Porritt is set to argue that Greenpeace and other environmental campaigners have gone soft. He will say that:

“There’s not a mainstream political party in the world out there challenging the orthodoxy of business-as-usual economic growth – stretching indefinitely into the future. Meanwhile, environmentalists continue to do their best to slow the pace of destruction, but are still losing battle after battle. Worse yet, we’ll lose the war if we can’t free ourselves of our subservient dependence on today’s earth-destroying economic growth”

He will argue that environmentalists have become too focused on creating “islands of conservation”, such as nature reserves, which cannot survive in a world of warming, habitat destruction and pollution. Instead the Greens should focus their efforts on stopping economic growth and development.

For him there is a contradiction between the words “sustainable” and “growth”, which makes the term sustainable growth an oxymoron. This debate is not trivial. That’s because the line that most PRs have been selling to their clients contradicts Porritt’s view fundamentally. PRs have pitched their argument saying that what’s good for the environment is also a catalyst for economic growth. We have advocated that going green boosts the top and bottom lines and therefore should be embraced as a business opportunity by the C-suite and boardrooms. This is the so-called win-win scenario.

Now that Porritt is laying down the gauntlet the response of most PRs will be to defend the status quo. For instance, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development’sVision 2050 tackles how to provide enough food, clean water, sanitation, shelter, mobility, education and health to provide for 9.2 billion humans. Porritt, in contrast, says the world can barely sustain its current 6 billion people. He proposes that world governments commit to limiting population growth to 7.8 billion instead.

However it is my view that we can do better than merely defend our current stance. First off, I think Porritt makes a valid point when he implies that sustainability and development are not comfortable bedfellows. Second, he might also be right, but for different reasons, to say that countries such as the UK should debate immigration and seek to manage population growth without being charged with racism.

We should be more critical about how we have been discussing sustainability issues, is my view. For instance, China’s industrial development, like ours before it, is based on the notion of Joseph Schumpeter’s creative destruction. Describing what that means in practice today, Thomson Reuters recently revealed how China has become the second-largest producer of scientific papers, after the United States. Moreover, research and development (R&D) spending by Asian nations as a group in 2008 was $387 billion, compared with $384 billion in the United States and $280 billion in Europe.

The Reuters report added that an AstraZeneca survey found that 27 percent of people think China will be the world’s most innovative country within ten years, followed by India with 17 percent, the United States 14 percent and Japan 12 percent, according to the 6,000 people in six countries questioned by the drugmaker. Reuters remarked:

“The survey across Britain, the United States, Sweden, Japan, India and China found a strong sense of optimism amongst people living in China and India, in contrast to relative pessimism in the developed Western economies. More than half of those in China and India thought their home countries would be the most innovative in the world by 2020, while just one in 20 Britons thought Britain would be able to claim this title.”

Today’s Sunday Times also reports how the West is being stranded in the doldrums as Beijing throws billions of dollars at its solar panel industry and other alternative-energy companies. It says:

“This partnership between business and government is driving some western solar firms to the wall and threatens to start a trade war in the alternative-energy sector.”

In the face of such challenges, Porritt’s call to give up on economic progress and growth looks pathetic. But there’s also a sense in which a new greener world based on new technologies calls for development, fast-paced innovation and levels of disruption which are going to bring into question the very mantra of sustainability. It also begs an investigation into what degree we can afford to throw out all the old Western growth, GDP, paradigms at the moment when the East (and rest of the world) is embracing them.

It should not escape PRs that optimism and trust and lack of cynicism is highest in the BRIC countries and lowest in the more developed ones, according to opinion surveys from the likes of Edelman. Moreover, the growing split in perspectives between countries in the East and the West on growth and development issues should alert us to the need to be more ambitious and not, as Porritt maintains, less.

But it is not my intention in this post to provide answers, as much as to highlight that the debate about the relationship between development, sustainability and global innovation is far from settled.

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Vision 2050 advocates that big business solves mankind’s major social and environmental problems in partnerships with government and society. The aim is to produce enough food, clean water, sanitation, shelter, mobility, education and health to provide for 9 billion humans.

Here’s some of what they think needs doing over the next forty years to make a sustainable planetary society possible:

“These include incorporating the costs of externalities, starting with carbon, ecosystem services and water, into the structure of the marketplace; doubling agricultural output without increasing the amount of land or water used; halting deforestation and increasing yields from planted forests: halving carbon emissions worldwide (based on 2005 levels) by 2050 through a shift to low-carbon energy systems and improved demand-side energy efficiency, and providing universal access to low-carbon mobility.”

