The largest corporations have broadly established, by trial and error, how they are going to handle the new media environment.

 

Smaller businesses and professional service firms had probably believed, with some justification, that the shift from the ‘old media economy’ to the ‘new media economy’ might take a few more years to complete. There would be plenty of time for adjustment.

 

Unfortunately, an integral part of the current ‘Great Correction’ is a major acceleration in the shift of communications to the internet. There is a lot of evidence for the pace of this change increasing as job losses mount at newspaper groups and their business models slip into the query basket.

 

It is perhaps best if we just accept that this change is happening and ask ourselves a very simple question - what does a business need to consider both in marketing itself and in protecting its reputation in these changed circumstances?

 

Two cultural systems, based on new media and old, will be operating in parallel for some time to come. Conventional PR and advertising techniques are likely to subsist alongside new techniques but change is coming and we have to prepare for it.

 

There is no sign of broadcast media weakening. On the contrary, its transfer to the internet seems to be smooth, limited only by the technical capacity of the system to adapt to mass viewership of popular films and programmes. Most newspapers may also poddle along for some time in genteel decline.

 

Cost cuts in editorial mean that a news story in one paper will tend to be found in all the others so that higher ‘opportunities to see’ only requires creative PR to hit those nodal points where the newswires touch morning editorial meetings in order to get widespread coverage.

 

But the wider population is definitely going to get its news (especially in crises), and increasingly its entertainment and general information, from the internet.

 

More to the point, the command-and-control of PR, the infamous world of ‘spin’, may soon collapse because every citizen is now a potential journalist, whether downloading mobile phone videos or ‘twittering’. He is also a publisher whether on social networking tools or on blogs.

 

So what do you need to know?

 

First, that there are things that you can control and things that you cannot and that the things you cannot are no longer always in the hands of an editor who can be handled by lawyers and PR professionals.

 

Second, that there are things that are simple negotiations between you and the system (much like traditional advertising) but that there are also conversations in which anyone can join in, including competitors, activists and downright cranks.

 

Your Core Presence

 

Let us assume news releases, annual reports and brochures as part of the old media economy. You control the text of these and who receives them.

 

You do not really care how far they spread into unsafe hands to the degree that you control the content. The PR and graphic design industries were built on the management of this process.

 

Now, you must consider your website, blogs that do not permit online discussion (like this Blog), podcasts and new techniques for placing your own videos online as either e-communications, or as part of a blog or website, as mere extensions of that process. Sales e-communications are another controlled tool.

 

So far, so simple. All these are techniques that only require access to technologies that are almost ridiculously cheap. This ‘core presence’ is not only technically easy to administer (so long as you have a system for creating and checking content) but cheaper.

 

Websites can replace expensive brochure print-runs. Annual reports are increasingly moving online to save costs. There is a growing temptation to halt the issuing of announcements in favour of simply placing material on the web and directing public interest to the relevant site.

 

If there is a problem, it lies in the sheer ‘noise’ of the internet. Your website and all the paraphrenalia of new media communications are buried in a world where search engines appear to be as manipulable by competitors as by yourself. Marketing has merely been made more complex

 

A brand based on exclusive and high pricing means a lot less in a world of instant price comparisons with easy search for competitor products and the availability of online consumer reviews.

 

And this pressure on brand value is going to increase if job cuts mean less service quality and customers no longer confuse the expensive with the good.

 

Extending the Marketing Range

 

Traditional advertising is not dead, it has merely shifted locus. Your agency will be offering ever more complex technical assessments of whether your spend will reach its target markets best through banner online headlines or a traditional full print page. Prepare to be boondoggled.

 

There is a whole new world of ‘viral’ marketing emerging where your agency can place material on YouTube or on a photo-site or some similar ‘holding pen’ and then kick-start interest that will spread (they hope) through those social networks that will matter for your sales or brand awareness.

 

Old and new live alongside each other. Space purchased in broadcast and to introduce an online video on the one hand sits alongside creative content that is sent as a meme into cyber-space to seek out and place itself before the eyes of potential customers as if it was a guided missile.

