CIPR president Stephen Waddington documents the role public relations professionals should be playing in the shift to becoming a social business

Throughout history each new wave of technology has led to cultural and social change, forcing longstanding organisational principles to shift.

In 2014 networks, openness, transparency and collaboration are the result of the latest round of technological innovation and are the drivers of change. Managing and navigating this landscape provides our profession a massive opportunity to take centre stage.

Public relations strategies and thinking have a critical role to play within every area of an organisation. As communications professionals, we’re perfectly placed to listen, understand and nurture organic conversations between organisations and their audiences. There’s no doubt we’ve come a long way, but many organisations are struggling to adapt to this new environment.

Appointments for doctor’s surgeries can be booked online but yet they still demand handwritten application forms. Major airlines and travel providers allow you to book online but don’t accept e-tickets on smartphones. Banks encourage customers to ‘go paperless’ yet many other organisations demand original statements as valid forms of identification.

All these examples of digital-driven initiatives that lack joined-up thinking are being brought to account as organisations strive to remove friction and ultimately reduce the distance between themselves and their customers. The organisations that truly integrate digital technologies with social thinking across all operational areas are the ones seeing the bottom line benefit.

An obvious area in which we can play a role in advancing and accelerating this change is customer service. Those getting it right not only have customers who continue to purchase their products and services, they also turn customers into advocates for their brand.

Embracing digital and social technologies to enable customer service achieves all of this while actually spending less on service and support. But some business leaders are yet to be convinced.

A recent report published by IBM, one of my clients at Ketchum, called ‘Stepping up to the challenge,’ found that only a fifth of organisations establish social networks to engage with customers. Even fewer companies make use of analytics to explore customer data to improve decision making.

Forward thinking organisations are using social and digital technologies to remove the barrier between internal and external. Customers are no longer customers – they are integral components of the organisation itself.

Sainsbury’s recently engaged its workforce with the ‘Little Stories, Big Difference’ campaign. The supermarket sourced staff to feature in brief videos showing how the little things they do have a positive impact on the environment, communities and the products they sell. The result was a convincing collection of content that not only promoted Sainsbury’s brand values to the public, it put the people who come into regular contact with its customers centre stage.

But organisations don’t just need lateral thinkers who can develop and tweak messaging, nor do they only require experts to develop organisational values to influence staff and customers. Successful social businesses need leaders who can identify opportunities for growth, with a self-assurance to embrace change and who understand how to make money. Communicators who are confident in seizing this new way of thinking can be the backbone of this movement and will unleash our profession to a higher purpose. The question is what are you doing about it