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

But such views ignore some major issues.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The three building blocks which constitute E2.0 are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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The report explored Wikileaks’ claim to speak truth to power by pulling down the controlling, secretive barriers the establishment erects to protect itself. Wikileaks uses zillions of ISPs to bounce leaks from whistle-blowers around the world leaving no way of tracing the originators.

This insurgent, trendy phenomenon has some impressive backers in the media world who endorse the idea that it’s good to leak. These include AP, the Los Angeles Times and The National Newspaper Association, according to Wikileaks.

Perhaps they’re seeking novel ways to do investigative journalism in the face of cutbacks in budgets; a case of old media seeking new lifelines through new media. According to The National, “Wikileaks has probably produced more scoops in its short life than the Washington Post has in the past 30 years.”

Wikileaks (ominously, in my view) is currently behind attempts to introduce legislation in Iceland to turn the island into an offshore “Switzerland of bits“, a safe haven for digital leaks. They’ve positioned it tantalizingly as a potential new business model for the bankrupt country.

Let’s unpick this and begin with the question: whatever happened to trust?

Is every leak a blow on a whistle that can justify itself in the public interest? Aren’t we supposed to want more trust in society? Does that exclude firms and official bodies hoping to trust their employees? How should we balance the tension between trust and the right to whistle-blow?

Well, as somebody who thinks that trust is vital to the functioning of a healthy society, I think the balance has to weigh – even positively favour - the right of institutions and individuals to keep things private, secret and confidential over the right of others to leak.

We have to trust that one another’s rights are going to be protected or we will destroy the bonds that make society function pleasantly and decently, not to say ethically and legally. Transparency has its place, but so does opacity. Reputations have a right to protection against defamation and they have the right to the benefit of the doubt when attacked, just as private property does.

We all have public, private and sometimes very separate other lives which would collapse like a house of cards if they were made transparent. Hence, the restraining arm of the law has a valuable role to play when it comes to protecting our collective freedoms.

That’s why as PR I have recently been on the side of gagging orders on behalf of John Terry, Tiger Woods, Trafigura and the British National Party membership list.

Very often, I have been glad that these issues are under the control of the courts, and very often I’ve found that the careful balancing of peoples’ competing human rights (to privacy, to free speech) are more sound than some giddy free-for-all masquerading as a crusade against censorship or for open-ness.

However, I accept it is a moot point whether the US justice system handles such matters better than does, say, the UK. But, whatever, I’m against a truly free press, just as I’m for democracy precisely because as well as protecting our freedoms, it limits them.

The UK Cabinet and any other organisation have a right to keep some things under wraps. They also have a right to expect that people they hire in any capacity will feel obliged not to betray them.

As a PR I know that the most embarrassing part of most crises is the behind-the-scenes highly-strung incompetence, panic and failure of leadership under pressure. My colleagues and I have always mediated that nonsense: that’s our job.

In a crisis the role of PRs is to keep the focus on the real issues the outside world cares about. Mostly, PRs put out fires which have little fuel but which generate lots of heat. But if ever we leak the detail of the inside insecurities we witness, the outcome becomes far worse than the original crisis warrants.

For instance, the problem at Three Mile Island was the stream of conscious transparency that the operators presented to the world as they grappled to grasp what had gone on inside their malfunctioning reactor. That was the very opposite of a cover up.

So it is no wonder, then, that governments want and should have the right to keep much of their inner workings secret. The same should go for companies and individuals. Moreover, at the heart of any profession is a lack of transparency – call it client confidentiality – which makes them honourable and trustworthy. Lots of people can do good, but not if what they say is leaked. As a list of such types, let’s begin with PRs, lawyers, priests, doctors, consultants and therapists. I don’t mean that every confidence accepted by every one of those is of equal importance and equally inviolate. I mean that very often what these people know is useful because it’s private.

That’s why Wikileaks is bad news. It is why I am pleased that it is currently so short of funds that it cannot function properly. And it is why I think that it would be in society’s interest to curb the power and effectiveness of this new threat.