 

Your jaded correspondent has found himself putting a very comical John West Salmon advertisement on his Facebook page, broadcasting its message to 200 or so people without hope of reward other than a smile.

 

The First Point of Risk – Opening Up The Debate

 

Press conferences have never been risk-free but then every time you meet a client for lunch or present to a new prospect, you risk a great deal in the way you interact personally with the other side.

 

The classic case in the 'old days' would be the supplier taking someone with strong and sincere religious views to a strip joint. A crude joke can kill a relationship. The rule about not discussing religion, sex or politics in a sales context is a sound default position.

 

The new media now opens up a new zone of ‘managed risk’ – the company-sponsored forum or a discussion facility on a company blog. This really is new territory. Such commentary is both ephemeral and on the permanent record. It is seen only for a moment and yet is permanently retrievable.

 

This is not a sexist comment but it is like many women's memories in times of stress. The web will recall and record a significant statement that a man has long since forgotten or considered trivial. It could be equally unforgiving if the original author cannot explain what he meant and means now.

 

Forums and discussions have also developed their own etiquette which is linked closely to their own credibility. Any overt manipulation or censorship would be more destructive of reputation than doing nothing. And there is cost to consider.

 

The shift to online should slash costs for one's ‘core presence’ in due course although you will be spending something on getting people to see your website.

 

It may break the control of some newspapers over advertising access to key markets although online replacements will soon be charging premium rates as soon as we get a recovery.

 

On the other hand, the low technology of forums and of online discussion is soon offset by the labour-intensive nature of their management and promotion.

 

Your managers have to have judgement and be literate every day and in every way, not just on those days when a one-way formulaic news release is to be issued into the market. Judgement under pressure and literacy are becoming rare enough to command, one day soon, premium prices.

 

It has been calculated that scarcely 3% of corporations are blogging in Europe, primarily because of the dead hand of legal liability. And yet, these arguments against getting engaged in controlled dialogue, which apply to most companies at most times, should be pushed aside under certain conditions.

 

If a business relies for its revenueon being expert, the one-eyed in the land of the blind, or genuinely finds value in dialogue with customers, especially where advanced products require interaction for research and development, then blogging, under controlled conditions, becomes useful.

 

There are also cases where ‘serious problems’ can be identified in forums. These can then be resolved before they become reputationally damaging in the wider world.

 

For some situations, with more or less closed entry points for users, depending on circumstances, such fora, which may receive further elaboration as online virtual worlds in the future, may well be useful and constructive additions to the marketing and reputational armouries of many corporations.

 

The Zone of Greatest Risk

 

So far, so manageable. Professional public relations or advertising help can deal with most aspects of the internet. An intelligent corporate assessment of risk and reward can allow a judgement about the value of company forums and online blog discussion.

 

If a company puts out a news release, podcast, advertisement or YouTube video that damages sales or reputation, it really has only itself (or over-reliance on poor advisers) to blame.

 

The next zone of interest is where it gets interesting. This is where old methods of management simply no longer apply. Here, anyone can say anything about anyone else and the only recourse is the heavy-handed use of lawyers.

 

This call to legal counsel is not merely expensive but is often counter-productive in a world of Wikileaks where there is no fixed focus for an attack on reputation. Sometimes all one is left with is silence.

 

Nevertheless, two things work to the benefit of the attacked. First, the internet is perceived to be an unreliable free-for-all so an unevidenced claim is often dismissed as long as it stays in the safe havens of committed activism. Eventually, 'trusted' sites will emerge but this gives business a breathing space.

 

Second, the internet is vast so that, unless a negative claim enters into one of the great aggregating sites, such as the BBC or Guardian (which can be dealt with through conventional legal or PR methods), it is soon buried or isolated on the margins.

 

Under these conditions, legal action is often counter-productive precisely because it creates defensiveness within the blogging or activist community. Clumsy legal action paradoxically increases the chances of spread or exposure.

 

There are case studies to demonstrate this, famously called the Streisand Effect. Once a claim is let loose as a ‘meme’ across the net, there is virtually no way of controlling it that is not expensive in time and legal and PR fees. Our reputational management team deals with many such cases.

