PR Knowledge Hub

​The third future for public relations is all about you - and it’s personal. Hyper-personal in fact.
 
I suspect a lot of us have experienced that spooky moment when, after a random in-person conversation, we start to see ads and information connected with our chat appear on our feeds. It manifests itself even though we have never searched for the subject in our life and, despite little or no interest on our part, ads on German castles, Icelandic pony trekking or tips on chicken farming just keep coming.
 
We’ve data to thank for that and we’ve got used to the personalisation of brand and consumer offerings over the years - Amazon, Netflix, Starbucks and others led the way and for a lot of people, that’s just fine. They’re happy to hand over their data in return for a more personalised experience but, as we’ve shifted into the faster gear of hyper-personalisation, and with that ‘personal experience’ coming at us in real time, it’s time to test the brakes before we find ourselves on a runaway train.
 
I’m hoping we all agree here that there’s no such thing as the public. There are an infinite number of ‘publics’ and anyone who has ever created a stakeholder map will know that mapping is messy, with our communities of interest getting smaller and smaller and the information we share, the stories we tell, the connections we make, becoming ever more personal. We also know that there is no such thing as ‘the public interest’ - there is a multitude that rises and falls, clashes and diminishes much like the spheres in an old school lava lamp - my lifetime analogy for community activity.
 
In understanding the need for niche communication, appropriate for smaller groups and individuals, it always surprises me that many organisations still use a shotgun approach trying to be ‘everything, everywhere, all at once’ for everybody.
 
Different ways of using data gives us different types of personalisation. ‘Ordinary’ personalisation is about the past, whereas hyper-personalisation is about the present. Hyper-personalisation combines real-time data, machine learning, and advanced technologies such as predictive analytics to deliver individual experiences to customers. And we’re not just talking about nuts and bolts data like your IP address, activity and location. We’re now looking at emotional recognition, layered over facial recognition, manifested most recently in Pizza Hut’s emotional recognition system that will serve up a pizza best suited to your current mood. It’s an ‘in-your-face’ future we glimpsed many years ago in the film Minority Report and, unimaginable though it is, the reality is more sinister than the movie. Facial recognition is used by governments and organisations on a daily basis and there is a blurred line between hyper-personalisation and surveillance.
 
So what does this future-now hold for public relations practice?
First call will be inside our organisations, guiding ethics and intent. Just because something is legal, doesn’t make it ethical and organisations need to be sure of their intent. A Deloitte report from 2020 -  Connecting with meaning - Hyper-personalizing the customer experience using data, analytics, and AI - states that the use of hyper personalisation for the CMO is to drive profit and the technology will maximise revenue. I would argue that this is not good societal intent. It is legal but certainly questionable on the ethical front. The sourcing, use, retention and future deployment of live data needs to be understood and the intent identified. This will help – at least in some small way - to preserve the relationship and maintain a human connection between organisation and people that is mutually beneficial, otherwise our people and communities simply become a cash cow, milked dry of data.
 
Hyper-personalisation also lands us on the shifting sands of misinformation. Targeted information conceived, seeded and based on scanned mood will undermine societal cohesion. As many countries enter election cycles, it is entirely probable (and I’m holding my breath just waiting for this to happen) that the atomic mix of technologies used in this way will unleash mayhem in many parts of the world.
 
Here in New Zealand, we’ve already had one political party using undeclared AI and thinking nothing of the skewed perspectives created and untruths spread as a result. US Republicans created their dystopian AI-generated attack ad, depicting another term with President Biden but at least - unlike the New Zealand National Party - they declared it to be AI. Yet even with that declaration, it is unlikely that the majority of people will realise such depictions are fictional and, in the same way as so-called behavioural economics is used to manipulate many publics, they will simply believe what they see.
 
This pace of change suggests that in our third future of hyper-personalisation, public relations practitioners will become firefighters, spotting and extinguishing wild fires of disinformation and discord.
 
Deeper understanding and management of AI-human relations will form part of our role. As organisations deploy generative models to develop and optimise ‘content’, that content will, in the end, speak only to other algorithms, leading to relationship breakdowns and humans slipping through the cracks of perceived communication.
 
It is hard enough now to speak to a person - negotiating chatbots, ‘live’ online help desks (run by chatbots), possibly a digital human with a smiley face, and, if you are very, very lucky and prepared for a four-hour wait, you might - and only might - get through to a human. The dark patterns used in websites for years, that make it harder to leave the site or complain, have been seamlessly integrated with AI powered ‘personalised’ customer service provision (and I use the term ‘customer service’ loosely). Such methods may reduce costs but they ultimately reduce customer numbers too.
 
How then, do we avoid dangerous deployment? It could be that regulation will play a part or the control and training of AI is taken out of the hands of the hugely powerful corporates like Apple, Meta, Google, OpenAI and others - the shadowy others that we seldom see.
 
Our societal models are based on profit and power and corporates and media companies are tuned to make a profit -because that’s their job. In all the great talk of purpose, commercial organisations are looking to maximise their returns and governments are looking to hold on to power.
 
