Where the Fishermen Ain't -- Phil Gomes' Thoughts on PR, Social Media, and Blockchain Applications

PR Must Lose Its Reliance on Hierarchy

A Truly Peer-to-Peer Online Environment Will Test How Good We Really Are At What We Do

(To catch up, check out my previous pieces “Blockchain, Inc.” and “The Future of Trust is Decentralization.”)

I have been in the public relations field for nearly two decades. In retrospect, I’ve noticed that the most notable milestones during that time have had less to do with the evolution of the trade but, rather, moments that mark its sclerotic resistance to same. Most often, the problem lies with our industry’s reluctance to let go of comfortable, familiar hierarchies.

What does this mean? Changes in how programs and platforms use the Internet mean that, sooner than we think, meaningful hierarchies that communications professionals can reliably appeal to will be rare. Companies whose success in communications and reputation management largely depends on mastering those hierarchies will find themselves somewhat adrift.

By way of example, here are some representative, on-the-ground, quasi-hypothetical stories that describe three mini-epochs in our trade during that time:

Late 1990s: Executive suite calls, freaking out about a story on the website for The Chicago Herald-Investigator-Review-Argus-Gazette. PR person contacts reporter. Mutual stubbornness escalates the issue to the associate editor who, in turn, brings the issue to a managing editor and editor-in-chief. Factual errors are corrected and (far less often) perceived undue weight or misunderstandings of context are addressed. Executive suite says something like, “Well, thank God! It least it wasn’t in the print edition!”

Early-to-Mid-2000s: Product manager calls, freaking out about commenters in a blog post on WayTooMuchTech.Com. The tone of some of the comments is abusive and even involve potential invasions of an employee’s privacy. Many of these are from known trolls. PR person talks to blogger who, understanding the impact of these trolls, bans them and hides their comments. It’s a good thing, too -- what if the blogger agreed with the trolls? How would you address it?

Late-2000s-to-Early-2010s: Chief-of-Staff calls, freaking out about the Wikipedia article about the company’s CEO. PR person (who keeps up with such things) encourages discussion with Wikipedia volunteers. Chief-of-Staff asks “Can’t you just call Jimmy Wales?” PR person says it doesn’t work that way since Wales, though a co-founder, does not wield that many more privileges on the system than the average user and, besides, concerns himself with many other things these days. “How about donating to the Wikimedia Foundation?” No. And, so, Talk-page discussions with Wikipedia volunteer editors and admins ensue. Article gets adjusted closer to neutral (if slightly, and with any luck) after some amount of debate, discussion, Kafka-esque rule-quoting, and strong suspicion of motive.

See what’s happening? At each step, the hierarchies that the company representative could appeal to in order to ensure representation of the company’s point of view have flattened. Every single time, the public relations industry has exhibited rather public and highly embarrassing teething issues.

This particular pendulum isn’t going to swing back. In fact, it has a lot further yet to go. Take a look at how engineer Paul Baran (1926 - 2011) described the progressive topography of networks:

 

As described in the three stories above, the evolutionary path that our industry has had trouble navigating is the seemingly simple one of moving from centralized to decentralized environments. Now, decentralized is flattening further to distributed, as we see with concepts like Bitcoin (for currency), OpenBazaar (commerce), Augur (prediction markets), Bitnation (DIY governance) and Ethereum (smart contracts and, perhaps at some point, a lot more).

Think this has nothing to do with public relations or media? The recent set of dustups at Reddit are instructive, particularly regarding the controversial dismissal of its popular communications director. This resulted in administrators and moderators shutting down entire sections of the site in protest.

As venture capitalist Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures said (emphasis mine):

We have also wondered what the first killer app of the blockchain is going to be. Is it going to be personal finance (bitcoin), is it going to be peer to peer connectivity (mesh networking), or is it going to be something else?

There’s a chance that the answer to the struggle that Reddit is going through will also answer this question. It may be that there is no viable middle ground between a centrally controlled media platform and an entirely decentralized media platform. You are either going to police the site or you are going to build something that cannot be policed even if you want to.

Is your organization prepared for such an environment? Is your team? Are your executives sufficiently briefed on the realities of a reputation environment where you probably can’t buy, sue, or “cute” your way to success?

As to what it may take to succeed as we move from decentralized to distributed influence environments, here are a few initial recommendations:

• You may need a really good programmer: Projects like OpenBazaar and Augur send the faint signal that we could be moving away from destinations and properties on the Internet as the first-order variable for digital PR. More fundamentally, communicators may have to understand the basics of distributed programs and protocols. It’s therefore not inconceivable that ensuring fair representation of your organization will have just as much to do with bringing on a skilled programmer as it does hiring a savvy media strategist.

• Uncertainty is a feature, not a bug: Skilled, experienced musicians, athletes, actors and other performers will tell you that they will always feel nervous just before going on stage. This means that they still care about their craft. You should feel the same, but use this anxiety as a source of inspiration rather than an excuse to stand still.