 

But companies can take a more active position. This requires a skill base different from traditional PR and closer to that of politics, a sort of PR-legal hybrid working closely with lawyers and press agents.

 

Such an approach will creatively manage the accuracy and flow of information into the ‘free’ web and ensure that, at every point, an interested party is easily directed back to the facts held within the zone of ‘core presence’ – which must be adjusted in real time rather than on some annual cycle.

 

Such operations are about monitoring, waiting until an untruth or innuendo appears and then making a judgement on action alongside company management and legal counsel. Sometimes, there is no alternative but legal engagement. More often, there is good reason to take no action.

 

But sometimes it will be appropriate to correct facts on Wikipedia or ensure an entry, to participate in discussion sites and forums, to comment on YouTube videos, to engage with Facebook groups and to share material or add comments to third party blogs.

 

This is the world that much of corporate and political life has not yet come to terms with. The election of Obamahas given us a first indication of a change in thinking because of his team’s use of the new systems but these are still early days and effective winning of office is not effective governance.

 

Nevertheless, his victory showed that nervousness about this new environment is not always justified - the level of risk is really not much worse than a broadcast interview or a meeting with workers who are about to be made redundant. There will be 'butterflies in the stomach' but that is only to be expected.

 

And corporate attitudes are changing. Hallvarsson & Hallvarsson found that 81% of the 150 largest European companies have now put information about themselves on Wikipedia, which is used by three quarters of business journalists, analysts and investors when looking for company information.

 

Linked-in and Facebook were accessed by a quarter of such investigators and this level of interest can be expected to rise.

 

A Final Comment

 

Over the next three to five years, tools such as Facebook (or Bebo or Orkut) and Twitter, as well as specialised social networking sites and new tools that are emerging for citizen journalism and for the release of documents on the web, are going to change corporate communications radically.

 

The arrest of Damien Green, MP, late last month may not seem relevant to all this but it is. The Government needed to frighten leakers by showing how far it would go to hunt them down. The question we have to ask is why was Government so frightened that it had to frighten?

 

The consequent constitutional fury about the Government's move does not remove this salient fact – that Government and others with an interest in opaqueness know that they will have to fight hard and dirty to halt the flow of free information into the market.

 

This is information that was previously shielded from public view by a variety of understandings between editors, PRs, lobbyists, politicians and business.

 

The 'D Notice' system for national security, a highly collusive operation between editors and officials, is only the most extreme element in a system of control that is now under threat.

 

As the old system breaks down, the State and the establishment, including the corporate establishment, are going to have to choose whether to try 'Chinese-style' control or learn to go with the flow. For cultural reasons, business in the West would be wise to ignore the State's paranoia and go with the flow.

 

The public policy aspects of this are certainly going to become very confusing. Renewed and reasonable demands for a privacy law are going to be confused with the demand for freedom of information on public policy matters.

 

One side in the game will be happy to see increased personal privacy as the reasonable price for a proper foundation for public interest disclosure, another will have a vested interest in the current system and another will want total freedom.

 

Behind all these will be the anal and deeply neurotic security lobby which will be trying to clamp down on a lot of new information flow by using national security as an excuse.

 

Whatever the politicians may want, unless the State is given draconian Chinese-style powers of control (which is unlikely but not entirely impossible in the current climate), the internet is likely to provide us with a massive flow of uncontrolled direct opinion.

 

Business just has to be prepared for statements like “this product is rubbish/brilliant” being twittered across the globe. We are also going to have to live with some rather useless emotional outpourings (memes of rage or despair at events) in reaction to horrors on broadcast media.

 

Above all, we are going to see the emergence of 'respected’ central points for the release of secret documentation and for direct citizen-based investigative journalism. There is going to be a lot of noise out there to be managed - and not always a great deal of sound analysis.

 

In this context, a business has only three tactics: withdrawal; monitoring; and engagement. Partial withdrawal is probably quite sensible for most businesses at this early stage but with a view to monitoring for eventual engagement in this new game.

 

The next few years will see whether the political and business classes can adjust to the empowerment of citizen and consumer by the new media environment. Just as printing and broadcast changed both politics and business models so will the new media do the same– we are only at the very start of the process.

 

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