I just love Kevin Kelly’s contribution It puts all this into contexts: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/kevin_kelly_on_the_next_5_000_days_of_the_web.html

The proliferation of new touch-screen phones demonstrates that iPhone touched a nerve. The other day, I saw a toch-screen desktop for sale, showing that we are getting closer to anyone owning the cool kind of technology that forensic police always have on tv.

Kristen

That’s a really good question! And an impossible one to answer because several of the key platforms probably haven’t been invented yet. But very thought-provoking.

I agree that the associations should be trying to stimulate their members, but short of marching into individual offices and forcing people to log on and catch on, there’s a limit to what they can do. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t force it to listen to podcasts!

And to be fair, it’s not always easy to understand the technology, especially if you don’t have really good technical support. I spent years oblivious to the interest of RSS feeds until someone somewhere explained that it was just like a news feed into my My Yahoo page. And, as a matter of fact, Yahoo has recently discontinued their separate RSS feed function and has now integrated it into the My Yahoo page.

I’m not out to redeem anyone. I’ll talk about my learning curve, but if people don’t have intellectual curiosity and a desire for self-improvement, then that’s their choice.

With regard to your point on polls, I would guess that those monkeys are the ones who don’t bother participating in surveys. Because our associations do tend to use the not-so-scientific opt-in approach to polling.

There is another problem. The associations are polling their members to asses the views of members. Many of the responses they are getting a view possibly of a “majority of the members of these associations who act like the monkeys that see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil.”

Not surprisingly, they too might be “astonished by the number of people in the professional association who claim not to have the time to attend events, read articles, network actively with other members or consult online archives… (and) don’t have time to try out social media and other new tools.”

It does mean some of us have to try harder or, alternatively, turn our backs on those we cannot redeem.

Worse still, for some of us, is that we believe that a lot of current day thinking is not capable of seeing just a little way into the future.

I have a simple question I try out on anyone who will listen: ‘based on the changes in communication over the last three years, what platforms and channels for communication will be relevant for the practice of PR in three years time?’

What they can do is be much more aggressive and transparent about how members can participate actively and what the benefits are for the individual.

Having said this, I am very grateful for your insights. Of course I agree with what you write and promise to make good use of your suggestions.
I have just returned from a Global Alliance Board meeting held in Lugano (whose University is now permanently hosting the Secretariat of the Alliance…and this is truly very good news…).
It is ironic that in those few moments in which I am relatively optimistic about the impact of our collective efforts to improve the awareness and activities of our professional community, I read pessimism pervading both Catherine and David…. but I will come back to this in another post soon.

