimed “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable”, he said:

“You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

Well, now Rupert Murdoch is about to call Shirky’s bluff. Murdoch is set on proving that newspaper firms are in the business of satisfying otherwise unmet needs. That’s what Shirky does not get and it is why I parted with my money today. It is my view that pay-to-view will expose the online utopians such as Shirky as false prophets of doom, and soon.

By the way, I do accept that lots of what we call journalism is just copying out other people’s material, and lots of that material might just as well be posted online. I mean that firms, law courts, governments, local councils, charities, campaigners, militaries, sports events, and others will of course continue to develop techniques of providing information online for free. And I can imagine that there may be other ways of ensuring the truthfulness of such material than having journalists, or even PRs, assessing it before or whilst passing it on. And yes, I can imagine that wire services may increasingly become an important port of call by consumers.

In such a world, newspapers may struggle to make the case that they are indispensable. But I think also that in the new world where there is an extraordinary quantity of information, newspaper-like organisations will make a handsome living as trusted filters and verifiers and investigators and commentators.

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Before we go on, it is worth building on part 1′s theme: what exactly do the Stockholm Accords expect to achieve? Here’s what the event’s website says about their objective:

“The aim of the Stockholm Accords is to articulate and establish the role of public relations in the “communicativeorganization”[sic] within a fast-evolving digital and value-network society.”

In essence, the Accords suppose that we live in a new “networked society in which communicative organizations are vital to organisational success” (forgive the clumsy words, they’re theirs, not mine).

In essence my beef is that this exercise over-complicates everything. Most PR is an effort to help clients both be and appear more attractive. You can usefully enrich that proposition by noting that there are internal and external audiences; that everything about an organisation can be part of its good or bad messages; that building up a good reputation may be useful for when things go wrong (as they will). One may want to stress how non-stop and intrusive and persistent modern observers are. Perversely, the globalised, modern world is more like a village than ever: everybody thinks everything is their business.

As I argued in part 1, the Accords ignore the obvious: society is, and always has been, networks personified. Moreover, all human interaction depends upon communication and relationships, or nothing whatever would have been or will ever be achieved. Of course, the digital bit is sort of new. I say sort of because the internet is now second or third generation. It strikes me that the Accords’ authors are really saying that their thinking boils down to considering technology’s influence on human behaviour. This narrow obsession has sent them and their new definition of PR’s role off in the wrong direction.

There’s no wisdom in a mob, but there’s often treasure buried in crowds. So, of course, I accept there is something in Reed’s Law. (See: “The Law of the Pack”). I accept its proposition that digital networks can scale exponentially by transforming technological platforms into social networks that add value. But in the business world, Reed’s Law is just a statement of potential. It remains a theoretical construct that might prove to be hopeless if taken too far. The commercial world is in recession. It is not currently up for the risky experimentation and investment that would be required to test the weaknesses and strengths of Reed’s Law. This is something I discussed in part 1 No. 2 & No. 14 (without mentioning Reed). In part 1, I also cited SM’s irrelevance in the British General Election and its only fleeting influence on American politics.

My charge is that the authors of the Stockholm Accords lack historical or sociological insight. Most of today’s social developments from the breakdown of traditional politics, to the shift in community alignments, or the fall of religious influence, to the decline in trust in, and authority of, traditional institutions, pre-dates the internet.

In other words, the internet and social media usage were shaped in the wake of already existing currents, including the already declining mass media. That was particularly the case with SM, which is more often used as a retreat from public life rather than as its lifeblood. That’s one thing China’s SM usage has in common with the West’s. There’s mass disengagement and passivity in society, which is the polar opposite of empowerment, which so many public relations professionals (let’s just call them ‘PRs’) like to crow about. That’s not to say SM is irrelevant, or that it does not have influence or empower people, sometimes, in this or that circumstance or usage.

It is the failure of the Stockholm Accords to look at these real world tensions during the boom and now during the recession, and the Accords’ myopic worship of all things digital, which I criticise. But let me make it plain. This blog celebrates technology and advocates innovation. It is obsessed with understanding them and with exploiting their potential. But it does not endorse technological determinism, which I believe the Accords’ authors do.

So, that’s the preamble. Let’s now look at the Stockholm Accords one by one.

