Has the Game of Public Relations Changed?
Wikipedia defines Public
Relations (PR) as the practice
of managing the flow of
information between an
organization and its publics. PR
aims to gain an organization or
individual positive exposure to
their key stakeholders.
Public relations practices of the
past targeted at coercing the
public into believing positive
messages about a product,
service, individual or business. Managing information has become a game of coercion and manipulation.
Coercion takes place by purposely manipulating either the perceived changes a message can bring to a market or aims at creating actions or reactions from the market’s existing mindset. Hence, effective coercion can only be carried out through manipulation of the existing market mindsets by managing the flow of information.
The Web is redefining PR practices; turning old methods upside down and inside out. Since communications have become transparent, the old PR
practices actually can work against a business Loïc Le Meur writes “PR is no secret science and it is not complicated. Or if it was in the past, it is not anymore. No targets or “marketing pitch” will get you very far anymore.”
Who cares about stories, you can get traction and users if you have a good product
Do not pick a PR person, be the spokesperson of the company Participation is NOT marketing
There are no “targets” either, We are just people, not an audience!
Who cares about the launch day and date.
Do not see bloggers and journalists as target either, they will ignore you Do not measure success and traffic from PR
Do Friends Coerce or Manipulate Each Other?
The term “friends” connotes both cooperative and supportive behavior between two or more humans. Friends do not usually manipulate situations; rather they share open and honest communications that spur cooperative and supportive behavior and the flow of good and bad information.
In order for Socialutions for businesses to succeed in a community of friends, it must start with a change in mindset. Actions and behavior must be geared towards human vs. institutional behavior. People do not like to be coerced or manipulated, but would prefer information to be forthright, open and honest.
Changing behavior for businesses or individuals can be difficult. Change comes from learning. True friends learn from each other and grow. Fake friends just pretend to believe each other’s bull. Markets are now conversations amongst true friends.
Socialutions: What Is PR?
Every business has a Public Relations machine.
The definition of Public Relations (PR) is the managing of internal and external
communication of an organization to create and maintain a positive image.
Public relations may involve popularizing
successes, downplaying failures, announcing
changes, and many other activities; but ethical P.R. practitioners will convince companies to work more closely with its various publics and form win-win relationships. The social web
presents both significant opportunities and
threats to the historical definition and practices of PR.
Given that the web is the “big social copy machine in the sky,” corporate performance and communications with customers and employees have become transparent. This transparency increases the demand on quality in terms of service or product performance levels, as well as promises to keep expected experiences at a very high expectation level. This new dynamic is and will continue to increase the demand for quality management practices required to produce the performance expectations of employees and customers.
What Can Management Do?
Quality gurus created a revolution in past management practices and brought about such terms and practices as TQM, SPC, Six Sigma, Balanced Score Card, Re-engineering, and these words became the corporate mantra of the day. After more than 20 years of indoctrination, the practices and the responsibility for quality performance and all the jargon and practices have been delegated down from the top of the organization to the bottom.
Leadership has delegated its responsibility to shareholders, suppliers, employees, customers and markets to others who rarely have the authority to change or improve anything. If profits are not good leadership simply demands, “Change something or else!”
Driven by fear and the desire to gain favor and power, management pursues solutions to problems aimed at creating better outcomes. The people are ordered to execute new changes while they, the people, know very well that the change will not work. The culture is not social and thus rarely does the organization understand the truths behind the problems. Therefore, the solutions never really address root causes and create permanent fixes that changes “the peoples” experience to the better. The problems remain even when attempts to change the numbers, create spin control or focus the conversation elsewhere are used as a public relations effort. Public Relations assumed the role of spin control to influence the masses.
Game Over?
The old game of PR spin is over and there is a new game in town. The new game is called Socialutions and it is about adopting a new philosophy about how businesses can not only improve the satisfaction of all the people it serves but rather exceeds “the people” expectations and turns all the people into its PR machine fueling win/win relationships. A win/win relationship starts by listening and ends with needed changes identified by the conversations--open, honest and with no spin.
The alternative is to continue to let “the peoples” leverage their new influence against your inability or unwillingness to change. However, businesses must recognize that the power of the people has been enhanced significantly, and their PR machines are and will continue to be bigger and better than anything you can create by yourself.
Another critical point is that the fundamental change required to succeed with Socialutions is a transformation in thinking by leadership and a change in practices by management, the culture. The people have already changed and are simply waiting for you to change.
What Are Virtual Chain Reactions?
