DEMOCRATISING INFLUENCE OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS
The democratising influence of digital communications is giving organisations a whole new communications challenge, says Ruth Sunderland, editor of Observer Business and Media:
We’ve all heard of citizen journalism, but what about citizen advertising? The German tabloid Bild this year ran a competition for readers to create ads for the paper after an earlier, successful experiment where it enlisted an army of unofficial paparazzi to supply it with pictures. The idea, according to an excitablesounding editor-in-chief Kai Diekmann, is to harness “the democracy of creativity! Anyone can join in, every idea counts. This initiative is of course not designed to make all of our advertising people unemployed – however we hope that our readers come up with brilliant and creative ideas. And as a beautiful side effect: readers associate themselves even more strongly with the Bild brand.”
Photographers, journalists and ad men might, of course, find their excitement tinged with fear, and the democratising influence of the internet is presenting a huge new communications challenge for organisations. Established channels for getting messages across are being dismantled – or at the very least, bypassed, circumvented and subverted.
To take another example, items are organised on social news website Digg on the basis of a popularity contest, rather than on conventional editorial lines: stories and ads move up and down the site rankings according to how they are rated by users, not on the judgment of an editor or by how much an advertiser is prepared to pay.
“With the agenda set by a worldwide constituency of clickers, how far can communicators rely on their little black book?”
Existing networks of influence are being deconstructed; not only is there a multiplicity of new outlets, but also the agenda is being set by
a restless, capricious worldwide constituency of clickers, not just reporters and editors. The question for communicators who rely heavily on their little black book of key contacts is how effective their professional networks will be in future, and how to deal with any power shift.
For the time being, CEOs still care far more what is in the FT’s Lex column, or the business pages of the national press, than they do about the likes of Digg, so the hierarchies are still standing – but for how long? We are in a transitional stage and it is not clear how tenacious the old order will be. My guess, for what it is worth, is that the media and PR establishment will be harder to shift than theclickerati might like to think, so that contacts book will come in handy for some time to come.
The barriers to entry to journalism and advertising seem to be crashing down, but that doesn’t mean it will be a free for all. In another field,
the estimable Joan Collins recently warned students at RADA that their livelihoods were under threat from the rise of reality TV: why pay proper actors when you can pluck people off the streets to appear on the box for next to nothing? But people can tell the difference between Judi Dench and Jade Goody.
Equally, they can distinguish an informed and astute commentator from a ranting blogger. Some may even be prepared to pay for quality. The empowerment of the amateur may be over-rated; discernment still matters. Attention and loyalty will be in short supply on the web: the individuals and organisations who can command that will be immensely powerful and have potentially global reach. The communicators
who identify those voices and work out how to convey corporate messages and brand ethics to them and their audience will be the power-brokers of the future.