Stockholm Accords on governance:

“The increasingly adopted stakeholder governance model empowers board members and organisational leaders as ultimate custodians of stakeholder relationship strategies and policies, as well as of monitoring their implementation.

“In today’s value networks, a communicative organization requires timely knowledge of economic, social, political, legal and environmental developments, as well as opportunities and risks affecting the organisation, its direction, its actions and its communication.

“Public relations professionals:
• co-create organizational values, principles, strategies, policies and processes;
• constantly report on the dynamics of stakeholder involvement;
• inform, shape the organisation’s overall communication abilities;
•  measure, evaluate and account for results;
• deliver timely analysis and recommendations to ensure an effective governance of stakeholder relationships, enhancing transparency, trust and sustaining the organisation’s ‘licence to operate.’”

My reply

I dealt with the above extensively in part 1. But let me now add a few more brief remarks;

• The stakeholder governance model or doctrine is seriously flawed. An organisation can’t look to outsiders as the first source of its probity and efficiency.
• Firms, governments and institutions primarily pursue self-interest. This will include a measure of enlightened and widened self-interest.
• PR is indeed uniquely useful in our complicated, media-orientated times. But we should beware over-stating the newness of our skills and roles.

Stockholm Accords on management:

“Effective and timely decision-making related to operations and resource management are essential for organizations seeking to enhance their license to operate. These management choices must be sensitive to the concerns of internal and external stakeholders, seeking equilibrium between societal and organizational goals.
A communicative organization listens to its stakeholders, uses this input to improve the quality of its decisions, and communicates through its behavior.

“Public relations professionals:
° help understand and interpret broader societal, political and economic interests and aspirations;
° participate to the solution of organizational issues and lead those that are particularly focused on stakeholder relationships;
° help to legitimize the organization; by increasing the communicative value of products, processes, services; and building financial, legal, relational and operational capital.”

My reply

Yes, PRs are the professional diplomats of the modern organisation’s internal and external relationships. But we won’t do the job better by having theories and ambitions which are too fancy for the valuable but recognisable work they have to do. Way too much of the Stockholm Accords’ approach brings in more posy sociology, management-speak, media studies, post modern guff. This is the way to lose the interest of clients and audiences alike.

Stockholm Accords on sustainability:

“An organization’s sustainability is based on balancing today’s demands with the ability to meet future needs, based on economic, environmental and social dimensions.

“In this network society, sustainability leadership offers a transformational opportunity for the communicative organization to enhance it’s license to operate and demonstrate success across the triple bottom  line.- economic, social and environmental.

“Public relations professionals identify, involve and engage key stakeholders contributing to appropriate sustainability policies and programs by:
• interpreting society’s expectations for sound economical, social and environmental investments that show a return to the organization (the advocate);
• creating a listening culture – an open system that allows the organization to anticipate, adapt and respond (the listener);
• ensuring stakeholder participation to identify what information should be transparently and authentically reported (the reporter);
• going beyond today’s priorities to anticipate the needs of tomorrow, by engaging stakeholders and management in long-term thinking (the leader).”

My reply

Sustainability has to do with robustness and flexibility, which can be darn hard things to reconcile. We need to be modest: sustainability is about the future, a thing we know very little about. We should not pretend to know the recipe for survival (or to assume, for instance, that environmentalists are any cleverer at it than supposedly un-green capitalists).

Stockholm Accords on the new boundaries of internal communication:

“Internal communication enhances recruitment, retention, development of employee loyalty and commitment to organizational goals by ever more diverse and segmented publics.

“In the network society a communicative organization goes far beyond today’s traditional definition of full-time employees, understanding that internal stakeholders now include full-timers with tenure generally shortening, part-timers, seasonal employees, contractors, consultants, suppliers, agents, distributors, volunteers and more.

“Public relations professionals constantly address:
° how organizational leaders communicate;
° how knowledge is shared;
° how decisions are made;
° how processes and structures are created;
° and expand communication to include many boundary publics that are also often considered as highly trusted sources of information about the organization and essential players contributing to the organization’s success.”

My reply

Yes, many of an organisation’s relationships are now both important and fleeting or arm’s length. Actually, that will often require an unattractive wariness. The need for secrecy, privacy and caution is greater than ever and has to be communicated as well as possible.

