Addressing Neville’s argument
I don’t think it’s a revolution, and even if it was it wouldn’t be all good or all bad. But before I say what I think it is really about, let’s begin by looking at how Neville Hobson defines what he’s addressing.

“…this isn’t really about arguing over tools and channels. It’s about fundamental shifts in behaviours that I believe are having a powerful effect on many organizations and how they conduct their business.”

“For instance, take a look at companies like General Motors and their experiences with blogs and other social media around the world; and Dell Computers’ IdeaStorm as well as the $3 million revenue Dell earned via Twitter. These are legitimate examples that illustrate how those firms’ embrace of new forms of communicating, connecting and engaging with their customers have directly influenced the way they conduct their business.”

I fear his examples illustrate the weakness of his point. General Motors is a bankrupt government-owned modern-day failure. While GM’s flirtation with selling new cars on under-performing eBay opens a new channel, GM has been keen to downplay its significance, arguing it does little to sidestep dealers. Moreover, if you follow the link Neville provides, you read:

“Driving Conversations is a blog for GM leadership in Europe—mostly led by Carl-Peter Forster—to discuss products, issues and corporate performance from a personal perspective. ”

But that’s a misleading claim from GM at best; dishonest at worst. Here, the “personal perspective” is a clever way to express the corporate perspective, or Forster would soon be out of a job. Consider this example: Whole Foods CEO John Mackay created a storm when he voiced an opinion critical of Barack Obama’s health-care policy that ran contrary to his company’s brand and reputational image. 

As for Dell using Twitter to sell, a $3 million revenue stream in a company turning over $41 billion per year is hardly a sign of an emerging commercial or social revolution: it represents 0.0073% of its business.

Dell, by the way, has had to ditch using the internet as an exclusive direct channel and adopt – the once derided – multi channel distribution, sales and marketing model favoured by the likes of HP. As the FT said last year as Dell started selling its kit at Wal-Mart: 

“The company has been struggling to right itself for more than two years after its belated response to fierce competition and changes in customer buying habits [in Dell's case away from the internet] led sales and profits to slip.”

Meanwhile, Twitter might have many millions of users, but it has no business model or revenue of note. It is in fact not a business at all. 

Toward the end of his explanation of “social media’s fundamental shifts in behaviours”, Neville calls up some evidence from others;

“Here’s a pretty good way to illustrate what’s happening now and what shifts in behaviours herald for many organizations and their old-world business rulebooks in the very near future, in  this video produced by  Erik Qualman to promote his book Socialnomics: How Social Media has changed the way we live and do business, and posted on YouTube last month.”

Addressing Erik Qualman’s argument
The video kicks off by welcoming us to the revolution. It then describes how the adoption of the internet and later social media platforms outpaced any communication channels that went before such as telephones, radio and TV.

That’s all true (except the revolution bit). But so what? Let me now rebut a few of the video’s major claims that follow.

Claim: Word of mouth is the new black. Evidence: 25% of search results for the world’s largest brands are linked to user-generated content. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products and brands. It asks, do you like what they are saying about your brand? For instance, 75% of consumers trust peer recommendations, only 14% trust advertising.
Rebuttal: This is the big one. This is the one that companies do grasp and rightly seek help to manage. However we should take the denigration of advertising with a pinch of salt, just as we should any denigration of PR; both remain critical to corporate success. Moreover, there’s nothing new about word of mouth, it has been around since we learned to talk. It just that it has gone from being grounded to being virtual. Apple – no fan of social media in marketing and corporate practice  - shows how an interactive relationship with its customers based on a fan base still works today, just as it always did so long as companies deliver on their promises. 

Claim: Successful companies in social media behave more like Dale Carnegie than David Ogilvy. Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertisers.
Rebuttal: Dale Carnegie and David Ogilvy sales techniques remain the major push-pull double act in town. Brands still need to be marketed driven, promoted, built and managed. Apple, for instance, has not been blinded by its own innovative technology or by the concepts of planners, aggregators and facilitators to ditch old-fashioned command and control management and marketing techniques. 

Today, the spontaneity of the crowd is as “manipulable” as ever. Indeed, with the advent of social media, brands have more reasons than ever not to stand by and leave their fate in the hands of others. But on the other hand, brands have always had little control over their markets, customers and society’s chatter (remember New Coke?). Marketing remains as risky as ever. 

Claim: If Facebook was a country it would be the world’s fourth largest
Rebuttal: If Facebook was country it would be bankrupt and facing a revolution, not leading one. The New York Times speculated last week about whether Facebook was “doomed to someday become an online ghost town, run by zombie users who never update their pages and packs of marketers picking at the corpses of social circles they once hoped to exploit?”