At the end of the day, society has more right to keep its secrets secret, than does Wikileaks have a right to wreak havoc, and to keep its sources hidden while doing so.

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The first time I considered transparency as an issue was as an eighteen year-old reading Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son. One of them contains this 18th century nugget that I’ve never forgotten:

“Without some dissimulation no business can be carried out at all. It is simulation that is false. Dissimulation is only to hide your cards.”

When I read Paul’s piece it was that quote that came to mind. There are often good reasons not to be too transparent even in public service, I thought.

Consider gays in the US military. The Don’t ask, don’t tell (DADT) is a semi-official licence designed to encourage opaqueness in the military. Personally, I favour the right of gays to serve openly, but if one is going to fudge the issue this seems to be almost an acceptable way to do so. It may be inadequate to purists, but it was a halfway decent staging-post to somewhere more honest (and may be not all that superior).

Or consider collective responsibility in government, as did The Times’s Danny Finkelstein in last Sunday’s edition of Westminster Hour on BBC Radio 4. He said that politicians who always speak their minds honestly cannot be good colleagues, because party government consists in the necessarily artificial device of assuming that there is a collegiate view.

Or consider the necessity of ordinary social deceit. The “Does my bum look big in this?” dilemma faces many people.

Or consider whether a schoolboy owes respect to a headmaster who has not yet (in the boy’s view or that of his father) “earned” it. Well, there is a necessary hypocrisy which suggests that respect is owed ex officio. (See Rod Liddle, Sunday Times, 26 October 2009.)

Or consider the politician who in public espouses infant vaccination but can’t get his spouse to allow it on his own baby? Must he be forced to come clean about the status of his own child?

These cases make me feel that transparency may or may not be valuable in this or that circumstance, but also that it is a new species of infantilism to think that transparency is always and everywhere a Good Thing as a matter of principle.

Perhaps, though, transparency is a decent principle for governance? Again, I think not. Transparency could actually be very bad for corporate and political governance. It may produce the unintended consequence of driving all serious deliberations and decisions deep underground  (off-the-record management that’s not accountable to anybody, ever etc.).

When it comes to managing public finances I agree wholeheartedly that transparency is increasingly hard to argue against. But surely, there’s something wrong when transparency in the UK results in the controversial backdated caps on MPs’ expenses recommended by auditor Sir Thomas Legg? Of course in that case – and there are many – the problem isn’t the transparency but the childishness which greeted the facts it revealed.(Too many of the public were unable to cope with the idea that they were contributing to their legislators’ lifestyles.)

I doubt that forcing people to reveal the “truth” will lead to either party (the informant or the informee) becoming wiser or nicer, at least not quickly.

There’s a very real danger that people will simply lie, or be forced to dissemble with greater and greater sophistication. Or they will become mealy-mouthed, say-nothing niceness cyphers.

Indeed, more transparency can only work well if we all become more and more indifferent to the information we increasingly glean. If we do get to the position where everyone knows everything about our finances (or our sexual orientation), we will also need to be in the position of saying, “So what?” to those who make a big deal of these things (or seek to bully or blackmail us). But there is something very authoritarian about arriving there. Surely, some things are personal, or secret for good political and commercial reasons, and revealing them should not be a public requirement?

As Paul Holmes rightly says on his blog, “transparency is less and less tenable as a strategy, because information has a way of fighting free of constraints….” What does this mean for PRs? I think it means that we need to push back on the demand for transparency as a principle. We should be very specific when we use the term and seek to identify when and where it is best to advocate or reject its use.

Otherwise, I fear, transparency is doomed to become the new opaque, and that wouldn’t be honest, would it?

No related pages.

Investors can’t have it both ways. Given the contradictory responses, the one we should trust is the one respondents invest in. Lots of people seem to have resisted a “flight to safety”. What we seem to have is a generalised sense that one ought to feel at risk and say one has lost trust, whilst operationally one goes on trusting and taking risks with roughly whatever appetite one had in the first place.