The WBCSD explains that:

“As part of this transformation, Vision 2050 calls for a new agenda for business: to work with government and society worldwide to transform markets and competition. New rules for markets will reframe environmental challenges as economic challenges, driving innovation and competition in the direction of sustainability and away from resource- and energy-intensive production. Rationalizing prices to include such externalities as climate and biodiversity impacts will make corporate environmental efficiency a true competitive advantage across all industries and regions.”

How to interrogate this stuff from an independent PR perspective? Sceptically, I suggest.

Big business likes this stuff because it sounds and even is virtuous. It has the merit of turning all kinds of uncertainties into market opportunities. I certainly warm to Vision 2050′s commitment to raising productivity (output) by improving land usage and making better use of genetically modified organisms. I can also see the logic of accepting political realities and in proactively helping governments turn costly externalities into profit-centres.

It’s worth noting, though, that this means that externalities and social desirables become goods and services which have a state-subsidy or state guaranteed price.

The problem is that state planning risks making the future of the world dependent on the short-term political thinking politicians are prone toward, which is the very opposite of what Vision 2050 aims to achieve. Certainly, WBCSD hopes that governments will map the paths to achieve pre-advertised and pre-announced priced services (the ex-externalities), which is something that may or may not happen.

Yet, when the state is required to map out the big things it wants to happen, won’t it be natural (as the WBCSD knows well) that big firms will be able to gear up to deliver it quicker and better than small firms? Won’t government find itself talking with the big firms which can deliver big stuff?

For instance, BP may have cocked-up in the Gulf of Mexico, but a small firm couldn’t have even begun to get the deal. If you electrify cars, the trains, build new track, put in huge windfarms or solar arrays, deliver new low-pollution chemical plants etc, etc, almost all the sustainability deliverables get delivered quicker by giant firms. So the big problem-makers become the big problem-solvers. Yummy. Trebles all round. And a PR victory to boot, you would think. Perhaps, says I, but it is a short term and limited one. Here’s why.

Vision 2050 assumes that in the future the world will have to cutback on carbon dioxide usage to combat global warming. However, what if we could either suck the carbon from the atmosphere or clean it up effectively as we go at little cost? With the former solution we could turn-reverse global warming and keep using fossil fuels. With the latter solution we could make use of all the fossil fuel resources we desire for as long as they are available without making AGW any worse than it already is (evidence suggests there are still huge reserves of gas, oil and coal waiting to be exploited).

Moreover, if the nuclear fusion technology comes on tap in the next 40 years then our energy usage could increase in intensity almost without limit forever. Energy production might remain centralized with the emergence of fusion. It would also make desalination possible on a grand scale; ending all worries about water shortages in a world that is two thirds covered by oceans. We already know how to build gas pipelines over distances of thousands of miles to deliver energy to our homes, so building a global water-pipe network should not be beyond us (something states might legislate for but might not pay for; while the market might be able to sustain the entire costs because it is profitable to do so).

By making best use of nuclear fission, solar and wind technology, this might facilitate the trend toward greater decentralized energy provision that environmentalists demand and Vision 2010 supposes: that is until fusion  - or something else – replaces them all (again subsidies might help, and they might not, and special pleading might not be attractive to taxpayers either).

My point is not to favour this or that solution over some other possible solution. My point is that innovation creates new industries, new possibilities and paradigms. Another issue is that the WBCSD Vision 2050 is in the business of envisioning. In that regard, I accept that the BCSD has identified all sorts of problems which are up ahead, and it may be right that government has a role in fixing them, helped by big business. My concern is only that we should be careful when big business signs up for a green agenda, but only because it’s neat and now it suits them.

Regardless, they may still be right. But I suspect they’d be quick to argue, whatever the reality was, for legislation, controls etc, which make their life more mappable. That doesn’t make them wrong, but it takes away some of their virtue, which they so boldly lay claim to. In any case, they may – as I fear – wrap us in all sorts of expensive taxpayer action which turns out misguided and which leads to its own backlash that undermines their credibility and reputations for honesty, integrity and insight.