First of all an answer for Toni. I have a problem with the theory that most people still to describe an organisation. Coarse’ concept of a nexus of contracts is now stretched to the point that it is no longer practical (and Sonsino’s idea of a nexus of conversations is too lightweight). At every level and in every department, organisations have become porous. They lease the office, factory, computer and machine tool, Like Procter and Gamble, Lego, or IBM they use open source Intellectual Property to compete with products. Manufacture is shipped to another company/country and even the means for payment and distribution belongs beyond the institutional structure. It is not that this is some cyberspace phenomena. It is not a virtual phenomena. This is about hard bricks and mortar, real machines and products you find in every home.
The organisation as it could have been described in 1958 no longer exists. In 50 years it has become an institution held together by relationships. So when we in PR talk of public relations being between an organisation and its public’s, we need to have a better idea of what we mean by organisation.
But the changed nature of an organisation does not stop there.
In the past, we recognised the militaristic nature of corporate structures. There were managerial divisions such as R&D, Manufacturing, Finance, Marketing, Sales, Transport. There were ranks such as labourer, clerk, foreman, supervisor, manager, department head and director. Contact between organisational division was discouraged. They were kept in separate locations and often had to make a journey or (expensive) telephone call via an operator to make inter departmental contact.
A clerk would never talk to a manager because the manager knew everything and past on the information that a supervisor needed to know, who in turn told the clerk what to do. You can see it laid out in its perfect symmetry in the Swindon Railway Museum. In 1958, just 50 years ago, that is how it was.
Today the newest, youngest employee can communicate to anyone of any rank in any division or department at will. With a really bright idea, that person can also create a small group of enthusiasts for something that will be just great to make them all rich and the company prosper. The old idea of an organisation is now different. Communications inside the company has changed that.
But hang on…. the organisation outsources lots of stuff.
So this new, junior person and his group of enthusiasts may well be dealing with an external institution (who might also work with competitors).
The nature of this group is that they have built relationships, are able to act independently and within and beyond the boundaries of the organisation. They have wrested control from the organisational ‘dominant coalition’ and the structure of organisations is changed.
Great theory…. is there any evidence?
Three months ago people who lent money to banks had almost no say in how those banks should be run. Then tax payers money was leant to banks. Now the editor of every newspaper, every Parliamentarian and, it seems, every bar room bore is affecting how banks are run. Outsourcing access to capital to taxpayers changed the way banks are run. The rise and rise of Management Buyouts (still an active market worldwide despite the credit crunch) is a manifestation of control moving inside organisations.
So far, I have avoided including the impact of ICT. But lurking in the background are things like email, low cost telephony and fast data transfer that made all this happen.
For many organisations, there is every appearance that they are monolithic until you look at the bottom of their website, look at the extent of off-balance sheet financing, examine the services they outsource such as recruitment, competitor research (most people don’t realise that Google is the most used form of competitor research in the world) and now we can see just how much control organisations have ceded to institutions beyond their control.
So now, perhaps, I can put the question back to you Toni. What do you mean by organisation? Is it that group of people in a relationship whose values associated with tokens such as brands bind them to a common cause?
This may well mean that Public Relations has to re-think its foundations to the extent that it has to grow up to challenge the myth that sustains the accounting and auditing profession – the nature of tangible and intangible assets.
These are legitimate questions for academia and working in concert with practice it has to be able to ask these big questions.
Which neatly takes us to Catherine’s relevant comments (and yes I do remember our all to short exchange over the nature of chaos theory in application to PR theory and practice).
Like Catherine, I too am frustrated by the PR institutions. They have to engage in the big questions. These questions offer future advantage for practitioners. Never before has that been more important than today.
I am completely committed to the idea that PR is about relationships management. I am completely committed to the sector not being fragmented by semantics (press relations, corporate affairs, internal communication, etc) because they are all valuable niche skill sets that make up the whole and which we all need to have some knowledge about and some of us need to be deeply expert.
All professions have specialist communities. If they don’ they are trades.
The member associations have almost conspired to keep members in the dark about the fundamental changes that are affecting the PR sector and the Universities are culpable in their use of academic brains to count fairies on pinheads while the Universe is caving in on their students and practitioners alike.
I want to start with media relations because its change will have a huge financial impact on the industry.
In February 2009, the number of advertising pages in print publications will be reduced. It is hard to guess by how much but let’s be optimistic (as I think this week’s media reports have been) – print media will decline 50% across Europe in 2009.
When will the recovery come? April? June? September? Or, as media report in the UK has it, perhaps 2012 (http://xrl.in/12n8).
And if by then, the newspapers and magazines have not found a new way of engaging readers they will be dead or next to it?
While we are imagining this Armageddon, let’s call it 50% fewer editorial pages.
Perhaps 50% of PR activity is predicated on contributing to editorial pages.
As the blood spreads on the editorial carpets so too does it spread to the miltch cow 25% of the PR industry. That is 25% of PR jobs, revenues, support industries and so forth.
In the UK this represents a loss of PR sector revenues amounting to about $0.5 billion (for the Global Alliance lets imagine perhaps $10 billion worldwide).
Unless, of course, the sector is capable, trained and ready to find new way of engaging people.
Who is it that steps into the world, where 11 million people are assaulted with fantastical lush greenery and floating cities through to barren ice lands and Titan-esque ancient structures in World of Warcraft. Is YouTube tame by comparison? And is a page of http://www.guardian.co.uk …. well…. dull?
Did we see this coming?
Even before the death of relationship management between banks (lets call that the failure of the Corporate Affairs sector for clarity), were there indications of problems for print, radio and TV publishing (well, can we call that the Press Relations sector)?
Did we see that internal communication would face new strains when most folk (yes it’s a majority in the UK) have a Facebook profile competing with the lumpy firewall protected intranet to build dominant-coalition-sapping brand evangelist groups? Is this a threat to the Internal Communications sector in Public Relations (and will the new CIPR certificate equip members to face the issues)?
For the Public Affairs, did we notice that volunteers used Obama’s website to organise a thousand phone-banking events in the last week of the race …and 150,000 other campaign-related events over the course of the campaign. Supporters created more than 35,000 groups by affinities like geographical proximity and shared pop-cultural interests. By the end of the campaign, myBarackObama.com chalked up some 1.5 million accounts. Obama’s campaign was the story of his supporters, whose creativity and enthusiasm manifested through multitudes of websites and YouTube videos online. It even resulted in volunteer contributions like the innovative Obama ‘08 iPhone and iTouch application that enabled owners to mobilize their friends and contacts in battleground states through the Apple devices.
The PR gurus in the Marketing Public Relations sector might look at other models like nine year old ASOS.com’s first half sales anticipated to be up 100 per cent to £65 million when it reports its interim figures on November 17 (and a debt-free balance sheet).
From this one might expect that the PR institutions (associations, institutes and academia) might be working hard at where the profession is going. They might be showing leadership. They may be examining how to re-energise this profession. They might be looking at the big questions and the big issues.
Today, they are very big.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away, you and I had a discussion on chaos theory which I suspect you will not recall. In that conversation I put to you that one of the opportune roles for public relations was to mitigate and streamline chaos within the online world. That opportunity still exists – but diminishes with every day that passes. However, the great and good still seem to chew on this like a wasp and fail to undertake the requisite actions. There has been a great digest of strategy over the last fifteen years – I am now almost looking forward to a resounding burp of tactics that could see the actualisation of public relations in practice in both online and offline realms.