The movie ‘Oppenheimer’ is about to be released and tells the story of the atomic bomb, first tested on July 16 1945, just shy of 78 years ago. It was a technological development that changed the course of history and we remain in its shadow today.
The deployment, testing and use of generative AI, a technology that improves itself but which has human bias and frailty at its core, is another such moment. Without brave navigation supported by good intent, the explosion of data and implosion of truth and reality will injure us all and the opportunity for good – great good – will be lost. 
 
 
 
Hope to see you tomorrow for our fourth future - immersion
 
 
 

Sometimes you don't know what you've got till it's gone - to echo a line from a favourite old song. And it is a line that also echoes the current predicament facing thousands of employers as they attempt to manage 'The Great Resignation'. Personally, I think it is more of a great escape as individuals take a long look at their career path, or a close look at the job they've somehow wound up doing and realise life's too short to be stuck with an employer who has no regard for them.

We've long known that internal communication, employee experience and simple decency on the part of the employer are essential if an organisation is going to achieve its goals, yet for many organisations such notions have been simmering dangerously on the back burner while they preoccupy themselves with shareholder interests, profits or politics.

Research from Edelman highlights that employees have overtaken shareholders as the most important stakeholders for an organisation - something we've known all along albeit something employers themselves have been slow to understand or have deliberately ignored.

This week I'm working with internal communicators on the shape of things to come as we navigate the ongoing COVID challenges. At the start of the pandemic, I counselled organisations that they should quickly turn themselves 'inside out' and take time to focus on employee relationships and what it meant to be part of their team. We've since survived the seismic shifts in the workplace - it really has been a case of 'the workplace is dead, long live the workplace'. Suddenly employers have realised just how important their workers are. Well, some have - others have turned a very dark corner, switching on surveillance software to monitor staff in their homes or sacked people en mass via text or social media.

With a multitude of research reports now in, we have new data to share with our leadership teams. Data that will help them understand that the employee experience is critical, that they have a duty of care to understand the external pressures their staff face, that they cannot remove themselves from the business of communication and, if they are going to use technology to 'keep in touch' then budgets must be found to equip staff with the devices and technology they need.

Employee wellbeing is central to the employee experience - financial, physical and emotional - and these are not areas that have been overly explored in the past. Banging out a newsletter and hoping for some good open rates won't work in today's world (it didn't before but that's a discussion for another day). 

If employers stop, listen and truly understand the value of their people and do something to make their employees' experience a good one, they'll discover it is possible to dodge the great escape and keep hold of those who get the job done.

There’s a lot of talk about storytelling, behaviour change, social purpose and what organisations are doing to connect with their ‘target audiences’. Some of the solutions are quite grand, some extraordinarily expensive and some seemingly simple - but none of them are really solutions as they forget to address the most important aspect of any activity - who is it for and why?

Often the activities in questions are actually undertaken for the organisation itself so it can tick the box that says ‘we communicated’ but just sending stuff out doesn’t mean communication has taken place - it means you have sent stuff out.

Before you pick up a pen, start a plan, devise a strategy you have to know the who and why of what you are doing. There is no such thing as ‘the public’ and personally, I believe the description of people as ‘target audiences’ is something that should be consigned to mid-20th century history as a relic from the advertising industry. If you doubt the assertion that 'the public' doesn't exist, take a moment and consider how many different groups of people your organisation interacts with on a daily basis. Are they all the same? No. Do they all hold the same beliefs and interests? No. Do they all interact with you for the same reasons? No. So why would you expect the same story, told in the same way in the one place to engage with them all? You have to break it down and really understand the people who hold your organisation's licence to operate then you can start to plan, share stories, develop connections because there will be real people involved - not just organisational assumption and bias.

We tell stories for people, not at them and there’s a significant difference between ‘communicating to’ and ‘speaking with’ - one approach imposes information on a group while the other seeks to engage.

​My mid-winter tip is to warm up your understanding of the people your organisation serves. Undertake regular community audits, build personas, ask for their views. There are many tools out there that make this critically important process much easier than it used to be so explore and play - it will be time very well spent.

 Last outing for a while occurred in Auckland on Tuesday, presenting communications help and guidance as part of a panel for The Alternative Board.  The event was designed to help small to medium sized businesses work out how they are going to stay viable and get through the current COVID-19 pandemic. 

I was speaking about communication - the need to plan, plan again, act, rethink and then plan again for what will be a very different normal if, as businesses and organisations, we manage to get through to the other side. 

Health professionals the world over are working tirelessly to help the sick, develop a vaccine, manage the pandemic and more besides. Our challenge is to sustain our economic activities - working within official advice, instruction and guidance - so that people have jobs, demand is stimulated when shutdowns and capacity reductions have ceased. The big job as the after-effects move into 2021 will be to rebuild trust - smoothing the confidence curve pictured below - so people are willing to 'begin again', physically and mentally. It will be a different world and will need human creativity, collaboration and compassion to rebuild.

Video extract above for your information - if you need help, contact me and we can work out a remote consultation or training session - whatever would help you most.  And remember - whenever possible, separate the facts from the fear.
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Wherever you are in the world, stay safe, stay informed and stay kind.