The future is almost certainly unpredictable. And perhaps my most important point of all is that we should instead be encouraging new risk-takers to emerge to solve today’s and tomorrow’s problems. Such risk takers are as likely as not to be competitors to today’s major solution providers. They will make best use of scientific and technological breakthroughs to challenge the existing order. Such innovation and innovators rarely emerge from partnership relationships (cosy clubs) but unfold as the work of disruptive entrepreneurs, as the railways, automobile, IT, internet and bio-pharmaceutical industries did.

Vision 2050 does have PR potential, certainly for spin. It also has potential for making progressive progress through the promotion of partnerships, even if its difficult to know in which field. What grates on me is the self-interested certainty that is embedded in the content and tone of Vision 2050. At the very least I counsel that however well intentioned Vision 2050 is, I don’t think it is a sustainable plan over the next 40 years given the nature of the unknown unknowns – such as politics, serendipity and competition – that are as likely as not to tear the plan’s assumptions to shreds.

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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.”

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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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Some of the details are startling. A man stabbed himself in the stomach during a staff meeting (he survived) and a woman threw herself out of a fourth floor window (she died). On Bastille Day, Michel Deparis, a 53-year-old France Telecom employee, was found with a suicide note blaming “overwork” and “management by terror.”

The firm’s Chief Executive Didier Lombard responded by saying that he would do everything he could to “stop the infernal spiral” of suicides among workers at his former state-owned Telco. He warned, I think sensibly, that:

“The more you talk about this kind of thing, the more you put it into the heads of anyone who is psychologically unstable.”

But he has been forced to talk about the issue because it has become politicised. Last week Lombard was ordered to account for the suicides in person to Xavier Darcos, the French labour minister, whose government is also a major shareholder in the firm. The French media has given the story a sensational outing and blamed France Telecom.

However, not everybody is convinced that the firm is responsible. Oliver Barberot, France Telecom’s head of human relations, told the French satirical weekly newspaper Le Canard enchaîné:

“It’s not that dramatic, I have seen worse. The numbers of suicides are not even going up. In 2000 there were 28 and in 2002 there were 29.”

Moreover, the suicide rate among France Telecom’s 102, 000 employees is no higher than the national average: 16.3 per 100,000 inhabitants, and in the most vulnerable group, men aged between 45 and 49, 41.6 per 100,000. And it happens that the median age of the firm’s employees is approaching 50. Lombard, however, has not put this hard-headed rational rebuttal at the heart of his PR response.

Regardless of the facts, there’s a more powerful narrative at play. It is one we know well. Since it was semi-privatised in 1996, France Telecom has shed almost 60, 000 workers. For those that remained life has got tough, as Christopher Caldwell usefully described in this weekend’s FT:

“France Telecom set targets for early retirement. It reassigned people to tasks other than the ones they had been trained for (engineers-turned-cellphone-salesmen is the image in the French press). These job switches were often accompanied by mobilités professionnelles: employees were reassigned to work far from their homes. Maybe to France Telecom, this was a way of keeping in meaningful work people whom the new economy had made obsolescent. But to unions, it smacked of playing with workers’ minds until they cracked under pressure and left.”

After the bad publicity over the suicides, Lombard has suspended the mobilités professionnelles and employed more human relations staff and physicians specializing in occupational medicine. He’s also sent his heads of department on tour around France to investigate why their workers are so unhappy.

Perhaps, indeed, the redundant workers are statistically happier than the ones who kept their jobs? Who knows. But if so the unions have something to answer for.

Certainly, the attitude of the union hardly seems to be sustained by the facts. Patrice Diochet, the CFTC union’s national secretary, says,”There is no humanity anymore, no neighborliness. Only business counts.” (If that were true more workers would have been sacked than have been, and France Telecom would be robustly defending its business against emotional blackmail).

But is either side – unions or management – responsible for the suicides? I think not. As Caldwell points out:

“There is always a temptation to interpret suicides ideologically. During the wave of suicide bombings in the Palestinian territories earlier this decade, pundits were quick to diagnose “despair” among the men who blew themselves up. Are we to assume the recent fall in suicide bombings means a decrease in despair? A perennial staple of American anti-socialist rhetoric is to ask why, if socialism is so great, Sweden has the highest suicide rate in the world. (It doesn’t, actually, and never did.)”