But the public is not merely contradictory. It is nonsensical (or the FT’s questions were). What, after all, is someone saying when they insist they trust themselves to look after their savings? That they would rather keep the loot under the bed? Or are they saying that they trust their own advice more than anyone else’s? Wot, and not read the FT? Renounce unit trusts and pension funds (both of which make choices about where to put their client’s money)?

Most investors, said the FT, did not think they were adequately protected by the state (another surprise given how the state has backed the banks). But, reassuringly, the FT reports that it is not only savers who are sticking with the status quo:

“…. a majority of respondents in all European countries and the US have not changed the amount of risk in their portfolios, three in 10 Americans, one in four French and Germans and one in five Italians and Britons said they were now taking less risk. In Spain, three in 10 have reported that they were willing to take more risk.”

It seems, also, that most people in Britain, Germany and France have not altered their attitudes towards investing in the stock market compared with two years ago. So while some have reduced their risk, most have not, and some are already ready to up their risk levels.

The FT results reveal – if you can reveal the obvious – that the public has lost confidence in individual risk assessments and in the reputations that were once built upon sound risk management (trust and keeping promises used to be at the heart of City-type values). But what does this mean? That an institution can be less trustworthy but just as worth investing in?

So how can the PR high ground be seized without resorting to talking populist nonsense?

The best way to face the challenge is for banks and institutions to take the defence of their reputations in to their own hands (there’s a useful call to action in PR Week by Anthony Hilton: Bankers Still Live In PR-free Zone).

Moreover, if firms want to avoid the worst forms of regulation then they have to promote self-regulation as well as openness. My colleague Richard D North puts on it on a sister sister site – here and here - like this:

Instead of writing lots of rules which must be obeyed, the best regulators would name and shame firms and sectors which had not produced the sorts of voluntary schemes which offered appropriate (always optimum, not always maximum) safety. Those warnings would then reinforce the market’s tendency to produce satisfactory safety. The firms and sectors which were exposed would see custom drying up or stakeholders demand premiums.

That would really be a return to the values of “a man’s word is his bond”.

By the way, those wanting to read my more detailed account of the future of financial PR in the new era can read it here.

No related pages.

Gratifyingly, there were comments from “Swatting at flies“, also @davefleet @ableo2 @girlmeetsweb @TweetGrid and their followers.

Here’s a sample of what the Twitters said about my “10 points: social media reality check”:

@ableo2 I read his 10 Points and I was just thinking, “No”… “No”… “No”… about 1 hour ago from TweetGrid in reply to ableo2

@girlmeetsweb Wow, that post is so typical of the PR type that refuses to move on and embrace new communication methods http://tiny.pl/6z97 about 2 hours ago from TweetGrid in reply to girlmeetsweb

@ableo2 I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love all views on social media and more but at least get the stories straight and show ur openness too about 1 hour ago from TweetGrid in reply to ableo2

@davefleet Okay, I rephrase – it’s ironic that he’s on about social media decline when he’s not being social himself with closed doors about 1 hour ago from TweetGrid in reply to davefleet

Let’s make this clear. I never said social networking online would decline. I said the hype around social media would decline in 2009. I did say, the term social media will fade, because all media are social, otherwise they are not media, and because old media will converge with new media. “Social media” is an oxymoron.

My point isn’t that Twitter and Facebook aren’t full of potential, but that they won’t undo existing media-types – including the “old” “New Media” – who are rapidly re-platforming their offerings for the evolving digital age.

“Old-fashioned” CNN is already the fourth most followed Twitter. The number one spot is held by President-elect Barack Obama. That shows how the real world elitist institutions are already dominating the Twitter-sphere.

I added that social media companies will be credit-crunched in 2009, with the ridiculous boom-time valuations reassessed and reduced substantially. There will be an all round reality check.