Stockholm Accords on the new boundaries of external communication:

“The network society mandates that a communicative organization expand its scope and skills to focus on customers*, investors*, communities*, governments*, active citizenship groups*,  industry groups*, mainstream, digital and social media*, and other situational stakeholders*.

“Public relations professionals:
° promote, support and contribute to modify products, services or processes;
° bring the voice of the organization into regulatory and community decisions;
° adopt social networking and research skills and tools to listen to stakeholder demands and report to management so that they may be appropriately interpreted and, where relevant and effective, integrated into the decision making process;
° strengthen brand loyalty* and equity*, thus reinforcing the organization’s license to operate;
° work with all organizational functions, through every step of production and delivery, to craft and implement effective communication programs*.
° actively participate in dialogue*, evaluate and measure results*, and accordingly adjust their practices.”

My reply

This looks like PR’s pitch to stick its nose in everywhere. Nice try, and to some extent justified.

Stockholm Accords on co-ordination of internal and external communication:

“In value networks, each communicative issue* is multi faceted*, multi stakeholder* and inter relational within and between different networks* and positioned in diverse legal frameworks.

“The communicative organization must balance global transparency, finite resources and time sensitive demands dealing with dynamic changes in inside/outside territorial borders and new conflicts of interests emerging from multiple stakeholder participation*.
Dialogue with internal, boundary and external stakeholders must be coordinated with the organization’s mission*, vision*, values*, implementation*, promises*, as well as actions* and behaviors*.

“Public Relations professionals:
° research, develop, monitor and adjust organizational behavior and communication behaviors providing leadership for issues based on stakeholder and societal relationships;
° develop a knowledge base that includes social and psychological sciences, best practices and formative research to create, evaluate, measure and implement programs for continuous improvement.”

My reply

This looks like a pitch for PRs to be rulers of the universe: all-seeing, all-knowing, etc. I don’t mind this accord but it is not so much edifying and energising as yawn-making. How about: “Almost every aspect of your work will convey a message about your organisation, so expect a good PR to take an interest in everything you do.”

No related pages.

Pulling together hundreds of academics, public relations professionals (let’s just call them ‘PRs’) and business leaders to meet in Stockholm to discuss the role of public relations today is a great idea. This post is a contribution to that debate. I want to try to frame discussion.

Yes, the world is changing for our employers and clients, and especially for our best customers in big business and big government. Yes, PRs are trying to position their trade in this new world. Yes, PRs feel that the world of new media is changing the ground under their feet. However it is my contention that the current new-wave of thinking being expressed in the Stockholm Accords has not been thought-through properly. It is open to serious question and in some cases should be rejected altogether.

I have two prongs to my attack. One is that the Accords do not describe the problems well. The second is that they won’t work, and that’s partly because people will see that the premises are wrong, and partly because the Accord’s assumptions steer our clients away from the kind of robust messaging which stands a chance of surviving scrutiny and events.

Because the proposed Accords are complex, I’ve decided to post my contribution in three parts. The first will interrogate the glossary of terms which inform the overall thinking of the Accords. The second will examine the Accords themselves on Governance, Management, Sustainability, Internal and External (communication), and Coordination. The third will offer a much shorter summary of my key points of concern and some pointers to taking a more robust approach.

I’ve decided to print in full what the glossary says so that I cannot be accused of quoting out of context and so that people can make their own assessments by contrasting what’s been said. Here goes:

1. Stockholm Accords on stakeholder governance model:

“It implies that a corporation’s board of directors, or the elected leadership of a social or public sector organization, in the case of conflicts between contrasting stakeholder group expectancies decided which of them needs to be taken more into account, on the basis of a sound listening of those expectancies.

“The shareholder model instead – even when it recognizes that other interests beyond those of the shareholders need to be taken into account- tends to privilege, in the case of conflicting expectations, the latter.”

My reply

The idea that all stakeholders are equal is erroneous. To pretend that organisations think they are is to be open immediately to charges of double-speak.

Shareholders set the objectives of firms, control them through shareholder democracy, provide the funds to run businesses and reap the rewards from their long-term success while carrying the risks from their failure. Firms and institutions have self-interest at their core and there should be no shame in saying so. Of course, other stakeholder interests need to be taken account of to fulfill shareholder expectations because firms fulfill their objectives by providing goods or services which add value to society.