That’s the point. Suicide is deeply personal. Its causes are difficult to fathom. The argument still rages, for instance, as to whether psychoanalyst Anna Freud contributed to Marilyn Monroe’s suicide (as Adam Curtis suggested in The Century of the Self) and to that of one of the Burlingham children, who killed himself in Anna’s house, after a life-time’s experimental therapy designed to produce a happy balanced individual, instead of the suicidal drunk he became.

I’m not sure that in the current climate one can criticize France Telecom for taking the line of least resistance. Third parties – such as me – are setting the record straight in a way which the firm could not (at least not without appearing hard-hearted).

Maybe the pseudo-firm (part state-owned, highly politicised, national icon and all that) cannot be blunt. Perhaps, anyway, it is employing dark-arts third party strategies to out-source the messaging. Maybe it has some bad practices it would rather wrap up in this suicide-bundle and get shot-of in one fell swoop (or grovel).

This is France, after all. Guessing what is going on is an art form that’s beyond most foreigners. But one’s heart does sink when one sees a big company getting into such an emotional muddle with its PR.

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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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Let me declare an interest. In the late 1980s early 90s I led media relations for both the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) and The Building Societies Association. Like Gordon Brown and Kenneth Clarke, I thrive on crisis. (Sorry, that’s the nature of lots of work – from the priesthood to journalism.)

Back then up to 75,000 houses per year were possessed by lenders, compared to an estimated 45,000 expected this year. But who knows what next year will bring. It does not look good. On Friday the CML released arrears figures that revealed that 168,000 mortgages were three months or more late with their repayments. That is 8% higher than the 155,600 at the end of June.

The statistics are important because they indicate the number of homeowners living on borrowed time in houses that may soon be put up for auction to pay off debts. But what gets forgotten is that defaulting mortgagors (for the sake of clarity mortgagees are the lenders) represent just 1.44% of all borrowers. That means that 98.56% are managing to keep up with their repayments.

The housing market is suffering, sure. But it remains a British success story. British houses are still worth many times what they were twenty years ago when I became the industry’s spokesman.

Nevertheless, banks and building societies have to accept some of the blame for this crisis. They became, in polite English, imprudent. Lenders, governments and central banks failed to constrain an expansion of credit that drove an unsustainable boom in house prices. But hang on a minute.

Borrowers now complaining about “over-priced” fixed-rate mortgages or endowments that look set to fall short of paying back their mortgage don’t have much of my sympathy. This was the biggest investment of their lives. They were adults taking risks, sometimes reckless ones. They made choices. They presumably read their contracts before signing them. Now they, the minority in real trouble, have to face up to their responsibilities. Letting them escape their debts is not an option, not least because it would discourage the rest of us from repaying ours.

But the good news is that it is not in lenders’ interest to take back properties except as an action of last resort. The government seems more determined than in the 1990s to find solutions that keep people housed. I think that makes sense.

Getting into a mess is one thing, managing it another. This crisis could easily have become a disaster for mortgage lenders. However, the CML has taken the PR initiative. As a result the industry has won more praise than criticism for its efforts. Therefore, the CML’s work is worth noting in detail:

• It came out fighting when its members were criticized for not passing on the full BoE interest rate cuts to hard-pressed borrowers. It explained the complexity of the market and different types of policies that borrowers held. It explained the difference between LIBOR and base rates. It explained its members’ duty to both savers and borrowers.
• Mortgage lenders came in for some bad press for speaking market truths. But it had to be said otherwise honesty and integrity would have gone walkabout. Moreover, by voicing market realities early on, the CML made its long-term work of defending its members’ interests and winning public acceptance easier. The bad press is no longer such an issue, but the market has not shifted much.
• Its Director General Michael Coogan said on air that the CML never favoured 125% mortgages (which was brave given some of his paymasters did).
• It helped expose the damaging criminality in the buy-to-let market which involved mortgage professionals and borrowers colluding.
• It publicised far and wide how how borrowers can help themselves and lenders protect their mutual interests.
• It explained why sometimes it is in the interests of both parties for homes to be possessed, stating that’s why many owners just hand back the keys.
• It released more information than ever on the state of its members’ mortgage books so that the government and public were forewarned of what to expect in the future.
• It worked with its members, government and consumer groups to manage this very challenging situation creatively.

This is a developing story. Lenders and borrowers recently lost sight of what the market was all about: providing homes for people to live in. Lenders must end the lending freeze as soon as possible, on responsible, sustainable terms. They have got to get back to their day job.

Meanwhile, the CML deserves to win a prize for its crisis management skills.

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