PARSONS GREEN — It’s a question that journalism students ask. And indeed I had to answer when I was a news desk copy editor at a tabloid owned by Robert Maxwell in the 1980s.
I’m not sure I always like the answer.
H1N1 (that ‘killer’ flu thing)
Surely Avian Flu was bad. But this is worse. Isn’t it?
Well, I dunno. I am married to a microbiologist and immunologist, so I am well aware of just how bad it can be. I even avoided the pub a few times and sat at home feeling stupid and angry. But what’s the news?
We clearly need to be prepared and you can see internal communicators exchanging ideas for their H1N1 Crisis Communication Plans. It’s best to be prepared, surely. But how long can humans be on high alert?
Not very long.
Give us some perspective. We can’t ignore the real one… when it comes… but is this it?
Michael Jackson
I am wrong, I suspect, but this whole thing leaves me quite agitated. What an overblown, self-indulgent schlock-fest. I eventually told my children that they couldn’t watch it.
Who knows how history will treat his ‘art’, but there’s no denying that the man was a pitiful figure… and worse. In my part of London a paedophile has been seen sneaking into schools, following young girls on school trips and was recently arrested in a children’s nursery changing room.
How can you deal with the horror of that …while there’s a global broadcast in honour of a man who many times was brought up on charges of something similar?
My feeling is that few people even fell comfortable asking that.
And there is a link here to internal communications. How can we provide ‘news’ if it is always ‘good’? Everyone knows that no news is always ‘good’. Stories that are too good are just not credible. But we are often required to leave out the part of the story that makes for more compelling reading: the conflict.
UGC and conversations
I am a bit disillusioned with Social Media. I am not sure I was ever illusioned, if I am honest. Blogs, like this one, are a means to an end. YouTube, Facebook, MySpace are like old shopping malls where the customers often seemed to have moved on. And I still think that while people are using Twitter to talk about… Twitter… it is not really a new means of communication.
But there is no doubt that User Generated Content (UGC) is something that businesses and other organisations will need to grapple with. At the moment news organisations seem to be coming around to it a bit. Getting control. But in the process they have lost a whole bunch of readers. Some people will never again go to traditional media for news. And this will also affect internal communications.
I guess that’s why we still have so much faith in talking about ‘conversations’. Businesses need to be able to talk to people in a healthy and consistent way, if they are going to stay up to speed with the world. Conversations are more honest and both parties learn something. News flows in both directions.
No one will put their faith in the great and powerful Oz in the future. Everyone will insist on looking behind the curtain. How prepared are we for that?
/df
The UGC point brings the whole authenticity issue to the front. It seems supremely ironic to see organisations trying to “control” social media rather than seeking to simply “honestly enter the conversation.” Some are doing it better than others. But it does take balls of steel at the end of the day in a world which is, let’s face it, quite risk and change averse from a business management perspective, and certainly not used to much more than command-and-control when it comes to any sort of communication with stakeholders. Exceptions certainly exist…
I love the way you have used the Wizard of OZ to sum up the fact the social media has ‘trained’ people to look further and question /challenge top down, one way employee communications. The game is changing…even for organisations choosing not to implement social media internally. OK if I use the same image to make a similar point in a presentation I’m about to give? It sums this up perfectly!