I’ve spelled out what’s wrong with today’s all-to-prevalent stakeholder doctrine and presented a manifesto in defence of shareholder value elsewhere on my PR blog here and here.

2. Stockholm Accords on value network:

“In the network society, the traditional and consolidated strategic planning process based on Michael Porter’s value chain model, which is mostly linear and material, is either replaced or at least integrated by another planning process based on value networks.

“This recognizes that much of the value created by the organization stems today from fuzzy (and not linear) and immaterial (rather than material) networks that normally disintegrate the distinction between internal and external publics because their components play specific and value added roles or are expelled from the value process.

“The value itself is based on the quality of the relationships which exist between the various components of each network and on the quality of the relationships which exist between the various networks.”

My reply

Society has always consisted of a collection of social networks held together by common values and interests. The question we need to address is what’s new about how they’re formed and interrelate. We need to ask sociological questions rather than get obsessed with technology and novelty.

Michael Porter’s supply chain model is as appropriate today as is Adam Smith’s account of the productivity boost and added value that comes from the division of labour in society (Porter just builds upon that sound logic: see also No. 14 in this text). Moreover, society is experiencing the exact opposite tendency to the one described in the Stockholm Accords. Value networks based on class and traditional communities are breaking down, as are old fashioned political allegiances and ideologies. But these social developments pre-date the internet and social media. They are hurting newspaper circulation, hollowing out political party organisations and undermining people’s self-definition as members of this or that class or community. In that sense traditional value networks are disintegrating.

It is also a myth (approaching technological determinism) that the internet and SM has created a new world of meaningful value networks. Take politics and public opinion. The UK election just showed that the internet is almost irrelevant to politics and to political outcomes (see here, here and here). The US election showed how the internet can have a major influence on politics, but not quite the way many commentators claimed. Even there it still played second fiddle to mainstream media, as demonstrated here. It is worth noting that the US-experience was a temporary one-off. There’s no relationship being forged between Obama and the masses via social media today, because a relationship is not a relationship unless it is ongoing. Moreover, as the 50-year-old and even older Tea Party GOP veterans turn to social media to vent their anger, Obama’s more youthful team increasingly condemns the medium itself (see here).

3. Stockholm Accords on the communicative organization:

“A communicative organization recognizes that even the most empowered public relations director cannot realistically hope to govern more than 10% of its communicative behaviours.

“Therefore the communication leader of the organization plays two fundamentally strategic roles:

“an ‘ideological’ role by supporting and providing the organization’s leadership with the necessary, timely and relevant information which allows it to effectively  govern the value networks as well as an intelligent, constant and conscious effort to understand the relevant dynamics of society at large;

“a ‘contextual’ role which implies the constant delivery of communicative skills, competencies and tools to the components of its value networks so that they improve their relationships amongst each other and with the other value networks.”

My reply

This is third-rate Machiavellian thinking. Indeed, its whole tone is the very reverse of the ”listening”, associative, socialised entites the Accords seem mostly to want our clients to aspire to become.

I insist PRs are not in the job of governing behaviour; not even among 10% of their audience. PRs do not and never should act like propagandists playing “an ‘ideological’ role” that seeks to “govern value networks”. PRs communicate as advocates. PRs seek to influence behaviour; not govern it. They influence debate and opinion and try to ensure positive outcomes on behalf of their employers. PRs explain and spread understanding and attempt to win consent for the views and activities of whomever they represent. Of course, that involves developing messages, positioning clients and defining what they stand for and wish to be known for. It also involves writing the narratives that connect with audiences, and it mostly requires us to cooperate with other groups by taking on-board their views and stances in a meaningful fashion (one that maximizes or acknowledges mutual benefits and honest disagreements). This was always so. But if there is a difference today to the past it is that the role and importance of professional PRs in ensuring positive outcomes is more understood and valued than before. Another major difference is that most post-1945 communication assumptions are becoming redundant precisely because there’s fewer clearly defined value networks of substance in play. Right now there appears to be more atomization and social disengagement in society than ever, which the internet and SM for all its potential doesn’t bridge and often accentuates.

