Acting like you’re an institution
One thing that never fails to astonish me is how the blogosphere can make the most casual comments turn viral in a completely unpredictable way. When I was deleting spam comments earlier today, I noticed incoming links from Adriana Lukas and Kristine Lowe. Of course it’s always flattering to be quoted, but I think beyond that it perfectly demonstrates the potential of blogs when a comment you’ve left three months ago in someone else’s blog suddenly shows up in a new context. The comment that Adriana and Kristine quoted relates to the Edelman flog incident. I found it hard to grasp at the time that Edelman apparently needed to exert some form of control over the sponsored bloggers and that this control was assumed to be worth the risk of having them exposed as fakes. Or, to be more precise: the impact of them saying something negative about Wal-Mart was deemed greater than the impact of a possible exposure.
As we found out later, this was a pretty major miscalculation.
In that vein exactly, Adriana concisely notes in a recent entry:
On the internet you are not an institution. If you want to be and behave like one, you get isolated and bypassed. So a media/communications/PR strategy makes little sense. It’s back to communication between human beings, communities and sometimes mobs. The rules of social interactions apply - if people challenge you on something you have done or said and you don’t respond, expect a commensurate impact on your reputation or credibility. If people make fun of you or try to embarrass you, the choice is to remain silent in hope of appearing dignified or to shoot back, with indignation or with humour. It depends. Different responses will be appropriate at different times and different circumstances. That is why etiquette is so complicated. Media and communications strategies don’t even come close. The main difference is that you don’t need to be ‘trained’ for online communication, it’s the one that you already know. And whether you are good at it or not has nothing to do with communication skillz but with respect for others and some good manners.
Brochures, press releases, ads, etc are always produced by a number of stakeholders inside an institution, sometimes even with the additional support of others from the outside (think advertising campaigns). All these people collaborate to make a piece of communication perfect, i.e. to give it a form that will appeal to as many people as possible. In the process of vetting the communication, any recognizable connection between the individuals speaking and those who are being addressed is severed. The voice is that of the company and not that of any particular individual working for it. What I’m describing isn’t some evil scheme of corporate communications either - it was simply the most effective way to mediate between an institution and the anonymous public around it… in the pre-Internet age.
But since individuals now see eye to eye with institutions in terms of their power to communicate and publicize ideas, they increasingly demand that institutions act like human beings in a communication. The rules of social interactions apply, as Adriana keenly observes, and like the uncool kid on a playground a company may be teased, ridiculed and embarrassed by its peers. Now think about Adriana’s statements that a media/communications/PR strategy makes little sense and that media and communications strategies don’t even come close (to solving the problem) in such a situation. Apart from the fact that they’re devised for a different kind of communicative situation (one-way), what else is problematic with such strategies? Two things, in my opion. Firstly, strategies are planned. The troublesome part is that people know this and usually deduct that the goal of a strategy must be to deceive them (think about the Wal-Mart/Edelman issue). After all, I might come up with a strategy for a lecture, a job interview or a political speech, but if I developed a strategy before chatting with my friends what kind of person would that make me? Secondly, strategies are static in the sense that they make general, fixed assumptions about what works and what doesn’t and, more narrowly, about how to achieve a positive effect. But they are useless if you need to adapt to a new situation because they offer a single recipe for everything.
So what’s PR good for in world where fixed messages are passé? A lot, in my opinion, if you put the emphasis on relations and not on public. Because although I agree with Adriana that manners and respect for others are the foundation of communicative competence, I think there is such a thing as skill involved. It’s why some kids are more popular than others and why being a talented writer also makes you a more effective blogger. Helping institutional clients to learn interacting with individuals - provided they bring manners and respect to the table - is what PR may be about in the future. Because apparently that’s no easy feat when you’re a insecure and introverted bureaucracy that usually addresses others by shouting at them through a megaphone.
