What would Superman do?

Back in the 1980's, before MySpace, before Yahoo and definitely before Facebook, Superman and Clark Kent lived relatively separate existences; by day, the boyish charm of Clark Kent, whose conservative mannerisms and passive, introverted personality, went relatively unnoticed by his reporter colleagues. By night, the hero known globally as Superman saved damsels from burning buildings, fended off lynch mobs and stopped the Earth from succumbing to apocalyptic meltdown. One need never know that Kent and Superman were, in fact, one and the same; despite a thin guise consisting simply of glasses and a dodgy suit, even love interest Lois Lane was duped.   

Fast forward to the turn of the century and our two men of the moment face a conundrum; the advent of the World Wide Web and the consequent pervasive nature of social media, in its various forms, means information travels at an astonishing rate. News that Superman has saved a small child from drowning might be broken on Facebook way before CNN even had a chance to get their reporter to the scene - indeed, Kent himself might even have spotted a cry for help on Twitter, such is the speed of the World's biggest news wire. 

All of this is well and good, but as a socially savvy man, Kent would surely consider that, in a world of 'selves', Superman would have his own Twitter profile - @superman, naturally - and Clark a separate one entirely (@ClarkKent, if it wasn't already taken). Superman would have a Facebook Fan page, with over 3 million likes, and Kent his own, low-key profile where he would 'friend' colleagues and family and post photos of his weekend spent watching football and walking his dog. All of these channels would be operated from the same email address and the same IP address. So what if, unbeknown to him, an intelligent chap somewhere invented a piece of software that aggregates all of your online profiles, lumps them together, with your image, and places them in your sidebar in Gmail? What if when you send someone an email, all this information appears alongside your message? Kent's carefully-constructed cover would surely be blown, with devastating consequences for Superman's army of admiring supporters. 

The reality is that Rapportive, a Gmail add-on that "shows you everything about your contacts right inside your inbox" is an opt-in service and one would hope that Kent would never be as foolhardy as to subscribe to such a service. But if one click of the mouse is all it takes for your online presence and any such 'cover' to be blown, might we question if it's worth having it there in the first place? Are we sharing too much online and is our privacy being compromised for simplicity? 

I encountered this debate recently when discussing with social media marketer Damian Pang whether to mention your job role and who you work for on your own Twitter profile. He considered that there are those that successfully curate their own brand – who they are, their interests, who they work for, or who they would love to work for – and project ‘Brand Me’ succinctly and effectively. Then there are those that simply aren’t comfortable with sharing that kind of information. If you want to tweet about the dim sum you ate at the weekend and not be decried for being mundane or ‘off-brand’, then you might consider keeping your account strictly personal, giving no indication of who you work for in your Twitter bio – therefore giving you ‘free rein’ to be as off topic as you like.   

Of course, this works for those who aren’t necessarily seeking employment, but when you’re job hunting and need to stand out from the crowd, showing you have an online presence, and one that is carefully nurtured and controlled, and engaging in content that is of relevance to the sphere you want to work in, is crucial. The same is true for many high-profile figureheads of big brands – take my former boss, for example, Scott Brownlee, Head of PR for Toyota GB. Scott is the perfect example of putting a face and personality behind Tweets – users can learn about the brand, but also find that he’s a human being too. As a result, ‘human’ brands succeed far better in conveying their key messages than a small picture of a logo would. All because we as humans are deeply social beings who crave human contact and fade when excluded from our fellows. Scott made the choice to make Twitter personal and as a result, his brand has prospered. But with add-ons like Rapportive, surely we’re all going to have to make like Scott, avoiding the dim-sum tweet, even if it is from a separate Twitter account, and ensuring that whatever we say is on-brand because, after all, what you write online exists forever, and as Rapportive proves, can be aggregated simply by using the right software. Is it a situation we are willing to accept? I wonder what Superman would do – I’m not even sure he can save the day here.    