4. Stockholm Accords on licence to operate:

“To reach its conscious objectives every organization needs to constantly nurture and improve its ‘licence to operate’ by improving relationships with its stakeholder groups and society at large on whose opinions, attitudes, behaviours and decisions the achievement of organizational objectives rely on.”

My reply

This is fine as far as it goes. But it is both obvious and empty. An organisation’s real licence to operate is its legality, the demand for its services and the willingness of people to deal with it. I have seen very few instances of the informal “licence to operate” being withdrawn where real-world acceptability was in place.

5. Stockholm Accords on boundary spanning and/or issue management:

“Beyond its direct and indirect relationships with active or potential stakeholder groups, the organization needs to identify and analyse those economic, political, social, technological issues whose dynamics impact on the achievement of its strategic and tactical objectives.

“In doing this and in prioritizing those issues through a careful importance/possibility-to-influence analysis, the organization must identify those subjects who either directly or indirectly impact on those dynamics and dialogue with them to convince them to either reduce their hostility or increase their support for the organization’s objectives.”

My reply

I agree. With luck PRs do operate as antennae, spotting reputational downsides and opportunities beyond the purview of clients who may well be too busy perfecting widgets to have ears to the ground, etc. And PRs ought to be good at spotting social changes which require changes in their clients’ behaviour.

6. Stockholm Accords on sustainability:

“In organizational management speak the term (once also defined as corporate social responsibility or CSR) is used to indicate those policies and programs which ensure the economic, environmental and social being of the organization well beyond the short and medium term, and is directly connected to its licence to operate, the quality of its stakeholder relationships as well as the concern for societal and presumed future generations expectations.”

My reply

This is a minefield in which a lot of nonsense gets said. Some firms and institutions are in it for the long term and some merely (but just as reasonably) for the short term (that goes for shareholder value too). Organisational structures are rarely sustainable because they are designed to meet specific challenges at specific times; hence the saying “the only certainty is change”. The word “sustainable” does not always fit comfortably with the word “development”. Of course that does not mean that firms ought to sacrifice their long term interests in return for short term gains. One of the big issues in society – perhaps partly responsible for the recession – has been the pressure to boost short term shareholder value at the expense of long term business success and at the risk of business implosion and collapse.

7. Stockholm Accords on economic, environmental, social dimensions -  transformational opportunity:

“Sustainability policies and programs, even more than external consequences for the organization, represent possibly the most relevant leverage for its leadership to drive internal cultural change and transformation.”

My reply

I think this means that being environmentally aware may achieve nothing much except for a feel-good factor within the organisation. This is OK so far as it goes but it seems (a) a bit inward looking and (b) a terrible mangling of the English language.

8. Stockholm Accords on stakeholders:

Are those publics which are aware and interested in dialogue with the organization because its activities bear consequences on them and/or whose activities bear consequences on the organization.

Potential stakeholders are instead those public which, if made aware of the organizations strategic or tactical objectives, would be interested in dialogue with the organization. The prevalent communicative mode with the first is pull and for the second, at least initially, is push.”

My reply

I have dealt with this issue above and refer readers to an in-depth piece by me here.

9. Stockholm Accords on advocate, listener, reporter, leader:

“These four roles of the organization’s communication function, as much as the internal articulation may allow, imply different professional skills and competencies.

“While the advocate needs to be highly familiar with the contents of the argument to be advocated as well as nurture rhetoric skills, the listener must know the basics of desk analysis, opinion and attitude research as well as be equipped with the skills to objectively comprehend and subjectively interpret inspired by organizations objectives the collected materials.

“In turn, the reporter needs to be an excellent narrator capable of finding the correct formats and preparing the most attractive contents to attract the attention of organizational stakeholders while the leader needs to be highly credible inside the organization as well as be a good manager in enabling other to be effective in group and project work.”

My reply

This sounds like a CV written by an over-educated and under-experienced chancer.

The real danger here is that listening and an over-reliance on research leads to confusion, indecision, caution and the abdication of responsibility by decision-makers. In a world as fluid as ours there is often not a coherent set of views, or even a clearly defined audience (never mind audiences) to examine and interpret what’s in their interest. The duty of PRs is more to help their bosses lead than it is to help them listen; though listening is a must-have PR skill. The real problem is defining what the public interest is, which is far from easy. Mostly it is not definable by opinion surveys or research. The public interest is a constantly changing reality; a moving target. Moreover, PRs are not the best advocates of the public interest or in the best position to interpret it objectively because they represent their employers first and foremost. Suspicious minds might also remark that no company ever claims to act against the pubic interest and that no PR campaign ever made opposing it a positive part of its platform.