Claim: We no longer search for news; the news finds us
Rebuttal: The news still gets filtered and produced by gatekeepers and then its distribution finds us or or we find it. News production is still a profession, a business, the product of which we’ve been getting for free on the internet and soon will have (rightly) to pay for. Put another way, Rupert Murdoch is about to call the bluff of those who believe dead tree press is dead by making people online pay to read his output.

User generated content cannot – repeat not – compete with professional news production, even if it can complement, supplement, spread, sometimes source news and most definitely interact with its originators via online networking. 

Addressing one or two other views
However, Tom Murphy, a leading PR working for Microsoft in the USA, sees things differently:

To argue that social media will not have any effect on the way we do business is like arguing that we should have four different bathrooms for four different levels of workers each with a different quality of toilet paper. And make sure that we eat in four different canteens because that’s the way we’ve done business for the last four hundred years. (I was in a factory just like that in Coventry in 1981. It was a wonder it still existed at all. I am pretty sure it didn’t last very much longer.) Business like society will change because of social media. 

Murphy makes a valid observation about culture’s impact on the world of work. But my argument is that while innovations from the spinning jenny to modern-day computer systems continually change the business landscape, business basics remain pretty fixed in terms of its essence, as the likes of Boo.com discovered during Web 1.0. 

Meanwhile, social media management guru Shel Holtz recognizes that despite utopian dreams of social media champions of flat, open models, the real work of real businesses requires structures. But he says that I don’t appreciate the full scope of what social media can do to improve how businesses function. For instance:

‘The ability for people in the oil and gas unit to have relevant and useful conversations with the people in marketing, for all of them to talk directly to the customer, and for the customer to have a voice in the organization alters the way businesses make decisions. It makes them nimble.”

Yet telephones, email and normal social interaction have long made it possible for everybody in an organisation to relate directly to customers. What’s stopped them doing so was commonsense. The last thing a salesperson needs is a PR or backroom technical person interfering with his or her pitch. That’s a recipe for chaos.

My own view
Social media is all very interesting but it may not change business and politics as much as people think. It may not change organisations as much as the internet did in the first place. The internet changed things by altering (a) information storage and (b) communications (within companies and between them, and between companies and the outside worlds they deal with). Obviously the net made customers both easier and harder to deal with. Roughly speaking, it made it easier to be nice to your friends and easier for your enemies to be nasty to you.

The internet also, of course, helped customers (voters) share information about you, and that was probably good all round provided you were up for the criticism.

Social media intensifies some of these trends. But it increases the likelihood of febrile and misinformed reactions. Febrile, because viral; misinformed because gossipy. Viral because peer-to-peer; gossipy because conversational. The trouble is, of course, that while social media doesn’t have to be lazy, stupid or ignorant it doesn’t encourage the diligent, intelligent or well-argued.

The issue for business (and politics) is how to join this conversation without becoming prey to its worst features, and how to respond to the viral world’s occasional attacks. So, social media is neither good nor bad, useful or problematic.

Social media is just there and everyone has to wrestle with it as best they may. Even when it seems to be working for you, you have to remember that you may be lured into bad or trivial behaviour by its charms. So you may dumb down your messages and then find you’re accused of dumbing down – and you hoped you were being alert to the zeitgeist. 

Now it’s over to Neville who, in the tradition of polite debate, gets the right to close this session because I opened it.

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

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

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

It was meant to capture all kinds of more or less micro-communications whose essence was that they were peer-to-peer.
 
Things got complicated because “social” media are not just “narrow-casting”. They might be micro, but they had also to be two-way. They were essentially interactive. But they were also essentially about networks: they were clubs.

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

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

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

Yes, they were intermediated, but they were interactive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Canadian Public Relations Society (CPRS) recently adopted a modern definition of PR. It throws up a whole host of issues about what PR is about. Here’s my take on the business PRs are in.

First, here’s the CPRS National Board definition of PR, which it endorsed in February 2009, in Fredericton, New Brunswick:

Public relations is the strategic management of relationships between an organization and its diverse publics, through the use of communication, to achieve understanding, realize organizational goals, and serve the public interest. (Flynn, Gregory & Valin, 2008)

As detailed in a post to PR Conversations, Introducing a new, maple-infused definition of public relations, in both official languages, by Canadian Judy Gombita, a member of CPRS, the definition is being discussed by the “defining” architects, other contributors and frequent commentators to PRC, plus academics at PR Conversations.