And, yes, I said:

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

Twitter describes itself thus:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Most of what any of us are doing right now is trivial (especially what can be said about it in 140 characters). Twitter content reflects that fact. Sorry, but it does.

Moreover, any medium that is so limited is never going to be ideal for communicating serious ideas. But Twitter is good at alerting people about their itinerary and key messages (Obama). Twitter is efficient at spreading the word about the existence of good content elsewhere. It is ideal for sending out headlines as hooks for people to read (CNN). Twitter’s also designed for making pithy remarks and entertaining absent friends.

The comment about my closed doors grates. Yes, you have to register to make comments. How is that a bigger challenge to Twitters who must register and then log-in repetitiously to Twitter to send messages? If my blog is closed, so is Twitter.

Moreover, the next iteration of the Web, call it Web 3.0, will be open, not closed as Facebook and Twitter are (PC, phone and the web will become one, the “firewalls” that protect Twitter and Facebook will come down).

The next innovation will be led by Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, AOL, the Mozilla Foundation and others; old and new. It will be be based on revitalized operating systems, cloud computing, web mail. Networking on the web will become an everyday thing, nothing special, causing no more hype than a chat over the garden fence or a phone call does today (it will become a utility; networking is just what people do and have always done).

Twitter will grow up and there will be space both for grown ups and teenage babble; its users will be more discriminating.

@davefleet @ableo2 @girlmeetsweb @TweetGrid: I predict that you will all move on, or face facts and adapt. Twitter is already doing so with a nose for where its commercial future lies. And, yes, mainstream PR is going to exploit Twitter’s potential to network on behalf of clients; and I support that, so I cannot be accused of refusing to embrace new communication methods. You though, I feel, will resent the co-option of Twitter by the likes of me and the interests we represent.

Now let’s turn our attention to Swattingatflies’ deconstruction of my ten points. Rather than reply to every point (I invite readers to read them instead), let me concentrate on a few points points of agreement.

Swattingatflies (SAF) argues that when a corporate blogs it is no such thing, it is just a website.

I think SAF makes a valid point. Mainstream media blogs also look contrived, if not a little patronizing.

SAF is right to point out that “social media” can be used for the whole range of human communication.

I accept that social networking can be done by Facebook. But let’s stay real. Human interaction is all about networking and being social. In terms of changing the world and making things happen, today’s online social networking activism is a pale reflection of a period during which social networking peaked. Online discussions today will get better, but I doubt that Danny Brown and his friends will play a significant role in making it so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The PR lessons?

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

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Doubtless in fact this was just a bit of good luck the Tories stumbled into. But it repositions them as a real opposition rather than as an out-of-touch Toff Tendency. How dissidence becomes a politician.

Labour is on the defensive. It is accused of and forced to deny Stalinist tactics. Perhaps they knew about the arrest in advance, perhaps not. Perhaps they sort of did and rightly did nothing. PC plod perhaps did it off his own bat for good reasons (the media and the Tories could yet be forced to eat humble pie if real crimes are proved to have been committed or were decently suspected).

This story wobbles in many directions in our imaginations precisely because we don’t know the full facts yet.

But as any author knows, nothing attracts readers (voters) like a good old ban or witch hunt against an undeserving target. Matthew d’Ancona said in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph the arrest has transformed the Tory image from Bullingdon boys to Woodward and Bernstein (though nobody accuses the government of committing a crime, unlike President Nixon).

My gut instinct tells me that this will not end in a clean win for anybody – not the police, the Tories, the civil servant involved, or the Speaker of the House. There’s a good chance that as the truth gets told and the events chronicled as to who did what and knew what when and why, the waters will muddy.

Still, the Tories may well hang on to their PR victory. There is a huge appetite for government openness and establishment-clobbering. The fine tuning won’t matter. Damien Green is very likely to keep his trusty sword of truth and his breastplate of indignation, or whatever it was that Jonathan Aitken couldn’t quite keep hold of.

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