UKNetMonitor

Some thoughts on Web 2.0 following a Demos seminar

Companies have clearly lost their ability to control the news agenda, their message set, and thus their reputation.  After 20 odd years in public affairs, these were the mantras by which reputation was managed.  Directly managing the outflows of information gave companies the ability to influence the buzz around them.  

New skills are now required – persuasion, competence, and trustworthiness will be essential to maintaining goodwill from all stakeholders, along with understanding, empathy and responsiveness – to generalise somewhat – these are all female traits that many of the “warrior” types who have succeeded in getting to the higher echelons of business will find difficult to come to terms with.

What does it mean for the way businesses behave?  Much vaunted transparency will have to mean more than just being “open”.  Transparency will require light to be shed on internal decision-making processes for their validity.  Corporate Communications professionals will need to throw away their command and control structures that allowed them to vet messages simply for reputational impact, in favour of structures that test messages by reviewing the credibility of the process by which they were arrived at.   So, no more “we can’t say that, let’s put it another way…”  No more, “who can we get to endorse this decision”, but “who did we talk to before actually deciding to do this?”  

A consequence of this is that corporate communications professionals must ensure they are embedded through the decision-making processes of a business, from top to bottom.  They can no longer be relied upon to do their jobs properly by being involved at the end of a process.