Some of their comments have expressed a wish that other PR bodies in other countries should endorse the CPRS line. Without wanting to be a party-pooper for the sake of it, here’s why I hope they will not be successful.

Who do PRs represent?

The problem PRs confront is the following. We have to decide whether our first duty as PR advisers is to our clients or to the public. Do we swear allegiance to both on equal terms even though it is our clients, rather than the public, which pay for our services? Would it be ethical to treat both responsibilities equally?

Now let’s examine some of the problems with this latest attempt at a reconciliation of this conundrum.

Proposition A (“realise organizational goals”) is scuppered by Propositon B (“and serve the public interest”), unless we are to have a rather strained oxymoron.

PRs are paid to promote the interests of their employers. They promote A within the bounds of decency and the law. They do this – if they do it properly – professionally in the best sense of the word. That is in the public interest (B) in the sense that having one-sided advocacy is a part of free society since freedom is not merely the right to speak but the understanding that truth and good sense emerge from competing arguments.

In other words, the defence advocate is serving the pubic interest almost whatever the merit of his or her client. Almost all the time, the PR’s job is to persuade the public that A equals B. But unless these two propositions are simply supposed to be coterminous (which is a stretch) there is often an important tension between propositions A and B. In reality, PRs have to favour A under the cover of espousing B.

The honest PR would admit that PRs dress up A as B. They would insist that his or her professionalism dictates that they should warn the public about the threat of “deception” (or at the very least, one-sidedness) which lies therein. This is why it is so unprofessional and sad and demeaning that PRs should (often do) pretend that A and B are always, or even should or must be, a good match.

It has always been a comfort to me and to colleagues that doing A is clearly defensible (within limits) and doable whilst achieving B is as hard to achieve as it is to define.

Public interest is hard to define

It is the impossibility of defining pubic interest (B) which has reinforced our civilisation’s conviction that lots of A (“realise organizational goals”), done competitively but within limits, is really the best way of achieving B. I say this in the spirit of how markets, democracies and debates are organised in the free world and how they actually behave in practice.

None of this is to deny that a PR may want to enrich an employer’s view of what A is, and do it by framing a view of B which could be promoted. A good example of this is corporate responsibility (CR) and a commitment to sustainability.

Hence, the honest PR needs to make a distinction between espousing B as an instrumental matter for pursuing A, and as a goal in its own right. He or she also must distinguish between pretending to know what B really is, and adopting a popular view of B, or a view of B which was plausible but also suited A.

Obviously the more B is bent out of shape so as to fit A the less the PR can claim a real moral power for his use of B, or for his employer as it claims to adopt B. Therein lies the accusation of greenwash and much more, as the rift between reality and practice produces a credibility gap.

It is my view that authenticity, truthfulness and being aligned with reality will nearly always and in the long run trump fluff, flannel and puff (spin) when it comes to winning long-term public trust; even if the case put is uncomfortable and unpopular. That’s to say: the long-term “organizational goals” will usually be best met with honest PR. With any luck, being honest will usually strike the public as having been in the public interest too.

The notion of the public interest is somewhat loose. We all have our own wildly differing definitions of what it is; even if sometimes it is also clear to all (most) of us what it is not. Being honest – and prizing honesty – is a principle that has stood up pretty well.

That is why it may be best to leave the public interest out of it. The International Public Relations Association (IPRA) Gold Paper No: 6 seems on safer ground when it notes that:

‘[According to the Dutch PR association] Public relations is the systematic promotion of mutual understanding between an organisation and its public‘. Or, as the British express it: ‘Public relations is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its public’.

Of these, I have a fairly decent quibble with the British definition. To “maintain goodwill” might involve a good deal of deception or systematic lack of frankness. “Mutual understanding” is nice because to understand something includes the idea that what one is learning is not untrue. (The English language does not allow that one can “know” or “understand” an untruth.)

Is PR related to propaganda?

By the way, Gold Paper 6 gets muddled when it tries to explain why PR and propaganda are different. It describes propaganda as a one-way process wherein the public (or a particular section of it) is a nominated target and the objective is to change public thinking or prompt public responsive action.

But perhaps the most successful propaganda campaign ever devised was based on two-way communication. It was also grand in scale and viral in nature.

The Four-Minute Men campaign launched by The Committee on Public Information contained many of the founders of the PR industry. During the First World War it rallied community-based opinion-formers who made speeches in favour of the war, interactively and face-to-face, to millions of people gathered in small audiences across the length and breadth of the United States of America.

