Resources
Jim Macnamara - Conversation with a Fellow
Janus, the two-faced Roman God of Gates represents opening and closing, beginning and ending. Janus looks both into the future and into the past, standing at the point of transition. In this Conversation with a Fellow, Professor Jim Macnamara will not only reflect, but will use lessons of the past to focus on the future.
Speech delivered to the PRIA (NSW) Evening with a Fellow talk on 16 April 2009 at the Royal Exchange.
Professor Jim Macnamara PhD, FPRIA, FAMI, CPM, FAMEC
Professor of Public Communication and
Director, Australian Centre for Public Communication
University of Technology Sydney
Good evening colleagues and friends.
The 'Conversation with a Fellow' series established by the PRIA is designed to provide an opportunity to hear from people who have spent a long time working in public relations and/or related areas of communication practice and who have, assumedly, learned something along the way, some of which could be useful to pass on.
It is very tempting at such a forum to reflect and reminisce - to look backwards at the journey done; to boast a little; to tell a few 'war stories'; divulge a few secrets; thank mentors and friends; embarrass a few colleagues; and probably bore most of you to tears.
I will do that - but not tonight. There is a book coming sometime in the next few years called Confessions of a PR Man. Don't think of the title as sexist. For those old enough to remember, it is a take-off of David Ogilvy's Confessions of an Advertising Man. The book will candidly reflect on 35 years working inside the world of public communication and I can assure you that after three years in Army and Defence PR, four years working in Canberra in the National Press Club, five years working for Microsoft including coordinating two tours by Bill Gates, and many years consulting to a hundred or more clients that involved - among other things - defending kangaroo culling, mulesing, agrochemicals, software copyright, and mobile phone towers - I have a few stories to tell.
But tonight, I want to take what I have learned and am still learning and, instead of looking back over it reflectively, I want to use it to focus forward to the future. I would like to speak for a little while about public communication in 2010-2015.
We want to have time for a conversation, so I will focus on just two issues that I believe are fundamental in the practice of public relations.
On the first topic, I want to start by presenting you with three simple scenarios. Three people in fact.
Prudence - 2010
First, meet Prudence. This is her Facebook site - well, as it is futuristic this is a mock-up, but all the photos and images I am showing are real, taken off various sites where they have been voluntarily posted. Prudence, Pru to her friends, is a young woman recently graduated from university and working in her first job. She goes out quite a bit, but is hard-working an ambitious. When she is out, Prudence loves to party like most young people. She drinks a little too much sometimes. And, like many of her age, she likes to take photos on her camera phone and post them on her Facebook site.
One evening in 2010, Pru and her friends took a bunch of photos of a fun night that involved a lot of drinking, flashing of a few tattoos, and a few hammed up lesbian kisses for the camera - and they posted them on their Facebook sites. Several of her friends tagged names on the photos and some posted comments. One comment joked about 'E's and Ice not mixing with Vodka. It was all in good fun.
Patrick - 2010
Second, I would like to introduce you to Patrick. Patrick cannot be here, but this is his blog. Patrick used to work at a large bank along with 5,000 other employees. Patrick is an amateur blogger - one of those who Geert Lovink calls 'pyjama journalists'. He is not in Technorati's Authority list. But he gets things off his chest when something is bothering him or he has had a bad day at work.
One day in 2010, Patrick heard on the grapevine at work that a major client was planning to merge with a rival. The two companies were struggling against one other much larger competitor and he could see that their merger would give the big competitor a run for its money. Patrick did not like the big competitor because he bought something from the company once and their customer service was frustrating.
That weekend he wrote a few lines in his blog as part of a rant against big companies in general in which he said that X, naming the market leader, would soon have a serious competitor because of "moves afoot in Sydney".
Across town, the big competitor using sophisticated text mining software trawled the Web and found their name in Patrick's post. They deduced that the only way they could soon have a major competitor was if their two nearest rivals joined forces. They saw the comment about "moves afoot in Sydney" and, knowing that one of their competitors was based in Sydney, they concluded that the leak came from that competitor who was probably the initiator of the merger plan.
So they immediately contacted the third competitor and made them an offer they could not refuse. The third competitor caved in and sold to the market leader, leaving the client of Patrick's bank out in the cold. Patrick's bank was disappointed that they lost out on the big commissions and fees that they would have received if the merger went ahead, but they told their client that it was just bad luck.