• Get your hands dirty: Since my early days in technology PR, it has always astounded me how many practitioners who reach a certain level of seniority start to believe that they are above understanding important details of the technology they promote. If you want to start seeing around corners, consider attending hacking meetups or participating in the sites that the world’s makers use. In my experience, it’s the rare one that will reject you for thinking that “garbage collection” is only the thing that happens on Tuesdays with the big truck. A sincere desire to understand a concept or movement, beyond the specific and immediate needs of a client or practice, is usually the price of admission.

• In the end, all you have is your ability to persuade: When you strip away the more blunt tools and worn concepts of our trade, you’re left with the core of what we are tasked to do--make a case and persuade an audience.

As you can tell from this essay and my previous writings, I am unapologetic in my enthusiasm for the emergence of truly distributed environments, and passionate about exploring what this means for public relations. In the next few years, we will know as a trade whether our industry’s talk and reassurances about its ability to innovate and adapt was a sincere call-to-action or just, well, spin.

(Banner image by Flickr user frankleleon, CC BY. Network topology picture via NetworkCultures.Org.)

At Edelman.Com: A World Without Authoritative Physical Media

I have a new piece up at Edelman.Com inspired by the excellent short film Scattered.

[Do] different physical media convey different levels of presumed authority? Any PR professional who has ever had an executive ask “…but is it in the print edition?” knows that, at least generationally, there’s a vestigial preference for paper as a means to convey a level of importance or permanence.

Taking this concept to perhaps its most provocative level, filmmakers have taken an excellent short story from Technology Review’s science fiction anthology and adapted it as Scattered. io9.com called the subject of this haunting short film “the worst crime you never imagined.”

Sound dramatic? Well, before I get into what this means for communicators (and inevitably convey spoilers), take a short break in your day and watch the eleven-minute film.

I won't say too much more. Go check out the film and read my take on Edelman.Com or my LinkedIn.

Image Credit: Sh4rp_l

My Comments on News of the NYPD's Social Media Policy

I have a post up at Edelman.Com about the news of the NYPD's social media policy.

From the piece, called "The Thin Blue (Digital) Line":

A balance must be achieved here. One could argue that we have a very strong incentive to know as much as we possibly can about those we pay to protect us. So, we should want members of law enforcement to be online as much as is practical, so long as it doesn’t interfere with their duties or compromise loved ones. A policy, if too-broadly drawn, may have a chilling effect at precisely the time when citizens desire more transparency from their government.

Featured in The New York Times Regarding Employee Online Behavior

I'm featured in a virtual roundtable this week in The New York Times' "Room for Debate". The topic is a favorite of mine: employee online behavior.

From my contribution:

Business in the information age is, in large part, governed by Industrial Age rules intended to restrain J.D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan and so on — bit-and-byte realities wrestling with concrete and steel legacies. It will prove interesting to see these laws and policies applied to corporate social media governance.

I'm also joined by my good friend Daliah Saper, who writes:

Even if a company did not create a “don’t act stupid” policy, it could easily fire or discipline its employees for posting inappropriate photos to Facebook or disclosing proprietary information on Twitter. Employees, in turn, should know that their conduct in public – including social media accounts visible to outsiders – can expose them to career repercussions.

Sensational Analysis of Team Palin's Facebook Moderation

 

For a Slate article subtitled "The Facebook Posts Palin Doesn't Want You To See", perhaps I was expecting too much. 

Generally speaking, Slate appears to try to make an issue of what, by and large, appears to be a sound and reasonable Facebook moderation policy employed by Sarah Palin's online team. 

From the piece: 

The deletions amount to a real-time look at how much effort and care Palin puts into protecting her public image. It's not just the number of posts that are screened out that gives some indication of how seriously Palin's team is monitoring things. The superfine mesh through which posts are sifted also gives an indication of the work involved. You don't get erased just for using vulgarity or pushing spam (which Facebook might remove anyway if flagged).

Replace the word "Palin" with "any reasonably funded public figure or candidate" and you start to wonder what exactly the fuss is all about. 

As to Slate's methodology for analyzing the Palin team's Facebook moderation policies (emphasis mine):

How much work does it take to keep everything so sanitized? To help me find out, my colleague Jeremy Singer-Vine wrote a program to capture comments to Palin's page before the clean-up crew could arrive. (Here's an explanation of how Jeremy's program works.) All these posts were initially public, if only for a few minutes. We looked at the comments to 10 Palin posts over 12 days, capturing the deletions in the 24 hours after the posts were live. In that period, a rough average of 10 percent of total posts were deleted.

Ten percent? Why those newspeak-uttering, censorship-happy bastards! Seriously? I probably delete more than that in a given week on my Cachaçagora blog. 

Anyway, let's address Slate's classification of deleted Facebook comments one-by-one: 

Mean comments about Sarah Palin. "Please go away from my wall. I do not like you or agree with any dumb thing you say or do."