10. Stockholm Accords on falling boundaries between internal and external communication:

“With every individual potentially being a globally accessible medium and with the constant decline in credibility of institutions and authorities, traditional internal publics are increasingly being considered as the most trusted sources of information from the organization.

“Vice versa, and for the same reasons, any customer or supplier or competitor opinion on the organization is immediately accessible by traditional internal publics.

“What is more, border publics such as shareholders, consultants, agents and partners are considered highly credible subject by both traditional internal and external publics.  Most boundaries between publics are tumbling down.”

My reply

Yes, everyone’s got an opinion and it’s amazing who gets attention. So yes, you want to be in touch with a huge range of voice. But – and it’s a huge but – firms, governments, institutions, NGOs and all our clients still have to aim to get trusted, and they’ll do it best by speaking in a trustworthy way about their work.

11. Stockholder Accords on leadership communication:

“Organization increasingly define and attempt to implement policies and programs which imply coherent and cross functional leadership styles. This is a core and natural role for public relations professionals operating inside or working for the organization.”

My reply

Perhaps, and certainly it’s the job of PR to grease the wheels of whatever structure our clients fancy. But fashions change. One day, the business is a network or a matrix. The next it’s a series of radiating lines. Like, one day organisation is by region, the next by function.

The fact is, old-style top-down management techniques still predominate the business world today for good reasons. Even so-called old-fashioned silos still make business sense and define best practice – not least for setting lines of accountability and responsibility. Moreover, successful and innovative businesses today are increasingly centralised and command and control-led: look at Apple, Google, Facebook, Ryanair and Microsoft. Some businesses do well with a decentralized and locally empowering approach, such as coffee shops and other retail chains (though only up to a point because their backbones are tight and efficient). It is worth noting that many of Toyota’s recent problems were caused by over-centralisation on the one hand, and a too loose a grip on its suppliers on the other (so there’s always a tension involved in managing such challenges successfully).

At the level of the state we can expect to see lots of change (for instance, the US state may do more, the UK state less). States’ management and regulation of the economy is changing fast, and unpredictably. Firms and the Third Sector may get much more involved in previously non-commercial welfare roles. The transition and restructuring that all this involves will require a lot of consensus-busting and unavoidable conflict. Such an environment requires honest and robust PR. It also requires a rejection of much of the language, logic and thinking currently being proposed in the Stockholm Accords. Increasingly, both firms and governments are going to have to be brutal to survive – let’s not pretend otherwise.

12. Stockholm Accords on knowledge sharing:

“The sharing of knowledge inside and increasingly also outside the organization is considered one of the more precious immaterial assets in and amongst value networks.

“This is enhanced by smooth and productive relationships amongst network components and the public relations professional in appropriately performing h/er ‘contextual’ role can be instrumental.”

My reply

Holding on to intellectual property has never been more important or more difficult. But sure, firms and other institutions probably should be more adventurous in their pro bono use of their skills, wisdom and information.

13. Stockholm Accords on decision making processes:

“Effective and timely decision making process are essential to the success of the organization. By professionally listening to, understanding and interpreting stakeholder expectations before decisions are made by management, the public relations professional allows leadership to improve the quality of those decisions, to accelerate the time of their implementation and, in those recurring circumstances in which decisions are not adapted to include a specific stakeholder group expectancies, allows the organization to better anticipate and prepare to deal with potentially disrupting actions by that stakeholder group.”

My reply

This is a statement of the obvious.

14. Stockholm Accords on processes and structure:

“Ever changing processes and structures inside and amongst value networks are constantly framing change management programs of the organization. Change management, if and when it really works, mostly relies on sound and realistic objectives and effective relationships, which in turn are driven by good communication.”