What’s my view of a working description of PR?

I like to say – as Bill Huey did here – that PR is defined by its practice. Or, as an Hegelian might say: the spirit of PR is involved in self-realization by the process of movement, development, evolution and progress. If I had to pick one word that captures its essence it would be “advocacy”: the act of pleading or arguing for something to influence an outcome on behalf of clients, preferably by using two-way communication techniques. That is to stress that I am not all that interested in PR which persuades people to think a certain thing unless the PR has invited and accepted and met informed challenge by the target audience.

At the end of the day, PRs have to acknowledge that they are not in business to push their own varied agendas on to their clients. Rather they represent – advocate – their employers’ interests. PRs are more like barristers than priests. True, they can – like doctors or management consultants – help fix their employers’ problems. True, they can – like diplomats – bring the wider world to their employers and sensitise their employers to the wider world’s needs. Be they however sophisticated, flacks are hacks – they are for hire. That does not mean they leave decency or professionalism behind when they go to work.

Indeed, the definitions I recommend for them may be more rigorous and personally costly than swimming with the tide of fashionable nostrums, which is my beloved trade’s commonest activity right now.

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Let’s just listen to the counsel PR 2.0 blogger James Warren provides firms in his PR Week Digital PR Essay: contrariwise.

The second idea I want to talk about is again straightforward. But if followed to the letter, it will ensure that the design and tactical execution of any digital activity is optimized for success. And it is, very simply: Be Nice.

While it sounds trite, those businesses that adopt the attributes of niceness when communicating online can only succeed. A few months ago I wrote on my blog: : “…if you’re generous with your time, are courteous, listen, don’t interrupt, help people achieve what they want to achieve and make people smile – in short, if you’re nice – then people will want to hang out with you and they’ll want to introduce you to their mates.”

Any organization that demonstrates the attributes of niceness online – those that run online campaigns that are inclusive, non-judgmental, even-handed, polite, respectful, courteous, humorous, empowering, supportive, interesting and engaging – will be infinitely better placed to succeed than an organization that doesn’t. After all, it’s not not called antisocial media for nothing.

James Warren confuses two things: attracting mates online, and running campaigns. First let’s examine the social side of networking.

Relationships and communities are built on bonds of self-interest, reciprocation, identification and shared experiences. Communities by their nature are rarely inclusive, they have boundaries, just like brands, fashions and all worthwhile relationships do. Niceness, while not to be sniffed at, is rarely at the heart of them, on- or off-line. Allow me to bring this point to life by introducing into the mix a campaign element involving a company or affiliation.

Viewers don’t share NBC’s Saturday Night Live content online because it’s nice. The online Apple community was orginially organised in opposition to PC owners. For both networks of fans it was the judgmental tension that got them motivated. My father is a Millwall FC shareholder, I support West Ham. The conflict over that difference is sharp, and great fun.

The most read interactive political website in the UK is the British National Party’s. The party and its supporters are the very opposite of inclusive.

Moreover, The Sun, The Times and WSJ do not attract readers by being friendly to all, neither does The Huffingdon Post.

James Warren and many others are also wrong to infer that mainstream media is “anti-social”. “Social media” is an oxymoron. All media by definition are social. That’s why the fourth estate has real power, real influence in the real world whether online or off. At some point the term “social” will be dropped, just like the “e” in “e-commerce” already has been (digital convergence will ensure this, I’m sure).

By the way, I do of course think that in some sense all communications and even arguments ought to be “nice”. This is especially true of communications which involve strangers. One can afford to be very impolite – downright rude – only to those who one knows well or who one has decided deserve it. But it is always a risk.

I don’t want an anodyne niceness. I know nice can sell. Sometimes. Of course it can. We’ve all viewed attractive holiday advertisements, contacted self-help groups or been touched by viral video clips of a dog mothering kittens, or a baby horse raised by a goat: everything has its place.

Indeed, too much online communication is childish, not least in its intemperance. The web badly needs a bit more courtesy, especially granted its phony intimacy.

Rudeness has a role in many communications, but not all. My larger point is that proper communication is often about quite sharp differences, and it’s best done with civility.

Actually, I rather liked the rest of what James Warren said in his essay about inline communication. But this blog is not designed to be a fanzine. I hope, then, that I can still share a civilized pint with him at some point. That would be nice.

No related pages.

