I am in Stavanger, giving a presentation on Ethics and Social Media to the Norwegian Communication Association's Autumn Seminar. It is an impressive event attracting 400 delegates and even without Norwegian it is clear they have heard some good sessions.
Delegates who want to follow up some of the ideas I discussed might look at the Social Media Guidelines posted for consultation by the UK's Chartered Institute of Public Relations - download here.
Just back from the Euprera Congress, held in Carlisle, and run by Julia Jahansoozi and colleagues at the University of Central Lancashire. There was a lot of good stuff, but the PR presentation that caught my eye was outside the body of the conference. On Friday night delegates were taken by coach to the Rheged Discovery Centre for a gala dinner, preceded by a big screen showing of a film, Rheged: The Movie.
Projected on a screen said to be the size of six double-decker buses, it was pretty spectacular stuff, lots of swooping helicopter shots of the Lake District, held together by a narrative that featured a boy searching for his roots with the help of a book and talisman handed down by his grandfather, and guided by a gypsy girl.
Hence lots of flashbacks to epic battles between club wielding Angles and Saxons, a bit of pillage, and rather curious intervention from William Wordsworth. Maybe my education is lacking but I had never heard of the Kingdom of Rheged or King Urien (pictured), and nor, for fairly obvious reasons, had most of the delegates who had gathered from all over Europe.
The trouble was, by the end, they had even less idea of the history of the region than beforehand. Brendan Quayle's script veered from pseudo-documentary to children's drama, and I spent quite a portion of the evening struggling to answer questions about its historical accuracy.
The film was intended as PR for the Lake District, and with so many images of spectacular countryside to draw on, it could hardly fail to impress. So why, then, create a narrative and myth that willfully blurred truth and fiction? Presumably the feeling was that for today's audiences history needs to be interpreted and amplified - and anyway it was good, escapist entertainment...
The Congress focused on various aspects of strategic communications but, for me, the movie offered some interesting insights into PR effects.
Whatever else, PR polymath David McKie (Waikato Management School) makes you think.
His presentation at BledCom of a paper he wrote with Deborah Munshi and Margalit Toledano, Communicating Unity without Diversity, veered off in countless directions and I doubt if anyone in the audience was familiar with all the references. Stripped to its absolute basics, the theme was - I think! - that as long as PR theory is rooted in a single paradigm, the Grunig Excellence model, its US-centric focus will suffocate much-needed investigation of non-Western framings and be very much the poorer for this neglect.
Talking afterwards, David emphasised the importance of Dejan Vercic's comment that it was time to get away from normative conceptions of PR and deal with 'dirty reality'. We had both been struck by Dejan's suggestion that to develop the Excellence model, PR had had to 'commit patricide'; in my notes, 'They needed to kill Bernays to make PR work."
David himself characterised Bernays as 'the spectre haunting PR'; he was referring to his 1928 book Propaganda, and in particular, I think, statements like this, from Chapter One, entitled Organising Chaos:
The conscious and intelligent manipualtion of the organised habits and opinion of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
.....
Invisible governors ... pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and and guide the world.
The great achievement of James Grunig is to recast PR as a business-based discipline that could achieve results through the application of a different conception, ideally based in a two-way symmetrical flow of information; PR as dialogue not command.
The problem for PR is that so powerful was this framing it has remained almost unchallenged for over 20 years and, in the view of McKie and others, a discipline with a single dominant paradigm lacks strength and vigour.
He said: "The way forward is by theorising practice. The rise of Asia in business terms is going to force PR to reflect on its Western-centricity. The fracture will come when the economic power has shifted to Asia. We will get many more complex approaches; two-way symmetry is only the beginning."
Ironically, while at once celebrating what he saw as an overdue challenge to Excellence, David suggests that the two way model that had seemed so unrealistic when first put forward was now looking more viable. The reason was the emergence of what he calls the electronic world; sadly Bled was characterised by an 'electronic absence': "It is not acceptable to me that the Bled Manifesto didn't mention social softwares."
I think David is right. And I think, too, that social softwares will force us to rethink some of the core theories of PR.
Quite where that rethink will take us I have no idea. But I strongly suspect it is more likely to resurrect the spirit of Bernays than to bury him.
Bledcom 2006 set itself a challenging agenda by taking as its theme Communicating Europe, and took on an even harder task by attempting to draft the Bled Manifesto on a European Communication Policy of the Commission of the European Communities.
Not surprisingly, the closing roundtables decided that members needed quite a bit more time to work on their ideas.
One one level the problem is straightforward - even those who are fully signed up find Europe boring. The reason newspapers and TV don't run inspirational sories about European success is that they are usually dull and, worse, presented in Euro-speak. Simplifying the message is part of the challenge but the real difficulty is that most of the EU's work gets exactly the column inches it deserves - certainly as far as the average reader or viewer is concerned. And that is what matters.