My reply

Again this is motherhood stuff. However there could be something in this that the authors of the Stockholm Accords don’t get. Some modern companies are increasingly partner-focused and dependent on integrated inter-company networks. The success of such endeavours requires collaboration and the management of processes throughout the value chain. This is very much in line with Michael Porter’s thinking, which the authors of the Accords mistakenly believe is now largely redundant (see No. 2). The innovation here lies in the introduction of end-to-end data access between the various companies. In other words it is about the integration of one company’s internal information systems with another’s. The objective is for staff from different firms to work in sync to maximize the use of social and technological capital. Of course, this does throw up some challenges for PRs, but it is much more the realm of CIOs and other business disciplines than it is of ours. Moreover, such developments do not put a stop to command and control or top down leadership techniques, even though they encourages collaboration and real-time decision making. I’m of the opinion that it is from this fledgling field of cross-company systems integration, in which social media could play a major innovative role, that the Accords’ authors grabbed the term “value network”, and then bent it out of shape and made it valueless.

15. Stockholm Accords on stakeholder groups:

“These are individuals and organizations who are aware and interested in developing a relationship with the organization because the organization’s actions bear consequences on them or through their actions they bear consequences on the organization. Not necessarily a favourable relationship.

“These stakeholder groups are not chosen by the organization, but decide by themselves to be and act as stakeholders. It is clearly up to the organization to acknowledge them and to responsibly involve and/or engage with them, at its own peril.”

My reply

I have tirelessly – indeed to the point of tedium – combatted the idea that all and sundry are one’s stakeholders. I do accept that it’s no use assuming one’s critics are one’s enemies and can be ignored or fought, as opposed to schmoozed, co-opted, or otherwise engaged where possible. I think it is also true, by the way, that one’s clients’ supposed friends are often very false. So sure, a PR’s job is to engage widely. But reticence will sometimes be useful, and it can be extremely dangerous to pretend to be all things to all men.

16. Stockholm Accords on situational stakeholders:

“Stakeholder groups may also be situational as they form and dissolve according to social and organizational dynamics which need to be carefully monitored by the public relations professional.”

My reply

Well said. That’s a pompous way of saying that a lot of one’s support and opposition is temporary and opportunistic. It doesn’t do to get too bogged down in today’s PR battles. As is the case in bringing up children, quite often problems have just gone away long before one’s worked out a clever strategy to deal with them.

17. Stockholm Accords on brand loyalty:

“This is a traditional marketing term which has grown to include the quality, the trust, the commitment and the power balance of the relationship of a customer or any other stakeholder with the organization.”

My reply

It’s a big mistake to think that there is much new about brands: they were always valuable and wide-ranging. Just think of what Ford or Boots or Cadbury or ICI meant to people. Anyway the statement, like much of the wording of the Accords, reads like an assault on the English language, which does little to enhance our image as professional communicators.

18. Stockholm Accords on brand equity:

“This is one of the immaterial values attributed to an organization’s overall capitalization. Often expressed in monetary terms, this value is calculated by conventions amongst peers which relate monetary value to immaterial indicators.”

My reply

Agreed. Intangibles such as reputation have a direct influence on tangibles such as share price and market share.

19. Stockholm Accords on dialogue, participation:

“An organization’s stakeholder relationships may be differently categorised according to their acknowledgement, involvement, engagement, separation, divorce programs. A relationship begins with the two subjects acknowledging each other (acknowledgement); then proceeds when the organization stimulates its stakeholder groups to access the information they believe stakeholder groups require to keep abreast on their relationship and are enabled to provide feedback (involvement); the organization may also decide that in order to more effectively achieve its objectives it should engage some of its stakeholder groups in direct dialogue and conversation on specific issues in order to find mutually beneficial outcomes (engagement):

“Sometimes this does not work, and there is a period of time between separation and divorce in which the organization can attempt to involve them”

My reply

The degree to which any organisation engages with another is driven by self-interest. Of course it can be enlightened. Anyway, isn’t this Accords statement a complicated PC way of saying the obvious: that you often need to sup with a long spoon?

20. Stockholm Accords on success, evaluation and measurement:

“The most importance measure of success for public relations professionals, beyond the visible and tangible achievement of the organization’s specific objectives, within a given time frame and a given amount of financial and human resources, is based one or more selected evaluation or measurement tools which today are abundant and certainly no fewer than those available to other management functions. Evaluation implies the prevalent use of qualitative tools while measurement implies a prevalent use of quantitative tools. The new frontier, as is happening for other management functions, relies in quantilitative (sic) tools which integrate both evaluation and measurement.”

