I have enormous respect for David Phillips, as a friend and as a colleague. For more than a decade he has been ahead of almost everyone else in the UK in understanding the impact of the internet, and later social media, on the discipline of public relations. He thinks deeply, cares passionately and bursts with ideas - always a challenging combination.
On Friday, ostensibly as an adieu to its departing director Colin Farrington, David posted what should be seen as a manifesto for the future of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations. It was strong stuff, and underpinned by claims bolder than were perhaps appreciated by some readers. Yesterday, he added to this with a second post, Where PR has to go, which takes some of these ideas even further forward.
As Richard Bailey noted, David's polemic races off in rather too many different directions to launch a focussed debate. Helpfully, Richard has chosen to highlight two points that relate to the future of PR education and training that demand carefully attention from the CIPR, the industry and from academia. For the record, I think he is absolutely right on both counts.
To move things forward, here are what I see as the main points in the opening salvo of David's cry to arms.
After almost casually accusing the Farrington-era CIPR of throwing away the industry's chance to double its £6.5bn worth by embracing the internet, he homes in weighty issues which effectively define PR.
Phillips argues that the now standard CIPR definition of PR as "the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics" has been left behind.
"We live in different times. The very nature of an organisation is different. The nexus of contracts is replaced by a nexus of relationships. Not everyone subscribes to a view of social groups being defined by the (Grungian) Excellence model... The new models of public relations theory are designed for a new century and are based on research. This research is pivotal."
I take this to be a critique of Grunig's idea of publics arising around issues. Crudely,Grunig can be seen as saying that publics arise when an organisation upsets a group of people, or people who form into a group, by either doing something or not doing something that prompts a reaction (often disapproval). In many ways, this model has worked well, but for Phillips and others, it lacks the subtlety and nuance needed to understand the myriad of individual interactions between a population and its organisations.
To an extent, Grunigian publics only come into play when people care quite a lot about something, but in reality most of us don't think much about many of the product and services we use, but those small thoughts do matter, and social media allows these micro-opinions to coalesce and aggregate into reputation, and it is this aggregated reptuation that provides the substrate for individual relationships to develop. It is these relationships that drive behaviour and therefore drive organsational success.
If this is right, it does require a significantly broader understanding of relationship management, and it certainly requires a more extensive skillset than can be boasted by not only many of those entering the industry from our universities but also from a considerable proportion of the CIPR's membership.
Leaving aside David's claim that "All too many (university courses) are not much more than a course in spamming 'press releases' and having a 'creative idea' to fly a barrage balloon over the Houses of Parliament", I think he is arguing that the next Director General of the CIPR must help create a cadre of research-driven thinkers who can develop the knowledge and expertise needed to define and lead the next generation of PR professionals. Their thinking will be based on what David calls semantic PR, and an understanding of the nature of relationships.
Arguably, the IPR began a group of military information officers, persuaders and propagandists got together to work out how to apply their skills to the post-War world. Today, true leadership requires a similar vision, shaped and focused to carry the discipline forward in the age of social media.
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