Let the paradigm shift begin
Anne Gregory, Professor and Director of the Centre for Public Relations Studies at Leeds Metropolitan University and Ronél Rensburg, President-elect of PRISA and Professor in the Department of Marketing and Communication Management at the University of Pretoria, write the following about their session at the World PR Forum:
“In our session at the WPRF, titled ‘New world, new challenges: what and how will communication professionals contribute to sustainability?’ we will attempt (by acting as provocateurs and idea midwives) to stimulate new thinking and lively discussion on the place and space of professional communicators in the “brave new world” of tomorrow.
The global environment as we know it is changing rapidly and governments, business and citizens must seek innovative ways to deal with the issues this generates, as well as with the sustainability of business, of organisations and of the physical world itself. The “one world, people and planet” imperative, with its focus on interdependence amongst all people, forces a consideration of the radical changes needed for the future. Documents such as Vision 2050 demand different approaches from business leaders, requiring them to rethink how they should develop and operate for a more sustainable future. This will mean challenges and a new agenda for governments, business and other organisations. The vision for the world on a sustainable pathway by 2050 will require fundamental changes in governance structures, economic frameworks, business, organisations and human behaviour.
Partnerships and strategic coalitions with all stakeholders will be more complex, but enabled and made more effective through developments in the way that people, governments and business use information and communication technology to connect. The use of social media and networks and improved communication technology will continue to increase the speed and scale of information exchange and will play a significant role in effecting organisational development, sustainability and accountability. Vast opportunities lie both in the unmet demand for basic communication infrastructures, as well as in innovative new platforms for improved interaction amongst stakeholders. This increased interaction across borders and cultures will speed up the dissemination of ideas and opportunities. Stakeholders will be enabled and more empowered to communicate their interests, concerns and expectations to organisations that operate in their social, economic, physical and political environments.
This new world with its novel ways of doing business will have to tap into the creativity and innovation of all stakeholders, using them as resource, but also recognising their increased accountabilities. Communication, communication management and the activities of public relations and communication professionals will be essential in facilitating the links between stakeholders and partners, building and maintaining reputations and relationships, as well as co-creating value in an interconnected world.
We will gather in Stockholm for the World PR Forum to find the next frontier in the practice and academic discipline of public relations and communication management by examining and ratifying the Stockholm Accords. In our session we aim to provide a platform for vigorous debate on how to fill the gap between public relations and communication as usual, to public relations and communication management as exceptional stakeholder engagement.
As an outcome of our session we will also seek to provoke ideas and suggestions on the ‘Stockholm Accords’ themes of Governance and Management. The global and national issues mentioned above will impact on public relations and communication professionals over the next few years and we will consider the implications for organisations, on the capabilities of communication professionals and on their roles in the future business environment. It will be an interactive session in which ideas on these issues will be shared and lively debate ensue – all for the development and sustainability of the discipline and practice of public relations and communication management. We invite you to become part of the change and substance we want to see in the future for our profession.
Let the paradigm shift begin….”
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Briefing for PRs on E2.0’s brave new world | 21st-century PR issues › Paul Seaman's online review
[...] Utopian PRs have been dreaming about “one world, people and planet” in which all the barriers between various publics come tumbling down. They envisage a connected world in which the lines of demarcation between internal, boundary and external stakeholders dissolve as they connect transparently and interactively in a value chain that links interdependent companies to their consumers and markets. [...]
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Paul Seaman
Where are these novel examples of doing business? Here’re my two debates with Neville Hobson, arguably Europe’s leading social media business guru, they show that your text lacks bottom:
http://paulseaman.eu/2009/09/theres-no-social-media-revolution/
http://paulseaman.eu/2009/08/debate-social-media-changes-business-basics/
Anne Gregory
Paul, if you think the arguement lacks bottom, see the recent Vision 2050 report produced by the CEO led World Business Council for Sustainable Development http://www.wbcsd.org/Plugins/DocSearch/details.asp?DocTypeId=25&ObjectId=MzczOTc The reality is that if we don’t take this seriously there is no future for us…..and someone has to start the conversations. Anne
David Phillips FIPR
I am delighted that a paradigm shift can be contemplated and have made a contribution on my blog that I hope is helpful.
toni muzi falconi
And I also add a recent comment by David Phillips posted under Ronel and Anne’s excellent post on this forum’s website, but which also belongs here:
A small contribution for the Stockholm Accords
I am delighted at what I have seen of the Stockholm Accords
The dynamism of Toni Muzi Falconi is breathtaking and I am full of admiration for the efforts of Ronél Rensburg and Anne Gregory in their explication of the change that is taking place in the world today.