Now, let's step forward a few years. It is 2015.
Prudence - 2015
Pru is married and has two children. Unhappy with the Costello Government's performance on family issues, she has joined the Family Matters Party, a breakaway from the old Family First Party. She is standing on a platform of morality and ethics, calling for the teaching of Christian values in schools and stricter government policies to address drug taking and binge drinking.
Two months before the election, while Pru is on the campaign trail with her Party's PR manager and a press adviser drumming up increasing support for her conservative moralistic stand, a spurned ex-boyfriend e-mails a journalist with a link to view Prudence's old Facebook photos - long-before removed from her site, but still in existence in bits and bytes in the world of Web archives. Some of you may know that nothing that is posted on the Web is ever completely deleted. Web files are archived and have a half-life longer than Uranium238.
The journalist, anxious to beat the citizen media for once, gets a great story. The photos appear within hours in an online Google-owned publication, together with quotes from the wall posts about using drugs. There are calls for her resignation immediately and by 6 pm of the next day her digital wall screen at home shows a serious faced president of the Family Matters Party visual messaging her to say that the Party expects that she will "do the right thing" and step down immediately. Her political career is over.
Patrick - 2015
Patrick has left the bank. The client of Patrick's bank that missed out on a merger that would have bolstered its place in the market, suffered continuing loss of market share and went through several restructurings during 2011 and 2012.
The client also launched an investigation in late 2010 into how information on their secret merger plans reached their major competitor. Within weeks, their investigators come across Patrick's blog post. Patrick's blog gave no personal details other than his name, but by cross-matching his profile on LinkedIn, they soon discovered that he worked for their own bank.
Subsequently, the now ex-client sued the bank on the grounds of damages for $1.4 billion.
In 2015, after four years of costly legal wrangling, the bank settled for $750 million.
The public relations department was called in after the settlement to draft a statement to minimise damage as best they could.
In the same year, my third scenario unfolded.
Eric - 2015
Eric, the new head of the Department for APEC Relations, a federal government department set up to develop Australia's vital trading relationships in Asia, particularly China, stood before an inquiry in Canberra and stated emphatically that his staff in Beijing had not visited houses of ill repute in Guangdong as guests of corporate interests. The department had conducted a thorough month-long internal investigation and found no evidence of such claims. They did check YouTube and found nothing. The Department head assured the Minister and the PR department drafted a statement to such effect.
Meanwhile, a video on Tudou had been viewed by 500,000 Chinese in just 30 days, including officials in Beijing. It showed three Australian officials drinking and being entertained by Chinese women in a darkly lit establishment, with the officials addressing each other by name in slurred Australian accents.
Now, of course I don't have that video, but Tudou, Chinese for coach potato, is not made up. It is the largest video sharing site in the world with more video views that YouTube.
Questions
Now I won't ask how many of you here tonight have potentially compromising personal photos or information somewhere on the Web. But let me ask you some professional questions:
- How many of you as professional communicators, have counselled your organisation about the risks of potentially damaging content in Web archives?
- How many of you have conducted a Web search on your senior executives to identify what information is available about them? A Web audit?
- How many of you and your colleagues monitor employee blogs?
- How many PR professionals have implemented or recommended policies on employee blogging or Tweeting? Does your organisation know what its own employees are saying? Do they know whether they are leaking organisation secrets, undermining the brand, or contradicting its marketing and corporate messages? Of course, employee blogs are not private communication - they are public communication floating around the Web for 1.5 billion people to see.
- How many have counselled management on security issues that can arise with camera phones and PDAs that can record sound and images digitally?
- How many monitor social media?
- How many routinely monitor YouTube? Or Twitter?
- How many practitioners across our profession even know of Tudou, Joost, Baidu, Bebo, Orkut, Hi5 or Cyworld?
- How many have checked for mentions of your organisation or industry in Wikipedia to see if they are accurate?
Now you could ask whether some of these things fall within the role of public relations or corporate communication. Perhaps not. Perhaps it is the job of lawyers to assess risks and liabilities, including those of communication or miscommunication. Perhaps it is the job of HR or management consultants to suggest employee blogging guidelines.
On the other hand, communication professionals claim to conduct environmental scanning. We claim to be experts in issues management, of which identification is the first stage. We say we can manage reputation. We claim we provide strategic counsel - not just implement tactics after the event. We say we are media experts.
