Frank Shaw, the president of Waggener Edstrom (my former firm), wrote an excellent blog post,
The New New Communications; or why Twitter/Facebook/Yammer/ et al Are Not It. He sagely points out that products like Facebook, Twitter and Yammer are not the answer to every communication need. Status updates, pokes and retweets are incapable of communicating complex issues and as communicators we need to use the right tool for a given job (as artisans have always known). It’s easy to just turn to new, trendy tool to solve all of your (or an industry’s) problems.
The problem is that the
New New Communications isn’t a tool or platform play. It’s a fundamental change in the way that people expect to experience information. People want to be able to have easy access to the news, information, entertainment, opinions and conversations which are most relevant to them. Some folks also want to discover the truth (or at least alternative opinions) about the stories in the news, and an even smaller number want to tell their own stories. At any other time in history to do any of these things would have required wealth, resources and time. Now, it’s just a matter knowledge and interest, knowledge that amazing things are possible and interest in participating with others in the social stew. The revolution is what can be done with the tools and not the tools themselves.
Jackson Pollack,
Pablo Picasso and
Koko the gorilla all used similar brushes and paint but with radically different results.
Frank also mentions the various buzzwords and mantras which are often heard in social huckster conversations, Bzz..Bzz..
Loss of control Bzz.. Bzz..
Micropayments Bzz..Bzz
Wisdom of crowds . The problem with these and other buzzwords isn’t that they are wrong. It’s that they are being used for the wrong reasons. On one side we have the folks who wish to build up their products, content and consultancies. These guys will say anything to make a quick buck, and couldn't care less about the carnage. On the other side are the folks who were hoping for another five years to realign their businesses; publishers, PR & ad agencies and broadcasters. The financial crisis accelerated over leveraged conglomerates’ timelines and now they are pitching any excuse that might stick, it’s Google’s fault, it’s the decline in literacy, it’s Craigslist killing the classifieds, it’s pirates downloading Ironman and U2.
The reality is that most of these factors shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who has looked at the communications landscape over the past five years. Sure some folks are luddites but many more rightly feared cannibalizing their existing businesses. It’s hard for many to consider a newspaper a newspaper, if there’s no print edition. Few in PR want to move from a cozy behind the scenes relationships with a couple of dozen journalists and a smattering of high profile bloggers to the business of direct influence with thousands(or millions). Corporations, mostly find it unnatural to listen to and engage with their customers. Real conversation can be scary, but to use another buzz phrase, those conversations are happening whether you are participating or not.
So the genie is out of the bottle, and the revolution will be televised, tweeted, blogged, posted, status updated, podcasted and printed (for a while). Audiences will continue to expect more control and access to information they desire. They will turn more and more to trusted voices to discover the best content, and those trusted voices may not be coming from the mainstream media. I can sometimes be subversive, but I say jump in before the pool is closed! Start discovering where relevant conversations are happening, then listen and learn from them. It’s useless to have a Twitter or Facebook (or even Yammer) strategy. Toolcentricity is a losing proposition. The propagation of new tools will continue unabated, but the core values of sharing, community, commenting and content are here for the long haul, and the corporations, agencies and media groups that understand this will thrive.
Finally, I’m sick of all the talk about PR, Advertising, Journalism and Entertainment being near death. Face it, they’ve been dead or dying for quite awhile. As a true believer in the
New New Communications, I’m praying that the resurrection has already started. Stop the presses and start the hyper local reporter networks. Stop trying to hide stories, but make it easy to find your side of the story. Realize that advertizing, PR, customer service, original content and social media are integral to any campaign. Ignore this and your communication effort is short sighted, misguided and doomed. Communications is dead, long live the
New New Communications!
Illustration by Matt Hamm