I am bored with people faffing around; completely over associations talking but not acting on behalf of members. Somebody, somewhere has to hit the coalface first, and, in my book, that is the job of associations, so their members can chip away and follow through with the leadership, back up and support of the big guys. I hope that in some portion somewhere, groups of practitioners will supply other practitioners with the concise, comprehensive and collaborative methods they need in order to undertake the task at hand that Toni outlines.

@anyone vaguely interested

We can bang on ad infinitum about paradigms, concepts and collusion but until the majority of practitioners are informed and confident as to their role we are, to put it quite bluntly, pissing in the wind.

There has been much discussion about public relations not being qualified to speak about the way ahead because ‘we’ have been part of the problems of ‘now’. I disagree. Where we have been at fault – our grand mea culpa – is not advocating with sufficient strength within, and to change, the organisations we serve on behalf of the myriad of stakeholder groups (or actors, or publics, or communities or whatever is today’s term).

I completely agree with Toni’s observations; my only note – borne of personal frustration – is that our current situation has been apparent and evident for some time – 2005 I would suggest at the latest – and that no preventative action has been taken. What, may I ask, have we been doing up till now, given our significant and collective competencies in environmental scanning? Maybe, for many, it just fell into the ‘too hard basket’. Well it is even harder to fix now. For those who might have read a line or two of anything I have written here previously you may be aware that for me, media is to public relations as as apples are to Ferrari, but, in this instance, we should share one characteristic – the ability to respond to a deadline without resorting to extensive deliberation and ponderous coagulation. And that deadline is upon us.

Elsewhere on PRC, Tonks has commented (sic):

“Presently, in some circles, this is not happening; unions (and activists like me) are still constrained by lack of transparency, inclusivity, respect for human dignity, authoritarianist practices where people see themselves as the only people on earth, others are just machines. I have seen PR employees treated as image builders, carrying the flag for their superiors; I have seen communication employee being organisation shields that protect them from media attacks: representing good than bad publicity. therefore, stakeholder relationship management and participation of PR/Communications members in organisational decision-making and strategic direction is long overdue.

I believe that this quote is particularly valid, even out of its original context. The opportunity is there for us to speak with a view to guiding change. There is a necessity – almost an imperative – for things to change; there is a confusion as to ‘where to next’, exacerbated by a mistrust of what has gone before. So, perhaps, collectively (not just public relations, but the complete community), there should be a recognition and admission that we have previously got things wrong – an action completely at odds with existing and historic business and organisational models. But, if it can be done and once it is out of the way, we can then work to improve our current and pending predicament based on the primal need and recognition that all societal functions revolve around – you guessed it – the individual and collective human relationship. And unless I am mistaken, the human relationship is what we do. Best.

As an aside to Toni, I cannot agree that the US is the ‘most important and powerful Nation State’. It might have been perceived as such once, and very recently as well,
but it ain’t the case no more – George W put the final nail in the coffin for that one. No amount of work by Barack Obama and his successors will reinstate that perception. The prime US position of the late twentieth century has passed and is now completely fallible – much the same as the Greeks and Romans of ancient times or the slightly more contemporary ‘British Empire’. Look East, but not West, South, but not North in the long term.