Today whether you are a major brand or just an individual, communicating an opinion has its implications. The “how and what” you communicate can cause a virtual chain reaction. Your communications methods will create results, both good and bad.
Understanding the dynamics and
methodologies of Virtual Chain
Reactions (VCR) is a critical strategy
to adopting Socialutions aimed at
improved results. VCR is word of
mouth on steroids.
What are Virtual Chain Reactions?
A Virtual Chain Reaction (VCR) is
a sequence of reactions where a
communications product or by-
product causes additional reactions to
take place. It is a self-amplifying
virtual chain of events, which are
explained below:
The Communications Chain
Reaction: A message is copied resulting in a larger number of participants consuming information than in the initial chain reaction.
Virtual Reactions: Communications throughout the web create a reaction is itself a virtual reaction, which can cause more reactions that are similar.
Virtual Avalanche Process: Collisions of virtual stories or opinions in numerous communities form “new” stories or opinions to undergo the same process in successive cycles.
Market perceptions and impact: These become the gradual and sometimes immediate outcomes of Virtual Chain Reactions and subject to ongoing influence.
The Virtual Chain Reaction is an emerging dynamic perpetuated by more and more people engaging in social media. As VCR progresses, the dynamics generated serve as templates for replication. This sets in motion a chain reaction in which the VCR dynamics are exponentially amplified. With VCR it is possible to amplify a single or few copies of a story or a piece of information across several orders of magnitude, generating millions or more copies of the original story or opinion.
VCR can be extensively modified to perform a wide array of virtual manipulations. VCR is the new dynamic of influence, and not understanding it can be detrimental to a business and an individual.
What Does VCR Change?
It changes everything! A company with a brand can no longer afford simply sending out a press release announcing a new product, an acquisition or their plans for social initiatives. The wrong message, whether it be in the words used or the visions stated, can and will create a negative VCR and subsequently the brand has lost control of their message to the readers.
Losing control of the message means you have no control over the impact.
Negative impacts can change your brand equity, customer satisfaction indexes, loyalty, value perceptions and ultimately the share price.
Organizations and individuals alike are being and will continue to be impacted by VCR. The more people, and there is a lot of them, who engage in social computing the greater the force of the implications of VCR becomes. To manage VCR, organizations need to learn how to engage people and their opinions in order to create an intended VCR. Otherwise, the people will create a VCR that may not produce the kind of results an organization desires.
The Socialution to VCR is changing the methods, and that requires changing thinking first.
Do We Really Want Customer Service?
Every business has some type of
customer support or service
center aimed at serving the
needs of the customer. The
customer service center model
has been driven by two things:
1. Managing common
customer issues
2. Managing uncommon
customer issues.
The difference between common
and uncommon issues is as
follows:
1. Common issues: things that create common request for assistance from the customer base
2. Uncommon issues: things that are not common but arise as customer needs on a periodic basis.
As the web becomes more and more transparent, companies are just beginning to pay more attention to “the process of customer support.” Case in point:
Marguerite Reardon of CNET writes: “As cable and phone companies slug it out in markets across the U.S., improving customer care is becoming a core part of their strategies. Now, more than ever, consumers seem to be influenced by their perception of a particular company and their own experience with customer care. What’s more, the Internet has changed things. It used to be that a single disgruntled customer would influence only a few friends and neighbors. But with the advent of blogs and forums all over the Web, unhappy consumers can find a much wider audience, potentially reaching thousands or even millions.”
So What Are These Companies Doing to Improve?
Reardon also reports that : Comcast has hired 15,000 new customer service agents and technicians over the past 18 months to help the company answer calls and provide service to customers. It has also rolled out new high-tech diagnostic tools for agents in the field and at call centers to help better assess problems. Comcast has also started re-dispatching field technicians if it looks like a certain technician may not be able to get to his next appointment.
Customer service agents are also starting to work on Saturdays and Sundays to schedule and serve customers when it’s most convenient for them. And it’s offering real time online chat services so that customers can talk live with a customer account executive.
Verizon’s Maguire said that his company is doing something similar. Like Comcast, Verizon has a team that monitors blogs. And Maguire himself often answers e-mails from customers with complaints as part of what the company calls a “you touch it, you own it” philosophy.
What Could Be An Alternative Socialutions?
Adding people and processes may not be the best solutions. Reducing or eliminating the common problems is likely a less expensive and consumer friendly option. Uncommon problems will always remain and they need human intervention. Common problems simply need to be fixed, and the consumer needs common answers to these problems until they are eliminated.