Platforms, channels & Internet Agency

The radical change in the digital landscape brings a new approach to PR - where once organisations "had the impression that they had control of what was said and believed about their activities" (Phillips, D. and Young, P. 2009, p7) the very advent of the World Wide Web means information can not only be taken out of context, but can, and will, be interpreted in new ways. Hours of carefully crafted statements and slogans are being turned on their heads as they appear alongside the very item the statement was trying to deflect attention from. In this sense, the Internet can be considered as an 'agent' - the idea that it facilitates the changing of information as it it passed from one person to another. The role becomes two-fold, as we can also consider that Internet agency allows us to find things out - your dream employer's email address, for example. Before, it would have taken more than a person's lifetime to make a pencil from scratch, but with Internet agency, you can share knowledge instantly, and so that pencil becomes a more viable option.

If the Internet is an agent, then there must be platforms and channels to enable its existence. A platform can be defined as the device on which we employ Internet agency; in the late 90's, the only platform available would have been your vintage box-looking computer, but fast forward to today and the list is endless - internet-enabled mobile phones, laptops, tablets, games consoles, sat navs, digitally-empowered TVs and MP3 players. Almost half of the UK population own a smartphone, according to Kantar Worldpanel ComTech (2011). Platforms are important for the simple reason that people use them to communicate. The idea of going to a library to research something becomes obselete when you have the power of Google in your pocket.
If the platforms are the hardware, then the channels become the software; the websites you visit, the blogs you visit, the emails you send and the social networks you use. If we consider just one channel alone, social networking, we can already note how PR has had to adapt to the rise in this becoming, for many, the preferred form of communication. And it's changing still - mobile phones that vibrate is a recent adaptation of vibration for communication, Kinect uses movement as language and avatars collect information and play it back to us. As David Phillips point outs, the only thing that holds PR back is "the need to understand these things, see the opportunity and adopt this different way of using PR creativity."

To explore internet agency further, we can consider the four elements that drive online public relations: transparency, porosity, richness and reach.

Internet Agency alone has a direct impact on transparency; if the possibility exists to interpret messages in a variety of different ways, then there is added pressure for organisations to be transparent (for more on transparency, see my previous post). 'Digital natives', or those who have grown up with and are most familiar with the online world, have become accustomed to a new level of transparency, and operate "under the assumption that everything they do will eventually be known online." (Brogan, C. and Smith, J. 2010).

Transparency itself comes about because of porosity - that is to say, that organisations are giving away information that they wouldn't have given away in the past. For example, we tell competitors the benefits of our products (though it is worth noting the exact recipe of Coca-Cola is still a highly-guarded secret). This information is spread about and made available to all, and 'leaks' out of organisations at a rapid rate, in the same way that 'gossip', be it emails, Instant Messaging and other online transactions, find their way into the public sphere. Porosity has seen the emergence of codes of conduct that dictate what is acceptable for those using these internal channels, and are a vital part of an organisation's PR toolkit.

Richness is the idea of adding value to your product or service, and making it niche; it is a PR practitioner's role to create rich content through words, pictures, videos, diagrams, voice and music. Through Internet agency, and utilising its main characteristic, its reach, organisation's can add richness through online communities. This may be in the form of blogs, wikis and forums. In addition, SEO will make such content transparently available, and can also increase reach in the same way that hyperlinks and offline advertising can.

So, what's the link? The Internet changes an organisation, forcing it to be more transparent and porous, and acts as an agent of change. This allows for rich content that will reach many, who will access these messages using channels on their platforms.

The Growing Significance of Transparency

Richard Edelman declared that "continuous, transparent - and even passionate - communications is central to success." (Edelman, R. 2007)

If we consider that transparency, according to David Phillips and Philip Young, can be defined as "openness, communication and accountability," (Phillips, D. and Young, P. 2009) then it leads that the radical change in the digital landscape means there are infinite channels with which to deliver the advantages of transparency. Indeed, Don Tapscott talks about the idea of 'corporate nakedness', with the advent of the Internet making it harder for companies to keep secrets from its consumers and its 'shareholder web'. The benefits of being a company with integrity is becoming unquestionable; treat employees well, and costs of transactions will drop; better trust environments bring better collaboration, more loyalty and less office politics.
And it's happening externally too - companies are showing integrity and transparency not because they believe it is ethical, but because it pays off - we as consumers want to engage with a company that has our best interests at heart, and is candid about its efforts and its competitors.

We have moved from a one-size-fits-all medium of broadcast and traditional print, to a one-to-many medium available at your disposal, forcing companies to become 'naked' in the process.