At the centre of all of those scenarios I have just described are media. Fundamentally affected in all of those scenarios are reputations and relationships. In advance of all those scenarios lay opportunities to give strategic advice and counsel to management - to make a major valuable contribution.
And none of those scenarios needs to be positioned in 2015. They could all happen in 2009 - well, all except the Peter Costello as PM part. The time of those media, those reputational and relationship risks, those opportunities, is already here.
The Makovsky State of Corporate Blogging survey in 2006 found that 80 per cent of Fortune 1000 companies do not monitor blogs and 50% do not have policies on employee blogging. While this is changing, according to the Institute for Public Relations in the US, the percentage is still high.
And yet, four in five blogs post product or brand reviews according to Technorati (2008) and a 2008 Society for New Communications Research study found that 59 per cent of internet users surveyed use social media to vent about customer service on a regular basis.
A research study undertaken by my former colleagues at CARMA International in the US released just this month presents some interesting findings on blogs. A CARMA analysis of reporting on 17 major companies in mainstream media and in 3,700 blogs found that blogs are NOT more negative, more vicious or more unpredictable than so-called mainstream media - and, therefore, to be avoided as claimed by some. CARMA found that mainstream media were favourable 43.9 per cent of the time. Blogs were favourable in 41.4 per cent of coverage. MSM were unfavourable towards the companies in 26 per cent of coverage. Blogs were unfavourable in 27.8 per cent of coverage. Some blogs were very unfavourable, but some were very favourable. In other words, there is greater variation in consumer-generated media, but overall it affords similar volumes and similar quality of coverage as newspapers, radio and television.
We are living at a time of not only change, but major paradigm shifts in media and public communication - a time cited by many as a watershed as significant as the invention of the printing press or television. I don't believe that comparison is over-stated.
As communication professionals, I believe we have a responsibility to provide leadership and guidance through this seismic shift. But also there are major opportunities for public relations in relation to emergent media practices.
I would like to finish off this section of my talk and link to my second conversation starter by citing two definitions of media. I know definitions can be academic and boring, but the first is from a 2008 book by a leading media scholar Lisa Gitelman and highlights a very important point. She says media are:
"socially realised structures of communication, where structures include both technological forms and their associated protocols, and where communication is a cultural practice."
The definition goes on further, but I use this to emphasise that media are only partly about technologies - and we too often focus on that aspect. Media, particularly the 4th revolution or what some are calling the 'Fifth Estate' of interactive internet media, are equally or even more about protocols and cultural practices that form around technologies.
Another eminent scholar, Nick Couldry, argues for a whole new approach to media research that treats media as practice. He says we should not look at media as channels, or content, or systems of distribution, or from a narrow perspective of what media do to people. Rather, Couldry and a number of media researchers, drawing on an emerging field of practice theory, say we should look at media in a wider sociological sense as a range of practices involving producers, distributors and consumers interacting and that these media practices are embedded within and interlocked with social and cultural practices generally. The rise of prosumers - consumers who are also producers - supports this wider view and focus on what people do with media, rather than looking only at what media do to people.
A shift in focus from media as technologies to media as a set of social and cultural practices (i.e. how we all use media as producers, consumers or both) is important because not only do technologies change - something we are all patently aware of - but practices also change. I want to put it to you that working with and in media and communication today is not just about learning to use new technologies; it requires a new way of thinking and a new way of working - a new method of practice. I will elaborate on this with some specifics in a moment.
In working on my latest book called Emergent Media and Communication Practices which looks at future trends in media and public communication and includes a chapter on 'The Future of Public Relations', I have come to two realisations about PR.
The first is that if or when it is practised ethically and in line with modern models and theories, public relations is one of the most fundamental and important functions for businesses, governments and all types of organisations. In the sense of building and maintaining relationships with key 'publics', in the globalised networked society in which we live it is integral to the interactions of politics and business and even to the fabric of society itself. It is not a function that can be performed by advertising and, in fact, building and maintaining relationships requires a particular approach to communication that is quite different to advertising - something I will return to in a moment.
But my second realisation is that applied practice in public relations has been developing over the past decade or two in the opposite direction to social trends. It is becoming increasingly out of step with social and cultural practices.