Some stories simply aren't sexy.
But the discussions over two days of conference brought into focus some much bigger concerns, concerns that go right to the heart of what PR is. Several practitioners from Slovenia and other (Eastern) accession countries spoke about campaigns to promote European themes, including for example urging a yes vote in 'Shall we join?' referenda. The machinery of state communication was engaging in 'heart and minds' stuff from a power base that, for some people, brought it close to propaganda. That was certainly the view of some Western European delegates whose thinking was no doubt sharpened by the lucid account of Zionist nation building presented by Margalit Toledano, from the Waikata Management School in New Zealand. Where, many were left asking, was the dividing line?
Perhaps the difference between a PR campaign and a propaganda campaign comes when the deliverer has the power to close down opposing voices, leaving room for only one message. OK, but the police or military are but one way of stifling debate - huge inequalities in financial power can do so just as effectively.
Interestingly, there were very few references made to new media or social software. Many delegates seemed happy to dismiss internet-based communictions as they were exclusive - not everyone has access so it is not an option.
Two responses came to mind. In a brilliantly delivered presentation Cees Hamelink talked about the need to engage children. Now, how do young people communicate? If my children and my students are anything to go by, they do it through mobile phones and MSN...
The argument was that half the EU popoluation isn't online. I suspect that figure is skewed not just by economics, but by age. If the story was interesting enough, you could get to a lot more than half the EU's under 25s.
More worryingly, surely every Bled delegate believes the future is digital? The point was made that only 20 percent of EU citizens read newspapers but which begs the question why ignore online on the grounds that it excludes 50pc of the population whilst thinking carefully about a print media that excludes 80pc? Worse, who are the 20pc who read papers? Is it older people who are already in elite positions, or younger people who are learning about the world through the new media offered by social softwares...?
I think we know the answer to that one - so surely it is time to start familiariing ourselves with the tools...
Here's an unusual picture of star presenter Neville Hobson; he's wearing a tie and he is not saying anything.
The tie was in deferrence to the host, IBM, Brussels. More importantly, he was listening not talking because his co-presenter Shel Holtz was in full flow - Skyping in from the USA. That this was straightforward, effective and do-able provides just another reminder of how quickly things are changing...
FIR duo Hobson and Holtz were the keynote speakers at the International Association of Online Communicators conference, Where Content Meets Technology, hosted by IBM PR manager IAOC founding member Philippe Borremans (left). I was there to talk about the results of the EuroBlog2006 survey into the impact of weblogs on PR practice, on behalf of fellow researchers Ansgar Zerfass and Swaran Sandhu.
One of the challenges for the IAOC is to how to stay focused and carve out a clear identity; put simply, who isn't an online communicator these days? As Guillaume Du Gardier argued in a useful roundtable, in 2006 'there is no such thing as offline PR...'. Anyway, Philippe and his team put together an eclectic mix of commercial, academic and practitioner presenters that took the conversation in a wide range of different directions. Their speed-dating format (see earlier post) meant delegates got a little bit of a lot of ideas; it was a bit like a buffet where you fill yourself with taster starters and may not quite have room for the main course. Like most delegates I suspect, I learnt most from speakers touching on areas I know little about, including Romina Rosada, vice president of client and media relations for the newsmarket, a company which sells on video content for an impressive range of clients, to 7,800 newsrooms in 140 countries . Apparently the UN is Newsmarket's biggest customer and Romina gave an example of how Unicef used Newsmarket to push video that helped refocus media attention on the plight of children caught up in the Asian tsunami.
Philippe made a good case the view that videoblogs are the next big thing - especially when they become searchable, using RocketBoom as an example.
As ever, networking at the bar was hugely valuable. It was good to meet Guillaume du Gardier, of Edelman and PR Thoughts, (pictured multi-tasking) who passed on some fascinating insights into the French blogosphere, and a new(ish) entrant into the PR blogging fraternity, Pieter De Wit.
UK academics will be pleased to hear that Alison Theaker was there, picking up ideas for the next edition of her excellent PR Handbook (see essential reads, right).
One of the drawbacks of the conference formula was that I didn't hear the other Friday morning presenters, but I did catch Rod Nicolson from PR Newswire, explaining the changing role of the press release, and Andrew Muir making an impassioned sales pitch for Vocus evaluation software, under the title PR Measurement to make your CEO smile. I think there is a whole conference to be devoted to measuring PR in the new world of social software; impressive as Vocus appeared to be as a measuring device, I left still not sure how it - or any other package - can deliver effective qualitative evaluation in such a diffuse and subjective area.
Thanks to Philippe and colleagues for the invite - and good luck for next year. Here's a final pic of Alison Theaker and Suzanne Fitzgerald of Rowan University with IAOC president Don Dunnington.
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