Leveraging social media to engage with customers is also a much less expensive proposition than adding resources. After all, customers do not want to deal with customer support because historically it has been such an antisocial experience. Not having a product or service work as promised,
means that the customers, the people, have to spend their time and attention trying to get it to work when their common expectations are that it should work to begin with. All a customer really wants is for things to work right the first time. When they do not, it is considered antisocial and customer service becomes a negative experience.
Collaborative Socialutions…Where Does Collaboration Fit In?
The social web seems
to attract a lot of
definitional
redefining, whether
by adding numbers
after a term like
Collaboration 2.0,
Business 3.0, or
Office 4.0, or by
combining two
previously
independent words
into one as we have
with Socialutions.
These attempts at
redefining can be
useful, but they have
a tendency to confuse.
Collaboration intuitively has a place in Socialutions, but where exactly does it fit?
We previously defined Socialutions as people, communities and organizations leveraging technology to interact with people for the purpose of solving problems; the act of working together with others to create new solutions to old paradigms of communications and interaction without boundaries and with limitless reach.
The term “Collaboration” which does appear in Dictionary.com, is defined as the act or process of working, one with another; cooperating, colluding, joining, assisting, or abetting.
Collaboration then, fits with Socialutions in the implementation – when we are working together with others to create new solutions, we are collaborating!
Tapscott and Williams, in their book Wikinomics, identified four steps to developing a collaborative culture.
Encourage and reward openness in networking for all members of the organization.
Create peering environments that foster self-organizing human connections for collaboration and innovation.
Allow radical sharing to expand markets and create new opportunities.
Think and act globally as an individual, team and organization.
To achieve Openness means ensuring a culture of candor, flexibility, transparency and access. How many of today’s workplaces can accurately be described by these words? Peering is also important in the establishment of a collaborative culture. Peering succeeds because it leverages self-organization.
As any business model demonstrates, expanding markets create new opportunities. These opportunities are beneficial, and often require insight into the local business culture.
Thomas Friedman was right - The World Is Flat. The only way that today’s companies will be able to maintain a healthy balance sheet tomorrow is if they focus on staying globally competitive. That means they need to devote time to monitoring international developments. They will have to begin (or continue) tapping the global talent pool. They will have to get to know the world.
In Collaboration 2.0, Coleman & Levine (2008) identified 10 Principles of Resolutionary (note, they are not saying Revolutionary, though it is) Thinking (p. 176):
1. Abundance
2. Efficiently Creating and Sustaining Collaborations 3. Creativity
4. Fostering Resolution
5. Becoming Open
6. Long-Term Collaboration
7. Honoring Logic, Feelings & Intuition
8. Disclosing Information & Feelings
9. Learning
10. Becoming Response Able
Note that each of these fits with the Socialutions paradigm, in the furtherance of our engagement of The Relationship Economy. Each of these contributes to a collaborative culture – even if the principles are implemented in pockets of the organization. Moreover, each of these principles can be learned, as long as the intended result is a positive change in the corporate culture.
In order to implement Socialutions, collaboration is essential. Today’s individuals and organizations are ready for a change. The time is right.
Ready, set . . . collaborate!
Collaborating with Co-Workers and Customers: Socialutions As a Management Strategy
We are, of course,
social creatures, and
many marketers
understand that.
Telecom companies
have long encouraged
us to connect with our
friends & family (or Unity), call our network for free, and purchase family plans. Starbucks has built a business around a unique mixture of offline connections accessing online content “together.” Many email newsletters have the “forward to a friend feature.” A growing number of communities are using a mixed-use design that allows us to work, live and shop in one area.
We are naturally drawn to places where people we know congregate. As social networking sites have demonstrated, we go where our friends are, and we connect to people with whom we have something in common. So is it natural to think that managing an organization would include understanding the relationship dynamics of those who contribute in some way to the bottom line?
Not necessarily.
Many large organizations operate with a directed-association model.
Departments are set up in hierarchical fashion, and we learn to work with or for people with whom we may never have come in contact but for our employment. Some enterprising organizations make attempts to capitalize on our personality styles, but how many try to capitalize on our networking styles? Do we examine the “fit” that new members to the team demonstrate in relation to those already established?
Not very often.
Caldwell, et. al., in studies of perceptions of “fit” found that as organizational change becomes the norm, adaptations by individuals is expected, though the ready embrace of change often eludes the observer. The change itself may be the variable, and many organizations are finding that change strategies should include possible reactions to change. So, if people initially deemed “a good fit” for the organization are suddenly experiencing major challenges, was the hiring process faulty?