Let me explain. While technological developments are important enablers of communication practices - particularly the development of large public networks, notably the internet, and the development of low-cost and even free interactive communication tools and content production software through the open source movement - there are a number of protocols, conventions and cultural practices in what is called Web 2.0 that are redefining the way public communication is conducted in democratic and even non-democratic societies.
These are part of what are referred to as the five, six or seven Cs. These are:
- Connectivity (which we have like never before)
- Conversations enabled by the interactive capability of Web 2.0, and
- Collaboration also made possible on a wider scale than ever before using open shared software tools such as wikis. Collaboration harnesses what sociologist Pierre Lévy calls
- Collective intelligence - a vast resource of voluntary contributors who previously were viewed as the 'mob', but now found to possess the 'wisdom of the crowd' if encouraged and engaged creatively. This is generating new types of
- Content that is increasingly user-generated, diverse and openly shared. Also, connectivity, conversations and collaboration are creating and building
- Communities unconstrained by geography. And they enable true
- Communication in the sense of creating and sharing meaning (as opposed to transmitting messages).
These factors are revolutionising approaches to creative design; strategic planning in organisations; product development; policy making in government; and many other fields. In terms of media and communication, there are three key inter-related practical changes arising from them:
- A shift from monologue to dialogue - the people who New York journalism professor Jay Rosen calls "the people formerly known as the audience" now want to have a say and they have the tools to do so;
- A shift away from dialogue in the form of formal discussions, presentations, and for-and-against debate and away from what Geert Lovink terms "lecture" and "sermon" by elites - whether they be politicians, corporations or journalists - to conversations; and
- Conversation requires authenticity. Conversation is 'real' people talking in 'real' language about 'real' things. It is not rhetoric, packaged imagery, pre-prepared statements, and hyperreality. In the practice of conversation, as we all know because we all do it as part of human relationships, both sides have to listen, both have to give and take, and both have to be honest and frank with each other, or the conversation breaks off abruptly.
Why bother with the time-consuming, sometimes messy and often unpredictable processes of dialogue and conversation and the risks of authenticity which requires openness, honesty and frankness? Are they just fads that will pass, allowing us to get back to the familiar and comfortable business of issuing official statements, news releases, speeches, Web sites and newsletters to tell people how things are? Well, very simply, these three things are fundamental to relationships. Relationships cannot exist without authenticity, dialogue and conversation. And government, business and organisations cannot exist without relationships.
Against this trend, let's look at the practice of public relations - which, significantly, has 'relations' in its title and in most modern definitions.
Even though it is part of what critics call 'promotional culture', public relations has been conceptualised as quite different to advertising and sales and product promotion. After divorcing itself from the early days of propaganda, public relations set out to professionalise itself first as the provision of information - accurate, honest information distribution. Then it developed further to recognise the need for two-way interaction to build relationships with 'publics' and stakeholders. Evolving two-way and dialogic models of public relations include listening, genuine attempts to act in the public interest, and occasionally changing the organisation's position to align it with its stakeholders and communities. At a practical level, PR practitioners have traditionally known and advised their organisations that editorial content, for instance, cannot be controlled and that public relations is a dynamic, interactive process that works through communication and negotiation.
Group Chief Executive of the WPP Group, Martin Sorrell, referred to this open uncontrolled interactive nature of public relations in a speech about the future to the Yale Club in New York in November last year. He said: "There are risks and opportunities inherent in the more complex uncontrolled communication environment of social media. But public relations is used to working in an uncontrolled environment. It is its natural territory."
I believe Martin Sorrell is right - theoretically. But somewhere along the way, PR practice has lost its commitment to working in an uncontrolled, interactive environment. It is now almost universal PR practice to instruct organisation spokespersons to stay 'on message'. Carefully crafted, increasingly promotional messages are provided to spokespersons who repeat them ad infinitum in the media, hardly ever answering questions that are asked. In fact, many media training programs urge spokespersons not to answer questions.
I have to make a confession at this point and admit that I have been as swept along as many others in this approach during my career, at least to some extent. In 1996 I wrote a book called How to Handle the Media which was published by Prentice Hall and endorsed by and used by the Australian Institute of Management as an executive guide to media interviews. It recommended preparing key messages for interviews and suggested reiterating them and staying out of uncharted territory, as well as giving other tips to get your message across. I did not go as far as saying that you should or can control media interviews, but I would rephrase my advice if I was writing that book today.