My reply

“Quantilative”: we can hope that doesn’t last. There’s an obsession with measuring intangibles which borders on nonsense. It is partly driven by the research industry itself (call it their marketing success) and partly by insecure PRs trying to justify their budgets. Much of what constitutes research and its results is self-justification and not to be trusted. Some is invaluable. Naturally enough, as a PR you will be valued when you prove yourself in a crisis. The rest of the time you’re trying to prove you’re valuable because of something which didn’t happen, and that’s a tough call.

21. Stockholm Accords on communicative issue:

“A communicative issue is one which, in its analysis and operative process by the organization coherently with its objectives, implies and requires an above average focus on stakeholder relationships and effective communication.”

My reply

I have a feeling that a “communicative issue” is a communication problem or opportunity. So that would be an issue involving diplomacy and messages. Do you mind if I repeat that our trade does itself no good when it wraps simple ideas in the kind of windy guff that is more in place in a third-rate sociology department?

22. Stockholm Accords on Multifaceted, multi-stakeholder, inter-relational:

The concepts of network society, value networks and communicative organizations imply that issues are more than often multifaceted (they provide different perspectives and angles according to the single stakeholder group perspective), multi-stakeholder (individuals and organizations increasingly belong to parallel stakeholder groups who may even have conflicting interests, for example shareholders, employees and sometimes even suppliers…), and inter relational in that value network components may in parallel belong to more than one network and perform different roles which implies that relationships amongst value network components as well as different value networks may be also in conflict.”

My reply

There’s nothing new in the insight that society consists of a tangle of webs in which contradictory values and interests co-exist. (Bernays, for instance, was clear about that.) It has also always been the case that most people rarely grasp how their differing interests are irreconcilable or at least conflicting, or even how downright hypocritical their own views are. It was always true that customers could be shareholders, employees, activists and consumers. The truth is we can’t have it all and often we don’t know what we want anyway.

23. Stockholder Accords on networks:

“Networks are today the core components of society, as well as of single public, social, private or mixed organizations.”

My reply

There’s never been a society without networks. Society is networks personified.

24. Stockholm Accords on mission, vision, values, strategy, implementation, promises, actions, behaviour:

“The mission describes the organization’s identity. The vision describes the organization’s aspiration to be in a defined time frame. The values are related to the defined behaviour the organization declares to abide to in migrating from mission to vision. The strategy is the path the organization decides to pursue in its migration from mission to vision; while the business plan defines the operative steps the organization plans to implement to pursue that strategy.

“The promise is what the organization claims it will deliver to and with its stakeholder groups. The actions are the operative behaviour of the organization in implementing its business plan, and communication is in itself a behaviour.”

My reply

Almost all mission statements play down the things an organisation really has to do and play up the things its critics would like it to do. Fine: but since most mission statements also make one feel slightly sick, one can hope they either wise-up or go out of fashion.

25. Stockholm Accords on highly trusted sources (Edelman trust barometer):

“For many years now, Edelman Worldwide has been conducting an annual global effort to monitor the concept of organizational trust by different stakeholder groups. The overriding ‘fil rouge’ is that official and institutional sources are decreasing in public trust while peers and friends and neighbours are increasing.”

My reply

The latest Edelman trust survey points in the other direction altogether. People’s trust in “people like me” is falling rapidly as a consequence of the recession as people seek authoritative sources of information and opinion. This is a trend PRs should encourage. I believe that the faith people supposedly put in “people like me” was always overblown and now it appears to be no longer even fashionable to make such claims.

I agree that PR can’t altogether ignore or disparage the anti-institutional fashion. If social media networks are now what people trust, PR has to get in amongst the social media and get heard there (and, yes, listen carefully too). But the big thing to remember is that “people like me” are less likely to have means of being serious, informed, experienced or even honest than do well-managed, long-haul, publicly-accountable bodies of the kind PRs get paid to represent. Doctors have to stand by science-based medicine; astronomers understand the heavens better than astrologers; I’d rather fly in a Boeing than by levitation. Likewise, PRs need to value honest, serious, information: they need to know it when they see it; promote it fairly; and defend it against the shrill relativism of much social media and vox pop noise.

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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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