Tomorrow’s employees are engaging in the social space now, and they are bringing this tradition to the workplace. They may adapt to the directed-association model, but they may also rebel. These are not members of the complacent generation(s) that took what they got and kept silent. These are the “kids” who have been asking why and what is in it for them since they could talk. So how do we incorporate them into our management strategies?
A recent example of the technology-enhanced ability to have everyone manage processes was described by Denis Pombriant in his look at Right90, which captures and tracks changes to the business forecast (all the things that can and should be forecasted in addition to revenue, so that a company can keep its supply chain informed of coming changes) in real time. With Right90, if a salesperson reports that a customer is doubling an order for 32-inch HDTVs, managers in sales and operations are alerted, and the full implications of the change in the forecast are thoroughly reviewed.
Pombriant observed that this kind of attention to detail gives every relevant person and department a seat at the table, and makes him or her accountable for bringing in the forecasted revenue in the forecasted product lines. Imagine this strategy being implemented in your organization!
Many small businesses have the idea of this kind of collaboration built in to their initial organizational cultures. Have you ever been to a diner where one person tells the other, “I’m going to the freezer, do you need anything?” The ensuing dialog is likely to result in an informal report of the number of a certain product remaining in stock, followed by a quickly calculated mental note by the person who orders these things. As the business grows, however, each position becomes more intense and focused, and it becomes decreasingly natural to see the operation as a system.
And that’s where the problem lies.
When all the participants in a system fail to see it as a system, each facet of the operation becomes disjointed. If not integrally connected, additional effort is needed to catch up to unify the thought process on at least a temporary basis, for actions such as logistics, personnel, finance, and the like.
By implementing Socialutions as a management strategy, organizations can capitalize on the relationships and relationship connections of the people
connected to them in some way. This naturally includes the employees and the organization’s leadership, and should include customers, clients, vendors, and others served by and serving the organization. These people all represent the company in some way, so why not acknowledge and try to affect the way they represent? As we engage The Relationship Economy, we need to find new ways to leverage technology to interact with people to solve real problems. Only those people, communities, and organizations that use this type of collaborative problem-solving model will emerge successfully.
Those who choose to go it alone and use long-antiquated systems and applications will look back and wonder why they made that choice.
If these suggestions look familiar, perhaps you are seeing a similarity to team-building, for which the social web appears to be well suited. Team building in Asia has been part of the culture since long before W. Edwards Deming traveled to Japan to implement Quality (and plan-do-check-act) in the post-war rebuilding effort. Global team building has enjoyed mostly steady growth as organizations expand and a variety of travel opportunities contract. Socialutions as a management strategy requires using a group (team) of people (stakeholders) to be accountable for the process.
What do you think?
Customers Can Get Satisfaction – With Sunshine Socialutions Meetings for government at all levels are covered by sunshine laws, which require opening to public view and access meetings and records regarding those meetings for public officials and organizations in a variety of scenarios.
We have defined the term
Customer Powered Service
as service that is shaped
by the customer . . . driven
from outside the business
to inside and designed to
make the customer
successful, not just to
make support staff more
efficient.
We suggested that
Customer Powered Service
should be seen as a return
to the mindset of the
marketplace . . . the
empowering of the
customer.
We noted that Customer Powered Service was not just about the customer —
it is also about the service!
Get Satisfaction has been promoted recently in the blogworld as a direct connection between people and companies that fosters problem-solving, promotes sharing, and builds up relationships.
That sounds a whole lot like a Socialutions!
Let us take a random look at the 1st and 10th ranked companies on the Fortune 100 - Wal-Mart and ATT.
Wal-Mart on Get Satisfaction had one active topic (seven months old at the time of this post). ATT, on the other hand, had 37 posts on Get Satisfaction, with the newest one three days before this post.
So what does that mean?
Is there a better customer service plan for Wal-Mart on the Internet than there is for ATT? Are more of ATT’s customers likely to have Internet access?
Perhaps Wal-Mart has better customer service, or maybe their customers do not expect as much as ATT’s customers do?
If you want to learn more, check out the Business Week article entitled
“Consumer Vigilantes,” which looks at creative ways “we the people” are using social media to address the issues. Businesses are spending time and money trying to figure out how to engage customers.
We change the conversation from what has been to what could be.
In the social web, the problem with getting in touch with someone from customer service is inexcusable. There are a variety of ways in which we can contact each other — phone, text message, email, snail mail, fax, and meeting in person. However, once companies cross that Rubicon, then what?
Here is a novel idea . . .