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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3. Blowing the whistle on Wikileaks Warning: this post is counter-revolutionary. A recent BBC’s Culture Show...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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First off, Steve Hartman of Creativille, Inc., explained how his Harvard Executive Education course discussed Rynair as a case study in branding success. Toni Falconi Muzi wrote to say that when senior public officials in Italy were asked, “which organisation, in your view, is more aware of and uses with most intelligence the power of conscious public relationships”, Ryanair came out in the first three choices.

David Brain commented that it’s difficult to argue with success, but wondered how many lost slots, delays and loss of partners were caused by people disliking Michael O’Leary’s approach. Then Heather Yaxley posted an incisive comment (see both here). I’m now answering their points:

(1) Ryanair does care about its customers and reputation, up to a point Lord Copper. The carrier cares to get the customers’ business (good routes, good fares). It cares and needs to get the customers’ repeat business: Ryanair stresses repeatedly its relative reliability (a feature you need in order to lure people on a second time).

(2) Ryanair is playing several PR and brand-defining games. The airline invites its fans to be “in” on the secret of being a beneficiary of its service. It shares a complicity with its fans that they know how to game its offer. It invites its fans to relish the way namby-pambies aren’t up to gaming or enjoying Ryanair’s offer.

Ryanair has indulged its customers’ instinctive contempt for a class of passenger weened on a level of schmooze most people could never afford. It’s a bit like The Sun implying that the broadsheet readers are snobbish about The Sun because they don’t get the joke.

Ryanair does not offer a PR presence to produce a virtual brand. That is, it is not manufacturing a corporate image as an umbrella that’s not directly linked to the service the airline provides.

Hence, Heather Yaxley is correct: Ryanair’s brand is a marketing machine and performance is the brand promise.

I would add that the value of any particular brand is measured by the extent to which the promise it symbolizes is trusted. And in Ryanair’s case, a certain level of distrust, or a health warning, comes as part of the bargain.

Ryanair understands that the key to brand management lies in setting realistic expectations and in being consistent (that’s a text book strategy, well executed).

Michael O’Leary’s PR strategy, and we should note here how PR is his trump card, is to shoot the opponents’ fox. “Customer: ‘You’re brutal’. Ryanair: ‘We’ve always said as much!’”.

Meanwhile, the more BA and the other airlines struggle to play a higher moral game (call it with-frills and added values) the more they set themselves up to be exposed as untrustworthy.

(3) It isn’t obvious that Ryanair has a bad complaints policy merely because it makes people go to the trouble of faxing or mailing a letter. Point being, Ryanair gets to hear about those complaints from customers who go to some bother to make them. Of course, Ryanair may be awful in its response to complaints, though I imagine there’s some regulation surrounding just how awful it can be.

(4) It is unclear to me the degree to which Ryanair can afford to be casual because it has a monopoly on some routes. That is, I don’t know if Ryanair has a monopoly, or how that would play if it had (perhaps somebody with more knowledge of the airline business could answer this point).

(5) It is not my impression that Ryanair is any worse than any other airline, or even that it is necessarily the cheapest. My impression is that its behaviour is quite similar to that of other similar airlines in its class, but that it has an aggressive, loud-mouthed boss and great PR. If he was less loud, and left less rows and havoc in his wake, would Ryanair’s behaviour – even the Ryanair effect – be all that different?

So when I make point (2) (that its pre-emptive PR keeps the firm safe) I may be overstating things. It is possible and likable that Ryanair’s PR is as it is because that is how the boss likes it.

In short, perhaps we have to like Ryanair’s PR because it is authentic.

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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.

Let’s start at the beginning. Since the ancient Greeks perfected rhetoric, persuaders have used every trick in the book. And since then, too, the debate has raged about whether such techniques constituted an artform-cum-science as claimed by Aristotle, or whether they constituted no more than flattery as Plato maintained. And, perhaps, Machiavelli’s The Prince was the first psychological-PR handbook for despotic rulers (I’ve not read enough to know if that’s true or not). Edward Bernays seems sensibly to state:

Although ancient Sumeria, Babylonia, Assyria, and Persia were despotic monarchies, public opinion played some role in the national life. The governments of those ancient empires spent a great deal of money and ingenuity in building up the reputation and importance of the rulers.
(Edward L Bernays, Public Relations, University of Oklahoma Press, 1952)

But Bernays also offers a more profound insight:

The three main elements of public relations are practically as old as society: informing people, persuading people, or integrating people with people [stakeholder relationship management hadn't been coined back then]. Of course, the means and methods of accomplishing these ends have changed as society has changed. In a technologically advanced society, like that of today, ideas are communicated by newspaper, magazine, film, radio, television, and other means….. Modern individual psychology and social psychology provide the basis for persuasion, a symbol of pluralism and fluidity.
(Ibid.)

So for Bernays – and for his uncle Freud upon whose thinking he relied – human nature and human social psychology were not fixed, not hard-wired. They were in important measure social constructs, capable of study and manipulation, and indeed so because not – as it were – ingrained. For instance, Gustave LeBon, the originator of Crowd psychology, made a useful contribution to modern PR theory. But the crowds that formed his subject were part of urbanized life. His crowd was a modern phenomenon driven by the end of rural (isolated non-crowd) life and the emergence of modern networks of communication and industry. I make this point in defence of my heroes such as Bernays, Carnegie, Freud, Levitt, Lippmann and Maslow. They all popularized the use of social science theory in our trade.