An analysis of six media training programs and guides currently in the market reveals that the controlled approach to communication has continued to gain momentum. All use terms like "manage" the interview, "control" the interview and all advocate pre-preparing messages and staying "on message" irrespective of questions asked. In politics, in business and in organisations, the practice of giving media interviews has largely become a case of 'pushing a play button' on a 'spokesperson' and their recorded messages come out like the stilted phrases of talking dolls and puppets. I won't name any individual media trainer included in my research, but let me quote from one corporate media training program. In a training section of its Web site, Microsoft provides a section explicitly headed "six tips for taking control of media interviews" where it says: "stay on track with your message" and "bridge to deflect any attempt to derail your message".
Media interviews, and media releases, have become scripted advertising and promotion.
Similarly, corporate Web sites, organisation newsletters, and even corporate blogs increasingly present slick rhetorically air-brushed 'Photoshopped' images of organisations that are often indistinguishable from advertising.
Our most valuable partners and stakeholders have become target audiences and target markets. Public relations practice unashamedly, or unthinkingly, uses language that implies lining up people in its sights and firing its arsenal of information and imagery at them. The militaristic language has resonances of 'taking them out', 'neutralising them' or, in the very least, it describes a practice of zeroing in on those in our target zone to do some premeditated strategic 'psyops'1 on them.
Where's the dialogue? Where's the conversation? Where's the authenticity?
The fact that many PR practitioners measure editorial publicity in terms of advertising cost equivalents, or what they illogically call Advertising Value Equivalents (AVEs), is revealing. (They are actually what advertising hypothetically would have cost - not a measure of value.) But apart from this anomaly, this practice is an illustration that many public relations practitioners see publicity much like advertising. In fact, in using AVEs many practitioners explicitly claim that it is equivalent.
Meanwhile, ironically, advertising is in serious trouble. Hyperbole, slick imagery and glib promises of 30-second TV commercials and press advertising are being rejected by a new generation of cynical media savvy users. On television, advertising is being filtered out with TiVo. On the internet it is being deleted using ad blocking software and many sites do not allow advertising. Deloittes has warned that public antipathy towards advertising is growing and a survey has found that 76 per cent of internet users find online advertising intrusive and 28 per cent say they will pay to avoid advertising.
The reason that advertising is in so much trouble is not changing technology. Technically advertising can easily be placed on any Web site. As I noted previously, we are in the midst of a social and cultural revolution more than a technological revolution. A key shift in social and cultural practices in relation to media and public communication is rejection of one-way top-down monologue in favour of interaction and dialogue and rejection of 'spin', rhetoric and hyperbole in favour of authentic conversations.
The control paradigm of information distribution that has existed in an era of mass media is no longer effective in this new era of audience fragmentation, disintermediation, open public networks, and media savvy prosumers tired of 'spin' and prepared to talk back. Like the crazed newsman Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch, in the 1976 movie Network they're saying "I'm not gonna take it anymore". Only this time, they can do better than shout out the window. They have some powerful tools and a vast public network available to them.
It seems to me that in trying to lock down and control communication and amp-up its promotional messages, public relations has lost its distinctiveness from advertising and propaganda that it has strived to achieve and is travelling the wrong way down the information superhighway.
In communication, to be relevant in today's emergent media environment and to today's society, it is imperative that organisations engage in two-way dialogue and conversations and embrace authenticity rather than clinging to a control paradigm of one-way top-down dissemination of packaged information that will increasingly be rejected. It seems to me that public relations should be the spearhead of this change.
Public relations practitioners mostly reject charges of 'spin'. But, to today's Generation Y, or as some now say Generation C, any information that is totally or mostly one-way, controlled and packaged is not dialogue; it is not conversation; and it not authentic. It is 'spin'.
It's time to unspin spin.
Or, as I like to say, it's time to take the 'PR' out of public relations and put the 'public' and 'relations' back in.
Technological change is very visible and commands our attention. But social and cultural change creeps up on us. I put it to you that public communication - both advertising and public relations - needs to adapt to changing social and cultural practices, not just changing technologies. And that means changing public relations practices - what we do with communications technology - not just changing tools and channels.
What awaits is a great opportunity to engage in the conversations of our time, upon which the relationships of the future are being built.
1 Abbreviation of 'psychological operations' as practised by intelligence agencies and the military to spread propaganda and undermine target groups' belief systems, values, reasoning and behaviour.