I would have deleted this simply because the poster appears to be a deranged lunatic who believes that Mrs. Palin's Facebook content is getting shoved down his throat. This person probably clicked "Like" one day on a lark and couldn't find the "Unlike" link, typically buried in the left-hand margin. I'd remove this comment, but might try to send the commenter a complimentary tinfoil hat. Verdict: Delete. 

Mean things about the people who say mean things about Sarah Palin. "if you dont like her posts LEAVE THE GROUP DUMBASS!!!!"

The moderator of a Facebook page (or any community) owes it to the audience to police decorum. Big deal. Verdict: Delete.

Racial or ethnic slurs. "America's greatest threat is Marxism and International Jewry/Zionism! We will never regain our Liberty and Freedom until we expel every Jew from America!"

Again, the problem with deleting this? Are they somehow surprised that a Republican wouldn't allow such postings? I sense a double-standard from Slate here: Basically that a Democrat's Facebook team would delete this out of the need to maintain civility but, in the hands of a Republican, such a deletion must mean that they're trying to hide what they're really like! A-ha! Caught them! 

Uh-huh... Right. Sure. Verdict: Delete. 

Polite disagreement. "Sarah, perception is everything! I learned that in the military. All you have to do is disassociate yourself from those Tea Partiers that are indeed racist and the NAACP gones [sic] away," wrote one in response to Palin's post on the NAACP's charge that the Tea Party tolerated racism. "Even they [the NAACP] admit the Tea Party is not a racist organization. Mrs. Palin, I believe you to be an honorable Woman. You believe in your cause. Sometimes for the good of the cause one has to make a stand even to those that support the cause. Remember John Mccain, circa 2008 in which a woman stood up and called Candidate Obama a Muslim. The Honorable John Mccain rebuked her. This could be your moment."

I'm actually kind of borderline with this one. I don't expect mellifluous prose from every netizen, of course, but the comment shared here is very poorly written and can easily be misunderstood. I first read "those Tea Partiers that are indeed racist" as meaning a blanket statement applied to the entire group. It's clearer to me now that the commenter wants Palin to denounce any racists within the Tea Party.

Honestly, I think that racism as an element of even a significant minority within the Tea Party's membership is grossly overblown. As a result, it looks like Team Palin was a bit hypersensitive with this one. Verdict: Keep. 

Too much agreement. "Do us a favor Sarah, trap a few Wolves and ship em to D.C., they do eat Rats don't they? Have a great trip Sarah, God Bless."

You could flip a coin with this one but, given today's environment, this post does imply that someone believes Sarah Palin should seek to do harm to elected officials. Verdict: Delete. 

Criticism of her children. "please dont let your daughter do a reality show :( but i love your family and you ..hope thats just a rumor from the liberals."

When Bill Clinton took office, he had one big rule with the press: Hands off Chelsea. The standard then became that the children of a candidate or office-holder were generally off-limits to the press, even when the children were brought on the campaign trail. So, would one expect less from Palin, especially in an environment she can at least somewhat control? Verdict: Delete. 

Anything about Obama's birth certificate or conspiracies related thereto, even in muted form. "Just so we're clear, Conspiracy theories about Obama's refusal to release his college records—lunacy. Conspiracy theories about Trig Palin—journalism."

Allowing anything fringe on a site in this scenario invites great risk. But Slate's example here--however "muted"--is more about criticism of the media than it is about supporting the so-called "Birther" movement. Verdict: Keep, though items that perhaps more specifically promote conspiracy theories would be deleted. 

In the end, Slate's analysis of Team Palin's Facebook policies is much like the Palin phenomenon itself: You'll be kind of left wondering what the point of it all was by the time you reach the end. 

Internet-Proofing the Cease-and-Desist Letter

Photo by Laughing Squid

Not too often but, every once in a while, a company will send a cease-and-desist letter to a netizen it finds, well, pesky. These are typically attempts at control and intimidation in an environment where the most one can reasonably strive for is to influence an outcome. These letters quickly get posted, passed around, and become targets of richly deserved ridicule. 

Nevertheless, there are instances where taking such action is justified. OnTechnologyLaw gives a five-point test to at least help ridicule-proof a C&D. Philosophically, their approach is very sound:

A kinder, gentler approach is almost always better – not least because the cease-and-desist letter might someday be read by a judge, by jurors, and/or by journalists and bloggers.

The Technology & Marketing blog wisely points out:

Increasingly, lawsuits play out in the public arena, so it's also worth looping in the PR/messaging folks at the early stages (i.e., before you send the letter). If the recipient posts your letter and mockery ensues, you probably skipped one of the steps outlined in the post, but in any event, it would be helpful to have something articulating your rationale and position already out there or ready to go.

I was once the recipient of the threat of a cease-and-desist letter. I didn't really see the humor at the time, but I now kind of liken it to when I was in First Grade and just threatening to give someone the finger (GASP!) was enough to earn you detention. Nowadays, that 2005 incident continues to be a private joke between me and a longtime correspondent of mine. (It was my online answer to his question that sparked the almost-C&D from the interested party.)