There has, however, always been a darker side to this issue. It has covered everything from racism (slavery/apartheid), anti-semitism (fascism) or phrenology (the theory stating that the personality traits of a person can be derived from the shape of the skull). These all relied on the view that there is a fixity in human beings and human relations. 

The history of these mechanistic accounts of human life makes me nervous of modern explanations of human behaviour based on neuroscience or evolutionary biology. (Though I accept that mental illness is something different and often has a neurological origin.)

Moreover, some commentators have also rightly pointed out that all PR techniques are value-neutral and are open for use for both good and bad purposes.

For a contemporary in-depth discussion of neuroscience’s possible wider social implications, I recommend this book review by a peer of Chris Frith’s Making up the Mind: How the Brain Creates our Mental World.

Whichever side of the expert argument – the reviewer’s or Firth’s – you take, it offers little support to the notion that neuro-PR is possible today. For the record, my Enlightenment and post-modernist-tinged views, which inform my PR practice, are instinctively hostile to Firth’s belief that free will is just a manufactured state of mind. Firth’s point, however, should not be confused with Bernays’ concept of manufacturing consent just because the words and meaning sound similar (I’ll defend Bernays in another article soon).

What interests me here is why there is renewed interest in the benefits that neuroscience could bring to our industry. Toni Muzi Falconi explains it thus:

I refer to what many researchers and practitioners are beginning to realize: opinions are much less correlated to behaviours than they used to be only ten, fifteen years ago.

If this is even only partially true, it means that we (as well as the market, political and social research industry) need to focus our attention much more on understanding behaviours than opinions.

And this certainly raises the necessity that we revise our listening processes through a much better knowledge of both psychology and neuroscience.

What people say they think, and what they do (or how they vote in secret), often seem dramatically out of sync. That’s not new. Hypocrisy is not new. (It’s true that mass cynicism is a very modern trait, but even so, in Soviet Russia it was for many years a national mass underground sport.) Few people – as Bernays knew all too well – have thought in depth about their world view. It is, then, no wonder most opinion research highlights shifting, confused responses even when the opinions given seem to be most emphatic. A good dose of commonsense could very easily square the contradiction between the opinions given to researchers and people’s actual behaviour in the real world. 

And here comes my counter-intuiative punch. I think that the insights of science aren’t especially powerful or sinister when it comes to determining PR outcomes or even influencing opinion. I don’t think that either PR or, indeed, propaganda can be held responsible – even if they played a part – for Stalinism, the Nazis, or Apartheid South Africa; if only it were that simple.

One might as well use all the insights one can: scientific or not. They’re not likely to be more sinister or stronger than ordinary commonsense or wiliness, or more influential than the many other factors – say, chance, culture, economics, geography, history, personalities and politics – that determine outcomes in society.

Hence, I’m not advocating closing down discussion about neuro-PR or any other form of PR or discarding any scientific tools that might prove useful. But I don’t think neuroscience will be influencing anybody’s PR practice and line of argument any time soon.

By the way, Heather Yaxley did us all - me, certainly - a great service in her excellent blog post on this theme.

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A PR’s heart is bound to leap when it reads the Barclays story. What an opportunity at last to stop schmoozing a soft-line to all comers.

There was no talk of aligning the values of employees, consumers, shareholders and other stakeholders. There was no talk of mutual social responsibility either. What was on offer was a take it or destroy it option. TINA was the Board’s message (There Is No Alternative). The board wasn’t playing nicely. George Dallas, corporate governance director at F&C Investments, told the meeting:

“We deeply object to being put into a position where the consequences of voting against this deal would make a bad situation worse.”

No wonder Barclays needed security guards to hold back shareholder anger when both retail and institutional investors were losers in an unprecedented fund raising exercise. Its chairman Marcus Agius expressed regret for the mess without backing down. Hence, nobody can accuse Barclays Bank’s board of lacking courage or leadership.

It has laid itself and its bank’s future on the line. It had the balls to reject the government offer of the taxpayers’ shilling because of the strings attached. Instead it sought more expensive capital elsewhere. In the process it shocked, indeed horrified, its existing stakeholders. But these are extraordinary times. The bank had few choices, it said (unlike Standard Chartered). There was no time for niceties. This was about securing long term survival, it argued. There were few advantages in going down the route of the near-nationalised banks, it said. What a narrative! We’re coming out fighting! We’re not giving in! We’d rather dangerous and costly independence than sucking on the state’s wet-nurse teat like babies!

The resistance won a few concessions – rather than a U-turn. Shareholders did take action to defend their interests as they saw them. The board was forced to reonounce its bonuses this year and next and put itself up for re-election annually.

It can be argued – and the FT has – that Barclays’ board is more accountable and more prone to listen to its shareholders than before. Perhaps had shareholders been less satisfied and more active over the last ten years the financial sector would be in better shape now. The period before – a period of boom in which many assumed bust would never reappear – was characterised by a complacant and meaningless consensus, with fake accountability and translucent transparency. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have got in to the credit crunch in the first place.

Barclays Bank will have to repair its relations with its shareholders. The board’s reputation will need nurturing. But this time around the whole process will be more volatile, more democratic and honest than what we witnessed during the amazing aberration of the last boom.

The wider PR lessons are that there will be far more different – and angry – messages flying around. Our clients are going to be fighting harder for much more differentiated positions which are sharper-edged. The arguments will be fiercer, more aggressive, less obvious.

We will have to accept that not every difference is reconcilable and not every stakeholder is going to be a winner.

Yesterday Barclays share rose by almost 10 percent. While, Standard Chartered shares fell 34½p to 725p.

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