Getting over-heated, one of Europe’s leading PRs – Weber Shandwick’s Colin Byrne – has enthused:

Obama’s campaign focused heavily on the personal touch, making its theme all about “you” and not “I”. As a direct result of this empowering message over 3 million people were compelled to make personal donations to ‘team Obama’, many of whom gave less than $100. This powerful personalisation mobilised the masses, creating active advocates who were willing to help deliver the message and get out the vote. John McCain, who claimed not to use the ‘net’, subsequently lost a large majority of the under 30 vote.

There is no doubt Obama groomed millions of already-onside voters with texting, YouTube and Face Book communication. Oh alright, “groomed” is too loaded a word. How about schmoozed? Or wooed? But when Byrne talks of mobilising the masses, a quick look at the election results suggests that Obama made little impact on the overall electorate. Sounds an outrageous claim? Well here’re some facts:

Rather remarkably, too, voter turnout did not massively increase, either as the result of the charismatic Obama luring youth and ethnic minorities into the ballot box, or for any other reason. About 126 million people voted for President on November 4. In 2004, when the uncharismatic George W. Bush and John Kerry faced off, about 121.4 million people voted. Given America’s population increase in four years, turnout in 2008 was quite possibly below that in 2004. [Editor's note: The point made is correct, but these figures might not be exact. Wikipedia reports around 129 million voted in 2008, compared to 122.3 million in 2004, which was the previous numerical record. However the turnout percentage was not a record in 2008, and was below 1960, for instance. One has also to consider the total eligible population to vote, voter registrations, and actual votes. Moreover, Lyndon Johnson (in 1964 against Barry Goldwater), Richard Nixon (in 1972 against George McGovern), and Ronald Reagan (in 1984 against Walter Mondale) each received about 60 per cent of the total Presidential vote, far higher than Obama's share.]

Nor did the election reflect any basic social or demographic changes in America’s population mix, as has been widely suggested. The percentage of Afro-Americans in the total population of the United States is the same today as ten, thirty, or sixty years ago: about 11 per cent. More might well have voted for a black candidate than in the past, but 90 per cent of American blacks always vote Democratic. There are more Hispanics and Asians than before, but most American Hispanics are stable Spanish-speaking Caucasians from Mexico, whose grandchildren will be indistinguishable from the rest of the white population, while most Asians are upwardly mobile Chinese, Indians, and Japanese who were as likely to vote for McCain. A visible portion of the “youth vote” campaigned for Obama, but at what election in modern times has there not been a highly visible left-liberal contingent of young activists?

Moreover, McCain in many ways was more reliant on the internet to get his message out than was Obama. McCain, unlike Obama, could not afford to buy up prime-TV to transmit his adverts. He was forced to release many of them purely over the Web instead.

Another counter-intuitive breakdown of the election results reveals the following:

Barack Obama did not win the presidency because white voters have discovered racial tolerance but because there just ain’t enough of them any more.

43% of whites voted for Obama and 55% for McCain. A mere 34 percent of white Protestants voted for Obama, while 65 percent went with McCain. In other words, if only whites could vote, Obama would have lost in a landslide.

Eight years ago, 42% of whites voted for Gore and 54% for Bush: virtually no change! Despite an economy in ruins and the worst president in US history, Obama made virtually no headway among whites. Now contrast this with Bill Clinton. Although running against a war-winning incumbent in only a mild economic downturn, Clinton split the white vote 50-50, whereas Obama lost it decisively. With the Perot distortion almost gone in ’96, Clinton again split the white vote almost evenly.

All nonwhite groups and Latinos voted for Obama by huge margins: Blacks (95%), Asians (62%), and Latinos (67%). Obama’s gains among nonwhites coincided with a shrinking of the white electorate. Here are the percentages:

Clinton-Bush: 83%
Gore-Bush: 81%
Kerry-Bush: 77%
Obama-McCain: 74%

Samuel Huntington‘s nightmare is becoming reality. A nonwhite won because there were not enough whites to stop him. At long last.

The internet is a fact of life. It has changed things. But we still need to keep a grip if we are to understand exactly what has changed and how we should adjust PR strategies accordingly.

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It shows you don’t need Web 2.0 to do viral. But certainly you need YouTube to make it global and to let the complainers go out of their way to hear what they loathe more than once.

If this had been designed to win the ratings war, it would have been a good stunt. That’s weird, perhaps. Yet Ross and Brand were unkown in Germany until this happened. Today they were one of the major items in the German online tabloid.

Nobody can accuse the BBC of being boring anymore. Its image is shifting on a global scale as it competes for viewers with the Web and the rest. It is not pretty. It is hardly pleasant, but it is what’s happening if we like it or not. Watch this space.

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