But I am not without concerns.
Perhaps, as we look to the next two or three years of PR practice it gives us a clue as to the life of the Acccord. It is a bold effort but, in my experience, will have a struggle to survive or have any impact.
My interest is in how the internet affects the world and PR in particular. I did predict its significance to the CIPR in 1995 and was involved in some of the papers for the now long forgotten 1999 CIPR/PRCA Internet Commission (some of the papers are here and some are here Journal of Communication Management; Volume: 5; Issue: 2; 2000 ).
I am a practitioner, researcher and teacher and so am part of this industry. Part of me is agast at how little we regard the future. Students leave university with scant understanding of internet implications for their future work. At best they are told about something called ‘Social Media’ (a module that could equally be called etiquette). I see some agencies ‘sliming down’ because of the ‘recession’. They don’t recognise that they are being by-passed. There is some form of belief in this industry of ours that the internet is, progresively, having a greater effect on our lives and has effects that mediate everyone’s life. The big thinking concerns online reputation developments, convergence in marketing communications and best practice social media measurement. This is a linear view, a straight line graph of change.
The reality is much more potent.The influences brought about by the internet are not straight line, they are exponential. According to an IBM study, by 2010, the amount of digital information in the world will now be doubling every 11 hours. Some years ago Kevin Kelly explained the effects of exponential growth of hyperlinks in network rather well when he told of the prior and future 5000 days.
Some clue to this change can be seen in the consumer/tech cell phone in our pocket or handbag. The move from phone/text to email to hand held mobile computer has been quite quick and as quickly has become passe. Another clue may be found in changed consumer habits and annual growth of online retail sales of 25% plus every year. The biggest development is from, effectively, no cloud computing four years ago to common place corporate application with, in the UK, companies like Rentokil Initial replacing all their email into the cloud in two years, Insurance giant Aviva, Logistics firm Pall-Ex and Universal Music already implementing mass internal and extrernal communication in the cloud and tiny tiny organisations like mine with mega computing power for pennies.
Should it care to use it, the Centre for PR Studies at Leeds Met now has unlimited computing power available without making the lights dim. In the last month, the capability for my research into semantic public relations has moved from being stalled by the high levels of media coverage for the general election to being able to provide both semantic analysis of text and an automated taxonomy to find infered links. This is not a mega university reserach institute it is, literally, in a shed at the end of my garden.
In three years we will have both inference of relationships and predictability of discourse at very high levels of accuracy routinely using massive cloud computing power.
These capabilities will change how governments and societies operate because they will provide near complete radical transparency of every organisation. You and I will be able to find out the precise nature of the common values that hold disperate organisations, their financial backers, customers and other stakeholder in thier networks.
As for companies, so too for terrorists, wayward governments and so forth.
As the leading thinkers in the world explain in this video, we very nearly have the knowlege and we do have the computing power.
It may possibly be that it is the PR industry that benefits from these developments but linear thinking however ambitious the growth projection may be, is not enough.
From the values lecture, I gave in Lincoln four years ago to Bruno Amaral’s Euprera discourse this year to cloud capacity for semantic PR development in the last month is pretty impressive.
But this thinking has drawbacks. It is not a conversation one can have with practitioners. They both could not understand nor have the inclination to want to stare so much change in the face. Equally, I know of only one Masters course world wide which is prepared to entertain such radical thought (I don’t know of a PhD doing such work – but would be thrilled to find one).
It is for these reasons that I think the Accord, like the CIPR Internet Commission will need re-thinking from scratch in three years.
But it is a great start that can be developed in June.
Paul Seaman
Anne, I’m not against sustainability. But there are many competing forms of sustainability. I’m also a great advocate of one of the basic messages of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development’s 2050 vision: we need to raise productivity by producing more with less effort (raising worker output per hour) particularly when it comes to food production and making best use of land and water resources. But the odd thing about progress is that it involves accepting that the present unsustainable – that’s what change management is all about. Moreover, the future is one thing we know little about so making predictions is a tricky business. For instance, you might remember that Hamish McRae, one of Europe’s leading economists, wrote a best-selling and widely-acclaimed book in 1994 entitled “The World in 2020 – a vision of the future” in which the word Internet is not used once.
But let’s for now stick to discussing E2.0, which I have explored in-depth on my website. Comments on this specific topic would be welcome.